I went to my front door and pressed the button that would let my visitor into the building. I didn’t bother to use the intercom, since I knew who my guest was. I opened my door so he could let himself into my apartment.

I was back in front of the bathroom mirror when Leischneudel Drysdale came bounding up the stairs of my building, paused to knock courteously on my open door, then entered the apartment in response to my invitation—which he could hear easily, since my bathroom was only about four feet away from my front door.

“Hi, Esther. How’s your eye?” Leischneudel stuck his head into the open bathroom door and took a good look at me. “Hey, I can hardly see the bruise.”

“Good,” I said. “That’s the idea. Want something to drink before we go?”

“I’ll help myself,” he said genially. “You finish what you’re doing.”

He went to search my refrigerator, having become comfortable in my modest home during the weeks we’d been working together. Leischneudel, who came from a small town in Pennsylvania, had evidently doted on his grandfather; having inherited the old man’s name, he had decided not to change it upon becoming an actor and moving to New York.

He was well-cast as the apple-cheeked and perpetually helpless Aubrey in The Vampyre. A blond, blueeyed, prettily handsome young man, Leischneudel was only a couple of inches taller than my 5 foot 6. Although as fair-skinned as he, I’m brown-haired and brown-eyed, and we really didn’t look like siblings. Nonetheless, the casting seemed to work well onstage. Perhaps because offstage, I had quickly developed an older-sister sort of relationship with him.

Although he was a good actor who’d gotten some work in the two years he’d been in the Big Apple, Leischneudel was unprepared for all the attention The Vampyre was getting, and he felt overwhelmed by it. He was intimidated by the volatile fans outside the theater. Inside the theater, he was also intimidated by our cranky wardrobe mistress, our bipolar stage manager, and our melodramatic fellow actors.

For the past few days, he had insisted on escorting me to and from work each night because of how unpredictable the crowds outside the theater had become—though, given the frightened way he clung to me, I thought it was questionable who was escorting whom. However, I had appreciated his company last night, shaken as I was after being mauled by one of Daemon’s crazed fans. Leischneudel had accompanied me home, stayed with me while I iced my sore eye, and chatted with me until I had felt calm enough to bid him good night and then go straight to sleep.

From the kitchen, he now called, “Is it okay if I finish this juice? It expired yesterday.”

“Go ahead,” I said absently, dabbing gingerly at my tender skin.

Leischneudel returned to the bathroom a few moments later and watched me make the finishing touches to my eye as he sipped from his glass of juice.

Glancing at him, I noticed that he was unconsciously making a strange face and tilting his head at an odd angle. “Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Oh. The humming.” He gestured to the fluorescent light over my bathroom mirror. “It sets my teeth on edge.”

I didn’t hear any humming. But I knew that Leischneudel had suffered from delicate health for much of his life, and I’d certainly realized by now that he was more sensitive than I—in multiple ways. With that thought in mind, I realized there were dark circles under his eyes today. “You look tired. Is this schedule killing you?”

Although Daemon Ravel as Lord Ruthven was the star of the play, Leischneudel’s character was the protagonist of Polidori’s story, and he went through the most dramatic changes during the course of the show: Aubrey falls in love, grieves heartbrokenly over his sweetheart’s death, comes to realize that his trusted friend is a monster, has a nervous breakdown, succumbs to a raging fever, goes mad with grief and guilt when his sister is murdered, and dies just before the curtain comes down. It was draining to do so many performances of a role like that in just a few days.

Leischneudel waved aside my concern. “It’s not the show. It’s Mimi.” When I stared at him blankly, he reminded me, “My cat.”

“Oh! Right.” I went back to applying makeup. “What about her?”

“She woke me up really early this morning, crying. Her face was all swollen and tender. Abscessed tooth.”

“Did you take her to the vet?”

He nodded. “We were there for hours. Then I decided I’d better leave her there overnight. She’ll need someone to keep an eye on her, and we’ll be working most of the night again.”

“Will she be all right?”

“Yes,” he said. “But the bills for her treatment may kill me.”

I smiled. I recalled that Leischneudel had found Mimi starving on the street soon after he’d moved to New York. This wasn’t his first anecdote about the expense of caring for her, but he obviously doted on her.

“Anyhow, that’s why I didn’t really get any sleep.” Seeing my concerned expression, he made a dismissive gesture. “I’ll be okay.”

Like most actors, he was interested in makeup and costume, so he asked what I was using on my bruise, and he studied the combination of colors I had applied to conceal the purple-blue discoloration.

As I peered at my reflection, he said to me, “It looks fine. Add a little mascara and a touch of blush, and no one will notice.” He added with an envious sigh, “You’re so lucky, with those cheekbones.”

