but then, she didn’t need to do it for long. Johnny’s look was engraved in her consciousness. She’d spoken to his ghost, he’d even come to her in her dreams. So, she held his look and his essence in her heart, and she breathed into her astral body and became him.
“You have your wish!” she called out in Johnny’s voice, and Darius turned to her, startled, and then drew back in shock.
Just as Tiger had saved himself—once—from Mayo by taking him off guard, Darius was now so startled at the sight of Johnny Love that he relaxed his bead on DJ and simply stared at Johnny.
And in that split second Mick leaped from the throne and tackled Darius.
They struggled with the gun. And as they fought, Darius Changed. His eyes turned from black to red as fangs sprouted from the roots where his canine teeth were grounded, and he suddenly seemed twice his size as the supernatural strength flowed into his limbs.
But on the other throne, DJ was Changing, too. The animal ferocity that was always just below the surface of his performances now was fully realized. He was a creature, a vampire, and there was no hesitation or laxness in the way he flew at Darius with the full strength and fury of his kind. The two otherworldly beings grappled with each other in a tangle of fangs and leathery wings.
Mick grabbed Phoenix up from the floor and hustled him over to Barrie. “Take him. Get him out of here.”
She knew he was playing on her maternal instincts to get her out of the fray, and she was having none of it. “I’m not leaving. We have to put Darius down.”
“Let me help,” a voice said behind them, an ethereal sound, but Barrie felt the resonance in her soul. She and Mick turned as one...and she gasped.
The real Johnny Love stood in front of them, insubstantial but large as life. “He’s not immortal and we are,” he told Robbie. Mick. Whoever the shifter was, other than the man Barrie loved.
To her shock, Mick grinned at the ghost of Johnny with a careless, adolescent, fuck-you smile. “Hell, yeah,” he told Johnny. “Let’s do it.”
They turned as one and called out, “Deej! Let’s off this bastard!”
DJ pulled himself away from the fight, and for a split second, the three Others looked at each other. In the candlelight they seemed caught between adulthood and adolescence, a trio of supernatural beauty the likes of which had never been seen in the fever dream that is Hollywood before or since.
“Get him!” Johnny called.
And the three of them converged on the vampire with all the idealism of youth and the strength of manhood and the supernatural power of their Otherworldly nature.
Invincible.
For a split second Darius seemed stopped in his tracks at the sight of them. Then he drew himself up, bared his fangs and crouched on his haunches to spring. As the fire raged around them, DJ tackled him with all his vampire power, pinning him to the floor. Mick picked up a chair and smashed it against the floor, then grabbed one of the splintered wooden legs: a perfect stake. DJ held Darius and Mick held the stake and Johnny used invisible strength to drive it home, piercing the vampire’s flesh, cracking through ribs.
Blood spurted from Darius’s chest as he arched and hissed and writhed in his death throes.
At that final moment it didn’t feel like a movie to Barrie, but horribly, tragically real.
Darius spasmed in death, blood still fountaining, and then went still on the floor, pinioned through his heart.
And as the fire raged, a blistering heat, Barrie grabbed Phoenix and Mick grabbed Barrie and DJ grabbed Mick...but then they all looked back at the beautiful, golden ghost of Johnny Love, surrounded by mirrors and flames.
“Go!” Johnny shouted at them. “Go!”
And still they hesitated, until Johnny Love smiled, that heartbreaking, unforgettable smile.
“I’m fine,” he told them. “I’ll be fine now.”
As he faded away, the others all ran for the stairs, ran for their lives, as the fire ate through the dying, curling, burning images of Otherworld.
Chapter 23
As it turned out, DJ had not been breaking as many fire codes as Darius had suggested. The basement room was completely fireproofed relative to the rest of the house. While the basement burned itself clean, the rest of the house was untouched; the blaze never even raised an alarm with the County Fire Department.
“I may be a junkie, but I’m not stupid,” DJ huffed.
It was the