Suck It Up and Die (12 page)

As the crowd bellowed its support and the picture cut to Ally Alfamen, Cody flipped the TV off. “ ‘The new Transylvania’? Does she actually think Dracula was real?”

Portia stared ahead, eyes narrowed. “It’s rhetoric, Cody, the PR war for hearts and minds.” She steepled her fingers and tapped them together. “
The Shadow
getting canceled is bad, but there’s a silver lining.”

“What?”

Portia turned to her partner in film. “Rachel’s schedule suddenly opened up for our interview with her.”

In the top-floor office of Diamond Sky Productions, Penny sat at her desk and finished reading Birnam’s post. She looked over her desk at Rachel, sprawled in an easy chair. Spread-eagle, with her head thrown back, Rachel resembled a Raggedy Ann doll that had been tossed there.

“Did you hear what I read?” Penny asked.

Rachel heaved a sigh. “Yeah.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

Rachel answered in a pitiful voice. “All I wanna do is be an Earth Angel, and what do they do? Crucify me.”

Penny’s brow knitted. “How ’bout we drop the martyr act and figure out how we’re going to respond.”

Rachel sprang out of the chair and paced. “I mean, I don’t get it. What’s the point of freedom? What’s the point of the VRA passing or not passing if we can’t exercise the ultimate American freedom: making good TV?”

Penny’s computer blipped and the Skype menu appeared. She read the name of the caller. “It’s Birnam.”

Rachel stopped mid-pace.

“Should we talk to him?” Penny asked.

“Damn straight!” Rachel swept around the desk and dropped to her knees so they could both be seen on the Skype screen.

Birnam’s video feed was blank, but his voice came through loud and clear. “Hello, my two favorite newsmakers, the Queen of Spin and the Princess of Mayhem. Sorry about playing the Prince of Darkness, but the camera on my computer is on the fritz.”

“Is that why you called?” Penny asked. “To see if we can fix it?”

He chuckled. “No, I wanted to talk to Rachel about her dramatic twenty-four hours. Yesterday you soared like bird, today you crashed back to earth.”

Rachel eye-rolled. “If you’re gonna tell me the Icarus story, flying too close to the sun and all that—”

“I wasn’t,” he cut in, “but now that I think of it—”

“Now that
I
think of it,” she interrupted back, “you might be old enough to have been there when Icarus fell out of the sky, which is my point.”

“Sometimes your point evades me, Rachel,” Birnam said, sounding bemused. “What point is that?”

“You’re from generation BC.”

Penny grimaced. “Ooh, harsh.”

“I don’t wanna hurt your feelings, Mr. Birnam; I don’t wanna hurt anyone’s feelings. I’m just saying there’s a new generation in town.”

“And that is?” he asked.

“Generation V.”

“Ah, yes.” He chortled. “Eternal youth.”

Rachel took a breath. “Mr. Birnam, you’ve done super-amazing things for vampires. If it weren’t for you,
we’d still be wild-ass punks jumpin’ necks for joyrides. But in your long fight for equality, you’ve gone too far.”

“How do you mean?”

“By making us burn our fangs in the public square.”

“You lost me.”

“Me too,” Penny said.

Rachel huffed with impatience. “It’s so obvious. The feminists burned their bras back in the seventies, right?”

Penny nodded. “My mother was one of ’em.”

“And,” Rachel continued, “it turned out bra-burning was a feminist disaster ’cause they weren’t listening to all the women who still wanted to wear bras!”

“What on earth,” Birnam asked, “does bra-burning have to do with fang-burning?”

“I think I know what she’s getting at,” Penny said.

“Help me understand,” Birnam pleaded.

Penny continued. “Early feminists wanted women to step up to the table of equality and be just like men. It didn’t work. Women wanted to be
women
, too. They wanted to be equal and free and
sexy
at the same time. They wanted to step up to the table with their full skill set.”

“Right!” Rachel jumped back in. “And just like women, there’s lots of vampires who wanna step up to the table with their full skill set. In the seventies when women were fighting for equality, people—
male
people—were freakin’ out. They were thinking,
Oh, man, women are gonna cry every time something goes super wrong
. Or,
Damn, women are gonna go hysterical every time they get their period
. Did any of that go down? Don’t think so. ’Cause women brought their
best selves
to the table. And now, as vampires are about to step up to equality, mortals are freakin’ over the same crap. They’re thinkin’,
Oh, man, every time someone gets a paper cut vampires are gonna pop fangs
. And
Oh, damn, every time vampires lose their temper they’re gonna turn into a fire-breathing dragon and roast someone
. But we won’t do those things, ’cause just like women, we’re gonna bring our
best selves
to the table. We’re gonna step up to the table and be Earth Angels!”

