Lost Angeles

by Mantchev, Lisa

  When she looks up again, she mutters, “You okay?”

  “Am I okay?” I say, keeping tabs on her double-time metronome heart. “Are you okay? You just jumped so hard you almost fell off the damn bed.”

  Lore runs a hand through her sleep-rumpled rainbow locks, smoothing down the fly-aways and tucking bits behind her ears. She stares at me, bleary-eyed, and I can tell that she’s thinking hard about something.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m good. You caught me dreaming.” She offers up a small smile and a half-shoulder shrug. “No sweat.”

  Plenty she’s not saying right now, but none of it’s my business. Not that we didn’t hit ninety-miles-an-hour kind of intimate on the stage at Scion, or hell, even on the floor in the hallway when I returned to reality to find her straddling my lap. Still, the awkward morning-after is still the morning-after, even with vampire rock stars and Fuzzy Bunny bedmates who are clutching a ticket to ride the pony but have yet to cash it in.

  As it is, I let the arm she’s currently occupying tighten, a reassuring squeeze from the guy trying to beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen. “Well, if you’re fine, I’m fine.”

  Just hungry. And you smell like breakfast.

  Well, not exactly true. Lore smells like shampoo and clean skin and the subtle perfume that’s wholly and unmistakably female. It doesn’t help that she isn’t wearing anything under the hole-riddled T-shirt I put on her.

  I don’t have very many rules, but one tried-and-true is that I don’t fuck when I’m hungry. I know vampires who do. Hell, I used to do it myself, but over time, the risks started to outweigh the thrill. Even if I never killed anyone doing it, there are a couple of women who had really close calls at my hands and dick, so whatever else is going to happen with Lore, it’s not going to happen this second.

  “I need to get something to eat,” I finally mutter, realizing she’s not filling the silence with a bunch of meaningless chatter. Waiting. Just waiting. Waiting for me to answer. Waiting me out, like a spooning blonde cipher. It takes me another couple of minutes to realize she still hasn’t said anything, and I haven’t so much as twitched toward the door. “A hungry vamp is a dangerous vamp.”

  Pathetic. It sounds like something you’d get out of a fortune cookie, which means two seconds later, my brain tacks on—

  In bed.

  Lore’s head comes up until her chin digs into my chest. Approximately two feet of rainbow-threaded hair tumbles around her heart-shaped face and across my shoulder and over my stomach. One set of fingernails trace a tiny pattern across my chest. I don’t think she even realizes she’s doing it, but hell if I’m going to be the one to clue her in.

  “You didn’t eat anything last night?”

  “Yeah, I did.” Back at Scion, but as far as those girls were concerned, it was basically hors d’oeuvres. “But not enough.”

  Not enough, because performing takes as much out of me as it does anyone else. I ride that stellar high for a few hours before crashing hard. Normally when I crash, it’s face-and fangs-first into a willing neck. Two, on a concert night. Then there’s fucking and more feeding and then crashing for a few hours. Lather, rinse, repeat.

  “Look, I don’t actually want to get up,” I mutter. “I think you and I could use about twenty-four hours of downtime before facing the real world, and I’d like nothing better than to stay put.”

  “So, breakfast in bed?” Lore hits me with a wry grin. “I don’t mind. At least… I don’t think I’ll mind?”

  The way she says it gives me pause, mostly because I’m not sure she really understands what’s she’s offering. Those curves and that innocent face make me want to devour her whole, but it’s that now-familiar question that is not a question that makes me pull back.

  “Have you ever been bitten, sweetheart?” It’s pretty much the same as asking if someone’s still a virgin. People lie about it, and a lot of them stretch the truth, if they’re addicts.

  But Lore’s not a liar or an addict, and her expression more than confirms my suspicions before she ever says, “No?”

  There it is again.

  It’s like the hallway back at the club, with big blue eyes and importuning looks. Elizabeth all over again. Except Lore is her own woman, with her own agenda and her own dreams, and she can make immortality happen without me. Her music will echo longer than anything else. Her particular brand of magic is still reverberating through me, hours later, leaving me hungry for the next hit.

