“Rather, he was me.”

“Danny Ravinsky is your real name?” I guessed.

“No! Daemon Ravel is my real name!”

I had never actually believed that. So I stared at him, waiting for a more comprehensive answer.

He let out his breath on a gust. “I changed it. Legally. I’m Daemon Ravel now.”

“Ah. I see. You were Danny Ravinsky.” When he nodded, I said, “So what? I don’t understand. Why is that such a big deal that Branson would . . .” Then it hit me. “Oh, good God, Daemon. When the cops were questioning you on suspicion of murder, did you not tell them your real name?”

“Daemon Ravel is my real name!”

“It didn’t occur to you how suspicious that would look?” I said in exasperation. “Or how much it would annoy the cops when they found out you’d concealed your real name from them in—let’s review—a murder investigation?”

He said doggedly, “Daemon Ravel is my real—”

“Fine, whatever. Ravinsky is your given name, then. The name you were born with. The name the cops were bound to find, you idiot, when they started looking into your past—which they were certainly going to do, since they think you killed Adele Olson.”

“Who?”

“The murder victim!” I snapped. “Angeline—the girl you intended to have sex with two nights ago. Ring any bells now, Danny?”

He winced. “Don’t call me that!”

Although it was beside the point, I said, “Daniel Ravinsky seems like a perfectly reasonable name. Why did you change it?”

“I . . .” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I’m not that person anymore.”

“Who was that person?” I gasped and asked, “Oh, my God, was he a con?”

Daemon—who had never worked for the Crime and Punishment empire, after all—looked puzzled. “A what?”

“A skell. A perp. A criminal. Was he—I mean, were you—in prison or something?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, no!” Daemon jumped to his feet and paced the room in agitation. “I am not a killer! I was not a criminal! I’ve never been arrested. Until this girl got herself killed, I’ve never been in trouble with the law at all.”

“Got herself killed?” I repeated.

“This is a nightmare for me!” he cried.

I looked at him in appalled wonder, and I fervently hoped that this self-absorbed jackass wasn’t a reflection of what Branson saw in me.

“Well, if you don’t have a criminal record as Danny Ravinsky,” I asked, “then what’s the problem?”

“Like you said.” He sagged into another chair. “The cops think it’s suspicious that I didn’t tell them who I used to be.”

“Go figure.”

“Look, I knew I didn’t have a criminal past. So I didn’t think my former identity was relevant.”

“I’m pretty sure the cops like to be the ones who decide what’s relevant in a murder investigation.”

“And apparently the wheels of justice turn slowly,” Daemon grumbled. “They’ve found out who I was, but they haven’t yet determined that I have a clean past. Not to their satisfaction, anyhow. I gather that’ll take a little longer.”

“But if you’re telling the truth about that—”

“I am!”

“—then they’ll find out, and they’ll drop it. So cheer up. It’ll blow over.”

“No, it won’t,” he said desperately. “Not now that Tarr has caught a whiff of this. You’re absolutely right about that.”

I didn’t understand why this made Daemon look suicidal. “Okay. Tarr will print that you used to be a blameless guy named Danny Ravinsky. So what?”

He looked at me as if I were a pathetic half-wit. “I’m Daemon Ravel.”

“Yes, I think you’ve established that.”

“I am a vampire!”

“Oh, please.” I turned to leave the room.

“I’m a romantic prince of the night, a mysterious figure who walks the edge of darkness, an icon of erotic desire.”

I turned back to him. “And because of that, I keep getting assaulted by your crazed fans!” I added, “I’ve meaning to kill you for that, by the way.”

“I’m a symbol of modern society’s craving for magic and wonder in their drab little lives,” he insisted. “I’m a representative of man’s struggle with his dark impulses and his quest to understand his primal nature.”

“And I’m about to barf.”

“I’m also a celebrity. The face of a national ad campaign. The star of my own TV show.”

“Canceled.”

“The title character in a sold-out off-Broadway play,” he continued. “And the first choice for the lead role in an upcoming movie.”

I blinked. “Really?”

“Yes! Plus,” he added, “I own a nice loft in Manhattan.”

Well, he had me there.

I said, “I gather none of this was true of Danny Ravinsky?”

