Nancy A Collins-Vamps 02 (5 page)

Lilith watched as the club promoter approached the model, fawning over her like a dog eager to ingratiate itself with a pack leader. Gala had exchanged the bland Maison d’Ombres threads she’d worn at the show for a metallic silver halter dress with matching strappy high heels that showed off her sun-kissed skin and toned body.

Lilith felt a flare of jealousy as she realized that Sebastian was greeting Gala exactly like he’d welcomed her.

As the model moved through the room, every head turned to follow her. When she sat down, her barely there skirt rode up, revealing panties to match. The eyes of the men shone with lust, while those of the women flashed with envy—especially Lilith’s.

“What’s all the excitement about?”

Lilith was startled by the sound of Jules’s voice in her ear. She had been so focused on the attention Gala was getting, she had failed to notice Jules walking up behind her.

“It’s nothing, just some model named Gail something, I think.”

“Really?” Oliver stood on tiptoe in order to get a better view. “Is she hot?”

“Of
course
she’s hot,” Sergei replied, rolling his eyes.

“She’s a model.
Duh!
”

Oliver nudged Sergei in the ribs. “Wanna go check her out?”

41

“I don’t know why you’re in such a hurry to go ogle some tarted-up clot.” Lilith sniffed.

“Jealous much, Lili?” Sergei snickered.

“What’s there to be jealous of? If her tan was any oranger, she’d be an Oompa-Loompa!”

“She
still
looks hot,” Sergei said with a shrug.

“Whatever!” Lilith snapped. “Excuse me—I need to put on some lipstick.”

The ladies’ room in the Loft, unlike its sister downstairs, did not have a vanity mirror over the sink. Normally Lilith would bring Tanith or one of the other girls with her so that they could check each other’s makeup, but Tanith was dead, Melinda had defected, and she’d had enough of Carmen for the day, thank you very much.

Without a spotter, she did not dare apply any more lipstick. But then, she hadn’t really needed to fix her makeup in the first place. She’d simply had enough of the others drooling over that bimbo model.

Just then Gala entered the ladies’ room like she was striding down a runway in Milan. She passed Lilith without a single glance and disappeared into one of the stalls.

Lilith turned the sink faucet on with her elbow and began to pretend to wash her hands. A minute later she was rewarded by the sound of a flushing toilet and the stall door reopening. She pulled a length of brown paper towel from the dispenser, taking her time drying 42

hands that had never been wet. She then stepped out of the way, allowing the model access to the sink.

“I saw you at the trunk show,” Lilith said, the words tumbling out faster than she’d intended.

“Yeah?” Gala said in a politely bored voice as she stuck her hands under the running water.

“I was wondering—can I ask you a question?” Gala shrugged but did not bother to look up at Lilith.

“What do you think of Kristof?”

Gala turned off the water and looked sideways at Lilith. There was a hard glint in the model’s aquamarine eyes that Lilith had not seen before. “What
about
Kristof?”

“I’m just asking if he’s any good? I’m thinking of taking up an offer to pose for him—”

“
You?
Pose for Kristof?” Gala ran her eyes up and down Lilith’s body like it was a dirty rag. “There’s this magazine called
Vogue
, sweetie—you better pick it up and thumb through it before you go wasting Kristof’s time.”

As Gala walked out of the ladies’ room, she thought she heard the low, throaty growl of an angry dog. But that was ridiculous. What would an animal like that be doing in a Manhattan nightclub?

Gala already had a realtor lining up a new place for her that was more befitting her rising supermodel status, 43

but until something opened up she still split the rent three ways with two other models from her agency, living in an apartment in Chelsea.

As the taxi pulled away from the curb, she was momentarily startled by what she thought was someone standing in the shadows of the doorway of her building. She gasped in fear, but when she looked again, the figure had disappeared.

Damn it, Skyler, you better not have palmed off acid
as X on me again,
she thought sourly as she unlocked the door to the lobby. She had that shoot with Kristof first thing Monday, and the last thing she needed was to spend the next eighteen hours tripping. Kristof hated it when his models arrived for a shoot looking tired and worn out.

