When I walked out the double glass doors of my building, Greg was leaning against the wall waiting for me, in almost the same spot and pose in which I had found Malcolm the day I had come home with my Hemastix and broken up with him.
I didn’t say anything, just gestured for Greg to lead the way. I used the hand with the crucifix in it.
“A bit aggressive, don’t you think?” He motioned toward the stake and the crucifix. Without waiting for an answer, he turned and headed toward the train station.
Falling into step beside him made me feel almost dizzy. We had walked this way hundreds of times, companionably silent, content merely to be in each other’s presence. Our strides matched almost perfectly; we had always moved in synch. At this moment, I could hardly believe that the past few weeks had really happened.
I couldn’t let the silence continue. It was too easy to fall into old habits of trusting the man beside me. I had to do something to remind myself that he was no longer a man—not in the sense of being human, anyway. I assumed he was still male. I wondered if vampires could have sex. Did they have enough blood in their veins to spare some to make their…. No. I shook my head. That was not an acceptable line of thought.
“Can you move around in daylight?” I blurted.
“What? No. The sun’s a bit of a problem.”
“Not in the sun. I mean, if there isn’t any direct sunlight, can you move around? Or do you go all dead and have to sleep in a coffin or something?”
He laughed. “Coffins are for the dead. I’m not dead.”
“You’re sort of dead.” He started to interrupt me, but I continued. “Anyway, that’s beside the point. If you were, say, underground, would you be able to move around even when the sun is up?”
Greg looked thoughtful—the same look he used when he was working through a legal problem. “I don’t know,” he said.
We turned the corner onto Fordham Road. There weren’t many people out on the sidewalks this far down, but cars whizzed past us.
“You don’t know? Well, what’s it like when you… when the sun comes up?”
“It’s like getting really sleepy. Combined with anxious, if I’m not someplace safe. That goes away as soon as I’m someplace I know the sun won’t hit me. Then I go to sleep.”
“Do you dream?”
“Sometimes.”
“What about?”
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Fishing for compliments?”
“No. God, no.” My voice sounded harsh. I looked away from him.
“It’s not like it used to be,” he said, pretending I hadn’t spoken. “The dreams are more,” he paused, searching for the right word, “more primal.”
I decided I didn’t want to know any more than that. Talking to him wasn’t helping me feel any better about the situation. Anyway, the closer we got to the train station, the more crowded the sidewalks got. I tucked my hands into my jacket pockets so that no one could see them, but kept a tight grip on the crucifix and the stake.
Instead of talking, I watched the way Greg’s eyes moved across the people around us. He might look human for the most part, but his eyes were the eyes of a predator. He scanned the crowd, then fell on one young woman re-settling a backpack across her shoulders. His gaze moved up and down her body, lingering on her face and then her neck. He actually licked his lips. At that moment, any illusions I’d had about feeling comfortable with him fled.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To the city, first.”
We crossed Fordham Road and made our way into the train station. Greg stopped at the kiosk and bought two tickets to Grand Central. I didn’t offer to pay my way, and he didn’t ask. As far as I was concerned, this was his party, and he could cover any associated costs. He did still have a job, after all.
The train ride into Grand Central Station was miserable. Greg took a window seat—I wasn’t about to let him get between me and the aisle and any chance of escape. I sat in the same row, but left one seat open between us. I didn’t want to brush up against him at all, even accidentally. The thought of letting him touch me made my skin crawl.
A car met us on 42nd Street outside Grand Central. The car itself was a black Lincoln, much like the livery cabs in the Bronx. Unlike the cabbies, though, this driver wore a dark gray suit. He had dark hair and extraordinarily pale skin. I assumed from the pale skin that he was a vampire, but I had no way of telling for sure. The vampires at the armory had seemed alien, but some vampires seemed to be able to blend in with humans. I needed to figure out some sure way of knowing which was which. The driver, who had gotten out of the car when he saw us exiting the train station, held the back door open for us. I hesitated before climbing in, but I couldn’t think of any other way to find Malcolm. I had to go. Anyway, as Greg had said, I was the big bad vampire killer. I knew how to take care of myself.
Once again, I seated myself as far from Greg as possible.
I was surprised when I realized that we were headed toward the Midtown Tunnel; I had anticipated a Manhattan destination. I looked over at Greg.
“We’re going to Long Island? Wouldn’t it have been easier to get there from the Bronx?”
