Love Bites Read online

  “It’s him, Ovsanna. You shouldn’t be seeing him. He’s a cop and he knows what you are. You can’t trust him.”

  “That’s ridiculous. He helped save our lives two weeks ago. He saw my clan, the Vampyres of Hollywood, and he saw Lilith and Ghul and every one of those Ancients and weres we were battling. He killed some of them, for God’s sake. And he hasn’t said a word to anyone. Nor will he. I trust him already.”

  “No, Ovsanna! You give him enough time to think about what he knows and he’s going to have to tell someone. He’s a cop, and that’s got to come first. And he’s a man. He’ll turn on you if he has to. They all do!” She was pleading with me, yelling in my face. “He can’t be trusted!”

  I grabbed her face with my hand and dug my fingers into her jaw. She couldn’t move her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears. I held her like that.

  “Breathe, Maral. Calm down and breathe.” She did what I said. Her eyes softened and her face went slack. I released her jaw. Her cheeks were red with my fingerprint. I pushed her hair off her forehead and said as gently as I could, “He’s become my friend, Maral. I want you to accept that. If he does something to betray my trust, I’ll turn my back on him—instantly. But until then, I want him around. Do you understand?” When she got out of control like this, I had to talk to her like a child.

  She didn’t answer. Like a child.

  It was a scene we’d played out many times before, in one form or another. Maral doesn’t have a lot of self-worth. She doesn’t know she’s valuable simply because she’s a good person. She has to rely on her position as my assistant to make her feel important. She needs the adulation and ass kissing that comes with being with me—the reflected glory—to help her believe she’s worthwhile. I suppose it’s the same mind-set that keeps the wives of all those philandering Republicans standing in the back on the dais while their husbands utter their mea culpas for CNN.

  So Maral can share me with my career, but if anything else, anyone else, takes my attention, she sees it as a threat to her place in my life. And without me, she doesn’t think she exists. I’ve spent years trying to reassure her. It’s exhausting. More and more these days I just lay down the law.

  “And I’d prefer it if you spent the night at the Malibu house. I’d like to have some privacy when Peter and I come back.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  What the hell was I going to do with Ovsanna on a date? The woman’s a movie star—more than that, she’s a vampyre who’s a movie star; it’s not like I could just take her anywhere. We couldn’t go bowling. She’s too strong. She’d probably take out the back of the building with a spare. She’s got a screening room in her house; she doesn’t need to go to the movies. She’d be mobbed at the Grove or the Promenade. And she doesn’t eat. Normally I would have reserved one of the private booths for dinner at La Bohème, but what was she going to do, sit there and watch me devour a steak? That seems rude. Not to mention maybe dangerous.

  From my kitchen window, I looked across my yard and saw SuzieQ on the computer in her breakfast nook. She was online, so I IM’ed her a single word: “Help.” She was out her door and in my kitchen in a flash. For five years she’s been a great friend and neighbor and the perfect tenant. Well, except for the times her snakes get loose. Jesus, there’s nothing I hate worse than waking up to a errant python in my bed.

  She never bothers to knock. “Hey, sugar, what’s up? I got your sweater on. I just love it.” She was wearing the turquoise sweater I’d given her for Christmas. “My babies do, too. I swear Ollie North gets off just rubbin’ against it.” Ollie North is one of SuzieQ’s snakes. She’s named them all after crooked political figures. I was hoping she’d buy another one and call it Blagojevich.

  “Do snakes really get off, SuzieQ?” I stared at the sweater for a second, hoping she was exaggerating. I still hadn’t recovered from the night she’d called me over to see one of them giving birth. Twenty-four baby snakes popping out on the closet floor. Gave me nightmares for a week.

  She opened my fridge and poured a glass of eggnog while I picked her brain about where to go on a date with Ovsanna. I couldn’t tell her about the eating thing, so I just said I wanted to do something other than go to a restaurant.

  “Why don’t y’all drive to the beach? I love doing that. ’Course, I haven’t had a date in so long, I don’t even know if the water’s still there. I swear, I don’t know what’s wrong with the men in this town. Look at me! I’m a good-lookin’ woman.”

