Love Bites Read online

  LOVE BITES

  ALSO BY ADRIENNE BARBEAU

  Vampyres of Hollywood

  (with Michael Scott)

  There Are Worse Things I Could Do

  LOVE BITES

  (VAMPYRES OF HOLLYWOOD II)

  ADRIENNE BARBEAU

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS New York

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TITLE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  LOVE BITES. Copyright © 2010 by Adrienne Barbeau. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  Based upon the characters created by Adrienne Barbeau and Michael Scott in Vampyres of Hollywood.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.stmartins.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barbeau, Adrienne, 1949–

  Love bites / Adrienne Barbeau. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-312-36728-2

  1. Motion picture producers and directors—Fiction. 2. Vampires—Fiction. 3. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.A759L68 2010

  813'.6—dc22

  2010021688

  First Edition: September 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Billy, Cody, William, and Walker—the blessings in my life

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Without Julie Smith—author, teacher, mentor, and all-round great new friend—this novel would be a novella. She guided me every step of the way and I couldn’t have done it without her.

  I am indebted to all the wonderful people who helped me get these words on paper: to my always supportive husband, Billy Van Zandt, for knowing what works; to Meg Bennett, for her wisdom and advice; to Wyatt Harlan, for her brilliance and patience; to Glenn Casale and Brian Williams, for a peaceful place to write; to Eva Long and Sally Fallis, for reading the early words; to Officer Tony Lee of the Beverly Hills Police Department; to Sgt. Mitchel Grobeson, LAPD Retired; and to U.S. Marshall Scott Samuels, for the facts and details, even if I didn’t always incorporate them.

  Huge thanks to Karyn Marcus, Elizabeth Curione, and all the folks at Thomas Dunne Books, and to Erin Brown, who showed me how to pull it all together.

  This is the third time I get to thank Jane Dystel and Miriam Goderich and everyone at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. Without you, there wouldn’t have even been a first, and I am forever grateful.

  LOVE BITES

  CHAPTER ONE

  I am nearly five hundred years old. My skin is flawless, my butt is tight, and my tits don’t need help staying up. Unless you impale me, dismember me, decapitate or drown me, you can’t do me much damage. I’ve been stabbed, scalded, and stretched on the rack, and I have survived. I’ve been burned, flayed, and shot, and I have survived. I’ve lived through the Thirty Years’ War, the French Revolution, and the Spanish Inquisition. The Taiping Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, two world wars, and a couple of scathing movie reviews from the L.A. Times. And two weeks ago, with a little help from my personal assistant and a hunky Beverly Hills cop, I managed to do away with the mother of all evil, leaving me the most powerful vampyre in North America. I’m not saying I’m invincible, but I’ve got a pretty good track record when it comes to dealing with danger.

  So why was I so terrified to drive over the hill to Studio City to have Christmas Eve dinner with the parents of a man I barely know?

  He looks like a cross between Springsteen and the model they use in all those paintings of Christ. Melt-in-your-mouth attractive. Water-in-the-desert attractive. Good-looking enough to get me going just staring at him, and that doesn’t happen very often, believe me. The last time was Nureyev, in the sixties. It’s the cheekbones. I like the ones you can cut paper on.

  His name is Peter King, and he’s a detective with the Beverly Hills Police. Early forties. Divorced. We met two weeks ago when he was assigned by his Captain to investigate the murders of my business partner, three of my stars, and an employee of my film company, Anticipation Studios. Yes, five murders, all connected to me. I am Ovsanna Moore, writer, producer, and star of seventeen blockbuster horror films, several less than successful ones, and a few that went straight to DVD. In the film business, I’m known as a Scream Queen. In my private life—my very private life—I’m known as Ovsanna Hovannes Garabedian, Chatelaine of the Clan Dakhanavar of the First Bloodline. A vampyre.

  A fairly powerful vampyre, when you consider my clan includes most of the A-list Hollywood stars, past and present.

  Peter King knows what I am. And he’d asked me out just hours after he’d discovered my secret. I found that intriguing. I like a man who’s not put off by an extra set of teeth. I was intrigued enough to accept his invitation.

  So there I was, standing in my dressing room on Christmas Eve, throwing clothes on the floor as fast as I could try them on and get them off again. I’d already eliminated a Costume National suit and my Diesel jeans. What should I wear to meet the family of a man I’d already fed on but barely knew? I was so nervous, if I’d had a gag reflex, I’d have been on my knees in front of the toilet.

  Meeting his parents, for God’s sake? On Christmas
Eve?

  I’d just taken my Carolina Herrera smoke suede pants off the hanger when the fowl started honking.

  Someone was in my yard.

