Lost Angeles

by Mantchev, Lisa

  But I have more important questions to ask first.

  “You can see me,” I say, because that’s the script.

  He nods. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “Then why—”

  A nurse enters the room, and Dr. Osamu looks away, consulting his tablet, ignoring me as I move closer. My bare feet make no sound on the floor, but the doctor flinches away all the same. The nurse rustles around, checking my wires and tubes, hooking up a new bag of medications to my IV, tinkering with the monitors and readings. I stare at myself while she does it, studying my still-living corpse. I’m clean now, bathed and put to bed like Sleeping Beauty, except that my eyes are open, staring, wide, blue, and blank.

  “Tell me what happened,” I implore, but the doctor ignores me, flicking brief glances at the nurse. “Please?”

  I stand close enough to him that I can feel his heat. It’s weird, that warmth, and I realize that it’s the only thing I’ve felt since I was, as the movies like to say, shaken loose from my mortal coil. Without thinking, my hands reach out with desperate longing toward his skin.

  The doctor evades me, taking a few casual steps out of reach, toying with a knob on one of the machines. When the nurse leaves and we’re alone, he acknowledges my presence again. “There is nothing I can do for you. You should go.”

  “What about my body?” I say, incredulous.

  “Everything is as it was,” he tells me. “There are secrets in your blood that we have yet to discover, but thankfully, we will have the opportunity. You are very special, and your spirit may depart knowing that some good may yet come of this.”

  “Depart?” I shake my head. “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Wherever people go,” he says softly, “when they move on.”

  Panic rising, I can feel absolutely nothing where there should be something. It’s all black and cold and empty. “You have to help me. You’re supposed to help me.”

  Dr. Osamu’s expression changes then, breaking apart and shifting as if I’ve moved something inside of him. “I heal people. It’s what I do. But I cannot put a soul back into a mortal vessel. That’s beyond the scope of medicine.”

  “You’re not just a doctor.” I don’t understand how, but I know it for a certainty. “There’s something about you. I feel it. You brought me back from the edge when you touched me.”

  I flash out and grasp him by the wrist. He jerks like I shot him with a taser, muscles spasming. I can tell he wants to pull away, wants to shake me off, but he can’t. His next exhalation of breath is accompanied by a puff of white, as if the temperature in the room dropped below freezing.

  “I cannot help you,” he protests.

  “You have to.” My other hand clamps down on his arm, and I jerk him toward my inert body. “You’re going to put me back. You’re going to do it right now.”

  “Please stop.” He manages to pull away, slipping through my fingers like I’m nothing but air. I watch in horror as my hands lose solidity, fading to transparence even as the doctor takes a few slow steps backwards.

  Staring at my palms, I try to wrap my head around everything. This is why I can’t remember those months. This is why I only see things in flickers and flashes. This is why there’s no memory of anything other than those random moments that Benicio dredged up. When I look at the doctor again, I feel the urge to cry, but no tears are forthcoming.

  “Nothing is ever the same once it touches death,” he tells me, repeating his earlier words. It sounds like a warning, an admonition to understand exactly what I’m asking of him.

  “I said I don’t care.” Hope rises hard and fast enough to choke me. “Can you try?”

  He shakes his head. “No, I will not do it.”

  “I’ll wait,” I tell him. “I’ll wait forever. I’ll haunt you until you change your mind. I’ll—”

  “Lore!” The voice calling me back is familiar, but out of place. It doesn’t belong here.

  Swiveling my head to the spot where Benicio was standing, I gape in disbelief at the suggestion of someone very different. “Xaine?”

  There’s a flash of him, the quickest flicker of his face and form before he’s gone and I’m staring at a blank wall. I stride toward it, hands outstretched, palms thudding against the surface. My eyes are telling me that I’m looking at pristine, white plaster, but the surface beneath my palms is rougher, colder, like stone.

  Like brick.

  Something plows into my side, knocking me to the ground. I hit hard, skin scraping and head bouncing against the concrete. I can taste blood dripping into my mouth, but from where?

  Lips. Nose. Head.

