Morales had been driving the cruiser. He rolled down the front window and I leaned in. “You know anything about this place…who owns it? Local gossip?”
“Nada. House has been here a long time; I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking how cool it must be to live inside a mountain like that.”
“What about the rest of the area? Ever been called out here for anything? Any neighbor complaints—loud parties, drug traffic?”
Montoya was reading his PDA. “Here’s one. Six weeks ago—got a call from an Abigail Hilton. Address is Shangri-La, which is down here to the left, the last house we passed before the dirt road. It was midnight, Halloween. Said there was a party going on up here and she couldn’t stand the noise. Officer came out to investigate, but by the time he got here everything was quiet. He didn’t even enter the premises.”
“Where was the party?”
“That house back there, almost opposite where the SUV is parked. It’s called Eden.”
Abigail Hilton took an inordinate amount of time opening the door, and when I saw her I understood why. She was ninety if she was a day. Maybe five feet tall to begin with, age had hunched her over to even less. I think if I’d taken her cane she would have collapsed on the floor. Her voice, however, was razor sharp, her diction pure Boston Brahmin.
“You’re investigating what? My complaint? That was six weeks ago, young man, and why is a Beverly Hills police officer investigating a crime in Palm Springs at all?”
“It’s intra-agency policy, ma’am, helping out our neighboring departments.”
“Well, that’s a bullshit answer if I ever heard one. Let me see some identification, young man.”
She took my badge and closed the door in my face. The two Bobs sat in the car and watched me, their faces expressionless; I was guessing they both wore mirrored shades during the day. I knew the producer of Reno 911; maybe I’d pass on his number.
Mrs. Hilton returned to the door, opened it, and handed me back my badge. “Okay, young man, what do you want to know?”
“You called in a complaint on Halloween night. A loud party, I understand.”
“Loud. And I’m partially deaf, so the noise must have been very loud indeed.”
“What did you hear, ma’am?”
“Screams, shouts, howling.”
“Howling? When you say ‘howling’—”
“Animal howling. We get a lot of coyotes around here, but it didn’t sound like that. More like dogs or wolves. It was disturbing.”
“And this was close to midnight.”
“It started about ten, but I never called the police until midnight. By the time an officer got here, it had stopped. That was one o’clock.”
“Did you talk to any of the occupants of the house?”
“I tried,” she snapped. “I phoned Miss Lilly, but I couldn’t get her on the line. Her creepy driver said she was ‘indisposed.’ Believe me, I gave him a piece of my mind. Pasty-faced little fuck!”
I was so stunned by the “little fuck” coming out of her mouth that it took me a second to take in the rest of what she’d said.
“Pasty-faced?”
“An albino,” she snapped. “You know, white? Pasty-faced? Man gives me the creeps every time I see him.”
“There’s an albino working in that house?”
“That’s what I said, young man. Are you going deaf?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, we’re done here. My Manhattan’s getting warm.” She stopped and squinted at me. “You’re smiling like an idiot,” she barked, and slammed the door in my face.
I guess I was, too.
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Lilith, darling. How lovely to see you,” I lied.
A ghostly shape moved in the gloom behind Lilith, and Ghul the ghoul appeared. I’m not sure what Ghul is—I know he’s not full-blooded human. He’s been with Lilith for millennia, so there must be some vampyre in there somewhere. But he doesn’t claim any clan and he’s enough of an aberration that none of the clans claim him. Only Lilith. She keeps him by her side constantly. Whether he’s her servant, her son, or her lover, no one knows. Perhaps he’s all three.
I do know he is a genuine graveyard-haunting, flesh-eating ghoul, though, and there are probably no more than a handful still on this earth.
“Why have you come here?” Lilith demanded. She was wearing some sort of black Vivienne Westwood number, a cross between a Goth wedding dress and a dominatrix nightgown.
“I’ve come to see you, Lilith.”
“You’ve seen me, now go.”
“You’ve moved things around since I was last here,” I said, looking at the living room, which was empty, save for two more chandeliers. “Are you going into hibernation or is this just your minimalist period?”
