“People are starting to ask questions about Ms. Cook’s career. As you said, she’s been playing leads for forty years. Romantic leads. She hasn’t aged a day since her first spot on the chorus line in the sixties.”
A chill crept up my spine. I hadn’t thought of it. I wouldn’t have thought of it. I’d have written it off to plastic surgery or a great makeup job. I’d have figured Mercedes Cook was one of those lucky people who hit twenty-five and didn’t seem to age for the next couple of decades. But if that was so, Judy Jones wouldn’t have been calling me.
I’d never been in the same room with Mercedes Cook to smell her, to be able to tell if she wasn’t quite human.
“Go on,” I said.
“After all this publicity about the paranormal over the last year, which you might be aware of—” Uh, yeah, did she think? “People are starting to ask the right questions about Ms. Cook and her remarkable career. The bottom line is we’d prefer to make this announcement on our own terms rather than have some reporter splash this all over the nightly news. What could be more perfect, Ms. Norville? America’s first celebrity werewolf conducts a live interview with America’s first celebrity vampire.”
Perfect, indeed. One of the country’s most beloved stars of one of its most beloved institutions—a vampire? Oh, the conservative witch hunters were going to have a field day with this. She totally hadn’t been on my list—my potential vampire list that included every celebrity who looked younger than plastic surgery could explain.
And I couldn’t tell anyone. Jones was smart—she’d given me a very good reason to keep the secret. I had to, if I wanted to get the exclusive story. Breaking this kind of news on my show? Ha! This was too cool.
I took a breath and tried to sound nonchalant. “That’s quite intriguing, Ms. Jones. I think I can make the time to have Ms. Cook on for an interview.” I acted like I was poking through a calendar. “Yes, I’m sure I can fit her in. When is she available?”
“Is this week too soon? She’ll be in Denver for her concert tour.”
“This week is fine.”
“I can arrange for her to come to your studio for an interview. I’m assuming that would be convenient?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I’ll make sure we’re set up on this end.”
“That’s great. Would you like tickets for her concert?”
Why the hell not? “That would be great. Thanks.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
She clicked off, and I had my show for the week all set up. Belatedly, I realized I had admitted that I was in Denver. But surely the publicist couldn’t reveal that to anyone who would cause trouble.
After the show, I’d have to call Detective Hardin and tell her that Mercedes Cook had hundreds of publicity photos and several videos of her musicals. Vampires did appear on film, and something else had robbed that store.
chapter 4
Judy Jones reserved tickets for me for the Thursday night concert. Not only that, but I had an invitation to visit Mercedes Cook afterward, with a backstage pass. I was starting to feel like some kind of big deal myself. This was all to butter me up so I’d give a flattering interview. We’d see about that.
I had two tickets, and I wanted a date. Ben didn’t want to go.
“That really isn’t my kind of thing,” he said, working at his desk the day before the concert.
“Have you ever even been to a show like this? World-class singer, world-class concert hall, it’ll knock your socks off.”
He spared a brief glance over his shoulder. “I’m really not all that into music.”
Oh, now he tells me. “Ben, I started my adult life as a radio DJ. You can’t live with me and not be into music. Are you saying that all the times I blast The Clash while making dinner you haven’t been into it?”
“To be honest, I mostly tune it out.”
How the hell do you tune out The Clash? Turned all the way up? Once again I reminded myself that Ben and I were together by accident. Did we even know each other, really?
“Ben, I’d really like to go to this. Together.”
He leaned back in his chair and sighed. Still wouldn’t look at me. “Can’t you get someone else to go? Maybe your sister.”
Uh, no. Not the same. “You know how you keep saying that we’ve never been on a real date?” We were living together, sleeping together. We were practically married. We’d skipped clean over the whole dating thing and went straight into settled. I wanted to change that. “Can this be it?”
Finally, he turned, stared at me in a way that was almost a wolf challenge—asking for a fight or offering to give one. Then, he gave a sly half smile.