There was a pause before Birnam spoke. “Very impressive, Ms. Capilarus, very forward-thinking. But I would advise you to head up to Leaguer Academy Two for a refresher course in CD Management and Lifer Awareness. You need to reacquaint yourself with a vampire skill more crucial to our survival than all others.”

“What’s that?” Penny asked.

“The ability to smell mortal fear. The scent tells us when to pounce, and when to wait. I fear your olfactory powers have been dulled by your naïve belief that the earth
devils
we’ve been for thousands of years have been completely eradicated, and, with a dash of fairy dust, we have been transformed into ‘earth angels.’ ”

Rachel started to object, but Penny raised a hand, silencing her. “Thank you, Luther, it’s all very good advice. Rachel and I will take it to heart.”

Early that evening, Portia and Cody were loading Zoë’s pedicab with lighting and sound equipment. Penny had told her daughter that Rachel was free to give them an interview that evening at Diamond Sky. Portia was bringing her camera down the front stoop when she almost tripped over Mr. and Mrs. Nesbit, the elderly couple who lived on the top two floors of the town house.

“Goodness, aren’t we in a rush,” Mrs. Nesbit stated more than asked.

“Sorry, Mrs. Nesbit.” Portia squeezed by them. “Great filmmaking stops for no one.”

Portia’s phone rang. She pulled it out and hit speaker so she could take the call while handling the camera and finding a space for herself in the pedicab not already occupied by Cody or equipment. “Hey, what’s up?”

Morning’s voice sounded over the speaker. “You got a minute?”

“Not really,” she answered, squeezing in next to Cody. “I’m headed to an interview with Rachel for our film.”

“C’mon, Harry Potter,” Cody urged Zoë as she stood on her pedals to get the pedicab moving. “Get this Firebolt up to speed.”

“Is everything okay?” Portia asked Morning.

“Yeah, I’m just a little nervous about our first live fire exercise tomorrow. I wanted to talk to you.”

“You’ll do fine,” she reassured him. “But, Morn, I can’t talk now. I gotta work on my interview questions. Call you later, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, masking his disappointment. “Later.”

The extra weight in Zoë’s pedicab didn’t seem to slow her. On the contrary, delivering her best friend and Cody to an interview with the famous—and now infamous—Rachel Capilarus had Zoë’s veins coursing with adrenaline. “You’re gonna let me come in and watch, right?” she asked.

Portia didn’t look up from the pad she was writing questions on. “If you promise not to say a word or even
think
about entertaining Rachel with one of your blood-obligate impressions.”

“Yeah,” Cody added, “it’s not like we’re shootin’ the sequel to
Never Been Kissed: Never Been Bitten
.”

“I’ll be good, I promise,” Zoë declared, then burst into lyrics from her version of “Part of Your World.” “I wanna be where the vampires are / I wanna see, I wanna see ’em feedin’ / Stalking around with those—what do you call ’em? / Oh, fangs!”

Unbeknownst to Zoë, she was closer to a vampire than she thought. She had just ridden by one in the window of a beauty salon.

The vampire with the coppery complexion sat inside Trixie’s Pamper Parlor. He was having his skin exfoliated. While he was an odd combination of flesh, bone, and a touch of bristlecone pine, the beautician, Trixie herself, was a blend of Southern charm and New York moxie.

The vampire was glued to the television in the corner as the evening news covered the story of
The Shadow
being canceled and Becky-Dell’s declaration of war against the new “red menace.”

Trixie peeled another bacon-sized shaving of dried skin off her customer’s face. “I haven’t seen skin like this since my Uncle Bodly fell asleep in his fishin’ floatie and caught himself a second-degree burn.”

The vampire’s insides shuddered at the thought of sunlight.

Trixie peeled away another shaving and gave him a flirtatious wink. “But you look more like a lifeguard who fell asleep in his guard chair.”

“It’s not a sunburn,” the vampire declared, wanting to get away from sunny topics. “I suffer from a rare kind of dermatitis: poison birch.”

Trixie recoiled. “Is it contagious, like poison ivy?”

“Not at all,” he assured her, “that’s why it’s so rare. It’s impossible to catch.”