Virtual Virgin dspi-5

by Carole Nelson Douglas

“They can do anything humans can do,” Ric said. “And when it comes to human and unhuman trafficking and the sex trade, that can be a big problem.”

  So we moseyed over to the back door, an appropriate verb since Tallgrass and I both sported boots of a sort.

  Ric hung back momentarily so we were following the other two.

  “You sure this group feed is okay with the resident CinSims?” he asked. “And what about Hector Nightwine? Doesn’t he have a spying fetish and the high-tech toys to indulge it?”

  For the first time I considered that this might not simply be a visit from a vacationing buddy Ric had reconnected with during our recent Wichita road trip.

  “Tallgrass is here on business?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Molly’s blueberry jam is primo.”

  “All right.” Ric pulled me close. “After breakfast, though, I want to take Tallgrass for a spin on the Strip.”

  “Dolly always likes to show off. Why is Tallgrass here?”

  “Not you and Dolly. I need a jaunt with just him and me,” Ric said. “I want him to see the real deal when it comes to world-class entertainment venues and the works of superhuman moguls.”

  “He’s not a hick,” I pointed out.

  “CinSims are a new breed of being. When I was a kid, I used to think I just needed to stop the zombie trade to end all the evil on earth. I thought on that happy day that all the CinSims should be unchipped, unplugged, retired to a refrigerated warehouse, buried, or whatever. Now I’m seeing it’s not that simple. We’d both miss Godfrey. It’s great that Tallgrass can meet a CinSim who’s not a public curiosity, but who holds an actual position, right here and now.

  “So,” Ric stood back to let me follow Tallgrass and Quicksilver into the Nightwine kitchen. “Bring on breakfast.”

  Fine. I was thinking I might want to be off on my own for the day anyway.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  BLUEBERRIES AND POPOVERS and Vienna sausages, oh my!

  We breakfasted family style in the kitchen while scents of fresh coffee and fried bacon incited our appetites. Godfrey, with his apron donned over his shirtsleeves, was still formal yet breezy. Molly prepared and helped serve everything as they waltzed around each other with the cheery efficiency of long-time employees.

  While I’d think nothing of Nick Charles holding a scarlet cocktail in his pale silver-screen hand at the Inferno Bar, to see Molly’s monotone flesh tones deliver platters bearing fluffy yellow clouds of scrambled eggs and ruffled ribbons of red-brown bacon strips to our table felt a bit odd.

  Everything was scrumptious, especially the airy popovers with butter and blueberry jam filling every crevice.

  Quicksilver had long gotten used to CinSim food servers. He provided entertainment while chasing and gobbling dozens of short Vienna sausages around a huge pewter tray on the floor.

  Afterward, the four of us gathered a moment in the courtyard before Ric and Tallgrass took off in the ’Vette.

  “I like these CinSims,” Tallgrass said. “Why didn’t this Nightwine bigwig join us?”

  “He’s a hermit,” I said. “Godfrey and Molly tend his few needs and he treats them very well.”

  “Other than chipping them in place,” Ric noted.

  Tallgrass shook his head. “Those Emerald City CinSims fresh from the farm didn’t seem happy, or even quite all there.”

  Ric answered before I could. “Godfrey’s alter ego at the Inferno Hotel, Nick Charles, explained that it takes a while for CinSims to take hold on a placement.”

  “Nick Charles?” Tallgrass sounded impressed. “The elbow-bending gent detective from the old movies? That guy was a hoot.”

  “We’ll stop in and see him. We can order one of Delilah’s Brimstone Kiss cocktails there.”

  “‘Brimstone Kiss.’ That sounds like real firewater, Miss Delilah.”

  “Rick Blaine from Casablanca loved it,” I bragged.

  “It’s a lot early for booze, Ric,” Tallgrass said, “but anything Humphrey Bogart goes for is good with me.”

  So off they went. Quicksilver barked once and ran around the cottage to the back. I suspect he had pestered Woodrow, the yard troll, into playing fetch with him.

  I returned to the cottage to start a find-and-interrogate list.

