Chapter 1
I am not a movie star so I don’t live behind high fences and locked gates. I’m an agent and a most of the time I don’t even bother to close the gates on my property. There are, however, certain things could make me rethink this, such as being dragged out of bed at six in the morning by a vampire. Believe me it’s not an experience that everyone should have. For me, at that ungodly hour, it was definitely something I could have lived my entire life without experiencing and never once felt I might have been missing something.
Try telling that to Ellis Kovacs, the vampire who happened to be doing the dragging and to whom the concept of ‘no’ or even a decent time of day, was utterly foreign. Don’t get me wrong, waking up to Ellis is not an entirely unpleasant thing, she is rather attractive after all, for the Undead, I mean. The thing just is I’m not a morning person and having anyone, even the gorgeous Ellis, drag me out of my bed at six, was annoying. To say the least.
There was a reason for this disruption of my ( believe me, much needed ) beauty sleep. The reason was Voshki Kevorkian. Voshki being the vampire community’s leader, or queen, or whatever you want to call her. High Priestess of Annoyance was about top of my list right now. Voshki wanted a meeting with me.
“ At six am?” I asked incredulously.
Ellis just shrugged. “ It’s important,” she added.
I bloody well hoped so. Standing there at my door in front of two vampires, attired in boxer shorts and a scruffy NYU t-shirt that some ex or other had left in my closet maybe a million years ago, my hair going every which way to Sunday, trying to claw the sleep and the remnants of a truly marvelous dream from my brain enough to make sense, and what wisdom does Ellis impart to me?
That my t-shirt has seen better days.
Well, shit, hold the front page. I shook my head at her, wandered off toward the bathroom. Over my shoulder I yelled, “ I’m taking a shower! I don’t care if Vosh has to wait an extra fucking five minutes! Am I making myself clear?”
“ Crystal,” Ellis replied dryly.
I stood under the hot jets of the shower, letting them massage my body and brain gently into wakefulness, my forehead rested against the cool wall tiles, ignoring the fact there were two vampires making themselves at home in my house. Slowly I felt myself come to resemble something that actually belonged to the human race. Eventually I turned the water cold and let that shock the last dregs of nighttime from my system. A cup of extremely strong black coffee and I’d be good to go.
Stepping out of the shower, eyes closed because my hair was running rivulets of water down my face, I put out my hand automatically to grab my towel only to have it thrust at me. My eyes flew open. Water blurred my vision. I swiped the towel across my face, then remembered I was naked. I wrapped it around me, fumbling because suddenly I seemed to have bananas where I ought to have had fingers.
“ For Chrissakes, haven’t you guys heard of knocking?” I demanded.
Ellis gave me a devastatingly sexy smile that also somehow contrived to be perfectly innocent. It made me want to run away and throw myself at her feet both at the same time. I hate vampires.
“ Sorry,” she said sounding like she really wasn’t. She jerked her chin toward the open bathroom door. I realized I could hear someone humming in the kitchen and the sound of my juicer whirring away in there too. “ Samson is making up some juice for you. And there’s a pot of coffee on.”
I raised an eyebrow. “ No bagels?”
“ Get dressed, Dante. We don’t want to keep Vosh waiting that long.”
No. That would never do.
I should explain. First of all, yes, vampires do exist. Secondly, no I don’t know whether this means other supernatural creatures also exist. I certainly have never met anything remotely resembling a werewolf or a fairy or a troll, although it has to be said, how would I know, right? If the vampires know about any supernatural cousins, they are keeping it under their collective hats. And thirdly, I don’t really care if the world is also teeming with werewolves, fairies, and trolls, I had a hard enough time just wrapping my head around the fact that vampires being real, and occasionally I still do have some trouble with it.
Those parameters established, let me tell you that vampires are very little like they are portrayed to be in books and movies and on TV. Most of that stuff - not being able to go out in sunlight, allergic to garlic and crosses and running water, being able to turn into bats - it’s all moonshine. Most of it perpetrated by the vampires themselves. The reason that vampires have been able to exist unnoticed alongside humans for thousands of years has been a fortuitous mix of their own ability to adapt and to blend in, and the limitless capacity of we humans to be deluded. Of course, there have always been some humans know about their existence, the vampires do need us for some things beyond the obvious feeding requirements. A vampire’s genetic makeup is somewhat different to that of a human - shocker, huh? - and so they need people in strategic places to keep things like this from coming to light.