“You know what I love about actresses, Ghul?” Lilith said, turning away from me. “They have an opinion on everything. Fashion, politics, art, world peace—as if anyone cares.” She tilted her head to look up at him. “These are the same people who make their living parroting words written by others, who move where they are told to move and dress the way they’re told to dress. They can’t even take care of their own business affairs, but they can tell people how to vote.”
Ghul said nothing. He rarely spoke.
I wandered toward the window, keeping as far from the mismatched couple as I could. I was under no illusions: individually they were deadly; together they were unstoppable. The danger in the room was palpable.
“What do you want?” Lilith demanded.
“I have some questions for you. I’d like some answers.” I moved closer to the rear door. Four ancient vampyres prowled in the darkness, hideous misshapen shadows.
“I have nothing to say to you,” Lilith snapped. “You forget yourself, Ovsanna Hovannes Garabedian. You are my subject. You answer to me!”
“Not in this country I don’t,” I snapped back, deliberately raising my voice, hoping the Ancients would hear me and start paying attention. “That is not the tradition.” The Ancients were very keen on tradition. “I came here first, Lilith. I staked my claim and therefore this is my fiefdom—and in my kingdom you answer to me.”
Lilith waddled forward. She’d put on a little weight since I last saw her, and I didn’t even want to think about what she might have been eating. I could smell the acrid rage coming off her in waves. She was shivering with it. If I’d had a gag reflex, I’d have been bent over; she smelled of sulfur and sour milk. “I am Lilith, the First, Everlasting, Immortal. Mother of the Vampyre and the Were. You owe me fealty.”
Lilith had other names—the Night Hag, the Night Monster—but I wasn’t about to remind her of those at the moment. I wiped flecks of her hot spittle from my cheek. “I am Clan Dakhanavar of the First Bloodline, Chatelaine of Hollywood. There is none above me on the West Coast of America. Not even you, Lilith. You know the tradition!” I yelled my last words at her, drawing in more and more of the Ancients.
Some of them had gathered in the foyer and someone had lit the chandelier. Most of the bulbs were broken, however, and the few that remained threw a dull yellow glow down on the Ancients, revealing cracked, black leather skin, misshapen molted wings, split talons and claws—a genuine Nightmare before Christmas. God help me if I get that old. Of course, Lilith could put paid to that concern in the next few minutes if I wasn’t careful.
Behind Lilith and Ghul, I saw others move into the room, her army of Bobhan Sith and Dearg Due, the dhampirs and the were.
“What do you want, Chatelaine?” Lilith whispered, her face turned down and to the side.
She wanted to keep the conversation unheard by the others, but I wouldn’t allow it. “I want answers, Lilith,” I repeated, so all could hear me. “I want to know who is responsible for the deaths of my kin.”
“I have no answers for you,” Lilith said, turning away. “It would be better if you left now.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
Lilith turned
to face me and, in that moment, no longer looked like a grotesque old woman in too much makeup. There was no humanity in this face, nothing human at all. This was evil—ancient and implacable. “I have killed vampyre before, you know. Feasted off their flesh, sucked the marrow from their bones, eaten their brains raw from the bowls of their skulls.” She no longer made an attempt to keep our conversation quiet. Lilith stepped closer and her cloying ancient mustiness enfolded me. “Do you know what vampyre tastes like, Ovsanna?” she asked.
“Chicken?”
“Memories.”
A tongue, short and black, darted out from between her painted lips. “Everything they have ever done, every place they’ve been, all that they’ve seen, is there, wrapped in flesh and sinew, bone and marrow. A vampyre is a feast indeed. I can make one last for days.”
Lilith was now so close that I could touch her. What I had thought at first was caked-on Baby Jane makeup wasn’t makeup at all; it was her skin. Pale yellow and cracked and mottled, like a desiccated grapefruit. Her teeth were little more than stubs barely protruding above her gums. Worn down by millennia of eating human bones, no doubt. In contrast, her eyes were bright and impossibly blue.
