“And there’s an image I don’t want in my head,” I said.
“He also said, Max, that you need to back away from this and go home,” Thack said apologetically. “Something about the Treaty of Gediminas? He said that since you’re in the Magnum Collegium, you’d know what the means.”
Max sighed deeply. His expression was troubled, but he nodded his head. “Yes. Of course. I understand.”
“I don’t,” said Thack.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
My eyes met Max’s, and I nodded. I would call him later and let him know whatever Thack found out.
Max wanted to honor the treaty, and he knew better than anyone why its terms had been negotiated this way. But, in the absence of a Lithuanian vampire hunter taking charge of this situation, he couldn’t bear to stand by idly while Evil menaced the people of New York.
“Nelli is physically distressed here,” Max said, rising to his feet. As if to back him up, the familiar sneezed again. “We should go home.”
I gave Max a hug, promising casually to talk to him soon. Thack shook his hand, expressed pleasure at having met him, and ruefully acknowledged that Max had placed Thack in the unusual position of doing something that would make his family proud.
Leischneudel appeared in the doorway just as Max was departing. He greeted Max and Nelli—who sneezed.
“I think your dog is sick,” Leischneudel said with concern.
“I’m taking her home now,” said Max.
“I think I’m going to go home, too,” Leischneudel said apologetically to me and Thack. His pallor and the dark circles under his eyes were noticeable as he explained, “I’ve scarcely slept the past two nights, and I think I’ll collapse facedown in my dinner if I go out now.” He added happily to Thack, “I’ll see you at your office for my appointment later this week.”
“I’ll see you then,” Thack said. “Nice performance today—despite everything.”
“Thank you.” Reminded of that farce, Leischneudel covered his face with one hand and started laughing helplessly again. I realized he did seem overtired.
I also recalled that the vamparazzi would still be outside in force, since Daemon hadn’t yet left the theater. So I suggested that Max and Nelli walk Leischneudel to his cab, along with the Caped Crusaders who would be waiting outside the stage door for him. Obviously grateful for the company, since I wasn’t going with him, Leischneudel was chatting pleasantly with Max as they left.
I turned to Thack. “So I guess it’s just you and me for dinner.”
“No, I’m afraid we’re doing to have to . . .” He swallowed and continued with obvious difficulty, “To accept Mr. Ravel’s invitation to join him.”
“What? No! Why?” I had never spent any of my personal time with The Vampyre’s star, and I didn’t intend to start now.
“Uncle Peter says that since the cops and the media seem to think Daemon is the killer, he wants me to stick to him like a burr until we have instructions from Vilnius.” Thack sighed unhappily. “So that’s what I’ll do. My uncle isn’t really the sort of person you argue with.”
“Oh. I see. All right.” My own course of action was obvious to me. “You know, Thack, I’m quite tired, too. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll just go home and—”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Thack said sternly. “You and your friend got me into this, Esther. So you’re coming, too. I will not spend the evening on my own with that appallingly clichéd—Ah, Daemon!” Without missing a beat, Thack smiled as the Vampire Ravel appeared in my doorway. “There you are! Are we all ready to leave? Good, good. Where we shall go?”
17
“My God,” Thack muttered, gesturing to our surroundings. “This place looks like a bad marriage between a Tim Burton film and a French bordello.”
“I thought there would be food,” I complained. “I’m hungry.”
Thack said to Daemon, “You’re not eating those, are you?”
Without waiting for an answer, he plucked a little bowl of nuts off Daemon’s end of the table and put it in front of me. The celebrity vampire, still red-eyed and pink-nosed, was sitting as far away from me as he could get while still remaining part of our merry little trio.
“I want dinner,” I said as I accepted the nuts. I had already eaten a bowl of pretzels.
“I need another cosmopolitan,” Thack said. “Where is that tastelessly dressed waitress of ours?”
