The Stars Afire

by Elizabeth Hunter

  * * *

  Happy Holidays, everyone!

  Finding Richard

  Giovanni Vecchio has a headache and Richard Montegu is it. Giovanni and Beatrice head east to New York City in order to take care of a little problem who’s been spotted off-off-Broadway. They join Ben, Tenzin, Chloe, and Gavin to deal with a threat to the Elemental World. And a threat to Giovanni’s sanity.

  Chapter 1

  Chloe leaned against Gavin’s chest, enjoying the quiet peace of the bar as she paged through the latest theater openings. It was four thirty in the morning, the Dancing Bear had finally closed, and she needed to get to sleep, but she was debating whether to trek down to her room in SoHo at Ben and Tenzin’s or stay at Gavin’s slightly closer apartment.

  Prudence said she needed to go home. Gavin’s warm cologne and solid chest were trying to tell prudence to take a hike. He was humming under his breath and playing with a curl of her hair, seemingly content to act as her backrest while she read the paper.

  Guest room. You’re still staying in the guest room. There’s nothing wrong with crashing at Gavin’s.

  If only her hormones were as calm as her internal voice.

  Chloe settled her head against his shoulder and turned the page. There was a feature on the top left with the picture of a smiling cast in a new off-off-Broadway play that was starting to get some attention.

  Imitation & Alchemy.

  Chloe smiled. Catchy title.

  She was about to turn the page when Gavin’s hand came down on the paper. “What is that?” He pointed at the cast picture in the corner.

  She yawned. “New play. Opened a couple of weeks ago way off-Broadway, but I’ve heard it’s pretty good. Some stripped-down historical piece. Did you want to go?”

  Gavin ignored her and brought the paper closer to his face. He narrowed his eyes and muttered, “You little bastard. Not this shit again.”

  Chloe frowned. “Do you know one of the actors?”

  “What’s he calling himself this time?” Gavin tugged the paper away from her and sat up straight, making Chloe lean forward in the booth.

  “Gavin, what’s wrong?”

  He stood and walked to the bar, holding up a finger when Chloe began to protest. “One minute, darling.” He picked up the old-style rotary phone on the corner of the bar. Most of their patrons thought it was for show.

  It wasn’t.

  He held the phone up to his ear and then dialed numbers. “Giovanni.” He paused. “Yes, she’s fine.” He glanced up at Chloe. “Wondering what the hell I’m banging on about, I’m sure. Listen…” He frowned. “Christmas? What are you talking about?”

  “Christmas is next week,” Chloe said. “He’s probably wondering—”

  “I’m staying here. Chloe is staying here. Yes, I’ve already bought her a present.”

  Chloe blinked. “You did?”

  “We’ve got a problem,” Gavin continued. “No, not that.” He drummed his fingers on the bar. “Will you shut up? Thank you. That’s not the problem. Or… that’s not the problem that’s currently in front of us. There’s a new off-Broadway play in the paper.”

  “Off-off-Broadway,” Chloe piped in. “Really, it’s a tiny theater.”

  “No, it’s not… Her first performance isn’t until the spring. I’ll send you tickets if you just shut up and listen.” Gavin took a deep breath. “As much as I enjoy annoying you, I honestly hate to tell you… It’s Richard.”

  Chapter 2

  Giovanni took a deep breath and calmly hung up the phone. “That annoying little shit.”

  Beatrice raised her eyebrows at him. “And what has brought about this unusually spicy language tonight, my love?”

  “Richard.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. The last time Richard had been a problem, it had been in Japan in the mid-1980s.

  Before that, it had been Norway in the 1960s.

  Before that, Los Angeles.

  Russia.

  Buenos Aires.

  Vienna.

  Prague.

  Why can’t you just disappear like a well-behaved vampire?

  “Who’s Richard?” Beatrice asked.

  “My own personal headache who could theoretically become every vampire’s headache unless he grasps the last few remaining brain cells left in his head—which he won’t—which makes him my own personal headache.”

