“Snow’s onstage backup group is a lot more sinful than those walk-off parts, especially Lust and Envy.” Ric ginned as he named the two female members of the rock group.
“So you’d noticed those hip-swiveling hussies? I thought you weren’t a fan.”
“I don’t follow Vegas stage shows, but when you admitted after I recovered from the Karnak ordeal that you’d had to submit to a Brimstone Kiss to get Snow to help rescue me, I caught a show to see what was involved. He bent down to do the Elvis scarf trick with the mosh pit groupies, but no kisses.”
I allowed myself a mental sigh of relief. And since when had Ric started calling Christophe “Snow”? He’d been reluctant to sound friendly with the mogul-rock star in any way whatsoever.
“You must have been his last customer,” Ric added with that deceptively casual side glance of a veteran interrogator. “Must have cured him of the habit.”
“Maybe.”
“I had to buy a used video of the show to get Brimstone Kiss footage. Just the standard long wet lip smack, but those women sure swooned like the hero of Metropolis kept doing. You figure out why, Delilah?”
Did I ever! And it wasn’t fit for family consumption, much less one’s boyfriend.
So I dismissed the strength of the effect. “The fans get overwrought when they have actual contact with an onstage idol. Every moment is magnified. It’s a kind of psychic orgasm.”
That was perfectly true, although in the case of the Snow groupies, the orgasms were real and serial.
“Not with you, though,” Ric wanted to confirm.
“You know Snow’s a power freak. A man, or whatever, who can call a dragon into being from a palmful of ashes would have to be. Me submitting to the Brimstone Kiss was his price for mounting your rescue expedition. He knew it was the most hateful and humiliating thing he could require.”
“Does the kiss pack a kick?”
“Like with a groupie? No. Not with me. And I don’t want to talk about it, any more than you’d want to reminisce about your enslavement to El Demonio Torbellino.”
Ric nodded. “I’ve just noticed some tension between you two.”
“True. Terminal lack of trust. Who’d put the stupid fairy-tale price of a kiss on rescuing a human from the vampire mob? Enough about that egomaniac. What did you learn from the film?”
Ric leaned back. I was thankful he’d moved past the dicey topic of Snow. “That Brigitte Helm was a hell of a performer. She was really just nineteen then?”
I nodded. “Ambitious kids today start on YouTube much earlier. She almost got the part in The Blue Angel that made Marlene Dietrich. She had first crack at the title role in Bride of Frankenstein.”
“From Blue Angel to Mrs. Frankenstein. She had quite a range.”
“Brigitte did what the old soap operas promised. As Maria, and as old film trailers boasted, she ran the gamut of human emotion. Metropolis let her turn it all loose. She’s a saint, a protectress of the downtrodden, a Joan of Arc in a suit of sexy cyber-armor, a seductress from the Apocalypse upheld by the Seven Deadly Sins, a helpless prisoner, a manipulated tool of worldly powers, a deranged orator with qualities of the antichrist, not to mention a virgin and martyr. And she played that emotionless metal cyborg too,” I added.
“I don’t get why they needed to create a robot to recreate it as an evil but human Maria under their control.”
“The robot was created to host the mad scientist’s lost love, Hel, who’d married the heartless CEO, then died bringing his son into the world. Rotwang abandoned his idea of re-creating his soul mate and used the robot to embody a programmable Maria he could use to bring down the bigwig, at the cost of destroying the workers too. The robot plot was probably a warning that factory work was making robots of us all. The theme is announced on the first screen. ‘The heart is the arbiter between the head and the hand.’”
“Not much heart in any world I’ve seen.” Ric sat silent as he reran the script of his life and I reran mine.
“The dreamer and the maker, the brain and the hands, need to meet inside us,” I said. “The dreaming-it-up and the making-it-happen parts. The head Wicked Witch of Wichita, Lily West, mocked her sister Lilah for believing that.”
“I don’t think she’s mocking much anymore, now that we’ve defeated the weather witches.” Ric took my hand. “You saved me when everyone else thought I was lost. I’ll never forget that.”
