Dead But Not Forgotten (26 page)

Refusing to flinch (though good golly, she wanted to), Bev placed her box of magic on the side table. “Yuk it up, Liara. The full replacement cost of my Stella McCartney jacket is going on the expense account. And if I know Eric, he'll expect you to reimburse him for every penny we have to spend on your transformation.”

“Hah,” said Liara.

Bev lifted the top tier up and out until all four trays were splayed open like a stretched accordion. “If I were you, I'd be more worried about angering Eric. He's facing a lot of pressure from the King of Nevada. He's using every connection he has to survive, and he's not going to tolerate you digging in your heels.”

Liara's speakers really were top notch. Bev could hear her unscrew something with a twist top as acutely as if she were standing beside her.

“Eric's got people, but I've got better people,” the woman replied. “And my people like what my investment advice does to their portfolios.” From the speaker came the distinct sound of something thick and viscous being poured into a glass. “In the end, you'll find that money talks louder than his old-world connections. Besides, I covered the short in Eric's account yesterday. If he'd looked, he would have seen that. I don't owe him a penny, so he's got nothing on me. You go back and tell him I'm not going to jump just because he snapped his fingers.”

Bev's fangs ached to extend. She removed her flipper and placed it inside one of the trays. One only needs to consume enough blood to survive, she reminded herself. A mouthful or two, every other day.

“So,” said Liara, in a voice that was suddenly flat and hard. “Why don't you take your pretty boy and your fancy RV and just go? I've lived under siege before. I've got enough TrueBlood in here to outlast the next presidency.”

Resolutely, Bev turned to the mirror. Droplets of water beaded it. Deadpanned—as if the sight of her rat-tailed hair didn't pain her—she inhaled until her empty lungs were filled and her cheeks were hollow. Then, pursing her rouged lips, she blew a thin stream of cold, dead air.

Right where a line of fingerprints marred the mirror's finish.

“You going to huff and puff until these Kevlar walls blow down?” Liara chuckled and then took a deliberately noisy, long swallow of her drink.

Bev silently cursed the quality of the sound system as her fangs extended with a slick
snick
. But she kept going—blowing on that polished glass as if her sharp canines hadn't just pierced her bottom lip—expelling air until its surface was as dry as her throat and all that came from her puckered mouth was a pitiful whistle.

Her tongue nipped out to tidy her mouth as she studied the mirror. Bev smiled. Amid the smear of prints was one perfect thumbprint.

“You're going to discover that I don't give up easily,” she lisped, turning back to her box of tricks. “By the time we leave here, you're going to be beautiful.”

“What if I'm already beautiful?” Liara asked after a few seconds of silence.

“I'll be the final decision on that.”

“Who crowned you Fashion Queen?”

“The former queen, of course.” Once dumped by Van D., Bev had set upon refining her personal sense of style with a vengeance. She'd studied, she'd sacrificed. For crying out loud, she'd endured nine months as Joan Crawford's dresser, just to get close to Edith Head. Every single night had been a terrible ordeal, during which she'd silently suffered, clamping down on the acute temptation to drain the opinionated actress drier than the Mojave Desert. But in the end, her self-discipline had proven to be worth it. Edith had become an acquaintance and then a mentor.

Now Bev knew style.

No—now Bev
was
style.

She selected a pot of eye shadow. “Fortunately for you, I have learned from the best.” She deftly loaded the sable end of her fattest blush brush with a light measure of Dior's finest taupe. “Unlike you, who wouldn't know what to do with a tube of lipstick if one were thrust into your hand.”

“That's not true. They make wonderful markers.” Somewhere inside the bunker, Liara placed her glass on a table with enough force for Bev to recognize the chink of crystal. “So tell me about this dude that Eric and his king want me to marry.”

“He's a vampire of discerning taste.”

“So, you know him?”

“I've met him once or twice.”

“A Swede like Eric? Tall and blond?”

