Lost Angeles (17 page)

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 veins. “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.

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.

Her answering groan sparks another grin.

“Come on, sweetheart,” I tell her, leaning my own butt against the makeup counter. “You can sleep when you’re dead.”

Lore mutters into the cushions and rubs one hand against her assaulted backside. Has to be hot to the touch, because I can see a partial print peeking out from beneath my boxers. “Where are my pants?” She lifts her head to look at me for the first time. “And why does this keep happening?”

“Lose your pants often?”

“Not as often as you seem to lose your shirt.” She sits up, bleary-eyed and blinking like an owlet, fingers creeping up to touch the spots on her neck.

Opening the mini-fridge, I rattle my way past bottles of cane-syrup sodas and hyper-caffeinated energy drinks to find her a bottle of vitamin water. Passing that over my shoulder, I go for the plastic-wrapped kit that’s complete with vial and hypodermic. “You need to eat, drink, dress, and be in that chair in fifteen minutes so hair and makeup can work on you.”

“What’s happening, exactly?” Lore peers around, probably trying to figure out where the hell we are.

“Command performance, apparently. Don’t ask me, I just own the place.” I’ve already got the needle out and filled. Those blue irises follow my every movement, and the closer I get, the more mistrust creeps into them. Lore pushes back into the cushions, watching me with suspicion, and I can see every muscle in her body go tense as I flick the bubbles out.

“No needles, no drugs,” she says with a note of panic I haven’t heard from her yet. “I don’t want any drugs.”

“It’s not drugs, it’s FeedFade.” I reach out to grasp her by the wrist, but she snatches her arm out of my grasp, tucking it close to her body and prompting me to frown. “It’s something to perk you up and help replace the blood I took. Over-the-counter stuff, standard issue, nothing that’ll mess you up. I know the guy who makes it, actually, he’s—”
A colossal douchebag.
“…not so bad.”

She still looks skeptical, but she doesn’t fight me as I roll her arm over and jab her with the hypodermic, jacking it into her bloodstream with about as much drama as a flu shot. Lore’s face doesn’t even register the pinch from the needle, but she still manages to look wounded.

“It hurts that you don’t trust me.” It doesn’t, not really, but it’s disconcerting how she doesn’t feel the need to fill the silence. I’m so used to that never-ending stream of female blather that not getting it from Lore is actually a little unsettling, so much so that I find myself babbling in its absence. “Seriously, I took you in, put a roof over your head—”