As for feeding, they can and do drink a synthetic blood product but they also drink human blood from willing human donors. Not victims, donors. Anyway, they are choosy about who they let in on the secret of their existence, so I guess I’m honored in that respect. Though I have got to say that a great deal of the time it does not feel like an honor. As I have already indicated, most of the time they just annoy me.
Vampires also can and do go out in daylight just fine. They would hardly have lasted for long as a race if they could not go out in the daylight, would they? Once you really start to think about most of these ‘vampire legends’, you also start to realize that, like most legends, they really don’t stand up to close scrutiny. So yes, vampires can move around in the day-time, just so long as they take certain precautions if they are going to be in direct sunlight. They need a very strong sun block, like Factor 99 or something, and they have to wear sunglasses. Otherwise they will suffer what would be the equivalent, I suppose, of a very bad sunburn, and their eyes will hurt. Think of when the optometrist puts those drops in your eyes make the pupils dilate and stay dilated, how much the light hurts for a few hours afterward. That’s what happens to vampires who forget their Ray-Bans. They also can eat human food. They don’t need to eat it to survive, and some of them, the older ones especially, have lost the taste for it. But they can, and do, eat human food. They love coffee. Drinking coffee acts as a stimulant to vampires. They rarely drink alcohol. It does not make them drunk, so they see no real reason to drink it, except to be sociable in the company of humans.
Vampires are very old. Some of them were walking the earth before Jesus. I once met one vampire who had been at the court of the Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten. You know, the weird-looking guy with the elongated limbs and head and the little pot belly? Apparently he was quite the joker in person, and very intelligent. He even invented an early form of light bulb that you can see drawn in some of the old tomb paintings, although all the archaeologists and Egyptologists tend to think it is some kind of representation of a god or something. Like I said, humans can be very stupid and painfully eager to be deluded.
Anyway, vampires are old, and not a lot of humans know about them. I know about them because my family have a history with them. I belong to a family made up predominantly of lawyers, cops, and general miscreants who were brought into the vampire loop around the time other humans were burning old, deranged women as witches in Salem. I’m not a lawyer or a cop though. Nor a miscreant. I’m an agent. An entertainment agent. I reside in LA, in Hollywood. I’m moderately successful …
… okay, that’s a lie. I’m very successful. I can get my A-list clients an audience with Stephen Spielberg just by lifting the telephone. My father was a criminal lawyer who switched to entertainment law, and I’ll leave it to your imagination the ways in which he would often find himself mixing those two disciplines on behalf of his Hollywood clients, many of whom were vampires. And still are. My mother has always been less involved with the vampires. She was a movie producer. I say ‘was’ because she retired from producing, or doing much of anything, some years ago, not because she’s dead or anything … well, on some days that may be debatable. My mother’s heyday was during the nineteen seventies and eighties. Throughout those two decades, trying to avoid drugs in Hollywood was a bit like trying not to get sunstroke walking naked across the Sahara. My mother was spectacularly unsuccessful at avoiding anything she could swallow, inhale, or smoke. This twenty-some years worth of drug abuse, all of it lubricated by copious amounts of alcohol, had the inevitable result of frying her brain. Before that, however, she was a personal friend of Spielberg. Which is how I can get a personal audience with him so easily. He is not going to refuse the daughter of Julia Sonnier an audience.
My name is Dante Sonnier, by the way. Pardon my lack of manners. Sonnier is a Cajun name, so I’m told. My father claims Cajun blood and has a habit of calling people ‘cher’, and repeating words at the end of his sentences. It’s a Cajun thing, he says. It’s an annoying thing, I think.
So that’s how I got involved with the vampires. Call it a Sonnier family tradition. Or you could call it having no fucking choice, which is what it often feels like. My brother, Milton, is married to a vampire woman. Yes, I did say married. There are vampire-human marriages although how legal those unions will remain should the vampire population ever choose to, or be forced to, come out, well, that’ll keep a legion of lawyers very busy and very rich, I expect.