They were my best feature. And fortunately, they could be emphasized enough to distract from an eye which, despite Leischneudel’s assurances, still looked a little discolored. I’d have to apply my stage makeup heavily tonight. “I’m just glad it’s not swollen,” I said. “That would be hard to conceal. You were right about applying ice last night.”

“Does it hurt much?” he asked sympathetically.

I shrugged. “A little sore. Not too bad. Luckily, Jane punches like a girl.”

My attacker had been dressed like my character, Miss Jane Aubrey. One of the eccentricities of this show was that many of the people in our audience were in costume. There was a wide variety of goth and vampire outfits each night, as well as a significant number of people in Regency costume. A few of the male fans dressed up like the fashionable Lord Ruthven—and those tight, high-waisted Regency trousers were an ill-advised choice for some of them. Hardly any of the fans came dressed as Ianthe or Aubrey, presumably because those characters were victims rather than vampires. To my surprise, though, many female fans dressed up like my character. Leischneudel and I referred to those fans as “the Janes.” I had grown used to them by now, but I had found it a little unnerving at first to keep bumping into carbon copies of myself (some of them less recognizable than others) every night. The girl who’d punched me last night looked more like me than most of them did.

“I hope she’s not there again tonight,” Leischneudel said.

“Me, too,” I agreed. “She hurtled at full speed straight across the thick dark line that separates rude from crazy. I’d much rather we didn’t meet again.”

Satisfied with my makeup, I left the bathroom and headed for my bedroom. Leischneudel trailed behind me. I live in the West Thirties in Manhattan. It’s a convenient location, if not an elegant one. The apartment, which was in perpetual need of maintenance that seldom got done, had certainly seen better days; but it was rent-controlled, which was a huge advantage to a struggling actress. It was also spacious by Manhattan standards, in the sense that I had a second bedroom; granted, it was only the size of a walk-in closet (which was essentially what I used it for), but it was an enviable luxury for a person of my limited means. The apartment was furnished and decorated with things I’d found at thrift stores and inherited from friends fleeing New York for a saner, more affordable life elsewhere. It was home, and I was comfortable there.

Leischneudel sat on my double bed while I puttered around the bedroom, filling my tote bag with various things I’d want with me at work for another two-performance shift that wouldn’t end until the wee hours of the morning.

“I can’t believe Daemon took that Jane home with him after she attacked you!” Leischneudel said, still scandalized by last night’s events.

Recalling the insolent way Daemon had winked at me when he loaded my overwrought look-alike into his limousine last night renewed my irritation with the celebrity vampire. “I can believe it,” I grumbled.

Indeed, that had a lot to do with why the cops had resisted my innovative suggestion that they arrest my attacker. Daemon had volunteered to take charge of her, and everyone but me considered that a perfectly satisfactory solution to the problem. (Leischneudel missed all of this, having gone in search of the cab we had called. I was attacked when exiting the stage door about a minute behind him.) If the star of the show could soothe the crazed fan (and, indeed, Jane calmed down as soon as Daemon put his arm around her and cooed sweet nothings into her ear), then the cops wouldn’t have to arrest and book yet another girl who wasn’t exactly dressed right for the lock-up, and that suited them just fine.

No one present pretended not to know exactly what “soothing” the young woman would entail. Daemon had a well-earned reputation for picking up female fans for casual sex. It was one of the reasons so many of them waited outside the stage door for him each night.

At three o’clock in the morning, having just performed two shows back-to-back, I was too exhausted to do much more than glare irritably at the cops with my remaining good eye while they waved Daemon off as he bundled the clinging Jane into his waiting car, under the envious gazes of dozens of other fans—some of whom were also dressed just like my character.

This job was a little surreal.

“When Daemon does things like that, he just encourages that sort of behavior,” Leischneudel said. “Now other unbalanced girls hanging around the theater will think the way to, er, meet Daemon is to attack you.”

This hadn’t occurred to me before. I paused in my packing as I realized that Leischneudel might well be right. “Great. Thanks to Daemon rewarding a fan with sex for punching me, more lust-crazed vampire groupies are bound to attack me before our run is over. That’s just wonderful.”

I’d like to kill the Nocturne-swilling creep for this. I pictured opening the coffin he reputedly slept in, inside his sunless Soho loft, and driving a wooden stake right through his narcissistic little heart.

“I won’t let it happen,” my companion assured me.

“Huh?” Indulging in my satisfying vision of Daemon’s startled expression when I staked him, I’d lost track of the conversation for a moment. “What?”

“I’ll stick right by your side outside the theater from now on. No one else will hurt you, Esther. I promise.”

“I appreciate that, Leischneudel.” I stuffed a few more things into my bag and said grumpily, “But, good grief, why me? I’m playing the plain spinster in this show, not the ravishing young beauty. I should be fully clothed and pitied by the audience, not envied and assaulted. Why me?”

