Virtual Virgin dspi-5

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  “No comment. It’s just . . . we deserve to put on the Ritz. Celebrate being alive. Find out what Snow’s up to. This sounds like a mega-event.”

  “Like the Oscars. We haven’t had a real night out for a while. You deserve to dazzle the Strip, amor.

  “Anyway, my Godfrey is sending a car for us.”

  “So the night’s on Nightwine and Christophe. Sweet. Bring on the spice.”

  I put down the phone and dug into dinner. It was delicious. I could hear the spa bubbling upstairs and took my martini glass with me. When I walked into the bedroom, my ruby red slippers from Emerald City Hotel and Casino in Wichita were sitting under the wall-mounted clothes rack, from which hung the scarlet silk velvet Nora Charles gown that was a prize of the city’s estate sales, like Dolly.

  I dropped off Betty Boop on my bedroom floor on my way to the bathroom.

  IF YOU’VE EVER seen the Disney Cinderella—and what girl child hasn’t, even me in a group home—that’s how everything went. I bubbled, I showered and washed my hair, I blow-dried it, I put on party makeup . . . for me just eye shadow and lip gloss and . . . dazzle dust here and there, but I didn’t do it.

  Maybe invisible little birds did it with their tiny beaks and tiny wings, maybe bluebirds that fly over the rainbow, but the blow-dryer magically put every hair in its fluffiest, shiniest place. The lip gloss wand rolled into my hand in a prechosen color. Ravaging Red, I saw when I looked. The clear mascara skated onto my naturally black eyelashes and shaped my eyebrows as if they’d been plucked by Kevyn Aucoin to look just like Elizabeth Taylor in her prime. It was a reality TV fantasy.

  The red sequined slippers fit perfectly, and I even got a matching Snow White headband with the stubby little bow at the top. Cutesy, but so classic. And on my dresser top, another estate-sale prize, the familiar going red carpet as a small rhinestone-covered nineteen-thirties bag just the right size for my cell phone, credit card, driver’s license, lip gloss, and forty bucks to see me through any transportation emergency if my date acted up. As I hoped he would.

  I checked my gown out in the mirror, red, yes, with full sweeping sleeves and long, rhinestoned cuffs at the wrist. No watch. A high-collared neck and long, trumpet skirt. Discreet slits from shoulder to cuff and nape to waist, but otherwise as modest as a nun’s habit.

  What was this? Maybe Group Home Girl finally free of her past and slaloming Olympic-style headfirst into her future. Heigh-ho the evil demon is dead. Ric is free and I am home free.

  I tripped down the stairs (you can do that only in Disney movies) and ran to the front door, where a man in a chauffeur’s cap waited like Godfrey.

  The Lincoln Town Car also awaited, the discreet celebrity choice. Godfrey would never endorse the ostentation of a limo.

  Ric was waiting inside.

  “Hombre,” I said, “you rock me,” as I sank into the backseat and his arms.

  And we were off to see the wizard and his mysterious unveiling. Maybe he’d even reveal just what kind of supernatural he was.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “I’M IMPRESSED,” RIC said.

  “By what?”

  “You know just where the penthouse elevator is at the Inferno. I had to hunt it up.”

  “But you’d used the Nine Circles of Hell elevators when I caught up with you.”

  “Before that, I mean,” he explained, “when I checked out Christophe’s personal setup before I investigated his entertainment section.”

  “It’s good you’ve at last had a chat with him, man to man. Or whatever he is.”

  “He does play the mystery card, doesn’t he?”

  “So you went from the penthouse to the Lust level? Anything he said?”

  “I visited the Inferno Bar too, to check with Godfrey’s alter ego, Nick Charles, and company. That Asta is cute, not to mention Nora, but Quicksilver, of course, is Serious Dog.”

  “You are the thorough investigator. We’d better plan for a second act tonight,” I told him as the elevator arrived and swallowed us up. “This announcement and celebration is scheduled for the break Snow has between evening stage shows. It’s just a stop before we move on elsewhere to party hard.”

  “Okay. Time to flaunt our fine feathers and for some bubbly and a toast to the latest Christophe triumph, and we’re off to where . . . ? The Venetian?”

  I nodded happily.

