When I first met Rodolfo Alfonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina in 1918, he’d just arrived from New York, where he’d been working as a gardener, a dishwasher, and a dancer. It took three years in Hollywood before he got his first break in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and his nickname Tango Legs. When The Sheik appeared later that same year, “Tango Legs” gave way to “Latin Lover.” He was handsome, charming, a wonderful actor…and completely self-absorbed. Along with millions of other women across the globe, I fell instantly in love with him. And I believe he loved me. Briefly. As much as Rudy could love anyone. I Turned him, made him vampyre to preserve his beauty and, in truth, to keep him for myself. That didn’t work. What can I say? I was young; I was in love.
Calling upon all my reserves and more than a century of acting skills, I kept the pain out of my face. “How long have you been plotting this, Rodolfo?” I knew he hated being called Rodolfo; it reminded him of his middle-class Italian upbringing.
“Decades, Ovsanna, decades.”
Rudy stopped directly in front of me. I was pinned two feet off the floor, so he had to look up into my face. He had looked dissolute yesterday, but today he was even worse. The bruises beneath his eyes and his black tongue suggested that he was overindulging in blood, and probably tainted blood at that. I could smell its rancid stink.
“Once Hollywood belonged to me.” Rudy tossed his headdress off his face with a carefully practiced gesture. All he needed was a camera. “I was the most famous actor of my day.”
Douglas and Charlie both stirred and opened their mouths to respond, but Rudy pressed on, lost in his own private fantasy.
“My career should have spanned decades. But you convinced me otherwise.”
“I told you if you died, then you would become immortal,” I said through gritted teeth. “You needed to disappear, Rodolfo. You had made too many enemies, both mortal and immortal.”
Rudy spun away, cloak swirling behind him. “You became jealous of me. All of you. I was a threat to your egos. You made me die too young.”
“It was a beautiful funeral, though, much grander than mine,” Olive observed.
“I’m sure you all enjoyed it,” Rudy snarled, glancing sidelong at Pola. “Walking those eleven blocks jammed with eighty thousand of my distraught fans, I realized then what a mistake I had made.”
“You could have come back,” Charlie suggested, his British accent still clear after all these years. He nodded towards me. “You could have done as Ovsanna has done: come back as a son or grandson. Valentino’s son would have worked.”
“You killed me,” he snarled, no longer pretty. “Wrote me out of Hollywood history.”
“Hardly,” Orson protested.
Rudy ignored him. “So I decided to destroy you…but more, much more than that, I decided to reclaim my city.”
“It was never your city,” I reminded him.
“It should have been.” He returned to stand before me. “I once asked you to marry me.”
“August 1925,” I said.
He blinked slowly, perhaps taken aback that I remembered. His black tongue curled across his lips. “You should have said yes.”
“Rodolfo, you didn’t love me. You wanted to make Natasha angry. I loved you once, Rudy, when I Turned you, but not then. Then, I knew who you were, what you were really capable of.”
“You should have said yes,” he repeated, eyes glazed and distant. “We could have ruled Hollywood. Chatelain and Chatelaine, Master and Mistress of the most powerful city on earth. Think of what we could have created, Ovsanna! We could have made an empire.” For a moment, emotion overtook him and I watched the Change flicker across his face: his features turned lupine and vicious. He shrugged and his face resumed its human form. “But no matter. It was you who taught me the value of time, Ovsanna. So I waited. I spent decades tracking Lilith’s whereabouts and then invited her to Hollywood as my guest.”
So the mystery of Lilith’s sudden appearance in California in the late sixties was finally explained. I’d always thought Manson had something to do with it.
“So tonight the old order changes.” He spun back down the room and drew the scimitar. This was no movie prop; the edge glittered in the light of the basement’s single bulb. “Tonight the Vampyres of Hollywood die the One True Death. At sunrise, Lilith and I will claim Los Angeles as our own, Master and Mistress of the City of Dreams.”
“And the rest of my clan?”