Whilst it is not a common occurrence, as I said, for me to be dragged from bed at ungodly hours by Ellis, it is not either as uncommon as I would like. Vampires do not keep normal human hours, as you might imagine, requiring a great deal less sleep than we do. I have known vampires to go for days without sleep. If life for them in the military was not so understandably difficult, they would make excellent soldiers. Perhaps that is why they keep their existence a secret. Someone in government would be bound to jump to that same conclusion. On this particular morning, after I had drank my juice and my coffee, and scarfed down a schizoid breakfast of All-Bran and Cheerios, I was herded outside and into the car Ellis had waiting to take me to visit with Voshki Kevorkian. Not just any car either. A 1950’s Cadillac stretch limousine, all black gleaming metallic paintwork and oceans of chrome so bright it made your eyes hurt, with smoked-out windows, and a hood ornament big enough to impale a small buffalo. Voshki Kevorkian collects cars the way normal people might collect baseball cards. She favors classic cars, muscle cars, and the kind of high-performance cars with price tickets make them prohibitive to all but a handful of oil billionaires and crown princes. I happen to know that Voshki owns one of the few remaining roadworthy Lamborghini Countache’s still in existence. In our vehemently eco-aware world, just owning a car like that could get you arrested by the Fun Police, which I think, is part of the attraction.
The Caddy had a fully-stocked bar and mini TV in back amidst acres of leather upholstery and mahogany wood fittings. Tempted as I was, I declined use of the bar. I like to be sensible about my drinking habits. I don’t really want to test the theory of inherited addiction. The Caddy also had a superlative sound system, which could have tested my lack of desire to test the addiction theory if anything could have. Vampires love music. The louder the better. I sat in back with Ellis, trying not to worry about my eardrums as Aerosmith pounded out of the sound system, and Samson drove with only cursory regard for the rules of the road. Samson is a sort of vampire multi-functionary. Please don’t ask me what all his functions are, I prefer not to think about that.
“ So what the blue fuck is so urgent Vosh has to send you to get me out of bed in the middle of the damn night?” I groused in the car.
Ellis gave me a bland look. “ She didn’t share that with me.”
Great. More secrets. I blew air, leaned my head back against the velvety leather of the upholstery and thoughts nasty thoughts about Voshki Kevorkian. Which would have been a seriously dumb thing to do if the vampires could read my mind the way they can most human minds. But the thing is, they can’t read me. I can block them out. It’s a skill all we Sonnier’s possess. None of us know why. There are other humans can do it, though I’m told not many, and I have certainly not met any others. The vampires don’t like being unable to read a human. Of course the vampires that I and my family deal with are aware of our unusual ability. I don’t know why they are willing to tolerate the ability in we Sonnier’s but I’m pretty sure it’s not because they love us so much.
“ She’s been very agitated for days now,” Ellis said suddenly and I realized belatedly that she was referring to Voshki. I cracked an eye open, rolled a look at her. “ I think she got bad news of some kind. She’s been making a lot of telephone calls to various high muck-a-mucks within our community. Yesterday she sent Armin down to New Orleans right after she got a call from her representatives down there.”
Armin Bedrosian is Voshki’s right-hand man, or lieutenant, or whatever. Je is also very, very scary. Armin is one vampire I dislike being in the same room with. Hell, I would prefer not to be in the same county as him.
Voshki upset enough to send Armin away from her side was not a good thing. It meant that whatever was going on … whatever the vampires needed my help with … it was going to be nasty and messy, and probably would end up with someone or two getting dead. My breakfast started to churn through my guts.
“ Fantastic,” I muttered.
Chapter 2
Voshki Kevorkian has the appearance of a twenty-something drop-dead gorgeous movie starlet. She has a body to die for and if Ellis has a smile that can make your knees turn to water, Voshki’s can have your brain running out of your ears. She is also eight hundred and forty-six years old. Which is young by vampire standards, but Voshki is also a vampire blue-blood. Her ancestry goes all the way back to the very first vampire leaders. Whoever they were. I have never felt any overwhelming inclination to inquire.
Voshki is also quite capable of killing you without even batting a beautiful black eyelash. Indeed afterwards she would probably step casually over your body and head off to Neiman Marcus to shop for some new boots. That said, she is also very, very charming when she wishes to be.
Needless perhaps to say I am suitably afraid of her because I’m a fairly sensible, sane person who wishes to remain amongst the breathing, thank you. Yet there is a part of me which would find Voshki quite irresistible. No prizes for guessing which part either. Voshki knows this too and is always to be looking for a way to seduce me, making it clear to me that she wants me to be her human. So far she has not succeeded. There are issues involved in being a vampire’s pet human, issues that I don’t feel like dealing with.
