“You honor this house with your presence, dark master,” he said, stepping aside to admit Doug. “Truly it has stood patiently these lonely centuries only that it could one day receive such an exalted visitant into its homely blah, blah, etcetera.”
Doug blinked as he walked into the hall. He had no idea how to talk to this person.
The interior of the house was more like it. The foyer was aglow with candlelight and clad in marble and bronze. There was a grand curving staircase of the sort that promised majestic introductions. In the movies a staircase like this could only exist to provide a beautiful woman with a decent way to enter a room. This was no movie, however, and the banister was rubbed dull and dry. The center of each velvet step was bald like an old dog. But the beautiful woman was a beautiful woman.
She looked like a college girl but carried herself down the stairs with the air of a woman three times her age. For all he knew, Doug realized, she was a woman three times her age. Thirty, even. It didn’t hurt that she was dressed like she’d stepped out of a school movie about the cotton gin.
Was this the vampire who had made Victor? She wasn’t French, not with that name, but what did Victor know? He’d probably think Sejal was French.
“I am Signora Polidori. You may call me Cassiopeia,” she added, with a faintly raised eyebrow like a footnote, a little legal disclaimer to explain that she wouldn’t normally permit someone like him to call her anything at all. Her voice was the sound of crisp new bills—a little British, not really Italian like Doug expected. More than anything, it had that sound of the East Coast rich that you heard so much in old movies.
She lowered a shoulder. She pointed a toe. She made the gentle tilt of her collarbone into the sort of thing that moved mothers to cover their children’s eyes. Doug decided then that, yes, she was very old. She had learned to inflame men in an era when a glimpse of leg could start swordfights.
“You are already acquainted with my thrall, Asa.”
“Yeah. Hey,” said Doug to the thrall.
Asa somehow managed, without twitching a muscle, to favor Doug with one last, breathtaking display of contempt before leaving the room.
“You are the first to arrive,” said Cassiopeia. “How embarrassing for you.”
Doug followed her through dark, wide doors into a sort of study. More candles here, and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and one of those wheeled ladders on tracks that Doug had never seen in real life before. Curved steps at one end of the room rose to a platform that accommodated a small piano and three high-backed chairs.
“You may repose here and await the others. The chairs upon the dais are reserved. Each object in the drawing room is worth a small automobile. Reflect on this before you touch anything.” With that, she left.
Doug stood stiffly. The air felt old, somehow, more brittle, and it smelled like books. He tried not to breathe it too deeply. He felt so terribly aware of himself here—heavier, fleshier…itchy.
Two guys who looked very much like Victor soon arrived, guys who looked like they were not so much born into this world as hiked, by quarterback, into an American flag. They took up places in the room and stared at Doug like he’d sat down at the cool kids’ table. He was certain they were vampires, too, from the smell. With so many in such close proximity the room was growing sour with an old-milk stink that filled your throat. Could regular people not smell this? He realized now that he couldn’t trust Jay to tell him he stank, though he was confident Jay’s sister would have mentioned it.
Victor himself came next, and stood at the far end of the room, and appeared to pointedly not stare at Doug; it was only for this that you might have guessed that the two boys knew each other at all. Doug fumed. They were all junior varsity vampires here, weren’t they? They’d all made the team one way or another. In a hot rush he realized that Victor had always planned to attend the gathering. He just didn’t want Doug there.
The great door opened and shut again. Finally, another girl. She was the last to arrive and the first who seemed to know how to dress for this sort of thing. She had straight green hair that just brushed her bare shoulders, and Doug imagined riding a tiny toboggan down their powder-white slopes into the foothills of her bust. She wore a black leather halter and skirt that showed a lot of everything. She looked to Doug like a video game character.
Signora Polidori returned now with another man. He was strikingly handsome in a way that looked very foreign next to all the homecoming kings in the room. Victor and his kind were big dogs, but here was a wolf, his face lean and sharp. He and Cassiopeia alighted on two of the three chairs.
“There! now,” said Cassiopeia. “All are here who will be here.”
All? thought Doug. The third chair was still bare as a headstone. He could feel the others beside him glancing at it, too.
“I am, as ever, Cassiopeia Polidori. At my left is Alexander Borisov. The third place is set out of respect for Mr. David, who enjoys his solitude. Until recently, we three were the only so ennobled for a hundred miles.”
“What about Asa?” asked the green-haired girl.
“Asa is not of our kind.”
“What is he, then?”
“He is my butler. Now. A gathering of the ton such as this will by no means be commonplace. For reasons you may have already deduced, our breed tend not to mingle.” Her nostrils flared slightly, and the point was made. “It is customary, however, for our kind to mentor those they grace—to guide, and to teach discretion. Discretion is paramount. You tell no one what you are. You speak to no one of our concerns.”
First rule of bite club: you do not talk about bite club, thought Doug. Got it.
“But that is not enough. Even in your private affairs must you be utterly clandestine. An elder shows her protégé how this is done. That you have all come so hastily and stridently to my attention suggests that you have not had the benefit—”
The green-haired girl tensed, her whole pointed demeanor aimed squarely at the seated man. “Well, if Count Dickula ever called like he said he would—”
“I got very busy,” Alexander protested in a thick stew of an accent. He pronounced every word like he was pushing it uphill. “Work has been a nightmare, I can’t tell you…I was going to call this week—”
“Whatever.”
