“He was a grieving father. He claimed Loretta had ‘gone missing.’”
“Thanks to him. But thanks to Ric and me, she’s back, and not the better for it. So I’m still doing the math. You remained with Cicereau for years, knowing what he was?”
“Knowing and seeing are two different things, Delilah. So he went off with the ‘boys’ to Starlight Lodge in the mountains for three days a month. My periods actually got in sync with the full-moon schedule. Convenient for Cesar.”
“Creepy. And more than I wanted to know.”
Vida smiled. “Odd how a woman’s blood cycle unnerves even other women. Now I know how to stop your incessant questions.”
“What about Sansouci? He’s the obvious suspect for turning you vampire.”
Vida’s dark eyes blinked twice in her impassive face. The involuntary tic broadcast a strong emotional reaction, from what I’d glimpsed of her. Her long fingers picked up the extreme cigarette holder to cover her discomposure.
“Sansouci. He tried to recruit me for his harem, but I was too savvy to fall for that.”
“You stayed true to froglike Cicereau with a suave number like Sansouci around oozing forbidden sex for the price of a little blood? Why?”
“Simple, Delilah. I knew too much. Not about Loretta, or I’d have risked leaving, but too much about Cesar’s shady criminal activities, not to mention the supernatural ones. I’d been ‘dropped off’ as an infant myself. All I knew of my family was a couple crazy old aunts in the Midwest and I ditched both of them when I was sixteen. I was on my own and doing my best.”
I kept silent. That was as close to an apology as she’d come yet. I didn’t believe her story about Sansouci. It went against human nature that a trapped and neglected trophy mistress like Vida wouldn’t at least have revenge sex with her sugar daddy’s handsome bodyguard, if not give blood.
Good question. Did daylight vampires ever have sex for the sake of it, or only when it netted blood?
Vida was watching me while trying to hide it. “How is Sansouci?” she asked too casually to feel that way.
“Same old, same old, I suppose. Hates Cicereau, loves women.”
“You said his forelock has more silver.”
“Only to a very keen observer, like me, after seeing the sixty-five-year-old photo.”
“His daylight lifestyle will shorten his immortality.”
“By a century or two, maybe. He doesn’t seem worried.”
“He never did. Does he like you, Delilah? You look quite a bit like me. Especially in those vintage rags you’re wearing.”
“Why should you care?” These were the first roster of questions she’d asked about me, besides wanting to know Ric’s history.
Then I got it. Sansouci could be my father! He was Black Irish. He’d been around Vida for years. He was the one who’d want revenge sex . . . with Vida. He had good reason to cuckold Cicereau even if a blood donation wasn’t in the picture.
The idea of Sansouci as Daddy made my skin crawl and wrung my stomach. Vida was right. He did act attracted to me. Still, Cicereau was more likely to be my father when you looked at the Gehenna Hotel habitués. Another revolting, stomach-churning idea. I recalled his lust for the CSI-autopsy image of Lilith, aka me.
This cast of likely suspects for my father was getting more twisted than the family freakiness in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet put together.
“You have no reason to be honest,” I told Vida, forcing myself to be so hard-headed I sounded cold. “You’ve let Lilith and me fend for ourselves since infanthood and grow up in a separate nest of lies. Maybe you fooled yourself into thinking you were doing the best for us, but you got out of Vegas, got out of motherhood, and now you’re running some chichi California fitness club, and you’re out only a few thousand dollars for my high school scholarship. I appreciate being your charity-of-the-month for four years, but all I want from you is our father’s identity, Lilith’s and mine. Then I’ll vanish like a bag of trash left for the garbage collector. I won’t even tell Lilith, so she won’t bother you, not that she’d be inclined.”
Vida leaned her gorgeous, made-up forties face on the elbow she braced on her desk.
“I’d like to help you out, Delilah, but you really ought to leave now.”
“I’m not leaving until I have the answers I need.”
“Too bad, because my workout girls are all done with their routines and hepped up and about to harvest the rave attendees up the street. Just up Delilah Street.” She pointed beyond me with a sharp scarlet fingernail. “I own both enterprises, you see. It works out very well. That’s one thing I learned from Vegas and Cesar Cicereau, owning competing venues just ups the ante for the savvy CEO.”
