Chloe nodded sagely. "Daniel knows everything," she said. "She wouldn't have the guts. She's just as pussy-whipped-or should I say cock-whipped?-as anybody else. I can't say I blame her-I've been there." Everyone at the table nodded in agreement. "So tell us more about your other vampire," Chloe said.

"I don't know. All we ever did was hang around in his hotel room and talk about nineteenth-century Europe. He took me out to dinner a lot and spent money on me and trashed my apartment. You guys would probably find him really boring."

"I don't know. He sounds kind of cool. Like a really genteel sugar daddy." Lovely got misty-eyed.

"I don't want a sugar daddy, though," I mumbled. "I just wanted to be in love with him, I think. I think I wanted a normal boring relationship with fucking and sweet talk and all that lame bullshit. I don't think he knows how to do anything like that anymore, if he ever did. I don't really want to talk about it anymore. He really, really hurt me."

"I'll say," Chloe said. "I stitched you up. But that's OK. If you don't want to talk about it, we don't talk about it, right, Lovely?"

Lovely frowned and sighed, but conceded.

That evening I ended up haunting the streets with Lovely. We got made up in zombie finery-he wore the jewelry that looked like silver bones piercing his nipples and his black eye smudge filled the entire space between brow and cheekbone-and hung around on the sidewalk outside a Goth club in Los Angeles. It was twenty-one-and-over and he had been thrown out of the place repeatedly for buying liquor with a fake ID, he said, but he was drawn there again and again, especially on Friday nights when he was without Daniel; hanging around on the sidewalk outside was better than going inside most clubs.

Certainly, the sidewalk was a raging scene-women dressed entirely in shiny black vinyl leading half-naked men around on leashes, more big crimped hair, purple lipstick, and skull buckles than you could shake a stick at, and always the swelling din of the music coming from inside. We weren't alone in the rejects pile either; a couple of other tatty young punks slouched in their personal corners, drinking alcohol from 7-Eleven Big Gulp cups, greeting friends they knew as they went inside.

Lovely and I shared a flask of amaretto and dope-laden cigarettes. "So where the hell did you come from?" I asked him.

"Precisely," he replied. "From hell."

"Whereabouts in hell?"

"Oklahoma," he said. "Norman, Oklahoma."

"No kidding!"

"I only wish I were," he said. He handed me the flask and eyed a strapping young man with a sheer, moth-eaten black skirt and bare torso. In my opinion, he didn't hold a candle to Lovely himself, but there's no accounting for taste. "I spent fifteen years there. There's just nothing there-just gray grass, as far as the eye can see. And Norman's not so bad as far as Oklahoma goes. My grandparents lived in Tulsa and they sent me there every summer-and I thought I was going to go nuts. I remember I spent one whole summer locked in my room, jerking off all day, then going outside at night and catching bugs and killing them. I think I was twelve that year."

"Ever thought of reading books?"

He smiled at me knowingly. "I did that plenty," he said. "I forgot to mention the book reading. I read while I was jerking off. I got sick of reading the books I had-I must have read them ten dozen times apiece. I read a whole lot of Michael Moorcock."

"Oh, child, that explains everything."

"Doesn't it? Doesn't it just? By the time I was fourteen I used to hustle my ass in Tulsa in the summer, just for something to do. I let anybody pick me up. It's a wonder I didn't get myself fucking killed doing that-more than I care to remember, some redneck bastard would pick me up hitchhiking, then beat the hell out of me and tell me to read the Bible or something else retarded. But you'd be surprised-a lot of the time I'd be peeing my pants going, 'This shitheel's about to blast me with his shotgun,' and they'd buy me a hamburger and then just take me to bed and suck my dick as nice as you please. Go on home to Bessie Lou and say, 'Aw, honey, I was just shootin' some pool over at the Dew Drop Inn." It was striking to see the urbane and bubble-headed Lovely putting on his homegrown heartland accent, much rougher and drier than my swampy polyglot Southern one. He was looking off into the distance at the punks across the street, who had grown sick of sitting still and had begun to half dance, half fight.

