I interrupted her. “Sorry, lady, you’ve got the wrong null. I had a happy childhood. And my cardinal vampire is a pretty decent guy, all things considered. Not that that will stop him from completely kicking your ass.”

“Hmm. So he does know you’re here,” she said, and I winced internally. Stupid Scarlett. Just keep your mouth shut.

Lucy pulled a phone out of her pocket and started typing out a text, looking mournful. “Have you any idea,” she said sadly, without looking up from the screen, “how much time and money we’ve invested into this little endeavor? The years of planning, recruiting, and research? And then you came along—a stupid, thoughtless child blundering into our business—and ruined years of work.” She finished the text and pocketed the phone again. “Now we’re going to have to start all over again.”

“Yeah, obviously I’m the bad guy,” I replied. I was tired, and frustrated, and worried about Wyatt, and I wanted the walkie-talkie and to get out of the building and for Jesse to be here. I was sick of all of this, and it came through in my voice when I said, “Look, what is the point of any of this? If you hate being a vampire so much, just kill yourself and let the rest of us go on with our lives. Hell, I can even make it easy for you. Have your little butt monkey out there shoot you in the head, and I can get home in time for breakfast.”

Lucy stood up, her fists clenched. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?” she said. “Trying to keep me talking, to tell you all about my feelings? Please. You’re just like every vampire sycophant who comes around begging Arthur and me for the real Dracula story—”

“Lady, I know the real Dracula story,” I interrupted, trying to sound bored. “I know all about Claire.”

Lucy Holmwood actually flinched. Then she went very still. I’d gotten to her. Interesting. “What did you just say?” she hissed at me.

“I said I know your story, you vapid, parasitic shithead,” I said conversationally. “Dracula was inspired by a psycho vampire named Claire Clairmont. She cozied up to some idiot personal assistant who fancied himself a writer, and told him all about vampires. He wrote a whole book inspired by Claire, but he changed a good deal of the story to disguise the real players. For starters, he changed his main character’s gender.” I shrugged. “As for the clichéd creepy castle and three skanky wives, I’m thinking that was just classic Victorian male fears about the horrors of releasing female sexuality, but you’d know more about that than I would.”

Lucy’s eyes were beginning to bulge in a very satisfying manner, so I went on. “That wasn’t the only change, though. There’s also the small matter of you, Lucy, turning Arthur into a vampire rather than letting him kill you. And, of course, the fact that Claire didn’t actually die in London. She died more than three years ago in Pasadena, California.” I glared right into Lucy Holmwood’s pretty little face. “When I motherfucking killed her.”

Lucy fell back in her chair, her hand over her mouth like I’d just slapped it. Okay, technically, I hadn’t killed Claire/Ariadne (Clariadne?). But I had turned her human again, right before Dashiell killed her.

Lucy held her hand to her mouth for a moment, and then got up and rushed a few steps away, far enough to get out of my radius. “You’re lying,” she muttered, not looking at me. “You have to be lying.”

“When I met her, she had dyed her hair black and wore black clothes. She went by the name Ariadne, and she lived in a great big mansion in Orange County that she let rot all around her like a demented vampire Miss Havisham.

“One thing I never understood, though,” I continued, not looking at Lucy, just speaking to the room in general, “when I researched her later, all the sources I found said she died at eighty. But the Claire I saw was maybe midtwenties, at the most.”

Lucy looked up then, her eyes stricken. “She was twenty-four,” she whispered. “After she was turned, she pretended to age for a few years, then she told everyone she’d taken a governess job in Russia. Really, she was looking for a doppelgänger to take her place back in England.”

I nodded. It was oddly satisfying to have that piece of the puzzle filled in, like when you find a lost item after you’ve already replaced it and moved on.

“Did you really kill her?” Lucy said, and her eyes were as intense as any I’d ever seen.

“Yes. She tried to move against the cardinal vampire of Los Angeles, and in the process, hurt a friend of mine,” I said. “I turned her human, and then she was killed.”

This was a simplification, of course, but not a lie. Lucy would assume I meant that I’d turned Claire into a human temporarily. Instead, I’d somehow taken the vampire magic right out of her, turning her into a human woman again. I hadn’t been there when Dashiell killed her, but I was completely certain that he had. Claire had been a thorn in his side for two hundred years, and she’d tried to kill his wife in front of him. Dashiell wouldn’t take something like that lightly.

But I didn’t understand why Lucy Holmwood was having such a huge reaction to the news about Claire. Had Lucy been in love with her? But why had they parted ways to begin with? I knew Claire had left London after Dracula was published, but why hadn’t Lucy and Arthur just gone with her?

“Oh shit,” I said, understanding. “You weren’t just trying for some big vampire final solution, were you? All this work, the whole vampire trap . . . you were looking for her.” That was why they’d done so much publicity under the Dracula names, why they’d made such a big deal of getting vampires from other locations to come to Las Vegas for the show. It wasn’t just to exterminate them. They wanted to lure Claire to Vegas.

“You were hoping to kill her, too.”

Chapter 33

Lucy’s pretty rosebud mouth opened, but for once she said nothing. Then she closed her eyes, and actual tears slipped down her face.

Staggering, she came back and sat down in the chair, looking like she couldn’t bear to stand up anymore. “I promised him,” she whispered. She bent her head over her knees, clutching handfuls of her hair.

“Arthur?” I guessed. “What did you promise?”

She had no reason to answer me, not really. At that moment, though, I didn’t think she was really aware of who she was talking to, and the words came tumbling out in a broken whisper. “If he let me live, if he joined me, we would fight against she who cursed me with this plague. She who tried to come between us. We would find her, together. We would punish her, and then we would die.” Lucy winced. She didn’t want to die, at least not anymore.

“That’s what all this was about?” I said, flabbergasted. “You hated Claire for turning you into a vampire?”

A momentary panic hit me—did the Holmwoods know that Dashiell was the one who’d turned Claire into a vampire to begin with? But no, I didn’t think so—they had never made any effort to draw him into this plan, so either they didn’t know or they didn’t hold him responsible for Claire’s actions. But I wasn’t about to bring it up now, in case Lucy decided that put Dashiell on her personal hit list.

“Do you think I wanted this?” Lucy demanded. She gestured down at herself. “Do you think I chose this existence over the life I had planned? I was going to marry Arthur, and we were going to have children and a beautiful estate, everything I’d wanted my whole silly, simple life. And she took all that away from me just for . . . for a demonstration.”

She’d lost me. “What? What demonstration?”

Lucy sat back, waving a hand. “Claire had some ridiculous notion that telling the world about vampires would force vampire societies to get along. She wanted to expose us, so she needed to show that hack writer what it was to feed, to turn someone.” Her face twisted sourly. “She picked me. Because I was naive, and because I was there.” Her lower lip trembled again. “I was going to have children.”

“Why wait so long?” I blurted. “Why not go after Claire back then? There were two of you.”

Lucy glowered at me. “Claire went into hiding,” she snapped. “It wasn’t exactly difficult, in those days, but she cut all her old ties with other vampires. Why do you think we spent so long traveling? It’s a big world. It took decades just to narrow it down to the United States.” Her glare deepened. “And then you took my revenge away from me.” She couldn’t keep up the anger, though. After a moment, she crumpled, her head falling into her hands.