Voshki’s office is a thousand square feet of look-at-how-rich-I-am and is part of her gazillion-acre estate in the Hollywood Hills. The estate she bought from an aging movie producer, then she had everything on it razed to the ground, and completely rebuilt. Now it’s all turrets and towers and red-tile roofs and a courtyard would not look out of place on an English country house at the top of a driveway that snakes through her own imported mini-Black Forest. This schizophrenic architecture continues on the inside too. The whole thing is testament to the fact that vampires, just like humans, can be very, very rich and yet be unable to buy even the smallest amount of good taste. I entered her office in the company of Ellis, Samson having taken the car to wax or whatever. I had fixed my game-face in place and got my thoughts tamped down, a must with Voshki, whose reading skills were so much greater than those of most vampires.
“ Dante. How nice to see you, as always. You look … edible.”
The great vampire leader was sprawled in a leather swivel chair behind a walnut desk only slightly larger than a football field. Clad in black leather from neck to toe, all of it clinging to her like a lover, chestnut hair falling to her shoulders, nails perfectly manicured, teeth gleaming white and even, she really was a vision. I could have got her any part in any movie. Of course she is a horrible actress. I know this because I once talked her into taking a private screen test. I was curious. Fortunately she knew she sucked, sparing me the obvious terror of having to tell her, but I still reckon I could get her any part, based on her looks and my influence. Hollywood is nothing if it is not a shallow, seedy place motivated solely by the twin gods of profit and sex.
There are some vampire actors around at the moment. I’m not at liberty to say who, although I can tell you that Bela Lugosi is a real vampire and is still going strong, running a bar in Detroit these days, and he’s very happy doing so. Much happier than hew as an actor getting typecast as a vampire. And not all of those sightings of The King are down to the wishful thinking of obsessed fans either. I have a few vampire clients myself, at least one of whom is an A-list actor, but don’t even imagine I’m going to tell you who it is. And no, it’s not Robert Pattinson. On the whole though, vampires tend to prefer being behind the scenes. There is only so much you can use “ I have a very good plastic surgeon” to explain away, even in LA.
I made a slight, mocking bow. “ Vosh. As ungodly early as it is, I am delighted as always to be summoned to your presence.”
If she caught my sarcasm she was ignoring it. Sitting sideways in the chair, one leg draped casually over the arm, she let her leather-booted foot bob up and down slowly, and smiled a lazy, cat-like, utterly sexy smile at me. I felt an idiot’s grin spread across my flaming cheeks. I felt other things too, a little further south, but I won’t get into that. I cleared my throat.
“ So, uh, what can I do for you this early morn?” I inquired since we did not appear to be doing the can-I-get-you-anything? routine. Vampires do not always bother to observe the politely pointless social rituals of humans.
Ellis had moved to one side of the room where she took a seat in silence. I darted a glance at her but her face was a mask. Voshki regarded me from her own relaxed position for a moment before telling me to come sit. I went and I sat. I was close enough now to her to see the amber flecks deep in her dark brown eyes. Ellis has dark eyes too, only hers are dark enough to seem like they might actually be black. Voshki has that amber fleck to lighten hers. I could drown happily in the eyes of either of them. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to have both of them at once make love to me and feed from me. Vampires inevitably bite when they have sex. The feeding is supposed to be almost as orgasmic an experience as the sex.
Whoops. I was letting my thoughts stray. Voshki has almost read me once or twice throughout our acquaintance, the only vampire who has even come close to being able to. I fought now to re-erect the mental barriers I usually can put without effort to keep them out of my head. The idiotic grin was still stretching my facial muscles. It would probably be there in a lesser form for most of the rest of the day.
“ I need your assistance with something,” Voshki announced then.
Okay, so this was going to be the day for the vampires to state the completely fucking obvious. I nodded, waited to be enlightened. Voshki frowned. Even that was sexy. I suspect it might have been scary if she had been displeased at me. I never, never want Voshki to be displeased at me.
“ My sister is working on a TV show shooting upstate,” she told me. Voshki’s sister, Amelia, also a vampire, is older than Voshki in human years but younger than her in vampire years which, I could only suppose, is a bit of a weird set-up to deal with. Amelia is a makeup artist. She has worked on a clutch of movies, including a few of the better teen slasher flicks, and she has had a few longer-running gigs on TV shows. Voshki peered at me with a raised eyebrow. “ The Right Guy. Have you heard of it?”
