Chapter 5: Full Charge

Lucas woke at dusk with three bodies in the bed and a stiff neck.

Noah was on his left, Thomas was sprawled across his legs, and Luke was sitting upright against the headboard, awake, with his eyes on the door.

All three had color in their faces.

"Did you sleep?" Lucas asked.

"We never sleep this well," Luke said. "I was keeping watch."

"For what?"

Luke did not answer.

Instead he reached into the drawer of the bedside table and took out a canvas bag.

He set it on Lucas's chest.

Inside were the van keys, the van's papers, three phones, a ring of house keys, and a battered notebook of passwords in Noah's slanted handwriting.

"What is this?" Lucas asked.

"Everything," Luke said. "Money, contracts, the schedule, our phones. Who we see and who we don't. It's yours to decide."

"Luke, I've been your manager for two days."

"You've been our manager for one night," Noah said, waking, "and a better one than the last man in nine months."

"He means it," Thomas said into the blanket. "We want you in charge. Of everything. Please."

Lucas looked at the three of them.

He had grown up in a house where nobody asked him what he wanted, and then in a hospital where nobody asked his father.

Nobody had ever handed him anything and said it was his.

He sat up and put the bag on his lap.

"Okay," he said. "Then I have rules."

"Tell us," Noah said.

"One. Nobody goes hungry. If you start going cold, you tell me that day. Not next week."

Thomas pulled the blanket up over his face.

"Two. Nobody feeds from anyone else. Not a stranger, not a fan, not a lord. If you need it, you come to me."

Luke's eyes went very dark.

"Three. Nobody decides alone. Not about the band, not about Abysis, not about anything that can get one of you hurt."

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