Though I had called San Francisco home for the better half of a century, I had gotten a bit of the wandering feet last year when I entered—and won, natch—a fashion competition out here. Granted, the win wasn’t as sweet as it could have been as my competitors had the uncanny ability to drop out of competition by dropping dead, but that’s really neither here nor there. Long story short, it’s been a year and I’ve returned to the runways and maiden forms and put on my fashion designer hat once again. Hence the frustrated frown at the walking stick bug wrapped in haute couture before me.
I was considering a comment—maybe a nip here or a hem there to give the model some shape—when my cell phone pinged. I glanced down at the little pink alarm clock that bounced around my screen announcing that I had just two days to shape up everything and get my show and my models runway ready to expose Drop Dead Clothing to the world during New York’s famed Fashion Week.
Fashion bloggers, hipsters, and celebrities everywhere were eagerly awaiting the debut of my whole collection. Right now, Drop Dead dresses were one-of-a-kind rarities which made them absolute necessities for everyone who was anyone who was (or wanted to be) in the public eye. I had a cult following that was growing by the social media minute, and I relished it. There was another cell phone ping and I glanced down again, grinning at the jumping icon of a sparkly pink stiletto—a new post by one of the foremost fashion insiders, probably popping up to gush about the sneak peek of a dress earmarked for a big celebrity—hush hush on the name, darlings—that had been “leaked” online. Little heart-to-heart: It was leaked by me, and the dress, though incredible, wasn’t the one that would premiere on the red carpet. While the leaked dress was to be adored, the premiere dress was created to be worshipped.
I popped my finger over the icon and frowned at the dress that graced the top of the page. It was nice, but it wasn’t mine. And if I had a breath I would have lost it when I read the site line: New Mystery Designer Debuts a Stunner!
Color this blogger stunned and positively chartreuse with envy! I was swilling champagne at the super chic-chic and incredibly exclusive Fashion Week Sneak Peek Cocktail Couture party and loving every chic piece that strutted by. As you all know, I’ve been counting the days to see the latest LaShay release from Drop Dead Clothing, the little black fashion label that could—and it didn’t disappoint. It was a pretty charcoal gray little number with the perfect tiny tucks and pick-ups that the elusive designer is known for. The bodice work was impeccable and the stones inlaid in the filmy chiffon were genius. I was ready to scratch the model’s eyes out and snatch that dress right off her when IT came into the room. Yes, it.
I don’t remember who the model was or even what she looked like—the dress was that fetching. First of all, it was short, which is practically unheard of for a Sneak Peek dress—a debut, no less—but it worked. The color was a soft mossy green and the stiches were so perfect and fine they looked like they were sewn by fairy hands.
My stomach rolled over and I felt my upper lip roll up into a disgusted snarl. Fairy hands? First of all, fairies are bitches—don’t let Walt Disney fool you. I worked with a clutch of them back in San Francisco, and if you ask them to do the simplest thing, like make a photocopy (which is far easier than laying a perfectly straight whipstitch, I assure you), you got nothing but grief and eventual retaliation from the whole lot of them. And second of all, who created this so-called masterpiece?
I scanned the rest of the article, willfully skipping over the stitch-by-stich narrative of the “it” dress just looking for a designer name. There wasn’t one.
Of course I had to know who designed such perfection. The model told me it was from a new label called Under the Hem. When I asked who the designer was, she didn’t know. I grilled her, Googled it, used all my sources, connections, and weepy doe eyes and . . . nothing. If anyone knows the mystery designer or proprietor of Under the Hem clothing, PLEASE let this blogger know ASAP! It’s only fair.
Bringing Couture to the Everywoman,
xoxo Fashion Fish
I was positively seething. My dress gets shown up by a no-name off-label? Impossible!
