Lance. Friend. Lover. Traitor.
Dead now. By my hand.
A shudder racks my body.
Max’s shoulder is so close to mine, he feels my body jerk. He pauses. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
The vampire answers from the darkest place in my soul. “It’s nothing. I just walked on someone’s grave.”
EPILOGUE
Max recognizes one of the guards at the border crossing. They exchange a few words in Spanish and he waves us through. It’s good because I’m not sure I want to try to explain the rust-colored stains covering my clothes.
Max drives me back to my car. He watches me climb gingerly out. “Can you drive?”
I massage my side. The scrape caused by the stake is healed. The path the bullet tore through my side is healed. Now it’s just the skin pulling tight as it regenerates over the wounds that makes me wince when I move.
“Yeah. I’m a little stiff but by the time I get home, I’ll be fine.”
Max watches as I get into my car and crank the engine before he motions for me to roll down the window.
“Thanks, Anna. You did good tonight. I owe you one.”
Okay, here’s my chance to tell him what I planned to tell him. To go fuck himself. To never call me again. To go to one of his vampire whores the next time he needs help.
What am I waiting for?
Max is leaning toward the window, smiling. He looks more like the Max I remembered. Superman, defending truth, justice, and the American way …
Shit.
I smile back.
And drive away.
MONSTER MASH
A DELILAH STREET, PARANORMAL INVESTIGATOR, CASE
by Carole Nelson Douglas
Sansouci, the main muscle for the Las Vegas werewolf mob, caught up with me at the neutral territory of the Inferno Hotel bar.
“Muscle” was no cliché when it came to Sansouci. I stand almost six feet in heels, and talking to him made me tilt up my chin, but then, I’m not afraid to lead with it.
“Delilah Street,” he greeted me, or maybe purr-growled.
Everybody assumed Sansouci was a werewolf. Yeah, with the silver forelock in his jet-black hair, the forest green eyes, and a long, lean build, you could picture him chasing the full moon in a thick fur coat, a creature of ferocity and grace.
Except I already had my own really butch wolfhound-wolf-cross dog named Quicksilver, and Sansouci was a vampire.
Not everybody knew the truth about Sansouci. Just me, in fact. Taken either way, Sansouci sported extremely white and handsome canines, which now flashed at me like a fishing lure.
“And where’s your boyfriend, the Cadaver Kid?” he asked.
“Ric’s in Mexico,” I reported, “rounding up demon drug lords and feral zombies in a multinational policing operation. And what have you done for the good of humanity and world peace lately?”
“Looked you up. Or down.”
His glance slowly skied the curves of the sweetheart neckline on my fifties black velvet top.
“One spike heel to the kneecap and you’d fold,” I pointed out.
“Maybe. But I’d take you down with me.”
Flirting with Sansouci was dangerous, which was why I enjoyed it so much.
And I was dressed to kill. The velvet bodice topped a ballerina-length, full, dark gray taffeta skirt that made solid me look so Audrey Hepburn–girlish you’d want to take me to brunch at Tiffany’s … until you noticed I was wearing silver-metal-laced gladiator-goth-style high heels that also worked well as weapons.
Sansouci had, and was looking even more lean and hungry.
“So,” I asked, “why’d your mangy, murderous werewolf boss let you off-leash from headquarters at the Gehenna Hotel?”
You’d think a female human paranormal investigator like me would sympathize with werewolves. We shared that three-days-a-month temporary-insanity-and-blood thing.
Yet I liked Sansouci precisely because he hated his werewolf overlord, Cesar Cicereau. Sansouci had been a hostage in the uneasy peace between the werewolves and the vampires that had lasted since Las Vegas’s 1940s founding all the Way to Where We Were, 2013. That added up to seventy-five years. Good thing Sansouci was immortal.
And most vamps still suffered from that twelve-hour-a-day “impotency handicap,” not that I’d dare use the phrase with Sansouci. Being an ex-reporter, accuracy was my middle name. Anyone who survived as a vampire gigolo was good to go 24/7. His breed of New Model Vampire had been in the making since the 1930s, a daylight vamp who sipped from a willing harem of female donors. Killing them softly with sex, not death, and they loved him for it.
