Lost Angeles (23 page)

There’s a tiny gasp from behind me. Glancing back at Lore, I see her standing there, staring at me, at Jess, at that phone with equal parts horror and hope. She said she remembers Cas from somewhere, that she knew him somehow. The way she’s practically humming with impatience tells me she’s got a lot of questions for him, but when I put a finger to my lips and signal her to be silent, she nods and hangs back.

There’s that trust again.

I return my attention to the bedazzled brick sitting on Reille’s desk. “Enjoying your vacay, Declan? Accommodations nice and cushy?”

“They are, as ever, to my specifications.” The cool, clipped words filter through the crackling silence hanging in the wake of my opening volley.

“How about the company you’re keeping right about now?”

“Our hosts have been rather… domineering,” Cas admits. “And you know how I feel about that.”

“And Reille?” I glance at Jess, who’s standing as far from me as she can get, arms crossed over her gold shirt and wearing a look that’s half panic, half go-to-hell. “She realized yet what kind of bullshit you’ve signed her up for?”

Again the pause, a tense hesitation before Cas speaks again. “Reille’s decisions are her own.”

“Yeah, well, enjoy riding that roller coaster right off a cliff.” That’s my kiss-off to Reille and Cas both, washing my hands of the two of them and whatever damage they are going to inflict on each other. “I wondered why you were back in town. We all know you like New York the way all pretentious holier-than-thou yupsters like the East Coast better than the West.” I cock one hip in order to lean against the desk. “I thought it was just Reille that made you condescend to trade Manhattan for Hollywood, but it wasn’t
just
Reille, was it?”

Lore sucks in another sharp breath, biting down on her lip to keep any other sound from coming out. As for Jess, she goes perfectly still, not a single muscle or nerve twitching, and that’s where the lie of omission begins. Her dark eyes bore into my face, a seething hatred bubbling beneath the surface. She’s nervous, too, but trying to hide it, like a card shark snuffing a tell, except she doesn’t realize that her lack of motion, her lack of
emotion
, well, that’s the tic she should be trying to hide.

“It’s Lore.” The second I speak the name, Jess flinches like I slapped her. And Lore… well… there are a thousand questions in her eyes, but I’ll ask the first one for her. “Why is it Lore, Cas?”

There’s a long pause, hisses and pops of static between
here
and
wherever.
The silence stretches out, as wide and impassable as the physical distance between us
.
I wait, and wait, and wait some more until I’m sure that any second I’ll hear the line go dead.

“You don’t see it, do you?” Cas’s voice filters through the phone at long last. “You haven’t even spared the time to really
look
, have you, Xaine?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“It’s right there,” he says, “in the shape of her face, the color of her skin, and that way she has of looking straight
through
you with those eyes of hers.”

I’m already thinking of Lore’s eyes, hell, I’m looking at them right now. They’re the sort of eyes that can take the measure of a man in the span of a second. Fuel for my fire, the catalyst for every single new fantasy that’s filtered through my brain in the last few days. Astute and clever, wicked and innocent by turns, I realize they’re the sort of eyes I’ve only encountered once before in my unnaturally extended life.

And now you’ve seen them
twice.

They’re the same as the eyes that haunt my dreams and nightmares. Wide and blue, trying so hard to hide the hurt and confusion behind a mild expression, an ironic grin. And I knew it… I knew it without knowing it, because I looked into
those eyes
and called her—

Elizabeth
.

“Bullshit.” I give my head a shake, unwilling to entertain Cas’s shoddy allusions, not wanting to follow where he is headed with this line of reasoning. He’s loading his gun, and I’m fairly sure at least one of his bullets has my name on it. “You’re fucking lying.”

His voice is cold, the shiny copper shell encapsulating a small measure of gunpowder. “I don’t have to lie, Xaine.”

Click.

“If you look close enough, it’s all there, stamped across her face with bits of each and every ancestor that came before. Including, but not limited to, my very own sister, who, like me, very much resembles our mother.” A pause, presumably to reload. “Except, she has my father’s eyes.”