I Googled the “mystery designer” and there were a slew of similar blogger articles: Who Is Under the Hem? Mystery Designer Steals Show! Under the Hem and Under Cover! And as there always is from an event that is very specifically “no photography allowed,” there was a cameraphone snapshot of the dress. It was slightly blurry and shot from the side, but even with the blemishes of the photo, the dress was unarguably stunning. It was skillfully draped, the dauphine fabric bias cut and sewn perfectly. Mossy green wasn’t the right description of the color; it was closer to a deep ocean green sewn through with slick thread that looked like it was spun gold.
Spectacular.
I squinted at the model. She was in profile, her features blurred by the lighting. But she looked familiar.
I cocked my head to get a better view of the model on my runway; her name was something weird and exotic like Bathsheba or Honeydew, which made me that much more certain that she was probably an Anne from Nebraska who had parlayed her string-bean body and half-dead eyes into a high-paying career stomping down catwalks and staring vacuously into camera lenses.
She was the model in the picture.
I felt my jaw tighten and squelched down a low growl.
“One minute, please,” I said, beckoning the model over. A puff of her perfume reached me before she did: It was something flower-scented, pungent and cloying enough to make my stomach churn. She followed behind the flower explosion, wide eyed and spacy looking, and I considered offering her a sandwich. Instead, I turned the phone toward her. “Is this you?”
She used her impossibly long, slender fingers to pull the face into focus and smiled thinly. “Uh-huh.”
“Who were you wearing?”
She bopped her head from one side to the other, and my annoyance—and a pounding ricocheting through my skull—was growing.
“It’s new. It’s called Under the Hem.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes, trying to visualize puppies or snowflakes or bald monks—whatever it is that is supposed to bring you back to center. “I know the name of the line. It’s the name of the designer I’m after. Who is it?”
The model chewed her swollen bottom lip. “I don’t know. No one ever told me.”
“Well, who dressed you? Who gave you the dress?”
Narrow shoulders went up to her ears. “I don’t know. It was on my rack when I walked in. I was supposed to wear Stella, but the organizer just said this is what showed up instead.”
I studied her for a half second, decided that the vacuous look on her face wasn’t an act, and sent her back to my runway, still trying to stifle a snarl. I was incensed that this mystery designer was stealing my fanfare, and I couldn’t help but feel betrayed by a model whose name I hadn’t bothered to learn.
There were three models in my studio; each one would be wearing two of my dresses for my Fashion Week debut. As I looked around at them, most already dressed in their Drop Dead attire, I gave myself a little pep talk—the dresses were gorgeous, the show was two days away, and the models were lovely. Everything was falling into place.
This so-called “mystery designer” would be old news by Tuesday.
I went back to watching the photo shoot, sitting in my little director’s chair, sipping a fresh pint of O Neg from my Starbucks thermos. Everything was going to be fine. Everything is going to be just fine, I chanted to myself . . . even while a little spark of anger started at the base of my spine and gained fire with each passing moment I watched the exchange between my model and my photographer.
It wasn’t that I hated models or felt a twinge of jealousy each time one of them slipped into a piece of haute couture that slipped through my fingers—well, that could have been a little bit of it—it was that I hated the way this one was pouting and thrusting her nothing-there hips in the direction of my boyfriend—not boyfriend, I re
fused to commit—male associate, who snapped every frame and didn’t seem bothered in the least by the drab way she modeled my art.
“Stop!” I snapped, throwing up my hands.
Pike, a deeply bronzed, muscled god of a man who pissed me off in all the right places, pushed himself up from his photographer’s squat and sighed. “What now?”
“She’s wearing that dress like a hanger,” I seethed to him, and then, over my shoulder, “No offense, sweetheart, you’re a dream, really. Take five.”
The model nodded and stepped down from her perch, picking her way toward the craft services table where she probably had the other half of her breakfast grape stored.
“She’s all wrong. The dress, the design—Drop Dead Clothing is supposed to be sensual and sexy. It should make your pulse race and your body hum when wearing it. The model should be sexy and curvy and”—I cut a glance toward Bathsheba/Honeydew—“not look like a baton wrapped in silk shantung.”
