[request_ebook] Night Rising (Vampire Babylon, Book 1)

Welcome to Hollywood—after dark…

Stuntwoman Dawn Madison is a girl with a lot of attitude—and a lot of issues, mostly about living up to the legacy of her mother, a world famous movie star/sex symbol, whose death left Dawn to be raised by her dad Frank, nobody’s notion of single-father-of-the-year. Now that she’s all grown up, she and Frank aren’t on the best of terms, to say the least.

Still, he is her dad, and when he vanishes while investigating the bizarre sighting—caught on film—of a supposedly long-dead child star, she comes home to Tinseltown to join the search for him. Working with his colleagues—a psychic short in stature but big in dreams of stardom, a beautiful Latina techno-geek, and the P. I. firm’s never-seen boss—she discovers an erotic and bloody underground society made up of creatures she thought existed only on the screen.

They are devious. They are deadly. And some of them are dangerously attractive...

1. Rising

A red mist hung over Los Angeles at midnight, a mist so thick that it blocked the moon’s glow.

One so dense it almost hid what would become another shocking Tinseltown legend by the time morning rolled around.

The damp air had been tinted with crimson neon from a dingy alley’s bar sign: Lenny’s, it read in cursive beneath the tilt of a cartoon martini. As the wiring flickered on and off, so did the atmosphere, an apathetic heartbeat on the fringes of Hollywood Boulevard.

A police radio from one of the many black-and-whites blocking the entrances to the alley broke the silence with a burst of static, then buzzed to nothing. A hushed crowd was gathering on the slick pavement nearby, craning their necks to gape through the fog and into the slender passageway but, even though the cops were doing their damndest to contain the scene, they couldn’t cover up the accident.

At least, that’s what they’d called it at first.

An “accident.”