“Jess saved my life last night,” he says. “I owe her. So I need to know how you fought the change when they tried to turn you. And I need to know what Cas Declan did… to bring you back.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lore
Since Asher pulled back the curtain around Jess, I’ve been in a stomach-dropping nightmare I can’t escape. I close my eyes and know exactly what it feels like. The way the blood pushes out of your skin. The clammy-wet of the sheets underneath. The way the pain comes in waves, tearing through every muscle like it’s changing them one at a time.
There’s a sound like rushing water in my ears, and I feel sick. Shaky. I can’t move, because if I do, something’s going to break loose inside me. Something I might never put back together. On top of all that, I’m assaulted by sterility: bleach, iodine, alcohol, antibacterial cleaners. The overwhelming smell of blood brings the bile up my throat, and I’m hard-pressed to gulp it back down.
How did you survive?
“You asshole.” Xaine lunges, fist raised, but Asher’s faster with a gun, drawing a modified Glock that hums with a UV charge. Only then does Xaine step back, spitting mad. “You’ve been holding out on us the entire time.”
A muscle twitches in Asher’s cheek. He lowers the gun as I pull Xaine backwards, twisting my hands in the fabric of his shirt. My vampire protector curls his lip, flashing fangs, but he allows me to hold him, even going so far as to reach back and catch my wrist.
“Why didn’t you say anything at the police station?” It’s the first question that presents itself in the aftermath of Asher’s revelation.
He shifts, glancing away as if he can’t bear to look at me. “I wasn’t at the precinct for you… not originally. They called me because Xaine had been brought in for questioning in a murder investigation. I showed up because I’ve wanted to pin X’s ass to a wall ever since he put my sister through one.”
“Then why talk to me at all?” I ask.
“I was supposed to get you out, and I didn’t. You’ve been on my conscience for a year. Then I realized you’d survived just to end up in Xaine’s back pocket. Needless to say, I don’t exactly trust him to mind his manners. But you looked fine, and I told myself that you made it out, that you were moving on.” Asher pauses before asking, “But you haven’t moved on, have you?”
“No, I haven’t.” I touch Xaine, because I need to touch Xaine. I’m ice cold, but I doubt he notices. He keeps his hand clamped around mine, his body between mine and Asher’s. “And you can grill me all you want, but I barely know what happened. The memories are just… dreams I can’t remember.”
“Doesn’t keep her from staying up all night, just to avoid sleeping,” Xaine says, laying on the guilt trip. “Or waking up in a sweat, or nearly falling off the bed. So be a prince and tell us what you know so my girl can start the healing process, huh?”
He’s so indignant it makes me smile the tiniest bit, despite the gravity of our situation. The Angry Doctor Phil routine is kind of adorable.
“I’ll tell her whatever she wants to know.” Asher’s jaw tightens, and his chin tilts up with resolve. “Once she gives me the answers I need.”
“I don’t have the answers you need,” I tell him. “Don’t you think that I’d do everything in my power to save Jess? I don’t know anything.”
“You do know.” It’s a statement of fact, or at least the facts as Asher knows them. “You know they tried to turn you. We figured that much out, but there’s a gap. I found Reille and extracted her, but we were forced to leave you behind. We just couldn’t stay any longer. After that, there was no communication with the inside.”
“Why don’t you ask Cas?” I say. “He’s the one who knows everything. He was there! I remember him.”
The look Asher gives me is strange, like he’s trying to piece things together, too. “No, Lore, Cas wasn’t there.”
“I remember him,” I insist, pressing my fingers to my temple, trying to drum up the memories of his face. “I do. I know he was there.”
“Your brain scrambled the timeline.” Asher’s expression goes sympathetic. “We got word a few days later that you—” He hesitates before admitting, “that you’d died.”
I can only blink at him, struggling to keep a lid on my disbelief, but Xaine has no such compunction.
“What are you trying to say here?”
“You know Cas, Xaine,” Asher says. “He was pissed as hell that Lore got left behind, but he wasn’t about to let the bastards donate her body to science.”