  With Ric doing the town with his mentor, now was a perfect time to delve into the pesky question of who might have fathered me. I didn’t want to introduce Ric just yet to the idea that my mama was a vampire. Encountering Vida in the absurdly long-lived flesh had tweaked more than my overdeveloped curiosity bone; it had quadrupled my fear factor.

  I came up with a long roster of hair-raising prospects for Daddy Undearest, starting with Cesar Cicereau, Vida’s werewolf sugar daddy.

  I’d already tackled number two on the list, Sansouci, the werewolf boss’s involuntary enforcer and indentured vampire stud.

  Also on the Gehenna Hotel roster, I could list the indentured house magician with the twin fey accomplices, Madrigal. An unlikely suspect, but he’d been there when Vida and Loretta had owned expiring life spans. I smiled to think that Cesar Cicereau just couldn’t kick the women out of his life without their coming back . . . and back.

  Moving on, there was the pre-vampire Howard Hughes, buying up Vegas properties in the sixties and growing more isolated and phobic every day, aiming to hang on to his empire by being turned vampire.

  And I couldn’t eliminate Vegas mover and shaker Hector Nightwine, another film and media empire force, so eager to provide me with room, board, and constant surveillance. Although imagining Hector fathering anyone except by test tube was a disturbing vision.

  Finally, there was Snow, mystery supernatural, age and aim unknown, but way more invested in me and the future than any Vegas figure of the past was, including Vida.

  All of them could have been around long enough to sire me. All had offered me opposition, attempts to make me play prey to their predator, and had claimed to have my best interests at heart, or to sell me on the idea that their best interests were also mine.

  All of them radiated the various degrees of lust from knee-jerk pseudosexism to something much more personal that came naturally to being a power on a guy’s playing field like Las Vegas. Two didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. One was likely an ice king in Hell. One I actually liked.

  I’d found my way to Vida, so it was time to connect her to all the usual suspects and find what had made the two and two that became me and Lilith. I didn’t expect to unbuild Rome in a day, but I expected to find some unexpected possibilities.

  So I donned my general-purpose spandex black-leather leggings, a trapeze-shaped turtleneck thigh-long top that hid my pared-down version of a cop’s duty belt under it, and ballet flats covered with suede gaiters to the knee. I had to wear something vintage as a lucky charm.

  The familiar obligingly tarnished to black with faint rainbow highlights and formed a chain-swagged steampunk epaulet on my left shoulder.

  I was a either a vain cat burglar or a woman not worth the trouble of tangling with.

  QUICKSILVER SURVEYED MY new look, and then sat in front of Dolly’s massive chrome grille, refusing to move.

  “No,” I said. “Nix. This is a solo mission. It’s investigative, not dangerous. I don’t need an escort.”

  I had to circle way around him to get to the driver’s seat, and then he leaped into the passenger side through the open window. We had a stare-down, but I finally pulled onto Sunset Road with him still installed, feeling good and guilty.

  Not much later I reluctantly left him guarding Dolly in a low-rent parking garage so I was able to join the women slipping into the shade of the Chez Shez royal awning to buy lotions and bath oils. They lined up two deep along the counters, sipping gratis wine while buying the rare oils and costly perfumes. The combined scents were sublime. Like a Goth shadow I slipped around the end of one counter and into the shop’s rear.

  Shezmou was far back in the manufacturing area, la
boring by oil-lamp light, working his ancient grape press. The sack that held the grapes or oil seeds he crushed was dyed dark bloodred from centuries of usage. Ancient Egyptians favored red wine and extreme afterlife intervention.

  I could easily imagine torn-off human heads inside that sack, being crushed by the steady power of Shezmou’s broad, muscled shoulders as he worked the two wooden poles like opposing oars to twist the sap out of the sack.

  The liquid that dripped down today was clear and golden. Olive oil.

  I could inhale through my nose again.

  Shez gave the sack a final, emptying wrench and stepped back to squint at me. I must be silhouetted by the lamplight at my back.

  “Who dares to intrude on Shezmou at his press?”

  “Sorry, big guy. I need a quick favor.”

  He wiped his palms on a piece of white linen. “The favor of the gods always pours down on the Mighty Delilah like the finest embalming and funerary oils.”

  Oh, goodie, Irma said.

