Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions

  Pez put up his hand. “Can I go to the bathroom?”

  “Thank you for that valuable contribution,” Faye told him. “And no, you may not. Just because I feel like being unkind. Anybody else? Josh.”

  “He menaced that poor woman with his vampire powers,” Josh said in a low voice.

  “Exactly,” Faye said. “Exactly! He moved too fast and loomed over her, and she was scared and stumbled back, and he did it all on camera! Can you all tell me what he looked like?”

  “A vampire,” Christian remarked drily.

  “Exactly!” Faye said again. “That’s exactly my point.”

  If Christian had still been human, he would’ve bitten his lip, but he’d learned the hard way that that was extremely painful as a vampire.

  “Faye, I am a vampire.”

  “That’s absolutely no excuse,” Faye said sharply.

  Christian stared.

  “You see, Christian, being a vampire in the context of a boy band is a lot like knocking boots.”

  “What?”

  Bradley, who had been lounging across three seats at once, leaned over and whispered helpfully, “She means making love, Chris.”

  Christian transferred his horrified stare to Bradley.

  “You guys are a boy band,” Faye said. “Your job is to make girls think about sex, dream about sex. Your clothes and attitudes are meant to suggest sex. Under no circumstances are you to be caught actually having sex with one of these deeply under-age fans. If possible, I would like no indication to appear that you ever really have sex at all.”

  “By caught, do you mean there should be no visual evidence?” Bradley inquired. “Like photos or say, hypothetically speaking, videos released online involving whipped cream?”

  Faye looked appalled.

  “Whoops,” said Bradley. “Oh well.”

  Faye visibly made the decision to ignore this. “Or the way Pez, who is doing an excellent job portraying the perfect stoner drummer, is not permitted to take real drugs. And he very seldom actually does so!”

  They all turned and looked at Pez, sleepy-eyed under his crown of dreadlocks. He gave them all a double thumbs-up.

  “I really don’t think resorting to snorting baking powder is helping him,” Christian said eventually.

  Faye ignored that too. “And vampirism is like sex.”

  “How?” Christian demanded. “How is it like . . . that . . . at all?”

  “Little hints of vampirism are very alluring,” Faye said. “Subtle touches. But we don’t want them thinking of real vampirism, any more than we want them thinking of real sex. That stuff is scary. What we need is for the danger to seem perfectly safe.”

  “That’s impossible,” Christian told her flatly.

  Faye gave him a brilliant smile. “That’s showbiz.”

  She pressed play again, so that on the screen Christian was looming, the reporter was shrinking back, and Bradley was interposing himself between them, talking lightly and easily, speaking lines that Faye had approved.

  In the brightly lit tour bus, Faye uncrossed her legs and rose from her perch on the table, and began giving instructions.

  Christian wasn’t sure which he found most depressing, Faye’s list of commands or Bradley’s earnest platitudes on the screen.

  “This tour is going to be a journey. Journeys are all about discovery: we’ll learn things about each other, about the fans. About ourselves.” Bradley flashed his safely dangerous grin for the ladies. “We’ll be bonding closer than ever as a band. And who knows who we’ll meet along the way. . . .”

  “You do realize what this interview means,” Faye said. “It means that I want the rest of the tour to be perfect. See to it, boys. Don’t let me down.”

  Their first tour stop was in Liverpool, which was always an intimidating venue for any band, as the shadow of the Beatles hung over the city. But it went off pretty well: the acoustics of the hall were good, and there was standing room only, nine hundred people chanting their names and snatches of their songs.

  Sometimes Bradley just sang while Christian took lead guitar, but mostly Christian and Bradley ended up taking lead guitar and bass while Josh and Pez backed them up on the keyboard and the drums.

  Bradley was always at the forefront, but he was a pleasure to follow. Onstage it wasn’t annoying that he was their golden leader: onstage it worked, and onstage Josh wasn’t afraid to be with Christian. They all played very differently, but somehow when they were performing, it ended up in harmony. Somehow they were able to sweep everybody else along with them.