I couldn’t help thinking, saved him for what? An even worse threat?
“So,” he went on, gazing at the dark screen. “My altered silver vision”—he tapped his left eye socket where a brown contact lens obscured the new, mirror-bright iris—“brought the potent deposit of silver nitrate on the scenes featuring the Maria cyborg to independent existence here and now. How did El Demonio hope to use her?” Ric mused on. “How can we do that, and aren’t we as bad as him, or Snow, for being willing to?”
“We don’t have a choice. You called her off the screen. Now you need to bring out her better nature.”
Chapter Seventeen
IT HAD BEEN a long day for both of us. Only security lights and stars were shining down on the darkened Nightwine estate, so Ric and I parted with a chaste kiss on the stoop outside the Enchanted Cottage.
“How’re you going to get home?” I asked, suddenly aware of the logistics. “Your car must be in the Inferno Hotel parking lot.”
A screech of wheels burning rubber into my driveway turned my head. Ric’s bronze vintage Corvette was tooling up to my door.
“How?” I asked.
“Godfrey got his ‘cousin’ at the Inferno to contact your favorite parking valet.” Ric smiled and went to open the driver’s-side door.
“Manny!” I cried as the orange-scaled demon leaped out of the driver’s seat. “Ric must owe you a huge tip.”
Ric was already in the car and waved a single bill at Manny through the open window. I’d have chewed out the valet if he’d treated Dolly that way, but Ric didn’t seemed bothered by the roar of his car’s entrance. He liked to push the ’Vette around the same way. Vroom. Guys.
Logistics remained on my mind. How was Manny getting back to his post at the Inferno?
I glanced at the slim vintage watch on my left wrist. Wristwatches were a trademark of mine, despite cell phones replacing them among the Android generation. I had a large collection from all eras and they were also a perfect undercover form for the silver familiar. As now.
If I pushed Dolly a little, and she pushed lesser vehicles out of her majestic way, I could make the time limit.
“I’ll drive you back to the Inferno,” I told Manny.
His eyelashes fluttered over his golden cat’s eyes. He had extraordinary long and lush eyelashes for a male demon. “A ride in the Queen. I could swoon.”
“Please don’t. I don’t want you shedding any scales on Dolly’s interior.”
Manny, more formally Manniphilpestiles, grinned. “No, ma’am.”
Parking valet demons in Vegas coveted Old Detroit steel. Manny always babied Dolly up the Inferno parking ramp because he knew I’d make Wiener schnitzel of his tail—the figurative and literal one—if he didn’t.
Dolly was parked under the porte cochere so I zipped inside for my keys. I returned to find Quicksilver in the back and Manny riding shotgun. Wow. Quick must like the friendly demon to cede his place to him. Quick could make faster work of Manny’s tail than I could.
Here’s a secret to making sure that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas: cultivate the hotel and casino staffs. Big shots and whales you have always with you and they come and they go, but the seemingly little fish are canny friends to have in a pinch.
“You drive like my aunt Zegaconphistia,” Manny complained as I floated Dolly onto Sunset Road. He still wriggled down into the red leather upholstery like a cat in a faux fur shop.
Soon the lights of the Strip were getting us tourist stares, but Dolly cruised up to the Inferno’s frenetic entrance unmolested. The momen
t I disembarked, Manny slid into the driver’s seat.
“I know. No more than fifteen miles an hour in the ramp. Still the best ride in Vegas.” He patted Dolly’s dashboard and moved away at barely above idle.
Quicksilver had leaped out to escort me inside, so we joined the throngs shuffling in. It was nine-ten p.m., the start of Snow’s break between the two nightly Seven Deadly Sins shows and I intended to have more than a word with him.
Quick got a lot of awed glances, but he was taken for a service dog. He had that all-business look about him, and his leather collar encouraged people to assume his thick gray body fur obscured a harness.
Of course, not everybody employed by the Inferno could be described as people.
One of them loomed into my path, a tall, sleek black woman wearing a short zebra-striped dress and fuchsia lipstick vivid enough to snarl traffic.