“But when I heard of this party—”
“Whatever.”
A thick silence filled the room. The green-haired girl crossed her arms under her chest, which Doug appreciatively noted had a sort of push-up bra effect.
Cassiopeia sighed. “Perhaps we should try to conclude with the introductions. Short boy, tell them your name.”
Doug’s face boiled, but he did as he was told. The other kids took their turns.
“Danny.”
“Evan.”
“Victor.”
“Absinthe.”
“Absinthe?” slurred Alexander. “At the rave you were called Beth.”
“Oh, so you remember what to call me, just not how to call me—”
“I believe it has been made rather plain how our dear Absinthe became one of us,” said Cassiopeia. “I am more interested in the provenance of our other guests.”
Don’t call on me, thought Doug. Don’t call on me.
“Douglas. Is the kinsman who granted your immortality present here tonight?”
“Uh, no,” Doug replied, and did some quick thinking. “No…not unless it was Absinthe, I guess.”
“Oh, right,” said Absinthe. “Sure. It was totally me.”
“Did she resemble Absinthe?” asked Cassiopeia with a note of surprise in her voice.
“It was dark,” said Doug.
“Maybe his was the same one who got me,” said Victor. “Doug and I talked about this already…we were both attacked in the Poconos.”
“Attacked?” asked the signora. Her distaste for the word was palpable.
“Well, not ‘attacked,’ maybe. It was…it was fine.”
Doug felt a surge of love and gr
atitude. He could have cried. He could have bumped Victor’s fist, or done one of those complicated handshakes everyone else seemed to know how to pull off but him.
Victor described his vampire then as “college aged” and “hot.” Average height. Foreign. Hair that was either black or brown. Danny and Evan, in turn, described their vampires in much the same way. Danny ventured that her hair was really dark brown, not black, and Evan offered that she definitely had an accent but that it wasn’t the same as Signora Polidori’s.
“You cannot fathom my relief,” she said. “Well,” she added, sharing a meaningful look with Alexander, “it seems we have an enchanted stranger in our midst. Such intrigue.”
“Such a delightful turn of events,” muttered Alexander.
“Alas! our mysterious friend has been remiss,” she continued. “Each of you should have your tutelage. I will take our Miss Absinthe under my wing; she may do well to have a fairer hand at the tiller than Mr. Borisov’s.”
“I will take on Victor, then,” said Alexander.
“And I will take Daniel, as well.”
“Then I will take Evan.”
There was a fat pause, during which Alexander cleaned his fingernails. Oh, give me a break, thought Doug.
“It occurs to me…” said Cassiopeia airily, “I hesitate only because it occurs to me that, absent though he is from our gathering, Mr. David should know the joys of mentorship as well.”
“Oh yes?” said Alexander. “Oh. Yes. Yes, definitely.”
“So we are agreed.”
“Definitely agreed.”
“Douglas”—Cassiopeia smiled sweetly—“you shall have the surpassing benefits of Stephin David’s many wise years. I will arrange it personally. It is, I daresay, a perfect match.”
She rose to her feet.
“Now! who will have some supper?”
It was like eating somebody’s stamp collection, this supper. Everything was small and difficult to acquire and had a story behind it that was meant to be interesting, but wasn’t. Parakeet’s eggs and truffles, roe from an endangered salmon served in a ring of lightly battered kraken. Edible flowers. A supper planned by someone whose relationship with food had drifted over the years. Doug was relieved to see that he was not the only one picking at his plate.
The party broke up at a little after two in the morning. Asa saw all but Alexander to the front door—Doug hadn’t noticed if he’d stayed behind or simply left by another route to avoid Absinthe. They walked toward the front gate, the three Victor clones a little ahead, Doug lagging behind and trying to appear to be lost in thought, Absinthe a couple steps behind him.
“Hey,” she said. “Douglas, right?”
“Yeah. Absinthe is a cool name.”
“Why aren’t you up there with the rest of the big bats?”
Doug shrugged. The answer, in fact, was that back here he was maybe Victor’s friend. Back here he didn’t force Victor to choose whether to accept him in front of the others.
It was nice of her to pretend that there was nothing separating Doug from the other guys. Or it was a kind of nice, at any rate. One that allowed her to spotlight Doug’s standing in life, his outward flaws, meanwhile casting herself as the sort of guileless ingenue who believes it’s what’s inside that counts. Or maybe Doug was overthinking things, as usual. He told her he had a lot on his mind.
“I hear that. God, isn’t she rad? La Signora? I’m so stoked to see her again next week. Fuck Alex.”
Doug didn’t know what to say to that. He tried to nod sagely.
“So…” Absinthe said, “have you…told anyone about becoming…ennobled? You can tell me if you have.”
“I haven’t, though,” said Doug. “I…almost let it slip to a friend, but I didn’t.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t either. Signora sounded so serious about that. Like it might be dangerous for anyone you told.”
