Lost Angeles

by Mantchev, Lisa

  Because she doesn’t really have friends so much as she has lovers, ex-lovers, and people she hasn’t fucked yet.

  That’s what Cas had said, and it’s pretty much the last thing I remember clearly from that night. At some point, Reille had come back from the Ladies’ Room and I dragged her out to the limo. I downed tequila shots with her, because it was easier to swallow the liquor than all the lies. Then I drank her blood and poured my venom into her until both of us teetered on the edge of blacking out. In spite of all that, Cas’s words still rang in my head. The second we staggered in the front door of the Palisades mansion, her cell phone rang. Convinced it was him, I plucked it from her hand and threw it to the floor.

  And that’s when absolutely everything shattered.

  By the time I woke up with the world’s most epic hangover, Reille was gone. All my messages went unanswered and my apology gifts got returned. She haunted me the entire time, because there were traces of her everywhere: her clothes in the closet upstairs, her lacy panties tucked in the drawers in the master bedroom, her laptop in my study. Catching an unexpected whiff of her perfume wafting off the towels was like breathing in a ghost. Housekeeping mopped up the blood in the front hall, but in my mind’s eye I could still see the gorgeous, glossy spray of her on the black and white marble.

  To this day, I still can’t explain what happened. All I knew was that I wanted her so badly, lusted after her so much, was addicted to her to a point where reality stopped making sense. I might be a lot of things: an asshole, a narcissist, a shameless glutton, and giant douchebag, but I’ve never been as out-of-my-head as I was that night, and after that night, Reille wouldn’t touch me with a twenty-foot pole.

  “Earth to Xaine,” she snaps at me, and I realize I missed the second act unplugging their equipment.

  “Also horrible. I think you might have gone tone deaf in the last month.” My gaze flickers over the girl heading center stage, if only because she’s blonde and busty and looks enough like the dead body they pulled out of the garbage to make me do a double take. Same build. Same heart-shaped face. It’s a little uncanny and a lot unsettling. “How’s your brother, by the way?”

  “Fuck you, Xaine.”

  “Language, sweetheart.”

  It wasn’t necessarily an idle question. Asher Reece, Vampire Hunter, was the one ringing in when Reille’s phone hit the floor. Idling his stupid-huge Humvee at my gate, he’d been cruising by to check on her; apparently one missed call was all in the invitation he needed to ram through the wrought iron fence, kick open my door, heft Reille out of the puddle of her own blood, and point a gun loaded with UV bullets directly at my head. Not that I can blame him, really. I did almost kill his baby sister. Even if the idea of her dating me left him cold, he was still her knight in shining armor in a way I could never be.

  I’m also expecting him to pick me off with a sniper rifle any day now.

  Finishing off the first cup, I crumple it and toss it over my shoulder as Contestant Number Three plugs in her equipment. Got to give her credit; a lot of them get intimidated by the setting and rush things. This one checks everything, making certain it’s all just so before she heads for the microphone.

  “Hi there,” she says, holding a hand up to her eyes to cut the glare of the stage lighting. “My name is Lourdes Chase?”

  Plain as day, I hear the question mark and smirk into my second cup of Type O. She’s green. Farm-fresh. You can tell by the way that her voice trembles the tiniest bit, the way that even her own name is something that she’s not quite sure of.

  The opening strains of whatever banal piece of crap she’s going to throw at me filter through her laptop and out the speakers. Giving an exaggerated snore, I roll my head toward Reille and hit her with a quick once-over. She looks like crap, skinny as hell, pale as anything. If she went Ophelia tomorrow, she’d sink like a stone if she had so much as a Skittle in her back pocket. But in Los Angeles, that’s considered a good thing. She could be skin and bones, and everyone would assume it’s Pilates and ask her about her secret diet.

  Liquor and late nights.

  “All the mouthwash in the world doesn’t cover up the smell of tequila,” I say, goading, always goading. “Spend another morning chugging Alka Seltzer and worshipping the porcelain god?”