  Beatrice reached for another puzzle piece in the five-thousand-piece monstrosity she’d spread over the library table. “That made almost zero sense. Why is he your personal headache, and why am I just now hearing about him?”

  “Because I thought I made my point in 1983.”

  “When I was a year old,” she muttered.

  “Dear Lord.” Giovanni laughed. “I really am a cradle robber.”

  “The worst.” She looked up and winked at him. “But what happened in 1983?”

  He stood and walked over to sit next to her. “Someone called me from Japan. A familiar face was starring in commercials. It was Richard.”

  She looked up. “Is Richard immortal?”

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes went wide. “And he was starring in commercials? What on earth was he thinking? He’s a vampire! And he was on-screen? Actually in the commercials?”

  The headache was just getting worse. “Richard always manages to find a screen. Or a stage. Or… something.”

  Beatrice said, “Okay, I need way more information on this. And… why is he your headache again?”

  Giovanni sighed. If only he’d kept his mouth shut.

  If only…

  London, 1863

  The young vampire was sobbing in the corner of the room. As immortal beginnings went, it was… not promising.

  Francis Winthrop, the vampire lord of London, was doing his best to offer the young man a friendly and encouraging perspective.

  “Now, now, young friend,” he said. “It’s not as bad as all that. Once you learn control, you’ll be anything but a monster. Look at all of us. Do we look like monsters?”

  The bright young man—whose blue eyes glistened with pink tears—looked around the room at Giovanni, Gemma, Terrance Ramsay, and Winthrop.

  Giovanni realized Gemma, usually fastidious, had a slight smear of red blood at the corner of her mouth. He reached over to her with a linen handkerchief and dabbed it.

  “Pardon me.” She took the handkerchief and wiped the blood away. “Truly, Richard, I am so sorry I wasn’t able to find the rogue before he killed you, but please stop whimpering and think of the bright side. He turned you into a vampire first!”

  “Then you killed his maker,” Ramsay muttered.

  “Yes, I did,” Gemma said with a fixed smile. “And if you’d heeded my warning when I spoke to you last month about that creature—”

  “I can’t kill an immortal because you have a vague feeling, my lady,” Ramsay ground out in his thick accent. “Unlike your Italian friend, I’m not a mercenary. And in London, civilized vampire society—”

  The brand-new vampire burst into tears again. He’d been bursting into tears every time any of them said the word vampire.

  Giovanni ignored the mercenary dig. He had been a mercenary once, though it had been more than a century since he’d taken a client. Ramsay was new and clearly had his own ambitions to protect.

  “Your life is not over.” Winthrop soothed the young man. “Far from it, young Richard Montegu. You had a brilliant future ahead of you in the human world, and you’ll still have a brilliant future. Just think! Your perfect face will never grow old. There won’t be a wrinkle or a crease. Your body will remain ever-young. That golden hair will never fade or go grey.”

  The thought had clearly not occurred to the man yet. “I-it won’t?” His mouth was clumsy around new fangs, but the resonance of his voice had only grown more golden. He would enchant others when he mastered it.

  “No.” Winthrop brushed Richard’s hair gently. “You will remain as you are for eternity. You’ll be just as beaut
iful in a century as you are right now. Isn’t that good news?”

  The young man began to smile. His smile dropped. He looked pensive. Then sad. Resolution began to arise within him. Every changing emotion was vivid in his expression. Giovanni could see the transformation behind his eyes.

  The idea of immortality was growing on young Richard, and it looked like he might make the best of it.

  “It is a shame you’ll never act again,” Giovanni said, flicking a piece of lint from his trousers. “You really were brilliant on the stage. That voice was created to play Hamlet.”

  Richard’s expression swerved from heroic resolve to shock. Agony. Tragedy. His face crumpled, and this time his cries were loud enough to bring servants running. Gemma had to rush to the door to keep them from bursting in.