  Huh. Who’s the addict now?

  I tease a brilliant blue strand of hair away from her face, gauging her reaction when my fingers slide along her neck and over her shoulder. I don’t know I’m waiting for… a flinch, maybe, or that sudden intake of breath that would indicate she’s changed her mind. But Lore keeps those eyes of hers trained on me, unblinking, waiting for what comes next.

  Just like a virgin on prom night.

  I slide my arms around her waist and pull her against me. A slow roll, and she’s on her back with me atop her. Then I see it: a tiny measure of fear, the slight widening of the eyes, that moment of are we really going to do this?

  Wedged between Lore’s mile-long legs, I breathe her in. My lips find hers, and I know I probably taste like metal, the iron sting of the blood doll offerings I downed a few hours back. It’s still in my mouth, on my teeth, flavoring the tongue that slides past her lips. There’s a moment of hesitation, then her tentative tongue flicks out, like she’s on a quest to get to know me one millimeter at a time. It’s sensory overload, between the way she smells and how soft she feels and that steady tick-tick-tick of her pulse. I move down to nuzzle under her jaw where I can hear it best. Listening to the heavy double-thud of each ventricle makes my mouth water, makes my teeth ache, makes my cock twitch until there’s no other sound in my world but the racing drumbeat of her heart.

  “You sure about this, sweetheart?” I murmur against her skin, the question just another kiss.

  For an answer, Lore arches her entire body against me, and I sure as shit take that as a “yes.” Sinking my fangs into the side of her neck, I break the skin. Crack her seal. As the razor points of my canines sink into her flesh, she hisses. It’s a sharp noise of surprise, of pain, that reflexive action that says it hurts, but so good. She tenses, braced for the crashing impact of her world falling down around her, but a moment later I get the tickling flutter of her lashes as her eyes drift shut.

  Mouth still latched on, I gently extract my fangs from her flesh, and the hot spill of her warmth across the back of my throat is intoxicating.

  Sonuva—

  I wasn’t lying when I told Reille those girls in my dressing room were “just food.” Truth is, every girl but Reille was just food. Her blood was like taking a case of Red Bull, a gallon of espresso, and a kilo of really high-grade cocaine, shaking it in a paint-mixer, cutting it with napalm, and shooting it straight into my bloodstream. One of a kind.

  Or so I’d thought, because Lore isn’t “just food,” either. But not liquid fire; no, it’s like I’m dying in a desert, and she’s the last drink of water on earth…

  I should pull back, pull away, but then she makes a sound that’s sweet and simple, the slow exhalation of breath with the tiniest whimper in the bargain. Her body trembles, goosebumps prickling her arms as I brush my fingers across the softness of her skin. Another shiver as she feels the pull of my mouth, drawing the blood from her carotid, which gives it up without a fight. All those lush curves melt into me, her chest pressed to mine, her wrists clamped between my unforgiving hands. Tight. I hold her so tight, fingers digging into her pale skin. I have the vague thought that later she’ll have bruises. Marks that I gave her.

  And I like the idea way more than I should.

  Her fingers curl, trying to gain purchase on anything they can, but all she finds is the bare plane of my belly and the waistband of my sleeping pants. She tucks her fingers into the elastic, hooking them inside, anchoring herself to a world that’s swiftly spilling out of her vei
ns. “Xaine…”

  It’s the only word she can manage, because I’ve stolen all the rest. She’s tumbling already, but still afraid of the fall, so I force myself to stop, to disengage, to move back an inch. Her fingers slip away from me, one hand reaching upward. They search and find, tracing over the small wounds at her neck. She can still feel the sting of these teeth, the drawing suck of my lips. It burns, that spot, that place where I bit her. The sort of burn they all get used to. The sting they all start to crave.