  “Eat a dick.” Reille doesn’t peel her eyes from the stage, but she knows I know I’m right…

  Angel on high,

  I pulled you from the heavens,

  And dragged you down, down, down

  Into my special brand of hell.

  It takes a moment for the lyrics to filter through, maybe because the girl’s clear soprano is nothing like my tenor. Then I have to stop talking, stop taunting, stop doing anything that detracts from the concentration it takes to pick the words out of everything else the Fuzzy Bunny onstage has done to this song. That’s not to say it sounds bad, just different.

  But nothing could have been more jarring to me than hearing her sing this.

  I don’t write about love. Sex, yes. Life, yes. Wealth and fame, all of that is fodder for my music. But love? In four hundred years, I only wrote one song about love, and I only sang it once before I put it away and never touched it again. It was a single impromptu lyrical whim that caught me on one of those nights, when the shadows are a little too dark, the hours a little too long, and the memories a little too vivid to be shoved down inside. Humans would call it a moment of weakness, but it’s worse than that for an immortal; it’s a moment when we let the ennui fall away and all our actual feelings slip through.

  Angel girl, the stars weep to see

  What you’ve become since falling,

  But I just can’t seem to let you go,

  And maybe that’s just as well.

  The world has heard this song exactly one time, at a live acoustic session twenty years ago. Back in the days before YouTube and Vine, before Twitter, and long before social media could tell you that an earthquake was coming your way a full thirty seconds before it hit. There are no video captures of that concert on the internet, no still frames, but every single word is burned into my consciousness as if I played it yesterday. If I close my eyes, I can still see the crowd, hear my voice echoing back through the mic, feel my broken heart poured into every single word.

  It’s the forgotten song, but I remember every single note.

  She’s too young to have heard it live, which means someone, somewhere, put the lyrics on paper. And this Fluffy Bunny built a dinosaur out of the bones, all conjecture and educated guessing, a one-off reduced to a poem and then reborn. She’s made it a full track, too, with violins and keyboard and percussion, so the whole thing builds into an actual song. It fills the room with everything it could have been, instead of everything it never was, and suddenly, all I can hear is her voice.

  Not the voice onstage, but Elizabeth’s voice, because it was Elizabeth’s song. Eyes open wide, I watch without blinking, but I’m not looking at the girl singing, not looking at the club. I’m two hundred years in the past, drowning in all the things I wish I’d done differently.

  It’s damn unsettling, and when my initial shock wears away, it’s replaced by anger. I teeter on two chair legs, cardboard cup clutched in my hand, because I love the song and hate it. Want to hear it again and can’t bear to listen. Need to get out of here, but can’t walk away.

  Here beside me,

  Tucked beneath me,

  Surrounded by me,

  Oh, baby can’t you see?

  I rock idly, the sole of my shoe pushing against the railing. My head bobs vaguely in time with the music, but I swear I’m barely holding it together, and only because I don’t want Reille to see anything but indifference. I’m not in the habit of putting weapons in the hands of people who may or may not be in the market for a little revenge.

  You burn ever-bright,

  My every wrong set right,

  You show me there’s still light,

  You are the light,

 
And I want to walk with you…

  In your light.

  “Well, at least you’ve stopped snoring,” Reille snarks. “So either you like her, or you’ve finally fallen asleep.”

  Her voice jars me from my thoughts, sending a tiny jolt of surprise through me. My foot slips, smooth sole skidding off the ledge, and there’s a moment of reaching, flailing, trying to catch hold of anything I possibly can before I lose my balance and topple back. My head hits the floor in the space between one note and the next.

  “Shit,” I mutter, though that doesn’t begin to cover it.

  Reille’s horrified, of course, and a little disgusted when she asks, “Are you all right?”

  Not really. I think I might have a concussion, insofar as it’s possible for a vampire to bruise his brain.

