Lost Angeles (3 page)

“All day and then some,” he agrees, casting me a few short sidelong glances. “And you can quit calling me ‘Fig Leaf.’ My name’s Jackson Trace. Call me Jax.” After that, he pokes a thumb in the direction of my backseat BFF. “That’s Tamsyn.”

“Tamsyn what?”

The look he gives me then is a little sour. “Just ‘Tamsyn.’”

“Okay, then.”

After that, the ride gets quieter, but probably not quiet enough for Jax. Tamsyn chatters jovially from the backseat, asking a million and one questions and generally yapping my ear off all the way back from the Valley. Whatever and whoever happened last night, I managed to end up in a fleabag motel out in Van Nuys, so I guess I’m lucky I didn’t wake up face-down on a porn set.

Or in a gutter
.

Within minutes, I know a little too much about my elfin friend, her shiny new shoes, her choice in smokes, her love of pancakes, and the pretty waitress at The Diner on the West End. It’s calming, in a weird way, and that calm sticks with me until Jax pulls over next to the towering blue water feature in front of Scion. The second the car comes to a full stop, my anxiety returns, bubbling up from my stomach and lodging in my chest. Suddenly, I don’t want to leave the car. I’m plagued by a dark sort of dread that has me dragging my feet. I get
that
feeling again, the one I had back at the motel. That epic, earth-shattery one.

It’s not safe out there. Not anymore.

“Look, kid,” Jax says, interrupting my inner meltdown. “You don’t have to go in. I’ll take you home if you want.” He throws a casual arm over the headrest on my chair, but his tone is dead serious. “Fame’s not all it’s cracked up to be, you know. There’s something to be said for being…
anonymous
.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.” I peer at the trademark glass structure that forms the front of the building. “I’ve been begging Mireille Reece for an audition for months.” Absolutely no need to tell him that speaking with her is infinitely more important than a chance on the Scion stage. “Up until a few weeks ago, she wouldn’t even give me the time of day.” I shake my head, adamant. “No, I need to do this.”

“Suit yourself,” he says, then adds, “but do me a favor and try not to get in the habit of following strange men to seedy motels, huh?”

I frown, because really, that’s never been a habit of mine. I am not
that
girl. “I won’t.” Then, I tack on, “’Cause if I got any sluttier, Fig Leaf, we might have a problem.”

At his skeptical grunt, I grin, climb out of the car, and sling my laptop case over my shoulder. Trading the Audi’s air-conditioned interior for fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk afternoon heat is like stepping into an oven. I slam the door shut and head toward the building, but a moment later, there’s the sound of a power window rolling down.

“Hey, Lo!”

When I spin around, Tamsyn’s orange head is hanging out the opening, her outstretched hand flapping a business card at me.

“Fig Leaf’s digits,” she chirps as I take it. “Just in case. Oh, and steer clear of—”

Without waiting for her to finish, Jax puts the car in gear and pulls away from the curb. I watch until the Audi’s gone, procrastinating mostly, then I turn toward Scion, staring ever-upward at that gargantuan water feature. The club is the Emerald City of hot spots in Los Angeles, the be-all end-all of vampire playrooms. I’ve never been inside. Hell, I would guess that only one percent of the one percent actually makes it past the velvet ropes, but two days ago I got a call from Mireille Reece, representative of one particular rock star, looking for one particular opening act.

You get the call. You take it.

“Here goes nothing.”

They pulled a corpse out of the dumpster behind the club this morning and everyone immediately suspected me. “Blame the Vampire” is a game that I have more than a passing familiarity with. I’ve seen enough pitchforks and torches in my four hundred years to know that it’s usually stake first, ask questions later, so I guess it's progress that I’ve spent the last two hours under police investigation.

Still, so much for social equality.

You’d think the world would be used to us by now, seeing as how vampires have been out of the proverbial closet since the Industrial Revolution. It’s doubtful America would have sent England packing if we hadn’t eyed this country and decided we liked what we saw. My kind won wars, stole land, and sculpted this place to suit our needs. Technology evolved because we wanted it to. Needed it to.

Doesn’t seem to matter in the long run, since we’re suspect numero uno when a corpse turns up. The cops are still having trouble explaining why I’m being questioned, given that the girl’s body doesn’t have a single fang mark on it. Easy enough to point the finger, I guess, but slightly harder to
prove
. I think I’m just supposed to be grateful that they did me the courtesy of conducting the “interview” in an upstairs office rather than dragging me downtown in handcuffs.

All of it put me in a really shitty mood. I’m never at my best when I’m tired or hungry, and right now, I’m both. Prowling down the hallway, I wince at the horrible noises coming from the auditorium.

Auditions.

Apocalypse is mine, from the six-story water feature in the front atrium of the Scion nightclub to the bank of offices that shuffle contracts for the record label, but I pay people to deal with this kind of crap. The trouble is that one of the people I’m paying snags me by the elbow as I’m passing the VIP balconies and fixes me with That Look. Reille must have put out the major PR fires already, but she’s running on pure adrenaline, taurine, ginseng, caffeine.

“Damn it, Xaine, you aren’t ducking out now,” she tells me. “I prescreened hundreds of acts. The least you can do is sit through ten.”

“No can do, sweetheart. I’m going home to do
all
the things. Eating, sleeping, fucking, and not necessarily in that order.”

“Don’t be a dick.” Reille looks up at me with eyes that shift colors when she’s pissed or scared or happy or
coming
. Yeah, Orgasm Green might not be on a paint chip anywhere, but I know exactly what shade it is. Right now, those eyes are dark and hard. She has to be here, but she wants to leave. She wants to quit, but she needs this job. She wants to tell me to go fuck myself, but she hasn’t had time to put an exit plan together. “This isn’t even my job. If you hadn’t fired Matty—”

“Don’t talk to me about him right now,” I mutter.

