Vampyres of Hollywood (31 page)

Like every cop, I’ve been trained never to give up my weapon, but I handed over the gun without a second thought. “You’ve got four rounds left in this clip, one full clip of seventeen, and a third with six rounds in it.”

“I’ll make every bullet count.” Then he took up a position beside Douglas. “Just like old times,” he said.

“The old times were never like this,” Douglas said with a grin, as he decapitated a beautiful young red-haired woman with the jaws of a shark. Her head, green eyes blinking in surprise, mouth working silently, rolled between his legs. He kicked it back into the fray. “I haven’t had so much fun in years.”

Orson had freed most of the men and women from the wall, and a black-suited man who looked astonishingly like Peter Lorre was working on the few who remained. Ovsanna sat on the ground at the back of the basement, beneath where she had been hung, cradling Maral’s head in her lap, gently stroking her hair. Two women stood behind her and there was something frighteningly familiar about them. I felt I knew them from somewhere: they both looked like daytime soap stars.

I crouched in front of Ovsanna, unable to keep my eyes off the terrible wounds in her flesh. I could see right through the hole in her wrist…and again, there was no blood. I looked around quickly: the walls should have been running red with blood where arms and legs had been nailed. They were dry. And Ovsanna hadn’t bled when the Sheik sliced her.

Ovsanna lifted her head from Maral’s limp body and stared at me and I saw something in her black eyes. “Thank you,” she said simply. “We are in your debt, Peter King,” she said formally, “a debt we will honour and repay a hundredfold.”

Everyone murmured what might have been an “aye.”

She pressed her hand against my cheek. I turned it to look at the wound in her wrist. A flap of skin had appeared over the hole; it was throbbing with veins.

“If I was to ask you what you are, would you tell me?” My mouth was dry; I could barely get the words out.

“If you were to ask,” she said very quietly.

“What are you, Ovsanna? Who are you? Who are these people?”

“I am Ovsanna Hovannes Garabedian, Chatelaine of the Clan Dakhanavar of the First Bloodline, and we…why, we are the Vampyres of Hollywood.”

“I need you to do something for me, Peter.”

He looked at me numbly and nodded. I was surprised he was still functioning. I had a good idea what he might have seen; I had left the living room in a bit of a mess, and Lilith and her followers were never ones to let a meal go uneaten.

Bizarrely, the first thought I’d had, when he stepped into the basement and yelled at Rudy, was that he really knew how to make an entrance. He could be the next Kurt Russell. One moment we’d been hanging on the wall, waiting—though never ready—for death, and then Peter was there and suddenly Ghul the ghoul was so much soup. After countless millennia, shot down by a BHPD cop. And then Rudy. I didn’t even feel him cut me with the sword, but I watched Peter shoot the legs out from under him and then follow my instructions and hit his spine. And Rudy was dead. Just like that.

Everything changed.

As Peter and Douglas fought Lilith’s beasts, Orson freed me and set about releasing the others. I sat on the ground and gathered Maral into my arms, holding her tight, relishing her strong heartbeat and her steady breathing. Brushing the blood off her forehead, I brought my fingers to my lips and sucked, drawing sustenance from the stickiness. Mary and Pola came to stand beside me, old enmities forgotten for the moment.

“What do we do?” Pola asked.

I opened my mouth to respond, but it was Orson who answered for me. “We go to war,” he boomed.

“But the Ancients?” Mary protested.

I raised a hand for silence. “It is Lilith we must concern ourselves with.” I looked into Orson’s bright eyes. “I know what I must do. Ask Peter to join me.”

When Peter came and crouched before me, his eyes locked onto mine, looking for answers to the nightmare he’d landed in.

And when he asked me who we were, I told him.

I watched his eyes widen, saw recognition in them as he looked at the members of my clan. I saw him look at Mary and recognize her; then his head snapped around to look at Douglas, who was laughing delightedly as he slashed with the sword, every inch the hero, Zorro, Robin Hood, and the Black Pirate all over again. Peter suddenly realized who Charlie and Peter were and his mouth opened even wider. I saw questions forming and I pressed my finger to his lips to silence them. “I swear to you I will answer every question you have, but not now. Not now. I need you to do something for me.”