“God, no.” He leaned back in his chair and contemplated the ceiling. “Danny was a middle-class kid from Gary, Indiana, who studied acting at a state college and then spent years doing summer stock, school tours, and industrial training films.”

“Well, that’s an actor’s life,” I said with a shrug. “That’s how most of us get started.”

“It was still my life when I turned thirty.”

“And I still don’t understand your tragic tone,” I said. “We become actors because we’re driven to do this, Daemon. Because we can’t stand not doing it. We get no guarantees about achieving success by a certain age—or ever. If you thought otherwise, then you were kidding yourself.”

“Thirty years old, and still doing crap acting gigs for low pay,” he said, ignoring me. “Still waiting tables most of the time, living in a low-rent apartment in Los Angeles, and driving a rusted-out death trap.”

Then a girl he knew asked him to participate in a performance piece for a Halloween event, and in playing a vampire for the first time, Danny began to glimpse his true destiny.

“I had always been an also-ran, offstage and on,” Daemon said with unprecedented candor. “Until that night. As a vampire, I stole the show! Sure, it was just a kitsch skit. But I’d never been a hit before. An audience had never loved my performance before. It’s an amazing feeling! It’s addictive.”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“It’s better than sex.”

“All too often,” I admitted.

“And speaking of sex, a dozen women gave me their phone numbers after the performance. I had a threesome with a pair of them that same night.”

“Too much information.”

“And I thought, Why do this only on Halloween? Why not keep it going year round?”

So he created his own street-performance act. Before long, he was making enough money, by passing the hat as a vampire, to see the greater potential in this role. He began gradually evolving a whole persona in tandem with his act and eventually decided to reinvent himself. Danny dyed his hair black and replaced his entire wardrobe with “vampire” clothing. He consulted a plastic surgeon, who made him look more like the mysterious gothic antihero he wanted to become. While healing from surgery, he changed his legal name to Daemon Ravel, shedding his old identity and embracing the new one he was creating. Then, intending to start his life all over as Daemon the vampire, he got on a plane for New York and never looked back.

“Once the tabloids get hold of this . . .” he said morosely.

“Get hold of what?” I said impatiently. “You changed your name. Big deal. Surely no one besides your fans believes Daemon Ravel is your real name, anyhow.”

Between gritted teeth, he said, “It is my real—”

“And you got some plastic surgery. Well, gosh, there’s something no celebrity has ever done before.” I shook my head. “You were a struggling actor who reinvented yourself in order to pursue success. So what?”

“You don’t understand!”

“That much is clear.”

“I am my image!”

“After the Ravinsky story breaks, you’ll still be your image.” And still nothing more substantial than an image.

“The vampire community has been so supportive of me ever since I came to New York,” he said tragically. “My fans believe in me!”

“Once they are confronted with facts that contradict their beliefs, I have a shrewd suspicion that most of them will go on believing in you,” I said. “After all, it’s not as if your fan base is big on reason and logic.”

“I buried Danny,” Daemon said darkly. “I don’t want him back in my life.”

“You might want to make an effort to stop sounding as if you have multiple personality disorder,” I said. “Daemon, I don’t understand why you gave so much access to a tabloid reporter when you had secrets to keep.”

“I have to keep my name in front of the public.” His tone implied that this was so obvious as to be indisputable. “Tarr is an effective tool for that. He raised a lot of profiles during his years in Hollywood.”

“I especially don’t understand why you’re still letting him hang around, all things considered.”

“This story is in play now, whether I keep giving Tarr access or not,” he said wearily. “So I’m better off with him as my friend than as my enemy.”

Although it sounded like a shrewd strategy, I thought it virtually certain that it was a viewpoint that Tarr had talked Daemon into holding during their recent argument. And I was sure that the crafty reporter would benefit from it far more than the celebrity vampire would.

“There’s something important I’d like to ask you,” I said.

“Go on.”

Since I had caught Daemon in an uncharacteristically candid mood, I decided to go for broke. “Are you Lithuanian?”

“Lithuanian?” He seemed startled by this bolt out of the blue. “Uh, no.” After a bemused pause he asked, “Why? Are you?”

There was a knock at the door and the assistant stage manager opened it. “Daemon, there’s a—Whoa! Why aren’t you people getting ready? Curtain is in twenty minutes!”