“No, of course not,” Xaine snorts. “Not when he could do it himself, right?”
Ignoring the jibe, Asher returns his attention to me. “You were transported to CasDec Medical on February tenth of last year after being reported missing by your adoptive parents three weeks prior. You were brought in via body bag from an unspecified location. You were dropped at the facility as a research specimen, Lore. A cadaver.”
My stomach drops, and for a long moment I think I might be sick. It’s the worst sort of fiction, the kind that asks you to suspend belief just a little too much. The sort where you’re sitting, and frowning, and thinking—
This has gone too far to be real.
But Asher’s not done, not by a long shot.
“There’s a gap,” he reiterates. “I know what happened before and I know what happened after. I just need to know what happened during, because that’s the part that could save Jess.”
Swallowing hard, I look toward the room where my friend is dying. Women don’t make the turn; we’re told that all the time, and it’s not a warning to be trifled with. It’s the world’s most relevant PSA, just in case someone was seriously considering it.
“I told you before, I only have the one distinct memory, and it’s of Caspian Declan. Just his face, his eyes, looking at me. I don’t know what happened at CasDec, Asher. I would tell you if I did.” I can feel my tone flattening out, the ragged edges becoming sharp as a razor. “I remember being grabbed by Silver Teeth, but there’s nothing except tiny flashes until I woke up in the mental facility back home.”
On the East Coast, three thousand miles from Los Angeles, CasDec Medical, or any viable memory of the weeks between January and March.
“No one at CasDec will talk to me, and the man in charge is on a different continent at the moment.” Asher crosses his arms over his chest. “What information I have, I had to get by other means, and it all equates to a whole lot of not much.”
A familiar story. The last few months have been nothing but a whole lot of not much. If I want to help Jess, I’m going to need to remember what happened in the glaring blank spot between then and now. More than ever, I’m convinced that my hunch back at the house was spot-on.
“I don’t have your answers, Ash,” I say, falling into a comfortable half-version of his name. “But I know who might. We need to track down Benicio.”
“What for?” Xaine barks out, his every muscle immediately tensed, coiled, ready to spring. “Look, I don’t understand what the hell’s going on here, but I’m not sure what he has to do with any of it.”
“Because if anyone would know what’s going on inside your head,” Asher says slowly and right over the top of him, “it would be the sin-eater who’s been using it as his personal playground.”
I run a hand down Xaine’s arm, willing him to relax, trying to transfer some of the dead-calm that’s washed over me. Because I know what we have to do next, and he’s going to fight me.
Tooth and nail.
“Every time I was with Benicio, it knocked some memory loose. It happened at the motel and again that night at Scion.” My gaze travels again to Jess in the bed. “I’m not going to remember on my own. I’ve tried. I think… I think only Benicio can fill in the gap.”
Asher stares at me, arms crossed tight over his chest. I’m willing to bet he’ll listen to just about any suggestion I have to make for Jess’s sake, but Xaine interrupts the silent indecision pinging between us.
“So, what?” He tightens his grip on my hand, swinging me around until we’re face-to-face. “We invite Benny in for a little session of Seven Minutes in Heaven?”
“He can help me remember,” I say. “And maybe the things I remember can help Jess.”
“He’s a murderer.” Xaine spits that last word at me. “A girl was killed not four hours after I took you from him.”
“Xaine…”
“No,” he cuts off whatever I’m about to say. “I’m not letting him put his hands near one single hair on your head. Not a chance.”
“It’s the only chance.”
Asher unwisely chooses that moment to chip in his two cents. “She’s right, Xaine. If Benicio’s the key to whatever’s inside Lore’s head, then we need to try to bring him in.”
“You—” Xaine thrusts an arm straight out to the side, fixing Asher in the trajectory of one pointed finger, “shut the fuck up.”
His other hand digs into the meat of my arm. I try not to flinch, but it hurts, and will likely leave five finger-shaped bruises on my skin. I try to stymie my heart’s racing gait, because I know he can hear it, feel it, smell it. I know he knows that I’m afraid. Afraid of Benicio, afraid of everything I don’t understand and all the things I can’t remember.
