A Girl's Guide to Vampires

and tell me that Miranda didn't foresee this!'

'What?' I asked again, warily this time as I approached a large black and red poster. 'It doesn't have anything to do with axe-murdering maniacs, does it?'

'Stop being such a poop and read it! Oh, what a glorious, glorious time we're going to have!' She hugged herself with happiness, and whirled around until the fringe on her jacket spun out.

'I knew it, I knew it,' she chanted to herself. I looked around quickly, hoping no one could see us in the gathering darkness of the late afternoon. I was ready to disavow her if she was going to stand in a foreign country and act like an idiot.

'Read it!' she demanded, pointing a finger at the poster.

'Stop acting like a boob, and I might.'

'Read it!'

I read it. The sign was printed in English, German, and French, GOTHFAIRE! it proclaimed in bold, red letters: TAKE A JOURNEY TO THE DARKNESS THAT DWELLS WITHIN US ALL, EXPERIENCE DARK PASSIONS AND DARKER SINS. INDULGE IN YOUR DEEPEST, MOST SECRET GOTHIC DESIRES AS YOU PLUNGE INTO A WORLD FILLED WITH THE MACABRE, THE BIZARRE, THE ENDLESS NIGHT. TICKETS available beginning 24 October. 'Sounds like a carnival or something like one of those Renaissance fairs, only this one is devoted to the Goth scene. What about it? You don't plan on going to it, do you?'

'Look at the bottom,' Roxy chanted, dancing a grapevine dance past the luggage. 'Look at the bottom, look at the bottom.'

'You need serious medication,' I muttered before bending over almost double and squinting at the tiny red print.

GOTHFAIRE IS PROUD TO SPONSOR THE ALL HALLOW'S EVE FESTIVAL OF THE DARK, 31 OCTOBER AT DRAHANSKA CASTLE, BLANSKO, CZECH REPUBLIC. TICKETS TO THE FESTIVAL WILL BE AVAILABLE AFTER…

'Oh, Lord.' Just what I needed, a big party celebrating a fictional cult of vampires. It wasn't bad enough that Roxy had planned for us to spend every evening scouring the area for any possible Dark Ones who might be roaming the streets in search of prey; no, now she would drag me to a week-long fair and festival with a bunch of pimply teens who were heavily into the Goth scene. 'No, no, no,' I groaned.

'Yes, yes, yes,' Roxy sang as she danced by me. 'You see? Now do you believe in Miranda's powers? She said you'd meet a Dark One, and just look! There will be a whole fair full of them! Not to mention the ones we'll find at the Festival!'

'Oh, for heaven's sake, Rox, there are no such things as vampires!'

My words fell on deaf ears, but before I could shake some sense into her, a small, beat-up blue Peugeot that looked like it had been through a couple of wars squealed to a halt beside us. I grabbed Roxy and shoved her toward the car. 'Taxi's here. Grab your luggage while I tell the driver what hotel we're staying at. And for God's sake, stop dancing! You want everyone to think Americans are lunatics?'

The Hotel Dukla wasn't really that far from the train station, but it was up a steep hill, and off the main square on the edge of the town. Within half an hour of arriving in Blansko, we had checked in, hauled our luggage up the three flights of twisting, uneven stairs to the loft rooms assigned us, and quickly changed out of wrinkled travel clothes to something a little more decorous. Roxy beat me to the communal bathroom, so I had to wait until she was finished before I could wash up.

'See you in the bar,' she called out to me a few minutes later as she skipped down the stairs. I grimaced at the careless way she raced down, hoping she wouldn't break her neck on the steps' uneven tread, and set about making myself presentable to the local populace. I had this Audrey Hepburn image in my head of how I wanted to appear: sophisticated, elegant, and unmussed. I carefully unpacked my long black velvet dress that made me look thinner, pinned up my plain brown hair that a stylist once kindly referred to as chestnut, and dabbed on a little perfume.

