Chapter One
‘You guys must see my photos from New York!’ Olivia Abbott dived down to grab her digital camera from the sequinned purple bag by her feet. ‘Jackson took a bunch of photos in between takes. Seriously, my BF is an awesome photographer . . .’
As she sat back up, her hair knocked straight into her sister Ivy Vega’s jet-black cellphone and sent it flying through the air.
‘Aahhh!’
Something else Olivia had brought back from New York City was her outrageously high 1950s-style beehive hairdo, left over from her latest movie shoot for Eternal Sunset!
Who knew that historical hair could be dangerous? Olivia thought, as the phone soared through the air towards the wall . . . until Ivy’s boyfriend, Brendan, caught it with superhuman agility.
He hunched his shoulders and looked furtively around the room. Luckily, Olivia’s adoptive parents were busy admiring the souvenirs she’d just passed on to her new stepmom, Lillian, on the other side of the Vegas’ living room. They wouldn’t have noticed a jet-plane landing beside them, much less the fact that Brendan had reacted far quicker than any ordinary human being should have.
Olivia knew just what he must be thinking. The First Law of the Night commanded that vampires never, ever let humans find out about their existence . . . unless they had an identical twin sister who was a vampire, but that did not happen often!
‘It’s OK,’ she whispered to Brendan. ‘They didn’t notice.’
‘Doofus,’ Ivy murmured, shaking her head and smiling. Still, she looked relieved as Brendan handed her the phone.
Olivia winced. ‘Sorry about that. I didn’t mean –’
‘I know. It wasn’t you, it was your hair!’ Ivy rolled her kohl-lined eyes. ‘Seriously, when are you going to have an update? It hasn’t been 1950 for a long time.’
‘Give me a break!’ Olivia laughed as she sat back on the couch beside Ivy, twitching the swirling pink skirt of her dress into place. ‘I’ve been off-set for less than five hours, and back in town for literally twenty minutes.’ Carefully, she shook her head, feeling the weight of the piled hair. ‘I’ll change it as soon as I get a chance, I promise.’
‘You’d better.’ Ivy crossed her arms over her black-and-crimson, bat-winged shirt. ‘Because we look even less like twins than usual right now.’
‘And that’s a problem because . . .?’ Olivia began.
Then she caught her sister’s meaning. Ohhh, right! With such massively different hairstyles, there was no way the two girls would be able to pull one of their occasionally necessary twin-switches. Pretending to be each other had saved their skins more than once.
‘I don’t know,’ Olivia mused, tongue in cheek. ‘Maybe if you got a beehive hairdo to match mine . . .’
‘Glagl-argh-what?’ Choking, Ivy dropped her phone again.
Olivia burst out laughing, while a grinning Brendan patted Ivy’s shoulder.
‘Hey, it might be kind of cute,’ he teased.
Ivy let out a moan of pure horror.
Olivia took pity on her grumpy goth vampire twin. ‘Just kidding,’ she said with a wink. ‘My hair will be back to normal by tomorrow.’
‘Olivia?’ The twins’ vampire bio-dad, Charles Vega, crossed the room towards them, elegant as always in a tailored black suit. ‘Did you say you had some pictures to show us?’
‘That’s right!’ Olivia bounced up to hand over the camera. ‘I took photos all over New York City.’
‘Ah, New York . . .’ Charles sighed wistfully as he took the camera. ‘It’s been so long since I was there. Did you go to DeLucci’s?’
‘Um . . .’ Olivia frowned. ‘What’s that?’
Charles half closed his eyes with an expression of longing. ‘It’s a famous restaurant,’ he said. ‘They serve the most mouth-watering steaks I’ve ever eaten . . . I used to go straight from there to the Tea Room dance hall. Didn’t you even walk past it while you were filming?’
‘Sorry.’ Olivia shrugged. ‘I didn’t see either of those places. In fact, I’ve never even heard of them.’
‘Wait . . . that’s it!’ Olivia’s adoptive father, Mr Abbott, clicked his fingers as he walked over to join them. ‘I’ve heard of DeLucci’s and the Tea Room dance hall. But only in History Channel documentaries about the 1920s.’ He shook his head in obvious confusion. ‘Charles, both of those places you just mentioned closed down decades ago – well before either of us was born!’
Uh-oh. Olivia froze as she realised what had happened.
Her bio-dad was usually so careful . . . but the Abbotts were so much like family to him now, he must have forgotten that they didn’t know his Big Secret. How is he going to get out of this?
‘Uh . . .’ Charles blinked rapidly, looking more rattled than she’d ever seen him. ‘Documentaries! That must be it!’ He licked his lips, the fingers of his right hand tapping nervously against Olivia’s camera. ‘I . . . was up late the other night watching documentaries on old New York. The lack of sleep must have confused me.’
‘But you just said you’d been there,’ Mrs Abbott said, drawing closer. ‘You gave so many details . . .’
‘Yes. Well.’ Charles smiled weakly. ‘Do you know, for a moment I may have thought they were memories, but of course it must have been just a dream. Too much History Channel for me! Haha?’
‘But . . .’ Mr Abbott began.
‘Olivia!’ Lillian Vega stepped forwards quickly, shielding Charles from the others. ‘You have to tell me all about the production,’ she said, looking as excited as Ivy when a new Pall Bearers album was about to be released. Lillian’s job was as an Assistant Director on Hollywood movies – she had first met Charles when one of her movies filmed in Franklin Grove. ‘What kind of cameras were they using on-set?’
‘Um . . . black ones?’ Olivia shrugged, laughing as she sat back down next to Ivy.
Her stepmom frowned. ‘But were they film or lightweight DV? And what was the “FPS” rate?’
Ivy snickered. ‘From the look on Olivia’s face, I think you might as well have just asked that question in Latin!’
‘Sorry.’ Olivia smiled apologetically. ‘If I knew, I would tell you.’