but pimps are small game. My master trained me to seduce and kill powerful men, a fine art. I know all sorts of kinky tricks if you’re interested. In any case there’s more to it than sex. What’s most important is to pinpoint a man’s weakness and exploit it for all it’s worth. Luring a man to your bed is no great feat if you’re attractive— stealing his soul away— now there’s the prize.”

“I’m not much for metaphysics.”

Her bee-stung mouth twitched. “No, you’re the objective man of science. Neurons firing— biochemical transmitters— that’s the meaning of life.”

“Something like that.”

She chuckled. “Everything on a map with a key, but it’s not that simple, my friend.”

He changed the subject. “How long have you been… like this?”

“I can sit hear and answer questions till the bats come home or just tell you as it all happened, be your Sheherazade and beguile you for a thousand and one nights.”

“We don’t have that much time.”

“I have all the time in the world. Where shall I begin?”

“At the beginning would be a good place. How did you become a vampire?”

Mia began, “First off, we don’t refer to ourselves by that vulgar term. We prefer Immortyl, with a Y. Of course I could care less, call a spade a spade, I say… ”

FOUR

* * * *

“Remember those three chicks in Dracula? His so-called brides who attack Harker? Ever wonder what their story was? How’d they end up there and what did they do with their considerable time? It wasn’t like he just flew into my bedroom window as a bat or something. There are circumstances leading up.

My parents emigrated from Italy in nineteen thirty. He was the son of a minor aristocrat and she was a servant. She was pregnant. He was an operatic tenor. Needless to say, they weren’t exactly well off. My mother died at my birth, and my father followed when I was eleven. After an abusive Catholic upbringing by my father’s spinster sister Selena, I ran off to Manhattan to become an actress.

Two years of pounding the pavement got me a break in a play directed by an acting teacher of mine, a married man who took me as his protegee and mistress. The play was Ibsen’s Master Builder. Not that that means a thing to you, Joe, but the antagonist Hilde is a dream part for a young actress, no simpering ingenue, but a first-class demon with the power to drive a man to his death. It’s a sexual power struggle between a young woman, Hilde, and the older titular character, Solness. At this point, I was barely aware of the awesome power of this primal force, but I was a quick learner.

I’ll never forget that nasty, rainy December night when I first met my fate. I was busy smearing cold cream on my face to remove my make up when the assistant stage manager knocked on the door of the dressing room I shared with two female cast members. I was always the last one out. This was my time to go over the performance mentally and analyze what had worked and what hadn’t, to retain anything new I’d found in the character.

“Hey Mia, some guy out in the lobby wants to meet you.”

The occasional audience member wanted to chat but most of these guys weren’t really interested in my acting. Making a face in the mirror I called back, “Anyone important?”

“Never heard of him, but this one’s created quite a stir with the female staff.”

Well, that was different. Apparently, this one was a looker. What would be the harm? “Be right out. Let him into the green room,” I hollered.

The first sight of him was if I’d been dealt a blow to the gut, a good sock right in the old breadbasket. I had to gasp for air. If a god walked on earth, surely this was one. And yet he looked vaguely familiar… The naughty boy had the audacity to take the form of my erotic fantasies. Gorgeous body, tall, strong, high cheekbones, straight flawlessly formed nose, firm and determined jaw, all crowned with a mass of thick, straight, coal black hair. But it was his eyes that ripped my heart out of my chest. They were blue, not the bright blue of cornflowers on a summer’s day, or the soft blue of a robin’s egg in spring, but the cold blue of frozen winter seas, almost white in their chilly brilliance, the irises surrounded by a thin black