“I assumed you wouldn’t want Rafael to know where you live,” he said blandly, gesturing at the driver.
That confused me. Greg the Vampire trying to protect me? It didn’t make sense. I sank back into the seat and decided not to think about it too hard. I was sure that there were plenty of reasons Greg might have for wanting to keep my address a secret—like not wanting any other vampire to get to me before he could. It didn’t have to mean he was protecting me.
I lost track of where we were headed—not surprisingly, as I always get lost when I go to Long Island. For the most part, it looks like one long, repeating suburb, full of strip malls and middle-class neighborhoods.
Eventually, though, we left suburbia and drove through a winding green—maybe a park or a golf course? We took a left and headed toward a building at the end of a drive.
The building itself had a billowing fountain in front of it, the sort you see in front of wedding reception halls. A circular drive, covered by a sort of portico held up by tall Doric columns, led up to the entrance. A red carpet covered the steps that led to the glass double doors. Rafael stopped the car in front of the steps.
Another pale man, also in a suit, opened the front door for us. It led into an elegant foyer. Inside, men and women in eveningwear clustered in small groups, talking. I could hear the clink of crystal and the shrill of high-pitched feminine laughter. A piano played softly in the background.
Through open doors at the end of the foyer I could see a sort of drawing room with couches and chairs arranged in what the decorating magazines called “conversation groupings.” The colors were dark and muted, elegant.
To the right of the foyer, a wide marble stairway curved both up and down.
To the left another set of doors led to a sort of ballroom with a dance floor in the middle. Tables lined the walls. A few couples were dancing, and more elegantly dressed people sat at the tables.
None of them were eating, but most of them had glasses in their hands. Other men and women dressed in black suits circulated through the crowd carrying silver trays with drinks on them. Some of them I recognized—champagne, white wine—but other glasses held a darker liquid.
Red wine, I told myself. It’s just a dark red wine. I wasn’t convinced, especially after I saw people sipping the viscous fluid.
There were probably two hundred people there.
Holy Mary, Mother of God. I had just allowed Greg to lead me into the mother-lode of vampire dens. And no one else knew where I was.
That’s it, I thought. I’m dead.
My eyes lit on woman in a long red evening gown standing in one of the small knots of people in the foyer. Her long, white-blonde hair curled over her shoulders and halfway down her arms. Her backless dress skimmed her body, and a short train gathered at the small of her back swept the floor in a long fall of shimmering red fabric. Her skin was white and smooth, almost the same color as her hair. As she excused herself from the group and turned, she caught me staring at her and moved toward us purposefully.
From the front, the illusion of perfection crumbled. She was certainly beautiful, without a doubt—her large dark eyes almost seemed to glow with energy and her mouth, outlined in a red lipstick that matched her dress perfectly, was full and sensuous. But her beautiful face was cold and hard. She looked almost plastic.
She approached us with her hands outstretched.
“Gregory, darling, I’m so very glad you could make it.” Her voice was low and smooth with just a trace of an accent. She caught his hand and leaned in to kiss the air by his cheek.
Leaning back from him, she turned toward me. “And this must be Elle. Welcome to my home.” She eyed me up and down, then turned back to Greg.
“Greg. You bad, bad man. You didn’t tell her you were bringing her to a party, did you?” She directed the next comment to me in a conspiratorial whisper. “Men are so terrible that way; they never know when to tell a woman she’s under-dressed. But then,” she said, looking at Greg in his Friday-casual khakis and dress shirt, “he didn’t do much in the way of dressing up himself, did he? No matter. I have clothing to spare.” She snapped her fingers at the nearest server. “Please see Mr. Parham and Miss Dupree to a dressing room and find appropriate clothing for them both.”
The man she had called over made a short bow and turned, saying, “Follow me.” Greg obediently moved after him, but I stayed where I was. I willed my voice not to shake with the fear I felt.
“I’m fine as I am, thanks, Ms.…?” I paused, waiting for the blonde woman to fill in her name.
“Oh, I am so terribly remiss. Please, call me Deirdre.”
“Deirdre. I see.” And I did. Deirdre was one of the names on the list of New York City vampire leaders. A chill went through me. I was in the home of one of the most powerful vampires in New York and Nick had no idea how to find me. This was not good. I gripped the stake and the crucifix in my pockets more tightly than before.
