I recalled Snow, fatalistic and as supernaturally cool as ever when we’d last met … the first time after Grizelle had told me what I’d done. My knees had been knocking, but the impervious rock-star persona Snow flaunted for the world had shown no signs of craving vengeance.
Why would he? He now had a greater power over me than any werewolf mob boss or undead Karnak pharaoh or vampire Howard Hughes … or even Ric.
My guilt. I’d deliberately chosen to undo the last seven lashes of Ric’s pain even after I knew each healing touch was scourging Snow. My punishment, so far, was cringing at the memory of Snow every time I made love with Ric. I suspected there was far worse to come.
“You need to stop,” Ric told me.
Startled, I assumed he’d eavesdropped on my distracted thoughts. But … no.
“Your sensual back massage is making me too happy. I trust we have something joint in mind,” he went on.
I stepped back, dropping my hands. Still the amateur, I scolded myself, either avoiding or pushing too far too fast. I didn’t know my own powers on any front … physical, emotional, or paranormal.
Ric picked me up in a bride-over-the-threshold carry and brought me into the dim bedroom. He settled me on the bed to a rhythm of kisses and caresses that made making love with one person in a wet suit seem perfectly logical, and my suit’s silver studs flashed tiny lightning strikes from all the room’s mirrored or metal surfaces.
“Electric,” Ric murmured, as he rolled onto his back beside me. Of course, I had to remain on my side. My phobia against lying on my back kept me with my head braced on my crooked arm, gazing down into his beloved face. Ric turned his head away from me, so I couldn’t see the silver iris. “Delilah, I need your mouth on me.”
I ran my hand down his muscled, slightly furry thigh. “No problemo, amor.”
His hand on my wrist stopped me.
“No. Here.” He turned his head farther, his brunet profile etched against the blue satin pillowcase the color of my eyes. I consumed the sight of his dark, thick hair, slanting forehead, slightly aquiline nose, deeply arched lips … the image as breathtaking as one of Michelangelo’s ultramasculine sculpted angels.
His motion had brought my focus to the strong, exposed column of his neck with the new knot of scar tissue resembling a miniature star gone nova.
“No,” I said.
I couldn’t miss how shallow, excited breaths lifted his bare chest up and down even as he kept his face and throat immobile for my view. The provocative contrast was playing crazy with my libido.
“No, amor,” I coaxed. “This isn’t a game anymore. That Sonoran desert bat bite left two tiny marks on your neck. I could play ferocious vampiress and leave you unchanged before. Now, real vampires have used that same spot as a spigot. They sucked your blood out. I can’t ‘pretend’ to do that anymore.”
“It was a vampire bat bite, Delilah, on the neck, a natural site for the tiny beast. I can’t help that undead beasts favor the spot too, or what I feel. Your mouth has made the welts on my back into a road map of pleasure points. Think what your lips could do for the new scar here.”
Help me, Irma! I couldn’t plead that I didn’t do oral sex. I couldn’t deny that we all had idiosyncratic turn-ons and turn-offs. I’d overcome my distaste of early attacks from predatory half-vamps to feed Ric’s harmless thirst for a bat bite rerun. He’d led me to overcome a lot of my hang-ups. How could I deny his one little long-standing kink?
“Por favor,” he whispered. “I can beg …”
I studied his beautiful, beloved features. Like I shouldn’t be begging him to let me touch him, love him.
I launched the most passionate kiss of my being at the damned vampire scar, pouring love and tears on the wound, as I had before when I had healed, sensing the pleasure shivering through his entire body and mind and soul, breathless at the power I had to shake him … and at his power to make me abandon myself and my fears.
IT WAS ONE of those paralyzing nightmares, where you know you need to move, change the scene, wake up … and you can’t.
Yes, I was reliving my old alien abduction scenario. Me pinned on my back to an examining table, or an autopsy table, like Lilith. Me in the glare of a sinister overhead light hovering like a pale manta ray. A trio of vampire nurses fencing me in along each side of the table.
Vampire nurses? Howard Hughes’s various Vegas venues had finally crept into my old Wichita nightmares.
An alien figure still stood at the foot of the table, ready to inject me with … some giant needle device. Yes, the alien was the black-and-white CinSim of Dr. Frankenstein, who wore far too much gel on his thick black hair.
And then he became the gold-glimmering black figure of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the underworld …
Really, I had too many alien entities to worry about to stay frozen in this dream … and so I awoke. I couldn’t move for several seconds, my heart beating as if the captive-on-my-back abduction experience had been real.
And then I remembered that … it had been. I’d actually lived through scenarios like this since hitting Vegas. I’d already experienced this in real life, surreal as Vegas was.
Was I finally outgrowing my childhood phobias by living through them?
Beside me, I noticed Ric thrashing on his black satin sheets. I softly stroked his upper arm. Where I feared to lie on my back, he’d made a habit of doing it to hide the whip scars of his childhood. Now he lay on his stomach, his exposed back and hips twitching with the phantom lashes of his deepest memories and nightmares.
“Ric,” I whispered into his ear whenever his head thrashed my way. I ran my fingertips over the pale scars, each stroke quieting his shudders.