“Because you’re playing Jane,” Leischneudel said. “And she’s the woman Ruthven really loves.”

I gave him an incredulous look as I picked up my tote bag. “He kills her on their wedding night.”

“Ah, but he marries her,” Leischneudel pointed out, following me as I exited the bedroom.

“Marrying her doesn’t make murdering her more romantic.” I went into the kitchen, which was basically the same room as the living room, separated from it by a counter.

“But why does he marry her?” Leischneudel argued. “He doesn’t marry Ianthe, after all.”

“He marries Jane to torment her brother. And probably to get his hands on her money.” I opened the refrigerator and pulled out a couple of water bottles to pack in my tote. “Want one?”

“No, thanks. I brought my own.” He nodded toward the daypack he’d left sitting by my door when he arrived. Then he said, “You’re so cynical about love, Esther!”

“Oh, come on. Ruthven seduces and lies to a naive woman, he destroys her weak-minded brother, and then he murders her.” I shook my head. “You’re calling that love?”

“Well, no,” he admitted. “But the fans are calling it love. They think Ruthven has reluctant feelings for Jane.”

“According to Daemon—who plays him, after all—Ruthven has hunger pangs for her. That’s not the same thing.” I packed a few protein-rich snacks into my tote, along with the water, then closed the bag. “Ready to go?”

Leischneudel nodded, and I picked up my keys and put on my jacket. He scooped up his daypack and preceded me out the front door, then paused and waited while I locked it behind us.

I followed him down the stairs as he said, “The fans think Ruthven proposes marriage to Jane because he wants to change.”

“It’s not an emotional scene,” I pointed out as he held open the front door of the building for me. “Not in that sense, I mean. He’s seducing her in the proposal scene. Also dominating her. Jane is as intimidated as she is aroused. She’s too scared to say no.”

Early November now, it was dark and chilly as we set out for the theater.

“He doesn’t have to offer her marriage,” Leischneudel said, walking down the windy street toward Ninth Avenue, where we would catch a cab heading downtown. “It’s clear from Jane’s behavior in that scene that Ruthven could have whatever he wants, then and there.”

I didn’t disagree, since that was indeed the way the scene was written and the way we played it.

“But he doesn’t feed on her or sleep with her then,” my companion continued. “Sure, it’s what he did with Ianthe when he had the opportunity—”

“Then killed her.” I thought the theme of Ruthven murdering every woman he seduced seemed to be getting glossed over in this interpretation.

“But when he could ruin Jane, even kill her ... instead, he convinces her to commit to him. To agree to marry him.”

“Completely different situation. Jane’s got money and no boyfriend,” I said. “Whereas Ianthe’s got no money and a boyfriend—you.”

Leischneudel said, “But we know Ruthven has used and discarded plenty of other women besides Ianthe. Jane is the one he decides to marry, though. The one and only!”

“That’s why there are so many girls dressed like me—like Jane—at the theater every night?” I said in amazement, never having thought of it this way. “Because Ruthven marries her before he rips open her neck and dumps her exsanguinated corpse on the stage?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, those fans aren’t just lustful, they’re crazy,” I said, hunching inside my jacket as the wind whipped down the street. “Is that really what they want in a lover?”

“Well, maybe not the ‘rips open her neck’ part,” Leischneudel conceded. “Though there’s definitely a lot of interest in the way he bites you in the final scene.”

“And he’d better watch his step. That’s been getting a little too real lately.” Fortunately, though, despite his vampire persona, Daemon didn’t have fangs.

“But female fans identify with Jane,” Leischneudel said, “because she’s the one woman who finds a place in Ruthven’s tormented heart.”

“Which doesn’t stop him from killing her,” I reminded him as we reached Ninth Avenue.

Leischneudel stepped up to the curb and stuck out his arm to hail a cab. Until recently, I had taken the subway to the theater every evening. But walking through the throng of people outside the Hamburg had become too chaotic and stressful over the course of the past week. So now I arrived at work by cab, getting dropped off as close to the stage door as possible.

Raising his voice to be heard above the roar of the cars careening down the avenue, Leischneudel continued, “Ruthven reaches a turning point, a fork in the road when he falls for Jane.”

I rolled my eyes. “He doesn’t fall for—”

“He thinks he can change course, find a new path. But then Aubrey returns to England, sees them together, and loses his mind. Ruthven realizes he was wrong. He is what he is, and he can’t change. He destroys everything he touches. That’s his curse. That’s what it means to be The Vampyre. So he accepts his destiny to destroy Jane, too.”

“Accepts it, embraces it, and sails full steam ahead with it,” I said as a cab pulled up to the curb.