“Are you asking me out?” he said.
“Yeah, I am.”
“Well, okay then.”
I turned my gaze to the ceiling, as if that would tell me how his brain worked. “You’re really obnoxious, you know that?”
He was still grinning when he turned back to his desk.
I convinced Ben to dress up—suit, tie, the works. I knew he could pull out the GQ polish for important courtroom appearances and high-level meetings. The rest of the time, not so much. But we were having a night on the town, and I wanted to go all out. Who knew when we’d ever do anything like this again?
He finished dressing while I was in the shower, and I hurried because I didn’t want to be that stereotype of the woman who takes forever to get ready while the guy is in the living room glancing at his watch. Hair dried and up, makeup on, earrings, necklace, little black dress, and strappy heels. I was probably way overdressed, but I didn’t care. The dress was a clingy silk number with spaghetti straps, sexy without being trampy. I’d only worn it once before—it had given me good luck then. I contorted in order to see myself in the narrow full-length mirror, making sure the skirt was all smoothed out, that a few wisps of hair were artfully arranged around my face—and rearranged, and arranged again—and that everything was in order.
“Kitty, we’d probably better—” Ben’s steps approached just as I bent over to adjust a strap on my shoe one more time. “Wow.”
He stopped in the doorway. He stared. I straightened and stared back. The look in his eyes—I found myself blushing in places I didn’t know I could blush.
For his part, Ben was wearing his best courtroom suit, charcoal gray, perfectly tailored, with a rust-colored tie. The lines were smooth, giving him a slim, fit appearance, an image of power and privilege. His hair was a touch too long to lay slicked back, so it flopped over his forehead, with a rakish, mischievous air. Put a pair of Ray • Bans on him, he’d be downright scary. Dreamily scary.
“Wow yourself,” I said. I resisted an urge to lick my lips, but I did gulp a little.
“You, ah, clean up pretty well.” His voice seemed a bit subdued, and he’d started fidgeting with his cuff links.
“You, too.” I didn’t have cuff links to fidget with, so I laced my fingers together behind my back. The blushing was getting worse. My whole body was turning red, I was sure of it. Did he have any idea just how . . . how amazing he looked?
“Can I kiss you?” he said, kind of offhand, as if we hadn’t kissed a hundred times before and the thought had just occurred to him.
In reply, I took a slow step toward him, and another. Before I knew it, he touched my face and brought our lips together. The kiss was hot, hungry. I held him and pulled myself close to him. His hands slipped down my back, one of them moving farther, cupping my bottom. Just a thin layer of silk lay between us. And still, we kissed.
We finally pulled apart to catch our breath.
“I suppose we should do this sort of thing more often,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, whispering, a little shaky. All of a sudden, I didn’t want to go to the concert. I was still holding on to him.
He ducked his gaze. “I was going to say—we’d probably better get going. We’ll be late.”
“Yeah.” We still didn’t move.
Then, at almost the same moment
, we started giggling. I pressed my face to his shoulder to stop myself, and he hugged me, and the intensity of whatever had just happened went away. Mostly, it went away.
I said, grinning, “Hey, wanna go on a date with me?”
“Absolutely.”
We looked like a million bucks. Stalking arm in arm, we crossed the courtyard of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, a collection of theaters in the heart of downtown, to the doors of the concert hall. We turned heads, the two of us. Like we were in a commercial for diamond jewelry or a music video. Sure, we were way overdressed compared to a lot of the crowd—why did some Coloradoans think it was okay to wear jeans to a symphony concert?—and it made us stand out, but in the kind of way that the stares told me that they all wished they could be us. My grin felt silly, but I felt better when I glanced at Ben and saw the same grin on him. The alpha pair indeed.
I even almost forgot that I was supposed to be in hiding. I kept telling myself that none of the Denver wolves would be here, lycanthropes avoided crowds like this and the vampires didn’t hang out here. I’d be fine, just fine. I didn’t wilt in the middle of the crowd. I felt on top of the world.