  I rely on a gaggle of geese to sound an alarm. It’s an idea I borrowed from Louis XVI, and I swear it’s more effective than my hightech security system. Like Louis, geese are territorial, and when they’re upset, they’re loud.

  This time they were making a hell of a racket.

  I let my senses sharpen. I am of the Dakhanavar clan—vampyre elite—with extremely honed sight, smell, and hearing. When I choose to, I can hear conversations taking place half a mile away. I stood still and listened.

  I heard the geese.

  I heard the koi in the pond. The waterfall hitting the stream. The neighbor’s cat cleaning herself out on the street. And more fucking geese.

  But I couldn’t hear the intruder.

  Maybe I had Marcel Marceau in my yard?

  I couldn’t smell him, either, which meant he wasn’t human. Humans give off a distinctive scent specific to their tribe. What I did smell, over the goose shit and honeysuckle, was something pungent and feral.

  I dropped the hanger and the pants on the floor and moved through my bedroom into my office. Whoever it was had had to scale the two-foot-wide, twelve-foot-tall stucco wall that surrounds my property—he wasn’t there by accident. I unsheathed my fangs but kept my claws in so I could use the computer to bring up the security cameras trained on the grounds.

  I hit the keyboard and my forty-five-inch monitor split into eight screens, giving me a 360-degree view of my property. I could see the guest cottage, the pool, the squash court, the front drive—nothing there save honking fowl. They had spread all over the yard, which they didn’t usually do, and had completely abandoned their resting place by the waterfall. Which was where I finally saw movement: behind the thick bougainvillea on the far side of the stream.

  You remember those scenes in Angel where David Boreanaz was standing on one side of the room and suddenly, without being seen, he was somewhere else? That’s what vampyres do. We transport ourselves so quickly that we become momentarily invisible. Something having to do with the speed of light. In the movies we call it “space-shifting.” I don’t do it very often; I don’t have the need. My lack of practice was evident in the several seconds it took me to get to my yard. I’ve got to get back in shape.

  The smell near the water was overpowering, like burning manure, and I knew for certain whatever was there wasn’t human. Or female. No bitch on earth gives off that kind of stench. I dropped my fangs, let out my claws, and studied the ground as everything took on the glowing clarity of my vampyre vision.

  The sound of his claws pushing off the cliff fifteen feet above me brought my head up, just in time to see him hurtling down on me from the waterfall. I threw out my arms to deflect him, and my nails sank into his fur. He was some sort of wolf, three times the size of a Grey, with rabid orange eyes and a coat so black that it disappeared against the darkening sky. I could feel it, though. A coarse, grimy undercoat, thick enough to act like armor, and then the outer pelage, as sharp as porcupine quills with razorlike edges. His muzzle was wide and long, overfilled with an extra set of yellow fangs that peeled his lips into a Jack Nicholson rictus and sprayed me with white foam. A Tom Savini wet dream. With foul breath.

  I met him in midlaunch, and we went down in the water. He had me pinned beneath him with all four paws. The stream was only inches deep. I’d spent thousands of dollars lining it with broken tourmaline granite. The fucking rocks were making mincemeat of my back. If I’d known I’d be playing Little Red Riding Hood, I’d have bought moss. At least I was nude; having to bleach my own blood out of my suede pants would have left me doubly pissed.

  He shifted his weight to his front paws, pressing my shoulders deeper into the rocks, and tried going for my neck with his fangs. I couldn’t throw him off. He must have weighed 250 pounds. I held him back with both hands, my claws slicing through his pelt into his flesh. His muzzle was inches from my face, snarling and slashing from side to side. His breath was rancid, infected, like the stench of a sewer. I couldn’t get close enough to get my mouth on him. Feral saliva dripped like acid in my eyes. I wedged a leg under his belly and gashed it with my claws. I tried again for his bowels, but he trapped my leg with his hind paw. Blood from his belly poured down on my breasts, pooling between them and sliming down through my legs into the water.

  We struggled like that for minutes, holding each other at bay in a thrashing embrace. I was snarling; he was growling; the geese were honking. He was stronger than I was, in that position, anyway, and if I couldn’t do something to get out from under him soon, the only Peter I was going to be spending Christmas with was a guy in a robe with the key to a gate.

  In the distance, I heard a siren and realized the silent perimeter alarms had been tripped. The security company I pay an arm and a leg to was sending its armed guards. I wasn’t sure how much help they’d be. If I couldn’t kill this thing, I doubted anyone else could.

  The beast heard the siren seconds after I did, just as the car’s flashing lights turned the sky red outside my gates. There was a screech of brakes and voices shouting, and then the thing was off me, racing to the wall, scrabbling up and over, taking the twelve feet like it was a bunny hop. He disappeared into the wilds of Bel Air.