“Is that something you want to be saying in the present company?” I asked, indicating the Ancients gathered behind me.
“They are in no danger, Ovsanna,” Lilith said loudly, walking around me. “You are.”
I turned to follow her.
“A danger to yourself and to others. The police are investigating you, Ovsanna. How long will it be before your somewhat nebulous past comes to light? The police will shine a light on you, actress. The press will turn that into a spotlight you cannot escape from. Your very existence endangers all the vampyres of America, Ovsanna Hovannes Garabedian.”
I turned again, trying to face Lilith and keep an eye on Ghul at the same time. I did not want him at my back. “A Hunter is destroying my clan, killing them in the old ways, the traditional ways, ensuring that there will be no regeneration. Now, he’s started killing humans around me.”
“Sending you a message.” Ghul spoke, his voice dead, devoid of expression, his mouth shaping the words with difficulty. “But what is the message, vampyre? Do you understand it?”
“This Hunter seems determined that this spotlight will only illuminate me and my world.”
“You Dakhanavar always were paranoid.”
“Kept us alive,” I reminded him. I turned quickly, aware that Lilith was behind me. She was standing at the door leading out to the pool, talking quietly with a saurian creature. Something was wrong here, horribly wrong. I was beginning to believe I’d made a terrible mistake coming here.
I turned to face the ghoul. Tall, unnaturally thin, with pink-white skin and a pale oval face split by blood-red eyes and the thin red line of his lips. I doubt he had ever been handsome, but now he looked like a dissipated walking corpse in a tuxedo that might have been in fashion when Capone was paying taxes.
If the Hunter was another vampyre, then he would have needed the blessing of the most senior vampyres in the country…and no one was more senior than Lilith. I also had little doubt that if someone was looking to usurp me, he would have Lilith’s blessing. She’d always hated me for claiming Hollywood before her, and I think she secretly wanted to be an actress. Val Lewton gave her a small part in the original Cat People—they were sleeping together—but she must not have been very good; by the time he produced The Body Snatcher, she was playing a corpse. She couldn’t even do that properly. They had to do six takes on one scene. I mean, how hard is it to hold your breath?
And I had walked right into her bestial arms.
Lilith was standing at the door to the garden, surrounded by her dhampirs and weres. More Ancients had gathered in the gloom. It was impossible to guess their numbers, but there must have been dozens. In my entire lifetime, I’d only encountered a handful and never more than one at a time. The last time the Ancients had gathered in any great number, in September 1666, the Great Fire of London had claimed hundreds of vampyre lives. Many believed the fire had been set deliberately, probably by agents of the Church Militant, though there had been rumors at the time that a Rogue vampyre had been responsible.
I moved across the room, purposely ending up near the huge fireplace. Perhaps I could effect a change into something small and birdlike and escape up the chimney. With the cool marble protecting my back, I folded my arms across my chest and confronted Lilith. “I believe you have authorized a Hunt against me.”
She was staring at me. According to legend, when the world was newly formed she had been beautiful beyond compare, but that was before she had been cast out of Eden and consorted with demons. The Night Hag had not been beautiful in millennia. But now, with the evening gloom blurring the lines of her face, leaving only her blue eyes clearly visible, bright and almost innocent, I could understand how Adam had been seduced by her.
And then she laughed. It was the most terrifying sound I have ever heard. If evil had a voice, then this was it. When the laugh trailed off, she stepped closer to me, put her hands on her hips, and snarled. “No, Ovsanna, I have not authorized a Hunt against you. It is I who have declared war on you! I have been hunting you!”
She slashed out with her right hand and her claws raked across my face, shredding the flesh on my cheek. My fangs unsheathed, my talons extended, I went for her throat, but her creatures were on me before I got to her flesh.
I am Dakhanavar, vampyre elite, trained from the moment of my birth as a killer. I fought back. I kicked and slashed, tore flesh with my teeth, sliced through bodies with my claws, ripped through dhampirs and were-creatures. I could see Lilith standing back, arms folded across her chest, her bizarre wedding dress splashed with my dark blood. She was urging on her female vampyres. I fell back under the onslaught, leaving Dearg Due and Bobhan Sith writhing on the floor in pools of their own blood and intestines.