He awoke groggy and purring at last.
“You can’t leave a man alone, Delilah,” he murmured. “Magic Fingers. Put in a quarter.”
I smiled, recognizing a reference to massage beds in cheap motels.
“Are we really going to stay in motels on our road trip?” I asked.
He turned over onto his side. Revealing his back had been a big achievement. Someday we’d make love in the missionary position, my own phobias no more too. Who’d believe a modern woman would want to be on the bottom. Oh, yes.
“God, I had a horrible nightmare, Del,” he said, blinking as the memories flooded back.
“Tell me.”
“Unlike you, I haven’t dreamed like this in years. Mama Burnside pretty much reprogrammed me.”
“I wish I’d had someone like her in the group homes of Wichita.”
“We’ll get back there and look them all up, paloma. And give ’em heck.”
“What did you dream?”
He laid his head on my shoulder. “I saw El Demonio, the chief slave-labor smuggler south of the border. He was using his bullwhip on me again—”
I clutched his head to my breast.
“Del, you’re gonna hook me on bad dreams.”
I unclutched.
“But, Del … in the dream, he turned into … you.”
“No!”
“Yeah, and your crazy silver familiar had taken the form of twin silver whips and then became tendrils of your silky dark hair and they were slashing like black-satin ribbons all over my body and I was really into it …”
“Oh, shut up. You just want a pity fuck.”
He laughed.
“Any time. No, honestly and truly. I dreamed that old dark dream and then you appeared and drove it back down into the deepest corner of Nightmareland. The day you dream your alien abduction scenario and I’m the one menacing you with the phallic implement from the foot of the table, we’ll know we’ve got both our kiddie nightmares deep-sixed.”
“You think that this trip back to Wichita will do that for me? Turn the bogeyman at the alien abduction table into Prince Charming with a hard-on?”
He turned sober.
“I believe that digging to the bottom of our nightmares always pulls up the truth, Delilah. And the truth will set you f
ree.”
“That’s the reporter’s credo, but not an original thought, Ric.”
“That’s why it’s so true, mi amor,” he said, pulling my face down to his in a deep, soothing goodnight kiss.
Chapter Four
“FAR BE IT from me,” said my landlord, Hector Nightwine, the next morning while I squirmed on the carved wooden chair opposite his office desk, “to insert myself into the course of true love, but you and the Cadaver Kid have been absent from the Strip for too long.”
He sat in an even more massive chair that cupped him like King Kong’s palm would surround a giant prune Danish. For once, I didn’t know what to say.
The mental picture of Hector Nightwine inserting himself between Ric and me was physically impossible and emotionally repulsive.
Hector was a mini-me of Star Wars’ Jabba the Hutt in an Orson Welles smoking jacket. If he knew I had a metal bikini top from the first film of Cleopatra in my cottage quarters on his Sunset Road estate, I’d be kept in chains on the set of his CSI V TV series forever.
The “Cadaver Kid” nickname was from Ric’s few years in the FBI, where his “gift” for finding buried dead bodies was considered gee-whiz great profiling, not an inborn paranormal ability.
As for true love, I doubted Nightwine would ever know it unless it came wearing a bottom line, and I was even more superstitious now about calling what Ric and I had anything that resembled a clichéd happy ending.
So I addressed the only possible part of his comment I could.
“The Strip, Hector? Some new mega-billion behemoth going up there? Where on dry Nevada earth is there room?”
Hector’s chubby, hairy hand stroked the black beard that concealed his multiple chin collection.
“No, this is a modest … shop, I’d call it. It’s sprung up on one of the odd bits of untaken Strip land housing one-story enterprises.”
I made a face and crossed my legs to distract his attention to my Betty Grable pin-up shoes: forties platform-sole spikes in VE-Day red. Better to have him leering at my ankles than my bustline. At least I thought so.
“You mean,” I asked, just to be clear, “among the cheapie tourist shops, scalped show-ticket booths, palm readers, and naughty lingerie hucksters?”
Something had to occupy and pay rent on the odd Las Vegas Strip corners not commandeered by hotel-casino frontage. What I couldn’t figure out was why international media mogul Hector Nightwine cared about a dinky new shop.
He couldn’t wait to tell me.
“Some of your old friends,” he said, waggling his coarse eyebrows, “are busy vying for this spanking new enterprise. I’d think you’d want to visit, since a new friend of yours is the merchant in question.”
“Merchant? I don’t know any ‘merchants’ except for a certain ghoulish TV mayhem huckster in my twenty-twenty sights at this moment.”
Nightwine’s plump hand dipped into a wooden salad bowl filled with crunchy little nothings from the lower orders of planet life. Dead now, I hoped.
“Flattery will get you everywhere, dear Delilah. I confess. You are such a modest little thing.” He wagged a forefinger that dangled something black and slimy and boneless. “Does Mr. Montoya know you’ve set up a bare-chested hunk in a commercial hot spot?”
I straightened my spine, imagining myself standing at my immodest full five-eight, though seated, and glowered to encourage him to go on. Which he did.
“Two major Strip forces you know, Delilah, are fighting wolf-fang and tiger-claw to acquire the business for their hotels, and no doubt franchise it.”