He nodded.

“I need some of your blood.”

I could have taken it by force and he would have been powerless to resist, but after all he had done for us, I couldn’t do that to him. I waited, watching the confusion in his eyes, and then the decision. He pulled up the sleeve of his jacket and presented me with his left wrist. “How much?”

“About a pint.”

“Will it hurt?”

Taking the proffered wrist, I pressed it to my lips. “Not too much,” I promised as my teeth lengthened. “Just a little prick.”

“Not the first time someone has said that to me.” He smiled and I locked on.

His blood was rich and heady. Memories and impressions flooded my system, fragments of the terrible images he had witnessed. I was concentrating hard on preventing the Change from completely altering my features when he turned to Mary and asked, “Why do you do this?”

“The Chatelaine needs to replenish her strength before she fights again. We cannot fight the Ancients without her to lead us.”

“The monsters, the leathery black things: what are they?” Peter asked.

“The Ancients. Very, very old vampyres.”

“And you are all like them?”

“Not at all.” Pola sounded affronted. “There’s no one here over nine hundred years old. The Ancients are a thousand years and more.”

“And the crazy woman in black?”

I raised my bloody face from Peter’s arm and saw him blanch. His blood, hot, sweet and incredibly powerful, surged through me, leaving me gasping. “That is Lilith,” I snarled, this time unable to prevent a Change from warping my features into something saurian. “The mother of us all.” I dipped my head to lick his wrist, my saliva closing and healing the wounds. “Before Eve, there was Lilith, the equal of Man. When she was thrown out of the Garden of Eden, she consorted with another race, an ancient serpent race that pre-dated mankind. In time she gave birth to new hybrid creatures, the vampyre and the were-folk.” Laying Maral gently to one side, covering her in my torn jacket, I rose to my full height, and sought a Change I’d not used in three centuries. With Peter’s blood fueling me, black batlike leathery wings unfurled out of my rear ribs and rose over my shoulders. “Hear me.”

The Vampyres of Hollywood and the sole human, Peter King, looked at me.

“I am your Chatelaine. I could command your obedience if I so wished, but I will not command. Not this night. It is time to choose.” My voice was altering as the Change warped my body. “Tonight, Lilith and Rudy sought to destroy us all. Tonight, we have a choice: we can flee and hide, as we have done for some many centuries, or we can take the fight to Lilith.”

“And what if you slay Lilith?” James asked me. “If she dies, do we not all die with her?”

“James, you fool,” Tod hissed. “You forget we created that myth.”

“Oh! So we did.”

“So choose: flee now and spend the rest of your lives starting at every shadow, or stand and fight with me.” The Change was nearly complete, rendering my voice almost unintelligible.

Surprisingly, it was Charlie Chaplin who stepped forward first. “I helped make this town,” he said simply, “I’ll not let Lilith destroy it.” Hollywood had treated him abominably, and yet here he was volunteering to defend the town that had once abandoned him. And one by one the others stepped forward, except Douglas and Orson, who were still defending the stairs. I knew what their response was.

I crouched awkwardly before Peter. I was as much a monster now as the creatures outside, but I saw no fear, no loathing in his eyes. “When we leave here, take Maral and flee. And whatever you do, don’t return until there are no more sounds.”

“There are police on the way. SWAT, too.”

“It would be better if you kept them away.”

“I was thinking, it might be better if this place burned to the ground,” he suggested. “Fewer questions that way. With answers I couldn’t even begin to give.”

I think I fell in love with him then.

I turned and walked away, striding past my army. The Vampyres of Hollywood had
Changed,
taking on the shapes that had inspired mankind’s darkest myths. Theda’s kohl-rimmed eyes turned blood-red as she morphed into a sleek black jaguar, twice its natural size. Olive’s curly hair filled with snakes writhing out of the skinless bones of her skull, her body nude and full breasted, with the haunches of a goat. Orson, my beloved Orson, grew even more bloated, hair covering his giant girth, a were-bull with huge, curling horns. One by one, Mary and Charles, Peter and Pola, and Tod and James and Charlie transformed into werewolves and gargoyles, grotesqueries with falcons’ wings and bat faces, scales and snakes’ skins. Only Douglas chose to remain in his human form, though it was subtly altered to make him taller, broader, more heroic.

