“Hey, the paper the other day said it was supposed to be seven fishes for the seven sacraments.” This from my cousin Tony, who should have known better than to get involved.
Adelaide started yelling, “Ah, you can use that paper to wipe my ass! What do they know, are they in church on Sunday? No! They’re too busy printing lies in the paper!”
Ovsanna put down her plate. “I don’t know anything about Christmas in Italy, Aunt Adelaide, but I can barely hear anything in here. Let’s go outside. I’d love to hear the story of the fishes.”
And it was over as fast as it started. Adelaide followed Ovsanna outside, and I watched them exclaiming over the fruit trees. Ovsanna seemed a little antsy; she kept looking around as though she expected to see someone she knew. She explored the yard while Addie continued ranting about sacraments and sacrilege. I watched them through the kitchen window. Finally Ovsanna put her hands on Addie’s shoulders, stared into her eyes, and spoke so softly to her that I couldn’t hear what she said. And Addie calmed down, just like that.
My mother shot me a look. Even if Ovsanna weren’t a movie star, she’d just passed some kind of test.
“She’s a nice girl, Peter,” my mom said. “A little old for you, maybe, but an awfully nice girl.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
I couldn’t believe the dinner Mrs. King served. The last time I’d seen that much food on a table was in 1575, in Kenilworth at the Earl of Leicester’s feast for the queen. I was only twenty-five at the time and hadn’t had much experience hiding my true nature when it came to feeding, but there were so many revelers that no one noticed the food I didn’t eat. Or the footman I did. That feast lasted seventeen days. Looking at Peter’s mom’s table, I think she had just as much food as they did at the castle.
I couldn’t believe myself, either. Normally I would have had a shrew like Peter’s aunt Adelaide for lunch. Drained the damn bitch until she was too weak to complain. Instead I was acting like Emily Post, making nice and calming the waters. Well, I did mess with her mind a little when I got her alone outside, but only with the suggestion she back off on the annoyance factor. And when no one was looking, I gave her a mild bite wound on the back of her arm to keep her occupied. She didn’t remember a thing, but she spent the rest of the evening itching and scratching. But I didn’t do anything else to the old biddy. I wanted Peter’s family to like me. Hell, I wanted him to like me. I already had a couple of strikes against me, not least of which was involving him in the monster massacre in Palm Springs. I didn’t need to make any more problems for him on Christmas Eve.
Peter and I were seated at the kitchen table, chatting with his mom while she wrapped the leftovers. She’d already served enough desserts to feed an entire movie crew. Things I’d never seen, even living in Italy a few hundred years ago: sfogliatelle, cassata, pandoro, pasticiotti. And then the ones I did recognize: cannoli, tiramisu, zeppole, and struffoli. She had gelato for the kids and a bûche de Noël. I guess Peter’s side of the family didn’t carry much weight when it came to their national dishes. That was understandable; egg whey and blackberry suet pudding don’t sound too festive.
Mrs. King had just offered me a double espresso when a beautiful, blond Valkyrie walked into the room and I was saved from refusing. The woman must have been six feet tall, and she had the most remarkable blue eyes. I knew we’d met before, but I couldn’t place her.
“Well, Merry Christmas, y’all,” she said, leaning down to give Mrs. King a hug. “Ooh, Angela, did you save all of this food for me? Now, ain’t you just the best mom in the whole world?” She popped a shrimp into her mouth, tail and all, and kept on talking while she chewed. “Peter, you know how lucky you are to have your mom for a mom? And to have me for a friend?” She turned to me. “He is one lucky son of a gun. Hey, how ya doin’, Ms. Moore?” She had a bottle of wine in one hand and a shopping bag of gifts in the other, so she didn’t attempt to shake hands, which was fine with me. Physical contact with strangers brings on a bombardment of impressions I can usually do without. “You prob’ly don’t remember me, but I wrangled your snakes on Bride of the Snake God. I’m SuzieQ, and I live in Peter’s guesthouse, and it’s sure nice to see you again. You were pretty good in that movie, too.”
As soon as I heard her voice, I remembered her. It was four years ago; she’d had a python named Spiro Agnew and another snake named Dick Nixon. We’d hired her and her python for a movie I was starring in. She’d been on the set for a couple of weeks, but most of her work had involved my co-star, Bruce Campbell. She’d done a good job handling the snake. And Bruce, too, for that matter.