"How'd you get to L.A.?"

He smiled slowly. "I robbed the student council," he said. "They'd just had a bake sale and dog wash to buy more Sunday school books for the church across the street from the high school. Got myself a cool eighty bucks. Stole the rest from my dad's wallet while he was sleepin'. I got my faggy ass on a Greyhound and came out here."

"And then what?"

"Then I fucking hustled, obviously. Hustled my faggy, skinny, white, podunk ass." He took a deep drag on his cigarette and showed no signs of letting go. "I slept on the street for a month or two, mostly in the stairwells out back of buildings. Then I was kind of successful. I didn't get beat up too often. I guess men liked how I looked-I had sort of long blond hair then, you know, big brown eyes, looked kind of like I was straight, T-shirt and jeans. I knew a lot of really nice men who paid me OK money to sit on their cocks. No hardship, as far as I'm concerned. I'll climb on top of a hard cock any minute, even now. All I ask is that they wipe their ass every now and then, and don't think I look cuter with some of my teeth missing." He smiled at me to demonstrate, and I saw that one of his lower canine teeth was gone, and the other teeth had valiantly tried to fill the space.

I moved over to him and hugged him as hard as I could. He kissed my hair, then nudged me away for another mouthful of amaretto. "No, see, it's fine now, I'm with Dan now. I don't regret it. I don't regret anything."

"And how'd you hook up with Daniel?"

"He was a trick, of course." He grinned. "He called my pimp, who apparently had done Dan wrong sometime in the past-maybe it was just the fact that he was a pimp. Daniel fucking hates pimps more than anything. He loves hookers-he thinks hookers are great-but if they don't get all their money, Daniel goes on the warpath. He's wasted more pimps... But anyway, my old man brought me over to some party or something, and I had cut my hair like this for the first time that day, and my pimp was so mad, he was ready to sell me to Shanghai or some shit; but there was this party in Beverly Hills, and my old man brought me in, and brought me up to Daniel-I remember Daniel was sitting there like a prince in a big red velvet chair, in a proper Umberto suit and white shirt and tie, but with his lips painted the same color red as the chair. So my old man goes, 'Well, I'm sorry, he cut his hair, like, two hours ago, and it was either this or bring you a skinhead,' and Daniel goes, 'No, no, that's fine... quite all right... lovely, really. Lovely.' " Lovely imitated Daniel's voice perfectly; he must have been practicing it for years. "So, like, Daniel and I go off into another room, and he asks me if I really want to, and I'm like 'Uh, yeah,' and he goes, 'I have something I want to show you,' and he bares his fangs at me. I was like, 'Cool, nice fangs, dude, that's so Love at First Bite,' but then he starts taking off his domes, and I can see how fucking white he is-he's like snow. Snowy white. And he, like, reaches out to me and tweaks my tit, this was before I had them pierced, and he tweaks my nip with his fingernails, and I'm like, 'Whoa, shit, that ain't fake.' But I never panicked or anything. He was nice. He kissed me just a little. He kind of bit my lip and tasted my blood just a little bit, and I was ready by then to do fucking anything the man said. He, like, asked me how old I was, and how long I'd been hustling for that guy, and then he was like, 'Watch this, little one.' And I followed him into the other room where my old man and some other, like, coke-dealer guys were sitting around smoking cigars and talking and shit. And... Daniel just goes to fucking town." Lovely held out his hands in parallel planes. "He fucking killed those dudes so fast, I didn't know what was going on until the last guy fell. Daniel just like... he like... I think he crushed their hearts and slit their throats. All he has to do to crush a guy's heart is punch him in the chest and his breastbone just goes whooom. Instant death. Guy doesn't feel a thing except he can't breathe so good. And there I was just standing there and watching this one guy's neck just kind of pouring blood all down the front of his yellow silk suit, looking at Daniel all startled, but he's, like, already dead. And Daniel just kneels down and drinks the blood coming out. He fills his hands with it and drinks it like he's drinking water out of a river. My pimp is sitting there with his chest caved in like somebody hit it with a sledgehammer. Four men, just like that. When he was done drinking the blood he came over to me and said, 'Get undressed, I'm going to fuck you, and I don't want to ruin your clothes.' "

I sat there stunned for a long time, my cigarette burning away to a long ash between my fingers. "And you did?" I said at last.