“No, he's dark and short.” In fact, by modern standards, he was Lilliputian. But if one had looked—and Bev had gazed long and hard at him before his roguish eyes had turned in her direction—his lack of vertical inches was a minor issue. His body was well made, lightly muscled, well proportioned. Tousled hair with auburn highlights. A carefully tended goatee that drew the eye to his wicked lips.

He'd been the good thing that came in a small package.

Until he wasn't.

Bev bent forward to delicately tap the powder-loaded brush onto the thumbprint.

“Well, now I'm all a-quiver to meet him.” Liara poured another measure into her glass.
Glug, glug, glug.
“So, give me more details. What type of man is he?”

“He's elegance personified.” Though, when she'd known him, he'd had a weakness for velvet. Which, on reflection, now seemed a tad outré. What would Edith have said about his velvet-trimmed collars?

“No. What's he like as a person?”

He's alive.
The thought slipped in so quickly, she didn't have time to edit it. That was what had drawn Bev to him. Despite his age—Anton had seen the Renaissance period—he still had the smallest flicker of life inside him when she'd met him in the middle of the last century. She hadn't read ennui on his face, only curiosity and a restless need to move. Through his eyes, she'd seen things. Like, for instance, the perfection of a well-drawn line.

Toddy reminded her of him, in a way. Toddy didn't care much for art—at least not the type that hung in galleries—but his whole body would tighten when he spied a well-executed design. Come fashion week, he'd study the runway photos with the fixed concentration of a nuclear physicist teasing apart a problem of relativity. And let's not forget the tears—sudden and touching—that had welled in Toddy's blue eyes the day she'd presented him with tickets for the Alexander McQueen retrospective. Yes, her Toddy understood art.

Bev carefully blew the excess dust off of the glass. “Anton Van D. is an old vampire,” she said, sidestepping Liara's question. “Need I say I more?”

“You wouldn't have made a dime selling shoes.”

Bev found the tape, cut a length, then considered just how to position it over the dusted print.

“That doofus you hang around with is a lot of work. Letting some vamp slash his neck on prime-time television? He made you look bad. You should have handed him his paycheck that night and called it quits.”

Ignorant, ugly,
stupid
woman. Bev slapped the tape down. “He's got great taste.”

“He's dumb.”

“He's useful.” And he was. In his own way. Come morning, when the faint pink of a new dawn rimmed the horizon, Bev was confident that she'd be sitting cross-legged on her bed in the RV, watching Toddy clean their makeup brushes. And when her lids could no longer stay open, she knew Toddy would say, “Bedtime, Peaches.” Then he'd seal the door and activate the metal shutters, and lie down beside her. They'd talk. About where hemlines should go, or whether they should improve on their test flippers or just give up on that venture and invent a brand-new tooth paint that would successfully whiten some of those old vamps' yellow teeth. They'd talk until she mumbled. Then Toddy would twine his pinkie around hers, and she'd feel safe to close her eyes.

And she'd sleep.

Without dreaming of stage lights, or men with cruel smiles.

“What are you doing?” Liara asked with an edge.

“Getting ready to lift your prints.”

“You're presuming that getting that door open is all you need to do to pry me out of this room.”

“There is no such thing as an impenetrable defense.” Bev teased the tape's edge with her nail. “All you have to do is keep rooting around until you find the right leverage.”

“What's yours?”

Fear of being alone. She'd never thought of her Achilles' heel as being leverage, but she supposed it was. It was the sharp-pointed triangle on which her life balanced.

The motion detectors went off again and light flooded the back garden. Bev flicked a hurried glance to the window. Todd was floating outside, his teeth flashing. He lifted his burden so that she could see it. “Isn't it great?” he said. “I got it from the neighbor's garage.”

“It's marvelous,” she said, intent on the job.

“I got the key to this sardine can,” Toddy hooted. With a flash of teeth, her friend pulled the rip cord and the chain saw buzzed to life. He whooshed upward. A moment later metal teeth began to chew through the second floor.

Machine tools and Toddy. Another poor combination.

“Just another second,” she murmured to herself.

The tape lifted, thumbprint intact, at precisely the point of catastrophe.

