The audience erupted into chaos as they very loudly informed the world that Exodus End was playing.
The vocalist pointed to his ear. “What was that? Did you say Exodus End is playing here tonight?”
Toni had to cover her ears due to the volume of the crowd. When the roar died down a bit, she lowered her hands and fixated on the vocalist, hanging on his every word.
“Get the fuck out. Exodus End is going to be on this stage in less than two hours?” He jabbed a pointed finger toward the stage beneath his boots. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Logan chuckled. “He’s really getting them pumped up,” he yelled over the noise of the cheering crowd. “I hope we live up to their expectations.”
Toni glanced at him, beaming an exuberant smile in his direction. Of course they would live up to the fans’ expectations; they’d exceed them. She didn’t doubt it for a second. She wondered if they were ever swamped with self-doubt the way she was. Not likely.
Riott Actt finally began their second song and Toni tried to keep track of all that was occurring onstage. The flurry of activity was overwhelming. She didn’t know whether to watch the pacing vocalist, the wailing guitarists, or the rhythmic stylings of the drummer and the bassist. She glanced at Logan for direction and tried mimicking his devil-horn-shaking, head-banging, body-thrashing celebration of the music, but ended up feeling like an awkward fool.
“I have got to get in on that circle pit,” Logan said unexpectedly. He pecked her on the cheek and then vaulted himself over the stairs to the floor before hurdling the railing and several members of the audience and disappearing into the crowd. It took Toni at least half the song to comprehend what he’d done. She finally found the mental capacity to close her mouth. She stretched up on tiptoe and craned her neck, trying to see down into the audience and the writhing chaos occurring in a round area that at first appeared empty, but was actually the center of activity. Bodies bounced off each other around the periphery—shoving, stumbling, thudding, dancing, or maybe they were fighting. Hell, she couldn’t tell. It looked just plain violent from her vantage. She caught sight of a blue T-shirt, a tangle of golden wavy hair, and hard-muscled arms covered with sleeves of familiar gray-shaded tattoos. When Logan slammed chest first into a member of the audience, she cringed and hid her eyes behind both hands. What was he thinking? What if he got hurt and found himself unable to perform? How could he want to be involved in something that had to be painful?
Even though she personally didn’t want anything to do with the circle pit, Toni realized she should be getting pictures of Logan’s interaction with the crowd for the book. She sidled along the edge of the stage, hoping to stay out of sight as she cautiously made her way to the front left corner of the high platform. She looked through her camera, trying to capture Logan as one of the crowd, but it was all a hopeless blur. She couldn’t tell who was who. She noticed a riser at the very front of the stage but off to the far side and bathed in darkness. Riott Actt wasn’t using that part of the stage at all. Maybe she could see better from there. She’d be a bit higher up, but farther from the mosh pit. But that was what a zoom lens was for. To get the best shot, she needed a high vantage point, not a close one.
Once she was standing on the platform, she zoomed in on the mass of writhing bodies below. Scanning the crowd, she eventually focused on the center of the mosh pit and took dozens of shots in rapid succession. She hoped she captured something usable. Watching through the viewfinder, she cringed each time someone got shoved a bit too hard, hit a few too many times. She didn’t see the appeal of this ritual in the slightest. But then she didn’t have mass quantities of testosterone pulsing through her veins.
“Hey,” she heard someone yell from down below. “You can’t be up there.”
She wasn’t sure if the security guard was talking to her or not. Before she could figure that out, something hard and solid hit her in the stomach—an arm, she realized as the air wooshed out of her lungs—and then she was falling. Her arms pinwheeled before