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mother? You were your mother?” Peter was struggling to take it all in. I knew I probably shouldn’t throw too much at him at one time. But I might not have another chance. Better to get as much out on the table as possible.
    “I’m old, Peter. More than four hundred years old. I came to this country at the turn of the century as my ‘grandmother,’ an actress in silent films, and then when talkies came in I was her daughter, Anna Moore, and when Anna had outlived her career, I let people think she was dying and I showed up as her daughter, Ovsanna, supposedly raised in Europe and here to nurse her mother through her final days.”
    “You were your mother? Jesus. All this time my mother’s been selling Anna Moore memorabilia on eBay. If she only knew.” Still not a smile, but his hazel eyes had softened a bit. “She could raise her reserve.” With his black hair and high cheekbones, he looked like he should be modeling for Hugo Boss, not fighting crime in Beverly Hills. “What about all the others, those old-time movie stars you introduced me to? And the three that were killed—Jason Eddings and Mai Goulart and Tommy Gordon? What’s their story?”
    “All members of my clan, all Vampyres of Hollywood. You see, it wasn’t until the birth of the cinema that my kind found their true calling. Have you seen us on-screen? Well, you have, you just didn’t know we were vampyres. The camera loves us. It’s something about our vampyre physiology; we’re luminescent on-screen. You can’t take your eyes off us. Charlie Chaplin, Theda Bara, Peter Lorre, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks—so many of my clan became stars as soon as they found the camera. Any vampyre with a shred of talent became a star back in the twenties. And then some, like Pola Negri and Olive Thomas, couldn’t make the cut when talkies came in. But that’s how I started, or rather, my ‘grandmother’ started, back in 1915. When the talkies came in, I retired for a while and came back as Anna Moore, and then in the late sixties, right before Anna ‘died,’ her daughter, who bore a striking resemblance to her—even down to her first name, ‘Ovsanna’—arrived from Europe to follow in her footsteps. Some of the others who started with me and became too recognizable to relocate or fade into obscurity simply staged their deaths and went into hiding. I always thought Orson was so clever, waiting until the day Yul Brynner died to dilute the press coverage of his own ‘death.’
    “And we controlled the industry, so we controlled our mythology,” I continued. “All that stuff humans believe about garlic and mirrors and living only in the dark—we made that up. And put it on the screen. As for controlling your mind, I’m not. I can’t. My clan doesn’t do that. I am Dakhanavar, from the Mt. Ararat region of Armenia. My ancestors weren’t the brightest of the clans—remind me to tell you the toe story sometime—but we are guardians by nature and I will fight to protect you, but I will not bend you to my will. If anything, right now, I want you to know the truths about me so that you can make your own decision.” I held my breath, just a little bit. He looked so formidable in the dim light.
    “What are the truths, aside from your ability to change into whatever William Blake–looking creature that was that you became in Palm Springs? What’s the story with you and Maral?”
    Just like a man, I thought. I’m telling him I’m the überbeast he’s only seen in horror films and all he wants to know about is who I’m screwing. “Maral is my family . . . my helpmate . . . and my source of life. I think she’s beautiful. She’s the only human I’ve let get close to me in many, many years, and I care for her deeply. She lives with me in this house. Not in my house in Malibu, though. She has her own bedroom and office here. We’re lovers when the desire arises, but it’s not an exclusive relationship. She knows she can have