  I closed my eyes and retracted my claws. My fangs slipped back inside their sheaths. I wasn’t worried about the security guards finding me naked; in all the trips they’ve made to the house over the years, they’ve never managed to have the right password with them or the right set of keys. It would probably take them half an hour to get in. By that time, I’d be presentable and apologizing profusely for the false alarm.

  So I lay there in the water for a moment, watching my flesh mend itself in the lowering light, and thought about what had just attacked me.

  It was a wolf, all right, but not your North American garden variety. He wasn’t a timber or a Grey. He was a were, and as soon as I’d touched him, I’d known what kind.

  Werewolves come in several varieties. You’ve got humans who like using magic or a talisman (most often a wolf pelt) to shape-shift at will. They’re called boxenwolves or hexenwolves. I’ve seen a couple wearing their talismans around their necks, hanging out at the Magic Castle. That’s the landmark mansion on Franklin where you can have dinner and watch magicians entertain. The last time I went, Phyllis Diller was doing jokes about her husband, Fang, and the boxenwolves in the audience were eating it up. But they never let on that’s what they are, and nobody would believe them anyway.

  Then there are humans who don’t have any control over their shape-shifting; they’ve been cursed by a devil or a demon, and when the full moon comes up, they’re possessed. The French call them loup-garoux; online they’re beta-wolves. Remember Joan Crawford?

  And then there are humans who think they’re wolves and act like wolves and sometimes have the ferocity of wolves without doing any shape-shifting at all: lycanthropes. Like Joe Eszterhas.

  This werewolf had never been human. He might be able to shift to human shape, but that was where the similarity ended. He wasn’t a boxenwolf or loup-garou or lycanthrope. This beast was a true were.

  Werecreatures come in almost as many varieties as vampyres. They are vampyres, actually, although not purebred. The nogitsone in Japan, werefoxes in China, the boudas—hyena people—in Morocco, apemen in Sumatra, santu sakai in Malaysia. You think about an animal and somewhere on earth there’s probably a werecreature inhabiting that form. Weres are a breed born from the coupling of Lilith—the Night Hag—and an ancient Akhkharu serpent. They’re a vampyre hybrid that can only change into a specific beast shape, and they’re nothing but evil.

  Who, I wondered, was this were, and why had he just tried to finish me off?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Did I want to jump her bones? I didn’t even know if Ovsanna had bones. I knew she had blood because some of it was mine. I�
��d let her feed on me to save her life, right after I’d discovered she’s a vampyre.

  I’d found that out when I’d followed her and her assistant to a mansion in Palm Springs, thinking they were leading me to a serial killer the media had dubbed the Cinema Slayer. The killer who’d practically shut down the town and sent every A-list star running for the hills.

  The Cinema Slayer was there, all right, but he wasn’t your average everyday serial killer. I stumbled into a coven of monsters and weirdos the likes of which I never believed existed, lorded over by a Bette Davis look-alike in a Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? outfit. Baby Jane’s name was Lilith. The Lilith, Ovsanna said, who claimed to be Adam’s first wife, before Eve. Ovsanna called her the Night Hag and said they were related by blood. That’s when I realized Ovsanna was more than just a movie star.

  So I asked her out. Which surprised me as much as it surprised her. Having a vampyre spend Christmas Eve with my parents had never been on my short list.

  This all happened two weeks ago. We’d been standing in the rubble, staring at the fireplace, which was the only structure that had survived the explosion, when out of nowhere I thought about my mother’s house on Christmas Eve, and how much fun we always have, and how last year was the first time since I’d divorced Jenny that I’d been there alone, and how that hadn’t been as much fun. The next thing I knew, I was asking Ovsanna to come for dinner.

  It was only after the words came out of my mouth that I considered the ramifications. And the implications.

  The ramifications I could deal with. As far as I was concerned, the case that had brought us together was closed, so I wasn’t breaking any departmental regs. Of course, the Captain might not see it that way—he didn’t know yet that the killer was dead—but my conscience was clear. That was one. And two, I was sure Ovsanna didn’t want her true self exposed any more than I wanted to expose her. No one would believe me anyway. There’s no such thing as vampyres, right? Three, I’d known her only two days by then, but when you’ve been a cop as long as I have, you learn to trust your instincts, and my instincts said she wasn’t a threat. So what was the worst thing that could happen—she wouldn’t eat my mother’s food? Ma’s served food to actors for twenty years; she knows they’re all nuts when it comes to worrying about how they look. She wouldn’t take it personally.