I paused at the door and turned to look back at Peter King. He was standing at the back wall looking at me, and for a moment I saw myself through his eyes. I had allowed my body to adopt the ancient and original form of the Clan Dakhanavar: that of the dragul, the dragon. Peter raised his hand in farewell. The claw I raised was tipped with six-inch-long nails.

PALM SPRINGS
6:30
P.M.

After everything else I’d witnessed this evening, discovering that Hollywood’s classic actors were still alive didn’t faze me. As I put names to faces, the one thought uppermost in my mind was that I had to get some autographs for my mother. I guess I was in shock. Probably the same shock that allowed me to watch Ovsanna drink my blood and then begin to change into a dragon. Not some cuddly Disney creation, either. She wasn’t Barney. She was something that looked like it belonged on the side of a Gothic cathedral, complete with claws, teeth, tail, wings, and crocodile skin. Only her eyes remained unchanged. I’d almost said “human,” but I knew then that Ovsanna and the rest of the people in the basement—indeed the whole house—were not humans. A massive bull-headed man, looking like something off a Greek urn, handed me back my gun. I think he said, “You’ve six rounds left” then he turned and stamped down the room on proper cloven hooves.

And suddenly they were gone and the basement was empty.

I found myself completely disorientated and the room suddenly shifted and spun around me. Had I just imagined everything? For just a moment I wondered if I were tripping; had the cactus outside been smeared with acid or something, some toxic hallucinogen that poisoned me through my cut skin? But there was a bruised bite mark on my wrist and the black, sticky shape on the floor that had just been the tuxedoed albino. And Rudolph Valentino’s Jell-Oed remains were bubbling in the dirt. That hadn’t been a look-alike and this wasn’t an hallucination. Shit. I’d just shot the real Rudolph Valentino.

I was gathering Maral into my arms when she opened her gray eyes, then her mouth. I pressed my hand over it. “It’s Peter,” I said urgently. “Police.” Her eyes focused, then narrowed as she recognized me. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Talking to you on the phone…and then there was someone at the window…and then…” She trailed away and shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe the dreams I’ve had.”

“Nightmares?”

She nodded.

“I’ve seen them,” I said grimly. “Can you stand?”

Maral McKenzie came shakily to her feet. “Ovsanna…?”

“Is fine. She told me to get you out of here.”

“Where is she?”

“Upstairs.”

“Doing what?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” I checked the clip on the Glock, then pulled my backup piece, a .32 S&W, from my belt. “Can you shoot?”

“I’m from Louisiana,” she said, her accent suddenly pronounced. She slipped off the safety, flipped open the cylinder, checked the loads, and snapped it closed, all in one smooth movement. “Is there anything you want to tell me?” she asked.

“Like what?”

She lifted a booted foot. “Like what the fuck I just stepped in?”

“Believe me,” I said sincerely, “you really don’t want to know.”

The stairs were awash with blood and body parts. Ovsanna’s Vampyres had cleared the bodies from the stairwell as they’d fought their way upstairs. I stepped onto what might have been a brain and promised myself, when this was over, that I was going to burn every stitch of clothing I was wearing. Maral, to her credit, kept her mouth shut and her eyes fixed firmly ahead. Looking down at the floor was definitely not a good idea.

The house was eerily quiet.

I had expected screams and shouts, but there was nothing. When we reached the kitchen windows, I realized why. They were all outside: the Vampyres of Hollywood, the monstrous Ancients, and Lilith’s “people,” whatever they were. They were standing in a circle on the mountain side of the house and they were completely silent. In the center of the circle stood Lilith and the dragon Ovsanna. Lilith didn’t look like Baby Jane anymore; she was slowly changing, elongating, transforming into a huge yellow snake.

