Lost Angeles (12 page)

The words kick me right in the gut. No splitting my attention between him and her, not now, not with
that name
tumbling from his asshole mouth.

“The fuck did you say?” I lift him up until his chest is against his chin. Instead of backing down, Muscles reaches out and catches hold of my elbow. The second his skin meets mine, everything goes sideways, my entire world tilting a little to the left.

“That’s right, Xaine,” he says, sliding that hand down the taut muscle of my forearm, his voice fading to a soft monotone by the time he reaches my wrist. “I’m not the only murderer here, am I? But it doesn’t count if you don’t mean to do it, right? Because sometimes they just slip away, and there’s nothing you can do to bring ’em back.”

Don’t touch him. He’ll hurt you.

Lore’s warning echoes in my head, but I register it far too late. The next breath, and I’m two hundred years in the past, reliving that fucking love song one more time. Gas lamps and horses’ hooves and the smell of fetid flesh. Everything is dark, streaked with soot stains, the air tinged with coal dust. Dickens knew this world. He wrote about it, did his best to capture it. So did Anne Rice, but neither of them got it quite right. There were only a few of us in those days, and we weren’t exactly giving interviews. We roamed wild, the absolute top of the food chain, and everything was ours for the taking.

Everything
.

Of course, whenever there’s a band of brothers, the sisters are always off-limits, but unspoken rules were never really my forte, and I never could take orders worth a damn. Elizabeth Declan was fourteen when I met her, and at the time, her brother was still playing at being a viscount. Caspian was a brilliant, ambitious, political cannonball, even after he had to start phoning it in—so to speak—because he couldn’t formally sit the Lords. He and Trick and I, though, we were dynamite, a big, red cartoony stick of it, destined to explode sooner or later. It’s all fun and games, as they say, until someone loses an eye.

Or, in this case, a sibling.

Elizabeth was pretty, with big blue eyes and dark hair. She followed me around like a puppy, looking at me with adoration and a certain measure of resolve. For the first five years or so, she was the gangly little sister I never had and never wanted. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment that I thought of her as more than a nuisance, but I more than remember every single millisecond of that
last
moment when she lay in my arms, soaked with our mingled blood, dying as it oozed from her pores.

It’s what happens when humans turn vamp. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t nice, but I’d been convinced she was strong enough to make it through. Cas had survived, right? And he’d been on the very brink of death, knocking on the proverbial door when Roman had changed him. It couldn’t be any worse than that. It couldn’t be any harder.

How fucking wrong I was.

Every time I close my eyes, I see
hers.
I see
blue.
It’s why I don’t sleep any more than I have to. It’s why I spend days on end in the studio, working through the songs until I’m hungry and red-eyed, until pink-tinged sweat bleeds out my pores, stains my shirt, and leaves me aching but exorcised. When I hit the sheets, I want to be so exhausted that I don’t just fall asleep, I pass out. And it works, for the most part. Or it did, until I crack my eyes open, trying to get away from the memories, and I’m welcomed back to the real world by
yet more blue
. Everything beyond her is a haze of color and light, but all I need is
that blue
and her in my arms again. My hands find her face. My fingers slide into the riot of colored silk tumbling over her shoulders, and all I manage to choke out is, “I’m sorry,” before my mouth finds hers.

I fall into her completely. Without holding anything of myself back the way I have since she died. All the barriers down. Raw and exposed. She’s here, maybe only to show me a shortcut to hell, but I take this moment to hold her, to touch her, to taste her one more time—

Not the same.

It’s not the same. This is Los Angeles, two hundred years later. Elizabeth is dead, but a girl with her eyes is straddling my lap and kissing me back like I’m the sun in her fucking sky. Every inch of her is pressed against most of me. Her mouth is open under the assault I’m waging, so that our tongues are tangled together even as I start to get bits and pieces of everything else that’s going to shit around us.

“Xaine!” The summons is as insistent as it is muffled by the roaring in my ears. “Xaine, you’re supposed to be onstage!”

I pull away from her, ready to rip someone’s head off, and reality punches me in the face as hard as I’d hit…
that
guy
. That motherfucking
guy
who’d had his paws all over—

Lourdes.