Ooh, our favorite fashion-forward shape-shifter is here, Irma warned.
“Fresh from a garden party?” Grizelle asked in a put-down tone.
True, nineteen-forties daytime frocks had a frothy, innocent air.
“No dogs.” Grizelle’s face and voice were harder than granite as her luridly green eyes moved from my floral print to Quicksilver’s flashing fangs.
Snow’s security chief cherished a major hate for me, one part deserved and three parts not. But that one part had been a lulu.
“I intend to see Snow,” I said, scrupulously avoiding the verbs “want” and “need.”
“Besides,” I added, “Asta the wire-haired terrier is acting out just fifty feet away at the bar.”
“He’s a CinSim. Your dog is not.”
Quick growled so deeply it sounded like he had laryngitis. He’d taken a hunk out of Grizelle’s hide once when her inner white tiger had attacked me.
“No dogs,” she repeated.
“I’ll leave him with Asta, then. I’m sure you’ll report my visit to Snow before I can reach the elevator.”
Quick and I walked on, his growl still rumbling in his throat.
He peeled off at the bar, though, sitting beside Nick’s stool where all the gathered lady tourists and CinSims started cooing at Quicksilver for being so big and strong and having such great hair. You’d think he was a Fabio CinSim, perish the thought. Thank God that had been a color film era.
The private elevator was waiting for me, doors ajar. I whisked up sixty-some stories fast enough to make my ears pop.
The elevator door opened on the penthouse foyer and rooms decorated like the interior of a giant ice sculpture snowflake, all white and silver and cold. Against this dazzling background stood Snow, up close and way too personal in his onstage outfit of skin-tight white leather open to the navel above a jeweled fly, the only color in the entire scene. I was amazed there wasn’t a follow spotlight on it. Then I realized there probably was when he was onstage.
“Was it necessary to ruffle Grizelle’s fur?” he asked.
“No, but it was fun.”
“I have a feeling this visit will not be fun. At least not as much as our last encounter.”
I was glad his back was turned as he headed for the glittering bar, though I couldn’t help wondering if the whiplashes I’d transferred from Ric to him were still present. I was startled to notice the Metropolis cyborg standing statue-still and apparently dormant beside the bar setup.
I wandered to the window wall that framed a black velvet painting of high-rise Vegas lights and glitter. Some buildings were dotted by functional yellow work lights and red aviation warning lights. They were still under construction, giant erector-set skeletons of vertical concrete columns intersected by horizontal steel I beams. I imagined the pharaohs gazing on such a sight and wondering how the heck our twenty-first-century civilization had built ladders straight up to the sky.
One such ugly behemoth crowded the fiery exterior sheath of the Inferno itself. Somebody somewhere owned every bit of near-strip land.
Snow appeared ghostlike behind me in the reflecting window glass. An opaque Silver Zombie glass seemed to levitate from his to my hand. His other hand held a milky Albino Vampire martini.
“I have thirty-five minutes,” he said. “Will that suffice?”
“Easily.” I turned from the bewitching nightscape and set the drink down on an end table by the cushy white leather sofas that undulated through the spacious room like a giant anaconda. “Just what are you trying to do, adopt Ric?”
“Excuse me if I sit.” He did as promised on a sofa arm. “I spend a lot of time pounding hardwood floors nights.” He demonstrated by lifting a foot shod in a white snakeskin boot. PETA would have his ass even though I wouldn’t on a bet.
“You certainly don’t tire of meddling in my life,” I said.
“Works both ways, Delilah.” Snow idly slouched down onto the couch. “Inviting Montoya to move in here is purely a business offer. I need to protect the Metropolis CinSim and your . . .”
“Partner.”
“. . . your partner has had the bad or good luck to have a unique relationship with the most desired object in the supernatural firmament, which I own. The arrangement has nothing to do with you.”
“I am not going to let you use Ric’s powers to protect your greed.”
“My offer would protect Montoya as well. You know better than he does what supernatural scum will be on his tail now. They mean to have the hidden power of the Metropolis robot, and they’ll want the man who evoked and controls her.”