  “Really, Almighty Shez, you can stop calling me Mighty. I am a mere pipsqueak compared to your power and nobility. And your customers will find the usage . . . unfitting.”

  “What is a pipsqueak?”

  “Something insignificant that your sandaled foot could crush like a grape.”

  “Or like the heads of the damned.” He grinned with the zest of a proud craftsman.

  That had been the dark side of his godly role . . . acting as Osiris’s headsman and using damned heads as twist-off caps to throw into the bottomless pit of the Egyptian underworld.

  Right now, I needed to persuade Almighty Shez to be my doorman.

  “What then should I call you?” he was asking, polite in the way of demon gods who can grease their skids with your own blood.

  “Delilah would do.”

  He inclined his head. “So, pipsqueak,” he said instead with relish, “what favor can I perform for you?”

  “First, how did you find your new shopgirl?”

  “Hastur came to view my product . . . line?”

  I nodded. Shez needed to update his ancient formal manner of talking, and get with his new career as entrepreneur.

  He spoke on. “She seemed an excellent canvas for the new powdered Jewels of the Nile Eye you encouraged me to create. I wish to impress the emissaries of the other foreign powers when they come to sue me for custom.”

  I nodded. The semiprecious stones in the broad Egyptian collar he wore formed a natural palette for a killer eye-shadow collection . . . malachite green, amethyst, lapis-lazuli blue, deep red carnelian. Shezmou was an unemployed god I was responsible for jerking into the twenty-first century. The least I could do was to find him a commercial niche.

  “They don’t want to sue you for custom,” I told him. “That could involve legal action. They want to sew up your franchise.”

  “I am not sure I wish strangers to sew up anything of mine, including this ‘franchise.’”

  “That merely means they . . . pay you tribute, massive tribute, for the honor of selling your unique wares at shops all over the world.”

  “Even in Phoenicia?”

  “They call that . . . ah, Phoenix now.”

  “Nubia?”

  “New . . . Newport Beach.”

  “Persia.”

  “Palm Beach now.”

  “The Nile must have risen alarmingly high during my endless imprisonment.”

  “The world is completely different, Shez. You’re adapting to it very well. It was smart to hire Hastur. She has the look of a supermodel.”

  His tilted his head to question me.

  “Ah . . . a queen, as does Grizelle of the Inferno Hotel.”

  “Grizelle.” He intoned her name with more than relish. Reverence. “She is the equal of Nefertiti, a word that means ‘the beautiful woman has come’ in my language. And you have also,” he added with a majestic head nod.

  Beauty is as beauty does. Grizelle had always kept me in her guard-tiger sites, but I could see that a guy who’d been chained to a pillar for four millennia might respond to the statuesque black shape-shifter in her tall, lithe human form. Not to mention her own goddess attitude.

  “I have met with the Gehenna city’s Sandsoozi,” Shez went on. “Apparently Gehenna is a later version of the Egyptian underworld. It is gratifying to encounter one whose ancestors go back a few centuries. I am puzzled that I find the same condition that destroyed the Egyptian royal house for millennia is . . . passable in this Sandsoozi and my esteemed sponsor.”

  “It’s Sansouci. He’s a customer of yours?”

  “He samples the latter-day bloodwine my esteemed sponsor is creating and bestowing on his many subjects.”

  Shez was living in a dreamworld long gone. His “sponsor,” the now eternal vampiric Howard Hughes, was still a controlling power in Las Vegas, even though few knew of his continued existence. And Sansouci? Throwing back Howard Hughes’s synthetic bloodwine with Shezmou? Nothing good could come of that.

  “I’m so happy for you all,” I said to move on. “That’s where I need your assistance, Shez. I must consult your sponsor. Getting to his secret digs atop the Karnak Hotel means going through the hotel’s main attraction floors. I’m not exactly welcome to the current administration.”

  When Shez remained politely silent I named names. “I mean the twin reigning pharaohs, Kephron and Kepherati.”

  “Those unnaturally eternal betrayers! They remain in the living world as careless consumers of the blood of innocents. Yes, I remember that your companion in freeing me and the blood slaves had recently escaped their lowest unnatural appetites.”

  “My companion was Ric, Ric Montoya.”

