Lost Angeles (47 page)

He trails after us, looking bewildered and ten kinds of shitfaced. There’s a redhead on his right arm and the dude on his left. I don’t know where he ditched the other woman, and I don’t care.

“Isn’t that
Xaine
?” the girl mutters.

I turn on my heel and walk backward long enough to answer, “Naw, I am the artist formerly known as Xaine.”

“Dude,” the other one blurts out like he’s waited his whole life to have the opportunity to ask, “do you even
have
a last name?”

I’m beyond caring what anyone other than Lore thinks about me, about
all this,
and she laughs all the way outside, her loose giggles interspersed with those adorable fucking hiccups.

“Nope, he’s just Xaine,” she says, falling against me as we reach the curb. “Thank god he’s not a
symbol
yet.”

“Well, I’m a
sex
symbol,” I say, stuffing her into the limo. “But if it makes things easier, you can call me ‘Rock Star Vampire Friend’ until death do us part, sweetheart.”

Because the Something Old is me. The Something New is her. The Something Borrowed can be Lonan, and the Something Blue—

Was the Porn Stars.

Consciousness comes at the cost of comfort, stampeding into my head with all the grace of a rhino. At first, I don’t even move, don’t open my eyes, don’t so much twitch a single muscle except to draw a breath. A slow, careful breath that I have to monitor, in case I need to make a sudden lunge for the bathroom.

“Hell,” I mutter into the silence, swallowing hard against the gorge rising in my throat. “This must be what hell feels like.”

I’m hot, but my skin is coated in a cool sheen of sweat, and the more discomfort that I acknowledge, the worse it seems to get. My hands shake, so I clamp them down on the sheets, pushing at the fabric until I’ve kicked free of the wild tangle. The bedroom smells like alcohol, sex, and perfume: a mélange of debauchery that keeps my roiling stomach on edge. I need to open a window. Turn on the air conditioning. Something,
anything
, because if I don’t…

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck…

I jump up from the bed so quickly that I lose my equilibrium, then it’s a battle against vertigo the entire way to the bathroom. Hitting my knees at a tile-burn skid, I lean over the pristine white porcelain bowl.

Then I empty my guts. Heave until my jaw hurts, my throat burns, and tears trickle down my face. Heave until it’s all yellow bile and reflex. Heave until there’s nothing left. Eventually it tapers off into a full-body weakness that has me shaking and caving in on myself. Slowly, I recline, ass pressed to the bare tile floor, shoulders against cool porcelain.

Too bad they don’t leave mints on the toilet seat, too.

It smells like soap here, like air-conditioning and
clean
, which makes it a far better place to wallow in my misery. Propped against the whirlpool tub, I battle the urge to puke some more and wait for my stomach to settle. I don’t know where Xaine is, where Lonan and Rebel and Jude are, but I get the distinct impression that last night was a wilder ride than any of us bargained for. I have vague recollections of icy body shots, vaguer recollections of dancing, and a niggling feeling that tells me I’m missing a big part of the paint-the-town picture.

So, about that niggling feeling in your boobs…

Except I encounter a white bandage on the curve of my right thigh first. I narrow my eyes at it, then tug at the medical tape holding the gauze down. A swear word trips across my lips the moment the bold, black tattoo comes into view.

That motherfucker.

It’s unmistakably Xaine’s X. The one he dashes across eight-by-ten glossies and fangirl tits. That trademark slashing autograph that gets auctioned off on eBay, burned across an expensive guitar or etched into a monogrammed pick… or scrawled on a napkin with some song lyrics written on it.

I’m a goddamn piece of Xaine memorabilia.

Irritation flares hot, but on the tail of that discovery comes another realization: there
is
an odd feeling in the vicinity of my boobs, certainly more painful than the anger building in my chest. Right now, I’m wearing nothing but a dress shirt. Whose, I don’t know, but it’s white and starched and pristine, except for the tiny dots of blood streaked across the front. My first instinct is to touch the bite marks on my neck, dabbing at the skin and searching my fingertips for signs of a spill. Nothing, though.

