Gorgeous as she is, she is a domestic cat. I have almost killed humans in the pursuit of my cases, but I am remarkably strong and clever. I cannot believe this bit of fluff is homicidal.
Then I reconsider. Never underestimate the female of the species, any species.
I sniff along the victim’s upper torso and encounter a scent of…nothing.
The man is not only dead, he is not…um…how shall I put it delicately? He is not rotting.
Now that is a truly revolting turn of events! I do scent the odd combination of earthy odors. Either this gent wore an unusual cologne or…aha! My luxuriant whiskers follow the shape of a large, curved claw impaled near his heart.
Dainty Vesper certainly could not have wielded this large a lance.
By now someone has stumbled out of a nearby dive, leaving the rear door ajar enough to cast pale light on our tableau of three.
The deceased is indeed a young man. His dark hair contrasts a dead-white skin. He would be handsome if he had green eyes like mine, but his eyelids are closed. Vesper is rubbing back and forth on his black attire, shedding white hairs in her distress.
I realize that she has led me here. This man must have been her…companion. I dislike the word “owner” used in relation to my kind. I have been street-smart and fancy free since I was a kit. True, I have a human female roommate, Miss Temple Barr, a public relations expert and sometime crime-solver—with my immense help, that is—but it is a voluntary arrangement on both our parts.
Vesper releases a sad mew and tries to make like an ascot around the poor guy’s neck. I understand the bond between human and animal, but this is over the top.
“You must remove her,” a low, rasping voice says.
Easier said than done, I think as I whip around to see what human has arrived on the scene.
I can communicate in various ways with various members of the animal kingdom, but I do not speak to humans. This is not because I could not if I so wished, but, really, some of my kin have suffered much at their disloyal hands. I am not about to honor even the best of them with my voice.
As for the voice I heard, we three are still alone. No one has discovered us.
I stare at Vesper while she whimpers and buries her face in the dead guy’s neck and runs her dainty muzzle along his jawline. You would think she was a Silver Screen drama queen. I am not the sentimental sort, but realize that this distraught lady must not disturb the evidence on the body.
“Vesper, no!” the faint voice says. “I will not. Never. Anyway, it is not enough now, and this strapping fellow you have lured here is not sufficient, either.”
Midnight Louie, not sufficient? For anything? I beg your pardon. I am the primo PI in this town and have been since before God made millenniums and the Devil made brimstone. Well, so to speak.
“Go, you” the voice commands me and follows up with a demeaning order, as if I were not Midnight Louie, PI. “Scat! And consider your hide well saved. Vesper means well but this is beyond the abilities of cats.”
I drop my jaw. And speak. I am not violating my vow to address no human being. This man is unhuman.
“You are still alive,” I tell my handsome corpse. “For a vampire.”
He coughs slightly. “Good. You hear my thoughts. My dying thoughts. My poor Vesper is offering her slender artery for my survival, but it is not enough. You must drive her away.”
“Someone has staked you so you cannot move,” I diagnose, on the right trail at last, now that I know the nature of the victim. The claw must be polished wood.
It is not every day—or night, I should say—that an investigator can interview the corpse, who is also a corpse-to-be even more.
“A long distance blow,” he answers. “I staggered here to escape more poison wooden darts just before the curse pinned me here like a bug.”
Vesper lifts her lovely throat and howls. “You good-for-nothing,” she accuses me. “You have neither blood nor brains to offer! Do something.”
“I am a professional,” I tell her. “Your fit of pique is not called for. And I am not about to trick some innocent tourist down this alley—although I could—so he or she can be drained to death.”
The vampire’s form stirs.
“No, no. Not to death. I am a daylight vampire, the new breed designed to mingle safely with humans. I feed on a…circle of willing volunteers, a mere cocktail with each, one at a time. Only now, I have been immobilized and starved. I need more than a serial filling day by day. I need a full body’s blood. Keep anything human away. My will to survive could drive me to drain a person to death and make that soul into a vampire…one without my scruples.”