  Gaze focused, words paused, Lore’s eyes fix on my mouth, wondering what she tastes like. Then she smiles, a loopy, lopsided thing. It’s a little dizzy, that smile, because it’s her first time and I probably took a bit too much. My other hand slides up into the riot of colored hair, up, up, so I can press my thumb against the puncture marks to staunch the trickle still working it’s way down her neck and toward the shirt she’s wearing. My shirt.

  “You all right?” I finally ask, echoing her earlier question to me.

  “I think,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper. “I think I might need to sleep now…”

  And just like that, she clocks out. Dead faint. Her shallow inhale of breath tells me she’s fine. Going to wake up starving. Sore, too, with a supremely stiff neck, the kind you’d get if you went to sleep on your stomach with your head twisted to the side and pressed against a fork. I go to pull my thumb off the puncture wounds that I gave her, and my finger sticks for a second, like we’re glued together. If I did it right—and I always do it right—the marks on her neck will ripple down to mostly-nothing. Just raised bumps, like spider bites.

  I don’t pull away, because I’m a little punch-drunk, a little full-up on her. Not the sex-crazed fuck-me-now vibe Reille’s blood dumped into my system, but a mellow buzz that sets up camp in the back of my noggin and starts toasting marshmallows. Calm. The kind of tranquil it would take a yoga asshole four hours of meditation to achieve, and it feels so good that I let myself drift on the high. Everything else floats on the periphery: Matty, Sebastian, Roman, Reille, Cas… they’re all dangling off the edge of zero-fucks-given, hovering far away in a place where I can worry about them later. Much later.

  So fucking later.

  I don’t think I sleep, but it’s a while before I’m cognizant again. Rosa’s been in the room; not only can I smell the faint grandmotherly traces of cleaning fluid, starch, and cooking oil, but she opened the curtains. Full night now. Moonlight pours in, silver fingers tracing over the bare expanse of Lore’s thigh and knee and calf. She’s still dead to the world, and my phone is vibrating across the nightstand. Reaching out to snag the cell, I’m ready to take someone’s head off, but a second later, Caller ID has me frowning.

  “Yeah?”

  “What the hell, Xaine?” Reille’s voice reaches through the line to grab me by the throat.

  “You’ll have to be more specific—” Sweetheart. That’s how I’d usually finish that sentence, but not right now. Not with an armful of Lore. Not with her blood humming through me… “Babe.”

  Even to my ears it sounds odd, and it does a number on Reille, because she sputters for a full ten seconds before launching into a counterattack. “What was all that bullshit last night? Did you do it on purpose? Wait for me to leave and then pull a new fucking song out of your ass?”

  New fucking song. I file that one away for later. “I don’t usually keep new music in my ass—” Sweetheart. Shit, this is all getting really weird, really quickly. “What’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is that I have every major entertainment news outlet on the planet crawling up my ass, trying to get decent footage of the ‘new song.’ There are snippets of it all over YouTube, pictures on Instagram, people blogging the lyrics. ‘In Your Light’ is a trending topic on Twitter, you asshole, and I didn’t know anything about it until I woke up buried in a thousand emails and voicemails—”

  “Jesus Christ, Reille, take a breath.”

  A pause. A long one.

  “Something’s wrong,” she says at last. “Something’s different.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I tell her. “Except that you’re shitting on a perfectly good afterglow.”

  “You’re far too calm right now.” There’s suspicion in her voice, another pause before she asks, “She’s there with you, isn’t she?”

  In reply, I hold the phone up next to Lore’s mouth so that Reille catches the next softly inhaled snore. I get it back up to my ear in time to catch three seconds of irate silence and then a terse, “You both need to get down here.”

  “I am not going anywhere anytime soon. I don’t any have plans that involve Scion, or whatever lectures you’re working up right now… or pants, for that matter.” I smile at the ceiling. “Definitely no plans involving pants.”

  “You could have had that plan twenty-four hours ago. Now you get to come in and deal with being Mister Big Shot. I have interviews scheduled. Press loading in. The two of you are due onstage in a couple of hours. There’s a line around the block outside.”

  “That’s not my problem, is it? You should have asked first.”

  “I can’t ask if you don’t pick up.”