Of course I had. I would have had to be living on the Moon for the past year and a half not to have heard of it. It was only TV’s currently most successful weekly cop show. Plus, one of my clients had landed a supporting role, something of which I was sure Voshki was aware. I also know the lead actress. Once I knew her very personally. I didn’t burden Voshki with any of these details, however, just nodded to her to go on.
“ Well, Amelia tells me that there has been some tension on the set. It’s apparently being caused by the presence of a peeper. And the suicide of a crew member.”
I blinked, frowned. This I had not heard. “ Say again?” I begged.
Voshki actually smiled. “ There has been someone going around peeping at the actresses, and some of the female crew have been bothered also. Then a wardrobe assistant committed suicide three days ago,” she explained. She flicked her long, slim fingers at the air a couple times. “ You know how actors are. They are …” more finger flicking as Voshki sought an appropriate word.
“ Squirrelly,” Ellis supplied helpfully. It was as good as any word I could have come up with to describe the nature of most actors.
Voshki liked it. She nodded. “ Squirrelly, yes.”
“ Okay. So I assume the local cops have been notified?” I wanted to know.
“ Oh yes. Local sheriff investigated the peeper business and came up with precisely zip.”
Voshki did not seem to find this surprising. Mind you, neither did I. Very often movies and TV shows will shoot in small towns. Small towns are picturesque so they show up good on film. They are also very often eager to take the generous amounts of money offered to them for allowing a production to take over their town, not to mention reap the ongoing rewards from tourism if the movie or show is a hit. Extras are easy found and don’t need to be paid either since the locals will perform walk-through parts for the hell of getting their faces on screen. The kind of small towns we are talking about are also lucky if they have a retired city cop for a sheriff and maybe a couple of the brighter local lights acting as his deputies.
I still was unsure, however, what had got Voshki in such a tizzy. With show business comes behind-the-scenes drama. She must have read the confusion on my face. She did not read it from my mind anyway.
“ You know I have invested heavily in the show,” she stated and I nodded. I was getting real good at the nodding thing. “ Well, I also convinced several other people to do likewise …” the scowl made another appearance … “ and I really would not like for them to get wind of this. They invested because they trust my judgment.”
Now I was starting to get the fuller picture. Investors in movies and TV shows are almost as squirrelly as the actors. Only for a damn sight better reason. A single investor may have several millions of dollars sunk into a high-concept ratings-dependent TV show like The Right Guy. Naturally they wish to see good returns on money as serious as this. What they do not want to see is a show go down the toilet because someone committed suicide and the superstitious nut-bags that are most Hollywood people have started believing in some kind of curse on the damn show.
“ You want me to go up there and smooth any ruffled feathers,” I guessed.
Voshki nodded. Then she added, “ Amelia is of the opinion that the peeper might be a vampire” and a dark cloud sailed across my horizon. I stared at the vampire leader.
“ Do you think there is some connection between the suicide and the peeper?” I inquired politely.
Voshki poked her tongue into her cheek and rolled it around a few times whilst she scowled into middle distance. The tongue-rolling thing was distracting to my fervid little imagination. Finally she admitted that she did not know for sure whether there was any connection. “ But I want to be sure, one way or the other,” she added. The scowl melted away into a dazzling smile. “ And that’s where you come in, Dante darling,” she cooed. My brains were starting to leak out of my ears, I was pretty damn sure of that.
It was my turn to frown however. I’m not that easy a sell. “ Wouldn’t you be better to send a private detective up to poke around? I’m just an agent,” I reminded the vampire in case she had forgotten this.
“ A private detective would draw attention,” Voshki argued. This made sense, I supposed. Rumors and TV or movie shoots are kind of like dogs and fleas. Where you find one, you’re gonna find the other eventually. An agent on site would seem much more natural.
Then Voshki turned the wattage right up on her smile. My brain fried itself trying to imagine all the wicked, delicious, naughty things I would be willing to do for that smile. I wondered suddenly if I were drooling. God, that would be embarrassing. I heard Voshki say, “ I have the utmost faith in you, Dante” and I knew that I would be heading upstate to play amateur detective before the day’s end.
“ It’s really not my forte,” I protested weakly.
“ You can take Ellis and Samson with you,” Voshki added helpfully.
Great. Samson I might be able to use, but what exactly was I supposed to do with Ellis Kovacs tagging along? Then Voshki looked around me at Ellis and inquired if Ellis had booked the hotel rooms? I know my mouth fell open. I could feel the rush of air over my back teeth. I had closed it again before Voshki’s gaze swung back around to me.
