Dante's Awakening

by Devon Marshall

“What do you want I should bring? Vodka, gin, or scotch?” she asked.

  “All of them,” I told her. I hung up on more raucous laughter.

  I love Lydia. I truly do. There are very few genuine people in Hollywood, let me assure you. In this town everything from the images audiences see on the screen to the tits on most of the women are all fake. No one ever says what they really mean, and half of them don’t even know what they mean anyway because they are either too stupid, too self-involved, or too doped-up to know or care. Everyone, however, has an angle, and they will display a stunning breadth and depth of cunning in pushing that angle. Lydia is the real thing behind all the smoke and mirrors. She might scream at everyone, from her husbands to delivery boys, and enjoy scaring the crap out of them all, but she cares about the job she does, she cares about movies and TV, and she cares passionately about those she considers to be her real friends. Like me. I know there is nothing in this world that I could not ask Lydia to do for me, and nothing that I could not tell her and be sure it would remain forever in her confidence. Pliers and hot pokers would not pry it from her lips.

  That said, Lydia is also a fantastic source of gossip. It is from Lydia that I have learned some of the most spectacular scandal. It was Lydia who told me about the impossibly handsome ’80’s brat-pack actor who got high in the company of a certain European royal with supermodel looks and a body to die for. And it was Lydia who told me about the beloved actress in a ’90’s family TV sitcom who was a closet dyke into serious S&M. Having a few drinks with Lydia is about the most fun you can have with your clothes on in this town.

  My friend did not disappoint tonight either. She brought Messrs. Daniels, Gordon and Stolichnaya to the party, and a little bit of weed too. I know I said I dislike testing the inherited addiction thing, but there are times when you just have to let loose and damn the consequences. This was definitely one of those times. We enjoyed a few hours by my pool before it got too cold and we had to retreat indoors, taking our drinking, smoking and gossiping with us. No mention of vampires or Children of Judas, or warring vampire lovers. Just delicious, scandalous, human gossip. For a butch dyke, I can be such a girlie at times.

  Eventually Lydia did get around to inquiring about the state of play with Ellis Kovacs and me. “That is one hot vampire,” she said, her eyes narrowing. She practically licked her lips. I looked at her in some surprise. Lydia is about the straightest heterosexual I know. In Hollywood, those are a rare find. Like real tits, or real emotions. She shrugged at my surprise. “I know it’s not my thing usually, but there’s just something about Ellis Kovacs. I certainly wouldn’t kick her outta bed for eating crackers, you know? So, where are you two at?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know…” I told her about Holly Bush Junction, and about the way Ellis had acted over my impending dinner date with someone else, or at least I told her some of it. I left out the blood drinking and the crazy-jealous tantrum Ellis had thrown, and the fact that the dinner could be a trap to lure me into the hands of the Children of Judas. I left them out too. I did mention that Ellis had called me her “girlfriend.”

  “How’d you feel about that?” Lydia asked. She snickered, acknowledging the shrinky feel of the question.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I…guess I liked it. But it also kind of scared me. They can be so fucking possessive, vampires. And you know my commitment-phobia.”

  Lydia mulled it over some, then asked succinctly, “But why would you even want to have dinner with someone else if you’ve got Ellis Kovacs wanting you to be her girlfriend?”

  That was a question I had been avoiding asking myself ever since I had accepted Sheriff Bartlett’s invitation. Let me see…I really am scared shitless of commitment for one thing. My mom never cheated on my dad but that’s only because she found the love of her life in addiction. Dad cheated on Mom, I’m sure he did, probably lots of times, but he was always very discreet, and who could have blamed him anyway? He was coming home to a woman zoned out of her gourd on every shade of pill known to pharmacology. I think Milton is faithful to his vampire wife. Anyway, I’m pretty sure she would have killed him already if he had not been. So my commitment phobia is neither inherited nor a learned response. You could blame it on Hollywood not being the best place to date if you are looking for long-term loving commitment, I suppose, but that’s not it either. I don’t need to date in Hollywood after all.

  “I think it’s because I kind of like Voshki too,” I confessed to Lydia.