'You're a long way from Audrey Hepburn.' I wrinkled my nose at the reflection in the tiny mirror over an oak bureau. 'But you'll do.'

I don't quite know whom I had pictured as the patrons in the hotel's bar, the most popular in the city according to the proud hotel owner, but the sight that met my eyes was not it. I imagined people in tweed hats and dirndls and such, but what I saw was a room with a low ceiling made of dark, smoky beams crossing in a herringbone pattern. The few people already in the bar were for the most part in jeans and sweaters, and there was nary a dirndl to be seen. At the opposite end of the room, two large windows ran ceiling to floor, overlooking a balcony that opened to a grassy meadow that brushed up against the darker purple rise of the Moravian mountains. Peeking through the dark trees, I could see a part of a turret of Drahanská Castle. The sky above it was deepening into an indigo that matched the soft lines of the mountains nestled against the town. There was something about the rich shades of blues, blacks, and purples that struck a chord deep within me, but before I could wander over to the window to look out at the scenery, I was hallooed.

Roxy called out from a long table that hugged one of the side walls. She sat in the middle of the table with two women on either side of her. At least I guessed they were women; they could have been men in drag. It was hard to tell, what with the layers of pancake and kohl and the crimson lipstick that slashed their mouths into hard, unbending lines. They were dressed similarly, both in black vinyl lace-up bodices over red chiffon blouses. Although their lower halves were hidden by the thick polished plank that served as a table, I assumed they also had spiky, high-heeled black leather boots, and probably micro miniskirts with the visible garter belts that so many young women thought looked sexy.

'Damn. She's found herself some Goths,' I swore to myself, looking around the room for an escape. There was none, so I slapped a pleasant smile on my face and wound my way through the chairs and tables to where Roxy was waving vigorously at me.

'There you are. I thought you'd never get here. Joy, this is Arielle and Tanya. They're both witches.'

My smile frayed a bit around the edges as I held out my hand to Tanya, sitting nearest me. She examined my hand as if it might have leprosy, then gave me a sour look and dismissed me as unworthy of her time. Goths—the poseurs of the underworld. Where would we be without them?

'Actually, I'm apprenticed to Tanya,' the woman named Arielle said as she stood up and leaned over the table to shake my hand. She had a faint Slavic accent mixed in with heavy French. Her friendly washed-out blue eyes were a nice counterpoint to her friend's hostile glare. 'I'm not a witch yet, but I hope to be as powerful as my sister in a few years.'

'Your sister?' I asked, pulling out a chair across from Roxy.

'They're sisters,' Roxy said helpfully, smiling at Tanya. She ignored both of us, her eyes darting around the room, glancing frequently between the long windows and the door opposite. 'I got you a beer. I hope you don't mind if it's dark. That's all they seem to drink here.'

Roxy pushed a huge mug toward me. I figured the Czechs must have bladders of iron if they were able to drink that much on a regular basis.

'You'll never guess where Tanya and Arielle work! The GothFaire! Isn't that great? Arielle says they have all sort of attractions like palm readers, and tarot card readers and a medium, a magician, and lots and lots of vampires.'

I choked on the tentative sip I was taking of the dark brown beer, just barely keeping it from taking the passage north to my nose.

'I beg your pardon?' I asked, licking the foam from my upper lip.

'Vampires,' Roxy said happily. 'Loads of them. Isn't that thrilling?'

'Loads of them,' I repeated, looking from Roxy to Tanya to Arielle. 'How many is loads?'

Although I was curious about the so-called vampires connected with the fair, I wasn't entirely surprised to hear they were present. I had a friend who had flirted briefly with the Goth society in San Francisco, and she told me that vampirism, in its pretense form, was very popular amongst the set. Some of them really got into the image, with cosmetically enhanced canine teeth, drinking animal blood obtained from slaughterhouses (something that was more common than I cared to think about), and living, in general, the vampire life without actually being undead.

'Dominic and Milos, the owners of GothFaire, are Vampyr,' Tanya answered in a