Vamparazzi (32 page)

“Go figure.”

“Look,
I
knew I didn't have a criminal past. So I didn't think my former identity was relevant.”

“I'm pretty sure the cops like to be the ones who decide what's relevant in a murder investigation.”

“And apparently the wheels of justice turn slowly,” Daemon grumbled. “They've found out who I was, but they
haven't
yet determined that I have a clean past. Not to their satisfaction, anyhow. I gather that'll take a little longer.”

“But if you're telling the truth about that—”

“I am!”

“—then they'll find out, and they'll drop it. So cheer up. It'll blow over.”

“No, it won't,” he said desperately. “Not now that Tarr has caught a whiff of this. You're absolutely right about that.”

I didn't understand why this made Daemon look suicidal. “Okay. Tarr will print that you used to be a blameless guy named Danny Ravinsky. So what?”

He looked at me as if I were a pathetic half-wit.
“I'm Daemon Ravel.”

“Yes, I think you've established that.”

“
I
am a vampire!”

“Oh,
please
.” I turned to leave the room.

“I'm a romantic prince of the night, a mysterious figure who walks the edge of darkness, an icon of erotic desire.”

I turned back to him. “And because of that, I keep getting assaulted by your crazed fans!” I added, “I've meaning to kill you for that, by the way.”

“I'm a symbol of modern society's craving for magic and wonder in their drab little lives,” he insisted. “I'm a representative of man's struggle with his dark impulses and his quest to understand his primal nature.”

“And
I'm
about to barf.”

“I'm also a celebrity. The face of a national ad campaign. The star of my own TV show.”

“Canceled.”

“The title character in a sold-out off-Broadway play,” he continued. “And the first choice for the lead role in an upcoming movie.”

I blinked. “Really?”

“Yes! Plus,” he added, “I own a nice loft in Manhattan.”

Well, he had me there.

I said, “I gather none of this was true of Danny Ravinsky?”

“God, no.” He leaned back in his chair and contemplated the ceiling. “Danny was a middle-class kid from Gary, Indiana, who studied acting at a state college and then spent years doing summer stock, school tours, and industrial training films.”

“Well, that's an actor's life,” I said with a shrug. “That's how most of us get started.”

“It was
still
my life when I turned thirty.”

“And I
still
don't understand your tragic tone,” I said. “We become actors because we're driven to do this, Daemon. Because we can't stand
not
doing it. We get no guarantees about achieving success by a certain age—or
ever
. If you thought otherwise, then you were kidding yourself.”

“Thirty years old, and still doing crap acting gigs for low pay,” he said, ignoring me. “Still waiting tables most of the time, living in a low-rent apartment in Los Angeles, and driving a rusted-out death trap.”

Then a girl he knew asked him to participate in a performance piece for a Halloween event, and in playing a vampire for the first time, Danny began to glimpse his true destiny.

“I had always been an also-ran, offstage and on,” Daemon said with unprecedented candor. “Until that night. As a
vampire,
I stole the show! Sure, it was just a kitsch skit. But I'd never been a hit before. An audience had never
loved
my performance before. It's an amazing feeling! It's addictive.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“It's better than sex.”

“All too often,” I admitted.

“And speaking of sex, a dozen women gave me their phone numbers after the performance. I had a threesome with a pair of them that same night.”

“Too much information.”

“And I thought, Why do this only on Halloween? Why not keep it going year round?”

So he created his own street-performance act. Before long, he was making enough money, by passing the hat as a vampire, to see the greater potential in this role. He began gradually evolving a whole persona in tandem with his act and eventually decided to reinvent himself. Danny dyed his hair black and replaced his entire wardrobe with “vampire” clothing. He consulted a plastic surgeon, who made him look more like the mysterious gothic antihero he wanted to become. While healing from surgery, he changed his legal name to Daemon Ravel, shedding his old identity and embracing the new one he was creating. Then, intending to start his life all over as Daemon the vampire, he got on a plane for New York and never looked back.