So the next move is to nut-up and peer down my borrowed shirt. With my hands on either side of the collar, I spread the fabric wider, peering inside, jaw dropping at the sight of two perfect little barbells through two very sore nipples.

Pink. The balls are pink and cold and definitely not plastic.

“What the fucking fuck? I am going to kill hi—”

Even before the words are out of my mouth, my eyes catch on the matching rosy sparkle of
something else
. Letting go of my borrowed shirt, I spread the digits of my left hand wide, gaping at the conspicuously pink diamond sparkling on my ring finger. It’s huge, square cut with a ring of smaller diamonds around it, and set in shiny platinum. My mind goes completely and utterly blank.

Because… he wouldn’t… he didn’t… he…

The bedside alarm clicks on, sending staticky voices spiraling through the suite. Echoing off the bare walls and amplified by the white tiles, they compete with the pounding in my head.

“There’s some surprising entertainment news out of Las Vegas today,” the disembodied male voice tells me. “Seems that bad-boy rocker Xaine got himself hitched last night, and to none other than the recent break-out pop artist, DJ Lore.”

Oh, no…

“No one could have seen that coming, John,” his female counterpart volleys. My head hits my hand, the cool brush of metal across my forehead so foreign that it startles me and I have to open my eyes to look at the ring again, blinking twice to take it all in. “Apparently the wedding was witnessed by none other than Noah Carmichael, another rock icon signed to the Apocalypse label. He was the one who tweeted the first pictures and video of the happy couple.”

…Noah Carmichael?

That’s a new development, and one I most certainly don’t remember. Trouble is, relying on my memory for anything these days is tantamount to asking an orthodontist to fix a hemorrhoid.

In other words, completely pointless.

Pushing up from the floor, I have to clutch the sink because the room’s spinning and I’m spinning right along with it. Giving it a minute, I hover in limbo until I stabilize, until I can open my eyes, take a deep breath, and move away from the counter. Legs like a fawn’s, I work my way through the bedroom and into the living room, clinging to every piece of furniture and every door jamb on the way. I aim for the TV remote, and as soon as I have it in my hand, I click on the tube, flipping to the E! Network.

My stomach bottoms out when
I
am the first thing that I see, leaning heavily against Xaine, head resting on his shoulder, both of us standing in front of Elvis at the altar. Xaine’s got his arms looped around my waist, like he’s not ever going to let me fall. He can’t. Not if he wants me to make it through the goddamn
vows
.

It’s the shit-eating grin that hammers the last nail in the coffin I have planned for him, and I head off in search of my Asshole Vampire
Husband
.

“Xaine!”
Too fucking loud, Jesus Christ.
I lower my voice several notches to shout his name again. The suite is big, but not that big, and I’ve already covered the territory from the bed to the bathroom to the television set. If he’s here, he has to have heard me puking my guts out. If he’s here, he has to know that I’m awake. Then there’s not only the righteous indignation burning me up; there’s a sudden stab of fear that he didn’t make it back to the hotel with me last night—

“For fuck’s sake, stop shouting,” comes the hoarse retort.

Still clutching the remote, I head for the door off to the side of the full bar, behind the dining room table and chairs. When my bare feet hit the marble tile beyond the furry white carpeting, I shudder.

He’s holed up in some kind of office space, complete with a giant flatscreen playing the Drunken Vegas Wedding Highlight Reel. A wall of windows overlooks the Strip, the dimmer switch set to “hungover vampire,” so that the view is still visible but the glass is shadow-gray. The massive conference table is covered in ToughBook computers, USB cables, and surveillance equipment from PFC. There’s a few half-empty coffee cups and a glass scummed over with Alka-Seltzer residue, so my guess is the boys were here for part of the morning, at least until Xaine commandeered their base camp.