I was on my high-heeled feet. “Your vamps are hitting the rave club? You let Lilith stay there?”
“No, my dear. You did.”
I ran to the door, pausing when I heard high-pitched tittering outside. Excited feminine twittering.
I turned my back to the door and faced my mother as the silver familiar abandoned its old-timey charm bracelet and reshaped itself into a dagger in my right hand, a dagger with a cross-shaped haft, of course, as hokey as that old superstition was.
“You must have been the one,” I told Vida even as I realized it, “who was made vampire so Howard Hughes could get turned by a beautiful woman.”
I didn’t need a confirmation. A look of paralyzed fury froze her face into a horrific mask. Mama as a snaky-tressed Medusa would never leave my memory.
“That’s the beauty of being undead now. I don’t need men anymore, Delilah, I prey on them. Exclusively. My girls are not so persnickety.”
I turned and yanked open the door. Zombies on speed were one nightmare I’d already navigated. Aerobic vampire chicks were about to become another can of worms entirely.
Chapter Twenty
THE SCENE IN the health club lobby was like being trapped backstage at a major beauty pageant. Thin, fit, tall, busty young women were milling everywhere, wearing full makeup that concealed their undead pallor.
They lounged at the health bar, warming up with bottled blood in trendy concoctions that abused fruits and vegetables. They used the metal railing along the stairs to the second floor as a ballet barre, stretching toned torsos, endless legs, and supple arms into supernaturally unnatural positions that would have snapped human bones.
They gathered at the front glass doors, prancing and preening like racehorses at the starting gate.
And I had to get through them.
Bursting out of the boss’s office door gave me an edge of surprise. For about fifteen feet.
I shook my hair to fall into my face and kept my head down, squared my shoulders, and slammed one foot down in front of the other so my heels echoed rifle-shot-style on the terrazzo floor. Concealing my silver dagger-bearing right hand in my ample skirt folds, I lifted my left hand high and slowly lowered it, pointing imperiously to the front door.
Vida herself had said I looked like her. Maybe enough to pull off a short stroll.
Around me, I sensed these self-absorbed beauties pausing in their occupations, turning their attention on me. The ones crowding the door parted for my passage. My left hand pushed the left glass door open so hard it banged against the glass window-wall.
A cracking sound cascaded into a shower of broken glass that tinkled like the very highest keys on a piano. I was still striding away toward the street, Delilah Street, not daring to look back.
When the second of the double glass doors resounded as it slammed open, I broke into a full-out run. Thanks to GPS, I had an aerial memory of the area’s layout, and I angled across to the next dark building. I dodged around the Dumpsters at its rear, my footsteps obscured by the sharp high yips of once-human hounds.
Speed was not on my side, and I knew they could scent my blood, but my shortcut had zipped me into the back parking lot of the Rave Machine. Darting through the highest SUVs and pickups, I noticed a lot of non-California license pla
tes. These patrons were unwary tourists who didn’t know Corona supported a hornet’s nest of vampires. All their black-clad mock-Goth and high-sepia steampunk fantasies were about to come to life in living color, red bleeding into the monotone crowds.
I burst into the back hall, bouncing off lines holding up both sides of the walls . . . the restroom queues.
“Go to the end of the line,” a few wasted girls in black lipstick snarled at me.
“Just what I intend,” I snarled back. “I’d stay in the restroom if you don’t want to be vampire bait.”
Meanwhile, the bleary-eyed guys, some in black eyeliner, whistled and noticed me.
“Schoolteacher,” one drawled, and others took up the refrain. “We’ll muss you up, teach.”
One guy with a leer and abs of corrugated cardboard tried to block my way. When I elbowed him hard, he folded and slid down against the wall. You just can’t drink and drug and then molest women properly.
“Vintage is a waste on punks like you,” I told them.
Irritating, immature blowhards they might be, but pathetic victims-to-be they were sure to be.
The relentless screeching of the music in the hollow two-story box ahead was already filing my nerves to the quick. Was the high-pitched end of the clamor the first wave of vampire victims or just bad-rock white noise? And where was Lilith?
