A person … a … thing. One eye barely visible under a curtain of red hair. Shoulders hunched, gloved arms curved by its sides.
All of Dawn’s hunting instincts came screaming back, and she flipped open her jacket, going for the silver-bullet loaded revolver she’d strapped on, just for this case.
No time to get Kiko, so she grabbed a tube of lipstick from a nearby table and scribbled on the mirror: Gigi!
Then she drew an arrow toward the spot where she’d seen the vision. On her way, she caught the eye of Roberto, who was laughing with a showgirl.
Dawn yelled over the music. “Tell my friend where I am!”
She saw him spy the note about Gigi on the mirror. Then she thought she saw … anger?
She didn’t have time to think about his expression as she darted toward the dark nook where she’d last seen the vision — the superstar who’d already disappeared into the dimness.
Her revolver drawn — dammit, would bullets do anything to ghosts? —Dawn entered what seemed to be a maze of wooden pillars, but they faded as it got darker … and darker.
Please be a ghost…
Still, even if that’s what Gigi was, Dawn knew this wouldn’t be the end of it. They’d have to see if they needed to help put Gigi at peace.
To put all of them at peace…
A sound in front of her … a door opening, the hinges yelping … weak lighting…
Dawn sucked in a breath because, right there, solid as could be in the soft illumination, was a woman, half her face revealed under all that falling hair. But this close up, there were wrinkles on her skin. And her expression…
Twisted. Her mouth, pulled down, like gravity had tugged on it and wouldn’t let go. She seemed to be forming a word.
Or maybe she was just smiling—
Something crashed into Dawn and, as she hit the floor, her forehead banged against wood, leaving her gasping under the weight of a body, her world going black over the hazy image of a nightmare in red.
As Dawn came to, she barely heard the voice through the fog in her mind.
“Are you here to kill me?”
Husky. But the tone seemed whittled down from its former glory: thinner, an imitation of seduction. The words were slurred, too, like they were coming at Dawn through a filter.
Fighting the needled pain in her temples, Dawn forced her eyes open. It took an instant for the room to come together, so the smell got to her before anything visual did.
Blood: coppery, strong.
She jerked, and that’s when she realized that she was sitting slumped, her back to a wall. As her vision slowly cleared, her stomach roiled.
There were three of them confronting her — people wearing surgical masks, just like cops at a crime scene would, the material coated by Vapo-Rub or something to block the smell. They hovered, stared. Dawn already knew who two of them were because she and Kiko had interviewed them.
Roberto, with his slicked emcee hair and butterfly-collar shirt. Naomi and her Bambi eyes. Also, a dark-eyed man Dawn had never seen before.
Her pulse was racing, but she told herself to calm down because she could already feel the dragon’s blood marks on her right side shifting, like they were connected to her shuddery wariness.
Breathe, she thought, going to that place she’d found in rehab. Right away a sense of control eased through her. It smoothed out her heartbeat first, then everything else.
She’d be fine. Kiko would be down here soon.
But then she remembered she’d hadn’t told anyone but Roberto where she’d been going.
The female voice came again from behind the wall of humans.
“Are you here to kill me?”
Still dizzy — there was a pounding bump on her head from her fall — Dawn tried to answer, but the stench in the room made her gag instead.
Naomi’s voice was muffled behind her mask. “We know who you are now. She just told us.”
She. Gigi.
Roberto added, “You’re one of the hunters who took it all away from her.”
He backed away from Dawn, revealing the movie star right behind him: the vision in the red dress, red gloves, red hair. She was dressed like a younger version of herself, but Dawn could see how her skin was withered, her one visible eye droopy. An appalling mockery of the young movie star.
But she looked human enough…
Lipstick blurred Gigi’s mouth, one side of it limp, like she’d suffered a stroke.
“I saw you Underground,” she slurred. “Eva’s daughter. You killed my master.”
No sense in denying that. “Me and my friend are here to help, Gigi. That’s all.” Dawn’s words … they were just as slurred as the star’s. “All the rest of the vampire Elites in the Underground … we weren’t sure what happened to some of you after you turned human and ran away.”
“The others killed themselves, right in front of me.” Gigi’s voice was ragged. “They couldn’t live after you made us ugly. Mortal.”
The soul stain — it’d made the Elites’ loss of youth worse, hadn’t it?
“You’re the only one left?” Dawn asked.
Gigi’s sideways mouth dipped as she whispered, “I think so.”
Collateral damage, Dawn thought, as there was with all wars.
Bile inched up her throat. All of them were just the smoking aftermath of a war.
“The weight,” Dawn finally said. It was hard to talk because of the smell. “How did you survive the weight in your soul when others didn’t?”
Gigi started, then rested her gloved hand over her chest. It only confirmed to Dawn that the soul stain really was there.
“It stays with an ex-vamp,” Dawn added, “as if you never deserved to be human again anyway. It destroys.”
Her voice choked off, and it wasn’t just because of the charnel house odor.
Roberto adjusted his slipping mask as he walked closer to Gigi. “You can tell her, darling. Tell her what kept you going after you turned human again.”
Dawn had already assumed that the masked people around her were servants. The star was still the queen who held court, just like in the Underground. But with the way the old, grotesque woman glanced at Roberto, Dawn could see that there was an imbalance of power here.
Things weren’t the same as they’d been in Hollywood…
At Gigi’s hesitation, Roberto sighed, as if resigning himself to speak for her. “Naomi and I were so happy to get jobs at the Bahia, because Gigi used to work here. We collected old dresses of hers, even put up a web site…”
The numero uno fans exchanged fond glances.
“And, what do you know,” Roberto went on. “While Gigi was Underground, waiting until she could resurface, she’d kept tabs on all her press — which she still got, even if she’d been dead for a few decades. Servants would print out reports for her and bring them below ground, where she’d read about the continuing devotion of her fans. She was so close to her release date. Did you know that? She’d waited such a long time…” He swallowed. “It’s only natural, when she turned back human, that she tracked us down, using our site information. She knew we would still love her, no matter what misfortunes she’d endured.”
So the undying devotion of fans had kept Gigi alive this long. Maybe the other stars hadn’t connected to that — remembered that in their urgent anguish — as this star had.
Dawn focused on the third man, still silent under his mask. Still wary, as if he expected her to attack him. She didn’t feel her revolver on her, and she was sure they’d taken the other weapons she’d strapped on, too. The knife. The throwing blades she hadn’t used in such a long time.
Roberto turned toward Gigi, who’d lowered her head, as if in shame.
“When she came to us,” he said, “she was a gray, shriveled thing, wearing a ripped evening gown. I found her backstage one day, watching us. At first, we thought she was a street person who’d wandered in, but…”