  “You’re an intimidating woman, SuzieQ, and the snakes don’t help. You’re hot as hell, but you’re scary ’cause you’re larger than life. A lot of men can’t handle that. It’s like me asking Ovsanna out. She’s a movie star, for Christ’s sake. She’s got more money than God and almost as much power—in her business, at least. She hangs out with other movie stars.” Okay, okay, so some of them have been “dead” for thirty years, but I couldn’t tell SuzieQ that. “What’s she going to see in me, was my first thought.”

  “Yeah? And what was your second?”

  “You can guess. But right now I’m trying to think of a place to take her. So drink your eggnog and give me some help here. Look through this copy of City Beat.”

  By the time Suzie and I came up with a plan and I had showered and shaved, it was almost seven thirty. I put the top down on the Jag and hoped Ovsanna wouldn’t mind a little wind in her hair. “The Jag” sounds more impressive than it is, believe me. It’s forty years old and needs a new clutch kit. It was my father’s, back in the days when a gallon of gas cost thirty-one cents. He sold it to me just before 9/11. Any day now, my ego is going to lose out to my budget and I’ll start using a patrol car for my dates.

  This time, there were no photographers at the gate. I was glad about that. The less anyone knew I was seeing Ovsanna socially, the better. My Captain would shit. Ovsanna had been connected to the Cinema Slayer case. As long as he thought the case was still open, he’d be less than happy about my seeing her. That reminded me, I was going to have to come up with some way to provide a perp for the five dead victims. I knew the killer was Lilith, and I knew she was dead, but there was no way I could deliver her to the Captain. I couldn’t even tell him about her. I pressed the button on the intercom and checked my teeth in the mirror while I waited for the gates to open.

  Once again Ovsanna was waiting for me outside the front door, once again looking fantastic. Come to think of it, the only time I’d ever seen her not looking great was when she turned into that prehistoric monster, with wings coming out of her back. Even then she’d been pretty striking. This time she had on black leather pants and a hunter green sweater. My eyes went to her necklace. Carved gold lying flat against her chest, with a tiger’s-eye scarab resting on the spot I’d like to be.

  “That’s a great necklace,” I said, nervous all over again, as though we hadn’t already spent an entire evening together. Well, hell, it was impossible to predict what an evening with her might bring.

  “Thanks,” she said, looking down at the carved beetle. “I’ve had it for years.”

  “I’ll bet. A gift from the Etruscan who made it?”

  “Wow!” she teased. “A police detective who knows what an Estruscan is? I’m impressed.”

  “Hey, I like studying historical objects. Why do you think I asked you out?”

  “Oh boy,” she said, laughing, “you’re going to pay for that.”

  I wanted to take her someplace she hadn’t seen before. I didn’t get the feeling vampyres made a big deal out of Christmas, and it didn’t seem very movie star–ish to cruise the streets of the Valley, so I took a chance she’d never been where I wanted to go. I drove out the 101 and exited at Winnetka. That put us in the middle of a long line of cars driving through a neighborhood of decorated houses, each one more elaborate than the next. Candy Cane Lane in Woodland Hills. With light bulb reindeer bouncing over every roof, and red and green garlands roped around the palm trees. One yard had an entire crèche made out of Legos. A
nother one had a full-size Frosty made of popcorn balls. There was a red-capped SpongeBob fighting for lawn space next to a ten-foot-tall inflatable Santa Claus with an electric air blower up his butt. SpongeBob’s blower must have been broken because he couldn’t stay upright; his nose kept bouncing on the ground. Made him look festive, though, like he was dancing—or drunk. The requisite Salvation Army solicitor—human, not inflatable; nothing up her butt that I could see—stood on a corner with her cauldron and her bell. Passengers handed her dollar bills. She wasn’t doing as well as the homeless guy across the street, though. He was raking it in. The sign he was holding said: “Aging comedy writer. Will work for Disney.”

  Ovsanna laughed. “Maybe I should get his card,” she said. “See if he’s got a spec script sitting on a shelf. If there’s one thing vampyres are sensitive to, it’s ageism.”

