I want to tell him what’s happened to me. I’m the furthest thing from okay—I’ve become a blood donor. I want to curl up and cry on his shoulder.
“Just anxious. No big deal.”
“Your first day openly working among vampires was no big deal?”
Some of the dark ice that formed around my heart when Lillian bit me chips away. “Well, we do have a slaughter to prevent this weekend.”
He raises an eyebrow. “We do?” He squeezes my hand. “Sounds like a date. I went home during lunch and packed a bag. Don’t be freaked out or anything, but I’m going to be by your side until we know you’re safe.”
I love this protective streak he’s displayed ever since he found out about the vampires. I wonder how he’s going to react when he sees the teeth marks on my wrist.
He catches my expression. “You don’t want me to stay over?”
“No! Of course I do!”
My enthusiasm is a tad too transparent. James grins. “I’ll sleep on the sofa, if you want, but I’m not leaving you by yourself.”
“My aunt’s apartment is awfully huge,” I point out to him. “You might need to stick a bit closer than that.”
We agree to meet by the door in an hour, and I plunge into the crowd to find Annabel. I need to talk to her privately, before Rachel and Nin catch up to me.
I find her standing in the long line for the garage’s single unisex bathroom. “Kate!” she squeezes my hand. “Hi, lady. I’m so glad to see you! What do you think of the photos?”
“Cynical, high gloss, morally bankrupt, from what I was able to see of them.”
“They’re brilliant, right?” She gives me a dazzling grin. “I shouldn’t be telling you, but the photographer is one of us. Photographers almost always are.”
I wonder if Giedra Dylan-Hall is a vampire. If she’s in on this scheme with Lexa, she must also be a murderous rogue vampire as well as a high-profile photographer.
Speaking of high profile…the person standing directly in front of us in line is a famous downtown celebrity wearing the season’s most coveted Chanel neck-ruffle and a faux-soiled Paul Smith tuxedo.
“Do you see his tux?” Annabel whispers to me. “It’s dirtied with Prada Earth. I can smell it. It must have cost a fortune.”
There is something strange here. “Why are you in line for the bathroom, anyway?” I ask her.
She smiles at me, showing her tiny fangs, and jerks her head toward the celeb. “He’s a blood donor.”
“What are you doing?” I have a bad feeling about this.
“Wait and see.”
The bathroom door opens and three girls come out together.
I really don’t want to wait and see. Also, if Nin and Rachel spot me this close to a celebrity, they’re going to make a bee-line over here.
I cup my hand close to Annabel’s ear and say, “I think Lexa has been the one doing the fashion murders.”
“Why do you say that?” She looks cautious.
“The Tasty Girl shoot. Hasn’t it occurred to you that Lexa’s interest in the girls’ backgrounds and medical histories is beyond the scope of a modeling contest? She’s not picking models, she’s picking victims. She’s bringing them up to those woods to kill them.”
“She wouldn’t. That would be professional suicide.” Annabel’s lip quirks. Clearly, she wouldn’t mind if Lexa did commit professional suicide. “Even Lillian would have to get mad if she brought suspicion on the magazine like that.”
“But we both know Lexa’s not the most rational decision-maker. She might think she can get away with it. Or she might be so sick of dieting that she doesn’t care.”
“How sad if she got caught, then,” Annabel says facetiously. “Come on, he’s moving!”
As the star opens the bathroom door, Annabel swarms up behind him. Her highlighted head leans close to his ear and she whispers something. I see him startle, then hear her laugh. She steps inside with him. I hesitate briefly on the threshold and then follow her, ignoring the chorus of protest from the people behind me in line. I’m not done talking with her yet.
Up close, the guy looks bad. He’s pale, breathing heavily, and weaving unsteadily on his feet. Before he became the actor-auteur-director he is today, he was a model. He has that famished frame and a very pretty face. His bloodshot eyes are the deepest, brightest shade of cornflower blue I’ve ever seen on a human being.
“You have blow?” he asks in a faraway voice.