We collected our tickets from Will Call, were ushered to our seats, and settled in as the orchestra was tuning up. The lights went down, the conductor appeared, and the orchestra launched into an overture.
Then she appeared, entering stage right.
Mercedes Cook had ivory skin and brick red hair, the rich color and sheen of silk, rippling past her shoulders. A midnight blue, shimmering gown clung to her slim figure. Her limbs were slender, her face aristocratic, like that of a Greek statue. I couldn’t tell her height from where we sat, about halfway back in the orchestra section. She seemed to fill the stage. She seemed bigger than life.
I was close enough that the hall’s air-conditioning system carried her scent to me—the cold, clean scent of a vampire. If I hadn’t been warned, I’d have been shocked. She moved with such energy, such vibrancy. A consummate performer, she had a spark in her gaze.
I could guess her story: she’d always aspired to the stage. A talented performer, vampirism wasn’t going to halt her ambitions. Maybe she even sought out the vampirism, or encountered the opportunity and grabbed it as a chance to hold on to that elusive advantage of youth and beauty. She’d been on stage since the sixties, when her official biography set the start of her career. Maybe she’d even been around longer, a vaudeville performer or singer in the twenties and thirties who disappeared and changed her identity to start a career on Broadway. That would take a bit of research and digging. I was hoping I could get the scoop from Mercedes herself.
Vampires didn’t need to breathe. Their blood was borrowed, and their hearts didn’t beat. They existed in a kind of stasis, never decaying, and never experiencing the cellular processes of life. But they used their lungs, inhaling air in order to speak. And to sing.
Mercedes’s vocal cords didn’t suffer at all from her being a vampire. She was a belter, yet her mezzo voice rang like a bell. She sang show tunes and torch songs. Fast, jazzy pieces and slow, bluesy pieces. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. Every one of them had me at the edge of my seat. She owned that stage, and she needed the full orchestra to keep up with her. Nothing else possibly could.
She spotted me. From the stage, she looked right at me, caught my gaze, and she knew who I was, could tell what I was from forty feet away. Her smile thinned, her eyes narrowed into a sultry gaze, almost but not quite winking at me. Then she turned, and it was all part of the song, all part of the act. Every person in the audience probably imagined she was looking right at them.
Part of me didn’t trust her talent. Vampires had . . . something. Energy, power, presence. They were seductive, they spent decades practicing being seductive. More than that, some of them could entrance you with a look. Hypnotize you. You’d follow them anywhere without knowing what was happening. They lured their prey to them.
She might have been casting that spell over the whole audience. Ben’s jaw was open.
She gave two encores, then the lights came up, and it was over. I shook my head, like I was trying to clear a fog from my mind. The spell was fading. I reached over to close Ben’s mouth for him. He blinked, also spellbound.
“She’s impressive,” he said.
“Want to meet her? I’ve got a backstage pass.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Perks of the job, baby.”
“Did—was I imagining it? Is she really—”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m here. Come on.”
I grabbed his hand and pulled him into the aisle. Back in the lobby, I followed my nose to a side corridor that led to a plain-looking door. We slipped through it to the chaos of backstage. Cables and lighting fixtures decorated shadowy concrete walls. Velvet drapes hung from a ceiling that was lost in darkness. The whole thing was, strangely, both cozy and industrial. Musicians carried instrument cases from the brightly lit stage.
I didn’t spot anyone who looked official. At most rock and pop music concerts, a whole barrage of staff and bouncer types would have stopped us from getting this far. I’d marshaled my speeches that would get me past them to see Mercedes. But no one paid attention to me here. I was almost relieved when I spotted someone dressed all in black and wearing a headset. Even then, I had to intercept her.
“Can you help me? I was invited to visit with Ms. Cook after the show, do you know where I can find her?”
Just like that, the techie showed Ben and me to a back hallway where the dressing rooms were.