And there she is when I blink my eyes, staring at me and looking for all the world like she just fell down the rabbit hole. Her pupils swallow up the blue, she’s breathing heavily, her cheeks are pink, and her heart is racing. As she rakes a hand through the Technicolor strands of her hair, she blows out a soft sigh through the slightly parted “O” of her pursed lips.

“Are you all right?” I ignore everyone and everything else for a second, and it takes way more effort than it should. She’s still trying to ride me like a pony, so I guess it’s good that the styling team let her wear pants tonight. I catch the telltale red sole of some epically stupid fuck-me shoes, the glitter-sheen of her top. Her lipstick is slightly smudged, like she’s the blood-drinker, and under all the perfume and product, she smells like
him
. She smells like the dead girl they pulled out of the trash. “Come on, sweetheart, I need you to talk to me.”

“I’m fine,” she murmurs, giving me that lopsided smile that I’m starting to think of as the Fuzzy Bunny’s trademark. “I told you not to touch him.”

“Who the hell is he?” Doesn’t really matter, because whoever he is, he’s long gone, taking his muscles and his stench of death with him. “Do you know him?”

“Benny?” She frowns and corrects herself. “No. Benicio.” She rolls through the name with full accent, so I know that’s probably how the dipshit introduced himself.

Sitting up hurts, but I do it anyway, cradling Lore against my chest. My head’s still buzzing, speaker buzz caged inside my cranium. I feel as foggy as she looks right now, blinking as rapidly, because we both got hit with whatever drug her muscled friend is pimping. “Yeah, him. I mean, did you know him before he rammed his tongue down your throat?”

“Yeah. Well, sorta. I met him in the hallway after my set.” The words are little halting, more than a little hesitant.

“So you ‘knew’ him for approximately three minutes before you took off with him.” I’m not judging, just looking for a confirmation I don’t actually need. I’m pretty sure I know what we’re dealing with now, and if my hunch is right, we’re fucked even if we kept our clothes on.

This
is what Roman was hinting at but not saying.

There are other forces at work here.

Forces that can reach inside you and eat your bad dreams for breakfast. Forces that can spin you in a circle until you’re sick and dizzy, caught in a vertigo so fierce that everything you know narrows to a hazy tunnel of guilt and regret.

Sin-eater.

Fantastic. Exactly what I needed right now. I can’t say I’ve had the pleasure of running up against one of them before, not that meeting one right now was all that pleasurable. They’re shadow-dwellers, mostly keeping to themselves. Like hyenas or coyotes, they hang around the periphery, scavenging for their “food.” When they start venturing out into the open like this, stalking and killing without care for their meticulously concealed existence… something is seriously wrong. Like rabid animal, needs-to-be-put-down
wrong
. And the fact that one is running around Los Angeles and getting suck-happy in my nightclub doesn’t bode well for me.

Or for Lore. Because this guy obviously has a type: blonde and leggy, with great tits and all the other interesting bits she has mashed against me. Can’t fault his taste, especially given that she’s gloriously tousled, her rainbow spill of hair falling in loose, beachy waves over nearly-bare shoulders. Her chest rises and falls a little too quickly, and she’s got her delicate hands pressed to my bare shoulders. They burn like fire, I swear, and she doesn’t seem to realize one of her fingers is brushing in a little back-and-forth glide across the cool surface of my skin. Her lips are parted, full and glistening, and I can’t help but reach up to thumb away a little bit of ruby red that’s staining the perfect peach beneath.

Her eyes go half-lidded, and I know she’s thinking exactly what I’m thinking, which is not much beyond wanting the hot press of her mouth on mine again. I lean forward, and her chest stops rising and falling, breath held, waiting, anticipating the moment when—

“Xaine!”

The strident voice of the stage manager cuts through the buzz in my head, zapping me back to the present. When I turn my face toward him, he gets the full effect of my temper, and everything from my hunched-up shoulders to my scowl is his for the keeping.

“Shut up, asshole. I heard you.”