Annabel ignores him. “This is the hard part,” she tells me. Her face assumes an expression of intense concentration. “The victim should get sleepy and go into a trance. The blood donors don’t complain afterward because they don’t remember. It’s fuzzy, like a dream.”
The guy leans against the sink, gazing passively at us through half-lidded eyes.
“The older a vampire is, the better she is at numbing the victim. And the more often someone has been bitten, the easier they are to numb. If this guy was untouched, I wouldn’t have been able to do this.”
Someone starts pounding on the bathroom door.
Right. To business. “Don’t you think we should do something about Lexa and the Tasty Girls?” I blurt. “It’s going to be a bloodbath up there. And even if that doesn’t bother you, it’s bad for the magazine.” I try to speak in language she’ll understand. “As her assistant, you might be implicated!”
Annabel pulls aside the neck ruffle, revealing two deep-crusted holes in the man’s white neck. The edges of the wounds are bleached dry, their centers black with clotted blood.
“Annabel! Are you listening to me?”
She tenderly brushes strands of his limp red-gold hair away from his ear and then lowers her mouth to drink. He doesn’t resist, but when her lips touch his skin, his body trembles violently.
I’m transfixed with horror. The back of my friend’s ash-blond head bobs slightly as she sucks. In the quiet bathroom I can hear her guttural swallows.
In my pocket, my cell phone beeps. Nervously, I pull it out to discover that I have a new text message.
Are you thirsty?-SO
My skin crawls. Someone out there—probably someone who has to pee—is SO. I’m being watched. My chest gets tight.
“Stop!” I yell at Annabel. “We have to talk. Now. You can’t want this shoot to happen, you said your…kind is careful when it comes to humanity. You have to help!” I am really cracking up. I might cry.
Annabel releases the guy and snaps the neck ruffle back into place. She grimaces at me, revealing incisors tipped scarlet with blood.
“Kate,” she says, “you have to let fashion police itself. If Lexa does what you say she’s going to do, the consequences will be immediate and harsh. It will be a good thing in the long run. I won’t interfere.”
I lean back against the bathroom wall, fighting back tears. I’d really hoped that she would take my side.
She pats the blood donor on the cheek.
“He doesn’t have much left,” she says. “People must be hitting him every few minutes.”
“Why does he come to places like this?” I mutter resentfully. “He must know on some level that it’s dangerous.”
Annabel pulls a tube of M.A.C. lipstick out of her purse and starts freshening up. “All the donors are slaves to fashion. We have a symbiotic relationship.”
“And now he won’t remember anything? Is he going to be okay?”
Annabel dips back into her clutch for a glassine Baggie full of white powder.
“He’s gonna be feeling great in just a minute.”
Quickly—because people are freaking out with the door-pounding at this point—she lays out lines on the edge of the sink. Eyes closed, the donor snorts a couple of times, breathes deeply, rubs his nose, then opens them, seeing us as if for the first time.
“Thanks. You ladies are the greatest,” he slurs at us. “You want to dance?”
“We’re huge fans of your work!” Annabel trills, unlocking the door.
“Hey
, what’s your names?” he calls after us. “I’ve got a suite at the Mercer!”
Annabel heads to the bar for a chaser. Trembling, I scan the bathroom line, looking for Felix or Rico or any of the other people I’ve suspected might write StakeOut. Suddenly all the New York City glitterati look alike to me. That Asian girl in the tent-sleeved top and shorty leggings—wasn’t she at the other parties I went to? What about the gym-bodied guy with short dark hair and stubble? I’ve seen him before. And the tall, very braless redhead wearing a black-and-white-striped leotard? I saw her talking to James at Carnivoré. I glare at her and she glares back.
Someone grabs my arm.
“We saw you go into the bathroom,” Rachel says. “Why did you bother to invite us if you were just going to go hide with your famous friends?”
“That’s okay,” Nin says with a touch of sarcasm. “She doesn’t have to take us everywhere.”
“He’s not a friend of mine. I just followed Annabel,” I protest.
