Lost Angeles

by Mantchev, Lisa

  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, definite
ly 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.

  “My good friend Lourdes has agreed to sing again tonight, this time a duet.” Another bout of screaming, another couple of moments until they settle. I turn toward Fuzzy Bunny and offer up a smile that’s gotten me shot on more than one occasion. She’s wide-eyed, pupils still eating up her irises, skin flushed and glistening, cheeks a high pink. When one of the stagehands drops a guitar over my head, she looks at it with no little envy, and I make a mental note to send her two, or three, or maybe just one of each. “It’s called ‘Blue-Eyed Girl.’ Want you all to sing along with the hook. My girl Lore will show you how it’s done.”

  The speakers crackle to life, notes ricocheting off the walls as the crowd explodes. She holds the mic between us, and I pluck out the first set of chords before letting them have it with everything in my lungs.

  Storms slam into glass and scatter it across your floor,

  Back away, but every curve is asking for a little more.

  The words rip along the edges as I lean into them with everything I’ve got. There’s no half-assing this song: it’s all or nothing every time I sing it, and that goes double now that I am singing it at her. To her.

  You’re the one who cuts me down,

  Blue-eyed girl, your eyes are knives,

  Run your blades across this town,

  We’ll make them bleed, beg for their lives.

  Lore keeps her eyes locked on me through the entire verse. Coming up on the chorus, there’s no time for her to dither, no space for her to falter because the music just doesn’t allow for it. She hits me with a tiny smile, like we’re conspiring. Sharing a secret. Well, fuck, maybe we are. Maybe we’re sharing all the secrets. She certainly seems to have every single word I’ve ever written memorized when she opens up with that glorious voice and blows me away.

  You want to be the one in control, control… baby,

  You want to be the one to tear… it… down.

  You want to be the one, be the one with the pieces, baby,

  And I’ll be the one to bleed.

  The sound system catches her lyrical sparks, and just like that, the fire’s lit. It chases us through the rest of song. She knows it, has it memorized, is able to add flourishes like spurts of gasoline tossed onto the flames. I catch her gaze on me for the half-seconds between words, noting the exact moments when she takes over the melody, when she loses herself in the music, when she’s the kind of fearless that she desperately wants to be. I give her those moments, and then I throttle her words with my own, screeching down on her harmonies like a semi with the brakes cut, willing and able to run her over if she doesn’t speed up, move over, get out of my way. Sometimes she does, and sometimes she deliberately taps on the brakes, forcing me to back off.

  Those are the moments I grin at her. Those are the moments I show her my teeth.

  Before I’ve had a chance to process it all, we come to a crashing finish, and we’re left there in the spotlight to stare each other down. Suddenly, there’s a sense of need, a feeling of desperate wanting that bubbles up from some buried place. When the music fades away, I make a slashing motion with my hand, silencing the next song, cutting through it until some asshole in the booth turns it off. The whole place goes deathly still, like a blanket thrown over a fire.

  Exorcise the demons.

  Slowly, I step back, lift the guitar from my shoulders, and hand it off to some skinny kid who stares at it like it’s the Holy Grail. When I reach a hand out, someone else puts
a microphone into it. Lore shoots me a puzzled look, because she probably knows my set like the back of her pretty hand.

  And she knows this too, even if she’s the only person in the universe who remembers it.

  I raise the mic to my mouth and give Lore the only thing that can properly convey all the emotions that her eyes and her lips and her music have ripped out of me.

  Angel on high,

  I pulled you from the heavens,

  And dragged you down, down, down,

  Into my special brand of hell…

  My voice cuts through the reverence, echoes through the silence, reverberates from the floors and ceilings and balconies. Three notes in, Lore stiffens, already knowing the lyrics but needing another second to recognize the melody as the one I’d played her on this very stage, both of us with guitars in hand. We’re standing here in front of LA’s elite, piecing together my past… and hers.

  And the audience gets it. They realize they’re witnessing something, even if they don’t know exactly what it is. Especially when I close my eyes and let it out, let it go.

  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…

  It’s softer, sadder, more gentle. It’s my song, the way that I sang it. No better or worse. Not right or wrong. Just different.

  Here beside me,

  Tucked beneath me,

  Surrounded by me,

  Oh, baby can’t you see?

  Lore’s sweet soprano picks up the refrain, and she sings my pain the way I sang it, the way I felt it twenty years ago, on a night just like this.

  You burn ever-bright,

  My every wrong set right,