Daemon, whose attention now seemed fully occupied with the vampire girl sitting on his lap, had chosen the venue for our evening out. We were in his (enviably luxurious) car by then, and Thack felt honor-bound to remain by his side until Uncle Peter called again. So when Daemon announced we were going to a club called the Vampire Cave (“where they love me”), we hadn’t put up nearly as much of a struggle as I now realized we should have put up.
For one thing, there was no food here other than generic bar snacks and, as was usually the case after a performance, I was ravenous. There were some choices on the specialty drinks menu which I might have found amusing under other circumstances, but all things considered, I just felt my gorge rise at the thought of drinking a Bloodsucker, Jugular Juicer, or Carotid Cooler. In any case, right after the show, I had swilled about onethird of a bottle of lukewarm champagne on an empty stomach, so I had decided I’d better stick to club soda here.
I was rethinking that decision at the moment, actually, since the Vampire Cave wasn’t sort of place where I particularly wanted to be sober, if I had to be here at all. Down a steep flight of steps, situated underneath a leather-gear novelty shop, this club was decorated pretty much as Thack had described. The customers were a cross-section of self-proclaimed vampires, vampire groupies, vampire lifestylers, psychic vampires, donors, and people hoping to (as Leischneudel would put it) meet a vampire. There were enough other customers dressed in ordinary street clothing that I didn’t look out of place (though Thack, in his Brooks Brothers suit, certainly did), but vampire-goth was the most prevalent style choice among the clientele.
Thack glanced at his watch. “You would think,” he said, “that these people might have some place else to be this late on a Sunday night.”
“Such as home in bed?” Which was where I wanted to be. I gave in briefly to fantasizing about eating my favorite Chinese carry-out food in bed while watching TV, and then sleeping undisturbed for at least eight hours.
“Do you suppose that vampire hunting is always this demeaning?” Thack wondered, as Daemon and Vampire Girl pawed each other at our table. Several people in flowing black capes greeted the two of them while walking past us. “Or are we just lucky?”
Daemon was obviously well-known here, and he had told us he’d been a regular at this club ever since coming to New York. A number of people had greeted him since our arrival a half hour ago. They spoke to him as friendly admirers, rather than with the hysterical adulation displayed by fans outside the theater. And the woman currently occupying his attention wasn’t even the first one to sit in his lap since we’d arrived; indeed, he seemed to have several friends-with-benefits among the club’s clientele tonight.
Nonetheless, I noticed he was also getting some censorious looks from this crowd. I wasn’t sure whether some of the people giving him dark glances thought he was a murderer, or whether they just thought he shouldn’t be out partying and pawing so soon after the murder, all things considered. (Or maybe they just didn’t like him bringing a scowling yuppie in a Brooks Brothers suit to the club, as well as a hungry actress who was eating all the bar snacks.)
When I used the ladies’ room a little while later, though, I discovered another possible reason for the chilly glances. While I was out of sight in one of the two wooden bathroom stalls, a couple of girls were touching up their elaborate makeup at the sink. I wound up hovering in my stall and listening with mild interest as they talked about how Daemon had “gone commercial” and “sold out.” He also gave people the wrong impression of vampires, they said, which was bad for the
vampire community.
“I mean, most vampires don’t even drink blood at all,” one of the girls said. “But he makes it such a thing.”
“God, I know! And that whole ‘sunlight must not touch me’ attitude,” said the other girl. “Puh-lease. How corny can you get?” She suddenly inhaled sharply. “Oh!”
“What is it?”
“Mmm.” She gave an ecstatic little moan. “I’m getting a psychic embrace from Rafael.”
“Oh, wow.”
I flushed the toilet and exited my stall.
As I was returning to my table, I paused to give a little finger wave to half of my vampire posse. The four guys had met us outside the stage door and had insisted on following Daemon’s car here, riding on a couple of motorcycles, two men per bike. After we got here, Flame and Casper stayed outside with the bikes. Treat and Silent entered the club with us, though they sat unobtrusively at a separate table and didn’t intrude on our evening, such as it was.