Rachel shoves a highball glass of light green fluid into my hand. “Here’s your drink,” she says, and walks off.
I can’t take it anymore. “I’m going to go home,” I tell Nin, who’s looking at me resentfully. “I’ve had enough of this horror show.”
But of course it’s impossible to find James in the dense crowd. I try calling him, but when he picks up all I can hear is a blast of noise. I fight my way toward the door, where most of the photographers are clustered, and don’t see James but am in time to witness Lexa’s arrival. I guess the damage from the holy water wasn’t bad enough to keep her in for a night. While she’s still poised by the door, bathing in flashbulb adoration, Annabel dashes up to her and starts whispering. And I have an uneasy feeling that this conversation might concern me. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned my suspicions about the contest to Annabel. The two of them scan the crowd, as if they’re looking for someone. I really, really hope it’s not me.
“Hey,” a thrilling male voice with a mild Midwestern twang whispers in my ear. “You want to get out of here?” He found me. His lips are hot against my ear and I smell something—wine?—on his breath.
JAMES AND I alight from a taxi in front of Victoria’s. A speeding dark-haired apparition shoots from the lobby of Vic’s building and hurtles toward me. I’m opening my mouth to scream when I recognize Sylvia and the shriek of horror turns to one of joy. We hug and yell “Oh my God!” and “Honey!” until I notice that James has put his fingers in his ears.
“Sylvia—James. James—Sylvia,” I introduce them.
Sylvia’s eyes widen.
“James is staying with me now,” I tell her.
“I thought you were on the West Coast,” James says.
“I flew out because I’ve been worried about Kate.” Again, her glance asks me how much he knows about what’s been going on.
“James is fully up to speed,” I assure her.
And then I can’t restrain myself anymore. “Sylvia, you look amazing!” She really has lost weight and she’s wearing a cute, trendy outfit that still looks exactly like her style, but better. She seems more poised and confident than she used to.
“Thanks!” she says, and even this is more confident than I expect. I’m so happy for her.
WE SET up in Victoria’s living room. Before she left L.A., my best friend was busy. On the coffee table is her archive of vampire-related material. She’s also brought a rosary from Gucci with a huge, jewel-encrusted crucifix, stolen from her props closet, wooden doweling cut into ten-inch lengths, and an industrial-size bottle of Xanax. That last one’s for her, since the real-life existence of the monsters from her beloved books is proving more stressful than she anticipated.
While we talk, James is whittling the ends of the stakes into points, as per Sylvia’s instructions.
“…so I’m pretty sure that Lexa is planning to lure the Tasty Girls upstate to make fashion snuff. We have to go stop her.”
“How are we going to stop her?” Sylvia asks. Despite the Xanax, she sounds nervous.
“Well, we’re lucky that the only probable vampires on the call sheet are the photographer and the stylist.”
“I noticed that Lexa didn’t ask for a photo assistant for that shoot,” James adds.
“She’s keeping the numbers down so there will be more models to go around. This benefits us because there will be fewer opponents.”
“Three vampires still sounds like a lot of vampires,” Sylvia mentions.
“I know. We’re going to have to trap them somewhere so they can’t run or fly away from us. I told you how they move really fast, right?”
“You’ve mentioned it three times already,” she says.
I must be nervous.
“I’m not sure them running away from us is what we need to be worried about,” Sylvia adds.
I rub my temples with my fingertips. It’s late, I’m upset, and I’m not thinking clearly. “There’s a cellar at this place.” I recall Annabel standing close to the edge of a yawning black hole in the ground. “Maybe we can find a way to trap them in there.”
Blank stares greet this idea.
“Trap them how?” Sylvia asks, trying to be supportive.
“We’re thinking about this the wrong way,” James says. He puts down a finished stake and starts a new one. “Instead of confronting Lexa and her crew, why don’t we deprive them of their victims? Is there a way to prevent the models from showing up?”
He’s so good in a crisis.
“We could tell them the shoot is canceled!” I suggest. “By the time Lexa finds out they haven’t flown to New York, it will be too late.”