  “I’m not moving in with Christophe,” Ric whispered in my ear. “Trust me.”

  “One thing about that facedown in the desert. What does El Finado mean?”

  “What?” Ric mocked. “You’re not keeping up with your Spanish dictionary?”

  “El Demonio’s real men, the actual human vermin, were chanting that as they perished.”

  “Did they? I was in my own Zen place then. They must have gotten the gender wrong. You know Spanish has masculine and feminine words.”

  “Sí, señor.” I copped a feel of the Spanish masculine.

  “Del.” He laughed and swung his hips back. “The elevator has a security camera. Concentrate on your Spanish grammar until later. El Finado is like El Muerto. My culture doesn’t fear death and the dead as Anglo culture does. We personalize concepts like Death.”

  “Like El Muerto is Death, our guy with the scythe, only he’s got the grinning skull down cold.”

  “Right.”

  “So if El Muerto is Death, who is El Finado?”

  “A corpse. The corpse. That’s what a corpse is called.”

  Oh. My heart stopped.

  Maybe I was La Finada. That’s what the dying men would have called out if they were addressing the femicide army. Or maybe not. Some words don’t have a feminine version in Spanish.

  The elevator spit us out into the White Zone.

  Snow wasn’t immediately visible, as he usually was, like Godfrey. I felt a ping of unease as Ric and I moved into the main room. Maybe everybody was finado, and it had all happened while we were riding up in the sixty-story elevator.

  I’d expected a murmuring, champagne-swilling crowd and waiters skating by with appetizers and Appletinis. The place was as silent as a tomb, a gorgeously designed and posh tomb, but deadly quiet nevertheless.

  The penthouse was . . . deserted. I was walking through a dream.

  “There’s one thing I envy Christophe,” Ric admitted. “I love the view from here.” He swept me to the window wall.

  Far down the Strip I spotted the huge lit billboard for Madrigal and the fey girls. Once it had advertised the iconic big cat magicians Siegfried and Roy, a sad reminder of how even decades of Vegas headlining could vanish in one tragic moment. Nothing lasted.

  “It’s a shame,” Ric said, “that huge construction next door is blocking our view.”

  “I’m amazed Snow would tolerate that kind of infringement. I guess somebody paid a bunch of billions to smuggle their new concept against the Inferno.”

  “Let me tell you, the Lust level right here is pretty spectacular. What? Delilah, I’m saying you should take a stroll down there, chica. Discover what, or who you find. It’s pretty illuminating.”

  I knew I should give him heck for that when I heard the elevator arrive.

  We turned.

  Another couple entered the foyer.

  Grizelle and . . . Snow in full white leather rock-concert regalia.

  Ric took a deep breath next to me. He’d never seen Snow’s raunchy rock uniform up close and Grizelle was wearing a strapless sheath of magenta sequins that showed lots of her black skin with its glistening pattern of charcoal gray tiger stripes.

  They made a spectacular pair. Both tall, she black and runway-beautiful. He platinum blond-on-blond.

  “This is it?” I demanded.

  I looked around, then realized why the place felt so deserted. No Silver Zombie was plunked against the wall like a family suit of armor.

  But the bar, I saw, now boasted a silver ice bucket on a tripod and a bottle of Cristal champagne. And four flutes full of bubbly all in a row.
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  “This is it?” I asked again.

  I was right. Ric and I were the show break.

  “Grizelle,” Snow invited his security chief-cum-arm-candy.

  She plucked up two of the flutes to give to me and Ric. Seeing the haughty shape-shifter fetch was worth about ten cents.

  Snow ambled to the window, Tallgrass style, a champagne flute in his pale, ringed hands.

  “You’re here for the birth of a billboard,” he said, nodding to the Strip scenery.

  Even as he spoke, of course, there appeared a Times Square scrolling–light billboard, with a scarily larger-than-life-size image of Snow prerecorded with audio that was piped onto the Strip and into the penthouse.

  Way to hold a press conference, dude! I downed some champagne.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the filmed Snow far below but way larger than life announced. “I give you the Inferno’s newest expansion and Vegas’s most dazzling must-see, must-go-to venue, the Metropolis.”

  Half the view outside the window shifted, crumbled, sank, as if the earth had set on the moon. A total reverse of reality.