It was one thing to pretend she was partying her ass off for the cameras; it was quite another to look like she’d just closed down the last bar on the Bowery.

As Gala walked past the bank of mailboxes in the lobby, she had the weirdest feeling that she was being watched. She glanced over her shoulder but saw nothing. Still, she couldn’t shake the sensation that someone, or some
thing
, had been behind her.

Damn it, Skyler! Dosed again!

She punched the call button and heard the elevator start to make its way back down from one of the upper floors. As she waited for it to arrive, she consoled herself with thoughts of all the nice things she was going to 44

buy herself with the money from the Maison d’Ombres contract.

After what felt like an eternity spent modeling expensive cars, clothes, shoes, perfumes, and jewelry, she was finally going to be able to afford them. Not bad for a high school dropout from Ledbetter, Texas, with nothing but a GED and some kick-ass genes to her credit.

The doors to the elevator opened, revealing pitch-black darkness. At first she thought the bulb inside the car must have burned out, but as she stepped in, Gala heard broken glass crunch under her foot. Someone had shattered the overhead light.

Gala quickly stepped back out of the elevator. The very idea of being sealed inside a pitch-black box, even for a few seconds, was enough to give her the chills, tripping or not. For all she knew, whoever broke the light was still in there, watching her from the darkness.

Cursing under her breath, she began climbing the stairs to her fifth-floor apartment. The building was prewar and the steps were worn from generations of foot traffic up and down their flights. One thing was for certain, in her new building—wherever that might be—this kind of thing would never happen.

Supermodels didn’t take the stairs.

As she reached the third floor, Gala heard the scuff-ing of a foot on the landing above her. She paused and leaned out past the banister, looking up the narrow 45

shaft of the stairwell. To her surprise, she saw someone peering back down at her from the fifth floor. She instantly recoiled, her heart racing in her chest, and began frantically fishing around inside her Gucci tote.

She sighed in relief as her fingers closed around her cell phone.

She was about to punch in 911 when it suddenly occurred to her that calling the police might not be the smartest thing to do. After all, she was underage, drunk, and on drugs. While she wasn’t sure she’d
really
seen someone looking back at her from the landing above, she was dead certain she couldn’t pass a breatha-lyzer test. She was probably just seeing things. She
was
tripping, after all.

Mustering up her courage, Gala edged over and peered up the stairwell. No one was looking back down at her. With a sigh of relief, she returned the cell to her purse and resumed her climb.

As she reached the landing, there was a loud flapping sound, like laundry on a clothesline snapping in a high wind, and something large and dark came swoop-ing down the stairs. Before she could react, Gala found herself being pummeled by huge, leathery wings. The thing attacking her thrust its face into hers, revealing a hideous mix of bat and human features: short, piglike nose, beady eyes, and gnashing fangs.

Gala screamed and clapped her hands over her eyes in a desperate attempt to blot out the horror before her.

46

As she spun around, the heel of her shoe abruptly gave way, sending her tumbling down the steps. She came to rest on the next landing, her legs bent like those of a broken doll.

She moaned in pain as she lifted her head, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth, only to freeze upon seeing that her attacker was crouched over her like a vulture. The model opened her mouth to scream, but she was so frightened all she could manage was a choking noise.

The creature’s monstrous features seemed to waver, as if seen through a haze of rising heat, and, to her surprise, Gala suddenly found herself looking into the face of a beautiful young girl with cold blue eyes and long honey-blond hair.

“
Nobody
talks to me like that and gets away with it,” the bat-girl snarled. She grinned, revealing a pair of white canines that grew bigger and bigger the longer she smiled. “Kristof is
mine
, bitch.” Before the creature could sink her fangs into Gala’s throat, there was the sound of a door being thrown open.

“Who’s there?” a man’s voice called out.

The bat-girl yanked her head back, hissing in anger.

And just as suddenly as she had appeared, she was gone.

In her place was an older man Gala recognized as one of her neighbors, dressed in a loosely belted bathrobe and carrying a hockey stick as an impromptu weapon.

47

“Oh my God! I’ll call nine-one-one!”