“What’s to stop her from rescheduling?” Sylvia asks.
“Nothing. But at least it would buy us some time. And Lexa would definitely get in trouble at work.” Anything that gets Lexa in trouble is a good idea in my book.
“Can it be done?” James asks me.
“They’re flying in tomorrow, so we would need to call them first thing. That might work. I don’t think anyone from Tasty is meeting them at the hotel,” I muse. “And Lexa’s traveling upstate separately from them, so she might not know anything is wrong until Sunday morning when the charter bus doesn’t show up.” I smile at him gratefully. I like this idea. “I wish we’d thought of this before I left work today. I could have brought contact info for all the contestants. As it is, we’re going to have to go into the Dark Tower to get it.”
“Then we’d better do it soon,” James says. “The ones that sleep in their offices will be back at dawn.”
“I don’t know if they sleep there on the weekends.”
He’s focusing on carving the stake, and doesn’t look at me. “I think we should play it safe and go now, not in the morning.”
“How are we going to get into the building in the middle of the night?”
“Easy. Big corporations want their employees to work ungodly hours. We just sign in.”
I don’t love the idea of venturing out into the night with Lexa suspicious and Lillian on the warpath, but we don’t have much choice.
“Oh, wow,” Sylvia says. “Do I get to see the cafeteria?”
Now that we have a plan, there’s just one more thing I need to share with them, but I feel reluctant, almost ashamed. I’ve been fiddling with the band of cloth around my wrist, uncertain of how to break the news, when James grabs my hand, turns my palm up, and kisses the inside of the wrist, looking up at me with intense, unreadable eyes. I try to pull my arm away. He turns and rests his cheek against the velvet band.
“Let me see it,” he says.
“How did you know?” I ask, still reluctant and ashamed.
“See what? What’s wrong?” Sylvia asks.
James sits up and unties the knot, his fingers working with delicate precision. The swathe of black silk falls to the floor, revealing the wound in all of its ugliness.
He licks his lips. Closes his eyes. Looks away. His hand tightens convulsively on my wrist.
“I’m going to kill her,” James says. “No matter what else happens, she’s dead.”
At the moment, I’m not going to argue with him.
17
A Dead Zone
DAWN WILL COME at 5:28 A.M. today. An hour before that we’re crossing onto Fifty-seventh Street, the Dark Tower looming before us when my phone rings. Not beeps, but actually rings.
“Who is calling me at three A.M.?” I ask no one in particular.
“Maybe your aunt,” Sylvia says hopefully. “It’s weird she didn’t call you back.”
In addition to the usual mess inside my bag, I now have sharpened stakes and the giant Gucci crucifix. By the time I find my phone, it’s stopped ringing. The number comes up Private Caller, a good sign that it may be my aunt.
I’m just slipping the receiver back into my purse when it starts to ring again.
“Hello?”
“May I speak to Kate, please?” It’s a woman’s voice, sounding hesitant.
“This is Kate,” I answer suspiciously.
There’s a long pause. “Kate, this is your mother.”
Adrenaline slams through my veins.
“Very funny,” I say. I don’t recognize her voice.
“It’s Eva. I realize you weren’t expecting to hear from me.”
I’ve imagined this conversation hundreds of times. I’ve prepared speeches. For a year or two I wrote letters even though I had no address to mail them to. Now I can’t think of a word to say.
“Hello?” she says. “Kate? Are you there?”
She disappears for six years and thinks she can just pick up the phone?
“Kate?” Sylvia’s face swims into my field of vision, looking concerned. I turn away from her. “I’m sorry, this is a bad time,” I tell Eva, aiming for an impersonal voice, the one I use to answer Lillian’s phone. “I have an urgent matter to deal with. Why don’t you call back in another few years?”
“Kate, please give me a chance. It’s important that I talk to you.”
“Look, the weepy mother-daughter reunion is going to have to wait.”
Behind me, Sylvia gasps.
“And we’re about to get cut off. I’m heading into the office and the building is kind of a dead zone.”
Blood Is the New Black Page 19