  These were the only times Christian had ever felt like he belonged to something, like he belonged to some people, since he had become a vampire.

  They came off the stage with most of their makeup sweated off, except for Christian, as vampires didn’t sweat, and beaming, except for Christian, as Faye had forbidden him to look anything but vampirically brooding when there might be cameras around.

  But he was possibly smiling a bit, face turned toward the inside of the high collar of his deeply embarrassing cape, as Bradley swept them all into their dressing room.

  “How about that, then, boys?” Bradley asked. “The Beatles have nothing on us. Well, none of the Beatles were vampires, were they?”

  He ruffled Christian’s hair. Christian was in a good enough mood to let him.

  “There were some rumors about John Lennon,” he said.

  He recounted the whole thing to his mum on the phone that night, and she seemed really impressed. She thanked him again for the front-row tickets for the show in Birmingham. He told her again how much he was looking forward to seeing her.

  Christian hung up the phone and drew the lid of his coffin shut, and was content for a brief moment in the dark.

  Then the lid of his coffin was pulled away with a wrench, leaving him blinking at his white hotel-room ceiling.

  Until his ceiling was obscured by the face of a woman, leaning over his coffin with her black hair hanging into his eyes and her fangs glittering. Before he could speak, before he could even move, her cold hand was fastened at his throat.

  “Hello, Chris,” the vampire whispered.

  Christian had never met a girl vampire before.

  She was so quiet. There was no heartbeat, no breath or crackle of living cells. Christian found he did not want to meet her eyes and see how far from human he looked to everyone around him.

  She said her name was Lucille.

  She’d let him rise from his coffin. Now she was perched gracefully on a sofa in Christian’s hotel suite and she’d refused his nervous offer of a glass of blood.

  “Sometimes I enjoy a chilled glass of white wine, with a dash of blood warm from the wrist,” Lucille remarked. “I call it the true rosé. Have you ever tried it?”

  “Uh,” Christian said. “No.”

  “I highly recommend it.”

  She was one of the vampires he’d read about, the ones who drank from human beings.

  “So, Chris,” Lucille said. “Are you going to share information with me willingly?”

  She did not describe how she might persuade him if he was reluctant. She did not have to.

  He could almost manage to look at her now, stealing glances and every time coming up with a new way in which she did not look human. Even the position in which she leaned back against the sofa, the precise arch of her spine, did not look right, as if she had forgotten entirely the limits her body used to have and the way her body used to work.

  “Let’s not play games, Chris,” Lucille said softly. “What nest do you belong to?”

  “Uh,” Christian said. “Nest?”

  “The other vampires you are associated with,” Lucille explained. “Your eternal family.” The expression on Christian’s face must have remained pretty blank. Lucille’s lip curled. “Who sent you here? What’s your agenda?”

  “I really don’t understand.”

  “Come now, Christian,” Lucille said, her voice more like an actual jungle c
at purring than a noise an attractive woman should be able to make. “I’m entirely in sympathy with you. Making vampires more popular, making them part of the mainstream. Starting this whole revolution in how vampires are seen. It’s quite brilliant. My nest is interested in forming an alliance with the vampires behind this scheme. So tell me, who made you?”

  Christian looked away from her. “I was attacked,” he said quietly. “They never caught the man who turned me. He never even meant to turn me. I cut him when I was trying to fight him off and swallowed the blood.”

  “Oh,” said Lucille, her voice as hushed as if she were in a library.

  Christian glanced back at her. She was looking at him as if she was seeing a human being for the first time.

  No, wait; of course she wasn’t: she was looking at him as if he was a person. And to her, the real people were vampires.

  “Not a lot of vampires come into this alone, I take it,” said Christian.

  “Not a lot of vampires survive this alone,” Lucille corrected. “So you have no nest?”

  “There’s no nest. There’s no scheme,” Christian said, and added quickly, “Sorry.”