Not I.
“Why’d you come all the way over to the Inferno,” I prodded Sansouci, “where you’re not welcome, from the Gehenna, where you’re really not welcome?”
“We have a problem.”
We? I lifted my eyebrows.
Nick Charles, the official Inferno barfly, rushed to my side. Yeah. That Nick Charles, the 1930s book and movie lush–detective with the witty wife and hyperactive terrier, Asta.
The entire trio was black-and-white and gray all over. They were Cinema Simulacrums, aka SinCims. Vegas throngs with black-and-white movie characters overlaid on zombies to give the tourists some semi-“live” entertainment they could not only gawk at, but actually talk to. Which was happening right now.
“Look here, my good man.” Nick Charles accosted Sansouci with a hand on the concealed gun in his tuxedo jacket pocket. “You’re not to pester our Inferno patrons.”
Asta’s teeth were tugging on one leg of Sansouci’s black designer jeans while Nicky’s sleek wife, Nora, was running a languid hand inside his jean jacket and down his firm pecs and abs to frisk him. Friskily. Face it, Nick Charles has a retro-cool pencil-thin mustache, a tipsy wit, and ace deductive ability, but he’s not exactly buff in modern terms.
“You have the most annoying allies, Street,” Sansouci said with an impressive shrug. “Get these reanimated vintage-film freakos off me. We have business to discuss.”
“I’m okay, Family Charles,” I assured my friends. Then I ordered Brimstone Kisses from the human barman and we adjourned to a table for two.
“I’m actually celebrating a private party here with some of my CinSim pals,” I said, sipping the spicy cocktail of my own concoction. “What’s going wrong at the Gehenna now?”
“Yeah,” Sansouci seconded me, “Cicereau does seem accident-prone, particularly when it comes to the supernatural set.” He slugged down my spicy liquor-loaded concoction in three gulps. “When are you going to invent a cocktail in my honor?”
“You don’t claim the Vampire Sunrise?”
“I’m not that kind of vamp.”
“The ‘Sansouci’ sounds comatose. Hardly you.”
“More like Cicereau lately.”
“You saying he’s comatose?”
“That would be nice, if you could arrange it. I know a few dozen vamps who’d like to catch him snoozing and kill him without tasting a drop of his rotten blood. But, no, he’s the same power-hungry, brutal, dumb mob boss as ever. Except he’s been cursed.”
“Cursed? Like bespelled?”
“Maybe that way. On the surface, it looks like a vengeful dead dame’s got him on her radar.”
“And I can help … how?”
“You got rid of the daughter he offed. He thinks you’re the one to banish this new dame.”
“What do you mean, me? I know what crimes against women Cesar Cicereau is capable of. He tried to force me into his Gehenna magic act when I first hit town, playing on my exact likeness to that hot CSI V: Las Vegas corpse, Lilith, but he gave up that idea.”
“You weren’t as cooperative as he likes his women to be.”
“You mean alive and kicking.”
“I do. Not a problem for me, though.”
“Why can’t you handle this?”
“He won’t listen to any of his pack, and I’m the hostage help, so
I rank even lower. You’re the perfect undercover operative to figure out what’s going on.”
“But you’re still his top enforcer.”
“Because I can still outkick werewolf pack butt. Just because my … dining partners are voluntary doesn’t mean I can’t unleash the vampire bloodlust that kept me alive, so to speak, for seven centuries or so.”
“A real Jekyll and Hyde.”
Sansouci nodded. “The best … and worst … of both worlds. Don’t forget that, Delilah, while you admire my designer sunglasses.”
Sansouci had pulled out opaque black Gucci shades with titanium frames. Dark glasses began to be commonly used only during the Great Depression, when some vampires learned that keeping their eyes shaded allowed them to stroll around unsizzled by broad daylight. Once unhumans went public after the recent Millennium, the vampires were even more eager to live “normal” lives without being labeled serial killers, which tended to get them hunted down, staked, and beheaded.
“Let’s take a trip down the Strip,” he suggested.
“Cicereau’s still got it in for me, and I’m not dressed for work.”