  Her eyebrows went all the way up. “But you keep turning her down?”

  “I know!” I wailed.

  “They’re two very different things, aren’t they?” Lydia said softly. I tilted a look at her, demanding an explanation. She sucked deeply on a joint first, handed it to me, and on the exhale she explained: “If neither of them were vampires, Vosh would be purely fun and froth. She’s the kinda gal that will take you for a spin up the PCH in her sexy sports car, screw you silly and then wave hasta la vista to you in the morning. Ellis, on the other hand, would be a keeper.”

  Trust Lydia, she had nailed it. Ellis Kovacs, you fall in love with. Voshki Kevorkian, you lust after. Well, that’s the way it would be if they were human, and not possessive, jealous vampires who want you all to themselves. Even when they don’t want you, or have you. I smiled at my friend. “They’re Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner, is that what you’re saying?”

  Lydia cackled wildly. She nodded too, knowing exactly what I meant.

  “Do you think Vosh is gonna drive straight to this Fuck Bush place tomorrow?” she asked then.

  I didn’t bother to correct Lydia as I had Voshki. Lydia knew what the place was really called. I shook my head. “I don’t suppose she will,” I said dryly. I drained my glass, held it out for a refill. “She’ll probably make a detour to some out-of-the-way little eatery, kinda sexy in a shabby Hemingway sort of way, ply me with beers and seafood, and then try to take advantage of me in that sexy sports car of hers.”

  “Will you resist?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Lydia snickered. “Good luck with that.”

  I sighed, laid my head back and gazed up at the ceiling. Outside the French doors I could hear the breeze had gotten up, ruffling the water of my lap pool. Unlike most Hollywood denizens who have these lap pools added to the other accoutrements of their fame, I actually use mine for its intended purpose. I hate exercise in general, refuse to go within a mile of anything that has the name Nautilus on the side, and running, hiking, or even fast walking are all strictly for weirdoes—but I do enjoy swimming.

  “If I have sex with Vosh, it’ll drive Ellis crazy,” I said quietly.

  “You afraid of what she might do?”

  “No. I mean, yes, but not that she would hurt me or anything. I’m afraid she’d back off from me because Vosh is their leader and…and…” I waved a hand in the air to indicate that I could not explain the whole vampire etiquette thing. I did not need to anyway. Lydia knows about it as much as I do. She grunted. I blinked… “I don’t want to lose Ellis. For all I keep telling her, and myself, that I’m not her human or anyone else’s, I don’t want to lose her either.”

  “But you also want Vosh like a thirsty man in the desert wants water,” Lydia guessed.

  I nodded.

  “Ain’t life a bitch,” Lydia sighed. “One minute you’re getting none, and then the next you’ve got ’em all over you like bees round the pot and you don’t know which one to give your honey to first.”

  Amen.

  Much later, after copious amounts of coffee and orange juice to counteract the alcohol and weed I had consumed, I tossed and turned in my bed, unable to sleep due to a combination of the incipient hangover buzzing through my veins and the caffeine chasing it through there. I gave up the effort around three a.m. jerked out of bed and went outside onto the deck that adjoins my bedroom. It overlooks a steep canyon brimful of the kind of lush vegetation the Southern California climate was made for. Sometimes at n
ight you can hear the coyotes howling down there, and night birds of prey screeching, and very occasionally you will hear a sound that is not animal—but you don’t think too much about that. I lay down on a lounger there, and just listened to the nighttime go on around me, and I thought about how much I love this wacky city that is LA.

  I didn’t hear Ellis enter my house. I do lock my doors at night—I may not be paranoid enough to always close my gates, but I’m not suicidal either—but I’d left a window open on the second floor. I didn’t hear her walk out through the sliding doors behind me either. I only realized she was standing beside me because she cleared her throat.

  I shot upright, a scream ratcheting its way up my throat, only to get locked behind my teeth when I saw Ellis standing there and not some ax-wielding, grinning psycho. I have as active an imagination as any actress sometimes. I mean, don’t we all when it’s three a.m. and we are still a wee bit high?