  The traffic slowed as we drove past three wise men and a cardboard camel. Time to find out more about Ovsanna. “So . . . I started to ask you the night of the fire, but I got sidetracked . . . do you celebrate Christmas? I mean . . . not just . . . vampyres in general, but you . . . did you celebrate when you were growing up? How did you grow up? How does all that work with . . . your people?”

  “Well, I was born a vampyre, not made. Not turned, which is what I did with Rudolph Valentino. Rudy was in his mid-twenties when I turned him. But I was born vampyre—of a vampyre father and a strega mother. Do you know what a strega is?”

  “Not the way you do,” I answered. “As far as my family’s concerned, it’s an Italian liqueur my mother made us drink if we had a stomachache. You weren’t born in a bottle, were you?”

  She laughed again. “No,” she said, still smiling. “Although strega means ‘witches’ love potion.’ Somebody had a good idea for a marketing ploy. No, my mother was a witch—a real witch who could put spells on people and hex them and wreak havoc with their lives if she chose to, which she didn’t, very often, at least. Except for my father. That’s how she kept him in line. And you’ve got to know she was really powerful, because he was a vampyre of the Dakhanavar clan, in Armenia. Not easy to control, except by my mother. She’d mix up some powders and potions and set them burning, and when my father inhaled the fragrance, she’d put a spell on him. Then he’d follow her around like a puppy. He roamed the countryside a lot, defending the villages from interlopers, and my mother raised me, most of the time alone, in a village near Mt. Ararat. And of course, by the time I was born, the Armenians were all Christian. In fact, Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion, back in the fourth century. So the villagers celebrated Christmas—on January sixth, that’s the Armenian Christmas—and I used to listen to the music and go to the feasts. I never ate the food, but I had a good time.”

  “But you don’t believe in God, do you? Heaven and hell?” I wanted to stare at her. Her face was so animated when she talked that I couldn’t stop watching. I dragged my eyes back to the car in front of us, barely missing the guy’s bumper before I braked.

  “You know, it’s not a concept I spend much time considering, Peter. When you’re fairly immortal, you don’t worry about an afterlife. You don’t need to create an idea of what it might be like after you’re dead. And you certainly don’t need anyone to pray to—for forgiveness or anything else.” She tucked her feet under her on the seat and turned to face me. “Plus, I think most of us are so bored after living eight or nine hundred years that the thought of dying doesn’t carry with it any fear. Maybe just relief. When you’ve seen firsthand what humanity does to itself . . . well, as young as I am in terms of my kind, there are days when I wouldn’t mind if it were a little easier for me to get gone.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I shouldn’t have said that to Peter. We were having a good time looking at the Christmas decorations, and I think I dampened the mood of the evening with my diatribe about humanity. I had the were attack in the back of my mind, and the fact that I didn’t know who he was or why he’d come after me was pissing me off. Not to mention that I hadn’t done away with him when I had the chance. So I started railing about the Deluge and the War of the Triple Alliance, the Herero genocide, and, of course, the Armenian genocide. “You know what Hitler said when he ordered his death-head units out?” I asked Peter. “ ‘Gas the Jews; who remembers the Armenians?’ ” That left Peter sort of speechless; I don’t think he’d ever heard it. Actually, Hitler’s exact words were “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” I memorized them at the time. Right after I drained an SS officer. But I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place; it wasn’t very festive. And certainly not on a second date. I shouldn’t have gotten started. But, you know, it’s one thing to read about the horrors mankind has perpetuated over the last five hundred years and quite another to have seen a lot of them with my own (sometimes raging red) eyes.

  Anyway, I finally changed the subject. Peter asked about the films we had in production, and I told him one of my favorite agent stories—about the time we offered Matthew MacFadyen a role in Drown with Love and heard back from his agent that he hated the script and wasn’t interested, but that they had Denis Leary as a client and he’d love to do it. So we started negotiations with Denis, whom I love as well, and that weekend I ran into Matthew at a fund-raiser for blood disease. I told him I was sorry he hadn’t liked the project, we thought he’d be great in the role. He didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. His agents had never shown him the script or told him about the offer. They figured they could get more money for Denis, so screw their own client Matthew. Needless to say, Matthew’s not with them any longer.

