Lost Angeles (38 page)

The doctor clears his throat before venturing, “Her heart is pumping, her lungs are functional. Everything is as it should be. She took the blood they gave her, and she healed herself with it. It is a miracle, unlike anything else I’ve ever seen.” He keeps his eyes averted, head slightly bowed. “The body… is alive.”

Caspian turns a critical gaze upon the doctor. “So you’re saying that she’ll be a vegetable for the rest of her life.”

“The vampire blood likely had a hand in regenerating her cells,” Dr. Osamu clarifies, “but no amount of physical healing can bridge the gap between this world and the next.”

Closing his eyes for a moment, Caspian shakes his head and moves toward the bank of windows that run along far side of the room. He’s silent for a long time, but there’s a slight tremor in his body. Quiet fury spills out when he swings around to ask again, “Will she ever wake up?”

The doctor’s eyes lift, gaze sliding across the bed, across my
body
, and suddenly his dark eyes are boring into me.

Me.

The
me
standing beside my own hospital bed. The
me
that fell out when they lifted my body off the gurney.

He can see
me
.

“It’s possible.” The doctor’s gaze is full of sympathy and sadness. “But it’s just as possible that she simply isn’t
in there
anymore.”

It’s like he’s talking to me, too. That those words were meant for me and not Cas Declan. Eventually, Dr. Osamu turns away, those kind eyes shifting toward the tablet in his hands.

“Hey!” I scream. He doesn’t glance my way, but he does startle. Turning around, I focus my attention on Benicio. “He can see me, I know he can. Why’s he pretending he can’t?”

“It’s not the real thing, sweets,” the sin-eater scoffs. “You’re not
really
here. You were, but you’re not now. This is an instant replay. And besides, nobody talks to dead people unless they want to end up in the loony bin, y’know? I mean, you oughta know.”

I do know. It’s all playing out like a dream on repeat, an echo of things that have happened before. I’m struck by the strangest sort of déjà vu, like I’m running lines in a play I’ve seen a thousand times before, uttering the words over and over until I know them by heart. Because this is all another one of my dreams, one of my nightmares—

A memory within a memory.

“Oh, god,” I hear myself choke out because it’s my cue and the show must go on. “I’m really
not
in there, am I? How am I not in there?”

The voice that speaks next belongs to the doctor. “You are
ikiryō
. A living ghost, a soul separated from the body.”

We’re alone in the room now, just me, the doc, and my empty shell. The room is somehow dimmer than before; not day turned to night, but an encroaching absence of both light and dark that somehow adds up to a great big Nothing.

But I have more important questions to ask first.

“You can see me,” I say, because that’s the script.

He nods. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Then why—”

A nurse enters the room, and Dr. Osamu looks away, consulting his tablet, ignoring me as I move closer. My bare feet make no sound on the floor, but the doctor flinches away all the same. The nurse rustles around, checking my wires and tubes, hooking up a new bag of medications to my IV, tinkering with the monitors and readings. I stare at myself while she does it, studying my still-living corpse. I’m clean now, bathed and put to bed like Sleeping Beauty, except that my eyes are open, staring, wide, blue, and blank
.

“Tell me what happened,” I implore, but the doctor ignores me, flicking brief glances at the nurse. “Please?”

I stand close enough to him that I can feel his heat. It’s weird, that warmth, and I realize that it’s the only thing I’ve
felt
since I was, as the movies like to say, shaken loose from my mortal coil. Without thinking, my hands reach out with desperate longing toward his skin.

The doctor evades me, taking a few casual steps out of reach, toying with a knob on one of the machines. When the nurse leaves and we’re alone, he acknowledges my presence again. “There is nothing I can do for you. You should go.”

“What about my body?” I say, incredulous.

“Everything is as it was,” he tells me. “There are secrets in your blood that we have yet to discover, but thankfully, we will have the opportunity. You are very special, and your spirit may depart knowing that some good may yet come of this.”

“Depart?” I shake my head. “Where am I supposed to go?”

