I thought about it. "No," I said.

"He would have killed you a long time ago. And he hasn't even bitten you. Maybe he should, then he'd know what you're thinking."

I began to laugh despite myself. "You're a real vampire expert by now, aren't you?"

"I damn well ought to be." He put his arm around me and led me away. "Come on."

That evening I had dinner with the others at a dim Middle Eastern restaurant in Hollywood, the kind of place where the guests are supposed to lounge on embroidered cushions and the only utensil allowed is pita bread; the lights are terribly dim, and young actors who have yet to be discovered languish in the shadows. The food had already been set on the table when Lovely and I arrived and sat down. A young woman with a cloud of dark hair and an oval, cameo-stone white face poured my cup full of red wine with mysterious shreds floating in it. "Good evening, Ariane," she said with a formal pleasantness. "I hope you don't mind, I've taken the liberty of infusing the wine with psilocybin mushrooms. It's not very strong, but the flavor is wonderful. My name is Chloe." She indicated, with one delicate white hand, a lanky gentleman with a spikier, blacker version of Daniel's hair and fishnet tights, relaxing back against the cushions, nibbling from a handful of black olives. "This is Mimsy, he's my lover; this"-she nodded to a shining platinum-blond femme in blue velvet and white lace-"is Nora, and I see you've already met Lovely. It's our honor and pleasure to meet you. We're Daniel's cabinet, so to speak." Chloe smiled as I took a cautious sip of the poisoned wine. It was pleasantly bitter, like unsweetened chocolate. "You could say that I am Daniel's right hand. Lovely is his left. Nora is sight and sound."

"I'm his butt," Mimsy said.

There were giggles. "We haven't found a body part for Mims yet," Nora said modestly. Her voice was surprisingly gravelly, coming from that fairylike body.

"I'm Daniel's fist," Mimsy said, quite serious.

"The executive branch," I said, selecting some food.

"In a way. We're not really a government. We're just the ones who take care of things."

"We're the only ones with responsibilities," said Nora. "Although I don't usually think of 'Lovely' and 'responsibility' at the same time." She smirked at Lovely nastily, and Lovely pursed his lips and looked at the ceiling.

Chloe rested again, leaning her head against Mimsy's chest. "I've been with him the longest. Seven years ago I was in nursing school, wondering why I wanted to kill myself every ten minutes. I had a friend, well, not really a friend, this guy I knew, who was a designer, and one day I went to his studio to see if he had anything interesting going on. And that's when I met Daniel." She paused to drink her wine cup dry. "He wasn't really doing anything at the time-just hanging out in gay bars all the time, picking up guys. He had picked up this friend of mine, came home with him. By the end of the evening he had gone home with me."

"Seven years?" I said. "So that makes you, what... ?"

"Twenty-seven," she replied with a smile.

"I'm glad there's somebody here older than me," I said.

Mimsy laughed. "I'm twenty-five, so don't worry too much. But we're about it. Nora here just turned twenty-two."

"Not like it matters," Nora said quickly. "I've still been setting Dan up for three years."

"How do you mean, 'setting up'?"

"I'm his manager," said Nora.

There was a faint bluster of protest from everyone else.

"Like, she knows all these people," Lovely explained, pausing to swallow, "so, like, she sets up club dates like the one we're going to tonight. And, like, making sure people don't figure out too much..."

"I'm the screen," Nora said. "The makeup. I show him, but only in a way that's safe. Daniel's a little reckless sometimes. I don't want him making any disastrous mistakes and ruining all our lives. I want him to be famous, but not too famous, y'know?"

"What are we going to tonight?" I asked, sipping my wine somewhat more cautiously. Not too strong, my ass-already I felt the telltale edge of excitement and nausea from the mushrooms, the hallucinogen ushered in by warmth, hunger, and wine. I began to nervously pick at my cucumbers.

"You'll see," Chloe said with a smile.

I relaxed upon the cushions.