  Ramsay turned to Giovanni. “What the actual fuck were you thinking, Vecchio?”

  “What?” Giovanni shrugged. “It’s true.”

  What the actual fuck were you thinking, Vecchio?

  Ramsay’s words had never rung truer. After a time, Richard Montegu mastered his vampiric instincts and took a very accommodating human lover who traveled with him. He found his fortune on stages across the continent, using different names and dodging in and out of human companies. Rumors followed him, but humans were remarkably reluctant to believe anything other than the mundane, so Richard and his human companion—he always had a young and attractive one—escaped with their secrets intact.

  But he grew bolder every year. And each time Richard came a little too close to revelation, someone would summon Giovanni—who was widely seen as responsible for Richard’s delusions of grandeur—and Giovanni would have to take Richard by the proverbial scruff and drag him away from the spotlight.

  Theaters across Europe. The early silent-film days in Los Angeles. The bright studio lights of Hollywood in the forties. The dark auteurs of Scandinavia in the sixties.

  “Scandinavia?” Beatrice asked.

  Giovanni grimaced. “Richard was obsessed with Bergman.”

  Then, most recently, Japanese commercials in the eighties.

  “It’s not the money,” Giovanni explained. “Winthrop treated Richard as a son even though he was killed and turned by a rogue. He was a darling of London immortal society for decades. He has plenty of money.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Francis was killed and it was horrible. Terry took over after that, and he had no particular affection for Richard, though to his credit, he gave Richard a solid portion of the inheritance, which he didn’t have to do. But Terry never had the patience for the man. Wasn’t impressed with his looks like Winthrop was. Because that is what Richard needs.”

  “Flattery?”

  “Adulation.” Giovanni sighed. “Attention. Admiration. Women and men—he doesn’t care which—who just adore him.”

  “He sounds… really obnoxious; I’m not going to lie.”

  “He is… and he isn’t. If you met him, you’d probably like him. He absolutely brims with charm. And he really is an excellent actor. It’s a shame he can’t be onstage anymore, but I tried to make him understand the last time how permanent things are now. He can’t just fake his death every ten or fifteen years and start a new life in the spotlight in another part of the globe.”

  “No. He really cannot.”

  “He has to be more careful. This is all going to catch up with him and then… it could get very bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “He’ll die.” Giovanni looked up. “Someone will finally lose patience with his antics and they’ll kill him, likely to prevent exposure of everyone else.”

  “And no one would blame them.”

  “Not a single vampire. Not even those who like Richard.” Giovanni pressed his fingers to his temples. “I can’t physically get headaches—I know I can’t—but I’m fairly sure I have one.”

  “I’m sorry.” Beatrice combed her fingers through his hair. “You do have a headache. His name is Richard.”

  Chapter 3

  Ben leaned back in the narrow theater seat, his eyes trained on the stage below, which was lit with a single spotlight. The curtain was closed. Tenzin was next to him. Luckily, all performances of Imitation & Alchemy were after dark.

  Which, knowing that a vampire played the lead, made perfect sense.

  “At least Chloe says the play is good,” he whispered.

  “I don’t like plays.”

  “You don’t like confined spaces.”

  “You’re correct, but I don’t like plays in the park either. Why do people pay money to watch other people pretend to be people who don’t exist?”

  He took a second to parse that before he answered. “Sometimes actors play people who did exist.”

  She shook her head. “Historical inaccuracies are the rule. Not the exception. And plays are stupid.”

  “Plays are”—he turned to her, which was difficult in the tiny seats—“they’re stories, Tenzin. It’s a form of storytelling. They tell the audience a story. Sometimes it has a moral. Sometimes it’s just funny. How do you not understand that?”

  She gave him a blank look. “Then why don’t they just have one person tell the story? Are human attention spans that short?”

  Your attention span is that short. He didn’t say it. It sounded petulant. “Just listen and try to spot the guy. Giovanni asked us to check it out.”