Then I struggle to a standing position, because either I get up and move along, or I strip Fuzzy Bunny naked right here in the hallway and finish everything that good ol’ Benicio started. Lore finds her feet too, teetering a little on those crazy heels, and I reach a hand out to steady her. It starts out as the honorable thing to do, you know, just a guy helping a sister out.

No, definitely
not
a sister.

And not off-limits, either. Not this time. When my arm slides around her waist, she gives a little meep, but it’s not a protest. I can feel the muscles at her side twitch as my fingertips pass by, involuntary spasms that tell me in no uncertain terms exactly where she’s ticklish, and I file that information away for later. The taste of her is still on my tongue, hot and sweet, red lipstick and candy. The deep-ocean color of her eyes is burned so far into my brain that I know I’ll dream of it when I sleep tomorrow morning.

I don’t even begin to consider the way her soft, perfectly curved body feels pressed against mine.

Later.

Because right now, I’m in a dark hallway, caught between Scion’s stage manager and the damn exit. I look one direction and then the other, ticking through the options. I can’t ditch Lore here because then I run the risk of her friend returning. I can’t bail with her because I was supposed to be onstage five minutes ago according to the headset monkey shooting me worried looks from six feet away. And then there’s Roman’s advice knocking around my head.

It might be wise that you have an alibi against similar incidents.

Before I say a word, Lore blinks twice and asks, “So what’s the plan?”

“I can’t leave you alone, and I can’t leave.” I cast a quick look around us. “You’re a witness, an alibi, and a
target
. You’re staying right next to me until this shit’s sorted.”

Lore nods. When I grasp her hand and maneuver her toward the stage door, she adds, “I think I met him before. Benicio, I mean.”

That draws me up short so quickly that she runs right into me. “What do you mean, you met him before?”

“I think…” Again with the hesitation. “I think I spent the night with him a few days ago. He seems… familiar?”

There it is, that infernal question that is not a question. That way Lore has of making statements that don’t sound like statements, like she’s not sure of anything. “You asking or telling, sweetheart?”

“I don’t really know,” she admits, pressing the fingers of her free hand to her temple and staring at a place near my right nipple. She looks confused and frustrated, flushed and forlorn. “It’s all mixed up in my head.”

She blinks up at me then, like she’s willing me to understand, and I almost do. I’ve got my mind back, but I’m a damn vampire. We metabolize everything a lot quicker. For all I know, she’ll be in a hazy daze for, well,
days
.

“Let’s just get this over with,” I tell her. “After my set, I can take you home. Get some food into you or something.”

Admittedly, not my first instinct. What’s left of the sin-eater juice in my system has me wanting me to strip her naked and crawl all over her body. Sink my teeth into the pretty white column of her neck and drink just to see how she tastes. But maybe whatever our friend Benicio pumped into her can be diluted by greasy food and gallons of water. It’s worth a shot, but first, one last hurdle.

Wending my way through the darkened backstage area, I’m still not exactly sure I know what the plan is. I figured that my own goddamn club was a safe enough space, but apparently I do need to have a discussion with Asher Reece about upgrading our security. And I can’t just park Lore on a stool, not when she’s chock-full of sin-eater roofies. “How do you feel about duets?”

She gives me a slightly saucy smile and quips, “You telling me you wanna make sweet music together?”

Can’t help but grin at that. “You game?”

“Well, I’ve already been onstage in my underwear. Doesn’t really get more
worst nightmare
than that.” Lore starts forward, but when she realizes I haven’t budged, she turns back to ask, “You coming, or what?”

Can’t help but stare at her for a second, because she’s the oddest mix of shy and audacious. The pretty half-grin and sarcastic wit are entertaining, but I get the feeling that it’s just a mask for all the
scared
she’s trying not to show right now. Hell, she almost got carted off to god-knows-where by a rabid hyena a few minutes ago. If I were mortal, I’d be changing my shorts right about now.

“Yeah, I’m coming.”

And I head for the flare of spotlights and the sound of a thousand people chanting my name. Lore matches me, step for step, squinting up at the glare a little but not balking, even when there’s an uptick in noise as the audience erupts into cheers and random spurts of applause. Taking hold of the mic posted on a stand at the front of the stage, I raise my free arm in the air, hushing them until they’re silent, rapt, waiting to see what comes next.