Maral stopped, widemouthed at the bestiary, and I caught her arm and dragged her away. She put her mouth close to my ear and pointed with her chin at the dragon. “Ovsanna?”
I nodded.
“Impressive. I didn’t know she could do that,” she muttered.
“You knew she was a vampyre!”
“Yes. Of course.”
“We’ll talk about that later,” I promised. “Let’s go.”
With everyone gathered on the mountain, we made our way through the house. I’m sure that it had once been beautiful, but it was never going to make the pages of Palm Springs Life again. There were bodies everywhere, stacked like cordwood in the corners, propped up against the walls, shoved into side rooms, hanging from above over the exposed beams. All of the bodies were pale and bloodless, and most had parts missing.
“They’re so young,” Maral whispered.
I nodded; I’d already noticed that. “Runaways,” I said softly. “Some of the thousands who come to Hollywood looking to be famous.”
“It could have been me,” Maral muttered.
We stopped outside the door to the dining room. Neither of us wanted to step inside. What remained scattered across the floor was indescribable. “I want to burn this place to the ground.”
“Amen to that,” Maral said sincerely. “I have an idea,” she added, turning and darting back through the house. “Help me find the garage.”
The triple-door garage was at the far end of the house. I hadn’t followed the stone wall that far in the dark or I would have come to it. Probably could have saved myself the swim in the moat if I had. We got to it through another flight of stairs from the kitchen. It was huge, but I guess it had to be—everything from the empty rooms upstairs had been dumped into it. Antique chairs stacked on top of cut velvet sofas, all of them shredded and broken. A long, ornate cherrywood dining table was scratched by the computers, VCRs, TVs, clock radios, and a microwave piled on top of it. Broken beds in a corner, covered with torn blankets and stained pillows. Lilith should fire her decorator.
There were three cars in the garage, a classic 1940 Studebaker Champion, a modern BMW 7 series, and an enormous black Hummer.
“Check the tanks,” Maral snapped.
“They’ll be full,” I promised, and they were, ready for a quick getaway, no doubt. The doors were unlocked, keys in the ignition. I tried the three buttons on the Hummer’s dash; the middle one worked the garage door. I climbed out of the car to find Maral stuffing the fuel tanks with lengths of cloth torn from a blanket. I could smell the gas.
“My granddad taught me this trick,” she explained.
There was a storage cupboard at the back of the garage, filled with an assortment of cleaning supplies that had obviously never been used. Most of them bore the legend “Inflammable.” Carrying out a handful, I emptied them over the blankets and pillows, dumped more onto the velvet sofa and a stack of books lying on the floor. I returned to the cupboard and filled my arms.
And when I turned around, a red-haired, fang-toothed woman was looking at me. My gun was on the shelf behind me and I knew, even as her fingers sprouted daggerlike claws and lunged at me, that I was not going to make it.
The axe caught her in the side of the head and slammed her into the wall. She stood looking at me, blinking slowly until both eyes popped out of their sockets and she slid wetly to the floor, leaving a sluglike trail on the wall.
“Your granddad teach you that, too?” I asked Maral, shakily.
“Sure did.”
I emptied the remainder of the cleaning supplies around the rest of the room and turned around to find Maral pulling the microwave off the table. She heaved it up onto a workbench and plugged it in. The clock started blinking on and off. “Are we cooking?”
“You feel like eating after all we’ve seen?” she demanded, lifting the microwave off the bench and putting it on the floor beside the rag hanging from the Hummer’s tank.
I shook my head. I didn’t think I’d ever eat again. I wondered if Mom would buy my explanation.
Maral popped a jar of varnish and a pot of paint into the microwave, spun the dial to full, and set the clock for three minutes. She pressed the start button and the plate started to turn. “We should go,” she said.
I looked at her stupidly.
“There are certain things you don’t put in a microwave unless you want a big fiery explosion.” She grinned, catching my hand and dragging from me from the room.
“Learned that from Granddad, too?”
“Nope, I worked that one out for myself.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Lilith became the serpent.
Standing in the center of the circle behind the house in Palm Springs, surrounded by her followers while I was backed up by the Vampyres of Hollywood, she began the appalling transformation into a shape that is forbidden to my kind. Once Changed into a serpent, a vampyre can never change back; it is impossible to return to oneself. But Lilith is not one of us. The creature that had tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden had been no devil, no demon: it had been Lilith.
When I led my vampyres up from the basement, destroying all in our path, I had expected to find the Ancients arrayed against us. But when they saw us burst from the house, led by a dragul, I watched them melt back into the shadows. The Dearg Due, the Bobhan Sith, the dhampirs and were-creatures threw themselves at us, but we easily brushed them aside, reveling in their destruction, relishing the taste of their blood.
Douglas fought at my side. “Why aren’t the Ancients attacking?” he shouted.
I answered him in Armenian, finding it easier to shape the words using a throat never meant for human speech. “They know what happened to Rudy and Ghul. Suddenly Lilith is not so powerful as she would have them believe. The Ancients are fearful, they do not want to die—and they know if they go up against us, at least some of them will perish.”
“As old as time and still afraid to die,” Douglas said, a note of genuine wonder in his voice.