At one point in the evening Chloe and Nora followed me to the bathroom, where they not-too-covertly fed me tiny methedrine pills; when I returned, Mimsy gave me marijuana chocolate truffles. Lovely was gone, and I hadn't even noticed when he left. I stared at my comrades helplessly through a wavering technicolor curtain, trying to express to them that I probably shouldn't be getting this fucked up, but I couldn't really speak. They were taking good care of me, though-giving me lots of cold water to drink, making sure I got something to eat and that I didn't mistakenly drink more of the wine.

Later Chloe helped me out of the restaurant into Nora's car (it smelled of patchouli and book mold), and we drove somewhere, listening to David Bowie's Low on the car stereo. Chloe sat in back with me, petting my hands and seeming to listen to me intently, though I wasn't sure if I was talking out loud or merely thinking a hundred miles an hour. I didn't feel too bad, all things considering-the wine had barely made me drunk, the mushrooms were good and not too nauseating, the speed was clean and pure, and the dope wore the glass-sharp edges off everything. The world shot by in a liquid concoction of amber and red lights. Nora and Mimsy seemed to be arguing, but I couldn't understand a word and decided that it had nothing to do with me.

By the time we arrived at the club, I had begun to sober slightly. It was a very pretty nightclub, most of the interior walls made up of square glass bricks, glowing purplish with black lights. A bar stretched along the wall to the right as one came in, the liquor bottles glittering in the uneasy rhythm of red light ropes; to the left was a partial wall, half solid black, the other half glass. Directly in front was a dance floor or stage, slightly raised, and currently set up with a wicked tangle of electronic instruments and drums.

"Want a drink?" Chloe asked me, leaning in close to my ear.

"Yeah," I said, suddenly thirsty from the speed. "I need a gin and orange juice. Can I have a cigarette?"

She gave me one of her Turkish ovals, lit it for me, and then walked away to the bar. The club was not crowded, and I wasn't so high that I didn't feel silly just standing there in the middle of the floor, so I meandered along to the wall of glass bricks, intending to run my fingers across them to make sure they weren't really ice.

Perhaps a dozen people were loitering along the wall, dressed in varying stages of severe black and vinyl, smoking bright sticks of smoking chalk. I thought to myself that in this light they all looked like vampires.

I saw Daniel then, leaning up against the wall where it became solid and black, his head thrown back and eyes closed; his arms were stiffly down at his sides. When a person moved aside to shift her weight, I saw Lovely as well, on his knees in front of Daniel, his head slowly weaving up and down. Daniel's hands gripped the suede sides of the boy's head so intensely that the veins stood out, the tendons like the skeleton of an umbrella.

I felt suddenly very sick, and it took me a moment to realize that I was angry, I was jealous, I was wounded. I felt like throwing up; I wanted to become sober again, to leave there and get back to something safe, something that made sense. But there was nothing to go to anymore. Nothing would ever make sense again. I wrung my hands, wrapped my arms around myself, digging my fingers into my ribs.

Daniel opened his eyes and looked straight into me. He smiled, slowly, knowingly, and he said to me, Yes, I know. But look. See here. See this boy. He is giving me head. He is giving you head. I am giving you head. You are mine always and he is mine always and I am yours always. This pleasure shall never be mine alone, as long as you stay with me and trust me.

And he was right. I held out my hand to the glass bricks to steady myself. Lovely was really giving it his all; his nude back muscles working intently to keep himself upright or from falling against Daniel with fatigue. A hot eroticism swelled inside me.

Chloe arrived with my drink. "What's the matter? Oh." She turned me away from them, blushing brightly against her white moon face. Her eyes were marked out in the face with smudges of black powder, the same makeup statement that Lovely himself employed, but in a more understated manner. "Jesus, he's always doing shit like that in public. It's so childish. Don't let it bug you."

"Are you Daniel's sex slave too?" I blurted out.

She laughed. "Mn-mn," she said, shaking her head slowly. "Oh, no. That's all in the past, long, long past. I was, for a long while. It's much more... filial now." She tugged at her hair. "He's kind of like a crazy uncle. Anyway, I'm with Mimsy, he's plenty."