“What?” I exclaimed. “No, it can’t be. Nothing’s come over the intercom.”

Daemon, who had already jumped out of his chair, was starting to take off his shirt. “I turned it down. I forgot.”

“You what?”

“I’ve been a little preoccupied,” he snapped.

“Christ, Esther,” said the assistant stage manager. “Look at your face! Can you go on like that?”

“Yes. Makeup. Lots of makeup.”

“Get it done in nineteen minutes.”

I ran down the hall and into my dressing room. Mad Rachel was, as usual, yakking into her cell phone. She interrupted her conversation just long enough to ask if Nelli was coming back and to criticize me for running so late, then went back to ignoring me.

Luckily for me, while I was frantically stripping off my clothes, Bill announced a fifteen-minute delay over the intercom. Due to ticket holders having trouble getting through the unruly crowds, he was postponing the start of the show until all the audience members were in their seats.

It was a welcome reprieve, but I still needed to work quickly. I swallowed some ibuprofen and, well aware of my renewed aches and pains now, recklessly slathered myself in muscle liniment. Next I applied a generous layer of pain-relieving antibiotic ointment to my inflamed cheek and the tender welt on my neck. By using a veritable trowel to apply my stage makeup, I managed to conceal the bruising and discoloration, but I couldn’t completely camouflage the bumpy texture of my abraded cheek.

Thanks to the delay Bill had announced, I made it to the stage in plenty of time to take my place before the curtain rose; and the opening of the show went fine. However, when Daemon went onstage on for his first scene, things started to go awry.

He was undoubtedly distracted by the events of the past twelve hours—and also, I realized, probably exhausted; while I had been sleeping, Daemon had been answering police questions. In any event, his performance was uneven and forced. Meanwhile, the audience, many of whom were perhaps also thinking more about the real-life murder scandal than about Lord Ruthven today, was unresponsive, neither laughing nor applauding in the usual places.

It was soon apparent that this lukewarm reception was throwing Daemon off, and his performance became even more unsteady—to the point of being awkward and distracted. He started forgetting some of his lines and adlibbing with Aubrey and Ianthe. Leischneudel adjusted well, but Rachel just stared at Daemon in confusion, unable to recognize cues that she didn’t hear phrased exactly as she expected to hear them. So there were some glaringly clunky moments during the first act.

At intermission, Daemon stormed into his dressing room, slammed the door, and refused to speak to Victor—who was the only person willing to try talking to him. Rachel, predictably, called Eric on her cell and complained loudly about how Daemon was ruining her performance.

By the time we started Act Two, audience members were restless—something we’d never before experienced in this show. People were coughing, riffling around in their purses or pockets, rustling candy wrappers, flipping through their program books, and whispering to each other. I had been in other shows where this happened, and I had learned to tune it out, as had Leischneudel. But Daemon clearly wasn’t used to this (not since becoming the Vampire Ravel, anyhow), and it was rattling him so much that he even broke character a few times, turning to look at the audience with ragged exasperation.

During the scene where Ruthven proposed marriage to Jane, I noticed that Daemon’s eyes were getting red and his nose was starting to look pink.

Dear God, I thought, is he getting so unraveled that he’s going to start crying? Here? Now?

As the stage went dark, we exited into the wings, and Leischneudel took his place for the next scene, in which Aubrey had a fevered nightmare and Jane came to his room to calm him down.

Ruthven would enter the scene later, coming dramatically through the upstage French doors, accompanied by roiling mist, moonlight, and the sound of nocturnal predators baying for blood. Daemon normally made his way to that spot backstage as soon as we finished the marriage proposal scene. I always remained stage left, where we had just exited, and entered Aubrey’s nightmare scene almost as soon as it began.

Tonight, though, instead of heading for his next entrance when we exited into the darkened wings, Daemon grabbed my arm and dragged me away from the stage with him.

“What are you doing?” I hissed. “I have to go right back on! Let go!”

“What is that stench?” he whispered.

“What?” I was still tugging against his grasp, aware that Leischneudel would start howling with nightmarish horror at any moment.

“I think I’m having an allergy attack.”

Ah, that explained the red eyes and pink nose.