“I do remember you, SuzieQ. You’re a dancer, too, aren’t you?” I remembered Maral mentioning that the cast was going to watch her perform at some Moroccan nightclub. Maral didn’t want me to go. She used the excuse that I wouldn’t be comfortable having to eat with my fingers, which was a little lame when she knew I wouldn’t eat at all. She was just jealous of the striking six-foot blonde.
“Oh, I do just about everything. A little of this and a little of that. Anything short a lyin’ on my back with my legs in the air. Gotta pay this man the rent, ya know.” She handed Peter the bag of presents. “Here you go, sugar. There’s something there for each of the young’uns, and that one on top is for you. Angela, you and Seth get the wine.”
We moved into the living room so Peter could give SuzieQ’s gifts to the kids. There was a flurry of tearing paper and thank-yous and “Look, Mommy, what I got!” Somebody opened a Jeff Gordon NASCAR Barbie doll, and then rubber snakes appeared and Nerf darts started flying.
I blocked out all the noise and concentrated on the conversation that was taking place across the room. Peter and SuzieQ had moved over to the Christmas tree. I was curious about their relationship. They were obviously close friends. I wondered if it had ever been anything more.
“Sugar,” SuzieQ was saying, “what’s going on? Why in the name a Jesus have you got Ovsanna Moore standin’ in your mama’s kitchen? Two weeks ago you were on her ass for bein’ a suspect in all those murders.”
Peter looked over at me, probably wondering if I could hear them. We hadn’t had time to talk about anything personal since he’d learned what I am, but I was sure he’d been reading everything he could get his hands on about vampyres. I wondered if he’d seen Vampyres for Dummies. One of the New York Ch’lang Shih clan was the author—his genus unbeknownst to his publisher, of course—and he’d put in just enough misinformation to cloud our discovery for another hundred years. Made me laugh.
“She wasn’t a suspect, SuzieQ,” Peter whispered. “That was her assistant we were looking at, and besides, neither one of them turned out to be involved. Not really. I just happen to find her attractive. And she was alone for the holiday, so . . .”
“Oh, Peter, you are in way over your head. That woman runs a movie studio, sweetpea. She could eat you alive.”
I couldn’t keep from smiling. If she only knew. I caught Peter’s eye and mouthed, “She’s right, you know.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
We left the party at midnight. Ovsanna was a big hit with the family, and I think she had a good time, but it may have been a little overwhelming. I saw her eyes start to turn when my nephew ran his tricycle over her foot.
She was quiet on the way home, staring out the window across the houses on Mulholland. It was one of those remarkable evenings in L.A. when the wind had blown the pollution somewhere else and you could see the lights on the mountains all the way across the Valley. If I’d been alone, I’d have been thinking about the people who live out there, separated from one another by acres and acres of scrub. I’ll bet they could see stars for miles. I always wonder who they are and what their lives are like. As much as I love the wilderness, I couldn’t stand the isolation.
“You’re probably not used to that much commotion. Did you have a good time?” I asked.
“I did,” she said, and she smiled. She was beautiful when she smiled. She was beautiful all the t
ime, but I realized I hadn’t seen her smile often. Maybe it had something to do with hiding her . . . whatever they were . . . teeth. “It made me feel . . . I don’t know what. I’d say homesick, but that’s ridiculous. I’ve never had a home like that to begin with. I guess I experienced the connection you all have to each other—even Aunt Addie—and it was nice. Loud, but nice. Is it like that for every holiday?”
“Pretty much. Except Bastille Day. Aunt Addie’s not a big fan of the French.”
A pack of photographers stood waiting outside her gate. Seven of them. There’d been more when I’d come to interview her about her partner’s murder, thirty or forty, not counting the TV crews. All of them screaming for Ovsanna to come to the door so they could get shots of her to put money in their pockets. But that had died down; she was no longer a suspect, and I couldn’t see any reason for them to be there. When they realized I was driving, they stampeded across the road in a herd to get to Ovsanna’s side of the car.
“Is it always like this?” I asked her. “It’s midnight. How late do they hang around your house?”