“Why, they will swear fealty to the new chatelaines. They’re actors, Ovsanna, most of them. They don’t care who represents them as long as they get work. My London agency will open an office in Hollywood; maybe I’ll take yours. And Anticipation will need a new studio boss. I can do what you’ve been doing and I can do it so much better. Perhaps it’s time for…The Return of the Sheik, time to introduce the world to the ‘new Valentino.’”
Pola spat at him, “What’s happened to you, Rudy? We are your friends, your admirers, your family in blood. You can’t destroy us. You can’t.”
“You are all nothing to me. I can destroy you, all of you, and I will. The Ancients will do it for me; they worship Lilith.”
“But not you,” I reminded him.
“They will,” he said confidently. He gestured around the room with the sword. “Tonight we dine on vampyre flesh, we sup vampyre blood. The youngest of you is nearly half a millennium, the oldest close to a thousand years old. Lilith has promised me that eating your flesh will grant me a lifetime of memories, knowledge, and experiences. No single vampyre has ever drunk the blood of eleven of the most powerful vampyres in the world. I will experience all the lives you have lived, and all that you have done. That will make me the equal of Lilith.”
Chaplin stirred. “There are twelve of us here. Who escapes your Last Supper?”
“Ah, yes, the lucky one,” Rudy whispered. He walked down the basement to stand below me again. “Lilith has a special treat in store for you.” His voice was rising, bloody black spittle flying from his lips. “You could have made me the ruler of Hollywood, you could have saved me, but no…no, you refused me; you forced me to die, destroyed my career, my life, cast me out into the shadows, where I watched lesser talents claim my throne.”
“Steady on,” Orson muttered. “You were a pretty face, Rudy. You were never that good.”
“It is not enough that I kill you, Ovsanna Hovannes Garabedian; I must destroy you, ruin your name and your reputation, ensure that you are written out of the annals of Hollywood.”
My senses flared and I knew what was about to happen even before Ghul appeared at the other end of the basement holding the limp body of Maral in his arms.
Rudy drove his sword into the floor and took Maral from the ghoul’s white hands. Then he turned and held her up to me like an offering. I smelled her sweet perfume and the bitterness of fresh blood on her flesh. There was a bruise over her right eye, a thin cut above her eyebrow.
“I’m going to kill her myself, right here, right now in front of you.”
I howled and shrieked, struggled against the metal spikes, wrenched hard enough to shift the stones in the wall. Blood, thick and black, flowed from my wounds, and I wept pale ichor. A dozen Changes warped my body, but to no effect: I remained pinned to the stones.
Rudy dropped Maral at my feet. “Tomorrow morning, her butchered body will be found in your home. There will be evidence of drugs, pornography, probably even cannibalism, and any other perversion I can think of. There will be items linking the previous murders to you, trophies from the scenes of each crime. It will be the biggest scandal ever to hit Hollywood and when it is over, your name will be a curse. You, of course, will be missing, and I doubt a worldwide search will ever find you: the Jimmy Hoffa of the entertainment industry.”
Ghul stepped forward and his thin lips cracked into a hideous smile. “Lilith has reserved you for herself as is her right. It will take her a month to devour you, and I will ensure that you survive till the last mouth
ful.”
Rudy laughed, the sound high-pitched and hysterical. “What do you have to say to that, Ovsanna Hovannes Garabedian, Chatelaine of Hollywood?”
Chapter Thirty-Six
PALM SPRINGS
5:50 P.M.
I was numb with horror and working purely on automatic. Breaking through the garden, I’d seen creatures beyond description. If I were still Catholic, I would have said that I’d seen devils from hell itself.
After that thing had taken Ovsanna, the rest of the monsters, the humans, and the peculiar beast people remained in the abattoir that was the living room. Gathered in a circle around the old Baby Jane woman in her weird, blood-spattered dress, they were eating the dead. The remains of my mother’s pizzaiolla were spattered on the trunk of the palm tree. I’d heaved until there was nothing left but clear bile.
