Wicked Game (10 page)

“A little?”

“—and act like those assholes on TV, then people are charmed rather than challenged. I make them feel open-minded because they have a ‘gay friend.’ People who feel good spend money.” Franklin spreads his hands in a gesture of resignation. “I faced the truth long ago: with my real personality, I couldn’t sell a bucket of water to a man on fire.”

As I’m marveling at the discovery of a kindred spirit, Bernita returns and clonks two more pizza candles on the counter.

“No pepperoni, but sausage will do, right?” She rings them up without waiting for my answer.

Franklin leans on the counter. “You know what would bring in even more business?” He flutters a sweep of blond eyelashes. “Advertising.”

Her glee fades as she becomes the sellee instead of the seller. “Times are tough. I’ve got to cut back on something.”

I pull the glass lid off the pizza candle and inhale the ghastly aroma of artificial garlic.

Franklin presses on, smooth as milk. “But Bernita, it’s during tough times that you need to get the word out more than ever.” His eyes actually twinkle. “If more people knew about this amazing place, you’d be flooded with customers.”

Bernita blushes, then stands up straight, as if she just remembered she has a spine. “I need to check my budget. I’ll think about it and call you.”

I reseal the candle. It’d sure keep Shane away, along with the rest of the world.

Wait a minute …

“There’s no time to think about it,” I blurt.

They turn to me with quizzical looks.

“That is,” I add, “rates will be going up soon. Now’s a perfect time to lock in the current prices.”

“Why are rates going up?” Bernita asks Franklin.

“Ciara, why don’t you explain?” he says pointedly.

“I wish I could, but it’s a secret.” I lean over the counter and give her my best conspiratorial whisper. “We’re beginning a new marketing campaign that will blow the socks off this entire region. Everyone will be listening.”

Bernita glances at Franklin, who smiles and nods in an Oscar-worthy performance. She doesn’t look convinced.

“Forgive my ignorance,” she says, “but how can a marketing campaign make that much of a difference?”

“We’re going to make a significant announcement about the nature of WMMP.”

Her eyes widen. “What is it?”

I bite my lip. “If I told you, it would ruin the surprise. All I can say is that it will show the world how unique the station really is.” At least, I hope it’s unique in that respect.

Bernita taps her polka-dotted fingernails against the counter as she thinks. Finally she drops the down-home facade. “You’d better not be bullshitting me, girl.”

“I assure you, she’s not.” With the flair of a magician, Franklin snaps open his briefcase and whips out the current rate sheet. “We hired Ciara because she’s the best at what she does.”

Bernita clicks on her adding machine and taps out
some numbers, using a pencil eraser instead of her fingers. “I suppose I could do my usual five thirty-second spots a week for four weeks. When will the rates go up and by how much?”

Franklin clears his throat. “Well, that depends on—”

“They’ll triple by the end of the month,” I tell her. “After that, depending on demand, they could rise again.”

She taps the pencil on the counter a few times. “I’ll take eight weeks, then.”

I peruse the merchandise while Bernita and Franklin draw up a contract. The many clearance items include holiday candles with candy facsimiles embedded in the outer surfaces. A two-inch-long wax Easter bunny stares at me, trapped like Han Solo in carbonite.

“You have a tremendous day now, ‘kay?” Franklin calls to Bernita as he walks toward the door. She gives me a bewildered wave, which I recognize as a sign to retreat before she can think too hard about what just happened.

Once we’re outside, a few shops down and out of Bernita’s sight, Franklin’s fingers wrap around my elbow.

“This idea of yours had better be good,” he growls, “or I’ll have your head in a chafing dish.”

The vampires—all but Monroe, whose
Midnight Blues
show pipes in over the speaker—file into the lounge and gather around the poker table. I stand next to an overhead projector, pretending to put my transparencies in order, though I’ve gone over them so many times I could do this presentation in a coma. Franklin helped me put it together, but he declined to join us this evening because of his “allergies.” Coward.

David stands beside me and addresses the skeptical-eyed DJs. “You all remember Ciara, our new sales and marketing intern. I hired her to help us turn things around. She has a big idea, but we need your approval and cooperation.”