  The real world returns in a screaming, roaring, overwhelming rush of sight and sound and reality. I blink up at my assailant, stunned and confused. I’m lying on my back in the semi-dark with Benicio crouching over me. He’s bloody and huffing, like he just ran the world’s longest marathon, but he’s smiling nonetheless.

  “What—”

  “No, no,” he growls. “Thank me later.”

  “Lore!” Xaine’s voice again, accompanied by the sound of him running toward us.

  Benicio makes a noise that I swear sounds happy. I don’t know how he broke out of PFC, whose blood he’s wearing, or what’s going to happen when he gets his hands on Xaine, so I do the only thing I can do: I clap my hands on his face and summon the memory of the scummy motel room.

  As distractions go, it’s pretty disgusting, but the memory of us tangled up in cheap cotton sheets is enough to get the sin-eater’s eyes closed and his mouth hanging ajar. Xaine’s gloved hands clamp down on Benicio’s shoulder two second later, jerking him away from me. I scramble back against the bricks, wishing I still had a weapon on me, but I’m not sure there’s anything I could aim it at without hitting Xaine. They grapple, with the sin-eater trying like hell to get a hand up to Xaine’s face, the only place he still has skin exposed. And Xaine…

  For all the times they’ve photographed him covered in fake blood, teeth bared, no one has ever captured this side of him. Somehow, his fangs look longer. His eyes have gone completely dark, repelling the light from the security lamps that blaze to life with a series of whining electrical charges. Reaching between them, Xaine grasps Benny by the hand and twists slowly, inexorably back until it reaches a sickening point of tension. I see the look on Benicio’s face, an awakening sense of panic as the odds balance out and then tilt in someone else’s favor. Finally, with a grunt and a nauseating pop!, Xaine breaks his wrist.

  The rest plays out like an action sequence from a street fighter movie, with Xaine taking Benicio apart, limb by deliberate limb. Kneecaps shattered. Ribs broken. Pretty soon, the sin-eater is curled in on himself like a shrimp, snarling and whimpering by turns, not that it makes any difference to the vampire. He’s still moving, his actions fast, furious, deliberate, vicious, and as horrifying to watch as it is gratifying…

  …right up to the blood. I can see spatter, but I can’t believe that Xaine would ever drink from a sin-eater, a suspicion that’s confirmed when I catch the metal-glint of light hitting a small knife in his hand. It’s one of Asher’s, I have to guess, curved like a velociraptor claw.

  “Let’s see if you’ll bleed out the same as any human would,” Xaine says, slicing through Benicio’s bicep. The sin-eater’s half-swallowed scream accompanies the spurt of too-red, but Xaine’s already moving to the other arm. “It’s rank, man. You reek like misery. My girl’s misery.” Xaine digs the tip of the knife into the soft spot under Benicio’s chin. “I think I’m gonna cut your head off and see how long it takes for the rest of you to stop twitching.” He moves in closer. “How much do you think they pay for powdered sin-eater dick in Chinatown?”

  Benicio’s answer is garbled, thick with the blood filling his mouth and the bubbles breaking on his lips. I should stop this, I should do something. Like an echo, I hear myself tell Xaine not to hurt him, the memory of concern. Except too much has happened since that hallway at Scion, and I’m ti
red of looking over my shoulder and holding my breath. I exhale, releasing the air from my lungs on a wordless whisper, issuing no stay of execution. And I watch as Xaine shoves the knife by painstaking increments into the neck, surpassing the base of the jaw, the hard palate, the sinus, and finally the skull. That’s when Benicio goes slack, the lean lines of his body relaxing into nothing more than a pile of very dead meat.

  There’s a flesh-hiss when Xaine slowly pulls the knife out. Flipping the blade around in his hand, he rocks back on his heels and stands. The madness is still there, painted across his face, his shaking body. He blinks, once, twice, clenching his teeth together, pushing one rough palm into his own eye socket like he’s got the mother of all brain freezes.

  When he finally looks up at me, his eyes are still black. He takes a step forward, then pulls up short, curtailing himself like he’s afraid he might not be able to stop if he moves too quickly. “Lore?”

  “It’s okay.” My voice wavers but I slowly crawl up the wall until I’m on my feet again, leaning hard against the cold brick. “I’m okay.”