Bull-headed Orson strode up beside me, plucked a pair of dhampirs off the ground and flung them at the cowering Ancients. The broken half vampyres crashed to the ground at their feet and the Ancients fell snarling upon them. “Let’s kill the dhampirs and the were-creatures, then feed them to the Ancients,” he rasped. “They’ll feast upon them until they are too stuffed to move and then we’ll take them.”
“Enough!”
The voice, low and subsonic, rolled across the mountain. Stones and gravel tumbled down the hill and the water in the moat roiled.
“Enough!”
Lilith had appeared, standing in the living room door. Immediately the surviving dhampirs and were-creatures fell back.
“Enough.”
In the sudden and absolute silence, the tiny woman-child in her hideous makeup made her way outside. I was wearing the dragul form, impenetrable to sword or spear, strong enough to tear steel and pulverize stone, and even I felt the sour tendrils of fear at the back of my throat.
And as she approached, she changed.
Before humanity claimed this earth, the snake people ruled. Lilith bred with the last of them and created us and, in doing so, she became one with them. Now her features elongated: nose pushing forward, chin sliding back, eyes shrinking, moving higher on her head. Her wig slid away, revealing a scabrous scalp. I watched her arms shrivel up her sleeves, and then the filthy dress slid away. She was briefly—horrifyingly—naked and then she was no longer human.
“Ghul is dead,” I said. “Rudy, too.”
A black forked tongue flickered in her mouth. “Dear, sweet Ghul,” she hissed, sounding genuinely upset. She didn’t seemed too put out about Rudy, I noted. “You have no idea what he was. He was glorious, my Morningstar. Ah, the flesh he has eaten, the blood he has drunk. The meat of generations.” Her legs had fused, and her body was elongating and changing color as she moved closer.
I was aware that a circle had formed around us, the Ancients and the survivin
g dhampirs and were behind Lilith, the Vampyres of Hollywood behind me.
Lilith was almost completely serpentine now: huge and hideous, her yellow-veined body rippling with muscle, her mouth filled with enormous upper and lower fangs. If she wrapped those coils around me, dragul or not, I was just so much paste, and I was sure her fangs could penetrate my armored hide.
“We could all rush her?” Douglas suggested. “She might get some of us, but not all—”
I shook my massive head. “This is my fight. I must do it alone. If I defeat her, then the Ancients and the surviving dhampirs will owe me fealty.”
“And if she defeats you? And eats you?” Douglas said grimly. “Your flesh and blood alone would make her immeasurably more powerful.”
“If that happens, Douglas, then I suggest you run!”
Even as I was speaking, Lilith lunged. She was fifteen feet away, then she twisted and coiled and suddenly she was airborne above me. I threw myself down and forward and passed beneath her, feeling her stinking skin brush my wings. The serpent hit the ground hard enough to shatter the stones beneath. Without pausing she turned and spat at me—a huge gobbet of luminescent phlegm-colored slime. I spun away and most of it splashed onto an unfortunate dhampir. The venom ate through her flesh, revealing muscle, sinews, then bone. The unfortunate creature was still alive as it started to eat away at her internal organs. An Ancient put her out of her misery by snapping off her head. And eating it.
Lilith moved again, the upper part of her body turning in one direction, the lower half in another. I dodged her lunging, snapping teeth, but her armored tail caught me across the chest, driving me back into the arms of a tall, chitinous Ancient. His claws grabbed my arms, holding me, but I drove my head back and up and my pointed horns caught him in the soft flesh under the chin, penetrating mouth and tongue and driving up into his brain. He was dead before he hit the ground.
But the moment’s distraction was enough for Lilith. Her tail coiled around my ankles, slithering between my feet, and suddenly she was on top of me. I caught her massive throat in both hands before her fangs bit into my face, my six-inch-long claws digging deep into the thick skin. I felt her throat work in my hands and barely managed to turn her head to one side as she spat again. An Ancient fell writhing as the venom ate away its slablike face. A single drop caught the edge of my wing and hissed like acid through the skin. The pain was indescribable. I brought my wings around, encasing her serpent body in their leathery folds, using their hooks to rip and tear her yellow flesh.
“Too late, dragul Dakhanavar, too late.” Lilith’s voice was a foul whisper.
The coils of flesh around my legs tightened. If I fell, it was all over. My hands were still locked around her throat, keeping her teeth and spit away from my face. Drool was running down her chin, and even the diluted venom was burning my talons. It was only a matter of moments before she broke free and spat full in my face. Or bit it off.
So I bit her.
Opening my dragul jaws wide, I clamped down on the flesh of her neck and bit hard. The taste of her flesh in my mouth was disgusting, the feel abhorrent. The sudden burst of images, memories, and sensations overwhelmed me and I loosened my grip. Lilith erupted into a frenzy and flung me from her. I crashed onto the ground, shattering the flagstones, tearing my wings to paper on the cacti. Shakily, I got to my feet, spitting Lilith’s meat from my mouth. A stringy spray of phlegmy venom arched through the air towards me. I turned sharply, and then the ground shifted beneath my feet, and suddenly I was surrounded by huge fish in the filthy water of the moat.