“ You were that sure I’d agree to go up there?” I asked in a strangled voice that I would not have recognized as coming from me had I not felt my lips and tongue moving.
Voshki just nodded. “ Indeed. Why? Is there some problem, Dante?”
Yes, I thought, I’m not your bitch to order around. I said, “ No. There’s no problem at all.”
Coward.
It is fortunate for me that I have an exceptionally good staff who can cover me at the slightest notice when I have to run errands like this for Voshki. In particular there is my PA, a highly capable young woman named Roz Black. Roz is a devout Mormon, she is married to a very nice and equally devout Mormon man, they have two young children who are very lovely as children go, and without her I doubt my office would run half as smoothly as it does, even when I am there. Roz also happens to be quite beautiful, in that freshly-scrubbed, utterly wholesome, apples-and-oatmeal complexioned way you expect of corn-fed Midwesterners and indeed Mormons. I have always been a little dazzled by Roz and her extreme capableness. I think I have always been a little in love with her too.
And besides, there are always cell phones and video conferencing for those clients who simply refuse to have anyone but myself soothe their egos.
Let me tell you something about the people I represent. Mostly they are actors, and actors are all fucking insane. They manage to be insecure and egotistical all at once, and they specialize in melt-downs. If you thought Lindsay Lohan was the exception, then you are very wrong. She is the rule. Actors are self-centered, self-absorbed creatures who think the world really does exist solely for the purpose of hanging on their every word and gesture, and that said world really should be grateful for this privilege. Anything which perturbs in any way this delusion of self-grandeur, no matter how small or how trivial it may seem to the rest of us, can be enough to send them spiraling into a melt-down of Chernobyl-like proportions. Ditto directors and writers. They are insane too. Writers perhaps are the lesser evil. At least writers tend only to go off on sex-and-alcohol benders in Vegas when things go bad for them. I have only ever represented one writer who needed to go into rehab and he only did that because the judge gave him a choice, rehab or jail. Actually, I hate most actors and nearly all of the directors and producers I have met, but I rather like writers.
Oh, by the way, I do not represent singers, rappers, or anyone else concerned with the music industry. The music industry is whole other kettle of crazy.
As I said, I had a client working on this particular TV show although their part was relatively small, as the rarely seen ex-boss of the lead character. This lead character, played as I have also said, by an actress I am personally acquainted with, is an ex big-city cop who has become the sheriff of a small town. She has a habit of getting ‘the right guy’ for the crime, albeit in a quirky, roundabout way, and at the same time she is constantly searching for ‘the right guy’ in her love life, never recognizing that the smart, sexy, handsome town librarian who often helps her out with cases is the right guy right under her nose. The series had done gangbusters in its first thirteen episodes, had a further thirteen commissioned straight away which were now shooting, and a second series was a shoe-in. Both leads, male and female, as well as the writers were being hotly tipped to scoop Emmy’s and Golden Globes. Already there was talk of a spin-off series, and maybe a series of tie-in novels. The network was shifting mugs, key fobs, and t-shirts bearing the show’s legend ‘Get The Right Guy Every Time’ by the crate.
I may not be the biggest fan of Caitlin Harris, the show’s lead actress, since she and I dated, but I respect the fact that she has shown some serious acting chops on this project. I don’t make it a habit to date people in the business. The occasional writer, if she’s not a raving alcoholic, one time a director, but producers I avoid like the plague. My mother was a producer, remember, so I’ve seen too much of that particular brand of nuts, and besides, it just feels creepy. Caitlin was actually the first, and so far the last actress I ever dated. The experience was really that not good. She was deep inside of the glass closet and I could not be bothered with pretending to E! News and Entertainment Tonight that we were ‘in negotiations for representation’ when in fact we were fucking like bunnies. After eight months of ‘negotiations’, I called it quits. She had the requisite mini melt-down, went off to a spa someplace to recover, and I vowed never to date another actress even if everyone else vanished from the face of the earth tomorrow.
Seeing her again was going to be fun.