  “Jesus H Christ on a bicycle!” I snapped. I glared and superfluously added, “You scared the living crap out of me!”

  “Sorry,” Ellis said, sounding genuinely contrite. I narrowed a look at her.

  “What the fuck are you doing here anyway?” I demanded. “I thought you went back to Holly Bush Junction?”

  She shook her head. A faint smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. It set off tugging sensations in other parts of my anatomy which I gamely tried to ignore. “I sent Samson on ahead. I think Amelia will be okay with him around.” She gave me an unblinking, direct look so full of lust it threatened to start a meltdown of my insides. “I wanted to tell you that I was sorry for what I did today. In Vosh’s office. It was… I mean, I shouldn’t have lost it like that. Sorry, Dante.”

  I shook my head. “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I—I knew what vampires were like before I got involved with you.”

  The smile tugged again. My insides caught fire. “Are we involved, Dante?” Ellis asked quietly.

  I did not even have to think about it. Not with her standing there on my deck, in the middle of the night, looking at me with those big, black eyes so soulful and penetrating all at once, the sheer want rippling off her so that it practically caused a disturbance in the air. She could not have been more lovable to me right then if she had been covered in chocolate and puppies. Also, to be fair, there was that matter of still being a wee bit high.

  “Yeah, we’re involved in something,” I told her. I smiled. “I’m not sure what it is exactly yet, but it’s…something. Maybe I am your girlfriend, after all.”

  She nodded. And then she was kissing me and I was kissing her, and there was that liquid fire boiling under my skin again as she peeled off my robe and my t-shirt underneath it and skimmed down my boxers. I kicked them free and she climbed between my legs. “Is this contraption gonna hold?” she murmured as the lounger beneath us pinged and creaked in protest.

  I nodded. Actually I didn’t know whether it would hold or not, but I didn’t care either. I could have cared less if the whole damn deck fell away and went careening down the canyon side. Just so long as Ellis did not stop what she was doing. She had a hand cupped to my crotch, lightly playing two fingers over my clit as she trailed her tongue languidly from my neck to between my breasts, down my stomach, probing with the tip against my clit until I squirmed and the lounger squalled. This time when she sank her fangs into me there was only a moment of pain before the head-spinning rush. She lapped up my blood whilst she kept me hovering on the brink of orgasm, not allowing me to get there until she was done feeding, and then she completed the job with her tongue. We moved inside then, mainly because I thought I felt a spring snap on the lounger and I really did not want the thing to collapse and me to have to spend the rest of the night in the ER, trying to figure out a way to explain my injuries. Or the fang marks. I also wanted to take a shower, as much to wash away the remnants of Lydia’s weed as the blood Ellis had left smeared all over my inner thighs. Sexy it might be getting bitten at the moment of screaming orgasm, but not so much seeing your own blood congealing on you afterwards.

  Ellis decided to join me in the shower. She stripped, stepped into the stall behind me under the steaming hot jets of water, slipping both arms around me and taking the washcloth from me. She soaped it, draped it over one hand, and slowly rubbed the cloth down the outside of my right thigh, then up the inside, stopping when the side of her hand touched my crotch. I leaned back against her, feeling her breasts, the nipples erect, pressing against my shoulder blades. Her face came down over my left shoulder until her fangs touched my neck, but she did not bite. Instead she kissed my neck, the side of my jaw, all the way up to my earlobe, lightly nibbling there. I jumped, gasped a little. My hands went around her waist. I clutched at her taut, slippery-wet ass and pulled her hard against me. She rinsed the washcloth, soaped it once more, and repeated the slow, sensual rub down and up my left thigh. This time, however, she did not stop at my crotch but gently washed it too in a way that almost made me come again. I stepped abruptly around so that I could look right into the hot red glow of her eyes as I touched her. She dropped the washcloth, grabbed the wet hair at the back of my head in one fist and pulled me into a kiss, pushing one knee roughly between my thighs. I raised one leg, wrapped it around her waist, resting my weight on her hip, one hand on her ass whilst the other braced the wall behind me. Her other hand slipped between my legs and she rubbed my clit, slowly to begin with, getting faster and harder as I came closer to orgasm. Just as I was about to come, she broke our kiss, letting go of my hair, and whipped her head sideways. Her fangs tore a gash in the soft underside of her own wrist, which she then pressed to my mouth.