Sansouci eyed my party getup. “The boss is so many decades behind the times, that outfit will lull him into thinking you’re a nice girl. This looks to be another corporate exorcism job. He’ll pay you well to get the freaks off his back.”
“Like the teenage daughter he murdered back in the forties?”
“Like Loretta, yeah. With werewolves, alpha pack power is thicker than blood.”
“I’ll do a meet with Cicereau,” I said, “but that’s not saying I’ll take the job.”
Still, I wondered what fresh “ghosts” were bugging the Vegas mogul. And I knew my carotid artery was safe in Sansouci’s company, if not much else.
* * *
“You want your car?” asked Manny, my Inferno parking valet buddy, as his goatish yellow eyes sized up Sansouci. “The visiting Gehenna Hotel fur-back owns wheels?”
“At least I don’t leave scales on the leather upholstery.” Sansouci eyed Manny’s case of all-over orange psoriasis. “Off-black Porsche Boxster with terra-cotta leather interior,” Sansouci spit out, handing Manny a claim ticket.
“Shallow and overrated,” Manny sniffed. “Figures.” He jumped into an idling Lamborghini and raced it up the ramp.
Vegas supernaturals can get edgy with each other. Being in an entertainment venue usually keeps that under control. I could charm or bribe the lower-order supers to my investigative causes. Manny, formally known as Manniphilpestiles, was a demon who’d made it all the way to “pal,” like the Invisible Man CinSim, who’d also saved my skin. I wouldn’t trust Manny with my soul, though, a recognizable commodity in Vegas long before the Millennium Revelation had brought the supers out of the closet.
“Minor-order demon punk,” Sansouci muttered.
“A poor thing, but mine own,” I agreed. “Your red-orange car interior color screams über-carnivore. Manny will certainly know whose name to shout around if I turn up missing.”
Sansouci shook his head. “I’ll get you back here in one untoothed piece, if Cicereau’s newest problem children don’t do you in.”
* * *
The Gehenna was a sprawling hotel-casino that rose from the flat landscape, a dark, glassy tidal wave frozen in midcrash. It seemed poised to devour, like huge wolfish jaws.
Inside, an elegantly dark and menacing forest theme prevailed, interpreted in green marble, wood tones from black to gilt, and lurid lighting glittering like migratory flights of fireflies in the casino areas. There was where Theme Décor met Taking Care of Business.
Even in 2013 you can’t enter a Vegas hotel without the raw sights, sounds, and smells of a casino assaulting your senses from the common business areas of the registration desk to the theater and restaurants.
More than drink glasses sweat in these dark, icy mazes of flashing lights and chiming slot machines spread across acres of puke-patterned carpeting. Greed is the color of money in Las Vegas. The overpowering smell is well-salted deodorant.
Over the clanging, chiming, whooping, coins-colliding noises programmed into the slot machines came a faint, high, sweet trilling that made me look up to find the source.
I backed out of the casino’s clang into the aisle to hear it better, so mystified and eager to trace the sound that Sansouci had to jerk me out of the way of an oncoming luggage cart.
“So you’ve noticed it already,” he said.
“Noticed what?”
“That’s what you’re here to tell Cicereau.”
I also noticed that even slot machine patrons were looking up for the source of the singing after every button push, not staring at the reeling blurred icons that would tell them whether they’d won or not.
“That sound is … oddly angelic,” I said, “for an enterprise sporting the hellish name of Gehenna.”
Sansouci shrugged. “That sugary-sweet high pitch drives the werewolves crazy. Their hearing is acute and this stuff never stops.”
“And you? You don’t find it … mesmerizing?”
“I do the mesmerizing,” he said with a modest smirk. “Besides, I dig smoky altos. Coo ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ at me and I’ll listen. Otherwise, it’s all noise.”
“I can’t even pick up a tune as a hitchhiker,” I said. “My tin ear tells me we’re hearing a heavenly … soprano.”
“Thin soup. Sopranos always sound to me like they’re being throttled,” he added.
“That’s because most guys don’t like opera.”
“Do you?”
“Uh, no,” I admitted. “But I have to admit I find this endless … aria-like perfume in the air addictive.”