My wayward bridegroom is collapsed in a leather chair, a glass dangling from his right hand. It contains some hair of the dog: Bloody Mary, celery stalk and all, but I highly doubt it’s tomato juice. Xaine’s head is tilted back, his eyes are closed, his chest is
still
bare, but twin silver-glints on his nipples draw my attention straight to the matching piercings he’s sporting. The white gauze bandage on his wrist suggests he also got tatted up. And the metal on his ring finger is the last bit of confirmation I needed.

Clutching the remote and the door jamb, I glare at him as hard as my head will permit. “You colossal
douchebag—
”

“Just to clarify,” he interrupts, “the nip piercings were my idea, but you wanted the tattoo. Being a gentleman, I went along with it.”

That leaves me sputtering for a full twenty seconds before I manage to get out, “Gentleman my
ass
.”

He lifts his head then, cracking one eye at me in something akin to surprise. “I tried to get food and water into you before you conked out, too. Extra credit points for me when you up-chucked cake all over me.”

“
Wedding
cake?” I throw the remote at him as hard as I can. It finds its mark, bouncing hard off his forehead.

“Ow!” He flinches and musters half a glower. “What the hell, Lore?”

“You said no funny business!” I’m unreasonably angry. Unusually angry. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever been
this
angry in my entire life. “You promised! There was a specific ‘No Wedding’ clause in our verbal contract!” The accusations are threaded through with panic and rage, and I can’t seem to get my hands to stop quaking, even when I jab an accusatory finger in his direction. “You did this on purpose!”

“If you don’t stop shouting, security is going to storm in here to cart you away. Then they’ll be showing wedding
and
arrest footage on the five o’clock update.” Xaine’s head falls back again, and I can tell he’s struggling not to smirk over the idea.

“Newsflash, Xaine, if I start screaming the house down, it’s not
me
they’ll cart off to jail.”

He lifts the Bloody Mary and takes another swig. I give him a minute, wait to see if he’s going to say anything else, but when he fixes me with that trademark bored stare, I can’t help but stomp one bare foot on the floor in frustration.

“What were you thinking? Four hundred years and suddenly you got a yen to turn domestic? Do you even understand what you’ve done?”

“You seemed to think it was a good idea at the time. Something about the press eating it up with a spoon, which they are. It’s a field day on every channel, and it’s driving presales through the roof. But I’m guessing that’s not what you’re actually pissed about.” He pauses, taking another deliberate sip of his drink. “If you don’t like the ring, we can get a different one.”

Standing there with a hip cocked, a finger pointed in his direction, and the weight of
that diamond
pulling at my other finger, I gape at him. “Don’t play stupid, Xaine. The shots were your idea. You had this planned from the beginning.”

“Not
quite
the beginning,” he retorts. “It was actually somewhere between your stupid salad and Lonan’s steak.”

That gives me pause, because between the appetizer and main course there wasn’t anything except—

“Oh, my god. Were you
mad
that I called you my rock star vampire friend?” He doesn’t say anything immediately, but ducks his head instead, turning his guylinered eyes toward the tinted glass windows. “Xaine, you can’t just
marry someone
because you don’t like the nickname they give you.”

“It wasn’t the nickname,” he says, but there’s enough of a hesitation that I know the moniker had something to do with it. “And you can calm your tits, love, it’s really not that serious.”

My every extremity is cold, glacial cold, arctic winds blowing across my fingers and toes cold. I feel sick and weak and my head is pounding. I want to scream and cry and curse him, curse myself, curse anything and everything that I’ve done in the past twenty-four hours. Getting liquored up was a stupid thing to do, but not quite as stupid as trusting him. If I’d placed my faith in someone else,
anyone
else, I might be a little less
married
. My slow descent into madness might have begun a year ago, but it wasn’t until I reached LA… and met Xaine… that my life spiraled completely out of control.