“Once the tabloids get hold of this . . .” he said morosely.

“Get hold of
what?
” I said impatiently. “You changed your name. Big deal. Surely no one besides your fans believes Daemon Ravel is your real name, anyhow.”

Between gritted teeth, he said, “It
is
my real—”

“And you got some plastic surgery. Well, gosh,
there's
something no celebrity has ever done before.” I shook my head. “You were a struggling actor who reinvented yourself in order to pursue success. So
what?
”

“You don't understand!”

“That much is clear.”

“I
am
my image!”

“After the Ravinsky story breaks, you'll still be your image.” And still nothing more substantial than an image.

“The vampire community has been so supportive of me ever since I came to New York,” he said tragically. “My fans
believe
in me!”

“Once they are confronted with facts that contradict their beliefs, I have a shrewd suspicion that most of them will go
on
believing in you,” I said. “After all, it's not as if your fan base is big on reason and logic.”

“I buried Danny,” Daemon said darkly. “I don't want him back in my life.”

“You might want to make an effort to stop sounding as if you have multiple personality disorder,” I said. “Daemon, I don't understand why you gave so much access to a tabloid reporter when you had secrets to keep.”

“I have to keep my name in front of the public.” His tone implied that this was so obvious as to be indisputable. “Tarr is an effective tool for that. He raised a lot of profiles during his years in Hollywood.”

“I especially don't understand why you're
still
letting him hang around, all things considered.”

“This story is in play now, whether I keep giving Tarr access or not,” he said wearily. “So I'm better off with him as my friend than as my enemy.”

Although it sounded like a shrewd strategy, I thought it virtually certain that it was a viewpoint that Tarr had talked Daemon into holding during their recent argument. And I was sure that the crafty reporter would benefit from it far more than the celebrity vampire would.

“There's something important I'd like to ask you,” I said.

“Go on.”

Since I had caught Daemon in an uncharacteristically candid mood, I decided to go for broke. “Are you Lithuanian?”

“Lithuanian?” He seemed startled by this bolt out of the blue. “Uh, no.” After a bemused pause he asked, “Why? Are you?”

There was a knock at the door and the assistant stage manager opened it. “Daemon, there's a—Whoa! Why aren't you people getting ready? Curtain is in twenty minutes!”

“What?” I exclaimed. “No, it can't be. Nothing's come over the intercom.”

Daemon, who had already jumped out of his chair, was starting to take off his shirt. “I turned it down. I forgot.”

“You
what?
”

“I've been a little preoccupied,” he snapped.

“Christ, Esther,” said the assistant stage manager. “Look at your face! Can you go on like that?”

“Yes. Makeup. Lots of makeup.”

“Get it done in nineteen minutes.”

I ran down the hall and into my dressing room. Mad Rachel was, as usual, yakking into her cell phone. She interrupted her conversation just long enough to ask if Nelli was coming back and to criticize me for running so late, then went back to ignoring me.

Luckily for me, while I was frantically stripping off my clothes, Bill announced a fifteen-minute delay over the intercom. Due to ticket holders having trouble getting through the unruly crowds, he was postponing the start of the show until all the audience members were in their seats.

It was a welcome reprieve, but I still needed to work quickly. I swallowed some ibuprofen and, well aware of my renewed aches and pains now, recklessly slathered myself in muscle liniment. Next I applied a generous layer of pain-relieving antibiotic ointment to my inflamed cheek and the tender welt on my neck. By using a veritable trowel to apply my stage makeup, I managed to conceal the bruising and discoloration, but I couldn't completely camouflage the bumpy texture of my abraded cheek.

Thanks to the delay Bill had announced, I made it to the stage in plenty of time to take my place before the curtain rose; and the opening of the show went fine. However, when Daemon went onstage on for his first scene, things started to go awry.