“They don’t, usually. I don’t know what this is all about. And these guys I’ve never seen before.”
I hadn’t, either. And I know most of the paparazzi in town. You can’t be a cop in Beverly Hills for sixteen years and not know the photographers by name. Half my time is spent smuggling drunken celebrities past their flashbulbs or breaking up fights between them and some star’s bodyguard. Or the star himself. Sean Penn calls me Pete. I rolled the window down a few inches. “Haven’t you guys got something better to do on Christmas Eve?”
Normally they would have answered back, made some kind of joke, even asked me what I was doing with Ovsanna in the car, was I on duty? As much as I have to police the paparazzi, we’ve got a pretty good relationship. But these guys, nobody said a word. Nobody yelled, “Ovsanna, over here! Give us a smile!” Nobody yelled anything. They just aimed their cameras at the car, shooting silently through the side window. Ovsanna turned her head toward me, hiding her face from them, and gave me the code to the gate. When I tapped it in, they stopped shooting and stared at us, still without speaking. It bothered me. There was something creepy about it. I wondered where they were from, who sent them. I rolled up the window and waited on the other side until I was sure the gates had closed completely. Maybe I’d get out and talk to them on my way home. Assuming I was leaving.
I had to brake twice on the quarter-mile drive to the house to avoid hitting the geese. Ovsanna has them wandering all over the yard. She says they’re as good as any alarm system. They’re as loud, that’s for sure. And a lot more messy.
Her house was great. Spanish architecture like mine, only on a much bigger scale. Probably ten million dollars bigger. It had a music room, a screening room, a gym, three offices that I knew about, God knew how many bedrooms, a separate guesthouse, a library, and a dining room with a fifteen-foot-long table. I don’t even know that many people I’d want to eat with. My sister would have thought she’d died and gone to heaven in the laundry room—a plasma TV, a built-in sewing machine, and spindles holding every color thread in the rainbow. And the art on the walls—original Toulouse-Lautrecs and stuff. What the hell was I doing there? How do you date a woman who spends more on her water bill than you make in a year?
I’m a damn good detective, but I didn’t have a clue about what to expect now that we were back at her house. I opened her door and gave her my hand to help her out of the car. Instantly, heat ran up my arm and flooded my chest. It felt like I’d grabbed hold of a live wire and a couple thousand volts were frying my body.
“Jesus!” I said, pulling my hand away. “Did you do that on purpose?” She might as well have Tasered me. I looked to see if my skin was burned.
“What?”
“That heat thing. Shooting out from your hand into my body like a lightning strike.”
She’d moved away from me and reached the front door. She put her key in the lock and without looking back said, “I think you’d better come in, Peter. We have a lot to talk about.” She opened the door, disarmed the security system, and disappeared into the house, not even waiting to see if I’d follow.
My arm was still tingling. I knew I shouldn’t go in. I shouldn’t have been there at all; I was already pushing the limit on departmental policy. But I couldn’t resist. It had only been two weeks since I’d discovered True Blood was a reality series. Everything I’d ever believed about monsters and ghouls had gone right out the window, and I was still trying to get a handle on Ovsanna’s lifestyle. Plus, I’d had a great time with her at my parents’, and I wanted to talk to her some more. I wanted to find out a lot more about her. I needed to . . . if I was going to decide to see her again.
As long as I didn’t get burned.
CHAPTER NINE
It was all I could do to keep my fangs in place and my nails from elongating. I was damned if I was going to ruin another manicure. The last time I’d gotten emotional, I’d left polish all over L.A.
Anger had caused that change, though; this was another emotion entirely.
Lust.
No, not just lust . . . something more complicated. I liked this man. He made me laugh. He was strong and fearless, and I didn’t intimidate him, even after he found out what I am. I mean, it’s hard enough to handle approaching a movie star, but how many men could deal with discovering that an age-old, terrifying myth is actually true? Peter not only rescued the Vampyres of Hollywood—Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin among them—he even let me feed on him to save my life. That takes balls.
Figuratively speaking.