“What if he kills you, Lore?” Xaine flashes at me. “Huh? What if I let him put his hands on you and he wraps them around your neck?”
“You won’t let that happen.” And I believe it. I have to believe it.
Xaine stares at me, nostrils flaring, forehead creased, the picture of bottled fury. I can’t begin to fathom what he’s thinking, so I don’t even try. After a moment, he turns and pins Asher with that same death glare. “And how, exactly, do you propose we catch a sin-eater? Cardboard box, a stick, and some bait?”
Asher coughs a little, clears his throat, and jerks his chin in my direction. Enlightenment dawns across Xaine’s features, followed swiftly by disbelief and denial.
“Like hell.” He snatches up my hand and hauls me toward the door.
“Wait!” Asher’s voice echoes behind me. “Where are you going?”
“We’re leaving,” Xaine tosses over his shoulder, dragging me in his wake like a recalcitrant child. “There’s no fucking way I’m letting you dangle her out there in the wind.”
“Xaine, stop!” I pull against his grip, but he’s ten times stronger than I am. “If it can help Jess—”
Xaine backpedals so fast that I skid into his chest. With one arm still clasping my wrist, he snarls out, “She’s not your friend, Lore. Cas sent her in to watch you. To spy on you.”
Asher butts in with, “Look, Lore. Jess loves you. For whatever it’s worth, she regrets—”
“You’d say anything, do anything to get Lore to help you!” Xaine fires off. “I’m not blind, Reece. I saw the way you looked at her.” He’s not talking about me anymore, that’s for certain. The words are an accusation that flares into something else. Something retaliatory. “Man, it must be killing you right about now, wanting to stick your dick in a half-turned vamp. Mister High-and-Mighty, falling for one of us. But hey, at least you’re not falling for all of us like your sister, right?”
Asher’s hands ball into fists, like he’s about to knock Xaine’s fangy teeth out of his runaway mouth. At the last second, I step forward, using myself as a buffer between two charging bulls. Xaine wouldn’t go through me, and it gives Asher pause. For all that he’s pissed as hell, he still possesses a modicum of chivalry and takes a step back.
“It doesn’t matter.” My voice is small in comparison to the two men roaring at one another in the cavernous space of the warehouse. “Whoever she is, whatever she’s done, nobody deserves to suffer the way Jess is suffering. And what’s more? This all goes far beyond just her. It’s about me, too. I can’t go through the rest of my life just missing an entire chunk of time. Months of time. I need answers.”
Xaine glares down at me, but I know all that anger isn’t for me. It’s for Asher, for Jess, but mostly for the situation, the circumstances, the shitstorm I’ve dragged him into. He’s not this guy, and I shouldn’t have tried to make him into this guy. Xaine’s a notorious hedonist, a king amongst playboys, so asking him to narrow his realm of concern to one little female and her problems is tantamount to asking him to swear off the rocker lifestyle forever.
“You don’t have to stay,” I tell him, although it ties knots in my stomach to utter the words. “You don’t have to be here.” The smile I give him is genuine, because he needs to understand that I have no expectations of him beyond this moment.
It feels like forever before he answers, and I wait, holding my breath until he does.
“As kiss-offs go, that was pretty piss-poor. You’re going to have to do better than that if you want me to bounce.” He lets go of my arm, leaning forward until his forehead is touching mine. His eyes are closed, like he can’t take looking at me one second longer, if this is where it ends. “Tell me to get the hell out, if you want me gone.”
I feel sick for just a second; I feel selfish for far longer than that. I should let him go, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? You’re not supposed to hold onto things because you want them. You’re supposed to do the kind thing, the right thing, because doing anything other than the right thing would just be, well, wrong.
Right?
“One,” he interrupts, startling me just a little. His hands find my wrists and clamp down. “Two.” Then I’m plastered against him, no space between us at all. “Three.”
“Wait, but—”
“Too late, sweetheart. Offer just expired. You should have told me when you had the chance.”