  That was the same agent who made an appointment with me to discuss a series idea he wanted Anticipation to produce. He handled the writer and Jeff Bridges, who was interested in starring. The writer and I made a date to meet at the agent’s office, but when we got there, his secretary said he was tied up on a conference call and it might be a bit of a wait. We waited. A half hour later, she tried to persuade us to reschedule the appointment because she said he was going to be on the phone a while longer. I rarely go to an agent’s office to begin with, they come to me, so I was already beginning to steam. I said we were there and we weren’t going anywhere, we’d wait. A half hour later, I got a call on my cell phone. It was the agent. He said he was in Aspen, Colorado, at the Comedy Festival and he’d gotten hung up and was really sorry, but he was going to have to reschedule. I told him he’d better look for another studio to “reschedule” with because I wasn’t interested in wasting any more of my time. The writer went home, hopefully to change agents, and Maral drove me over to Universal, where I was meeting Ron Myer at the commissary. And guess who walked in? Aspen—my ass.

  I regaled Peter with a couple more industry stories, and then the Doobie Brothers came up on his iPod and we took turns trying to hit Michael McDonald’s high notes. Peter won.

  We sang all the way to our next stop, which was a funky little outdoor restaurant in Glendale, with a four-piece band playing Armenian music and Peter’s friend SuzieQ doing a belly dance. I loved it.

  I noticed Peter was careful not to get too close to me when he opened the car door, which was good; the smell of him only weakened my control all the more. He was worried about getting burned, and I was worried about doing the burning. If I didn’t concentrate, I’d be changing in the middle of the parking lot.

  He smelled like fresh rain. Like green apples and comfort. Like “come lay your head on my breast and let me crush you to me”—whatever that smells like. I write horror films, I’m not so good with romantic descriptions.

  He looked great, too. In black pants and a black David Bowie concert tour T-shirt with a beautiful dragon graphic and Japanese writing on it. It must have had Lycra in it, because it hugged every muscle on his chest, just the way I would have liked to.

  SuzieQ was in the middle of her set, dancing to a guitar, a clarinet, a dumbek, and an oud. The host led us to a round table away
from the dance floor. I suspected Peter had requested it because it was one of the more private spots on the patio. Peter ordered meza—a large plate of appetizers SuzieQ could share with us (and no one would notice if I didn’t eat)—yalanchi, souboereg, tourshou, keufteh, little squares of lahmajoon, and taramasalata, hummus, and tabouli for scooping onto pita. I felt like I was back in the old country again.

  “Did you remember I was from Armenia when you decided to come here?” I asked. Very few people know my real nationality. As far as the public is concerned, Ovsanna Moore is third-generation Hollywood royalty. My “grandmother” came over from Europe in the early 1900s, and until “I” arrived, my “mother” had me going to boarding schools in London and Paris. Certainly no one except Maral and my clan knew my real name—Ovsanna Hovannes Garabedian.

  “I wish I could say I did. That would make me pretty thoughtful, wouldn’t it?” He used three fingers to pop a stuffed grape leaf in his mouth. “But the truth is, SuzieQ suggested it. She’s here every other Tuesday. And she likes having friends in the audience.”

  She was great fun to watch in her two-piece outfit: a push-up bra that barely covered her nipples and gave her generous breasts plenty of room to bobble; and an ankle-length, low-cut skirt made of a gauzy fabric sheer enough to see through, cut in panels so it opened when she danced. Her legs were long and muscled. I remembered the exotic dancers from my parents’ village; they didn’t look anything like SuzieQ. They were short, dark-skinned women with plenty of belly fat to roll around. And mustaches. Plenty of mustaches. Armenians thought they were sexy.

  SuzieQ didn’t have a lot of belly fat, but she could really roll what she had. The women at the tables laughed and poked their husbands in their sides. The husbands laughed and tucked one-dollar bills into the waistband of SuzieQ’s skirt. The single men smirked and tucked five-dollar bills on top of the ones. By the time she finished her number, I couldn’t see her navel for all the cash. She took a bow and came to sit with us.