Matty, short for Matthias, a kinda sorta little brother. Young for a vamp, too stupid to live if he thought he could get away with funneling dirty money through my nightclubs. And not just domestically, but internationally. I hadn’t even wanted to give him the job in the first place, but Scipio progeny look after their own.

Speaking of Scipios, I am going to have to pay Roman a visit tonight. Tell him what his youngest has been up to.

But apparently not before I sit through a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears wannabe musical auditions. One word to the negative, I could be miles away from here, cruising Sunset, heading for Pacific Palisades and peace and quiet. One look at Reille shoots that idea right to hell. Even if I leave, she’ll haunt me, follow me home like the ghost of try-outs past, blowing up my cell and making my life hell until I come back.

“Fine.” With a dramatic sigh, I follow her into the balcony area and fling myself into a chair. “Be a pal and order me a drink, would you?”

“I already did.” She points at the four-pack of Starbucks cups sitting on the ledge, all of them Venti, extra hot.

I reach for the closest one and let my head fall back on the chair. “I didn’t kill that woman, Reille.”

“Do tell.” Her glare cuts right to my blackened heart. “You were the last one seen with her. Half a dozen strung-out college kids swear you brought her into this very VIP suite.”

The Type O tastes stale, and “extra hot” isn’t nearly hot enough for me. Never is really, unless it comes straight from the tap. “Fucking and killing are two different things—”

I stop myself, but not before I’ve crammed half my foot down my own throat. There’s a fine line between love and hate, and I’ve walked both edges of that line with the svelte redhead to my left. Fucking
and
killing, in that order, except she managed to survive the whole ordeal despite my best, blood-drunk effort. So really, given my track record for severely maiming the ones I love, I guess I’m not all that surprised that the police hunted me down for questioning this morning.

“What do I need an opening act for, anyway?” I lean back in the chair, kicking my foot up the ledge. “Never needed one before.”

“Because you are going to start
giving back
, Xaine. Paying it forward. Supporting local music, supporting new musicians, supporting
something
that doesn’t have to suck you off first.” Reille crosses one leg over the other and starts swinging her foot the way she does when she’s feeling fidgety. She’s wearing a pair of those red-soled designer heels the Beverly Hills housewives cream themselves over, beige and shiny, adding four or five inches to her petite frame.

They look like stripper shoes.

Really, really expensive stripper shoes.

The music starts up, if you can even call it that. Reille’s fingers twitch around her pen and the clipboard in her lap, but not just because she's irritated. See, the real problem with letting a vamp feed off you isn’t the chance of dying, it’s the feeling that lingers after. An itch you can’t scratch with your fingernails. A creeping, crawling need to give it up again, and again, and again. The sensation that things only make sense when fangs sink through your skin. Reille was addicted to that feeling, addicted to
me
, for the better part of six months. She’s in some bullshit recovery program right now, with the Tiffany bracelet and “30 Days Sober” charm to prove it.

“What did you think about that one?” she asks when there’s a lull in the noise, pen poised over the paper.

I slide another inch down in my chair just to piss her off. “Fucking horrible.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’ then,” she fires back.

“Take it however you want, sweetheart.” The second group fires up, and I swear I want to stick my fingers in my ears. “I am trapped in hell. Musical fucking hell.”

At least musical fucking hell is posh. The private balcony’s appointments are luxe; once we get a group of VIPs in here, we like them to open a tab and settle in for the night. Everything is leather and glass and cold-lit with blue LEDs to match the glass panels composing the main dance floor below. Under that is water. Thousands upon thousands of gallons of it, all filtered and purified and moving like blood through veins. It was the only thing I really cared about when we built this place, and the only thing I bother noticing when I’m onstage.

Well, that… and
her
.

Reille and I had been nothing short of tempestuous. We went from madly in lust to just plain
mad
before I realized what was happening. It was like one of those TV show relationships where people scream and throw stuff, then go at it like cats in heat because that’s how good the sex is. I wanted her, sure enough, still want her, because I flooded her veins with so much of
me
that I can smell it on her skin, even now. My brain is over the relationship, but the rest is biologically bound to her, like it or not, despite the fact that everything we had ended the night Caspian Declan pulled the purple Dior veil from my eyes.

Leave it to him to use clothes to ruin everything. I wouldn’t know a designer label if it punched me in the nuts, but Reille did. It was one of the first things I noticed, along with her affinity for tequila and one-night stands. So I did what any guy trying to get a piece would do: I chucked her into the Apocalypse jet and took her to Paris. She found some insanely-priced piece of couture in a back alley vintage shop, then refused to let me pay for it. Got all ruffled-up offended and insisted she could afford it, even though she had to put it on three separate credit cards. Never wore it for me… but apparently she wore it for Cas. He took great pleasure in telling me all about it at a stupid museum gala, how it happened the first night of my international tour. The second I was out of sight, she beelined straight to him. And dinner between friends is never just dinner between friends, not with Reille.

Because she doesn’t really have friends so much as she has lovers, ex-lovers, and people she hasn’t fucked
yet.

That’s what Cas had said, and it’s pretty much the last thing I remember clearly from that night. At some point, Reille had come back from the Ladies’ Room and I dragged her out to the limo. I downed tequila shots with her, because it was easier to swallow the liquor than all the lies. Then I drank her blood and poured my venom into her until both of us teetered on the edge of blacking out. In spite of all that, Cas’s words still rang in my head. The second we staggered in the front door of the Palisades mansion, her cell phone rang. Convinced it was him, I plucked it from her hand and threw it to the floor.

And that’s when absolutely
everything
shattered.