Vampyres of Hollywood (17 page)

I hadn’t been able to settle down after Peter left. There was something about him. He interested me. He intrigued me. And yes, I’ll admit it: he excited me.

It’s a pattern of mine. It took me a century or two to recognize it, and I’ve a feeling I might have mentioned it to Sigmund in Vienna. No doubt he wrote a paper about it. Years can go by without my finding anyone attractive and then someone crosses my path with a certain look about them—man or woman—and I respond. If there is a response in return, a message in the eyes, an acknowledgment of mutual interest, then a connection is made and a subtle current of constant 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 it takes a very real act of concentration not to Change. The Thirst comes on me more often and with more insistence. I turn to Maral to slake it.

Blood and sex. The absolute truths.

Maral doesn’t mind these…well, I can’t call them romances…liaisons, maybe. Couplings. Passions. If she does, she’s never let on. She has her own
affaires du coeur
and she knows what we share is something different. A symbiosis based on mutual need and respect and comfort. Do I love her? Yes. Is she the great love of my life? No. Once, I thought it might be Rudy. Well, we all make mistakes.

I could feel the energy burning through my body and I needed to get out of the house. I didn’t want to face the papparazzi in Beverly Hills or Hollywood, so we drove downtown to Club 740 instead. I like the Beaux Arts architecture. It doesn’t hurt that the fog machine on the dance floor helps maintain anonymity and the music—primal and pulsing, like a heartbeat—always distracts me. Is it any wonder that many of my kind were drawn to music, that we became composers or musicians? Every vampyre is driven by the beat of blood, by the rhythmic pulse. When Bela talked about the children of the night and the music they made, I’ve no doubts that every vampyre in the audience nodded in recognition. I think I’m most proud of that line.

I watched Maral dance and felt lust slowly spreading through my body. And Thirst. We didn’t stay long.

At midnight, we were in my bedroom.

Maral knows when I need her. And how I need her. This wasn’t one of those times when her wrist would suffice. She stood still in the middle of the room with her back to me and undid the button at the back of her skirt. I unzipped the zipper and slid the skirt down over her black lace boyshorts. She had on black thigh-high hose. The bare, vanilla-colored skin between them and her briefs was so smooth and soft, I never got as far as removing her jacket. I turned her around and knelt down to pierce her upper thigh with my teeth, finding the rich femoral artery. She stayed bent over my shoulder, her tongue licking the skin on my back, while I drank my fill.

The taste was warm and salty on my lips, and the room came to brilliant—almost painful—light. Every sensation was intensified and I was acutely aware of my surroundings: the softness of Maral’s flesh, the scent of her arousal, the thickness of the liquid in my mouth. But when I raised my face from Maral’s bloody flesh and looked up, it was Peter King’s hazel eyes that floated before my face.

I wonder what Sigmund would have made of that?

Afterwards, I slept.

Alone. Like the rest of my kind.

Perhaps that is the true curse of the vampyre: to sleep forever alone.

Maral knows it’s dangerous to stay by my side while I’m sleeping. I’ve awakened too many times to find myself in the middle of the Change; I have no control over the transformation and there are moments when the beast is truly in control. Too many of my kin have awakened and found they have destroyed their lovers in their sleep. I sleep at night, just like everyone else. Just not
with
anyone else. And not as long, of course.

