Free Love Bites by Adrienne Barbeau

very often, at least. Except for my father. That’s how she kept him in line. And you’ve got to know she was really powerful, because he was a vampyre of the Dakhanavar clan, in Armenia. Not easy to control, except by my mother. She’d mix up some powders and potions and set them burning, and when my father inhaled the fragrance, she’d put a spell on him. Then he’d follow her around like a puppy. He roamed the countryside a lot, defending the villages from interlopers, and my mother raised me, most of the time alone, in a village near Mt. Ararat. And of course, by the time I was born, the Armenians were all Christian. In fact, Armenia was the first nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion, back in the fourth century. So the villagers celebrated Christmas—on January sixth, that’s the Armenian Christmas—and I used to listen to the music and go to the feasts. I never ate the food, but I had a good time.”
    “But you don’t believe in God, do you? Heaven and hell?” I wanted to stare at her. Her face was so animated when she talked that I couldn’t stop watching. I dragged my eyes back to the car in front of us, barely missing the guy’s bumper before I braked.
    “You know, it’s not a concept I spend much time considering, Peter. When you’re fairly immortal, you don’t worry about an afterlife. You don’t need to create an idea of what it might be like after you’re dead. And you certainly don’t need anyone to pray to—for forgiveness or anything else.” She tucked her feet under her on the seat and turned to face me. “Plus, I think most of us are so bored after living eight or nine hundred years that the thought of dying doesn’t carry with it any fear. Maybe just relief. When you’ve seen firsthand what humanity does to itself . . . well, as young as I am in terms of my kind, there are days when I wouldn’t mind if it were a little easier for me to get gone.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

    I shouldn’t have said that to Peter. We were having a good time looking at the Christmas decorations, and I think I dampened the mood of the evening with my diatribe about humanity. I had the were attack in the back of my mind, and the fact that I didn’t know who he was or why he’d come after me was pissing me off. Not to mention that I hadn’t done away with him when I had the chance. So I started railing about the Deluge and the War of the Triple Alliance, the Herero genocide, and, of course, the Armenian genocide. “You know what Hitler said when he ordered his death-head units out?” I asked Peter. “ ‘Gas the Jews; who remembers the Armenians?’ ” That left Peter sort of speechless; I don’t think he’d ever heard it. Actually, Hitler’s exact words were “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” I memorized them at the time. Right after I drained an SS officer. But I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place; it wasn’t very festive. And certainly not on a second date. I shouldn’t have gotten started. But, you know, it’s one thing to read about the horrors mankind has perpetuated over the last five hundred years and quite another to have seen a lot of them with my own (sometimes raging red) eyes.
    Anyway, I finally changed the subject. Peter asked about the films we had in production, and I told him one of my favorite agent stories—about the time we offered Matthew MacFadyen a role in Drown with Love and heard back from his agent that he hated the script and wasn’t interested, but that they had Denis Leary as a client and he’d love to do it. So we started negotiations with Denis, whom I love as well, and that weekend I ran into Matthew at a fund-raiser for blood disease. I told him I was sorry he hadn’t liked the project, we thought he’d be great in the role. He didn’t have any idea what I was talking about. His agents had never shown him the script or told him about the offer. They figured they could get more money for Denis,