“I think she looks fine, personally.” Pike flipped through a half dozen digital images of the girl posing like a praying mantis. He was clearly entertained by the hip-out, pouty look, hip-in, pouty look the girl had mastered, and that made my blood—well, whomever’s blood I was currently digesting—boil.
I don’t consider myself a jealous person—seriously, I’m adorable—and after more than a century on this earth you learn that jealousy is a wasted emotion. Breathers are manipulated easily enough without me having to get all red-cheeked and huffy every time my beau looked at another lady. But this wasn’t just any old beau. This was Pike, a delicious, carved, tropical coconut of a man, and though I’ve dated my share of beautiful men in the past, he was quite possibly the most beautiful. That skin, that hair, those eyes that were so intense and deeply dark that they could look through a girl and right into her soul if she had one.
Like me, he played the elusive card, which was as frustrating as it was sexy. After a brief but torrid affair that included a few deaths and dangerous situations last year, I had gone back to San Francisco and Pike had gone back to shooting photo essays. We tried to call, text, or make time for each other, but it never seemed to work. At such a great distance that was fine. The closer we got proximity wise, the more I felt the incessant need to bury my fangs in and never let go.
But, as is the case with every godlike breather dropped down from heaven, there were problems. Bird problems, mostly.
See, I hate birds. Hate them. It has nothing to do with my being a vampire or having an affinity toward bats or spiders or whatever foul creature modern media was intent on making you believe we like, it’s that they’re birds. Hollow boned. Flying rodents. Beady eyed with sharp little beaks just the right size for gouging out eyeballs.
Yes, I’m immortal. Yes, should my eyeballs be gouged out any which way, it wouldn’t take but a few minutes to grow them back into perfect peeper form. But seriously, who wants to have a freaking bird gouge out their eyeballs? Not me. So, no birds.
Pike, on the very distant other hand, is a bird person.
Literally.
While my pre-vamp bloodline included a mansion in Paris and an education that centered around aristocracy and the arts, Pike was born in the island sunshine of Maui, where he learned spearfishing, probably the hula, and that his bloodline and his ancestors leaned more toward the winged.
Yes, I’m a hundred-and-twelve-year dead French ingénue, and he can shapeshift into a bird at will.
Oh, like you don’t have a cross to bear.
But right now it wasn’t Pike’s penchant for poultry that was ticking at my last nerve; it was that vapid model, two days until Fashion Week, and a clothing line that was more stunted than stunning.
I chewed on my bottom lip while Pike reached out an arm to me. “Relax, pecksie, everything is going to be fine. The pictures look great.”
“The girl or the clothes?”
The edges of Pike’s full mouth pushed up into a disgustingly sexy grin. “Both, actually.”
I was considering laying a trail of bird-deterrent spikes across the floor while Pike crossed the room to our little kitchenette and began fixing himself a coffee or a pinecone covered in peanut butter or something. I was trying to count to ten and breathe deeply—a hell of a challenge when breath is in short supply—when my eyes landed on my little supermodel.
The little wisp of a thing had changed out of my dress and into the clothes she had showed up in—jeans that clung to her no-hips in an attempt to be skinny but edged away from her stick legs, and a tank top that slid over her tiny breasts that were mosquito bites more than A-cups. She had a business card pinched between her fingers and she was zeroed in on Pike, my Pike. She did a sexy little saunter toward him. I watched in horror as she pushed her chewed-to-the-quick nails through his lush, dark hair, moving the strands that forever fell into his eyes. She swiveled her hips in a laughable attempt at sexy, but the way she held her mouth made up for her stick-figure frame: Her lips were curved in a half pout, half scowl that oozed sex, pursed in that kind of grin that leaves everything to the imagination and sends it soaring into the sheets.
“It’s Wendi,” she was saying in a little singsong voice. “W-e-n-d-”—her eyes flashed into a mock-up of baby sweet innocence—“i.” She blinked those doe eyes and dragged a corner of pretty pink tongue across her bottom lip, dropping her voice to what would have been a low whisper to anyone who didn’t have vampire hearing. “Your girlfriend doesn’t have to know a thing.”