She. Elizabeth.

Click…

She. Lore.

Click. Click…

She—

Boom.

There’s no breathing after that, no thinking. There’s nothing but the hard rush of white noise as memories battle to the forefront. Elizabeth is there, a ghost staring back at me, smiling at me from beneath a tangle of dark curls.

Cas is still talking, but his voice has faded into the background, his words a steady monotone at the far end of my nostalgia tunnel.

Blood relations. Cas and Lore… are blood relations.

Another line drawn between another pair of dots.

Somehow, he managed to track her, find her, hunt her down, and now he’s trying to lay some sort of claim to her. As family.

As
his
family.

“…you’re not going to be able to look her in the eyes and tell her you love her, Xaine. Not now. Not knowing what you know. Not when every time you look at her, all you’ll see is Elizabeth’s corpse staring back.” Cas is still talking, spitting vitriol and bitterness in a slow recitation of all my faults. “And even someone, some
thing
like you surely realizes that Lourdes deserves far, far better than your ruined memories.”

The space inside my head explodes, even if blood and bone and gray matter remain where they should. Absolutely everything shifts. He’s had two centuries to dig into my shit, and I’ve had two centuries of digging myself out of the shit he’s piled on top of me. No more. I’m done.

It ends today.

Starting with shooting the messenger.

Before I even process it, I’ve circled the desk and clamped a hand down on Jess’s neck. When I lift her off the ground, crimson blood seeps around my fingernails. She pries at my hand. Her stiletto-shod feet kick ineffectually at my shins. I can feel her desperate attempts to breathe, the faint rasp trying to work its way along her windpipe under my fingers.

Lore’s suddenly there, tugging hard at my wrists. “Xaine,
stop
. Let her go—”

“Lourdes?” Cas’s tinny voice filters through the office.

The second I peer down into Lore’s wide eyes, everything clicks back into place. I drop Jess on the floor. Turn as she slithers down into a heap on the carpeting. My next step is toward the phone, but the second I go for it, Lore is there, reaching as well.

She wraps her fingers around my hand. “Please, let me talk to him.”

I keep my grip on the phone. I don’t want to hand her over to Cas, even if I know I should. There’s obviously some sort of unfinished business here—

“Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?” Cas shouts, and the words grab Lore’s attention quick as anything. She withdraws her hand like the Swarovski gems burned her fingers, slapping a palm over her mouth and staring at the tiny talk box like Satan just crawled out of it. “Xaine?”

Every speck of Lore’s body language tells me she’s changed her mind, maybe doesn’t want to stick her head in the lion’s mouth yet, so my next words are aimed at Jess. “I’m giving you ten minutes to gather your shit and get the hell out of my building,
chica
, or I’ll toss you out the nearest window.” I tilt my head toward the phone. “You get that, Cas? You send in any other moles, and I’ll return them to you in pieces. Understood?”

There’s a long pause, then a terse “Understood” from the other end.

I click off the speaker and putting the gem-studded monstrosity to my ear. It’s just him and me now, with two hundred years of revelation sprawled out behind us. Jess huddles where I left her, her cool facade cracked all to hell, dark mascara trailing a graceful line down one perfectly rouged cheek.

Then my attention returns to the woman standing next to me, physically as close as two people can get without Tab A going into Slot B. My attention’s on Lore, but my words are for the man on the other end of the world.

“Oh, and Cas?” I say.

“Yes?”

“Thanks.” I smile softly. Looking at Lore. Remembering Elizabeth. Achieving the first small measure of peace that I’ve known in two centuries. “I never thought I’d get a do-over.”

And I disconnect the call.

I never thought I’d get a do-over.

Those words tumble around in my head for a long moment, twisting and turning until my brain reboots. The haze recedes until I’m standing in Reille’s office again, enveloped in an oppressive silence.

Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?