Maral stopped, widemouthed at the bestiary, and I caught her arm and dragged her away. She put her mouth close to my ear and pointed with her chin at the dragon. “Ovsanna?”

I nodded.

“Impressive. I didn’t know she could do that,” she muttered.

“You knew she was a vampyre!”

“Yes. Of course.”

“We’ll talk about that later,” I promised. “Let’s go.”

With everyone gathered on the mountain, we made our way through the house. I’m sure that it had once been beautiful, but it was never going to make the pages of
Palm Springs Life
again. There were bodies everywhere, stacked like cordwood in the corners, propped up against the walls, shoved into side rooms, hanging from above over the exposed beams. All of the bodies were pale and bloodless, and most had parts missing.

“They’re so young,” Maral whispered.

I nodded; I’d already noticed that. “Runaways,” I said softly. “Some of the thousands who come to Hollywood looking to be famous.”

“It could have been me,” Maral muttered.

We stopped outside the door to the dining room. Neither of us wanted to step inside. What remained scattered across the floor was indescribable. “I want to burn this place to the ground.”

“Amen to that,” Maral said sincerely. “I have an idea,” she added, turning and darting back through the house. “Help me find the garage.”

The triple-door garage was at the far end of the house. I hadn’t followed the stone wall that far in the dark or I would have come to it. Probably could have saved myself the swim in the moat if I had. We got to it through another flight of stairs from the kitchen. It was huge, but I guess it had to be—everything from the empty rooms upstairs had been dumped into it. Antique chairs stacked on top of cut velvet sofas, all of them shredded and broken. A long, ornate cherrywood dining table was scratched by the computers, VCRs, TVs, clock radios, and a microwave piled on top of it. Broken beds in a corner, covered with torn blankets and stained pillows. Lilith should fire her decorator.

There were three cars in the garage, a classic 1940 Studebaker Champion, a modern BMW 7 series, and an enormous black Hummer.

“Check the tanks,” Maral snapped.

“They’ll be full,” I promised, and they were, ready for a quick getaway, no doubt. The doors were unlocked, keys in the ignition. I tried the three buttons on the Hummer’s dash; the middle one worked the garage door. I climbed out of the car to find Maral stuffing the fuel tanks with lengths of cloth torn from a blanket. I could smell the gas.

“My granddad taught me this trick,” she explained.

There was a storage cupboard at the back of the garage, filled with an assortment of cleaning supplies that had obviously never been used. Most of them bore the legend “Inflammable.” Carrying out a handful, I emptied them over the blankets and pillows, dumped more onto the velvet sofa and a stack of books lying on the floor. I returned to the cupboard and filled my arms.

And when I turned around, a red-haired, fang-toothed woman was looking at me. My gun was on the shelf behind me and I knew, even as her fingers sprouted daggerlike claws and lunged at me, that I was not going to make it.

The axe caught her in the side of the head and slammed her into the wall. She stood looking at me, blinking slowly until both eyes popped out of their sockets and she slid wetly to the floor, leaving a sluglike trail on the wall.

“Your granddad teach you that, too?” I asked Maral, shakily.

“Sure did.”

I emptied the remainder of the cleaning supplies around the rest of the room and turned around to find Maral pulling the microwave off the table. She heaved it up onto a workbench and plugged it in. The clock started blinking on and off. “Are we cooking?”

“You feel like eating after all we’ve seen?” she demanded, lifting the microwave off the bench and putting it on the floor beside the rag hanging from the Hummer’s tank.

I shook my head. I didn’t think I’d ever eat again. I wondered if Mom would buy my explanation.

Maral popped a jar of varnish and a pot of paint into the microwave, spun the dial to full, and set the clock for three minutes. She pressed the start button and the plate started to turn. “We should go,” she said.

I looked at her stupidly.

“There are certain things you don’t put in a microwave unless you want a big fiery explosion.” She grinned, catching my hand and dragging from me from the room.

“Learned that from Granddad, too?”

“Nope, I worked that one out for myself.”