"And Mimsy... ?"

"He and Daniel never were. Mimsy's straight, if you can believe that. What Mimsy feels is loyalty." Chloe put her arm around me. "C'mon, let's go sit down. How do you feel?"

We sat in stiff chairs to the right of the stage, and I assured her that I was quite all right. She lit me another cigarette and we talked lightly about medicine. I spilled to her about my schooling, my ambitions, my experiments, and she listened quietly, looking up at me once in a while to say, "Yes, I know what you mean." At some point Nora joined us at our little table with a tall flute of champagne. She was brittle with speed, her jaws clenched in a tight little smile. She jarred Chloe's and my trippy repose, and I fell silent after a few minutes.

But then the show began and I forgot all about drug incompatibilities.

So this was what Daniel did: He and six or seven (I was too gone to count accurately) other people came out onto the "stage." The others, including Mimsy, were dressed in black jeans, exercise tanks, rubber shorts, ripped tights; an athletic and dangerous crew, male and female. Daniel himself wore a tight maroon velvet suit with no shirt under it, his livid clavicles shining under the black light. I changed my mind about the people looking like vampires under a black light; only a vampire could look that way, the skin glowing a brilliant blue like a gas flame, the color of the eyes clearly discernible through the light distortion. Daniel calmly gathered up a microphone and began to sing.

The songs were a kind of liquid flowing, accented with clangs from the woman playing a heap of metal parts mounted on cinder blocks; Daniel himself manipulated a tape machine, playing back recorded loops of industrial sounds-rumblings, drones, samples from old films-and sang. Daniel's voice was guttural and melodic by turns, a deep register without much range; he sang in German. I had the sensation that I wasn't so much watching a band as an impromptu collage. Mimsy played guitar, sparely, only adding an accent to the music now and again, sort of as an additional percussion instrument, like the car parts.

At length Lovely came and sat on the floor at my feet. Absently I petted the soft blond suede of his head and he rested his head against my knees.

The audience sucked it up; most of them eschewed the tables and chairs and huddled close to the stage, watching Daniel's every move. As he moved across the stage to play another tape loop, the heads of the audience waved with him, like spectators at a tennis match. I found it deeply amusing, and largely watched the crowd for most of the songs. They were an even admixture of the L.A. intelligentsia and hopeful-looking Gothic teenagers, certainly far too young to be of drinking age, the whites of their eyes gleaming like jelly. The entire body of the Rotting Hall seemed to be in attendance, including Daniel's breakfast of earlier that day, her formerly crushed wrist held, bandaged, close to her heart.

The band paused for a while, switching instruments. Daniel set down his tape machine, after turning on a low throbbing growl, which I recognized as a fetal heartbeat. "All right," he said into his mike, winding the cord round and round his hand, "this will be our last song tonight, and anybody who knows me knows this song, and a few of you who don't know me know this song too. It's a David Bowie song, of course." He gestured wearily, and there was a smattering of understanding and indulgent laughter from the audience. "From the Ziggy Stardust album, and it's called 'Rock and Roll Suicide.' It's really a quite cheerful song."

The band began to lurch through a much slower and grainier version of the famous tune, Daniel slowing and lowering his voice to a nearly subsonic level. The girl who had been banging on the car parts, and a young man who had previously been manning some sort of synth console, began to dance with one another with an agile, athletic grace. I realized with a start that they must be brother and sister, two robust but delicate Asians, nearly identical in their black cutoffs and their elegant, spidery movements.

David Bowie, in his Ziggy phase, would drag out the last verse of "Rock and Roll Suicide" for ever and ever, getting more and more melodramatic and hysterical while the androgen-maddened crowd went into frenzies. The only real lyrics of this outro are "Give me your hands, 'cos you're wonderful." Ziggy's backup band, the Spiders, would continue this litany while Ziggy took the opportunity to shovel on the drama.