I barreled into the house and headed for my downstairs office, not waiting to see if he followed. I knew what was going on, and I had to get myself under control. It’s a pattern of mine, although it took me a century or two to recognize it because it happens so infrequently. I’ll go years without finding anyone attractive, and then someone comes along—sometimes it’s a man, sometimes a woman—with a certain look in the eyes, and I am captivated. It was like that with Rimbaud. You’d think after him I would have learned my lesson. What a mess he turned out to be. But no, when there’s a response, when I see the same interest reflected back at me, then a subtle current of sexual arousal sets in. I start sleeping even less than my usual five hours, my skin gets hypersensitive to the touch. I have more trouble keeping my fangs in place, my nails from elongating, and the Thirst comes on me more insistently and too often. It takes a real effort of will not to change.
That’s what Peter had felt when he took my hand getting out of the car. I lost control. Not good. I needed either to shut him out completely—walk away and not let him in my life in any way—or to explain to him what was going on with me and let him decide what he wanted the next step to be.
I didn’t want to shut him out. I wanted to get closer. I wanted to find out more about him. How his mind worked. Why he didn’t run for his life when he discovered what I am. And what it would feel like to kiss him. I’d already tasted his blood; it was spicy and rich. Complex, like the man seemed to be. What would it feel like to have him inside me? That’s what I wanted to know.
It would be better for both of us if he walked away.
For the most part, vampyres are solitary creatures. Vampyre couples do exist—I turned Rudy Valentino and we stayed together for several years, and Theda Bara and Charles Brabin have been together since 1921—but they’re the exception, not the rule. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, both members of my clan, eventually went their separate ways, although I believe Mary still loves him. But vampyres taking human lovers? They tend to be brief affairs, born out of the need to feed off a compliant partner who has some aberration of his own to work out. I have yet to understand humans who have convinced themselves they need to drink blood. Psychologists call them hematomaniacs. They’ve even got vampyre support pages on the Internet, for God’s sake, for “sanguinarians” and “vampiric people.” And vampyre dating services. If they o
nly knew the reality.
Maral knows.
We’ve been together for ten years. When I hired her, she was so grateful to get out of the mess her life was in, she would have done anything for me. She was an eighteen-year-old runaway facing a manslaughter charge for killing a man who’d broken into the house where she was staying. He’d attempted to rape her. The cops questioned her claim of self-defense, primarily because she’d managed to decapitate him. They didn’t believe a little bit of a thing like her could do that without premeditation. I still wonder about it. Had she been lying in wait for him? At any rate, she didn’t have money for a lawyer, and the only job she could get was starring in a porn production “mockumentary” about her story, The Real Killer Commits the Real Kill! The producer was a scuzzy weasel who’d just finished knocking off a porno version of my movie I Scream. That pissed me off. He’d titled it I Scream with Pleasure and used a girl to star in it who bore a slight resemblance to me. At least her face did. Her body looked like Britney Spears on a bad day, and that pissed me off even more. Then, in a real moment of sleaze, he’d given her the screen name Oval Moore. I wanted to kick the shit out of him. When I showed up at his “studio” (a two-bedroom house in the Valley), Maral had just started filming. He stopped the camera long enough to pull a gun on me. She grabbed a fire extinguisher and blasted him. His toupee went flying. I started laughing. She hadn’t really saved my life—the gun was a .22, about as effective on me as a mosquito bite—but she’d made the effort, and I was intrigued. I hired her to work for me and hired my lawyer to get her out of the manslaughter charge. She’s been committed to me ever since.
A year after we met, I was filming on Slieve More (the Big Mountain) in Ireland. It was our day off, and I’d gone hiking up the mountain alone when the sky turned black and torrential rains started falling. Whether I slipped in the downpour or was pushed, I’ll never be certain. The locals believed strongly that banshees lived on Slieve More and that said banshees weren’t happy with the movie crew being there—sort of like trying to film in Bolinas, California, where the residents insist on screaming, “Go home!” every time you roll cameras. Whether it was banshees or bad luck, I lost my footing and crashed sixty feet down the side of the mountain, rolling over and over again on scree and razor-sharp shale. I ended up in a river of mud with a broken left arm, two bone fragments sticking out of my calf, a punctured lung, a shattered cheekbone, two cracked ribs, and a broken collarbone. My vampyre physiology attempted to heal itself immediately, but it had been weeks since I’d fed and I didn’t have the nutrients I needed to sustain the healing process. My wounds were too extensive. I was dying.
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