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immediately, but it had been weeks since I’d fed and I didn’t have the nutrients I needed to sustain the healing process. My wounds were too extensive. I was dying.
    Maral found me before I lost consciousness. I couldn’t move my head, but I saw the look in her eyes and knew she was seeing the violent movement beneath my skin as my muscles and bones attempted to fuse back together. It must have been terrifying for her. The blood drained from her face as she watched protruding leg bones angle back towards the top of my tibia, cells reaching for cells to reconnect. “What are you?” she asked in a quavering voice, and eventually I answered with the truth.
    “Vampyre. Dying.”
    She stared at me a moment longer, shaking her head as though to confirm something she might have suspected for a while. And then she sliced her wrist on a jagged rock and she nursed me back to life.
    “How did you know what to do?” I asked her later as I healed the wound on her wrist with my saliva. It took only minutes.
    “Everyone knows what an injured vampyre needs,” she said. This time her voice was stronger. “You see it in the movies all the time.”
    She’s been allowing me to feed on her ever since. Not just allowing—needing. There are times when she begs for it.
    The tabloids never tire of questioning our relationship—we’re the Oprah and Gayle of the film industry—but only my clan knows the truth.
    And now Peter. He knows part of the truth. It was time to tell him the rest.
    I wasn’t going to tell him everything, though. He didn’t need to know I’d been attacked again. There was nothing he could do to help. Not until I knew a lot more about what was going on. Like who was after me, and why.
    And even then, I’d take care of it myself.
    I heard him enter the house and called out to him to meet me in the library. If Maral had been there, I would have asked her to make him an espresso, but right then dealing with the massive copper machine was more than I wanted to bother with. It was an original; Achille Gaggia had given it to me in Italy soon after he designed it. In 1945. I remember because we were celebrating Mussolini’s capture. Achille was so excited that I didn’t have the heart to tell him I don’t drink coffee.
    Peter was standing in front of the bookshelves when I came in. He’d turned on a single amber-shaded floor lamp and the room was bathed in soft gold light and shadows. He had a Gary Disher novel in his hand, the Inspector Challis series. He put it back on the shelf and turned to stare at me. I could see a vein throbbing across his left temple. I heard his blood pulsing through it. He didn’t speak, he just stared.
    “Would you like some wine or something to drink?” I asked. Tremors of nervousness tightened across my chest. I rarely feel fear, but this was something else. Anxiety. I didn’t want him angry with me.
    “No. I’d like to know what’s going on.” He was deadly serious, with not a hint of warmth in his voice. “What’s going on with you and what’s going on with us. I don’t know if you’re controlling my mind or what, but I can’t stop thinking about you. And I really don’t know what to think. I don’t know how any of this works. It’s pissing me off.”
    “Sit down. Over there.” I nodded towards the leather club chair, and I stretched out on the sofa opposite. I wanted to keep the coffee table between us. The closer I was to him, the harder it would be to keep my hands off him. In this light, he looked like a Greek god. If I touched him again, I might not be able to stop.
    “Okay, look,” I continued, “you know what you saw in Palm Springs. You know I am not of your kind, your race. I am vampyre. I am not evil incarnate, although I can be a class A bitch when I want to. And I don’t go around killing people so I can survive. Give or take a few film critics when I first started acting. But that was when I was Anna Moore, not Ovsanna.”
    “Anna Moore, your