  The massive construction framework next to the Inferno melted as the concealing curtain it really was—painted with a faux facade—fell like a finished Christo building wrap.

  Behind the curtain towered a golden glass and metal skyscraper surmounted by a five-tiered horned-roofed Babel, all from the silent film, Metropolis, except it was maybe sixty-five stories high.

  What an astounding, instant Dubai architectural-excess sort of monument. This was definitely Ric’s and my week for seeing giant icons in the sky, and I for one was sick of it.

  “There it is,” Snow said. “My new Metropolis Tower. Casinos, nightclubs, five-star dining venues below, lavish suites above. All yours, Montoya, except for the profits, of course, which you’d never take anyway. Below the pinnacle, a Vegas landmark that is protection in itself. Above, your own penthouse, a floor for the Silver Zombie. Utter security. A headquarters for your new crusades. Every technological and magical investigative tool you can imagine. You’re King of the World.”

  Ric turned to pin down Snow with a hawkish gaze. “And you’re not overlord of it? You’re not even on the premises?”

  “You rule. Call me a . . . neighbor . . . with a financial interest in the crass commercial machine that will fuel your work to destroy the zombie and drug trade.”

  “You’re serious?” Ric responded to the one thing that tempted him, not beauty and excess and money, but power against evil. “I can continue my incursions against the cartels?”

  “Expand them, Montoya. Think as big as the edifice I’ve built for you.”

  Ric hesitated, cast me a glance. “And Delilah?”

  “Your partner. Your lover. She can live with you there, or be a frequent visitor and ally staying low-profile and down-Strip on Nightwine’s secure estate. Nothing changes but your immense resources in the fight against international crime.

  “Grizelle.” Snow turned to order his security chief. “Second-show performance time nipping at my heels. Take Señor Montoya and Miss Street on a tour of this new facility, and his new possibilities.”

  Ric hesitated, stared out the window at the glimmering golden vista, and then turned his gaze to me. He wore his brown contact lens and looked perfectly normal, as well as perfect.

  “Go ahead. I’ll be right along.” I lifted my Lalique flute. “After I finish the expensive champagne.”

  Grizelle glared at me, and then at her boss, but took Ric’s arm in hers.

  “Consider me your personal wiki on all things Metropolis,” she told him in a royal white-tiger purr few mortal men could resist.

  Ric could, but he was taking some time to measure the law enforcement benefits against the personal debits. Still, Grizelle had major femme fatale paws on him and used her hypnotic green gaze to put him into a limbo of confusion.

  The private elevator opened its stainless steel maw to swallow them.

  I turned on Snow to present my own stainless steel maw.

  “You’re quite the seducer.” My crisp cool voice matched the champagne without the producing any heady bubbles. “I just didn’t realize you targeted men as well. An entire Las Vegas tower as a funding agency and headquarters and home base? What is that new Metropolis tower, really Christophe, The Daily Planet?”

  Snow strode to the bar and returned with the champagne bottle to fill my glass to the brim.

  “You’re not tired of champagne, Delilah, but you’re aching for battle for some reason. I’ve finessed your high card from you, admit it. You should also admit that protecting Ricardo Montoya comes second to safeguarding your ego. I can offer him so much more security than you can.”

  “Speaking of seconds, don’t you have another show to do?”

  He refilled his own glass and faced off against me. “You know I have a CinSim substitute available to play me onstage. I can stay here and argue with you all night if you want. And enjoy it. As you will.”

  I eyed his obvious, post-Elvis getup. “No wonder a CinSim can step in for you any time. Your act is a flashy, cheap, neo-Strip cliché, and so are you. Ric is not an attraction to be bought away from a competitor.”

  “And you’ve always been my competitor.”

  “Hardly. You’re a leech. I created two cocktails on your premises and you copped them for the profits.”

  “The Albino Vampire cocktail was your admittedly inspired way of flashing me the bird of paradise,” he said. “The Brimstone Kiss was an accidental tribute . . . to me and my stage show, used to . . . seduce . . . a hard-boiled CinSim at my Inferno bar into giving up some information that would save your sacred Ric. Who is used and who using? Are you so pure, Delilah, and I so damned?”

