Fangtabulous Read Free Page A

know he was a psycho. Vamps didn’t have an app for that.
    “I didn’t catch your name,” I said as he pushed aside a heavy black curtain. It had to be sound-muffling or surely we’d have twigged to the fact that there was a whole performance, audience and all, going on in the back.
    “Chip,” he whispered, so as not to disrupt the show.
    “Chip—really?” I asked, just as quietly.
    “Yeah, like the one on your shoulder,” he answered. “Now, shhh.”
    Oh, sure, I was the one with a chip on my shoulder.
    But I hushed, mostly because I wanted to catch what was happening on stage. I moved aside so the others could get in, and we ended up lining the wall between the theater area and the gift shop. If our entrance disrupted the show, we couldn’t tell. On stage—well, at floor-level in front of the rows of filled seats—was a tall man dressed all in black but for a white poet shirt complete with ruffles. His jacket was an old-timey cut, like something out of A Christmas Carol . His black hair was long and framed a vampire-pale face. Ice-blue eyes too cool for reality challenged the audience to see through the illusion that he was performing. The probable illusion—we’d seen enough real magic to know that it existed. But could books really bleed? Color me skeptical. I sniffed. Well, if they did bleed, it was stage blood. My fangs stayed sheathed. Anyway, I preferred practical magic, like the kind that zapped zits on contact.
    My gaze wandered, but only got as far as the assistant striding to center stage to remove the bleeding book. There was something familiar about the assistant, which was not at all a comforting thought. If Donato looked like something out of Charles Dickens, his partner was a character out of Oliver Twist . Wait, was that still Dickens? Anyway, he had those scruffy fingerless gloves on, a shabby coat, a cap pulled low at a jaunty angle, and a half-mask, like on all the posters I’d ever seen for The Phantom of the Opera . I couldn’t see enough for him to remind me of anyone, so why was I so sure … something in his walk? He was cocky and confident, tall but not freakishly so. I felt a weird flutter in the pit of my stomach.
    I was so taken with the mystery man that I missed what triggered all the applause, but suddenly the audience was in a frenzy of appreciation, and Donato was bowing his thanks. I’d missed the finale, whatever it was.
    Marcy had to nudge me with her elbow to move me away from the wall so that we could let the audience out past us.
    Donato and his assistant remained on stage, greeting a few friends and admirers who’d hung behind. I and my minions stepped behind the stragglers, not calling attention to ourselves, but I felt the assistant’s stare on me anyway. If this wasn’t one of those lust-at-first-sight moments when you catch a stranger’s eye across a crowded room, we had a problem. If he had any connection to the fangs or Feds who were after us, we’d be in big, big trouble. Possibly even fatal.
    Marcy looked from the masked man to me and back. “You know him?” she whispered.
    There was something about the way those eyes sparked and glinted, something about the quirk to the one side of his lips that I could see … “Maybe,” I whispered back.
    “Introduce me?”
    I nudged her with my hip. “You’re taken.”
    “So are you,” she pointed out, not wrongly.
    I tore my gaze away just as the last of the stragglers let out a hearty laugh and moved on. As the exit/entryway curtain closed behind them, Donato turned his ice-blue eyes on us. His assistant reached up to remove his hat with one hand and his mask with the other, and flipped his hair back to reveal a truly breathtaking sight—Ulric, my goth guy from New York. Nosy. Insufferable. Blood like mulled cider. Here, in the flesh.

2

    D onato stirred his coffee, apparently perfectly okay with being out in public in full costume. Except for those who greeted him as he entered, no one in the