  “A name that rolls off the tongue. And where is your small Anubis?”

  That stumped me for a few seconds. Anubis was the god of the dead. Sometimes shown with a jackal or dog head.

  “Quicksilver is guarding my, um, chariot.”

  “Most wise. Then I will commend you to the protection of my little brother. His position as court entertainer allows him to come and go and be seen in strange company.”

  Shez’s traditional Egyptian kohl eyeliner gave him a Captain Jack Sparrow–come-hither-or-run look. He squinted at me as he would a plump grape for the squeezing.

  “You look sufficiently unlike yourself when you last visited the Karnak in the skin with silver stars all over it. No guard god will recognize you.”

  He referred to the steel-studded impenetrable black bodysuit I’d been given at the Inferno. Star-studded skin sounded much more impressive. I thanked him and left, heading on foot for the Karnak, counting on a raunchy fertility god to get me in, and out again.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “WHY THE POSTADOLESCENT noisy sports car?” Tallgrass asked Ric after breakfast was just a fond memory.

  “I was not much more than a postadolescent when I bought it?” Ric suggested as he cruised the Corvette through the concrete canyon made by massive pyramids, domes, towers, and 3-D billboards known as the Las Vegas Strip.

  “So. Why aren’t Miss Delilah and what that butler-sorta fellah, Godfrey, calls Master Quicksilver with us on our sightseeing expedition?”

  “I have a big decision to make, Tallgrass.”

  “So? I’m an ex-coworker. I don’t share your soul and I sure as hell don’t sleep with you.”

  “It involves what I brought to life in Wichita. You were there.”

  Tallgrass’s espresso-dark eyes bored into Ric’s eyes, looking for his soul. “So was she. I think the phrase today is ‘significant other,’ amigo. Is that ‘she’ Miss Delilah, or is it that damn ghost of a machine?”

  “It’s that I might be poison to associate with because of the ghostly machine.”

  Tallgrass lifted his deeply seamed palms. “Stop the sports car. Let me out. I am good enough to swallow poison, and Miss Delilah is not? I would like to hear her opinion on the subject. Did you even ask her?”

  Ric put the ’Vette through the purpose
s it was made for, a slash across four lanes of less gutsy traffic and into the long drive up to the Inferno Hotel.

  “I need your opinion on something,” he said. Admitted.

  “Some thing?”

  “Some one. Maybe a something.”

  “Miss Delilah is full of opinions.”

  “That’s the problem. She may be prejudiced.”

  “If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t be worth much.” Tallgrass grinned. “These days are not for those who weigh left hand against right until they are paralyzed. It is a time to act.”

  “Exactly.” Ric nodded as Delilah’s favorite parking valet appeared in a puff of STP-scented cologne at the ’Vette’s driver-side door. He handed the orange-scaled demon a twenty-dollar bill.

  “You mind if I rev her up the ramp?” Manny asked, a devilish arch to his green eyebrows.

  “Be my guest,” Ric said.

  “Bonsai tree!” the demon shrieked from the driver’s seat as the ’Vette vanished in a cloud of genuine gas exhaust.

  “Self-indulgent and not very green despite the valet’s eyebrows,” Tallgrass decreed.

  “Wait’ll you go inside,” Ric promised.

  As Delilah had pointed out, Tallgrass was not a hick. He observed and nodded sagely as they entered the Inferno’s interior glitz.

  “IT’S TOO EARLY for the Boss to be up and receiving guests,” Grizelle said, eyeing Tallgrass after Ric had her paged.

  “You’re a shaman,” Tallgrass told her. “What is a creature of earth and sky doing caged in all this artificial light?”

  “I’m security chief here. Chief.”

  He nodded. “Of course. You are like that Corvette sports car Ric drives. There is a tiger in your tank.”

  Grizelle slashed Ric a look, part awe, part anger. “Don’t make me show my claws,” she told Tallgrass.

  “Nor me, mine,” he said.

  “Neither of you needs to resort to postadolescent noise,” Ric said. “Christophe made it clear that I was welcome at any time,” he told Grizelle. He might call the Inferno boss Snow to his face, as invited, but he preferred thinking of him as the mogul Christophe.