He was undoubtedly distracted by the events of the past twelve hours—and also, I realized, probably exhausted; while I had been sleeping, Daemon had been answering police questions. In any event, his performance was uneven and forced. Meanwhile, the audience, many of whom were perhaps also thinking more about the real-life murder scandal than about Lord Ruthven today, was unresponsive, neither laughing nor applauding in the usual places.

It was soon apparent that this lukewarm reception was throwing Daemon off, and his performance became even more unsteady—to the point of being awkward and distracted. He started forgetting some of his lines and adlibbing with Aubrey and Ianthe. Leischneudel adjusted well, but Rachel just stared at Daemon in confusion, unable to recognize cues that she didn't hear phrased exactly as she expected to hear them. So there were some glaringly clunky moments during the first act.

At intermission, Daemon stormed into his dressing room, slammed the door, and refused to speak to Victor—who was the only person willing to try talking to him. Rachel, predictably, called Eric on her cell and complained loudly about how Daemon was ruining her performance.

By the time we started Act Two, audience members were restless—something we'd never before experienced in this show. People were coughing, riffling around in their purses or pockets, rustling candy wrappers, flipping through their program books, and whispering to each other. I had been in other shows where this happened, and I had learned to tune it out, as had Leischneudel. But Daemon clearly wasn't used to this (not since becoming the Vampire Ravel, anyhow), and it was rattling him so much that he even broke character a few times, turning to look at the audience with ragged exasperation.

During the scene where Ruthven proposed marriage to Jane, I noticed that Daemon's eyes were getting red and his nose was starting to look pink.

Dear God,
I thought,
is he getting so unraveled that he's going to start
crying?
Here? Now?

As the stage went dark, we exited into the wings, and Leischneudel took his place for the next scene, in which Aubrey had a fevered nightmare and Jane came to his room to calm him down.

Ruthven would enter the scene later, coming dramatically through the upstage French doors, accompanied by roiling mist, moonlight, and the sound of nocturnal predators baying for blood. Daemon normally made his way to that spot backstage as soon as we finished the marriage proposal scene. I always remained stage left, where we had just exited, and entered Aubrey's nightmare scene almost as soon as it began.

Tonight, though, instead of heading for his next entrance when we exited into the darkened wings, Daemon grabbed my arm and dragged me away from the stage with him.

“What are you doing?” I hissed. “I have to go right back on! Let go!”

“What is that stench?” he whispered.

“What?” I was still tugging against his grasp, aware that Leischneudel would start howling with nightmarish horror at any moment.

“I think I'm having an allergy attack.”

Ah,
that
explained the red eyes and pink nose.

“Is it the dog?” I asked, thinking this was a delayed reaction.

“No, it's
you,
” he snapped. “That
smell
. I'm allergic to something you're wearing!”

“Just how many allergies do you
have?
” I heard Leischneudel wailing in terror. “I have to go!”

Daemon sniffed and coughed a little. “What
is
that odor?”

“Antibiotic cream and muscle liniment.” Well, yes, I
did
smell—at least, if someone got close enough to me. “Daemon, let me
go
.”

I yanked myself out of his grasp so hard that he staggered sideways and somehow managed to bash his knee against a steel lighting pole. He grimaced in pain and made a horrible gurgling noise, his teeth clenched with the effort of trying to keep quiet.

I rushed onstage to awaken and comfort the howling Aubrey. From the corner of my eye, as I embraced and soothed my hysterical brother, I could see Daemon just offstage, hunched over and staggering around as he clutched his knee and mouthed silent outcries of pain.

Once Aubrey was calm, Jane proceeded to tell him that she had married Lord Ruthven that morning. Considering that her brother practically went into convulsions every time Jane mentioned Ruthven, I had struggled in rehearsal to understand why she announced this to him right now, when he was still gibbering from nightmares and mentally fragile. (The only real answer I ever came up with was that Jane was an idiot—which certainly accounted for her choice of husband, too.) Predictably, the nuptial news incited another bout of tormented raving from Aubrey, the content of which would trouble Jane as she embarked upon her fatal wedding night.