"Damn straight I did. Best fuck I'd ever had too. We got all sticky with the blood and he licked it off me. Then we took a shower, and he left a hundred-dollar tip, and we left." Lovely threw up his hands. "Mental, isn't it?"

"And you were sixteen years old."

"Almost."

"Lovely, you're a cold-blooded motherfucker."

He smiled modestly. "More or less," he said. "Fuck this, my ass is getting stiff. Let's go get some coffee and pie."

I was walking around Hollywood at night alone.

It was a hot night-not temperate but hot-the fire hydrants had been running all day and a sick sweaty heat rose off the streets. I had caught a bus back to Vine, and I could have called Chloe from a pay phone and had her come pick me up, but I just didn't feel like it. After Lovely's and my journey to get coffee and pie, I had left him back at the club again, hustling his lithe young body at the death-rock boys going inside. I was deathly worried about him, but he assured me that everything was all right and that he could defend himself if it came to that.

The lights of the sex clubs glittered luridly off the black skin of the street. The road was full of taxis and Mercedeses, driving past too fast, with the legs and arms of starlets and debutantes hanging out; it was Saturday night in the first weekend of May. Occasionally a man would say something lewd to me, but catching my blank-eyed stare, he would gather that I was not for hire, and didn't bother me any further.

I took out my new pocket watch and looked at it. The skull of the rat yawned at me, painted orange and red with the neon brush. It was almost three in the morning. I didn't think I'd ever sleep. And where would I sleep when I did? I found my thoughts straying back to Ricari and the smell of the candles burning in Suite 900, the mellow softness of his mouth brushing against my breasts. I didn't understand how he could profess to love me the way he did, then send me away to an unfamiliar place to a creature who might have killed me as soon as looked at me. My love for him and my hate for him twined around each other like the trunks of braided fig trees, growing together to form a single system.

A couple of biggish men in badly fitting suits stood in front of me. I tried to get around them, but they blocked my passage, smiling like they were playing a game. I shook my head at them. "I'm trying to get someplace," I informed them impatiently.

"You can get someplace with me," said one of them. They both laughed.

"Christ." I turned round to look for someone to distract them with, but there was nobody near enough for me to say anything to. I started walking for the intersection, hoping to get traffic between me and them, but they followed me, muttering to each other. I walked faster, trying to keep myself calm. Finally I reached the curb and stopped there, looking back and forth in panic.

"Hey, mulatto, get in the car," someone called.

"Fuck off already," I said over my shoulder, walking faster.

"Is that any way to talk to a senior citizen?"

I finally gave it a glance. A Coupe de Ville (Dolores), gleaming in all her seventeen-foot glossy black glory, Daniel grinning fiendishly in sunglasses and fishnet blouse at the wheel.

I looked back at the suited thugs. They were stopped in the middle of the road, their eyes rolling in confusion as their arms reached out for each other. Groaning with disgust, they squished their sweaty faces together in a deep tongue kiss. Without being able to help myself, I started to laugh. "Don't call me mulatto," I shouted to Daniel in the car. "I'm technically a quadroon, asshole." One of the men gagged, but his hand went down the other's pants anyway. Daniel's eyes gleamed and he smiled a bitchy, satisfied smile.

"Get in the fucking car. Are you crazy walking around out here dressed like that?"

