Free Vamparazzi by Laura Resnick Page B

is quitting show business to go raise goat cheese.”
    â€œGoats,” Leischneudel whispered, still standing right in front of me.
    â€œWell, not everyone loves agenting,” Thack said magnanimously.
    â€œOr vampires,” I noted.
    â€œIt’s a thing,” he repeated. “Don’t even get me started.”
    â€œSo we’ll expect to see you tomorrow?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThere’ll be a ticket waiting for you at the box office.”
    After ending the call, I decided I would claim both of Daemon’s VIP seats for tomorrow’s performance. I called Maximillian Zadok, who lived and worked only a few blocks away from the Hamburg, and invited him to the show, too. He accepted my invitation with pleasure. Max had wanted to come sooner, but he’d been unable to get a ticket to the sold-out run. And, well, what with all the groping and pawing my inadequately clad character endured onstage, I’d been a little recalcitrant about securing a seat for him before now.
    As I ended the call and returned Leischneudel’s cell phone to him, we heard Bill, the stage manager, say over the backstage intercom system, “Places for Act One. Curtain in five minutes. Please take your places for Act One.” He sounded depressed.
    â€œThat’s us,” said Leischneudel, donning his elegant Regency frock coat as I opened the door to exit the dressing room. He followed me out into the hallway.
    He and I opened the show each night. The play’s first scene portrayed the two of us exchanging letters which established that Aubrey was traveling in Europe with the mysterious Lord Ruthven, whom he’d met at a party in London, while Jane managed her brother’s household back in England. Correspondence between the siblings was one of several ways that this stage adaptation restructured Polidori’s story to make it thriftily accommodate a cast of only four people, as well as minimal scene changes.
    As we made our way to the wings, Leischneudel asked me about the man whom I had just used his cell phone to invite to tomorrow night’s performance. “Is Max a friend?”
    â€œYes, a close friend.”
    â€œA potential boyfriend?” he prodded.
    Leischneudel had a sweetheart in Pennsylvania whom he usually saw twice a month, and he was eager to improve his income to the point where he felt he could propose marriage to her. I had met Mary Ann briefly a few weeks ago; a nice, level-headed girl, less pretty than Leischneudel and every bit as polite. Happy in love, Leischneudel wanted to see me having a happy love life, too.
    However, given the way that had been going this year—I met someone I really liked, then nearly got him killed twice —I had decided to put romance on the shelf for a while.
    â€œNo, Max isn’t boyfriend material,” I said. “He’s, uh, more like an eccentric uncle.”
    â€œHe’s older?” Leischneudel guessed.
    You have no idea.
    â€œYes,” I said. “A senior citizen, I guess you’d say—though I rarely think of him that way.”
    In fact, although he didn’t look a day over 70, Max was closer to 350, thanks to accidentally drinking a mysterious and never-replicated alchemic potion in his twenties—back in the seventeenth century. The elixir hadn’t made him immortal, but it ensured he’d been aging at an unusually slow rate ever since. Fighting Evil for the past three centuries or so had kept him fairly fit, and constant study and extensive travel had expanded his agile (if sometimes befuddled) mind. His courtly manners, however, did not seem to have changed a great deal since the powdered-wig era.
    I thought again about Max seeing Daemon fondle me onstage and figured, oh, well, it was too late to un invite him. Besides, he was a man of the world, after all—albeit the Old World.
    Leischneudel asked, “Will he be all right, rubbing shoulders with the