As David covers some old business, Shane pulls a familiar red envelope from his shirt pocket. He jigs the envelope on the table and gives me a secretive smile.

I look around to gauge the other vampires’ moods. Regina studies her nails as if they contain a long-lost Dead Sea scroll. Noah looks like his mind is paging through a
list of all the other places he’d rather be. Jim rotates his ‘69 Charger key chain—a miniature replica of his own blue sweetheart—over and over in his hands. Spencer listens attentively to David while using a Crazy Straw to sip from a bottle of cranapple juice. He sees me looking at him and grins, his gums a rich red.

Oh. It’s not cranapple juice. The butterflies in my stomach vomit on each other’s wings.

“And with that,” David says, “it’s on to new business. Ciara?”

I take a deep breath and try
not
to imagine my audience in their underwear.

“Today’s commercial radio is a musical wasteland. Modern disc jockeys play what the suits tell them to play. The less they know about music, the better, because every second they spend enlightening their listeners is a second the corporation isn’t making money off ads or promoters’ payments.”

Relishing their attention, I expand my gestures and let the words flow. “But you’re more than a bunch of trained poodles. You each offer something unique—an intimate understanding of your Life Time and the music it gave birth to.
You
know that.
I
know that.” I point to the walls. “But the world doesn’t know that. And even if we told them, ‘Hey, we’ve got the experts right here every night,’ they wouldn’t care. Unless we told them why.” Insert dramatic pause, my mental note tells me.

They glance at each other, then Noah takes the bait. “Why what?”

“Why you are experts.” I nod to David, who switches off the overhead lights. My first transparency is carefully positioned on the projector. I turn it on.

WVMP—THE LIFEBLOOD OF ROCK
‘N’
ROLL.

Above the slogan appears the new logo: an electric guitar with two bleeding fang wounds.

The vampires examine the image on the wall without comment, their eyes holding a guarded curiosity.

“Is that supposed to be us?” Jim asks finally.

I regard them one at a time, with more confidence than I feel. “We’re going to tell the world that you are all vampires. That’s why you know your era so well—because you were born and raised in it, because you live it. We’re going to tell the truth.”

I continue before they can interrupt. “You’ve spent your whole lives—your whole unlives—trying to blend in. But the only place you’d blend in is a Halloween parade. You dress differently, you speak differently, you have the facial structures of gods on Earth. I say, let’s not hide it. Let’s flaunt it.”

“Wait a second, honey,” Spencer drawls. “You want us to go on the air and tell everyone we’re vampires? That’s kooky.”

“Not just on the air. Live. In public. Show the world your magnificence. They won’t believe you’re vampires, because that’s insane, but they’ll believe you’re special. They’ll believe you have something they want.”

After a brief pause to let it sink in, I slap up the next transparency. “Let me tell you how they’ll get it.”

I detail the marketing plan, from the live gigs to the media interviews to the podcasts (the last one requires a lot of patient explanation and a certain amount of “trust me on this”). At the end, out of breath, I flip the original transparency—the one with the logo—onto the projector.

“If this campaign works,” I remind them, “ratings and ad revenue will go up, the station won’t get sold to Skywave, and you all get to keep your jobs. How does that sound?”

They stare at me a few moments longer, then everyone but Shane looks to Regina to begin. She clears her throat.

“So we could be like rock stars?”

“Exactly like rock stars,” I tell her, feeding off the eagerness of her ego.

“Why would anyone come to see us?” Jim asks.

“Have you looked in the mirror lately? Wait—can you look in the mirror?”

“Of course we can.” Noah strokes his smooth brown jaw. “How else would we look so good?”

Regina snorts. “Yeah, if you can see us, why can’t a mirror? Is it because we have no soooooul?” She rolls her eyes and basks in the derisive laughter of the other vampires— Shane excepted. He still wears the stony, pensive look that claimed his face the moment I unveiled the original slide.

I focus on the other vampires as their laughter fades. “I’m sure you have questions, all of which will be useful if and when we go ahead with the campaign.” I lean both hands on the table. “But you need to tell me, is it an ‘if or a ‘when’?”

Another long, silent moment.

Finally Spencer shifts in his chair and toasts me with his Big Bloody Gulp. “I think the sunnyside’s got something here.”

