He still sounded great. He’d never been proud of his vocals, but I’d always thought he had a good voice. Considering that he’d lost most of the feeling and dexterity in his fret hand, his playing sounded remarkably solid. It took me a second to realize what was different. He’d switched sides. He was playing the frets with his right hand. He’d re-taught himself how to play as a left-hander.

Mosh finished his sad song, looked up from his guitar, said “Thank you, Las Vegas.” And then walked off the stage before anyone even realized they were supposed to clap. There were cheers and a chant for an encore, but there weren’t going to be any encores tonight. My brother was done. Life had kicked his ass. When the lights came back on over the disappointed crowd, the stage was empty.

It was a real bummer of a finale.

A security guard wouldn’t let me backstage. There was no need to complicate things so I didn’t push it. I knew where he was staying. It had taken Melvin less than five minutes to get the room number for me.

There was another poster of Mosh in the elevator. This one was more recent than the older publicity poster in the entrance. I know it isn’t cool for rock stars to smile in pictures, but here he just looked grim. No surprise. This was the best job he could find after getting kicked out of the band that he’d founded and dragged to the top. They’d said they didn’t need his baggage. They were idiots. Sure, I was biased, but Mosh was a musical genius, brilliant performer, and sharp businessman. He had built Cabbage Point Killing Machine. They were nothing without him.

“Quit staring at me,” I muttered at the poster.

Even though they’d been surgically reattached with relative success, having his fingers cut off by the cultists had ruined him. His guitar playing had gone to hell, and his life had followed along. Myers’ cover-up had pinned the blame for the destruction in Montgomery on my brother’s supposedly drug-addled misadventures. His name was mud, even by rock-star standards. Trashing a place was one thing, having several innocent people die because you’d gone crazy with the special effects and crashed a tour bus into a fuel tanker was something else entirely. He’d avoided criminal charges—only because the MCB didn’t want anyone saying anything too crazy in court about two rampaging oni—but the avalanche of lawsuits had bankrupted him. Their record label had gotten sick of the bad publicity, and now CPKM was floundering along with a new guitarist who couldn’t hold a candle to my brother.