My mind had shut down. I had only one thought: to rescue Ovsanna. I’d watched her almost fight her way out; I’d seen the others take her down and then the albino carry out her unconscious body. Whatever they had in mind for her, it certainly wasn’t good. I tracked the albino through the windows as he moved through the house, following his progress into what must have been a kitchen, except there was neither stove nor refrigerator there. These people ate their meat raw and bloody. The albino pulled open a door and disappeared down a flight of stairs. Seconds later, he turned on a dim light on the first floor and then disappeared again, down another flight of stairs. Whatever room he was going to, there were no windows; it was belowground. Basement, probably. He reappeared on the second floor a few minutes later and tossed a bloody hammer on the kitchen table. Something inside me twisted and I swore that if I found Ovsanna’s corpse down there, I was going to put a bullet into the pasty-faced fuck, but only after I had messed him up with the hammer. Petty, I know, but I was in a petty frame of mind.
I got as far to the end of the palm as I could, held the Glock above my head, and dropped feetfirst into the moat. It wasn’t deep, but it was stocked with things I was glad I couldn’t see in the dark. Something slimy, with rubbery suckers, wrapped around my leg. I pounded on it with the handle of the Glock and it let loose just as a fucking fish bit into my ankle. I could hear more of them swimming toward me as I got my feet on land. I was missing a two-inch chunk of flesh from the back of my foot.
I kept my eyes fixed on the second-floor living room while I used my gun to hack through some of the cactus. The feast—there was no other way to describe it—was a scene by Hieronymus Bosch: women coupling with the leather-skinned beasts; animal-like creatures mounting one another in the midst of the blood, bones, and gore. In the middle sat the Bette Davis look-alike—cackling with glee.
I’m not the brightest, I know that. Sometimes it’s been my saving grace. I didn’t dwell on the implications of what I was seeing, didn’t try to make sense of it. I ignored the scene in the room because I could do nothing about it; I just broke it down into its simplest components. All I knew for a certainty was that a woman was being held hostage and I needed to rescue her. I’d work out the details later. If there was a later.
I’d made it past the Spanish dagger and prickly pear and was climbing up the base of the bridge when the steel gate opened and a cloaked figure came through. I had the Glock ready to fire, but as it got closer I discovered I wasn’t looking at another beast. If I hadn’t been so terrified and sickened, I’d have laughed out loud. He looked liked Rudolph Valentino in those Sheik movies he did in the twenties. He was wearing a costume that was a cross between an Arab sheik and a Spanish bullfighter. The whole ensemble came complete with a sword and cape. He brushed past above me, close enough to touch, and disappeared through the front door.
I pulled myself up on the bridge and followed him into a dimly lit foyer just in time to see him go down the stairs to the ground floor.
The orgy in the living room had reached a crescendo. No one was paying attention to anything they weren’t eating or screwing, and the old lady seemed mesmerized at the sight of it all. I dropped down to the ground on my belly and inched to the stairway door near the kitchen. The hall below me was empty. Bloody boot prints tracked across the tile floor and disappeared down another set of stairs.
I was at the top of the first set of stairs, just about to continue down, when the albino came out of a room below and stepped into the hallway there. Seen close up, he was an ugly misshapen son of a bitch, with tiny red eyes and skin the color of dead fish. He was carrying a limp Maral McKenzie in his arms. As he walked below me, I caught the stink of something foul, and I clenched my teeth to keep down what little bile I had left: he smelled like dead fish, too. He disappeared down the second set of stairs.
I needed to get down there. Holding the Glock close to my chest, I slipped from my hiding place and darted into the kitchen. Pressing flat against the wall, I risked a quick look downstairs. There was the hint of light from below and I could hear the murmur of voices. Snatching the hammer from the kitchen table, I shoved it into my belt and took the first step on the stairs, keeping close to the edges, hoping that none of them squeaked.
I could hear the indistinct drone of a voice and then someone started screaming.
The noise was the most terrifying sound I had ever heard. It was pain personified, overlain with a howl of raw anger, rage, and terror, and it was coming from Ovsanna. It took an enormous effort of will not to rush down the steps. In a way I was grateful for the sound, because it meant that she was still alive.
