Lost Angeles Read Online Free PDF Page A

and everyone would assume it’s Pilates and ask her about her secret diet.
    Liquor and late nights.
    “All the mouthwash in the world doesn’t cover up the smell of tequila,” I say, goading, always goading. “Spend another morning chugging Alka Seltzer and worshipping the porcelain god?”
    “Eat a dick.” Reille doesn’t peel her eyes from the stage, but she knows I know I’m right…
     
    Angel on high,
    I pulled you from the heavens,
    And dragged you down, down, down
    Into my special brand of hell.
     
    It takes a moment for the lyrics to filter through, maybe because the girl’s clear soprano is nothing like my tenor. Then I have to stop talking, stop taunting, stop doing anything that detracts from the concentration it takes to pick the words out of everything else the Fuzzy Bunny onstage has done to this song. That’s not to say it sounds bad, just different .
    But nothing could have been more jarring to me than hearing her sing this .
    I don’t write about love. Sex, yes. Life, yes. Wealth and fame, all of that is fodder for my music. But love? In four hundred years, I only wrote one song about love, and I only sang it once before I put it away and never touched it again. It was a single impromptu lyrical whim that caught me on one of those nights, when the shadows are a little too dark, the hours a little too long, and the memories a little too vivid to be shoved down inside. Humans would call it a moment of weakness, but it’s worse than that for an immortal; it’s a moment when we let the ennui fall away and all our actual feelings slip through.
     
    Angel girl, the stars weep to see
    What you’ve become since falling,
    But I just can’t seem to let you go,
    And maybe that’s just as well.
     
    The world has heard this song exactly one time, at a live acoustic session twenty years ago. Back in the days before YouTube and Vine, before Twitter, and long before social media could tell you that an earthquake was coming your way a full thirty seconds before it hit. There are no video captures of that concert on the internet, no still frames, but every single word is burned into my consciousness as if I played it yesterday. If I close my eyes, I can still see the crowd, hear my voice echoing back through the mic, feel my broken heart poured into every single word.
    It’s the forgotten song, but I remember every single note.
    She’s too young to have heard it live, which means someone, somewhere, put the lyrics on paper. And this Fluffy Bunny built a dinosaur out of the bones, all conjecture and educated guessing, a one-off reduced to a poem and then reborn. She’s made it a full track, too, with violins and keyboard and percussion, so the whole thing builds into an actual song . It fills the room with everything it could have been, instead of everything it never was, and suddenly, all I can hear is her voice.
    Not the voice onstage, but Elizabeth’s voice, because it was Elizabeth’s song. Eyes open wide, I watch without blinking, but I’m not looking at the girl singing, not looking at the club. I’m two hundred years in the past, drowning in all the things I wish I’d done differently.
    It’s damn unsettling, and when my initial shock wears away, it’s replaced by anger. I teeter on two chair legs, cardboard cup clutched in my hand, because I love the song and hate it. Want to hear it again and can’t bear to listen. Need to get out of here, but can’t walk away.
     
    Here beside me,
    Tucked beneath me,
    Surrounded by me,
    Oh, baby can’t you see?
     
    I rock idly, the sole of my shoe pushing against the railing. My head bobs vaguely in time with the music, but I swear I’m barely holding it together, and only because I don’t want Reille to see anything but indifference. I’m not in the habit of putting weapons in the hands of people who may or may not be in the market for a little revenge.
     
    You burn ever-bright,
    My every wrong set right,
    You show me there’s still light,
    You