  Lucille’s alabaster brow wrinkled. “Seriously?”

  “You’re the second vampire I’ve ever met,” Christian said. “Seriously.”

  Lucille regarded Christian with cool, suspicious eyes. Christian hoped she found his total fear and confusion convincing. They certainly convinced him.

  “Why are you doing this, then?” Lucille asked at last. “If there’s no plan, why?”

  Christian thought of being up onstage tonight, facing the Beatles’ legacy and smiling at it, listening to the surge and roar of the crowd, and being companionable in the dressing room afterward.

  Lucille had come here because of some gathering of vampires she’d called her nest. She might understand the urge simply to not be alone, to belong.

  But Christian didn’t want to have anything in common with her.

  “I enjoy it,” he said.

  Lucille stared at him with cold, cold eyes, as if trying to judge his sincerity, as if measuring whether it would be worth her time to kill him.

  “Well,” she responded eventually. “I suppose there’s nothing more to be said.”

  She got up, the movement a sliding, gliding thing more like an eel’s than a woman’s, and left.

  She did not go far. Christian was just up himself the next evening, going through the blood bags in the big kitchen he shared with the rest of the band, adjoining onto all their suites. He was trying to find some O positive.

  He was very surprised when Lucille staggered in.

  She was still not moving like a human. She was moving a little bit like a giraffe on stilts. She was also wearing a green T-shirt with love is the drug on it in purple letters, and her hair was all sticking up on one side of her head.

  “Good evening, Christian,” she said, and sat herself with great, solemn care at the kitchen table.

  Then she toppled forward, her face smacking against the wood.

  In a slightly muffled voice, she said, “I feel most peculiar.”

  “Would you, er, like some bagged blood?” Christian offered, trying to be a good undead host. “It’s A positive.”

  Lucille, her face still planted on the kitchen table, gave a full-body shudder. “Drink from a bag? I could never.”

  “Right,” Christian said. “Because you shouldn’t pop down to the shops and buy yourself a steak. You should go find a field and take a big bite out of a cow.”

  “All I had to do was knock on the door directly beside yours,” Lucille said. “It was very simple. Much simpler than cows. Cows never have hotel rooms. Well, I suppose some cows might. Cows with credit cards.”

  “You knocked on Pez’s door,” Christian said. “Didn’t you?”

  “Sweet boy,” Lucille told him. “Very amenable. But now I really do feel most peculiar. Have I said that already?”

  At that point Bradley wandered in, wearing a headband and a muscle shirt. He looked at Lucille on the table and gave Christian a thumbs-up.

  “She’s a vampire,” Christian said.

  “I see that,” said Bradley.

  “She knocked on Pez’s door last night,” Christian continued, just to make things clear. “And now she feels most peculiar.”

  “Oh,” said Bradley. “I realize this is a personal question, and I have no wish to pry into a lovely lady’s intimate affairs, but is Pez, er, alive?”

  “Of course,” Lucille told him in an offended voice. “I haven’t lost control and killed a human in years.”

  “Awesome,” Bradley said.

  “Well, one year,” Lucille conceded.

  Christian and Bradley exchanged worried looks over Lucille’s head.

  “The O positive’s in the back of the second shelf,” Bradley told Christian. “Give her the A negative, you’re always chugging that stuff trying to ignore the taste. Can you snag me a rhubarb-crumble yogurt?”

  “Almost a year,” Lucille murmured. “Ten months.”

  Christian passed Bradley the yogurt. Lucille propped herself up on one elbow. The elbow did keep slipping and getting away from her, but after a few tries she managed it.

  Bradley regarded her with some concern. It had taken Christian a while to realize that Bradley, who was ridiculous and terrible in so many ways, was also naturally very kind.

  “How many fingers am I holding up?” he inquired.

  Lucille regarded him blearily and said, “Avocado,” before her elbow got away from her again. “What was in that boy’s blood?” she demanded, sounding feebly outraged.

  “Hard to say,” Christian told her. “I saw him eating dishwasher powder once.”