“Wherever people go,” he says softly, “when they move on.”

Panic rising, I can feel absolutely nothing where there should be
something.
It’s all black and cold and
empty
. “You have to help me. You’re
supposed to
help me.”

Dr. Osamu’s expression changes then, breaking apart and shifting as if I’ve moved something inside of him. “I heal people. It’s what I do. But I cannot put a soul back into a mortal vessel. That’s beyond the scope of medicine.”

“You’re not
just
a doctor.” I don’t understand how, but I know it for a certainty. “There’s something about you. I feel it. You brought me back from the edge when you touched me.”

I flash out and grasp him by the wrist. He jerks like I shot him with a taser, muscles spasming. I can tell he wants to pull away, wants to shake me off, but he can’t. His next exhalation of breath is accompanied by a puff of white, as if the temperature in the room dropped below freezing.

“I cannot help you,” he protests.

“You have to.” My other hand clamps down on his arm, and I jerk him toward my inert body. “You’re going to put me back. You’re going to do it right now.”

“Please stop.” He manages to pull away, slipping through my fingers like I’m nothing but air. I watch in horror as my hands lose solidity, fading to transparence even as the doctor takes a few slow steps backwards.

Staring at my palms, I try to wrap my head around everything.
This
is why I can’t remember those months.
This
is why I only see things in flickers and flashes.
This
is why there’s no memory of anything other than those random moments that Benicio dredged up. When I look at the doctor again, I feel the urge to cry, but no tears are forthcoming.

“Nothing is ever the same once it touches death,” he tells me, repeating his earlier words. It sounds like a warning, an admonition to understand exactly what I’m asking of him.

“I said I don’t care.” Hope rises hard and fast enough to choke me. “Can you try?”

He shakes his head. “No, I will not do it.”

“I’ll wait,” I tell him. “I’ll wait forever. I’ll haunt you until you change your mind. I’ll—”

“Lore!” The voice calling me back is familiar, but out of place. It doesn’t belong here.

Swiveling my head to the spot where Benicio was standing, I gape in disbelief at the suggestion of someone very different. “Xaine?”

There's a flash of him, the quickest flicker of his face and form before he’s gone and I’m staring at a blank wall. I stride toward it, hands outstretched, palms thudding against the surface. My eyes are telling me that I’m looking at pristine, white plaster, but the surface beneath my palms is rougher, colder, like stone.

Like brick
.

Something plows into my side, knocking me to the ground. I hit hard, skin scraping and head bouncing against the concrete. I can taste blood dripping into my mouth, but from where?

Lips. Nose. Head.

The real world returns in a screaming, roaring, overwhelming rush of sight and sound and
reality
. I blink up at my assailant, stunned and confused. I’m lying on my back in the semi-dark with Benicio crouching over me. He’s bloody and huffing, like he just ran the world’s longest marathon, but he’s smiling nonetheless.

“What—”

“No, no,” he growls. “Thank me later.”

“Lore!” Xaine’s voice again, accompanied by the sound of him running toward us.

Benicio makes a noise that I swear sounds happy. I don’t know how he broke out of PFC, whose blood he’s wearing, or what’s going to happen when he gets his hands on Xaine, so I do the only thing I can do: I clap my hands on his face and summon the memory of the scummy motel room.

As distractions go, it’s pretty disgusting, but the memory of us tangled up in cheap cotton sheets is enough to get the sin-eater’s eyes closed and his mouth hanging ajar. Xaine’s gloved hands clamp down on Benicio’s shoulder two second later, jerking him away from me. I scramble back against the bricks, wishing I still had a weapon on me, but I’m not sure there’s anything I could aim it at without hitting Xaine. They grapple, with the sin-eater trying like hell to get a hand up to Xaine’s face, the only place he still has skin exposed. And Xaine…

For all the times they’ve photographed him covered in fake blood, teeth bared, no one has
ever
captured this side of him. Somehow, his fangs look longer. His eyes have gone completely dark, repelling the light from the security lamps that blaze to life with a series of whining electrical charges. Reaching between them, Xaine grasps Benny by the hand and twists slowly, inexorably back until it reaches a sickening point of tension. I see the look on Benicio’s face, an awakening sense of panic as the odds balance out and then tilt in someone else’s favor. Finally, with a grunt and a nauseating
pop!,
Xaine breaks his wrist.