  He went to a white Louie XVI desk I’d never noticed on the fringe of his main room, ripped something off a horizontal notebook, and returned to flourish it in front of my nose.

  “That gown you’re wearing is seriously schizophrenic, by the way, as modest as a red lamé bikini on a nun. I like it way too much for anyone’s sanity.”

  The check drowned out all commentary. Forty thousand dollars. My ears buzzed.

  “Your royalties so far on the Inferno house cocktails,” Snow said. “More will ensue. I pay my debts.”

  “I don’t want your money,” I said automatically.

  “Better to take that than what you really want of me.”

  “This is not about any of us or what we want. It’s all about Ric.”

  Those words came from the most fearful voice of my heart crying out, much as I hated to parade that raw fear in front of Snow.

  “Ric can’t be killed,” I said. “I’ve seen it twice in a few days. The first time was the Murderers Level Seven in your ersatz Hell. A poisoned centaur arrow couldn’t down him. I wanted to believe it was a surface scratch, but I later saw there was no mark at all from a wound meant to torment even dead men and that would be devastating to mortals.

  “I saw it again against El Demonio. Ric cannot be killed. El Demonio is dead, maybe, but . . . El Finado isn’t.”

  “El Finado?”

  “At first I thought the phrase referred to a defeated Torbellino. Finished. But no, it means ‘corpse.’ It’s what the cartel scum called Ric in Juarez when he took El Demonio Torbellino down . . . just two nights ago. ‘The dead body. Corpse.’”

  I froze like the Silver Zombie at attention, feeling the enormity of my fear and the suspicion I’d repressed so fiercely and at my idiocy in downloading it here and now.

  I let Snow lead me like a lamb to the bar and refill my champagne flute even though my head was reeling almost more than my emotions. I drank and started to feel my fingertips and toes again, but my heart remained ice cold.

  “Ric doesn’t need me, or you,” I told him. “Or your Metropolis Tower, or the bloody Silver Zombie. He cannot be killed. He’s a vampire. I made him one by bringing him back from the dead. I can’t allow myself to be . . . fed upon. I just can’t
.”

  I stood panting, emptied, exhausted by the truth I’d fought to keep from touching me.

  Snow edged away, then circled my tensed and furious form.

  “You won back Ric’s life . . . forever. That should make you very happy,” he said. Carefully. “It’s everything you fought for with every fiber of your being, with every beat of your human heart, everything that you believe in.”

  I took a deep breath, but it shook, and shook me. “You’ve always known what he had to become to stay alive, Snow. I hate you for knowing that and letting me dream on, but that changes nothing. What matters is that Ric’s not . . . normal anymore.”

  “And you are?”

  “I never was, was I? But Ric had . . . overcome all that. He’d sailed through the Millennium Revelation. Turned tragedy into triumph. Predestination into freedom. An ancient folk ability into a modern phenomenon. He’s taken on the supernatural drug lords and human traffickers and won. Yet now he’s not mortal! They won. He’s no longer human.”

  “And you are?’

  “I don’t know. I do know I can’t be . . . drained, for love or money. I am more than my blood, or my bloodline. Sansouci claimed you needed me. You, who need nothing. You with your Hell below and your Metropolis above. Tell me what you need me to do, Angel of Death, to make Ric mortal again.”

  “Can’t be done, Delilah. That was over under the Karnak Hotel even as you transferred my Brimstone Kiss to his lips. Impossible desire can’t reverse anything.”

  “I kissed him alive. What can I do now to kiss him undead?”

  “Even true love is sometimes lust, Delilah. The Seven Deadly Sins must always have their tribute. Fortunately, you have tendencies despite yourself.”

  “Tendencies?”

  “You’re far from perfect, and that’s perfectly human.”

  Why did he have to rub in that I wasn’t a supernatural, like him and Sansouci and everybody I knew, including . . . Ric now.

  “And you don’t really hate me.” Snow moved toward me. “Hate is inspired by something you see of yourself in someone else that you’re not ready to admit.”

  If it wasn’t Snow I hated, it was the damn calculated stagy sexiness of a breed I despised, a woman-using rock star who actually had the charisma and—could it be?—the soul to seduce the upright, maybe uptight, liberated woman I liked to think was me.