  “I’m fine.” Except I’m not. Finding my feet and my equilibrium takes several seconds longer that I would like, and by then, Miss What’s-Her-Face Something-Or-Other is well into the next torturous verse. She has her eyes closed, like she doesn’t care who’s watching her. A rainbow riot of hair tumbles over her shoulders, pale strands intertwined with pink and purple and blue and green and yellow, like she’s a kid who finally discovered Manic Panic. Ripped-up jeans, fluffy sweater, boring as fuck shoes, but that voice… that voice… echoes my own words back at me from another time, another place—

  “Of course, now you’re paying attention,” Reille mutters. “Blonde. Stacked like a porn star. I should have guessed she’d be your type.”

  “Then how’s about you scoot your ass down there and sign the Fuzzy Bunny, huh? Just think of it, today you get to play Fairy Godmother to her Cinderella and make all her dreams come true!”

  I hit the smartass inflections, pushing Reille’s buttons, trying to set off that spitfire temper of hers. It works, too, because she turns pink, the way only a real redhead can. I can hear the rush of her blood in her veins, the surge as her heartbeat kicks up. Except she doesn’t look quite as pissed as expected. Clutching that clipboard of hers against her chest—probably to keep me from looking at her tits—she looks to the stage, her forehead scrunching up like she’s thinking really hard about something.

  When she speaks again, there’s a halting quality to the words. “She’s not even the best of the bunch, Xaine. There’s a trio coming up—”

  “If she’s not the best, then why did you waste my time with her?” By inches, I crowd Reille against the railing, stepping into her bubble of nonexistent personal space. “You screened a hundred acts, but she’s the shitty one you made me listen to?”

  “No. I mean…” Reille glares at me for all she’s worth. “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I know that I told you to hire someone and you immediately started arguing with me that there’s someone better. Which means you made me sit through a crap act. Which means you didn’t do your job.” Instead of raising my voice, I lower it until I’m certain she’s giving me every last speck of her attention. “Is that what happened? Did you drop the ball on this?”

  Ass against the ledge, she pinches her mouth into a thin line. “No, I didn’t drop the ball.”

  “So the Fuzzy Bunny is a perfect choice, isn’t she? Because I have impeccable fucking taste, don’t I, and it’s time I start giving back, right? So I’ll start with that little slice of farm-grown, completely organic, all-American apple pie.”

  “If I sign her, you keep your distance,” Reille says, tilting her chin up like she’s allowed to make demands.

  “How about we play the game where I’m the boss, and you’re the employee? The game where you do as I say, because I pay you to. The game where you get down there and sign her, or you pack your shit?” She flinches at that, a muscle twitching in her jaw as she averts her face, but I duck down, staring her right in her goddamn lies so I can say, “It’s all right, sweetheart. You’re allowed to be jealous.”

  Her head shoots up, and I get all the indignant anger. “As if.”

  “Then prove it.” I flash a smile that’s more fangs than teeth and add, “Contract signed and in my dressing room tout suite, or it’s time to polish up that résumé of yours.”

  As I back up, she throws her clipboard at my head, but I manage to get out the door without her doing any damage. My ears are still ringing as I head down the hall, not with Reille’s voice, but the Fuzzy Bunny’s.

  My every wrong set right,

  You show me there’s still light—

  Except it’s all bullshit. There’s no setting my wrongs right, and the only light in this life is sold by the kilowatt hour. Stalking down the hall, I feel like I’ve entered into the world’s most risky game of Truth or Dare, and I wonder which one of us is going to break first. I’d like to put my money on Fuzzy Bunny, but with the way my hands are shaking and Reille’s temper is flaring, there’s no telling how this hand is going to pan out.

  My phone buzzes with an incoming text; this time, it’s my lawyers, giving me the rundown on the ongoing police investigation and what I need to do in order to appear cooperative.

  And innocent.

  Trouble is, I’m not exactly a solid bet when it comes to either of those things.