“And I insist,” said Deirdre, “that you change clothes before joining us again.” Her voice never lost its underlying smoothness, but it became hard and implacable.
“Greg told me that he was bringing me to my friend Malcolm.”
“Of course, of course, my dear. But first you must change. I shall brook no opposition.” She raised her eyebrows at me expectantly.
“Fine,” I muttered. I would dress up if it meant I got to see Malcolm, but I didn’t have to be gracious about it.
The dressing room the servant led us to upstairs was lovely, decorated in white and cream, with a dressing table and full-length mirror against one wall and a folding privacy screen against the other. A fainting couch upholstered in a cream brocade angled out into the room from the far corner. The servant, a tall black man, eyed me up and down, then said, “Size eight?”
“Ten,” I replied. I could sometimes squeeze into an eight, but I wanted to keep some of my stakes on me. A skintight dress would definitely prohibit that.
Apparently Deirdre’s staff already knew Greg’s clothing size, because nobody had asked him. When the servant came back into the room, he handed a tuxedo to Greg and an armload of dresses to me. Some of the dresses were size eight, I saw. I handed those back to him, and he accepted them with a bow, then left the room.
I turned around to find Greg already stripped to his underwear.
I stepped behind the privacy screen.
Okay. Greg and I had lived together for years. We’d had sex in our dorm rooms in college, for chrissakes. It’s not like I hadn’t seen him naked before. Or like he hadn’t seen me.
But it was different now. I kept remembering the way he had eyed the young woman on the way to the train station.
He didn’t get to see me naked any more. Or even in my underwear, for that matter. I was going to keep as many of my veins as possible out of his sight.
Most of the dresses were of the skintight sheath variety. Many of them were backless, and a couple of them were strapless. I discarded those.
I finally settled on the most modest dress of the bunch. It fit more loosely than the others; the front of the dress scooped low across my chest then swooped up to tie behind my neck. I tied it slightly tighter, and the front covered my cleavage. Most importantly, though, the dress had sleeves. They were mostly detached from the shoulders, connecting only at the top and under my armpits, but they fell into a wide hem at the wrist. The skirt of the dress fell away from the fitted waist in a wide A-line that mimicked the shape of the sleeves. The hemline just brushed the floor.
Overall, the dress was both elegant and (more important to me at the moment) good for hiding weapons. I had to take the stake out of my waistband and tuck it into one boot; the one from my jacket pocket went into the other boot. I dropped the cell phone down into the boot as well. I decided to hang onto the crucifix. If I got out of this alive, I was going to sharpen the end of it into a stake so it could do double duty as deterrent and weapon.
A polite knock sounded on the door just as I was stepping out from behind the screen. Greg answered the door and the same servant walked in carrying boxes of shoes.
“What size?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’ll just wear what I have.” I wasn’t about to take off the boots and lose four of my weapons and my only means of communication. “The dress covers my feet anyway. And I don’t plan to dance.”
The servant looked nervous, but he nodded and left. Greg turned to me and smiled.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
“Shut up,” I replied. “I don’t care how I look. Let’s go to Malcolm.”
“There’s a fully stocked makeup table here.” He gestured at the dressing table. “And you could put your hair up.”
“I’m not putting on makeup. I’m not fixing my hair. I’m going downstairs now. I really don’t care what you do.” With that, I left the room. Greg followed.
Deirdre was waiting for us at the bottom of the curving staircase. She spoke to us as we descended. “Ah. Much better. Though I must say, the crucifix is a bit much.” She waved her hand at it with a faint smile. “Now, please do come join us in the ballroom. We have a fabulous band this evening, and dinner will be served shortly.”
“Wait,” I said, stopping three steps up from the bottom. “You told me I’d get to see Malcolm.”
“And you shall, very soon.” She stopped a passing waiter and grabbed a champagne glass from his tray. “Here,” she said, handing the glass toward me. “Do have some champagne.”
When I looked at the glass, though, I realized that the bubbly liquid inside it had a suspiciously pink tint.
Deirdre saw me examining the drink and laughed. “It’s raspberry, darling.”
I sniffed the contents; it did smell fruity.
“I promise it has nothing in it that will harm you, provided you don’t drink too much and end up with a hangover in the morning,” she said in her lilting accent.