To his credit, Pike’s spine stiffened before anything else on him did. His hand clamped around her wrist as she went to stroke his hair again. “I’m not interested.”
“Why go vintage when you can go all new?”
Vintage?!
The word cut through me like a fang through flesh and I was seething, the rage thrumming like a pulse. I made a beeline for the kitchenette.
“Who are you calling vintage?” I roared, far louder than I’d meant.
Wendi’s mouth dropped open to a little “o” of surprise. “Oh, Ms. LaShay. I didn’t see you there.” She licked her lips again and stared at me, her eyes full of faux innocence.
“Get out,” I said, pressing my jaw together to regain a semblance of control.
Truth was, I wanted to pitch the bitch like a javelin, but I had worked too hard to get here—both as a designer and as a vampire posing as a breather—to blow it on this piece of insipid trash. Instead, I stepped forward, closed a hand around her upper arm, and told her in no uncertain terms that she was effectively fired from walking for Drop Dead Clothing, ever.
And I may have whispered something about her imminent death should she set foot near my man or my couture ever again. But again, that’s beside the point—or at least it was.
I let myself into my apartment and my nephew Vlad was already there, stretched out on the couch as if he had done anything, ever, that required him to relax and unwind. His giant duster jacket was draped over my coffee table, his brocade Dracula vest on the floor, and his ascot was lying in a crumpled heap next to two empty blood bags and his boots.
While I got the fashionista gene in the LaShay pool, Vlad got the “movementarian” one and had become the front man for the Vampire Empowerment and Restoration Movement (VERM for short, and for annoying Vlad incessantly). The movement rallied against the modern concept of the vampire in media and strove to dash the image of sparkly, soul-having, friendly vamps and restore vampires and their detractors back to the days of old. Basically, VERM demanded its adherents re-create the image of the sexy, brooding vampire that terrified and mesmerized all breathers he encountered. And somewhere within those requirements was the “classic” vampire dress code that made Vlad and his cronies look like Count Chocula rejects rather than the terrifying bastions of hell they strove to become.
Vlad rolled over onto his side, pausing his Bloodlust game just as the cartoon vampire was about to feast on some busty brunette with wide anime eyes. He held his laptop steady with one hand and glared up
at me like I was interrupting something in my own apartment.
I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “Surfing porn again?”
Vlad rolled his eyes—black as coal and a mirror image of mine—and looked suitably disgusted. “You’re so gross, Aunt Nina.”
“I’ve had a long day, Vlad,” I groaned, dropping my things and heading for the refrigerator. “Want something?”
“Nah, just ate.”
I rifled through the refrigerator that was half cold storage and half general bureau. Blood bags were kept on the top two shelves; batteries, nail polish, and a lone beer in the door should we have a visitor; and the crisper and meat drawers kept my selection of hats and scarves in pristine, if a little cold, condition.
Vlad kept his Doc Martens in the freezer.
I helped myself to a blood bag and pierced the edge with one angled fang, popped in a straw, and began sipping the thing Capri Sun–style.
“This is so good,” I said, holding the viscous liquid on my tongue for a beat before swallowing it down.
Vlad wrinkled his nose. “I don’t like the organic as much. They’re always low fat. Can’t you get the Trucker brand anymore? I like those. They have a bacon-y aftertaste.”
“You buy what you like. Oh, that’s right. You’ve been couch surfing for three and a half months and don’t have a job. Or an apartment.”
“I have a job,” he huffed. “In San Francisco. I’m just here on an exchange program.”
I slurped at the little stars of plasma stuck in the bottom of the bag. “Exchange of what?”
“God, Auntie! Why can’t you just let me relax for like, five minutes? I’m tired. It’s not like I didn’t go apartment hunting today because I totally did.”
I felt my eyebrows go up. Could it be true? I would soon have my own space, devoid of my dearest nephew and his bad attitude?
On the Hunt Page 33