I collect vampyre lore. I particularly love the folklore that my kind cannot walk during the day, that we are creatures of the night. The Irishman Stoker had a lot to do with our mythology, though he wasn’t the first. Dr. Polidori started it; his Lord Ruthven character in
The Vampyre
preceded Bram. Poor Polidori—
New Monthly Magazine
mistakenly credited his patient and friend, Lord Byron, with authorship. Polidori was furious, and Byron was none too pleased, either. I knew them both; I had a liaison with Byron briefly while he stayed in the Villa Diodati in Switzerland. Le Fanu had published his vampyre novella
Carmilla
years before Stoker came to work for him as a theatre reviewer. Before that, Rhymer’s Varney had been around in the Penny Dreadfuls for years. But Stoker was responsible for making it work, for taking all the mismatched myths and knotting them together—even when they made no sense. He rescued poor Vlad III from obscurity and turned him into a monster, a genuine horror franchise. Then later, when Tod Browning and I were deliberately adding to the confusion, we took everything Stoker had written, added in all the Penny Dreadful material, lumped together the conflicting vampyre and werewolf stories, borrowed from Murnau’s masterpiece
Nosferatu,
and created our own mythology with his film
Dracula
. Thus, in the Age of the Cinema, the cult of the vampyre was created. Some of the classic vampyre myths—like not casting a reflection—we threw in simply because we had just worked out how to do that particular special effect on camera.

I never dream when I sleep. Or if I do, I don’t remember. Maybe my subconscious has nothing to work out. Or maybe it’s a protective mechanism, designed to keep my race from going mad. Too many years…far too many memories.

An intermittent buzzing sound pulled me out of the depths of my blood-sated sleep. It took me a moment to identify it as the buzzer on the main gate, sounding in the kitchen intercom downstairs. A normal human would never have heard it…but I’ve never been a normal human. Whatever that is. I was not made a vampyre; I was born one, the only child of a Dakhanavar Clan father and a
strega
mother. I’ve never known what it’s like to be human, to be frail, to feel the touch of age with every passing day, to sniffle and cough and ache. It’s not something I miss.

Throwing back the single cover, I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and glanced at the digital clock—7:20
A.M.
Who the hell was calling at this hour? And where was Maral? Why hadn’t she answered the door?

My bedroom connects to a second, even larger room that I use as an office and study. I keep the overflow from my library there, my research books and those not for public viewing—the lurid romance novels and Japanese erotica. Framed one-sheets from all my movies take up two walls, along with posters of my
mother’s
and
grandmother’s
movies, all signed by the actors and directors “we’d” worked with: a who’s who of the Golden Age of Hollywood. They’re probably worth as much as the house itself. My computer sits on a huge amber-inlaid desk that I smuggled out of the Russian court in the weeks following the October Revolution. Poor Nicholas, I begged him to allow me to take the children with me, but he refused, confident that the people still loved him and that the family would come to no harm. He discovered how wrong he was in that cellar in Yekaterinburg in July 1918.

Padding naked into the study, I tapped the space bar on the Mac keyboard and brought the enormous widescreen to life. The house’s security system’s high-resolution cameras have a direct feed to a terabyte server in the basement, which stores both stills and video from every camera in the house and throughout the grounds. I accessed the drive and brought up the live images from the camera on the gate.

Detective Peter King.

And not with good news.

He was wearing almost the same clothes he’d been wearing last night—the T-shirt was a darker black—but his face had changed. Deep, bruiselike shadows under his eyes stood out against pale skin and his lips were drawn so tight I could barely see them through the high-res image. I watched him lean on the buzzer again and once again heard the insistent buzzing in the kitchen.

Where was Maral?

A sudden thought struck me and I darted away from the computer and out into the hallway. Maral. Where was Maral? Usually she was up before me. I ran down the hallway toward her room. There was no reason for King to be here at this hour unless…

Unless there had been another killing.

And why was he calling on me…unless it had something to do with…unless something had happened to…

I stopped outside her door, my fingers resting on the smoothly polished wood.

Maral
.

If anything had happened to her I would…I would what? I would rage and I would grieve and I would mourn…and then I would get over it. And I would do as I have always done—swear never to get involved with a human being again. I would live a solitary and celibate life for a number of years, and then I would get lonely again.

That is the great curse of the vampyre: loneliness. I believe that’s what kills us all eventually. When I was still young, I encountered a vampyre in North Africa who claimed he had been a Centurion at the time of Caesar Augustus. I wanted to ask him about the things he’d seen; he only wanted to talk about the loves he’d lost.