The rest plays out like an action sequence from a street fighter movie, with Xaine taking Benicio apart, limb by deliberate limb. Kneecaps shattered. Ribs broken. Pretty soon, the sin-eater is curled in on himself like a shrimp, snarling and whimpering by turns, not that it makes any difference to the vampire. He’s still moving, his actions fast, furious, deliberate, vicious, and as horrifying to watch as it is gratifying…

…right up to the blood. I can see spatter, but I can’t believe that Xaine would ever drink from a sin-eater, a suspicion that’s confirmed when I catch the metal-glint of light hitting a small knife in his hand. It’s one of Asher’s, I have to guess, curved like a velociraptor claw.

“Let’s see if you’ll bleed out the same as any human would,” Xaine says, slicing through Benicio’s bicep. The sin-eater’s half-swallowed scream accompanies the spurt of too-red, but Xaine’s already moving to the other arm. “It’s rank, man. You reek like misery.
My girl’s
misery.” Xaine digs the tip of the knife into the soft spot under Benicio’s chin. “I think I’m gonna cut your head off and see how long it takes for the rest of you to stop twitching.” He moves in closer. “How much do you think they pay for powdered sin-eater dick in Chinatown?”

Benicio’s answer is garbled, thick with the blood filling his mouth and the bubbles breaking on his lips.
I should stop this, I should do something.
Like an echo, I hear myself tell Xaine not to hurt him, the memory of concern. Except too much has happened since that hallway at Scion, and I’m tired of looking over my shoulder and holding my breath. I exhale, releasing the air from my lungs on a wordless whisper, issuing no stay of execution. And I watch as Xaine shoves the knife by painstaking increments into the neck, surpassing the base of the jaw, the hard palate, the sinus, and finally the skull. That’s when Benicio goes slack, the lean lines of his body relaxing into nothing more than a pile of very dead meat.

There’s a flesh-hiss when Xaine slowly pulls the knife out. Flipping the blade around in his hand, he rocks back on his heels and stands. The madness is still there, painted across his face, his shaking body. He blinks, once, twice, clenching his teeth together, pushing one rough palm into his own eye socket like he’s got the mother of all brain freezes.

When he finally looks up at me, his eyes are still black. He takes a step forward, then pulls up short, curtailing himself like he’s afraid he might not be able to stop if he moves too quickly. “Lore?”

“It’s okay.” My voice wavers but I slowly crawl up the wall until I’m on my feet again, leaning hard against the cold brick. “I’m okay.”

I get the flash of fangs, a gut-deep growl as Xaine stalks toward me. Maybe it’s stupid, but I’m too relieved to be afraid of him. I’m dizzy, the world is spinning, and I think I might lose my cookies all over the damn parking pad outside of PFC, but—

“I feel better, actually,” I tell him as he grabs hold of my waist and drags me against him. “I feel—”

Not haunted.

“Well, I’m glad you feel better.” Xaine’s words a little garbled, leaving me to wonder if maybe those famous fangs of his aren’t actually a little bit longer, sharper, and deadlier than before. “Because that was
the
stupidest idea on the planet.”

“What happened?” I touch the tips of my fingers to my aching head.

“Asshole busted the restraints the second you were within reach,” Xaine says, squeezing me against his chest so tightly that I can actually feel the blood seeping through my clothes. “Scrambled Asher’s brain, took out the Mini-Muff, and chopped Trace up with his own goddamn sword, that’s what.”

“Oh, my god.” I stare up at him in horror. “Are they all dead?”

“I don’t know,” he says grimly. “I didn’t exactly stick around to find out.”