That sparks a grin, and he jerks his chin at me in acknowledgement before he throws the Humvee into drive and takes off down the street, hitting sixty before screeching around a corner. There’s the first hint of light on the horizon, the faintest suggestion of how hot the day is going to get. I wobble a little, ducking into our ride, and the second my butt hits the leather, I realize all the places I ache, how badly my feet hurt, that my stomach is tangled up in knots, that I’m spattered with—
“Yeah, we both need a shower,” Xaine says, sliding in next to me and turning the engine over.
“Again.” I let my head fall back against the rest. “This is getting to be a habit.”
Xaine doesn’t miss a beat as he hits the gas. “I’ll try to keep the soap out of your eyes this time, sweetheart.”
As we pull away from the curb, something heavy hits the back window, shattering the glass and spraying my hair with glittering debris. I jump a mile, twisting around in time to see Benicio standing where Jess and I fell a few minutes ago. Through the busted pane, I can see his face twisted up in anger, the metal shine of a hubcap spinning in the street as he stoops to pick up a chunk of concrete.
I reach for Xaine, lacing my fingers through his. “Drive faster,” is all I say, but he knows, hand flexing under mine like a cat extending its claws.
“When I get my hands on that little shit,” he says, “remind me to beat ten thousand dollars’ worth of rear windshield out of his face.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Xaine
Twenty-four hours. I don’t know how I know, but that’s how long I spent passed out in the giant bed. Maybe it’s because I’ve always tracked the seconds the way I do beats in a piece of music or someone’s pulse at their throats, but before I crack an eyelid and peer at the bedside clock, I know that it’s somewhere near seven AM the next day.
A second later, I register that I’m alone.
And the second after that—
“What… the fuck?”
The arm extended in front of me is covered in Post-It Notes. My face is papered over with the same bright green and yellow and pink and blue snippets, as are my legs, my back, my shoulders and…
“My asscrack.” I pluck the first of many out. “Damn woman woke up and stuck memos in my asscrack.”
Except they’re not memos… they’re song lyrics. Snippets that don’t make much sense, until I realize they were written in order, stream of consciousness style, and if I lay them out on the bed in the same rows that they were stuck on my body, they form a song that is equal parts my scribbles—which she dug out of the bedside table—and her bits of inspiration linking them together. I pause a second, musing over her handwriting. Just like on the contracts, Lore takes the time to neatly form the letters, and yet there are little artistic swoops and curves that peg it as wholly feminine. Once I stop ogling the way she dots her i’s and crosses her t’s, it only takes a few minutes to get them laid out, perfectly color-coded bits of unfinished songs, finished. Staring at it all, I’m not one hundred percent sure that I have the verses in the order that she intended, but it’s setting off a thousand musical sparks, and my fingers are itching for a guitar, a piano, something to start pounding out a melody.
So much for telling Reille I don’t pull new songs out of my ass.
“Lore!” I reach for the shirt that’s closest and the sleeping pants I’d opted not to wear. Hell, if it gets me a new song every time I skip them, I’ll burn the damn things and put up with Post-Its for as long as she’s willing to cram them in my outbox. “Lore!”
She’s in the house, I know that much. There’s security, too. I can scent all of them, but the only one I’m interested in smells like peaches, is wearing my T-shirt, and has her cute little butt parked on the couch in my media room. She’s got the flatscreen on and tuned to E!, which is treating her to grainy cell phone footage from the first duet and then the more professional shots from the night of the lockdown. It’s muted, but that doesn’t stop me from lip-reading the rundown, from the incident with Cas in the VIP area to the fact that “In Your Light” is the most downloaded bootleg on BitTorrent.
The fans couldn’t even wait for us to lay a track in the studio. Jesus.
“Did you know you’re on every station?” Lore asks before I get a word in.
“I’m always on every station.” I flop down next to her on the couch.
“And that there’s a vampire running for president?”