“Is it the dog?” I asked, thinking this was a delayed reaction.

“No, it’s you,” he snapped. “That smell. I’m allergic to something you’re wearing!”

“Just how many allergies do you have?” I heard Leischneudel wailing in terror. “I have to go!”

Daemon sniffed and coughed a little. “What is that odor?”

“Antibiotic cream and muscle liniment.” Well, yes, I did smell—at least, if someone got close enough to me. “Daemon, let me go.”

I yanked myself out of his grasp so hard that he staggered sideways and somehow managed to bash his knee against a steel lighting pole. He grimaced in pain and made a horrible gurgling noise, his teeth clenched with the effort of trying to keep quiet.

I rushed onstage to awaken and comfort the howling Aubrey. From the corner of my eye, as I embraced and soothed my hysterical brother, I could see Daemon just offstage, hunched over and staggering around as he clutched his knee and mouthed silent outcries of pain.

Once Aubrey was calm, Jane proceeded to tell him that she had married Lord Ruthven that morning. Considering that her brother practically went into convulsions every time Jane mentioned Ruthven, I had struggled in rehearsal to understand why she announced this to him right now, when he was still gibbering from nightmares and mentally fragile. (The only real answer I ever came up with was that Jane was an idiot—which certainly accounted for her choice of husband, too.) Predictably, the nuptial news incited another bout of tormented raving from Aubrey, the content of which would trouble Jane as she embarked upon her fatal wedding night.

Having made Aubrey’s day, I urged him to get some rest, and I exited stage left again. He promptly had a horrible half-waking nightmare in which Ianthe came back from the dead to accuse him of letting Lord Ruthven murder her. This guilt-ridden vision forced Aubrey to contemplate leaving his sickroom to warn his sister that she was about to go to bed with a supernatural serial killer. But then Ruthven made his dramatic entrance and yammered at Aubrey about his promise to keep silent, the meaning of honor, and so on.

Watching this scene now from the wings, I realized that the dialogue had awkward ramifications, given the current circumstances. Daemon seemed to realize it, too, and his performance grew increasingly awkward as he uttered flowery dialogue implying that he had a right to take lives without interference or consequences.

I didn’t know whether he was feeling so self-conscious that he deliberately started omitting lines, or whether he was just so distracted that he was fumbling and forgetting them again but, either way, Daemon wound up skipping whole chunks of his dialogue. This shortened the scene so much that a startled Leischneudel had to leap over several emotional transitions that he usually played while Lord Ruthven blathered on, and he wound up simply diving straight into the catatonic stupor in which Ruthven left his new brother-in-law at the end of the scene.

Waiting in the wings for my final scene, I heard a woman in the audience say, “Oh, come on.” And no one shushed her.

The hypnotic spell Daemon had held over the vamparazzi ever since opening night seemed to be crumbling.

It was during the wedding night scene that this abysmal performance of The Vampyre took an unexpected turn from gothic melodrama to farce.

As usual, Daemon and I began circling each other while exchanging our dialogue, gradually reducing the distance between us. A spark of Daemon’s usual performance level started to return now, and the openly disenchanted audience actually began paying attention as the sexual tension built between Jane and Ruthven.

But then, as soon as he got within arm’s reach of me, Daemon’s reddened eyes started watering and his pink nose began running.

At the point where he was supposed to seize me by the shoulders, pull me backward against his chest, and start taking down my hair, Daemon instead backed away from me and turned upstage for a moment to sniff and wipe his nose.

After that, he wouldn’t come near me. He just kept circling me while Jane gazed at him in wary but rapt fascination, and I wondered how we were going to perform the rest of the scene if he wouldn’t touch me.

The audience began losing interest again, and I could hear their rustling, shuffling, and muttering. I didn’t really blame them. Now that Ruthven wasn’t pawing and seducing Jane, there was no concealing just how boring and pretentious his speech was. Obviously aware of this, Daemon suddenly walked over to a neoclassical statue of a half-naked woman that was part of the set décor, and he fondled it.

This created a wave of surprised laughter. Obviously not having expected amusement, Daemon froze and stared at the audience like a deer caught in headlights. That produced a burst of hilarity.

I kept gazing at him, my eyes trying to telegraph the message, We have to get this scene back on track.