Water is not the natural habitat of the dragul. We cannot swim.
Terror and Lilith’s abhorrent blood in my mouth gave me the strength to Change. There were a dozen shapes I could have taken if I’d thought about it, but I couldn’t think, so when I rose from the water I was Ovsanna Moore. Piranhas were tearing at me.
I scrambled out of the pool and stood up. I had fought as a dragul, but I would die as a human; there was something fitting about that.
And suddenly Lilith was towering over me and around me, jaws gaping. She wouldn’t use her venom on me this time, I knew. She’d want to taste my flesh and drink my blood. Maybe I could choke her on the way down. I was certainly determined to try. Her mouth opened, wider, wider, wider still as the bottom jaw unhinged.
“I am going to swallow you whole.”
I heard a pop and smelled the stink of gasoline, and the next instant a wash of superheated air detonated out from the center of the house. Half the house vaporized in the massive explosion. Huge stones rained down in lethal shrapnel. And then, in what seemed like slow motion, the front end of a Hummer hit Lilith full in the teeth and drove her head back into the ground.
“Swallow that, bitch.”
It took Lilith’s body mere seconds to liquefy and dribble into the pool.
Chapter Forty
PALM SPRINGS
6:50 P.M.
I’d just opened the front gate when the massive explosion ripped the heart out of the house. Maral and I stopped, then as one turned and ran back through the chaos. The house looked like the antechamber of hell. Piles of dead bodies burned like flaming torches; floorboards were warping and snapping in the intense heat. Huge swaths of the ceiling had bellied inward. Rooms had disappeared.
We raced through the dining room—I’ll never eat barbecue again—and burst out into the backyard. Flaming stones were falling like rockets, exploding all over the garden, cacti were alight, and flames shot up the palms, while ribbons of burning cloth spiraled slowly downward.
I’d expected to find monsters and the Vampyres of Hollywood, but instead the garden was deserted…save for the lone figure of a bloody and battered Ovsanna Moore leaning against the rear end of the Hummer. Its front was buried nose deep in the ground. Ovsanna turned. She had a slight smile on her face as we both came running up.
“When you said we ought to burn it to the ground, you really meant it, didn’t you.”
“I had some expert help,” I said, looking at Maral.
Ovsanna brought Maral’s hand to her lips and kissed it. Then she brought my lips to hers and kissed me. I wondered if there was a message there.
“Where’s Lilith?” I asked.
“I guess the whole thing was just too much to swallow,” Ovsanna said.
I was sitting on the side of the road, one arm around Ovsanna Moore, the other around Maral McKenzie, watching a prime example of Palm Springs real estate burn to the ground, when the first of the fire trucks arrived. Then the PSPD, Chief Barton, the paramedics, and the press. Lots and lots of press.
“What happened to the Ancients and the were-creatures?” I asked quickly, before they had a chance to descend on us.
“Fled into the desert. I think they’ve had enough to eat for a while.”
“And the Vampyres of Hollywood?”
Ovsanna turned her head and tilted her chin toward a long line of crows perched on the roof directly behind us, looking like something out of The Jungle Book. “A little singed about the feathers, but safe.”
After everything I’d seen, I didn’t even question her. “Say, do you think you can get me some autographs for my mother?”
“I think I can manage that.” Ovsanna smiled. “You rescued us, Peter,” she continued. “I think we were kidnapped by some sort of cannibal cult, don’t you? Doesn’t that sound like something the press will buy?”
“Sounds like a movie,” Maral drawled.
“Oh, it will be,” Ovsanna promised, leaning into me, putting her head on my shoulder. “This is going to make you a hero, Peter,” she added.
“I’ve been a hero before. It has its downside. The last person I rescued bit me on the ass. At least you haven’t done that.”
Ovsanna raised her head and smiled. I swear I saw fangs.
“Well…not yet anyway,” she said. And then she kissed me.
Also by Adrienne Barbeau
There Are Worse Things I Could Do
/> Also by Michael Scott
The Alchemyst (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)
Acknowledgments
There wouldn’t be any Vampyres of Hollywood without the talent of Michael Scott. He is brilliant at what he does.
Thanks also and once again to Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. And to Erin Brown, our editor at Thomas Dunne Books—working with you has been an absolute delight.
And as always, I couldn’t have gotten these words on the page without my beloved Billy making the days easier, dearest Leti for keeping the house in order, and William and Walker and Cody filling our lives with joy.
—AB
The danger in even beginning a list of acknowledgments is that it is far too easy to forget someone—so if I have, I apologize in advance.
In particular order, they are:
My collaborator, the gracious and charming Adrienne Barbeau, who is a fount of knowledge about Hollywood and the Business.
Claudette Sutherland, who introduced me not only to Adrienne, but also to Jane Dystel of Dystel & Goderich Literary Mangement.
Erin Brown, our remarkable editor at Thomas Dunne Books, who kept us on the straight and narrow.
And of course, Barry Krost of BKM Management, who really started it all…
—MS
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
VAMPYRES OF HOLLYWOOD. Copyright © 2008 by Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Vampyres of Hollywood Page 28