I frown. “How many daylight vampires are there?”
“Only a few dozen, but the program is promising.”
“Is it possible someone is trying to sabotage the movement by driving you to savagery or death?”
He gives a hollow, almost spectral laugh. “Even likely, but I do not have the time to explore that possibility, my feline friend. Can you…will you…look after Vesper when I am gone?”
Vesper emits an anguished screech and casts herself on the vampire’s chest.
What can I do but promise? Still, I know I am in no position to shepherd a vampire pussycat. I need help with this case, probably human help.
FIRST, I STIFFEN MY spine and judiciously pat down the fallen vampire. He is nicely dressed in silk-blend black linen from foot to, ah, neck, and well-built as humans go under his fancy clothes. I find a couple of interesting objects in his sportcoat side pockets.
One is a slick multifunction device the size of a credit card. My street-callused pads manage to punch enough buttons to call up his client list of blood donors. This causes my eyebrow whiskers to lift. They are all female, all right, and one is a well-known performer on the Strip. I could make some tidy dough from the tabloids if I outed her erotic…tastes.
But that would be unethical. A plan is forming in my agile brain, but things are always complicated for a guy of my physical type.
“What is this?” I ask Vesper, rolling a ping pong-ball-size object I found in his pocket from one paw to the other over the pavement.
She leaps down to swat it away from me. “My toy.”
“Just a minute there.” I manage to pull it safe against my hairy masculine chest. “There seems to be something inside.” I perk an ear at a muted but frantic buzzing.
“My toy,” she repeats. “My master bought it for me.”
A tug of toy ensues, during which, thanks to my superior strength, the ball breaks in half like a perfectly split eggshell.
Well.
The buzzing, now loud enough to decipher, resolves into an indignant high-pitched voice, as the winged inhabitant gives us both what-for.
“It is a Whirr-away,” Vesper says. “My master hurls it for me to chase and find.”
“Hmm.” I trap a tiny wing under one curved claw. “I have eaten bigger mites than this by accident. This is no ‘toy,’ Vesper, it is an earth-bound pixie. Very rare. Your master must treasure you indeed.”
“You would stoop to petty thievery while my master lies dying?”
“I would stoop to using your ‘toy’ for a much more serious purpose. What is your name, little fellow?”
“I am female,” the creature buzzes back at me.
“Is it true that pixies are allergic to silver?” A lot of supernaturals can be injured by silver.
I feel the tiny wing tremble against my pad. “Awful stuff. It burns my skin and if it ever enters my blood, I will die.”
“Then I imagine you could spot the stuff instantly, from a long ways away?”
Another shudder. “It is far too popular as human jewelry. I smell six women wearing it on the street out there.”
“What if the silver sprang from a lock of long white hair?”
The tiny human body leaps atop my mitt, pulling its wing free. “Changeling Silver. That is different. Very rare and powerful. Almost nonexistent in this rea
lm.”
“What is your name?”
“Wasp-Wing.”
“I take it you can fly far and fast, Wasp-Wing.”
“Like bolt lightning. I have been leashed so as not to over-challenge the vampire’s feline companion.”
“I usually work with a human female on my cases,” I explain to all who listen, which is a fading vampire, a heart-broken vampire cat and my new pixie pal. “We need human help and I am thinking of a new partner this time who might just have the paranormal talent to do the trick. Fly topside, find the woman who wears Changeling Silver and bring her back, fast you can.”
“That will depend on the woman.” Wasp-Wing rustles, vanishing like a dust mote against the neon-lit night.
“My toy will never come back,” Vesper mourns. “I always had to trap and fetch it.”
“Nothing wins over an ally more than letting it feel useful and challenged, Vesper.”
“You expect this silver-bearing human female to save my master?”
“At the very least, she can move the body.”
Vesper strikes at me with fanned claws, but I easily dodge the blow. Those vampire claws may be toxic, for all I know.
“Calm down, Vesper. We all need help sometimes.”