I should mention here that vampires dislike to fly. I don’t know why this is. I have never had the inclination to ask. They will fly, if they absolutely have to, but generally they prefer to remain on terra firma, or to travel by boat if that can be arranged. So I had to drive all the way to the unlikely named Holly Bush Junction, the upstate small-town slice of California where the series was shooting, with Ellis and Samson, in a house-sized SUV supplied by Voshki. Samson was not so bad, being a rather taciturn fellow, but Ellis was a fucking nightmare. She talked non-stop and she played music by a variety of ’80’s ‘hair bands’ the whole way. By the time we reached our destination I was ready to stab Jon Bon Jovi in the eyeball with a steak knife for ever having recorded ‘Bad Medicine’.
As if the journey had not been bad enough, there was the hotel. Not so much a hotel as a converted one-time brothel-cum-saloon, still complete with cheesy red lights and lurid purple velvet swag curtains in all the windows. The front parlor looked like a madam and her girls might come sashaying in at any minute. There was a lot more of the purple velvet and much dark wood paneling, imitation gas lamps, and paintings of naked people in various poses that I assumed were meant to be provocative but which just looked as though they had been borrowed from a medical dictionary. There was even a honky-tonk piano. I wanted to run screaming from the place. Preferably before Al Swearingen and Sheriff Bullock showed up.
Ellis had booked two rooms. One for Samson to have all to himself, and one for her and I to share. I was not in the least comfortable with that idea. However, upon inquiring, I learned that with the circus was a TV shoot in town, there were no more rooms at this inn. Nor any other in town. I would either have to hike five miles out of town or grit my teeth and share with the hyperactive hair-band-loving Ellis.
“ Cheer up, Dante …” she elbowed me in the side as we lugged our bags upstairs, nearly cracking a couple ribs … “ if you can’t sleep you don’t need to worry about waking your roomie up!”
I gave a sickly smile. “ Great. We can roast marshmallows and have a pillow fight.”
The room itself was much as I had been expecting, 18th century New Orleans brothel meets Ramada Inn, with one glaring exception. The bed was a double.
“ I was expecting twin beds,” I stated. That sickly smile was getting sicker by the passing moment. The proprietor gave me a look of befuddlement, and not a little suspicion also. He scratched his bald head, eyes darting between me and Ellis in a way that was making me suspicious.
“ Well, I thought you were, like, together?” he said. I must have looked incredibly blank because he frowned and added; “ Like, a couple, you know?”
I wanted to shove stake through Ellis’s heart right there and then. Who knows, if I’d had one handy, I might have. I could feel the burn of outrage rushing up from the pit of my stomach, erupting into my neck, and banging around inside of my skull. Words refused to form themselves in my mouth, however, and that gave Ellis an opportunity to step right in and compound both my outrage and my desire to kill her.
“ Oh, we are …” she trilled. She looped her arm through mine, fingers squeezing my elbow without letting the hotel proprietor see it. I hid my wince of pain behind a reflex smile… “ It’s just that we haven’t been … getting along so well, you know? I thought this would be a romantic surprise for my sweetie!”
“ Oh it’s a surprise alright,” I grated. “ I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d woken up this morning with my head sewn to the carpet.”
Ellis squeezed a little tighter. I felt faint. “ You’re a card, Dante!” she cooed.
The proprietor was giving us both a grin now that told us exactly how proud he was that he and his cheesy hotel could be a part of this romantic matchmaking. If I’d had a spare stake I’d have shoved one through his fucking heart too. Goddamn Californian liberalism. At least if it had been Minnesota or some other less well-intentioned place, I wouldn’t have to be enduring all this schmaltz on top of my outrage.
“ Well, you ladies get yourselves all settled in,” he told us and I swear he winked at us. Or maybe I was just having a stress hallucination. Either way I wanted to scream, die, kill somebody, and run away. In no particular order. The proprietor added that the bar was always open if we wished a refreshment and that room service snacks were available from seven to eleven pm. He could recommend some restaurants for eating out at.
“ Thank you,” Ellis cooed at him and she did wink, “ but I think we have all the eating we need right here!”
I jerked my arm free and ran into the room. The proprietor went away chuckling and Ellis followed me in, closed the door behind her.
“ What the fuck are you playing at?” I demanded.
She gave me an innocent look. “ I was just having fun with him.”
“ You called me your sweetie. If you ever do that again, I swear I’ll sharpen a railway sleeper and drive it through your fucking heart.”
Ellis smirked. “ Do you know that you’re adorable when you’re angry?” she asked.
I threw my hands up in defeat and stomped into the bathroom, slammed the door shut behind me hard enough to set the cheesy pictures on the walls downstairs to rattling.
Devon Marshall 2010