There was a moment when I thought I was going to make it, when the door was in sight, and then the Ancients attacked….
Chapter Thirty-Four
Palm Springs
5:00 P.M.
Pasty-faced little fuck.
Not the most politically correct way to describe someone suffering from albinism. But in this case, probably accurate.
Eva Casale, the special effects woman at Anticipation, had been seen with an albino. Milla Taylor, currently in two parts on the coroner’s table, was also seen in the company of an albino.
And now Ovsanna Moore had come to Palm Springs to visit the same albino.
I have to admit that I was disappointed. I didn’t want Ovsanna to be guilty, but the evidence never lies, as the guy on CSI says all the time, and then goes on to prove how it does. Someone with a lot more common sense would have waited for backup, but I was still working on the assumption that Ovsanna trusted me enough to talk face-to-face. I needed to ask her why and how and all those other good questions a nosy detective likes to put to a suspect.
I wandered back to the Bobs, careful to keep my excitement under control. “We’re going to need a search warrant for the Eden property and the grounds where the SUV is parked. Don’t look,” I added quickly.
The two Bobs swiveled in their seats to look at the house up the road. Montoya looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. “Do we have just cause?” he asked.
“Witness statement,” I said vaguely. “How fast can you get it?”
“Are you kidding? This is Palm Springs and it’s five o’clock. Every judge in town is either playing tennis or on his second martini. It’s gonna take a while.”
“Well then, here’s what I want you to do. It’s a private road, right? No exit past the house? Get as many units as you can and seal off this end of the road. But tell them to come in with their lights off. It’s dark enough out here and we’re far enough away, they may not be visible from the house. Then get Captain Barton in BHPD. Tell him I believe the occupants of the house are directly involved in the Cinema S
layer crimes and that we’re going to need a SWAT team just to get into the building, Let him take it from there. Now go; get the roadblocks set up.”
“Where are you going?”
I nodded up the road toward the house. “Going to knock on a door.”
“Is that wise?” Montoya asked, peering shortsightedly at the house.
“Probably not.”
I wanted ten minutes alone with Ovsanna. I needed to look her in the eye and hear what she had to say one more time. I was sure now she’d lied to me about the threatening phone calls, but I still didn’t have a clue what her part was in the multiple murders. All my instincts told me she wasn’t a killer. But my instincts wanted to throw her down on a bed and climb inside her, too, so it seemed pretty obvious my instincts couldn’t be trusted.
And if she was guilty, I wanted to make the arrest myself. In part, because I wanted to protect her—from the treatment she’d get without me around and from the media. And in part, because I’m no fool. I knew how this would look in my file. Maybe Dominick Dunne would write my story for Vanity Fair. “The Final Curtain: Capturing the Cinema Slayer.” Give me something else to tape up in my locker and remind myself sometimes that I know what I’m doing.
If Ovsanna weren’t involved, she could have bought the movie rights for Anticipation. Get Viggo Mortensen to play me. Johnny Depp isn’t tall enough.
The wall around the house was fifteen feet high, at least; big double doors were set into the center of the wall, with a smaller arched door to one side. The intercom was set into the wall beside the smaller arched door. I unsnapped the restraining strap and loosened the Glock in its holster. Maral had said Ovsanna had gone inside. With the car where it was, I figured she was still in there, maybe with the albino. And where the fuck was Maral?
I was just about to press the intercom button when I spotted something sparkling on the ground. I knelt and, shielding my pen-light from above, flashed it over the dirt. Grains of glass twinkled back at me. I picked up a handful of glass and dirt and let the dirt sift through my fingers. The glass was safety glass. Some of the pieces had dried blood on them. Still crouching, I turned my head and aimed the light back toward the SUV. From this low angle, I could see a trail of fragments leading from the black SUV driver’s door—right to where I was standing.
Vampyres of Hollywood Page 24