I heard a second voice, a man’s voice, gloating, arrogant. “Tomorrow morning, her butchered body will be found in your home.”
I was guessing it was the Valentino knockoff. And he could only be talking to Ovsanna.
Four steps from the bottom, I crouched down and peered into the basement. From my position on the stairs, I could only see a segment of the room, a length of dirt floor and about a foot of the wall. Standing five feet in front of me was the albino in his tuxedo. Directly in front of him, I could see the booted legs of the costumed Sheik. Maral’s unmoving body was lying on the ground before him. There was no sign of Ovsanna.
The Sheik continued his ranting, and I realized I was listening to a confession. “There will be evidence of drugs, pornography, probably even cannibalism, and any other perversion I can think of. There will be items linking the previous murders to you, trophies from the scenes of each crime. It will be the biggest scandal ever to hit Hollywood and when it is over, your name will be a curse. You, of course, will be missing, and I doubt a worldwide search will ever find you: the Jimmy Hoffa of the entertainment industry.”
I padded down the last few steps and pressed myself flat against the wall, my gun ready to fire. There was a second voice, the accent unlike any I had ever heard before, the sound cracked and broken, and I knew immediately it was the albino. “Lilith has reserved you for herself as is her right,” he grated. “It will take her a month to devour you, and I will ensure that you survive till the last mouthful.”
My stomach flipped. After everything I had just witnessed, I had no doubts these people were serious. And then the Sheik laughed and the sound was pure insanity. “What do you have to say to that, Ovsanna Hovannes Garabedian, Chatelaine of Hollywood?”
I’d heard enough. Holding the Glock in both hands, I stepped into the basement. “Put your hands up, you murdering little fucker!”
There were probably two seconds of absolute shocked silence, and I needed them to make sense out of what I was seeing: The walls of the basement were hung with men and women, arms outstretched, crucified with spikes through their wrists and ankles. Ovsanna was hanging on the end wall, facing me. Appallingly, they were all still alive and their heads turned as one in my direction.
The albino spun and lurched toward me, arms outstretched, mouth opening wide to reveal a circular maw of triangular teeth that never belonged in a human mouth. I pulled the trigger on the Glock and kept pulling, starting low and letting the recoil bring the gun up along his body. I load the Glock with Cor-
Bon 115-grain HJP +P rounds. One round will take the average person down and make sure they don’t get up. It took five rounds at almost point-blank range to even slow the albino. I watched huge gobbets of white flesh and stringy black blood erupt from his back. His giant hands fell on my shoulders, almost driving me to my knees. I knew if I went down, I was dead. He opened his mouth wide and dipped his head toward my face. Ramming the long, square barrel of the gun into his open mouth, snapping some of the ragged teeth, I pulled the trigger. Twice.
The shots lifted him off the ground and the top of his bald head popped off like a busted cantaloupe as he went tumbling away. He hit the ground five feet away from me—and exploded into black molasses-like sludge.
Everyone in the room, including the people nailed to the wall, exhaled in disgust.
The Sheik came at me with his sword, his eyes wide and utterly mad. There was something wrong with his face; in the light of the single bulb, which was now dripping black gore, it looked as if he were changing into some sort of dog.
“Who…who…who…,” he panted like a marathon runner.
“Peter,” Ovsanna said, her voice calm and controlled, despite the excruciating pain she must have been in. “The others will be here. Shoot him and free us.”
The Sheik turned and slashed at her with the sword, opening a wound across her belly and down onto her thighs.
I shot him in the right kneecap, sending him crashing to the ground. Then I shot him in the left for good measure. At this range the 115-grain round practically tore his legs off. He flapped on the ground, howling, clutching his shattered legs.
“Peter,” Ovsanna said evenly, “you must sever his spine to complete his death.”
I was about to protest when the thrashing man suddenly went silent and started to change. Something terrible was happening to his body, something that snapped bones and rent flesh. I heard muscles tear and cartilage grind.
Vampyres of Hollywood Page 26