Daemon pulled himself together enough to say his next few lines, twitching a bit as the audience continued giggling. I heard my next cue, but I really wasn’t sure, under the circumstances, that I should say my line.

I stared at Daemon helplessly, willing him to understand my dilemma.

He finally looked at me, with his hand still planted on the statue’s naked breast, and gave me an exasperated scowl.

So I uttered my dialogue: “You shouldn’t touch me there.”

The audience howled with laughter.

Daemon snatched his hand away from the stony breast as if he’d been burned. The audience laughed even harder.

“Why not?” he said. “After all, we were wed today.”

Beyond Daemon, in the wings, I could see Mad Rachel gaping at us as if we’d both lost our minds.

Daemon scowled at me again, clearly waiting for me to say my next line.

I didn’t have a next line. Normally, by now, Ruthven was boldly fondling Jane. Glaring at Daemon, I gave a deep moan of sexual arousal, which was what I always did at this point in Ruthven’s yammering. Daemon looked startled.

More laughter.

Then I lifted my brows at him, indicating it was his turn to speak.

Remembering his next line, he fondled the statue again and said, “You like that, my pet?”

Still more laughter.

This would be terrific, if we were actually performing a comedy.

Enough already. I just wanted to get exsanguinated and get the hell out of here. And I didn’t see how Daemon could possibly bite Jane and suck her blood if he wouldn’t get within five feet of me.

I walked over to Ruthven, seized his hands, and hauled my heel-dragging groom over to my mark, where the white spotlight would find me when Jane died. Then I boldly put his hand on my breast. He gaped at me in astonishment, then gaped at my breast.

The audience found this so hilarious, it was a few moments before either of us could deliver more dialogue. By then, a surprised Daemon had adjusted to my taking charge of the scene. He seemed relieved to be back in a familiar position, and he said his next few lines with almost credible gravity, though his reddened eyes were tearing up and his nostrils were quivering.

I swooned in his arms, right on cue, more than ready by now to die. Daemon leaned over to place his mouth against my tender neck with ravenous ardor—and then he sneezed so violently that he dropped me.

I gasped and reflexively grabbed him to keep from falling. He kept sneezing convulsively—which was probably why he lost his footing and fell on top of me. We hit the hard stage floor with a resounding thud, accompanied by gales of laughter from the audience and a scattering of applause. With the wind knocked out of me by the fall and Daemon’s weight on top of me, I couldn’t catch my breath and was afraid I would black out.

From my prone position, I could see the curtain starting to come down. Actually, it was jerkily starting and stopping, as if the crew couldn’t decide what to do.

Daemon rolled off me and sat up, sniffing and sneezing while the audience continued howling with merriment. I drew in a gulp of air. High overhead, I saw the lowering curtain stop again, hovering indecisively.

“Ah, my lord!” I cried in mingled agony and ecstasy.

Despite not having been bitten or drained, I gave a noisy dying gurgle and a quick body-stiffening shudder of death throes, then I closed my eyes and went limp.

I heard the audience chuckling, but nothing else. I opened my upstage eye and saw Daemon staring at me in consternation. Frantically gesturing only with my eye, I tried to indicate that Leischneudel would enter any moment and they could finish the scene. However, my right eye was apparently not as self-explanatory as I hoped. Daemon just sat there wheezing as he gaped openmouthed at me, clearly dumbfounded.

Bill, however, was on the ball. He recognized what passed for my lighting cue in these unprecedented circumstances, and the white spotlight came on, glaring down on me with bloodless intensity. I shut my right eye and lay there dead, feeling relieved to effectively be out of this scene.

Leischneudel came on a moment later, and Daemon staggered to his feet to finish the performance, such as it was. I could hear the vampire sniffing and clearing his irritated throat throughout the rest of the scene. Leischneudel did a creditable job, all things considered, but I could tell he was making a heroic effort not to burst out laughing. When he fell down dead, just outside the white pool of my spotlight, I held my breath to conquer my own impulse to start laughing. We both lay there in tense silence, waiting for Daemon to finish his final monologue—which he rushed through like a man desperate to finish the job and go find his private hoard of Nocturne.