Flame had instructed Treat and Silent, “Keep eyeballs on Miss Diamond at all times.”
The Vampire Cave was small enough that my halfposse could easily monitor my trips to the bathroom and the bar without even leaving their table. And, fortunately, I had managed to convince Silent that coming inside the ladies’ room with me would make the two of us much closer than we really wanted to be.
Daemon was canoodling with yet another goth girl when I sat back down at our table. I could tell from his unfocused, heavy-lidded eyes and slurred speech that he was very drunk by now. I gathered that, to top off the pleasures of my evening, my vampire host in this fine establishment had decided to go on a real bender.
Ignoring our companions, Thack said to me, “I mean it as an observation, not a criticism, when I say that, although you are normally an attractive woman, tonight you look like a boxer who recently lost a brutal match and you smell like a pharmacy. What on earth happened to you?”
I wearily recounted my misadventures with lust-maddened Janes.
Thack shook his head in disgust. “I should never have let you audition for this show. I had a bad feeling from the moment you told me about it.”
“Your bad feeling had nothing to do with the show,” I pointed out, “and everything to do with the chip on your shoulder about, er, cultural stereotypes.”
“But you insisted I get you the audition, and now look where we are,” he said grimly. “In a vampire nightclub with a drunken poseur who I fear may wind up having sex on our table before Uncle Peter calls me back.”
“Oh, come on, Thack, I’ve got a supporting role in a sold-out off-Broadway show. That’s a good thing.”
“Jane is not a part worthy of your talent, darling.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, “I need some auditions. This show closes in two weeks.”
“Oh!” He made a rueful face. “Sorry. I should have said something sooner. A murderous vampire menacing New York kind of distracted me.” Thack added wearily, “And talking to my relatives always rattles me.”
“Should have said what?” I prodded.
“I was going to tell you over dinner. I got you an audition for next week. It’s for another new play. Not a gothic revival this time.”
“Really?” When he nodded, smiling at me, I gave him a hug. “That’s great!”
“Geraldo will call you in a day or two with the details,” he said. Geraldo was Thack’s assistant. “And I’ve been talking with the Crime and Punishment people. They thought you did very well in D-Thirty, and they said you were really a good sport on the set. So they felt bad that they wound up having to cut your role so much in that episode. The upshot is they’d like you to come in soon and read for a guest spot on Criminal Motive.”
While The Dirty Thirty was the grittiest and most controversial series in C&P’s spin-off empire, Criminal Motive was considered the brainiest.
“Suddenly, I feel so much better! Good news is like an antidote,” I said cheerfully. “Now I can scarcely even tell that I was beaten almost to a pulp last night.”
“Did something happen?” Daemon asked us blearily.
“No, go back to your fondling,” I said to him. Then I smiled at Thack. “Now I can look forward to life after The Vampyre.”
Gesturing to my injuries, Thack said, “I’ll certainly be relieved when you’re done with this show. You look as if a third assault could put you in the hospital.”
“Fannish hysteria is a dangerous thing,” I noted. “And it’s not even as if they’re my fans.”
“Vampire hysteria is a dangerous thing,” said Thack. “I had to make my way through that crowd today to get to the theater. The effort made me better acquainted with Daemon’s fans than I had any desire to be. Which is how I know that, despite his being suspected of murdering his most recent pick-up, half the women in that crowd still want to sleep with him—as do some of the men. That doesn’t just run contrary to reason and good taste, it also defies any healthy sense of self-preservation.”
I thought back to something Leischneudel had said yesterday, on the way to work, about how the fans romanticized Lord Ruthven’s murder of his bride. “Maybe they think it would be worth dying to be possessed by Daemon in the final embrace.”
“Are you trying to make me nauseated?” Thack asked.
“Or maybe they fantasize that he’d turn them, and they’d become his undead true love.”