A ring of deserted tables hugged the walls. Everybody was dancing. I guess it was either move with the hyperactivity or sit on the sidelines and go blind and deaf to stay sane. Okay, I’m a party pooper.
I glided by some tables, snagging a faux leather jacket to cover my out-of-sync dress.
A central open staircase mimicked the La Vida Loca layout, so I fought my way to its foot, being drawn into crazy mob moves on the way there.
A pale hand grabbed my shoulder.
I turned.
“Sorry. I thought you were a guy,” one of the workout-gear-clad vamp chicks said.
I knew what she was right away. Her eyes widened with lust as her mouth gaped open until the fangs appeared, heading for my neck. In the hectic lighting, I could see drops of drool on the fang-tips. Seriously unsanitary.
My silver dagger stabbed through the flimsy shiny fabric of my borrowed jacket. I was scared enough to stick it in under her rib cage and twist, hoping the silver familiar knew what it was doing. The feel of blade tip rebounding off bone and then sinking deep into gushy heart of darkness was so repellent, I stopped the attack.
A horrid burnt acid smell and a stream like Vida’s cigarette smoke rose between us while our eyes held. Her pupils vanished up into her eye sockets as blood suffused the whites, whose blood, I had no idea. Not mine seemed enough to hope for at the moment.
She fell onto the first steps as I skirted her form and galloped up the stairs two at a time, soundless in the cacophony, desperate for an overhead view. How would I ever spot Lilith in this crowd? She blended in like pot in a look-alike spider plant field.
From the second-story balcony, I saw that the vamp girls were not only already inside, they had mingled, warming up their victim’s blood by boogying them into a dance fever. Their colorful workout wear made them stand out among the undertaker-black clad clientele like carnivorous Easter bunnies in a bat cave.
Great. Up here, I had a bead on every one of those fang-girl, grrrl-power bloodsuckers and no anti-aircraft guns to mow them down with. Even if I’d had a flamethrower handy, I’d do as good a job killing their victims as they would.
Helpless witness is not a role I care to take.
A pair of icy hands grasped my shoulders from behind.
I spun around and away from the two-story drop over the railing, punching my forearms outward to break the contact. My college martial arts moves were rusty, but a sideways kick caught the shadowy form in the abs.
“You are mean on the other side of the mirror,” a voice huffed out. Lilith’s.
I kept my dodging, defensive crouch. “You oughta know mean. What’re you doing up here?”
“Quick smoke. They don’t allow it down below.”
“That’s the only thing they don’t allow.”
Lilith edged into the light reflected from below, crossing her bare forearms over her lean middle. Figures like spiked worms were churning over her flesh.
“I managed to hurt you?” I tried to sound disbelieving. Our mama was a vampire. I knew I wasn’t one. Didn’t mean Lilith was taint-free.
“Not that bad.” Lilith showed her teeth as her breath hissed in. They were reasonably square and blunt. “If I don’t hold my defensive ink back, you’d be baled in barbed wire. Guess I startled you.”
“We’ve never . . . touched before.”
“And won’t do it again,” Lilith swore. “I won’t bite, promise.”
“Unless you’re a vampire.”
“Not yet. I wanted to ask you—discreetly for me—where the Phi Delta Dingbats cheerleader types on the dance floor all came from. They look more your style than mine or Rave Machine’s.”
She joined me at the railing, curling her hands around the top round bar.
The phantom tattoo poured over her hands like living lace and vanished into the dark surface. Her body ink must be metallic-based, discharging into the nearest inert metal. It made me wonder if my recently discovered trick of converting an involuntary copper intrauterine device into sterling silver endometriosis was a unique feature in Vida’s offspring. Maybe I wasn’t the only bionic baby.
“Have your dark tattoos always been mobile?” I asked.
“They come and go like a rash, without my asking. Why?”
“Inquiring reporter.”
“Right. Hold it over me that you’re a professional at something besides being a hard case, why don’t you?”
“Good sister, bad sister,” I said with a grin, feeling oddly mischievous, considering the situation. Lilith smothered a smirk.