  “And you still haven’t given me a single reason to give a shit.”

  Reille huffs out a laugh. “You don’t give a shit, but your new muse might. Timing is everything in this industry, Xaine, you know that. You bail on this gig, and those people out there could blacklist her. How much apple pie are you going to get if she thinks you ruined her big break?”

  “You’re forgetting that I am her big break.”

  “Sure. As long as you don’t break her first.” And there it is. The other thing I will never live down. It hisses and crackles in the static between us while I heave a weighty sigh and pinch the bridge of my nose. Reille, when she speaks again, isn’t necessarily sorry she said it, but there’s regret there nonetheless, along with a hint of anxiety. She covers it up with business, like usual. “The styling team will deal with hair and makeup and wardrobe. I’ve ordered food for Ms. Chase. It will be in her dressing room by the time you get here. Now just get here.” Then she hangs up, probably wishing she had an old-school receiver she could slam on me.

  I hate when she’s right. Right about the timing, which is like trying to catch a wave in the ocean. Right about the industry people slobbering over the next big thing until the next big thing comes along.

  Which means I need to wake up the Fuzzy Bunny so I can toss her to the lions.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Xaine

  It takes less effort than expected to get Lore back to Scion. I guess part of my brain is still hot-wired into Reille. Her reactions. Her moods. Her way of murdering anyone who wakes her up before the alarm goes off twice, then murdering them again if they get between her and that first cup of coffee.

  Once Lore is actually upright, she lets me stuff her in a pair of boxer shorts, only offering a faint protest when I take her by the hands and haul her butt off the bed. I shove a pair of sunglasses on her face, because this is LA and that’s what girls do when they don’t have any makeup on and there’s a chance a paparazzo might stick his camera up against the car window between here and downtown.

  Sure enough, there’s a cluster of them at the gate. Reille wasn’t shitting me. Something big has gone down, inadvertently sparked by that song, and I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t enjoy the idea.

  Lore’s half-dozing against the glass, hair tangled over her shoulders in a way the styling team would need three hours to replicate. The holes on her neck have sealed over. Her color is decent, but she’s still clutching the thermal mug of tea that Rosa made her, and she hasn’t reached for the bag of food the housekeeper packed, either. Honestly, that bit surprises and worries me. Lore should be starving right about now. My feeding on her will have kicked up her metabolism and immune responses, and I can’t toss her onstage only to have her keel over.

  “You need to eat something, sweetheart.”

  “Not
really hungry,” she says after a long moment. “Just tired.”

  “Yeah, I’d guessed that by the way your eyeballs are rolling into the back of your head. We’ve got about half an hour between here and the club.” I only let go of her knee for as long as it takes to shift gears. “Go ahead and—”

  She cuts me off with another one of those tiny snores, leaving me to laugh at myself and concentrate on the road. Traffic is kind, and it only takes me twenty minutes to pull into the underground structure. Lore’s still dead to the world, so I pack her inside like a sack of potatoes and head for the dressing rooms. Reille wisely put Lore in the one next to mine. A swipe of my watch gets it open, and I’m gratified to see another passkey sitting on the makeup table, complete with glittery lanyard.

  Not just the key, either. Flowers and food sit next to a rack of designer duds that’s all black leather, studded leather, sheer fabric, glittering gems, and yet more leather. Right about now, though, I’m more concerned with the contents of the mini-fridge.

  Depositing Lore facedown on the couch, I can’t help but stand back and enjoy the view for a second: those long limbs and smooth skin, all that bare leg capped off by two ass cheeks that could grace the covers of Playboy magazine. She hasn’t been in LA for very long, that much is obvious. A few months more and she’d have all those curves toned down, whittled away, and crunched out. Another year, and she’d be another overtanned Barbie with collagen lips, a Botox addiction, and a bottomless bottle of Xanax. It’s nice, actually, refreshing the way my hand cracks against the soft skin of her rear-end. The sound it makes is pretty satisfying, too. It’s that loud, full-palm slap, one you just don’t get spanking supermodels.