“Well?” I asked Ben. “Ready for this?”
He shrugged. “It’s your show.”
“Remember, she’s a vampire. Totally creepy. Don’t let her seduce you.”
“Hey,” he said, indignant, and I knocked.
“Come in,” said Mercedes Cook in her rich mezzo.
I opened the door inward. As I did, the stunning redhead seated at a long, brightly lit makeup table turned to me. She’d put a black silk robe over her gown. Her face was perfectly made-up, if thickly for the benefit of the stage. Cosmetics masked the usual pale vampire complexion. She looked alive, more so than any vampire I’d ever met. And her image showed in the mirror, perfectly clear.
Vases of flowers covered the table and spilled onto the floor nearby, giving the room a tropical, heady atmosphere.
“You must be Kitty Norville,” she said.
I offered my hand to shake, and she did, smiling indulgently. Her grip was cool. I gestured over my shoulder. “This is my friend, Ben.”
“Great show, Ms. Cook,” Ben said diplomatically. He stayed a step behind me, ready to let me make my own mess.
“Thank you very much,” she said, flashing a brilliant smile. “Please, come in, have a seat. I think there are a couple of extra chairs here.” We found the chairs, and I scooted mine close to her, like we were a couple of old friends.
I rarely had a chance to prep for an interview like this, meeting the subject beforehand and getting a feel for how they’ll respond to my questions. In moments, Mercedes put me at ease. Already I could feel that she was going to give a great interview.
“Thanks so much for the tickets. We had a great time.”
“I’m glad. I had a good audience tonight, but I always wonder. Maybe they’re just being polite.”
Friendly, endearing—she didn’t even talk like a vampire. Maybe she was young—for a vampire—and hadn’t yet acquired the arrogance of centuries. I started to ask, then thought I should save it for tomorrow’s interview.
“If you’re up for taking calls during the interview tomorrow, you’ll get to ask your fans directly.”
“I’m looking forward to it. I’ve done lots of interviews, but never anything like this.” That smile glittered. Not a hint of fang showed. She genuinely seemed happy about the interview. “I want to thank you for giving me this chance. Once I decided to tell the world what I am, I had to decide how to do it. Being on your show see
med like such a fun alternative to a stuffy press conference.”
I was sought after. My show had credibility. I could have burst with pride.
I tried to stay grounded. “Going public will change everything. No one will ever look at you the same. This could end your career.”
“Or raise it to an entirely new level. Going public certainly hasn’t hurt your career.”
“I can’t argue with that. But most of the time I feel like I’m madly treading water just to keep from going under.”
She laughed, a musical sound—of course. “Oh, that doesn’t have anything to do with being a werewolf. That’s life.”
She had a point. I just smiled. “I won’t be offended if you decide to back out of the interview.”
“Don’t worry, Kitty. I’m not exactly an innocent young thing in this business. It’s my choice to go public, and I know what I’m doing.”
These kinds of interviews involved a bit of give and take. We were both after publicity, but ideally we wouldn’t sound self-serving. We wanted to be entertaining. I wanted the whole thing to sound like a pleasant conversation. And at the same time I wanted to get as much information as I possibly could.
My smile turned sly. “Just how ‘not young’ are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Why is that the first thing anyone wants to know about you when they find out you’re a vampire?” Her gaze became hooded, her smile mysterious.
Ah well, it was worth a try. “Morbid curiosity, I think. Can I ask if you belong to a Family? Do you have a Master or someone you had to argue with about this?”
“No Family. I’m the Master of my own little world. I like it that way.”
“Amen,” I said. “I figure in the interview we’ll get the big news out of the way, I’ll ask a few questions, then open the lines for calls. Sound good?”
“Fabulous.”
“Then I’ll see you at the station at eleven tomorrow night. You have my number? You’ll call me if you need anything?”
“I’ll be fine, thank you,” she said, another laugh hiding in her voice. “Thanks again for agreeing to do this.”