I opened the door and got in. In the intersection, the men broke apart and promptly began punching each other and cursing. Whistling, Daniel turned onto Sunset and put his foot to the floor, dodging slower cars, missing by whispers. "Dressed like what?" I managed to mumble.

"Like Lisa Bonet in Angel Heart. Where did you get that dress? Seems familiar somehow."

"Chloe's."

"Ah. Back when she wore something other than black. Long ago."

We drove through the city sprawl, listening to a mix tape Daniel had found in a bedroom of some young hippie chick upon whom he'd slaked his thirst some ten years ago. There was a lot of the Doors, a lot of Syd Barrett, some Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell. He said that it made him feel like crying, but he simply steered his way through the heat-wave streets, looking straight ahead.

We went through a typical L.A. fast-food drive-in, got burgers and fries and alien fried-dough desserts, tall skinny plastic cups of Dr Pepper and Mountain Dew mixed together. Daniel parked in the parking lot, and together we unwrapped our treasures and ate them in big, half-disgusted bites.

"What were you like as a child?" Daniel asked. "Did you eat a lot of fast food?"

I shook my head and smiled. "Only sometimes. New Orleans wasn't fast-food paradise back then-the worst we ever did was buckets of chicken." I sat still for a second and let him dab mayonnaise off my chin with a stiff napkin. "I mean, why go out when you can get gumbo at home?"

"I've never had gumbo," he confessed, smiling.

"Oh, Daniel, you've never lived." The whole night was still now, as if Daniel had stopped Los Angeles in its tracks; perhaps he had. I figured he was capable of just about anything. "It's an interesting place to grow up."

"Is it really filled with dead things?" he asked naively.

I laughed. "No more than Berlin, no doubt. Unless you count the rotting kudzu. I mean, it is ancient, comparatively; there's lots of places, old churches and orphanages and houses, that are just empty, just waiting to be squatted in. I think Louisiana is allergic to tearing anything down."

"Let's go," he decided.

"Huh?"

"Why don't we get out of this suntanned hell and go to New Orleans? Stay there for a hundred, two hundred years? D'you think anyone would notice?"

I didn't reply. I wasn't quite sure what he was getting at, and my brain was only just starting to work itself out of the smoky knots of the early part of the evening. I didn't want to talk about it if I couldn't trust what I heard or said.

"Tell me," Daniel said, taking me into his arms and resting my back against his chest, "what do you want more than anything else in the whole world?"

Again I didn't reply. I just shook my head and smiled. He could see into my head anytime he wanted to, gather up the secrets like ripe berries. I just wanted to be close to him and feel the half-warm half-cool weight of his body. He turned my face gently towards his. "Ariane," he said insistently. "Tell the truth. You're not dealing with Ricari anymore. I'm not going to get mad if you tell me what's real."

"I want to understand him," I said.

"From within."

"I... want to know..."

"What it's like to be like me or he? To live for a very long time, see everything change, fall in love again and again, forgive yourself every sin?"

"A little," I admitted.

"I will make it happen," he said. When he felt me tense, just slightly, he added, "When you're ready. If you're ready." He broke away from me, lighthearted, and started the car again. "But first I want you to become yourself again. A scientist."

The caffeine was sobering me up. "I am a scientist," I said reflexively.

"What makes you a scientist?"

"I observe, identify, describe, experiment, investigate, and theorize."

"Your junior high school science club motto." He was right. "Yeah, whatever. But what does science mean to you? What do you study? What makes you a born scientist, the way that, say, I am a true artist?" He tossed his hair and examined himself in the rear-view mirror, straightening his smeared red lipstick.

"I don't know," I said irritably.

"Exactly. Exactly the answer I was looking for. If you spouted any more dictionary definitions, I was gonna smack you. You don't even know what it is that draws you to the sciences. It's a part of you. Something you can't escape. That will be instrumental in preparing you for your life as a vampire."