“I’m warning you, this evening has descended to such an unprecedented nadir that I am quite capable of tossing my cookies in public.” Thack glanced at our canoodling companions. “Possibly all over our preening pal and his giggly goth girlfriend.”
He’d spoken a little too loudly. The girl finally noticed us, and she looked offended. That was predictable, given what Thack had said; but I thought she could have easily avoided the insult by declining to give Daemon a lap dance in public.
“Who are your friends?” she asked him with a sour expression.
“Hmmm?” Daemon looked blearily at me. “I . . . work with her.” His gaze moved to Thack. “Who are you again?”
Thack asked me, “Should I risk a third cosmopolitan? The first two were pretty weak, after all.”
“I haven’t seen our waitress in ages,” I said.
“There is a sense in which that can only be a blessing.”
Goth girl stuck her tongue in Daemon’s ear, then said, “Why don’t you and I go back to your place and give your coffin a workout?” She uttered what I gathered she intended to be an alluringly wicked giggle.
“Oh, good God!” Thack exclaimed. “A coffin? A coffin?”
“Oops, I think the damn just burst,” I told the dreary couple.
“Is there no limit to your tasteless banality?” Thack cried.
“Oh, wait, you came with Esther, didn’t you?” Daemon said to Thack, as if starting to recognize him now.
“You sleep in a coffin?” Thack demanded.
“No, I don’t sleep in it,” said Daemon. “Do you have any idea how claus . . . claus . . .”
“Claustrophobic?” I guessed.
“Thank you.” Daemon nodded at me, then concluded, “How what-she-said a coffin is? Really tight squeeze, man.”
“Not to mention that it’s intended for the departed and should therefore be treated with respect. Not used as a PR gimmick, let alone as a venue for—for . . .” Thack concluded with discreet disdain, “Fun and games.”
The girl looked at Thack’s well-tailored suit, and her puzzled expression cleared. “Oh, I get it! You’re an undertaker?”
“Vampires do not sleep in coffins,” Thack said tersely.
“I remember now,” Daemon said to Thack. “You were in the car with us, right?”
“Vampires particularly do not sleep in coffins filled with the soil of their native land,” Thack said in aggravation, getting it all off his chest now. “If we have any attachment to our native soil, it’s purely sentimental! Though, I, for one, was delighted to shake the dust of Wisconsin off my feet. But I had fami
ly issues, so that’s beside the point.”
“What is the point?” Daemon asked in confusion.
“As for all this claptrap about being immortal ... Where does that even come from?” Thack demanded.
“The undead?” I guessed. “Though I suppose Max would say they’re not immortal, they’re just mystically animated by—”
“Someone living for hundreds of years? It’s idiotic!” Thack raged.
I kept my mouth shut.
He added to Daemon, “And how, by the way, were you planning to fake immortality? Plastic surgery can only take you so far, after all.”
Daemon’s jaw dropped and he gave me a look of horrified betrayal. “You told him?”
“Told him what?” I asked blankly.
“About . . .” Daemon made a vague gesture.
“Oh! About your plastic surgery?” I said, realizing what he meant. “No. Why would I tell him? Why would I tell anyone?”
The girl looked at him. “You had surgery?”
“Childhood accident,” he said quickly, slurring the words.
I had no doubt that Tarr would soon sniff out who Danny Ravinsky was, as well as the fact that he had altered his appearance when becoming Daemon Ravel. And then everyone would know. But since celebrities getting plastic surgery had by now become as common as my mother getting brisket and matzo, I still didn’t see what the big fat hairy deal was.
Thack, meanwhile, was really on a roll now.
“You know what else? The only vampire who requires an invitation to enter your home is a well-raised one with good manners.” His voice was rising, along with his temper. “A gauche lout of a vampire can burst through your front door whenever he feels like it—no invitation needed, folks!”
Thack’s outburst was starting to attract some attention.
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