“But it’s not what he wants in his heart. Not deep down.” Leischneudel opened the car door for me. “That’s what the fans think, anyhow.”

I climbed into the cab. Leischneudel gave instructions to the driver, then got in next to me and closed the door. The taxi leaped back into the flow of traffic, wheels screeching dramatically as we raced to catch the next green light on Ninth, heading down to the Village.

I said to Leischneudel, “Are you serious? The fans are reading all that into the play?”

“Some of them are.” He added with a smile, “The ones who dress up like Jane, anyhow.”

“That interpretation is quite a stretch. I mean, I’d like the play a lot better if it were actually that interesting.”

“Me, too,” he agreed.

“But honestly, I still think it’s just a gothic melodrama about three not-very-bright people who get preyed on by a hungry, oversexed vampire.”

“I know,” said Leischneudel, who had struggled hard in rehearsal to understand why his character fell into a self-destructive decline and let his sister be victimized, rather than exposing Ruthven as a lecher and a murderer. “But wouldn’t it be nice if we were in a play as good as the one the fans think they’re watching?”

“Indeed.” After a moment it occurred to me that Leischneudel was so terrified of the fans that (despite the touching promise he had made this evening to protect me from them) he usually hid behind me whenever we saw them. So I said, “Wait a minute. How do you know what the fans are saying?”

“Fan blogs,” he said. “I took my laptop to the vet’s today. And I had a lot of time on my hands while they treated Mimi.”

“This is what the fans talk about online? Ruthven’s hidden depths?”

Leischneudel laughed at my incredulous tone. “Among other things. They talk a lot about Daemon, too, of course. About his lifestyle, about his career, and about wanting to, um, meet him. They also talk about us—the other actors in the show—which is sometimes interesting . . . and sometimes embarrassing.”

“Let me guess,” I said dryly. “Your trousers?”

“Sometimes.” He cleared his throat.

Leischneudel was well-proportioned, and his costume fit him like a second skin.

He continued, “Mostly, they talk a lot about being vampires, or wanting to be vampires, or what they think vampires are like. They also talk about wanting to, um, get personal with a vampire.”

“No kidding?” I said dryly.

“They parse every scene in the play, particularly the ones with Daemon, analyzing every line, every movement, and every glance to a degree that’s either scholarly or obsessive—I can’t quite decide.”

“I’m voting for obsessive,” I said.

“And some of them talk about wishing they were Jane.”

“Not that I’d want to spoil a good blog discussion with finicky details,” I said, “but Jane gets murdered at the age of twenty-four.”

“Maybe some of the fans think it would be worth dying young, to get bitten by Ruthven—or Daemon—in the final embrace.” Leischneudel shrugged. “Or maybe they fantasize that he’d turn them, and they’d become his undead true love.”

“Good grief.” I thought over everything he had said. “Well, if those fans are so hot for Daemon—or the ‘vampire lifestyle,’ or whatever—that they’re idealizing a one-dimensional villain like Ruthven and interpreting him as a complex and tortured character ... I guess that explains a lot about the show’s popularity.”

Leischneudel leaned forward to peer ahead, through the cab’s windshield. “Speaking of which . . .”

“What’s going on here?” the driver asked as we approached the street the theater was on.

I rolled down my window to look ahead and saw that the crowd was even bigger tonight than it had been on the previous two nights. As our cab pulled up to the police barricade blocking the side street, flashbulbs started going off in my face—making me glad I had taken the trouble to apply makeup to my bruised eye.

A thick crowd of people gathered around the taxi as soon as it came to a halt. Some of them were wearing ordinary street clothing, but others wore costumes so elaborate they would need special assistance to maneuver their butts into their theater seats later—if they’d been able to get tickets to one of tonight’s sold-out performances. Some of the costumes were professional-looking creations that included fanciful wings, spiderwebs, hooves, or talons. Other fans were wearing all-purpose goth or bondage outfits—some of which were less than perfectly flattering to the wearers.

Our cab driver flinched and uttered a startled curse when two people whose costumes were disturbingly realistic imitations of bloodless corpses flung themselves across the windshield of the car to peer inside at all of us. I hastily rolled up my window when a toothy monster tried to reach into the car to grab me.

Another flashbulb went off in my face as someone tried to capture the moment. Since the fans surely knew the sight of Daemon’s car by now, I supposed they were rushing our cab because they were just eager to catch a glimpse of anyone associated with the show.

A cape-clad creature with a rotting face thudded its fist on the hood of the car.

The cab driver sputtered, “Who are these ... these . . .”

A growling, hissing vampire suddenly tried to open Leischneudel’s locked door. My startled companion scooted closer to me.

Our agitated driver said, “What are these ... these . . .”

“These,” I said wearily, “are the vamparazzi.”