Maral was eighteen when I first met her. There was a manslaughter charge hanging over her head for the killing in the house on Mulholland and the cops weren’t completely buying her story. They fully accepted that a guy had broken into the house and had intended to rape her. He’d done it before. And she might have been able to claim justifiable homicide when she stabbed him in the gut, but as far as the cops were concerned she’d crossed over the line when she nearly cut off his head. They were trying to hang a murder charge on her.

Maral needed a lawyer, a good lawyer, and she didn’t have the money to pay for one. She had a job offer, though. A porn producer, with enough wit to call his company Chicken Sheet Productions but not enough talent to make a living at anything but exploitation films, wanted to capitalize on her moment of fame and use her to star in a straight-to-video “mockumentary” about the killing.
The Real Killer Commits the Real Kill!!
It probably wouldn’t have helped her case much, but Maral wasn’t thinking that far ahead. She needed money to hire a lawyer. Mr. Chicken Sheet promised said money and failed to explain the net profit element of the contract. Maral showed up for work.

I got there just before she did.

Chicken Sheet Productions had just finished filming a knockoff porno version of my movie
I Scream
. Without my permission, of course. They’d titled it
I Scream with Pleasure
and the “star” was a pneumatic young actress whose screen name was Oval More and whose face, in the few seconds the camera was on it instead of the rest of her—
all
the rest of her—bore a slight resemblance to mine.

Needless to say, I wasn’t happy. I didn’t think Mr. Chicken Sheet would respond to lawyers and lawsuits, so I showed up in Van Nuys at the two-bedroom fixer-upper he used for a studio and proceeded to convince him to shelve the project by kicking his ass across the set.

Maral arrived just as her new boss was cowering under his desk, scrabbling in a top drawer for a piece-of-shit Saturday night special. He tried aiming it at me from his crouching vantage point, but his hand was trembling so hard he couldn’t hold it straight. I wasn’t worried about the gun; it was a tiny .22 that might smart a bit if he actually hit me but it wasn’t going to kill me. Especially not with the safety on. But Maral didn’t know that. She saw a weasel-faced little runt holding his rug on his head and a gun on a woman and so she blasted him with the fire extinguisher. I started laughing and couldn’t stop.

We walked out of Chicken Sheet Productions together. I bought her breakfast, listened to her story, hired her on the spot, and had Solgar represent her. There was something about her willingness to do whatever she had to that reminded me of myself. We’ve been inseparable ever since.

So if anything had happened to her…yes, I would rage and I would grieve. And then I would tear this town apart.

The door jerked open and Maral appeared, tousle haired and sleepy eyed. “There’s someone at the gate,” she mumbled as she shuffled past, a striped WCW referee’s shirt hanging down to her knees. She paused at the top of the stairs and looked back at me, frowning as she realized that I was naked and standing outside her door. “Were you looking for something?”

“You,” I said truthfully. A flush of pleasure touched her neck and chin and she smiled lazily. I watched her pupils dilate. “But not right now. Detective King is at the gate.”

Maral’s smile faded. “Trouble?”

“At this hour, it seems likely. I’m sure he’s not here to chat. Let him in, give him coffee, and keep him in the library. I’ll get dressed and be right down.”

Maral made Hawaiian Kona. Even through the rich aroma of the freshly ground beans I could smell the blood on him as soon as I stepped into the library.

There were traces of it under his fingernails, a splash on the edge of his shoes, more ingrained in the leather of the soles. I felt my nostrils flare and I ran my tongue across my teeth, ensuring they were flat. What I wanted to do was walk over and kiss him, not a good idea under the circumstances. I didn’t smell cordite so I didn’t think he’d come from a gunfight, and I didn’t smell antiseptic so that ruled out a hospital visit. Just blood. Lots of it. It permeated his hair and his skin and his clothes. Detective King had been to a murder scene…or a slaughterhouse.

King had taken up the same seat he’d occupied the night before. He came to his feet as I walked into the room.

“You look tired,” I said, by way of greeting.

“I got an early call.”