The ballroom was packed. More people had arrived while we were getting dressed. Women in sequined dresses and men in tuxedos sat around almost all the tables. Some of them were even eating. Couples crowded the dance floor. The band was indeed very good—they were playing a version of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home to” and the lead singer, a tall woman in a slinky black dress, had a deep, smoky-sounding voice.
It would be easy to be charmed by this setting, by all the elegance that surrounded me.
Of course, all the vampires that surrounded me weren’t quite so charming. They were terrifying.
And in a room full of people, I discovered that it was easy to tell which ones were vampires and which ones weren’t. Some of the humans were easy to spot—the ones who were eating food were easy to pick out as humans, of course, and many of them had bandages or fresh wounds on various parts of their bodies. The parts where the veins ran close to the surface: the neck, the crook of the elbow, the wrist.
There were other humans there, too, though, humans who weren’t eating and who didn’t have any visible blood-donation marks. But they were clearly human, just as some of the other people moving around the room were clearly vampires.
The vampires tended toward pallor, of course. And occasionally one flashed a fang here or there, particularly when they laughed—an effect I found chilling. They were mostly extraordinarily beautiful, but then, so were the humans. Deirdre seemed to like surrounding herself with beauty.
It had something to do with the energy the vampires projected, I guess. They seemed strangely brittle, yet almost vibrating with a nervous vitality. I’ve seen a similar thing with people who were on the verge of an emotional breakdown but attempting to hide it. I’ve also seen it in people with bipolar disorder. It’s a sort of forced, manic gaiety verging on hysteria.
But that energy was combined with an indolence of movement. They swayed through the room slowly, languorously, all the while virtually quivering with some suppressed power.
All in all, it was just about the creepiest thing I’d ever seen—toward the top of the list, anyway, right after “Seeing My Beloved Eaten.”
I recognized now some of that same energy in Greg himself. It wasn’t as pronounced, but it was there all the same. Perhaps it grew with age.
That meant that I was in a room full of old—perhaps very old—vampires.
God. I was in big trouble.
Deirdre herself moved with that vibrating slowness as she led us to an otherwise unoccupied table.
“Please, join us for dinner. And then I shall take you to see your lovely friend,” she said, then moved away from our table.
Almost instantly, a waiter—human, I noted—appeared as if from nowhere and set a plate in front of me. It held a gourmet meal of seared salmon and vegetables on a bed of saffron rice; if I had been able to eat anything at all, I’m sure I would have enjoyed it immensely. A second waiter, also human, brought Greg a balloon-shaped wine glass full of the dark red liquid I had noticed earlier. When he took a sip, it traced a thick, viscous path from the bottom of the glass to his mouth. Any hunger I might have had vanished in a surge of nausea. I pushed the plate away from me.
“How long am I going to have to wait?” I demanded, turning to face Greg.
“As long as Deirdre wants us to. I recommend you follow her suggestion and enjoy your dinner.” He took another long drink from his wineglass.
I forced myself not to gag.
I also forced myself to sit utterly still, my arms crossed over my chest and hugging my crucifix to my body. I might not be able to change anything, but I didn’t have to follow Deirdre’s orders, either.
The meal seemed to drag on interminably. After what felt like about an hour, I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes had passed. I spent every moment tensed for something terrible to happen. I kept twisting in my seat, watching for someone to sneak up behind me. I felt awkward and exposed. Two different women approached our table and asked Greg to dance. Both of them were human. He declined the first offer, and she left, but not before shooting me a dirty look. I wondered if they knew each other. It was an odd feeling, watching other women proposition my ex-fiancé. It had never happened when he was alive and we were together, at least not to the best of my knowledge. He accepted the second offer. The woman had a large bruise on the left side of her neck spreading out from what were clearly two puncture wounds. Someone hadn’t been very neat with his dinner. The other side of her neck was smooth and white.
This was horrible. This was beyond horrible. I was the anti-Cinderella at the Beasts’ Ball. All I wanted to do was gather up my charming non-prince and go home.
Eventually I noticed that the crowd was thinning. Almost all of them left in pairs, some in groups of three or four. There was always at least one human and one vampire in each group.
I decided to see where they were going. Greg still wasn’t back from the dance floor, so no one noticed when I stood up and made my way to the door. I was still clutching the crucifix, but I had almost forgotten about it until I accidentally brushed it against the back of a woman in a long, hunter-green dress. She hissed and turned toward me, baring her fangs. Her dark hair was pulled back tight from her face, and I could see that her fangs were crusted with an ugly brown substance; blood, I assumed. Gross.