“Yeah.” Jim taps his car on the table and bobs the top half of his body. “Sounds like a trip.”

Noah agrees reluctantly. “Anything that helps us survive, we should try.”

Regina regards them all, then nods. “We like it.”

I let out a breath and give David a triumphant look.

“I don’t like it.” Shane straightens up from his trademark slouch. “We’re not rock stars. We’re DJs. Most importantly, we’re vampires.”

“Wow, thanks, Senor Grasping the Obvious,” Regina snaps. “Will you write my resume for me?”

“This campaign is dangerous,” he says. “We’ve always kept the truth hidden. Now you want to announce it to the world?”

“No one will believe it,” I point out. “Sometimes the best way to hide the truth is to tell it.”

He shakes his head. “There are people out there wacked enough to believe it, and they’d come after us. We’d be in danger for the same reasons we’d be popular. People would want to get close to us.”

“And they can, by buying our merchandise.” I reach into a bag at my feet and with a grand gesture unfold a black T-shirt featuring the logo. On the back it says,
FEED THE NEED.
A chorus of
oohs
and
ahhs
greets the unveiling, with one exception.

“This crap trivializes what we do,” Shane says. “Haven’t we always resisted commercialization?”

David moves next to me. “Like it or not,” he says to Shane, “the recording industry has always been about money, and money comes from images and marketing.”

“That’s bullshit.” Shane glares at David. “It’s not what we’re about. We’re one of the few places left that’s still about the music.” He gestures to the T-shirt, and me in the process. “This corrupts our mission.”

Regina croaks a laugh. “Our mission is to stay alive.”

“Yeah, Shane, it’s easy for you to be idealistic,” Jim says. “You’re young. You can find other work. Hell, you still look human.” He twists the last word into an insult.

“But I’m not human.” Shane glances at me, then focuses on the other vampires. “None of us are. If we spend too much time in public, someone’ll figure out the truth.
Next thing you know, late one night we’ll find ourselves delayed on the way home. Then it’s ‘Good Day Sunshine,’ and they’ll be sweeping us into a dustpan.”

I squirm at the image. Spencer sees my reaction and tilts his head. “What do you care, honey? Why wouldn’t you be just as happy to see us go
poof
?”

They all turn to me. I put down the T-shirt. It takes a moment to decide how much to tell them.

“It may be hard to believe, but I’m not all that different from you. I suspect that’s why David hired me.”

He nods with half a smile.

“I used to prey on people, too, for money instead of blood. It’s how I was raised.” I’ve never said this out loud. “I liked it. I was good at it. I’ve made a career out of it for the last six years.” I look at them, each in the eyes. “So I can’t judge you for taking what you need to survive.”

“If you’re just as predatory as us,” Regina says, “why should we trust you?”

“Because I said so.” David steps forward, his posture straight and sure. “I’ve always protected you guys, and I always will.”

Shane groans and runs his hands over his scalp. “You’re not omnipotent, David, even with the Control at your back. And have you even thought about how other vampires will react? Some of them already think we mingle too much with humans.”

“It’s none of their fucking business,” Regina says. “We do our thing, they do theirs, we keep to ourselves. That’s the way it’s always been.”

“This is not keeping to ourselves.” Shane points to the logo projected on the wall. “This changes everything.”

Spencer taps his cup on the table. “Shane, I don’t
see as we have much choice. It’s either this or we end up homeless and out of work.”

“Exactly,” David says. “So do we have your support?”

“No.” Shane looks at me. “Sorry.”

Regina eyes him with disgust. “Then stay out of it and let the rest of us have our fun.”

He meets her gaze. “I hope you live long enough to hear me say, ‘I told you so.’”

“It’s settled.” David rubs his hands together. “Ciara and Frank and I will draw up more specific plans and let each of you know where you fit in. Meeting adjourned.”

I turn back to the projector to gather the transparencies. Several of the slippery little bastards slide onto the floor, scattering out of order. Augh. Why can’t this place use an LCD projector like the rest of the universe?

“I got it.” A deep, soft voice at my shoulder startles me. Shane kneels and sweeps up the fallen transparencies.