The night was quiet, apart from the crunch of gravel beneath their shoes. Up ahead the other boys erupted into bawdy woofing. The phrase “killer rack” drifted backward on the breeze.
“Hey,” Absinthe said suddenly, “if I fly home, would you get my clothes for me?”
“What?”
She answered by changing into a small green-and-brown bat, in a wink, and her clothes dropped to the ground beneath her. She flittered around Doug’s head until he bent down and retrieved her garments. He was inches away from what was technically a naked, beautiful girl but he couldn’t appreciate it. He folded her clothes neatly in his hands and the bat gave a lyrical chirrup and flew away.
When next Doug looked ahead he saw Victor, alone, by the gate.
“Did she just turn into a bat?” he asked.
“Yeah. She asked me to take her clothes,” said Doug, trying to make it sound like this sort of thing was always happening, girls rapidly undressing in front of him and so forth.
“You ever do that?” asked Victor. “Turn into a bat I mean?”
“Once.”
“Yeah. I don’t like it much. It’s like…you know when you’re driving somewhere and you space out, and when you get where you’re going you can barely remember how you got there? Like you just went on autopilot?”
“Not really,” Doug admitted. “I don’t get my license until next month.”
“Oh. How you getting home?”
“Bike.”
Lights blinked off in the house behind them.
“You want a ride?”
17
HIGH STAKES
“THERE!” Alan Friendly belted. “The San Diego vampires are before us! Present Redeemers!”
Each crew member raised and leveled his stake-firing weapon and squinted down its barrel. Alan stood facing outward for the cameras, his arm extended like the commander of a firing squad. He was the commander of a firing squad, he realized with a confusing sort of delight.
“Send those mothersuckers back to hell, boys! Fire at will!”
The crew let loose a volley of stakes, a few of which hit but most of which sailed past the row of dummies on the other side of the field.
“Cut! All right, that’s good!” said Alan. “Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. You know we weren’t filming the targets anyway. We’ll get them later at close range.”
The targets were dressmaker’s dummies. The art department had scoured flea markets for old ones but eventually just bought a crate full of new models and spent an afternoon staining them with tea and roughing up the edges. Then they sewed a red velvet heart in the center of each. They’d tried paper targets on hay bales but it just looked too much like something you’d seen before.
Alan met his assistant Cheryl by the only dummy that had a stake lodged firmly in its stuffing.
“How was that?” he asked. “Did we get that?”
“It looked hot.”
“I said ‘mothersucker.’ Too much?”
“We’ll have to run it by Standards and Practices.”
“It just popped out.”
They looked in silence at the dummy, and the stake.
“Well, that’s not the heart,” said Alan. “What would that be?”
“The appendix,” Cheryl answered. “I have a scar there. Oh—Mike called from San Diego, wants you to call him back.”
“Ooh!” Alan rushed for the phone. “He has something? Never mind, he’ll tell me.” He dialed and rocked on his heels while the line rang.
“Alan,” Mike answered.
“Mike! Mikey Michael! Michael P. Pfefferneuse! I don’t know your last name, Mike.”
“It’s Storch.”
“Mike Storch! Big Mike Storch! Tell me you have a lead. God, we need a lead.”
In lieu of hiring a private detective agency Alan had left Mike and a few other staffers to keep canvasing San Diego after the hunt lost its momentum. They had a police sketch of the main vampire based on a description the girl Carrie Lawson had given, and at least one intern was wandering the Gaslamp Quarter, showing it around. Another was calling ho
spitals and begging for information about anyone complaining of bite marks. It was vitally important for Alan to show his producers that they could do things on the cheap at the moment, so everyone was doing jobs they hadn’t signed on for.
“I do have something,” said Mike, “a very little something.”
“Tell me. Tell me.”
“All right. I talked to this convention center security guard today who had a run-in with a kid, a teenage kid, who had very severe polymorphous light eruption.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” said Alan. “What?”
“A really bad skin reaction to sunlight. Kid had to hide under a poncho. It was so bad they let him and his friend in early, so he wouldn’t have to wait in line. Which is good for us, because they were the only two to pass under the CCTV cameras in the lobby at that particular time.”
“And you got a look at the security tapes?” Alan was grinning and drumming on the snack table with his free hand.
“I got a look at the security tapes. And I gotta admit, the shorter of the two kids could definitely be our guy from Panda TV.”
“Yes!”
“But here’s the thing: If it is him, then the sketch we have from party girl is bullshit. I think she was very generous with her description. He probably gets better looking every time she tells the story.”
“Bloody hell.”
“I’m having the sketch artist do a new portrait based on the security tapes, and I’ll start sending it around. But, Alan, we’re running out of money here.”
“Wait,” said Alan. “Why don’t we just put the security footage on next week’s show? Or online? But then, of course, someone else would find him before we do…”
“Also? It would be slander. We don’t know for certain the kid on the security tape has done anything wrong—the panda room was too dark for a positive match and the Red Cross people won’t return our calls.”
“Stupid, bloody, pompous Red Cross.”
“But, Alan, did you hear me? We need more money.”
“You’re breaking up, Mike. I’m passing through a tunnel.”