A Novel Seduction (11 page)

“All ready for tomorrow,” Jill said with an air of finality.
“Honestly, Ellery, I don’t know why you have all these wonderful sexy things if you don’t wear them.”

“I
do
wear them!” she cried. “Just not on assignments! Now, please. How about just a couple of nice, comfortable work outfits?”

Jill looked at her sister.

“You’re going to the gates of hell,” she said. “You need to make an impression.”

“But one little sweater and a skirt can’t hurt, right?” Ellery said plaintively. “And a pair of nice cotton briefs?”

The gatekeepers narrowed their eyes.

Kate shook her head firmly. “C’mon, Ellery. You know as well as I do: Nobody goes to hell in a pair of nice cotton briefs.”

Flight from New York City to Pittsburgh

Axel stopped fiddling with the locking device on the plane’s tray table long enough to say, “I know it’s ungentlemanly for me to have even noticed, but if I apologize for that up front, can I ask why you’re wearing three pairs of underpants?”

Ellery, who had managed to get her bag out of the stuffed-to-the-gills overhead bin and onto the floor of the aisle and was now trying to extract the laptop from it, looked at him over her shoulder. “It’s a long story.”

The plane hit a bump and Axel grabbed her belt to keep her from falling. She could feel the warmth of his hand on her back.

“Thanks,” she said, flushing. She squeezed by his legs, dropped into the window seat and began to boot up.

“Already working on a draft?” he said.

“I’m thinking about one.”

“Great. So you’ve started reading
Vamp
?”

“Gonna look at it on the plane.”

He glanced at his watch. “It’s a forty-minute flight.”

“How hard can it be? It’s a romance, for God’s sake. When we land, are we going directly to the bar?” He had no hotel listed on his itinerary, and she was curious about where he was planning to stay, but she’d be damned if she’d ask.

“I will. I’ve got to set up the shots.”

No answer there. She pulled the book out of her bag and settled back with the laptop.

He inclined his seat. “Looking forward to seeing the old town again?”

“Not really.”

“C’mon, Ellery, you used to love it.”

“Pittsburgh is no Manhattan.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

She almost said he’d drink to anything, but he’d limited himself to black coffee so far, so she held her tongue. “Not a fan of the Big Apple anymore?”

He made a noncommittal noise, adding after a moment, “I’ve always loved Pittsburgh. Great sports. Great food. Great neighborhoods. It actually reminds me of Toronto, but on a smaller scale. And the vision of that skyline when you first emerge from the Fort Pitt tunnel…” He smiled, remembering. “It’s the only city I know that actually makes an entrance.”

She knew he was trying to be companionable and taking a risk doing it, since it would be easy for her to make a biting comment about why she’d felt like she needed to leave, so she dug into her arsenal of polite responses, coming up with the fairly benign and entirely honest, “I feel like I’ve left Pittsburgh behind.”

He gazed at her, his eyes unreadable. “Funny,” he said, “I feel like I’m still stuck there.”

She waited for a barb, but none came. He settled back into his seat, rolled his jacket into a ball on his shoulder and closed his eyes.

Ellery reviewed the stuff she’d printed out before she left, though she’d already read through it once. She hoped going through the motions of preparation would eventually help her find a way to get the story on paper without destroying her credibility. Axel had said he had a friend in London with access to a romance book club. She wasn’t quite sure what that meant, and she generally was nervous about anything that began with a friend of Axel, but they were going to attend a meeting of the club after the London College visit. Now, if she could only get through Pittsburgh and the damn Monkey Bar.…

She looked at Axel, who was sleeping blissfully. If ever there was a man whose conscience should bother him, it was Axel Mackenzie, but his chest rose and fell like a baby’s.

That
was an image she wished she hadn’t conjured up, she thought, and reluctantly reached for
Vamp
.

She opened it with care, as if the flames of hell—or, more likely, the stink of mass-market prose—might start rising from the pages, and began to read.

Harold, it seemed, had been recruited into the vampire world because he carried the mark of Odelon, rare in humans, which gave him the occasional power to see what might be. He was weaker than most vampires because his transformation had been incomplete, and he had to battle his way to Romgar, the guardian of the underworld and head of the elite Vampturi organization, to either be returned to his human state or become a full-fledged vampire.
Because of his vampy disadvantage, he had to rely on his wits and the help of a rogue she-devil, Ynez—she of the Monkey Bar and Ellery’s passport delay—to help him along the way. Complicating his journey was the appearance of Britta, the young woman he had loved from afar in the human world.

Well
, Ellery thought, pausing at the end of the third chapter and gazing at Axel’s long fingers laced over his buckle as he slept,
if he had told me we were dealing with Joseph Campbell’s monomyth here—a hero on an Odysseus-slash-Skywalker-slash-Potter–esque journey—I would have certainly been a bit more understanding. There’s nothing like a hero on a quest to engage one’s interest.

On the other hand, she could definitely do without the glowing eyes, iridescent skin and biting as a metaphor for sex. As far as Ellery was concerned, literature had pretty much done all it needed to do with vampires after Bram Stoker’s
Dracula,
and even with that book, one needed to read with one’s eyes partly averted to keep from straining one’s credulity.