“If my master cannot drink he will die,” she growls softly, curling up along his side.
I gingerly mount his chest, which of course does not lift up and down, and examine the weapon that pins him. It is a not toy either, but a curved claw two inches long. Small things can be potent, I know. Including pixies.
PERHAPS TEN MINUTES LATER, a shadow fills the alley opening, then a figure strides to our location and stands, hands on hips, feet astride, looking down. She is wearing low-rise blue jeans and a gray leotard top.
On her right elbow perches a tiny, glowing, winged figure.
“It is a good thing I brake for butterflies,” she says. “My windshield almost pulverized the pixie before I discovered what it was. Am I to understand I have been summoned to perform a ‘professional courtesy’ for another PI?”
“Nicely put,” I tell Wasp-Wing, although the woman cannot hear me.
Now that a human is on the scene, I am back to my usual handicap: my vow not to speak to the breed. Pixies, luckily, have no such principles and this one has been buzzing her head off since she landed on my colleague’s windshield.
The woman kneels beside the vampire, taking him for a fallen private investigator.
“Man, you are nearly gone,” she murmurs as Vesper jumps up to rub back and forth on her bent leg, white fangs gleaming.
I know what Vesper is thinking—she is hoping my hard-won assistant will trip over her onto her master and become instant fang bait.
He struggles, feeling the temptation, and manages to whisper, “Stay away.”
“No can do,” the woman says. “The pixie blabbed all. The name is Delilah Street. I am a paranormal investigator who has met a daylight vampire. I know your more-evolved type is mortally harmless to humans. We need to get you somewhere private.”
He struggles as her hand reaches for the claw dart in his chest.
“Bespelled!” Wasp-Wing whines a warning, hovering over Delilah Street’s fingers.
“No problem,” she says, jerking out the claw as if it was a mere thorn. “What is your name?” she asks the vampire.
His body still twitches from the stake’s removal.
“Damien Abbott,” he gasps. “You planning my gravestone? A daylight vampire will not rise again, never fear.”
“You had better rise now or you will die, and these cats and the pixie seem unhappy about that, which is good enough for me. My blood is a bit off, human docs tell me, but I am the only oasis you have got going, pilgrim. Can you take just enough to walk a few feet?”
“I am stronger unstaked, but my control is shaky.”
“I will have to trust it. I have never been vampire-bit. A minor withdrawal does not put me on the road to turning, Damien, but just a sip, pretty please.”
“You are not my client.”
“No, you are mine now.” She extends a brave, bare wrist to his lips. “As the Wicked Witch stepmother said to Snow White, whom I happen to resemble, “Come, bite.”
She is right. In the faint light I see her skin is almost as pale as the vampire’s and her hair as dark. I never thought I would live to see a smart dame inviting potential disaster, but I have heard Miss Delilah Street is the nervy type. I position myself to take a big chomp out of the guy’s private parts if he should over imbibe, and I can see his eye-white glisten as his gaze shifts to the threat I pose.
Miss Delilah Street shudders a pixie shiver and then all is silent and still in the alley until Damien jerks his head aside.
“I did not feel a thing,” Miss Delilah says.
“I secrete an initial drop of anesthesia.”
“In fact,” she adds, purring a little like Vesper, who is now kneading her master’s arm, “you remind me of my daylight vampire acquaintance, who is quite a sexy guy.”
“I secrete an aphrodisiac as well.”
“Oh.” She jerks back, then moves behind him and bends to get an arm under his shoulder. “Upsy daisy. Does my blood have any special effects?”
He lurches upright and actually cracks a smile. “It is a bit on the effervescent side. You enjoy your Champagne, Delilah?”
“I am the Cocktail Queen of the Inferno Bar from time to time,” she quips. “I invent ’em more than drink ’em. Come on, you had the smarts to get darted just feet from the back of Wrathbone’s Bar. I called ahead for a private room.”
“You are confident. What about—?”
“The cats are following.”