I glance at the screen. Of course, there’s Uriel Dellessandro in a too-expensive suit and too-styled hair, smiling for the cameras, fangs on full display. I should have guessed it would be him. “He’ll never win. His constituency is outnumbered a million to one, never mind the fact that he was their second choice.”
“Who was their first?”
I pull a face because politics have never been my thing. Doubling down, I throw in a fake snore before saying, “Cas.”
“Oh, I suppose that makes sense.” Another one of her thoughtful pauses. “Did you know he’s a viscount?”
I realize she’s dug up my iPad and must have been Googling Enemy Number One all night. “Was a viscount,” I say, then emphasize it by repeating, “Was. And that was like… two hundred years ago. It doesn’t even count.”
“No, it viscounts.” Those humor-filled eyes turn my way. “He was also the governor of New York City for two terms. How did I not know that?”
“It was before your time.” I pluck the tablet from her hands and chuck it across the room before she treats me to the litany of Cas’s many and varied achievements. “Do you ever sleep?”
“Not much.” Lore reaches around under her legs, presumably for the TV remote.
“And why were you Googling Cas?”
“He keeps popping up everywhere,” she says. “Figured I should do my homework.”
“For the record, it boils down to ‘pretentious douchebag with too much money and time on his hands.’” More than done talking about Cas and not wanting my brain to flick the connect-the-dots switch back on, I actively seek to distract us both. Reaching across my chest, I scratch my bicep, still feeling the tickle of her words on my skin. “Why did you stick Post-Its in my butt?”
“You were on your stomach,” Lore says as if it’s the most logical answer ever. That sly smile of hers makes a reappearance as she adds, “Wouldn’t be a problem if you wore clothes to bed.”
“Sweetheart, with prospects like that, I’m never wearing clothes to bed again.”
She ducks her head, like she’s trying not to imagine me naked. Her cheeks flush a very, very pretty pink, enough so that my fangs remind me that I need to get something into my system. “Have you eaten?”
“Rosa made me enough food for three truck drivers before she left for the night.”
“And how much of it did you actually eat?”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not one of your LA toothpick girls,” Lore points out wryly. “I had like forty eggs and a whole pack of sausage, but… that might have been a while ago.”
“Come on, then.” I bounce off the couch and head down the hall. “You’re going to need to carb-load before we go in the studio.”
Lore perks up at that. “Studio?”
There’s the pit-pat of her bare feet following me, so I keep right on going. “Yeah, we need to lay down ‘In Your Light’ properly before no one’s interested in buying it off iTunes.” A lie. We could make them wait a year and the fans would still be slobbering for the official version. “We’ll use the one here, so Asher doesn’t shit kittens over us leaving the property.”
It goes without saying that the studio downstairs is as high-end as the one at Apocalypse, and I actually prefer it because at least here I can control who barges in on me, and when. But if we’re going to put in a solid eight to twelve hours, I need blood, and a lot of it. Jerking open the door to the stainless steel refrigerator, I toss four packs on the counter and follow that with storage containers full of anything and ever
ything.
“It was a surprise to see how much… er… food you keep in the fridge,” Lore observes, sliding onto a bar stool.
“I have human staff,” I point out. “The occasional guest. Noah Carmichael drops in pretty regularly to shoot pool. Last time, he dragged the Leto boys out with him, and those shitheads might be vegans, but they can clear out the tofu and sprouts like Hoovers.”
“Bullshit,” Lore says, but the way she says it tells me she’s tickled to death by the very idea.
“Cross my heart.” I nuke the first blood pack and follow that with the usual high-end stuff, lobster mac and cheese with truffle something or other. Switching out bowls, I get a good whiff of something really rank.
“Mmm,” Lore says. “Gorgonzola.”
“Yeah, that.” My nose wrinkles a little, because expensive cheese and alcohol have this way of suckerpunching me right in the olfactory receptors. “It smells like ass.”
“Isn’t it the cheese of your people?”