Daniel's band chimed in with this at the appropriate time, and for a while Daniel sang along with them. His voice trailed off, though, while their chanting continued, and I looked up from studying the fine sparkle of light on Lovely's scalp to find Daniel staring straight at me. There could be no mistake-we weren't so far from the stage that I couldn't tell exactly where his eyes were trained. He unbuttoned the red velvet blazer, leaned in to the microphone on its stand, and began to talk across the gulf to me.

"I hope you'll forgive me for everything I've done. You see I can't help myself." He reached into a pocket for something, brought it out, unfolded it. The stage lights glinted painfully off the polished edge of a straight razor. The crowd between us let out a faint moan.

"When I speak of love, I don't mean the ordinary thing. No such thing for me. What I need, what I feel, is far deeper, far more consuming, than anything these tiny minds can command. Only you and I have the possibility." He took a great deep breath against the mike, and the sound went sighing through the club, echoing and echoing. He held up the razor. "I want to climb inside you... climb inside you, love, and wrap your skin around me like a blanket. Slither around in your blood. Inside you I feel warm, I feel... immortal. Invincible."

He drew the razor across the sleek smooth skin of his belly. The audience reacted with shock-not as much as a straight crowd would have given, but they had clearly not been expecting this. One fellow said "Whoa!" over the susurrus. The blood flowed down over Daniel's belly, black in the fluorescents, and down to the low-slung waist of the velvet trousers. "I want you to climb inside of me," Daniel said to me, cutting again. For a split second I saw the pink edge of flesh curl over; then the waterfall of blood rushed out anew.

The Asian twins danced on heedless; the band continued to play.

Daniel was sweating, sighing, a thick erection bulging in the velvet, and we all watched as the blood flow slackened, slowed, the blood dried on Daniel's belly, the heavy cuts smoothed themselves over. "Yes," Daniel whispered, "yes, I want you."

I could smell my own cunt wettening by then.

The band finished the last chorus on the major chord. Daniel idly flicked away the dried crust of blood from his stomach, revealing the smooth wholeness underneath. He turned back to the audience and smiled. "Thanks, good night," he said.

The crowd went wild, deafening me with their screams and whistles and applause. Lovely turned round and looked at me with surprise. "That was cool," he murmured.

"Does he always do that?" I said when I could find my voice.

"Nope," said Nora. Her normally bloodless cheeks were pink. "He'd better not do it too much, but that... really worked. We could be onto something here."

Chloe said, "C'mon, Ariane, we should get out of here."

Nora dropped us off at Chloe's apartment, across the street from the Rotting Hall, and we went up on the roof for a while, smoking and being quiet. I was almost completely sober by now, but there was no way I was going to be able to sleep. Chloe and Mimsy stayed with me for a while, but they got tired and decided to go to bed; I remained outside, my lungs raw, my brain a smoking wreck.

The eastern sky had begun to turn salmon pink as I stared at it, hypnotized, and Daniel came slowly up onto the roof by way of the fire escape. He was back in black stretch jeans and a white Jim Morrison T-shirt, and he sat easily beside me. I didn't say anything.

"Did you like it?" he asked shyly.

"I can't tell if it was for me or not," I said.

"Do you want to come back to my place and get naked?"

I shook my head and laughed. "Yeah," I said. "Sure."

In the darkness of his apartment, as the sun was coming up, he undressed me, kissed my body gently, almost chastely, then slipped his cock into me and we fucked. It was all so gentle. In the middle, as I was almost ready to come, he bit my neck, puncturing it easily with his sharp upper teeth. I felt the orgasm build abruptly within me. Then my spasms pumped the blood steadily into his mouth, and a sweet, umbrous darkness came.

Chapter Eight.

Chloe and I had gone to Denny's for an afternoon breakfast of hash browns, apple sauce, orange juice, coffee, and cigarettes. We must have looked like sisters; Chloe voluptuously plump in a lacy dress and me more butch in jeans and a T-shirt, both of us with wild damp straggles of curly hair and makeup-less night-bleached skin. She was telling me her repertoire of sick jokes, which was vast, and had me snorting orange juice into my nasal passages.