"I never said I wanted to be-"

"You don't have to say it," he said, cutting me off. He turned the key in the ignition. He drove in silence for a while, then eased the stereo back on and Tim Buckley's voice rose up ghostlike from the speakers on the doors.

I've got this strange feelin' deep down in my heart; I can't tell what it is, but it won't let go; It happens every time I give you more than what I have.

"You're breathing and walking and dancing and talking desire. You're like a horny twelve-year-old girl. You're not fooling anybody."

"It's just because you have it all," I sighed.

"We do have it all. We're angels without morals. Isn't that great?"

I kissed his ear. "What did I do to deserve you? You're like Charlie Manson with looks and charm."

"That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me," he said.

Daniel put me to bed in the alcove of the Hall with great tenderness, unhooking the difficult fastenings of my dress, massaging my feet, and pulling a light blanket over me. He kissed my forehead, leaving faint smears of fast-food residue on my skin. I reached up and embraced him tightly before I would let him leave, and he stood in the doorway and blew me a kiss before he was gone.

In the early morning Lovely slid into bed beside me, put his arms around me, and kissed the back of my neck. "I had such a good fuck tonight," he whispered. I smiled against the pillow. Together we resettled, and I went back to sleep.

Chapter Nine.

Some mornings I just couldn't sleep.

I found some lined loose-leaf paper on a table in Daniel's office and scribbled on it with a bright pink ballpoint pen, chewing off bloody hangnails.

performed microhematocrit on D. B.'s left thumb, it was difficult to employ the capillary tube-though skin is soft and easily penetrated, blood does not readily flow blood is deep red in color-hypoxic almost really thick buffy coat, plasma transparent, colorless RBC infinitesimally small-platelet size, impossible to tell configuration of RBCs without stronger microscope, shitty Radio Shack product, best Lovely could get without having to raid supply stores-might send him to one anyway. RBC count abnormally high, crowding into a solid layer with barely any plasma trace after centrifuge at 1500g-may try again at l000g or even less, much fibrinogen/prothrombin? might have some relation to healing ability insane hematocrit-just insane-it hardly makes any sense.

Basically it looks like vampire blood isn't really "super" natural, it's "un" natural. Many of its properties are beyond my ability to study given the limitations of the research materials. Need scanning microscope, MRI, lumbar puncture, marrow biopsy, more human blood to study effects.

I'm turning into Dr. Moreau.

In between having his thumbs stuck, Daniel did a lot of interviews, phone calls, schmoozing. Nora was almost always at his side during these, trying to give instructions to Daniel as to what he should and shouldn't say. Sometimes he said what she wanted, and other times he said whatever he felt like, no matter if it was foolhardy, obscene, or just plain incomprehensible. During one of the last of these, Nora threw up her hands and started yelling at Daniel, cursing him for being so difficult and for ruining so many things for her. Daniel watched her rail calmly, then stood up and held out his hand to the woman doing the interview. "Thanks, that'll be all," he said to her. "Just make up stuff you didn't get. OK? See you at Billy's on Tuesday, my love to Eileen." He gently nudged her toward the door of his apartment, closing the door behind him.

Nora had picked up a cheap brass figurine of a Venus and thrown it onto the bed petulantly; and Daniel turned from the door and had her underneath him faster than she could react. He closed his hand around her throat. "Remember what I am?" he hissed into her face. "Remember what I can do to you? You're not my zoo-keeper. I'm not a trick pony you can ride onto the society pages. Fuck society and fuck your conventions."

"I'm sorry," Nora panted. I sat frozen on the floor next to the television, Lovely stretched out asleep on the Moroccan rug.

"Our professional relationship is at an end," said Daniel.

"I'm sorry-I won't do it anymore-"

"I'm so bored with you," said Daniel, and let her go. He walked into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of bright blue soda nonchalantly, standing at the window drinking it and humming. Nora picked herself up, her eyes brimming with tears, and stared at me, horrified that I'd seen what happened.