Far worse, however, was the amateurish dialogue and characterization, especially those of the teenage Britta, who seemed to spend most of her time yearning for Harold and running her hands wistfully through her “chestnut tresses” and who was potentially the most passive woman in literature since Snow White during her poisoned-apple phase.

Ellery was grateful Jill had aligned herself with Team Ynez, for Ynez at least seemed capable of kicking some cold-blooded ass when she had to.

Which reminded Ellery: She’d better read whatever she
could about the Monkey Bar, for that seemed to be where most of this part of the article would be focused.

She paged through the book, stopping at the first reference to the Monkey Bar she spotted, and found herself in the middle of Ynez’s flashback retelling of her first visit to the place. It seemed Romgar presided over it, and it was crawling with criminal he-devils who drank and caroused and pillaged—a pretty spot-on description if she recalled Axel’s time there correctly—and who imprisoned the souls of the dead in a cauldron of fire high on a ledge above the bar.

Ynez, determined to free the soul of her beloved grandmother, had wrestled her way across the monkey bars one-armed while fighting off the he-devils with a sword and a killer pair of heels. No woman had made it to the ledge before, and the whores who serviced the he-devils watched in amazement as Ynez, who had been told only a complete sacrifice would free the souls, stripped to her skin and threw her clothes into the cauldron to renounce her human life.

With the help of the now-inspired whores, the souls, finally free of their torment, flew around the bar before driving out the he-devils. Ynez donned Romgar’s leather duster and, with tears in her eyes, announced that the gates of hell would be guarded by her army of she-devil whores from that time forward.

Ellery gazed out the window, thinking about what it would be like to kick all the lame-ass men out of
Vanity Place,
starting with Buhl Martin Black and ending with the jerk in Finance who kicked her expense report back every time she submitted one. Then she smiled, remembering
how she had led her first set of summer interns through the grueling paces of putting together a magazine like
Vanity Place
. She had felt pretty empowered, especially when they began to master the timelines and the internal politics and the tightening of prose. In a fit of good-natured fun at the end of the summer they’d given her a hat like the one Napoleon wore, but now that she thought about it, she could definitely see herself in Ynez’s floor-length leather duster.

Axel made a contented baby coo, and Ellery returned to the book.

Harold, who had been a medic in the Iraqi War, and who had witnessed Ynez’s triumph from the cell in which he’d been imprisoned by the he-devils, ran to Ynez. He knew that, despite her victory, the wound on her thigh was grave. She refused the painkiller he offered for fear that if her vigilance waned for even a moment, the he-devils would return.

Harold promised to keep her safe, but she was adamant, growing more frantic as the wound on her thigh worsened. They began to wrestle, and Ynez, with the fierceness of recent battle still coursing through her veins, pinned him beneath her. Harold told her he knew she held his life in her hands, but said that not even a tyrant can rule without trusting someone, and that she needed to trust him or she would die.

Ynez looked into his eyes, determined to find a lie, but could not. She rolled onto her back, opened her mouth and accepted the painkiller he placed there.

The ball of heat that flared in Ellery’s belly at this intimate act so surprised her, she jerked and dropped the book.

“Whoa, there,” Axel said, stretching. “Horse balk?”

“No.” Her cheeks began to burn.

He looked at the novel and his eyes narrowed. “Were you asleep? Honestly, Ellery, you might not like it, but it’s an assignment. Can you at least attempt to take it seriously?”

“I’m
reading
it.” She fished it off the floor.

“Oh.” He shrugged. “In that case, wake me when we land.” He balled up his jacket again and settled himself in the other direction.

Men.
How had Axel caught her at the one moment she’d been swept into the silly story? Yeesh! Ridiculous twaddle. Nonetheless, she found herself reveling in the moment when Ynez relented and accepted Harold’s help. She wondered how long Ynez had struggled on her own and how hard it must have been for her to let down her guard even for a moment.

Gah!

What was she doing? She closed the book and dropped it into her bag. She had spent all the time she intended with Harold and Ynez. She-devils? Seriously? This was not an article that was going to be built on heaving hips and breathless bosoms.

Monkey Bar, Pittsburgh

Axel had taken all the setup shots he needed: the crowd, the neon, the all-female bartenders and the infamous monkey bars. Now he had to wait until Ellery arrived. For the rest of the shots, he wanted the camera to “see” the place as she saw it.

He settled onto a stool at the bar and ordered a Hard Hat. He was glad to see they carried Brendan’s beer here. He hoped that meant distribution was strong enough that he’d have at least a crack of making a go of it if he bought the place.

The bar had changed so much since he’d first frequented the place, he hardly recognized it. Sure, the monkey bars had been there, traversed mainly by drunk college students trying to impress each other; but before
Vamp,
the Monkey Bar had been a proper drinking establishment, filled with muted TVS showing hockey.

Now the place was abuzz with music and littered with
Vamp
memorabilia, and fully eighty percent of the clientele
were women—not that he was complaining, mind you, but it was sort of a shock to his system.

His phone rang and he answered without looking, assuming it was Ellery.

“Hey, Boner,” Annie said. “How’d you talk your way out of this morning’s misstep?”

He flushed to his ears. She meant, of course, the “jumping Ellery’s bones” comment.