At once Lovely burst into the Denny's, his forelock flyaway, and threw himself at my feet next to the table. "Oh, Ariane!" he wailed. "I'm so so sorry, please don't hate me, I hope you don't hate me."

Looking around the restaurant at the amused gazes of the other patrons, I pulled him off the floor and made room for him beside me on the yellow vinyl. "Ummm... of course I don't hate you," I mumbled. "Why would I hate you?"

He clung to me, burying his face in my shoulder. "I'm just such a slut! I should respect you!"

Chloe smiled and lit another Turkish oval; I realized that Lovely must have been referring to last night's public blow job at the club. I gave the boy a reassuring squeeze. "No, don't even worry about it," I said, shaking my head and stirring my coffee. "You should hate me. I'm horning in on your boyfriend."

Lovely wiped his nose and began picking at the hash browns with his slim fingers. "No, he's totally not my boyfriend," he said. "I could never hate you. You're so cool."

I must have been blushing something awful; Chloe was all but grinning by now. Lovely didn't allow me to go on apologizing, but drew a little crumpled black plastic bag out of his baggy back pocket. "I stole this for you, to make it up to you," he said, holding it out at arm's length. I took the little parcel from him and unwrapped it; it was a gorgeous silver pocket watch on a chain, etched with a picture of a rat's skull, open in a furious-looking snarl.

I was aghast. "Oh, Lovely, you shouldn't have."

"I know, but I saw it, and I thought about you immediately. Do you like it?"

"Where did you get it?"

He shrugged and smiled a wicked child's smile. "Nowhere," he said.

Chloe leaned over to look. "Lovely's got what you call talent," she explained. "He could steal a warhead from the Pentagon. He'd just stuff it down those idiotic big shorts of his."

"Shut up, bitch," Lovely said playfully. "Can I bum a cigarette?" He lit up and looked around him at the Denny's, now held in thrall by our dark little table. "Where is our lord and master anyway?"

"He's fucking Nora," I said tiredly. I played with the watch, flicking the delicate exoskeleton open to look at the face, already set to the right time. "He dismissed it as an 'unpleasant obligation.' You know, what a hardship."

"I can't stand Nora," Lovely said. "She's so holier-than-thou. One of these days I'm just gonna snatch her bald!" He suffered a little paroxysm of hatred, then composed himself and went back to picking at my plate. "I guess we'll just have to amuse ourselves. Sooooo, tell us about your other vampire. I'm dying to know. Chloe is too, she's just too polite to bug you about it."

Chloe shrugged her agreement.

I poured the last glass of orange juice out of the force-pressed glass carafe. "I don't know," I said. "What is there to tell? What do you want to know?"

"Well, does he have a court like Daniel? How does he score his feeds?"

I paused while the waiter-the same pissy young boy from last time-came over and asked Lovely if he wanted anything, brought Chloe and me more coffee, rolled his eyes at the lot of us. "I don't know," I began. "He doesn't really drink blood all that often."

"Huh? How does he live?"

"I guess he takes just enough to keep him alive," I said. "I gather it's not very much. He's pretty old."

"That's weird," Lovely said. "That's like eating just enough to keep you from starving to death."

"Not that weird," Chloe replied. "Nora does it. She thinks eating is boring. She hates everything."

"You guys don't like Nora much, do you?" I said, trying to disguise the fact that I didn't either. The look on her face had been just insufferable when Daniel had announced to us all at "breakfast" that he was going to spend the rest of the daylight hours tickling her ivories.

"I used to like her fine," Chloe explained, running her hand nervously through her hair. "But she's been getting on my tits. She's so into money and rank and class and 'the industry.' She thinks she's making all of Daniel's money and managing it, when she has no fucking clue how much money Daniel's worth. You think he'd tell her? She'd embezzle the hell out of it, buy herself a mountain of crystal meth, and put him on MTV. Shit, she'd buy MTV."

"Does Daniel know this?" I asked.