Gala looked up and saw the bat-girl hanging from the ceiling over the Good Samaritan’s head like a monstrous chandelier, grinning down at her with demonic glee.

Only then was she finally able to scream.

48

It was early Sunday evening and Cally was in her room. As she finished sewing the zipper into a black miniskirt, her home phone rang. Setting aside her scissors and thread, she picked it up before it could roll over to voice mail.

“Hey there, girl,” Melinda said, not bothering to identify herself.

“Hi, Melly. What’s up?”

“Nothing much. I was wondering if you wanted to go check out this new club tonight. I used to party at the Belfry, but I need a new place to hang. Scuttlebutt has it that the Viral Room is a VIP club.”

“VIPs?” Cally frowned.

“You know:
Vampires Into Partying
.” Melinda laughed. “What about it? Wanna check it out?”

“Are Bella and Bette coming?”

49

“Those two?
Clubbing?
Are you serious?”

“Okay, I’m game. I need an excuse to get out of the house—my mom has been driving me nuts!”

“I hear that. When do you think you’ll be ready? I can send a car around for you. . . .”

“No, that’s okay,” Cally replied quickly. The last thing she needed was one of her friends accidentally getting a look at her mother. “I’ll meet you there. How’s midnight sound?”

“Great. The witching hour it is. See you at the club.” Her mother, as usual, was reclining on the red velvet chaise lounge in front of the television. Tonight she was watching
Near Dark
with a pair of wireless headphones clamped over her ears in grudging concession to the condo board’s most recent complaints.

Cally leaned over and lifted one of the headphones, speaking directly into her mother’s ear. “Mom, I’m going out to the clubs tonight.”

“Don’t forget to pick up the laundry from the cleaners first,” Sheila replied. “I had them dry-clean your school blazer. Honestly, Cally, it looked like you’d worn it to a slaughterhouse! Next time try and be more careful when you open the blood packets the school gives you for lunch.”

“Don’t worry, Mom, I will,” Cally promised. She was relieved that her mother did not question her explanation for the bloodstains. If she knew that her daughter had been attacked while at school—by Lilith 50

Todd, no less—Sheila would freak.

“That’s nice, sweetie,” Sheila replied, unaware that she was talking to an empty room.

Lilith sat on the corner of her bed, staring at the number printed on Kristof’s business card. Marshaling her courage, she quickly punched the numbers into her cell phone before her resolve could fade.

The phone on the other end of the line rang. And rang. And rang. She was afraid the call might go to voice mail when she suddenly heard an older, masculine voice.

“Hello?”

“I’m trying to reach Kristof . . . ?”

“Speaking.”

Lilith never got nervous around humans. In her mind, nervousness was connected to fear. And with the exception of Van Helsings, what did she have to fear from humans? After all, she was faster, stronger, deadlier, and prettier than all of them, wasn’t she? However, for some reason she found her mouth dry as cotton as she spoke.

“This might sound weird, but I’m calling because you gave me your card at the Dolce & Gabbana boutique on Madison—”

“Ah, yes! The blonde!” She could hear the smile in his voice. “So, you have changed your mind about my taking your picture?”

51

“Maybe I could stop by your studio sometime soon . . . ?”

“How about tonight?” Kristof suggested.

Lilith smiled, pleased at how quickly the photographer had risen to the bait. “You mean that?”

“I never say things I don’t mean. Unless I’m in love, of course,” Kristof said with a laugh. “And even then, I wait until the third date. I am going to be very busy, starting tomorrow. If you want me to take your picture, it will have to be tonight or not at all.”

“I think I can make it—I’ll need to know where you are, though. All I have is your phone number.”

“Very well,” Kristof replied, and rattled off an address in Tribeca. “By the way, since you know my name, it is only fair that I know yours.”

“My name is Lili—” Lilith was about to give her full name when she thought better of it and caught herself midway. If Kristof noticed her oddly clipped response, it did not register in his voice.

“I’ll be here waiting for you, Lili.”

Cally arrived just as the cleaners were locking up for the night. She quickly paid for the laundry, which was waiting for her in the collapsible shopping cart Sheila had dropped it off in the night before.