“Ric doesn’t get off on putting other . . . entities through the ringer, like you do.”
“A better man, no argument, but neither of us can make use of a dead man.”
That’s a trick answer, Irma warned. Snow may not be a ‘man,’ so he isn’t really conceding moral superiority to Ric.
While I searched for a withering retort, Snow’s sunglasses took aim at my feet.
“What on earth are those?”
I looked down to confront the forgotten peep-toe heels with marabou insteps. I felt my face flush with embarrassed fury.
“I had to leave home in a hurry.”
“Not a criticism. I can see some entranced lover painting your toenails scarlet in those shoes and then sucking them. The toes, I mean. One by one.”
My damn bare toes shriveled back like the dying Wicked Witch of the West’s stripe-stockinged feet in the ruby red slippers.
“That kind of inflammatory chitchat is just why I don’t want Ric under your roof. He wouldn’t understand you’re a . . .”
He waited, sipping the Albino Vampire. I eyed the raspberry liqueur shining like a lost jewel at the bottom of the martini glass. It reminded me of a tiny pool of dropped nail enamel . . . or blood.
“I’m a what?” The sunglasses tilted up, Snow’s version of an innocent look.
The trouble was nobody knew just what variety of supernatural he was.
“A . . . debauched sensualist addicted to the adoration of groupies.”
“Thanks, but I can be discreet around Montoya. Can you?”
“That makes it sounds like we have something to hide. He knows about the Brimstone Kiss.”
“Does anybody really know about it, Delilah? Besides you and me?”
Long, guitar-string supple fingers lifted to the blood bruise on his throat, his head tilting back a bit, as if to touch a talisman. That damn sexual hot spot had nothing to do with his extorted Brimstone Kiss. It was a souvenir of a more recent encounter that was my fault entirely. The mark would drive the groupies crazy if he stroked it onstage and I wouldn’t put it past him to put the gesture into his repertoire.
Why isn’t your damn hickey fading? Irma was echoing my own question. Although it does look hot. Leaving physical evidence of one of your more impetuous and misguided moments, how stupid is that?
Now Irma was ragging on me. It was bad enough that Ric had noticed the mark, maybe even envied it a little. Lord, I hated this super-bite-human world, even when it was human-bite-super.
“That,”
I told Snow—and Irma—“is the unfortunate result of an experiment. I needed to know if any disastrous remnants of your damn Brimstone Kiss remained in my . . . system. Don’t get your ego up. It was an experiment I couldn’t try on anybody else. Responsibly.”
“I could say that so was your Brimstone Kiss from me. An experiment.”
“Good. Then any . . . side effects on either of our parts . . . were purely accidental.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ‘purely.’” He sipped from the cocktail I’d named to annoy him. Now he had a means to annoy me.
“Why hasn’t the mark faded yet?”
Snow shrugged. “An albino’s skin is seriously sensitive. I thought you knew that, Delilah.”
“You’re about as sensitive as a Brillo pad. Ric told me you treat the Silver Zombie like an artifact instead of an unhuman being.”
“He’s right. I’m not sure exactly what I have in my possession.”
“Well, it won’t be Ric. Over my dead body.”
“And none of us want that, do we?’
“I fought off half a dozen vampy boys in my Wichita days. No bloodsucker is going to turn me now. Maybe you are an albino vampire.” I nodded at the glass in his hand, almost empty except for the glob of raspberry liqueur at the bottom.
Snow tilted back his glass and his neck to flaunt my blood bruise as he sucked down the last of the drink. Did I have damnably good aim. The mark was perfectly placed to make a pendant for the black leather collar he wore onstage. He set the empty martini glass on the same end table that held my untouched Silver Zombie.
“Whatever I call it, or her, I’ll protect the Silver Zombie at all costs. And Ricardo Montoya too.”
He stood, so I had to stand also to avoid communing with his crotch.
“I’m the only one in Vegas who has a . . . prayer . . . of doing that with El Demonio and the Immortality Mob and my rival moguls coming for it, and him,” Snow said. “I’ll even protect you, whether you like it or not.”
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