“Sweetheart,” I drawl, leaning far enough over to get right in her face, “I am the cheese of my people.”
“A national treasure, for sure,” she says, grinning back at me. “I bet they built statues of you in the plazas of Rome.”
“Venice. Hometown boy made good sort of thing.”
Lore snorts. “I doubt you were ever good.”
My next lean brings me close enough that I’m within kissing distance. “I’m always good.”
Before she can give me some smartass retort, I pile trays of sushi and California rolls, cartons of dim sum and spicy Thai noodles in front of her. “Have at it.”
“Xaine,” Lore says with the hint of laughter in that gorgeous voice of hers, “how much food do you think I need?”
“One of everything,” I say, distracted by a bright pink bakery box. A yank of the string yields petite French pastries—no clue who’s eating those—and I grin to myself, remembering all the dessert I had sent to her apartment.
“What’s so funny?” she demands less than a second later, and I realize I’m going to need to school my face if I don’t want her reading my damn mind.
“What was it you said about the pies and the dildos? That you made a night of it?” I nudge the box at her. “Why don’t you start with the pie and we’ll see about the rest.”
“You’re awful,” she counters, fishing in the box and going straight for the lemon curd tart. “Jess was furious.”
“You liked it, though, admit it.” When she doesn’t deny it, I smirk and reach for one of the metal straws. Punching it through the blood pack, I empty it out in one swift suck and toss it, straw and all, into the garbage can under the sink.
Lore lifts a brow at that, her mouth full of fruit and custard. “Those are reusable. Or, at the very least, recyclable.”
“So?”
“So, you’re immortal. Shouldn’t you care more about saving the planet?”
“Sweetheart, I didn’t name my record label ‘Apocalypse’ for nothing.”
She swallows and gives me a narrow look. “Really? So you’re not going to care when climate change burns up the entire planet and takes all of us with it? It’s altogether likely you’ll be around to see it, you know.”
“There’s a doomsday bunker in the backyard,” I say with a straight face. “You play your cards right, I’ll let you hole up with me.”
“Is there a studio in the bunker, too?” Lore pops off.
“There will be.”
And we keep on like that, verbal badminton through three more blood packs for me and most of the pasta for her. In addition to that, Lore eats a lot of the smelly cheese and more fruit tart. I track every choice, mentally composing a list of what to have Rosa reorder, until I can see she’s about done, and then I start punching buttons on the espresso machine.
“That thing’s pretty fancy,” Lore observes, leaning back and licking something off her fingers. “I think I’ve seen its baby at Starbucks.”
“The one at Starbucks is a piece of shit,” I observe cheerfully, pulling two double shots and pouring them into a single cup. “You want milk? Sugar?”
“I… don’t usually drink coffee,” Lore answers softly.
I pause, because I’d been on autopilot again. Reille could do a quadshot at midnight and still fall asleep an hour later, even if it was more passing out than falling asleep. “No worries.”
But when I make to pour the shots down the drain, I find Lore’s hand on my arm. Even that passing touch sends a shiver up my spine.
“Latte,” she says and when I look down into those eyes of hers, I lose a little something. My mind, I think. “Don’t waste it. Lots of milk and maybe some sweetener?”
“You got it.” Trying to get a grip on myself, I pull out a gallon of milk and start frothing.
“So, I was wondering if maybe…” Tentative, hesitant, and I get the distinct feeling I’m not going to like whatever she’s about to say. “Could you arrange a meeting? Between me and Cas?”
Everything inside me goes cold, utterly and completely chilled to the core. Twisting off the steam valve, I slowly turn around, bringing Lore into my crosshairs. She immediately looks guilty; that’s how I know she’ll be a terrible liar.
I love terrible liars. They never know when to quit.
“Is that what this is about?” I ask. “You wormed your way into my house hoping I could get you closer to Cas?”
“No, me ending up here just kinda… happened,” she says, surprising me with her candor. “I wormed my way into Scion hoping I could get closer to Reille.”