  I get the flash of fangs, a gut-deep growl as Xaine stalks toward me. Maybe it’s stupid, but I’m too relieved to be afraid of him. I’m dizzy, the world is spinning, and I think I might lose my cookies all over the damn parking pad outside of PFC, but—

  “I feel better, actually,” I tell him as he grabs hold of my waist and drags me against him. “I feel—”

  Not haunted.

  “Well, I’m glad you feel better.” Xaine’s words a little garbled, leaving me to wonder if maybe those famous fangs of his aren’t actually a little bit longer, sharper, and deadlier than before. “Because that was the stupidest idea on the planet.”

  “What happened?” I touch the tips of my fingers to my aching head.

  “Asshole busted the restraints the second you were within reach,” Xaine says, squeezing me against his chest so tightly that I can actually feel the blood seeping through my clothes. “Scrambled Asher’s brain, took out the Mini-Muff, and chopped Trace up with his own goddamn sword, that’s what.”

  “Oh, my god.” I stare up at him in horror. “Are they all dead?”

  “I don’t know,” he says grimly. “I didn’t exactly stick around to find out.”

  The inside of the warehouse looks like a war zone. The moment I step through the door, I draw up short, gasping at the trail of blood extending down the hallway. The sudden action makes my head reel, my stomach flipping over and over again until my knees give out. Xaine catches me, setting me gently on my feet and holding me up until I’ve stabilized.

  “Easy,” he admonishes. “You hit the pavement pretty hard.”

  Great. Just what I need, more brain damage.

  When I take a tentative step, my heel clicks loudly in the silence. Xaine is at my side, guiding me with his hand as we pick our way around the scattered red puddles. Back in the interrogation room, Jax is sitting up against the wall, grimacing as Lonan presses a heavy pad of gauze to his shoulder.

  “It’s severed, man,” Lonan says. “You need to go to a hospital.”

  “It’s fine,” Jax manages through gritted teeth. “It’ll be fine. Just… give it a few minutes.”

  “You don’t have a few minutes.”

  Jax snorts. “I have all the time in the world.” He pauses, then adds, “I think.”

  When the two men catch sight of me, there’s a collective frown. Lonan ducks his head and looks away, content to play nurse.

  Jax decides to lead with, “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “That I was tired of watching the menfolk duke it out like a bunch of Neanderthals.” Without thinking, I touch my throbbing head again. That’s when I notice the gravel embedded in my arms alongside scrapes that are still weakly oozing blood. “If it’s any consolation, I’m really, really sorry I did it. And also not sorry, because you were wrong. I did find something that could help.”

  “Lore—” Jax starts to say, but gives up and shakes his head. Raking his good hand through the gel-shell on top, he cracks the crisp waves of dark hair and leaves them to fall forward into his face.

  My eyes scan the room, searching for the others, but all I see is a circular pattern of debris and worse, like something detonated at the center of the room.

  Ground Zero.

  “What the hell happened?” I ask.

  It’s Lonan who answers. “The dude nailed us. He projected. Threw out some kind of pulse that knocked us all on our asses. Busted those bindings like they were nothing…”

  “Retard strength.” That bit comes from Tamsyn as she hobbles around the corner. She winces as she plops down on a crate, cradling her arms close to her chest. “G.I. Joe tried to take him on, got hit with the juice, and now he’s the Cobra Commander.”

  That provokes an unwelcome mental image, to say the least. “Where is he? Is he okay?”

  “Yeah,” she says, leaning against the wall with another fierce scowl. “He locked himself in the storage closet and won’t come out. Apparently an erection is serious business. So what happened to you?”

  “Xaine found me.” I glance at the man in question. He’s quieter than usual, still dazed by the whole ordeal. Not damaged, really, but cautious, like he’s afraid he could lose it again at any moment. It’s a very strange look on him and doesn’t sit quite right on his features. “He ripped Benicio to pieces.”

  Tamsyn nods her approval. “Double retard strength.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lonan says. “How did Benicio break loose? Those cuffs are meant to hold men like him. Men stronger than him. He cracked those suckers like they were made of tissue paper.”