From Bev's point of view, there was no real warning. She'd lived through natural disasters; she knew to duck for cover when the joists creaked over her head. But who could hear anything over the buzz of a chain saw?

The ceiling collapsed on top of her in a shower of wallboard, dirt, and splintered aged wood. It didn't hurt. It wasn't a fraction as painful as the time she got cornered by the small mob in that one-horse town in the Midwest.

But she was covered with ceiling stuff. Hunks of broken wallboard and a hundred years of accumulated dust. Grit—dry as a dead vampire's ashes—coated her fangs. Once again, Bev waited for the cloud of dust to settle, then looked upward. Todd floated above her, a horrified look on his face. She drew her finger across her throat.

The chain saw cut out. It would have been silent—it
should
have been silent—except Liara's guffaws seemed to fill the room.

“You okay, Peaches?” Todd asked in a small voice.

She didn't reply, as she was intent on pulling a strand of ash-coated hair from the corner of her mouth.

“I thought it would—”

“Shh!” she hissed. She toed aside the desiccated corpse of a long-dead squirrel, then picked her way carefully across the minefield of broken timbers. Using the sleeve of her $2,500 jacket, she wiped the glass clean and gave in to the inclination to rest her forearm against the glass. A moment later, her head drooped to the crook of her elbow.

“Did your maker ever talk to you before he made you into his child?” she asked over Liara's cackles. “Did he spend any time getting to know you?”

“None.”

“I thought so. If he'd any inkling into what type of stubborn witch you were, he'd never have made you immortal.”

“That's what I thought. But he was another dickhead who only saw the surface of things. He saw me, he wanted me, he took me. He got his, though. The jerk never made it past the French Revolution. Did he have enough smarts to ditch the powdered wig? No, he kept walking up and down the Versailles Hall of Mirrors, thinking he could glamour a crowd of peasants hoisting hoes. I learned a lot from him. Either blend in or hide.”

Bev's fist tightened on the piece of tape. “When did you stop trying to blend in?”

“When it got too hard. When I got too tired of feeling like I was running in a marathon that had no winner's tape. A girl needs to be . . .”

Appreciated,
thought Bev.

“A girl needs to claim herself. Be real,” said Liara. “At some point or another she has got to stop apologizing to the world for being who she is.”

“What a marvelous sentiment.” Bev, the ex–chorus girl, straightened. “Too bad it's left you living in the boonies, hiding behind a steel wall.”

“Peaches?” Todd floated down through the hole in the ceiling, arms slightly canted from his sides. A dusty fallen angel, clad in cashmere and penitence. “Can we go back to the RV? This isn't fun anymore.” His tongue played with the sharp edge of his fang. “Besides, I'm really hungry.”

“We can't do that, Toddy.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, then firmed her jaw. “We live on our reputation for success. We're only as good as the next makeover.”

“We've got ratings.”

“And I've been in stage productions that got gushing reviews and still folded. We can't take anything for granted. Do you want to go back to those days where you had to cadge closet space from guys who just wanted to . . .”

Pain in his eyes.

She lifted a shoulder, one survivor to another. “You know what they say, Toddy.”

“There's no business like show business?”

“You're only as good as your last hit.” She took out one of those white papers they used to blot oil and pressed the cellulose with Liara's prints sticky side down. “Take this to the RV and make a photocopy of it, okay? You can grab a couple of bottles of TrueBlood and bring them back.”

“Okay.” He started to float toward the door, then turned in a graceful arc, a puzzled expression on his lovely face. “Why do you want me to photocopy her prints?”

He needed her. He
truly
needed her. “Because a copy of them will fake out the fingerprint sensor, sweetie,” she told him in her gentle voice.

“Are you sure?”

“I saw it on
MythBusters
.”

Case closed as far as Todd was concerned. He heaved a sigh. “All right, but this is a lot of work for a wanker like Anthony van Dyck. The guy's so . . .”

While Bev waited for him to find the right word, she mentally finished the statement with some of her own:
fascinating
,
demanding
,
artistic
, and
sexy
.