Squeezing my eyes shut, I try to dispel the echo of Caspian Declan asking that very same question. Right now, I’ve got a hand clamped over my mouth so hard that my fingernails dig into my cheek. My throat feels tight, like I’m holding back a scream, and now there’s no doubt in my mind that he was the harbinger of my nightmares. I should have taken the phone. Should have asked him about everything. Now, I have more questions and less answers.

“Lolo?” It’s Jess’s voice, full of concern, that brings me back to myself. Blinking twice, I bring her face into focus, and I can tell she wants to reach out. “Lolo, are you—”

“Get the fuck out, Chiquita,” Xaine growls.

“Screw you,
pendejo
,” she shoots back. “Lourdes is my responsibility—”

“Not anymore,” he tells her. “Your boss understands my terms, and my terms are that you get the hell out of here and never come back.”

“I—”

“
Now
!”

A second later, the gem-studded cell phone shatters against the wall next to Jess’s head, a fortuitous near-hit that causes her to start and duck. She doesn’t say anything else, but turns and steps through the door, pausing long enough to pin me with a sympathetic look as she whispers, “I’m sorry.”

Then we’re alone, me and Dark Prince Apocalypse. Xaine’s glaring at the doorway, but the minute I shift my stance, I’m the one pinned by that furious gaze.

But all he asks is, “You okay?”

I manage a nod and a small, “Yeah.”

“You sure?” he prompts. “You backed out of the conversation pretty damn quick.”

Before he can ask why, I frown and say, “You didn’t have to throw the phone at her.”

“I didn’t throw it at her. I threw it
near
her.”

Semantics are the least of my worries right now. I’m starting to wonder if my life isn’t some staged reality TV program, like
The Truman Show
, only worse.

“So, you know Cas,” I say, “and you know Reille, and
she
knows Cas, and she knows you, and he knows you both.”

Xaine rakes a hand through his hair, scraping back the dark strands hanging in his face. “Yeah. We’re all one big happy family.” Except, there’s enough bitterness in that statement to tell me that nobody’s happy about anything in this situation.

“And Elizabeth?” I ask. “Who’s she?”

He hesitates then, turning to look out the windows. The glass isn’t UV tinted at night, so the glow of the streetlights carve space under his eyes and his cheekbones. “My wife. Cas’s sister.”

“And she’s dead?”

“Yeah, sweetheart.” Xaine’s voice softens. “Long dead.”

My throat closes up, because I’m not sure if I even want to ask the next question, but I do, I
need
to ask. “Why did he say what he said? What did he mean when he said—”

“That you have his father’s eyes?” Xaine finishes for me, tacking on a bitter laugh as he falls into the office chair and starts digging in the drawers. “Because apparently, sweetheart, you do.”

If you look close enough, it’s all there, stamped across her face with bits of each and every ancestor that came before.

“That’s not possible, right?” I say, shaking my head in denial.

Xaine turns his back on me, rifling through a file cabinet, talking off-the-cuff. “I know it seems impossible, but you need to understand something. Cas doesn’t make mistakes.
Ever
.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“Not this time,” he says with a headshake. “I sensed it, in the hallway the night Benny juiced us up. I was dreaming of her, and you stepped right in, like the perfect understudy—” He cuts himself off again, maybe realizing how shitty that sounds.

“No, he’s wrong about this.” I tell him. “And I’m not a do-over. You don’t get to—”

“I know that, sweetheart. I was jerking Cas’s chain.” Xaine slams the drawer shut harder than necessary, yanking open another one to root around inside as a strained silence falls between us. “Christ, for a woman as picky as Reille is about where she keeps her shit, this office is a fucking mess.”

It’s meant to change the subject, to shift the tenor of the room, to be some punch line that makes me smile, puts me at ease, but instead, it makes me realize that Xaine’s serious. Utterly and completely stone-faced
serious
. Somehow, I’m related to Caspian Declan. God knows how he figured it out. There have to be ten generations between then and now, and Jess must know the whole story, too—