“I was thinking, you ass!” I would punch him if I could, but thankfully his grip’s keeping me from breaking my fingers on his face.
“Blah blah, thinking,” he says before tossing a fake snore at me. “Completely overrated exercise.”
For a moment, I press my face into the fabric of Xaine’s shirt, breathing in the soft scent of detergent and cologne. When I lift my head, he’s looking down at me, vaguely bemused. It’s just a breath from his lips to mine, and he’s got me all caught up in the tangle of his arms. Slowly, so slowly, he begins to close the gap between us, his smile turning from wan to wicked in a flash, but he’s interrupted by a very unwanted third party.
“Oh, I’m sorry, were we going to save a life tonight? Or play suck-face in a warehouse?” Asher gives us a dark look as he turns back the way we came. Instead of heading down the circular steel stairway, he climbs up to the next floor.
Breaking away from Xaine, I follow our host upstairs and into a room that looks like a command center out of science fiction movie. Four LCD widescreen displays run tracking programs on who-knows-what. I can see the schematics for something that looks like a metal scarab straight out of The Mummy movie. And there’s a Google map printout on the wall, riddled with thumbtacks.
Asher jabs a finger at it. “Red pins are dead girls. Yellows are suspicious attacks that might have been our boy before he got angry enough to kill his vics.”
“They have a sudden influx of confused blondes down at the precinct lately?” Xaine asks.
Asher’s nod is grudging. “Something like that.”
The dots are clustered around the downtown area, scattered across the city in no particular pattern that I can see. Staring at the map, I begin to notice what might be the absence of a pattern. There’s a gap right in the middle of the West End. Suddenly, I get a flash-pan memory from the night of the lockdown and Trick’s second rule—
“Don’t fuck where you sleep,” I say, turning toward Xaine. He stares at me oddly, but I affect an exaggerated cockney when I tack on, “That’s what the guest rooms are for, mate.”
Xaine pulls back his lip in disgust. “Don’t you quote St. John at me. And you shouldn’t be taking advice from him, either.”
“He’s right though, look.” Reaching out, I point to the vaguely empty spot on t
he map. “O’Reilly’s is where he picked me up the first time. I mentioned it to you before, I think.”
“It might be his hunting ground,” Asher says. “But he doesn’t kill them there.”
“No,” Xaine concedes, “he wouldn’t. Not if he wanted to go back. It would draw too much attention.”
“See?” I say. “Rule Number Two.”
Xaine moves in close, hovering behind me. A second later, one hand slides around my waist and pulls me against him. Selfish or not, I’m glad to have him here.
“You think he’d venture out in the open?” Asher asks. “Even knowing that we might track him down?”
“The guy followed Lore right into Scion,” Xaine grumbles. “Ballsy as hell. Tried to make off with her backstage and then was hanging right outside the parking garage, close enough to tail her to that warehouse.”
“We’re the only ones who are onto him, right?” I’m still staring at the map, at that damning blank spot. “We’re not the police, or anyone he has to be afraid of, really.”
“Oh, he should be really fucking afraid of me right about now,” Xaine murmurs.
“Yeah, but he has no reason to hide. Not yet.”
Asher’s interrogator glare drills into me from across the room. “Do you really think he’d track you there?”
“I think it’s possible, if he’s so hot to get his hands on me again.” Hitching one shoulder in a shrug, I hear a vague growl coming from the halo of my hair. “But I have to go in alone—”
“I’m not sending you in there alone,” Xaine snarls.
“Benicio knows you. If he sees you anywhere near me, he won’t come within a ten mile radius.” To make him feel a little better about the situation, I say, “Asher can ride along.” Then, because the devil on my shoulder tells me to, I grin and add, “He can be my date.”
“I still think you should have stayed behind,” I tell Xaine as the Humvee turns the last corner before the club. “You being there will just piss Benicio off.”
“Fuck if I’m letting my girl run around town like a moving bullseye while I sit home like the Little Woman,” Xaine mutters.
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