The stage went dark, the curtain came down, and a wave of uncertain applause spread through the audience, as if they weren’t quite sure the play was over. I let out my breath on a relieved sigh, then Leischneudel and I convulsed simultaneously with hysterical laughter.

“Get up!” Mad Rachel insisted. “Get up, you guys!”

I couldn’t. I was laughing too hard.

“Come on, goddamn it!” Rachel, who hadn’t just had a spotlight shining against her eyelids, readily found me lying on the darkened stage and started tugging on my arm.

“Ow, that hurts.” That heavy fall to the stage a few minutes ago, combined with my other injuries, ensured that I was just one big ache by now.

“And where are you going?” Rachel cried.

I couldn’t see yet, but I could hear Leischneudel still laughing helplessly as he lay near me, so I knew Rachel must be speaking to Daemon.

“I’m not taking a bow after that,” he said.

“No!” Rachel cried. “Stop!”

The curtain rose on me and Leischneudel still lying on the stage, while Rachel clung desperately to Daemon’s arm, her full body weight dragging on him as he tried to make his escape. Leischneudel and I hopped to our feet, and we all fell into line for our curtain call—though Daemon declined to hold my hand this evening.

Half of the audience members were already out of their seats and leaving, ignoring us as they gathered their belongings and streamed toward the exits, talking about where they would go for dinner—or perhaps about how bizarre this show was. Some of the people who were still in their seats applauded enthusiastically—most of them, I noticed, were die-hard fans, dressed as vampires, Janes, or bondage babes. The rest of the stillseated crowd applauded politely, but their expressions suggested they were thinking of asking for their money back.

As soon as the curtain came down on what would clearly be our only bow today, Rachel gave Daemon a hard shove and cried, “You ruined the show!”

He ignored her and said angrily to me, “Don’t you ever wear that stuff onstage again!”

“Watch your tone!” I snapped back. I pointed to the covered-up welt on my neck. “You did this to me, you jerk!” I touched my injured cheek. “And you encouraged your fans to do this to me! I am the walking wounded because of you! So don’t you dare take that tone with me!”

Daemon sneezed and gave a little groan. “Oh, fine. Whatever. Just don’t wear it again.”

“I won’t,” I said. “I certainly don’t want to be stranded onstage with you like that again.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Leischneudel. “That final scene today was the first time I’ve ever liked this play.”

“Fuck all of you.” Rachel stormed off in search of her cell phone.

Daemon stalked off to his dressing room, followed by Victor, who was unwisely telling him the show hadn’t really been that bad.

Still laughing, Leischneudel and I staggered together toward our dressing rooms.

When we reached his door, his eyes widened as he said, “Oh, no! That was the performance Thack saw.”

“Oh, God.” I put my hand over my mouth. “He’ll kill me for making him sit through that.”

“Well, I can kiss that opportunity good-bye.” Leischneudel’s smile faded.

“No, you were fine in the first act, and you rescued a couple of scenes as best you could in the second act. I’m sure Thack saw that,” I said truthfully. “I’m sure he also recognized that no one could have rescued the final scene.”

We both burst out laughing again.

“Esther?” a familiar voice called.

I looked over my shoulder to see Thack being escorted down the hallway by the house manager, who had brought him backstage.

Thackeray Shackleton was slim, blond, nice looking, always impeccably dressed, and (as I had found was so often the case with attractive, well-dressed men who loved the theater) gay. He thanked the house manager, greeted me warmly, and presented me with a bottle of champagne.

“I’m so glad you brought alcohol,” I said honestly.

“After sitting through that play,” Thack said, “I think I need something stronger than bubbly.”

Although it wasn’t the most propitious moment, I introduced him to Leischneudel.

“Congratulations,” Thack said to him, “on being the only actor in the cast who can hold his head up after that performance.”

“Oh, er . . . thank you, sir.”

“Thack!” I said.

“Oh, you did as well as anyone possibly could, darling,” Thack assured me. “But even you couldn’t save yourself when you were stranded out there with a demented marionette puppet whose strings had snapped.”

Leischneudel and I both laughed again.

“Tell me, is this show always quite that ... odd?” Thack asked.

Daemon’s door opened and he came out of his dressing room just in time to hear Thack say this.

He looked at us. We looked back.