  “Fine.” Tenzin plucked at the loose pants she wore. “I still want to see Hamilton though.”

  “Forget it,” Ben said. “I’m taking Chloe. You don’t like plays, remember?”

  “It’s a musical,” Tenzin said. “That’s completely different.”

  He opened his program. “I’m taking Chloe.”

  “She’s already seen it!”

  “Yes she has, and she’ll enjoy seeing it again.”

  An older woman with crisp grey hair in the shape of a football helmet turned around and shushed them. Ben clamped a hand on Tenzin’s knee and slapped a hand over her mouth just as Tenzin bared her fangs.

  “Not here.” He winced when she bit him. “Cut it out.”

  “I’ve been feeling hungry the past week.” Tenzin glared at Helmet Head. “I believe she’ll do nicely.”

  “She doesn’t look like she’d taste very good,” he whispered.

  “It would be a spite-feeding.”

  A spite-feeding?

  Ben had nothing to say to that. With Tenzin, sometimes it was easier to simply ignore her and hope she forgot she was irritated with someone.

  “The Hamilton discussion is not over, by the way.” She leaned closer as the curtains opened. “Just in case you think I forgot.”

  Ben turned, his lips an inch from Tenzin’s. “Shhh.”

  She narrowed her eyes, but her mouth had turned up in the corner.

  Watch the play, Ben mouthed.

  The stage was noticeably blank. It was a historical piece, but in a theater this small, elaborate staging was impossible. Despite the size of the theater, every seat Ben could see was full.

  The first actor came on, a woman dressed in servant’s clothes, sweeping what looked like an old laboratory. A man emerged from the darkness behind her.

  He was nearly incandescent in his beauty. Ben wasn’t much for admiring men, but even he had to admit the actor was stunningly attractive. His hair was gold in the spotlight. His eyes, even from the back of the theater, were vivid blue. He had even features that would probably be described as patrician. He looked… noble.

  And he was definitely a vampire.

  “Oh!” The actress stopped sweeping and put a hand on her chest. “Sir, I am so sorry. I did not see you were in your laboratory. I would never have disturbed the great Comte de Saint Germain if I had known you were here.”

  “Please. I am only a humble alchemist.”

  A smattering of applause from the audience while Tenzin let out a loud cackle.

  “Saint Germain?” She laughed. “He wasn’t nearly that handsome.”
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  Ben squeezed Tenzin’s knee and offered a tight smile to Helmet Head, who’d turned around again. Sorry, he mouthed.

  “Tenzin,” he hissed in her ear. “You have to be quieter.”

  “Fine.” She sulked. “But seriously—”

  “Shhhhhhh.”

  This time Ben couldn’t stop Tenzin before she bared her fangs.

  Helmet Head, far from screaming in fright, rolled her eyes, muttered something about “theater people” under her breath, and turned back to the stage.

  Ben kept his hand on Tenzin through the performance, though he noticed that halfway through the first act, she’d stopped muttering about historical inaccuracies under her breath and was riveted to the performance.

  “Do you see it?” she whispered at intermission.

  “What?” Ben glanced around. Most of the audience was milling around in the aisle or had stepped outside for a smoke or a drink. “It’s really good. I wanted to find it ridiculous, but it’s not. The writing is good and the acting is way better than I’d expected. How much of this is true? Was he really— You know what? I don’t want to know. I like the play. What are you talking about?”

  “It’s not the acting.” Her eyes were lit up. “I mean, yes, it’s better than I expected too, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “What then?” Ben frowned. “Did you really know this guy? Okay, I do want to know. Was he for real or—”

  “Oh. Vampire. Totally. I think Saint Germain is living in South America somewhere this century. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  Ben paged through the program again. “The guy who plays the count is definitely a vampire. He didn’t even change his name much. Is he nuts? Richard Montez is not that far from Richard Montegu, which was his name in England according to—”