  Lucille twisted about in her chair, horribly graceful again for a second, and focused on Bradley.

  “Is your blood clean?” she asked.

  Bradley hesitated. “My body is my temple,” he said eventually. “Glowing and gorgeous inside and out.”

  Lucille tensed. Bradley was already a bit tense. Christian wondered what the hell he should do, and as he wondered he moved between them, shielding Bradley.

  Josh came in through the door, saw the hungry look Lucille had fixed on Bradley, and backpedaled so fast he hit the door with a bang.

  “No,” he almost shouted, his breath coming too quickly. Christian opened the cupboard and started rummaging around for Josh’s emergency inhaler, but Josh took a few more fast breaths and repeated, “No. Having one of you things around is bad enough—”

  “Hey, don’t talk about Chris that way!” Bradley snapped.

  “Having a wild one that bites people—”

  “I’m not a tame dog,” Christian snarled. He saw the flicker of fear on Josh’s face, and stepped back, the inhaler pressed hard against his palm.

  Lucille stood, still a little shaky. “And we don’t think of you as people.”

  Christian put the inhaler on the counter and seized her arm. The way Lucille stiffened and looked at him, her lip curled back from her razor-sharp teeth, he knew it would have been suicide any other time.

  Fortunately, right now she was debilitated enough that turning around rendered her so disoriented she swayed and had to hold on to Christian’s arm.

  She dug her pointed nails into his arm as she did so, and he swept her out of the room, safely away from Bradley and Josh, then faced a dilemma: she was a vampire preying on his band-mates and had to be eliminated, and yet she was also a lady in distress.

  He called her a cab.

  When he got back, Pez was sitting at a table being lectured by Josh and Bradley both at once.

  “You’ve got to be safe, dude,” Bradley told him. “Next time you sleep with a vampire, you’ve got to make her wear a gum shield.”

  “Or you could not consort with vampires!” Josh screeched.

  “Josh, I swear to God,” Bradley began.

  “I didn’t mean Chris,” Josh said, somewhat to Christian’s surprise. But then
he assumed Josh meant “consorting” in a certain way, and despite the allegations of certain tabloids, Christian was not in the habit of consorting with his band-mates all night long.

  “Wait,” Pez said slowly. “That girl was a vampire?”

  Christian had only been out of the coffin for half an hour, and he already had a migraine.

  “What did you think was going on?” Bradley asked after a while.

  He’d stopped looking frustrated, and now looked a little bit like he wanted to laugh. On the whole, Christian was glad: if the stress had given Bradley worry lines, Faye would have made them all suffer for it.

  “I just thought she was a little rough-and-tumble,” Pez said dreamily. “I went with it. I mean, whatever you’re into, am I right? Don’t be a hater.”

  Bradley really did laugh then, collapsing backward into a chair with his yogurt in one hand and his other hand held palm up.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Liverpool down, and the band scored a vampire groupie. High five.”

  “I don’t think she counts as a—,” Christian began.

  “Hey,” said Bradley. “She came, she saw, she sampled. She counts. High five.”

  Christian gave him the high five, and not too long after that they were in a tour bus trundling along the Mersey River, leaving Liverpool, city of the Beatles and their vampire groupie, far behind.

  Birmingham was their third stop, and time for Christian’s surprise. He had been surreptitiously collecting supplies behind Faye’s back for weeks.

  He still felt scared and sure that she was watching him, even though he’d used vampire vision and speed to take out the spy cameras on the tour bus and every hotel they’d stopped in. He found himself looking wildly around the hotel room as he slipped what he needed out from behind the lining of his coffin.

  First came the orange T-shirt, with the picture of a giant turnip sitting on a sofa. The big green letters read because couch potatoes have too much ambition.

  Then came the flip-flops, the sunglasses, and the baseball cap.

  Christian could have tried for the lift, but that meant walking the halls of the hotel, where Faye could be prowling.

  He was too much of a coward. So he decided to jump out the window.