“You’re okay, I’m okay,” I told her, “but those ‘dingbats’ below are a bunch of vampire girls about to go wild.”
“No shit! That’s why you retreated up here. Great view of the carnage.”
“No retreat. I’m a proactive chick. I’m trying to figure out how to stop them all. Right now they’re busy enjoying toying with their food.”
“You get down there and manage to stake one, the others are going to eat fast and run.”
“No staking. Like the metal railing in your hands, everything in this building is constructed of glass or metal. That’s what I’m seeing from up here. Not one sliver of wood. It might as well have been built as a vampire people-trap.”
“By who?”
“Whom.”
Lilith stuck her tongue out at me. Black Old English script read “Screwest thou.” Kinda demony, Sis.
“That should be reading ‘Mothersucker,’” I said.
“Huh? You sorta swear? Ms. Goody Two-hundred-shoes?”
“Mother is a vampire and she runs a health club just a few doors down Delilah Street for awesomely toned girl vamps. I’m surprised you opted out from meeting her.”
“I don’t care what she is and what she does where. This is your quest, Dee.”
“Her name is Vida and I have a picture of her on my computer. It’s several decades old, but she looks the same.”
“Hope those genes run in the family,” Lilith quipped, but she was keeping her billboard tongue bridled. She leaned over the railing. “Those dippy college types are really going to make this party into a bloodbath?”
“As soon as this set ends.”
Lilith looked around what would be the flies area in a theater, the dark top story above the stage where backdrops and other theatrical effects would be stored out of sight, out of mind.
We were on a level with all the light fixtures.
“What about that gigantic cheesy mirrored ball in the center of the dance floor,” Lilith asked. “Can’t you do some mojo with that?’
“I could try exiting through it, if I wanted to come out on the
other end fractured into tiny pieces.”
“You’re stuck here, then. Good. I hate to watch massacres alone. Look. There’s a mirror behind the bar.”
“Not glass I can use. Highly polished chrome. It distorts, see? I’d come through the S-shaped woman.”
“Oh, yeah. Kinda cool. Everybody looks like pig faces in it already. Some of these lights might hurt the vamps.”
“Neon hasn’t kept them off the Vegas Strip. Strobe lights only mask how superfast they can move when preying, or fighting. It also makes their pale faces look sexy to humans, so they can paralyze prey before the kill.”
“Sunlight can kill them, though?”
“Supposedly. Don’t you know the common remedies?”
“I’ve been locked up in mirror-world.”
Now was not the time to explore what my remote “twin” had been up to during my twenty-four years of existence. Still, Lilith’s simplistic questions reminded me of Sansouci, the “daylight” vampire. Sunglasses allowed him high-noon strolling time.
“Maybe you could use your superpowers to smash a huge hole in the roof—” Lilith was saying.
“And let the starlight in? Three hundred million light-years isn’t going to make any planet-Earth vamp go nova.”
I couldn’t get lost in centuries of legends and hearsay about what killed vampires. Vida was right. Yet Sansouci was a new-model vamp and he’d kept sunlight from his eyes. Sunlight had to be bad for vampire eyes, at least.
With all these lights here . . . and still the vamps were hopping around like Paris Hilton in a Manhattan nightclub spotting an Excess Hollywood camera. When the strobe light hit them, I noticed that their fangs had come out to play. Zero hour was approaching fast.
Their dance partners, male and female, were too busy being cool in black leather and shades—cat’s-eye-shaped shades, Snow-type expensive European shades, mirror shades, eye-slit shades, wraparound shades, round scholarly John Lennon shades, Sansouci aviator shades, glitter-framed shades, Matrix shades, cool hot shades—to notice anything outside their rum-and-Coke and cocaine hazes.
I had to escape looming doom mode and think like Vegas thought. Corporate. I had to get into the head of Forties arm-candy Vida knuckling under to Cesar Cicereau and watching hard as he took over what would become Vegas when it was as low-end and unglitzy as Delilah Street—pardon my low-esteem self description—was today. Or a few years ago. Vida the entrepreneur, building a new immortal life in California.
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