I cleared my throat and introduced Thack to Daemon. Their civil greetings were followed by an awkward silence.

Thack broke it by saying, “I saw the show today. You offered your audience . . . a unique interpretation of the role. That’s the hallmark of a great actor.”

Nice save.

“Thanks,” Daemon said morosely. “Does anyone know where Victor went?”

Leischneudel and I shook our heads. Daemon went back into his room and closed the door.

Without missing a beat, Thack said to Leischneudel, “I understand you’re seeking representation?”

“Um, yes,” Leischneudel said, obviously surprised that Thack was raising the subject after today’s performance. “I am.”

“Why don’t you two talk while I change?” I suggested. “And Leischneudel can explain what happened out there today. That wasn’t really our show. It was more like a crazed nightmare of our show.”

They went into Leischneudel’s dressing room. I went down the hall to my room, where I found Rachel raging into her cell phone about the performance while undressing and removing her makeup. I opened the champagne, then drank some of the lukewarm liquid straight from the bottle. I changed into my street clothes, cleaned off my makeup, and applied a fresh layer of antibiotic ointment to my cheek, pausing often to take more swigs from the champagne bottle. When Rachel left, still yammering into her phone, I sank into a chair and enjoyed the blessed silence as I drank warm bubbly.

I felt exhausted and in pain. Also overwhelmed, all things considered. I really wished we didn’t have to do a show tomorrow. However, although most theaters were dark on Monday nights, the performance schedule for our eight-week run had been based on Daemon’s schedule—and he’d had two longstanding commitments for public appearances on Tuesdays, related to his work for Nocturne. So our weekly day off on this show was Tuesday. At the moment that seemed very far away.

There was a knock at my door.

“Come in,” I said wearily.

Max and Nelli entered the room. I blinked in surprise, having forgotten about them during the course of that disastrous performance.

“Welcome back,” I said, as Max took a seat and Nelli lay down with a little sigh. I offered Max some tepid champagne, which he declined. I set aside the bottle as I asked, “Did you find any vampires out there?”

Max shook his head. “We encountered some interesting individuals. Also some rather alarming ones. As well as many friendly, er, vampire enthusiasts. I also spoke with a number of people who are very disturbed by the recent murder. But we did not discover any vampires. Or, rather, Nelli showed no unusual reaction to any of the hundreds of people we encountered. Well, apart from the ones who offered her food, obviously.” He frowned. “Our lack of results could be because there wasn’t a vampire out there.”

Nelli sneezed twice and gave a little groan.

I looked at her with concern as I rose to pack my tote bag so we could leave. “Has she been doing that all evening?”

“No, she was fine outside.” He reached down to stroke Nelli’s head soothingly. “However, it also may be that, despite her sensitivity to certain phenomena, Nelli cannot actually recognize a made or hereditary vampire.”

“Why are you trying to identify a made or hereditary vampire?” Thack asked sharply from the doorway.

We both flinched in surprise and turned to look at him. He was eyeing Max warily.

I said, “Er, we just, uh . . .”

Max studied Thack curiously. “We are concerned about the recent murders by exsanguination.”

“Murders?” Thack said. “As in, plural?”

“Yes.”

Thack frowned. “There was only one in the news.”

“Max,” I cautioned. What Lopez had told me about the other murders was confidential.

Still holding Thack’s gaze, Max held up a hand to silence me. “There have been at least two others. Possibly three.”

Thack entered the room and closed the door. “How do you know about this, given that it’s not in the news?”

Nelli sneezed. I patted her head as she wheezed a little.

“I think a vampire may be responsible,” Max said slowly. “What do you think, Mr. . . ?”

“This is my agent, Thackeray Shackleton.” I gestured to Max, wondering just how crazy he must sound to Thack. “Dr. Maximillian Zadok.”

“Let me make sure I understand you,” Thack said. “At least three recent murder victims—possibly four—have been exsanguinated, and you think a vampire is responsible?”

“Yes,” said Max.

“Hey, Thack,” I said. “After a performance like that, you probably just want to get out of here right away, and—”

“Does it mean anything to you, Dr. Zadok,” Thack said slowly, his gaze still locked with Max’s, “when I tell you that I’m . . . Lithuanian?”