“Good,” Sansouci said. “Find out where the sonic Chanel No. 5 is coming from and end it. You’ll get Cicereau’s eternal thanks—for about five minutes and a few thou—and I’ll be glad to have him off my back, totally nonhairy, despite the demon parking punk’s jibe.”
“As if I’d care to know. This … sound isn’t coming over the hotel sound system?”
“First place I looked. No. And I checked the security control room too. You pioneered those routes when Cicereau’s daughter’s ghost took over the hotel audiovisual systems until you exorcised her.”
“Loretta had good reason to haunt her murderous father, and I’m no exorcist. I just figured out how to make some other supernatural gag her. That’s what I am, a lowly human problem solver. Who is this … superb-voiced siren?”
“Someone or something that will shortly drive the paying customers away and the Gehenna’s wolfpack mad. I wouldn’t care, but the vampires aren’t ready to move on Cicereau yet.”
“Some are planning to?” This was hot news in the old town tonight.
Sansouci’s grin was wicked. “That’s for me to know and you to find out. You’re the paranormal investigator. Investigate.”
He gave me a little shove in the taffeta bustle, so I was propelled back onto the marble-floored hotel concourse. Sansouci. Always the gentleman vampire muscle.
I hopped into line behind another bellman-propelled luggage cart, protected from the milling crowds, and headed for the main atrium circled by elevators to the Gehenna’s various hotel floors and condo towers.
The haunting soprano voice kept me gazing up and around like a geek at an electronics exposition, tripping over my own feet, even though being gauche enough to tangle your killer heels is a Vegas mortal sin.
Being tone deaf doesn’t make for musical expertise, but this eerie, sweet as Heavenly Hash voice had me hooked. Since I’m also Black Irish, I was a Celtic woman deep down. I didn’t even notice that I’d slowed to a stop to listen until a couple dozen tourists dragging wheeled bags jammed up behind me, screeching annoyance at my back.
Before the rude crowds could mess my crinolines, they suddenly stared upward too, shouting and pointing and hitting the marble floor all around until I was the only upright long-stemmed rose in the garden.
Th
at’s when I spotted a large, dark blot streaking down toward me. An ape in a Mad Hatter outfit wearing a fright wig of coarse hair instead of a top hat swung down on a bungee cord. Before I could duck away, a huge hairy hand snagged me around the corseted Audrey Hepburn waist and swung us both up, up, up several floors to the sustained high-note accompaniment of the heavenly voice and my furious alto scream of protest. In seconds, my powerful captor used the upper-body strength of a circus strongman to perch us like gargoyles atop the highest railing of the Gehenna Hotel’s towering atrium.
First, I checked his grip on the thick brass rail. His feet curved like talons around the metal, but wore soft leather shoes curled up at the toes and down at the heel, slippers Santa’s elves would wear. My gaze inventoried the odd bits of wardrobe clothing his squat distorted body, then studied a pale bony array of bulbous cheeks and forehead and forked chin, every feature somehow pulled off center like a melted plastic mask. One eye was entirely missing. Rather than a mouth, the creature had a broken-toothed maw. A bushy eyebrow over that bright malicious single eye finished off a face twisted into a grimace a gargoyle would flee, shrieking.
Even at this suicidal height, I’d have pushed off from my captor just to avoid an inescapable double jeopardy of death by asphyxiation: the mixed reek of garlic and onion breath. While I calculated how to tip us backward onto the safety of the balcony fronting the elevators, the powerful arms spun me sideways to lift me like a trophy above the misshapen head.
While my stomach made an imaginary drop of forty stories and the siren’s voice soared to higher melodic peaks up here, my captor’s terrifying maw shouted something over and over to the crowd below.
“Sank you, Harry!” or some such gibberish spewed from his harsh throat. He snarled down at the gaping crowd below, repeating the word or phrase as boast … or challenge. I clung to the sleeves of his long arms as my personal King Kong shook my helpless torso like a weapon.
Then he swept me down again, clasping me doll-like to his barrel chest. In a moment his apelike feet had pushed off the railing as he swung us out over the gaping crowd on the hard marble hundreds of feet below.
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