  I drank her blood as greedily as a man in the desert would drink water whilst she fucked me like she both hated me and loved me.

  “I promise I won’t let anything happen to you,” Ellis said a little later when we were both lying in my bed, naked, still damp, and in my case anyway, pleasantly sleepy.

  I summoned the energy to turn my head on the pillow and look into her eyes. They were no longer glowing but that did not make them any less intense. Ellis was kind of intense all over. That scared me and thrilled me in equal amounts. Like I said, I am commitment-phobic and that means I try to avoid involvement with intense types. Too often “intense” is a metaphor for crazy, obsessive, stalker-type. Or at the very least the type who, after two dates, will be leaving magazines full of wedding pictures open on your coffee table.

  “I mean with Sheriff Bartlett,” Ellis added.

  I nodded. “I know what you meant. I’ll be fine. What can she do to me anyway? It isn’t as if she’s a vampire, is it?”

  “No. But she could be acting under their influence.”

  I frowned at that notion. “You didn’t feel anything like that from her, did you?”

  “The Children of Judas have a…special kind of influence. They can glamour people in such a way that…” Ellis was frowning now too, which did not make me feel one bit better… “Whatever. It means other vampires can’t pick up anything from the human. Normally, we can at least tell if a human is under glamour.”

  Terrific. A sheriff under the influence of a vicious vampire sect and normal vampires couldn’t tell whether she was under any such influence, and I was about to sit down to dinner with the woman. Hey, who knew—I could wind up being dinner. I wondered if Lydia would be interested in acquiring the rights to this, if I were to get someone to write it? It would make The Vampire Diaries look like Children’s Hour. I was also liking the sound of Judas’s godforsaken Children less and less.

  “She won’t lay a hand on you, I promise, “Ellis said, and I believed her. She kissed me again briefly, too briefly, and got up from the bed to put her clothes back on, which I also wished she didn’t have to do.

  “I need to get up to that crappy little town before Vosh,” she told me with a wry smile. “She would not be pleased if she knew I was here with you instead of there with her precious sister.”

  “Amelia doesn’t
need you and Samson both to look out for her, like you said. Vosh just wanted you away from me,” I said. Wow, how astute am I then?

  Ellis laughed. “I’ll see you later, Dante,” she said. She paused buttoning her jacket and gave me a direct look that stabbed me in the heart. “When you’re with Vosh…try to resist if she makes any attempt to seduce you, please?”

  It was already near dawn and the sun was peeking over the rim of the canyon, so there was enough light in the room for Ellis to see the blush that erupted into my face. She took a breath. I shook my head. “Don’t. I’ll try, okay?” I told her. There was no point in lying, telling her that I would resist, when I had no clear idea whether I could or not. My blush had given it away already that the thought of being seduced by Voshki was on my mind. Promising I would attempt to resist was the best I could give to Ellis. She knew it and nodded.

  And then she was gone and I felt alone. And sad. Like you feel when the person you love is not there.

  Oh boy. Falling in love with Ellis Kovacs was so not something I had planned on doing. Too bad though, because I thought I might just be.

  CHAPTER NINE

  After catching a few hours of much needed sleep, I called Roz again at the office, did some more catching up with her and gave her new instructions. There were no immediate crises that needed my attention, which is testimony to how efficient Roz is. That done, I made myself some breakfast. Surprisingly, the hangover that seemed incipient last night was gone completely, like I’d never touched a drop of alcohol or weed. I figured it had something to do with drinking Ellis’s blood. That could get pretty addictive in its own right.

  As it turned out, Voshki did not try to put any moves on me during our journey. We drove straight to Holly Bush Junction in the Viper without stopping and she did not once attempt to so much as accidentally-on-purpose brush my knee with her hand as she was shifting gears. Frankly I did not know whether I should be more insulted, disappointed or relieved by this. When we got to Holly Bush Junction, she gave me an explanation…of sorts.