“No, the , the —”
Miss Delilah Street looks down at me. Wasp-Wing had curled back into her ball, which I had rolled shut. Right now the lot was in my mouth, in my live prey carry, which would not dent a cotton ball.
“Who do you think told me your location? Handy little thing,” Miss Delilah says.
“Wasp-Wing is my cell phone, and Vesper’s companion.”
“Worry not,” she tells the ailing vampire. “Your pocket-rocket pixie is safely stowed. Midnight Louie’s custody is the safest place for it.”
“You know this alley cat who has designs on Vesper?”
“Yup. He is a primo private eye, although I am surprised to see him walking on the wild side down here. He is not as young as he used to be.”
I beg your pardon! I bare my fangs. But Miss Delilah Street is too busy planning her next move to pay any attention to mine.
“Get inside,” she tells the temporarily revived vamp, “where I can nail the dart-thrower and save your undead life.”
MISS VESPER PAUSES ON the threshold, flaunting her fantail in my face to bring me to a sudden stop.
“So you are a notorious figure in the Overworld,” she says.
I sigh and let Wasp-Wing’s carrier down to roll into the room beyond.
“I do cut a wide swath,” I say, striking a duelist’s pose with my foreshivs extended.
“All you have done for my master is hang around me.”
None are so unappreciated as the subtle. I step aside to permit the lady to enter first.
Wrathbones is a rather rowdy venue, I have heard, with armed skeletons decorating the walls and a clientele that runs from adventure-seeking tourists to celebrity zombies to werewolf mobsters to vamps and narcs.
This room we have entered, however, is rather luxe, with an inner sanctum, i.e., bedroom.
“Perfect,” Miss Delilah declares, ushering our wounded vamp onto the bed within. “You might as well husband your resources in your usual field of operations.”
“I have only so many minutes before I will need more than your compromised blood to keep conscious, much less…viable,” he warns.
“Relax,” she tells him as Vesper rushes to claim what must be her usual spot on the bed. I well recognize the instinct. My Miss Temple has only one significant other
(at a time; there are two vying for the prime spot), but that is another story in another place and time.
Poor Miss Vesper must share her master’s accommodations with… several usurpers. I hasten to the anteroom and Miss Delilah’s side. She has seated herself to scroll through our host’s social register.
“Seven women,” she mutters, “one for each day of the week, and all at staggered times. Six Thursday, nine A.M. Friday, noon Saturday, three Sunday, six Monday, nine P.M. Tuesday. And midnight tomorrow. Wednesday.”
She eyes my attentive presence. “Our vampire is a creature of habit, which makes him easy to target. I wonder if daylight vampires ever actually sleep.”
I settle on my belly, forearms wrapped and abutting in my “wise mandarin” pose. Any minute now I would be calling Vesper “Grasshopper,” were she not reclining in the bedroom.
“What is today’s nine P.M. client, Corinne, besides late?” Miss Delilah asks herself, and me. “Is she at their usual rendezvous? Or does she know she need not bother? Why not text her to come here?”
“Now,” Miss Delilah tells me, “that done, it is high time for an interview with the vampire.”
I APPRECIATE BEING KEPT abreast, so to speak, of the proceedings, and accompany her back into the adjoining bedroom. Vesper reclines beside her enervated master, although the crimson velvet bedspread is my main attraction. I would look terrific on it and my black coat would add a formal touch nestling next to Vesper’s dazzling white one.
Damien probably looks tasty to human females, with his white silk shirt open to allow the wound to heal, and his black-suited form long and lean against the plush fabric.
I assume Miss Delilah Street must be thinking the same thing, because I hear her catch her breath.
“Shades of Sansouci,” she murmurs mysteriously.
“I had no idea the Sinkhole had places like this,” Damien says lazily.
“Vegas has always sold seduction,” she answers.
“You realize I need to get back on my feeding schedule soon. Your blood is strangely soothing and exciting at the same time, but I took only what I needed to get to a safe place.”
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