  Good thing we’re not in Vegas.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lore

  It’s a little hard to breathe, following Reille Reece up to her office and sliding into the chair opposite her massive desk. The entire room is crammed with little personal effects, travel souvenirs, vintage knickknacks; god help the poor cleaning staff that actually has to dust this space. Reille doesn’t look like the kind of woman who spends weekends digging through rusty bits at the Pasadena Flea Market, but if this last year has taught me anything, looks can be very, very deceiving.

  For the first few minutes, she mutters under her breath, pulling out boilerplate contracts and Perrier waters. Her whole body is at an anxious fidget when she stops, spins toward me, and asks yet again, “Are you certain you don’t want to retain a lawyer before signing anything? A deal on the table… you could get an agent like that.” And she snaps her immaculately French-manicured nails.

  “I’m not worried about the legalities.” It’s the truth, edging closer to my real reason for being here. As much as I love it, the music has been a means to an end, so I pull the papers toward me and start signing on the dotted lines. All the dotted lines, everywhere she points with that one, perfect fingertip. In between scrawls, I flick curious glances at the woman seated across from me.

  For a while, the doctors had me convinced I’d imagined her. Imagined everything. Then one afternoon, I’d been sitting in the psych ward common room, flicking through the channels without really watching. Then… boom. There she was. The redhead who supposedly didn’t exist, on the arm of the world’s most infamous rock star. It was a red carpet clip of Xaine headed into the Grammy awards.

  That was the day I started to “recover.” That was the day I started lying to the doctors, to the shrinks, telling them I understood, that I really had hallucinated the whole thing. That my mind had played tricks on me, bending fantasy over memory until I’d pieced together an entire alternate reality from snippets of life and TV. They say that admitting to the problem is half the battle, and my battle couldn’t even begin until I was out of that hospital. That became my new goal: to tell them whatever they wanted to hear for as long as it took to convince them.

  But no matter what I said to those people, I knew I had to come here, find her.

  Find answers.

  My hand is shaking by the time my last John Hancock is in place, but Reille just sighs heavily and drags the papers out of my grasp.

  “Well, I suppose that is that,” she says.

  “Yeah, it really is.” I lick my lips and finally muster the gumption to ask, “Look, this is going to sound really strange, but… do you remember me?”

  There’s a flicker of something—the kind of panic I’ve seen in my own eyes when staring at my reflection—before she tamps it all down and goes Hollywood Hills cool
on me. “Most people generally have to be memorable for me to remember them.”

  “Right,” I say slowly, because what did I expect, really? “The thing is, I remember you.” A pause. “You were on the table next to mine. You know. At that… lab… or whatever.”

  I know she knows what I mean, because the color drains from her face lickety-split. Well, what color there is to begin with. Reille Reece is rather tragically wan, the sort of pale-and-pretty you’d find in a campy vampire novel, but that doesn’t stop her from turning a little green around the edges as well.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Leaning back in her chair, she offers up a brittle smile when she adds, “I’ve never seen you before in my life.” Opening a Perrier bottle, she takes a tiny sip and swallows harder than necessary.

  I’d feel more sympathy, if she wasn’t bald-faced lying to me right now. “I get it. I really do. Learned the hard way not to say anything if I didn’t want to end up in a strait jacket, bouncing off the walls of a padded room—”

  “Look, Miss Chase, I appreciate that you think you know me from somewhere—”

  “Who’s Cas?” Grasping at straws, I’m gratified to catch a tremor in her hand, so I push her with, “You kept screaming that he would come for you. That he would make them sorry.”

  Reille sucks in a breath and holds it, like she’s trying to decide something, but before she can answer, the intercom beeps twice and a voice cuts between us.

  “The car for Miss Chase is here.”

  Reille reaches out to press the button; her hand is shaking harder now. “Thank you. She’ll be right down.” Then she lets go and heads for the door without another glance in my direction. “We’ll be in touch about rehearsals. Please have the receptionist take your measurements so they can be forwarded to the wardrobe department.”

  It’s less than I wanted but more than I expected out of the ambush, and I have to content myself with the knowledge that the Scion gig will put me on Reille’s radar long enough that she might break down and trust me.