In an instant, the veneer of civility, of humanity, was gone, and I was forcibly reminded that this was no ordinary gathering. I took a step back from her and came up against Greg, who had moved up behind me.
“This one’s mine,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder possessively. I flinched, but didn’t move away from him. I was willing to let him protect me until I got out of this freak show.
The other vampire drew a long breath and visibly got her anger under control. I saw her look first at the bandage on my shoulder and then back up at Greg’s face. Great. She thought I was a member of the Blood Donation Brigade.
“Then you should keep her on a shorter leash,” she said, nostrils flaring.
“I think that perhaps you should sit back down, Elle.” Greg spoke to me, but his eyes never left the woman’s face. This was clearly some weird vampire dominance ritual, and there were undertones to it that I couldn’t exactly read. What I could see, though, was the way that strange vibrating energy increased, not only in Greg and his opponent, but in all the vampires who were now standing around us watching the show.
Suddenly the woman laughed—a strangely girlish sound coming after such a display of ferocity—and the tension evaporated so quickly that I could hardly believe it had ever been there.
“You’re not ready to challenge me, young one,” she said to Greg. “Go ahead and take your little pet away. But don’t let her out in public again unless you restrain her.” She waved her hand dismissively and turned back to her group of friends. I heard one of her companions mutter something to her, and she said, “Oh, let it be, Angelica; the newly turned have no sense of propriety. We must give them time to adjust.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding.
Greg gripped the top of my arm tightly and virtually dragged me back to our table.
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” he hissed.
“No. I’m trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing here in the middle of this Creature Feature. Who are these people? Why are they here? And where is Malcolm?” I whispered just as fiercely as Greg had.
That, of course, was the moment that Deirdre showed up again.
“Oh, my. I hate it when my guests are unhappy,” she said, scrunching her mouth up into a little moue of sympathy. I didn’t believe it for a minute.
“Good. Take me to Malcolm and let me take him home. Then I’ll be happy.”
“Take him home?” Deirdre raised her eyebrows and looked at Greg. “Was that part of the agreement?”
“No,” said Greg, “it wasn’t. I just promised to bring her to Malcolm.”
“I see. I couldn’t imagine that you would presume to speak for me; I’m glad to know I was right. Well, then, dearest,” she said, addressing herself to me again, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to bargain with me if you want to take your friend back home with you.” Her lips curved up into a little half-smile. On anyone else the smile would have been enchanting. On her, it was perfectly blood-curdling.
“What do you mean by ‘bargain’?” I asked suspiciously.
Deirdre laughed—the sort of laugh that under other circumstances might have been described as seductive. “Let’s wait until you’ve seen your friend and then we can talk business.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
But I still didn’t have any choice; there were far too many vampires here for me to fight alone. And I wasn’t getting any backup. So I followed Deirdre out of the room.
She led us down the marble staircase this time. Since the ballroom was on the ground level, I assumed that she was leading us to some sort of basement level. Actually, she led us past the first basement level, which had perfectly normal-looking doors—two of them were even marked “Ladies” and “Gentlemen”—and down to a second basement level.
I trailed along behind Deirdre, hoping that I could trust Greg to watch my back but not really counting on it. I ended up doing a sort of sideways step down the stairs that enabled me to see both vampires in our little group and still keep my back to the wall.
This wasn’t the sort of creepy dungeon staircase I’d seen in countless horror movies. It was white marble with an obviously modern railing—light and airy. The chandelier on the first floor dangled just above the stairway and shined its light into all the nooks and crannies.
The bottom step ended in the middle of a long, burgundy-carpeted corridor stretching to the left and right and lined with numbered doors. Some of the doors were standing open, others were closed. It looked like an upscale hotel, of all things. There was even a cleaning cart in front of one of the open doors.
But it sounded like a down-scale brothel. I could hear people moaning behind the closed doors. I couldn’t tell if the sounds were of pleasure or of pain, but either way, I didn’t want to listen to them.
Deirdre turned to the left. As we passed the rooms, I caught hints of murmured conversations, low laughter, and more than a few screams. The screams made me wince.
We walked all the way to the end of the hall and Deirdre pulled a key out from between her breasts. She caught my look and said, “I don’t want it to be too easy to get to, pet.” Then she turned the key in the lock and opened the door on one of the most horrible scenes I could ever have imagined.