I frown at that. “Why?”
“I told you.” Lore swallows hard, her throat bobbing a little. She knows she’s turned down the wrong road, but she forges ahead anyway. “I met her before. That guy at the warehouse, he took me somewhere… like he took Jess. And wherever he took me, Reille was there too, except she got out, and I got left behind.”
“And you think Cas is involved?”
No blinking, no stammering. “Yes.”
Fuck. Even if I’d tried to avoid it, Lore is trying to connect dots of her own. Just my luck that her biggest dot also happens to be a two-century-old pain in my ass.
“Me and Cas aren’t exactly bosom buddies,” I tell her. “Not to mention the fact that he’s fucked off to god-knows-where to do god-knows-what with Reille, and the last time you had a chance to talk to him, you dropped the phone like a hot rock.”
“I know.” Lore lays her hands out flat on the island, palms up, like she’s willing me to understand. “But after yesterday, I started thinking. If Cas managed to make whatever it was we gave to Jess, how would he know it even worked?”
“What, exactly, are you getting at here?”
Lore opens her mouth, then closes it, and takes a second to put together a new set of words. “At the precinct, while you were in the other room, I had the chance to talk to Asher and he thinks… we both think… that whoever took me tried to turn me. Only it didn’t work.”
“You’re related to him,” I remind her. “No way Cas snatched you off the street so he could human-trial his anti-vamp drug on you.”
“I know it makes no sense, and for a long time everyone had me convinced I was crazy…” Lore pauses, eyes going a little unfocused as if she’s flipping through her mental scrapbook, trying to find the answers she needs. “But I know he was there. I know I was there. I know.”
Cas and I have been at odds for a long time, but I don’t buy for a second that he would inflict a possible-turn on his own bloodline for any reason. Yeah, he’s annoying and pretentious and far too holier-than-thou for my taste, but if there’s one thing I know about him, it’s that he’s forthright. Honest to a fault.
And completely and utterly guilt-ridden.
Lore stares at me like she’s waiting for an answer. Trouble is, I’m not sure what she thinks I can give her.
“Reille never mentioned anything like what happened to Jess.” I heave a breath and shove my phone at her.
“Number’s in there. Call him and see if he’ll actually pick up. If he doesn’t, he’s probably in the middle of something that involves a winch, a pulley, and his sausage basket.”
Her hand hovers over the phone for a long second, but when she picks it up, she only slides it into her pocket, putting a bookmark in the conversation.
“How ’bout that coffee?” she asks, smiling to cover the dull ache lurking in those blue eyes. “Then we can make beautiful music together.”
Pouring espresso into the frothed milk, I have to wonder if this is a box I really want to open.
Pandora’s Box.
Because who the hell knows what’s inside.
I shake my head, setting the mug in front of Lore like some sort of caffeinated peace offering. “Drink up. You’ll need your strength.”
“You gonna put me through my paces?” Delicate, long-fingered hands wrap around the mug, and it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever envied a cup of joe.
“You’ll be walking funny by the time I’m done,” I tell her. With a soft snort, Lore jumps down from her stool and leaves me to play catch-up. “Hey, where you going?”
“The studio,” she says, headed that way with unerring accuracy.
“It’s that way.” I point in the opposite direction just to mess with her.
Lore glances in the direction of the living room before frowning and giving me a suspicious look. “No, it’s not.”
“Sure about that?”
Smiling at me over a cup full of foam, she retorts, “Your asscrack wasn’t the only thing I explored while you were sleeping.”
Keep on making yourself at home, sweetheart.
And I add Post-Its to the mental shopping list as well.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Lore
“Look, Lore, I know you’re worried.” Asher’s voice rumbles out of the iPhone. Somewhere along the way, he dropped the “Miss Chase” and even the “Lourdes” and picked up the nickname Xaine gave me. “And I’m well aware that you want to talk to Jess, but she’s sleeping off—” A hesitation, brief but enough to make me anxious. “Everything.”
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