  “Sin-eaters feed off of the emotions associated with memory.” Jax is still pale and slumped a bit, his pretty-man clothes torn all to hell. Lonan’s soaking through gauze pad after gauze pad trying to staunch the bleeding. “Plate of pancakes, man lives to shit another day. Plate of a pretty girl’s most painful memories?” He makes a gesture with one hand as he adds, “Kaboom.”

  Then, from the orange-haired peanut gallery, “Super retard strength.”

  “He was playing us all along, biding his time.” Jax nods to Lonan and pulls his arm away. “I think it’s fine now.”

  Lonan looks skeptical, but a moment later, he grips the fabric of Jax’s shirt and yanks the sleeve off to bare a still-red but healing wound.

  “Motherfucker!” Jax sucks in a sharp breath and clenches his teeth. “Could you maybe not jerk it out of its socket again, huh?”

  Lonan touches tentative fingers to Jax’s shoulder. “It’s clotted. And healing. Who the hell are you?”

  “It’s not a matter of who he is.” Xaine’s eyes are back to their trademark blue, but he looks no less menacing when he adds, “It’s a matter of what. Right, Trace?”

  The two men glare at one another, the air rippling with unspoken words. Jax looks away first, but his hard gaze doesn’t wander far; it lands on me, with all the censure and resentment that he must be feeling in the aftermath of our own mini-Armageddon.

  Done with staring contests, I pull away from Xaine. “I’m going to check on Asher.” Without waiting for permission, I head down the hall; a glance over my shoulder tells me that those glacial eyes of his are trained on me, following my every step toward the nearby broom closet.

  Leaning in close, I rap a knuckle on the heavy door. “Ash?”

  “Leave me alone,” he answers, voice muffled by the barrier between us.

  “I’m coming in, okay?”

  “That would be the opposite of ‘leave me alone,’ Lore.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s me, rebel all the way.” Slowly pushing my way in, I peer around the edge of the door, searching the mostly-dark for Asher. I find him sitting on a stack of boxes, his head in his hands, clothes conspicuous only for their absence. “Are you naked?”

  “What?” The question comes out panicked, like I startled him into some new revelation. None of that improves when Asher does a quick scan
of himself and finds that, yes, he is, in fact, slightly more than Calvin Klein underwear ad in Times Square naked.

  The second he starts to rise, my hands shoot out, gesturing him back down. “No, no, please don’t stand up.” Asher’s bare butt hits the crates again a second later. “Did you Hulk Smash all your clothes off?”

  “I don’t remember.” He falls silent again, his elbows propped on his knees, clutching two handfuls of hair.

  I give him the moment to think while I inch closer, approaching him like he’s a cornered animal because, really, that’s exactly what he is. Not feral like Xaine, but lost and confused and full-up on all the surging adrenaline and hormones that Benicio kicks into high gear with each unsolicited touch. “Are you okay?”

  “My dick hurts,” he says. “And I sort of want to fuck everything.”

  “I’m sorry. I get it, I do, having more than a passing acquaintance with the ‘Juice.’” When he cocks a brow at me, I add, “It’ll wear off soon enough.” In the meantime, the sight of him sitting in a broom closet without so much as his skivvies is actually pretty funny.

  “I’m hot… so I took my clothes off.” A pause before he adds, “I think.”

  “You must have,” I say, “because I certainly didn’t do it.”

  He blinks up at me blearily, dark brows pulling together over the Grand Canyon of forehead creases. “Please don’t do that again. The sin-eater thing.”

  “Yeah, that was not my best idea ever,” I tell him. “But I did find out a few things that might help Jess—”

  “Jess!” Asher shoots to his feet, giving me an instant full-frontal.

  Blinking twice, I clear my throat and avert my eyes. “Ash, holster your weapon, would ya? I can’t really think when it’s staring me in the eye.”

  He only gapes at me. “What?”

  I gesture to his—Jesus, what the hell?—substantial package. “Would you mind… uh… putting it away?”

  He finally understands, scrambling to locate his discarded pants and flashing me a full moon. I turn my back as he wrestles his pants on and stuffs the anaconda into its cage.