Now I got it. “Cesar Cicereau’s Gehenna Hotel werewolf mob versus Christophe’s rock-star Inferno Hotel?” I asked.
“Mais oui, ma petite. I’m considering entering the fray. The concept is genius, my dear Delilah. You did sign Mr. Shezmou to a personal contract, did you not?”
“Ah …” I was so shocked I descended into mob-speak. “He owes me.”
“Very wise. Well, trot yourself and your canine companion over there and prepare to protect your interests. And not only from bigwigs. The showgirls and tourist ladies are lining up for blocks in the hot sun in designer heels you would kill for.”
I stood. “I don’t have to, Hector. I have my own collection.”
“Ah, yes, the Enchanted Cottage’s new Bottomless Closet. How did you manage to convert the old-fashioned and invisible brownie and pixie helpers that came with the place into a host of personal Red Carpet stylists?”
“Your estate spy cameras are worthy of Excess Hollywood.”
“I am always the auteur, my dear, the director who writes his own scripts. But, sometimes, I admit, you write yourself into the most delightful corners, far beyond my humble powers to manipulate. Beware, Delilah. Powers less benign than I have also realized your potential.”
“Great.” I turned on my heel, or Betty’s. “Don’t forget that I protect my interests, to the hilt.”
“And to the last man. Yes, I know.”
NIGHTWINE’S MAN GODFREY was waiting outside the door, as usual.
His pencil-thin mustache surmounted a slightly receding chin and he had a slightly receding dark hairline. Still, his white tie and tails were always a swooningly crisp black and white. If you’d ever wanted to glide across the dance floor with a larger, wryer Fred Astaire, Godfrey was your man.
“The master is right,” Godfrey told me. “You’ve been undertaking dangerous duty in the dark lately.”
“Godfrey, you eavesdrop?”
“Religiously.”
I followed him and his button-down black tails down the Sunset Road mansion’s back stairs to the kitchen, our steps clattering on the uncarpeted wood.
In a moment the click of nails joined our percussive procession. The back stairs were narrow and turned like a ballerina on a music box. At the bottom, Quicksilver had come to heel at my side, not that I ever commanded him to do anything.
We faced Godfrey.
“Quick was with me on those missions,” I told him. “And Ric knows what he’s doing out there on the desert.”
“Of course,” Godfrey said. “My … cousin at the Inferno Bar, Nick Charles, well knows the combined power of man, woman, and dog. Who am I, a humble butler-in-disguise, to argue with that magic? But we CinSims are all merely motion picture phantasms in a way, Miss Delilah and Master Quicksilver. We are dancing with the dead, the resurrected bodies that serve as our sturdy immortal canvas, ever so much more resilient than film. We are not as fragile as living flesh, either.”
“But you are as dear,” I said, brushing my hand against his black sleeve. CinSims were solid, but I hesitated to touch a phantasm.
Since almost losing Ric to the Karnak vampires, I’d become a real softie.
“Part of the service,” Godfrey said, a pre-Technicolor twinkle in his gray eyes. “I was not a matinee idol for nothing.”
Well, William Powell had been a starring character actor, really, but I’d always had a weakness for character over flash.
“Sometimes, Godfrey,” I told him, “you make me feel like Dorothy on a road trip with one of her trio of cool dudes.”
He shrugged modestly. “You’d better follow the yellow brick road to the Strip, Miss Delilah, as the Wizard of Sunset Road suggested. Mr. Nightwine has an infallible eye for the main chance. And take your big dog too.”
I curtsied and almost skipped my way out the back door and down the flagstone path to the Enchanted Cottage, so very glad I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
Chapter Five
I’M NOT FAMOUS for following instructions. I left Quicksilver at home in the cottage, chewing on an Awesome Gnawsome stick.
I didn’t want to get known around Vegas as a dog and his girl. It was too easy in post–Millennium Revelation days, and especially here, to get tagged by the company you keep.
Besides, I had more than a clue about who the new “in” entrepreneur in town was … and who had helped set him up in business, besides the marketing genius of me.
Even a low-end Strip address takes cash money.
The moon’s intensity may wax and wane, but the sun is pretty much always on full power during the southern Nevada daylight hours, spreading warm vibes and skin cancer as the tourists soak it up from under funny hats, their white-creamed noses topped by very dark sunglasses.
My Black Irish–pale complexion had made high-SPF sunscreen a constant companion even in a come-and-go sunshine state like Kansas. Sunglasses were my constant accessory too, partly to hide the fabled baby-blues I share with my elusive double, Lilith Quince, but I put Lilith out of my mind before she drove me out of it instead.
Hector’s description of sleazy businesses took my Strip walk toward downtown and the last surviving, nonimploded hotel-casinos of the town’s fifties and sixties heyday, when the Rat Pack of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr., ran wild in Vegas instead of werewolf mobsters.
After weaving almost to the streetlamps to miss a steamy tourist array of sun-baked Goth and punk leather, I spotted a stunning gold-and-ebony sign above a shop frontage.
CHEZ SHEZ, the gilt letters read, just as I’d recommended.
“Chez”—pronounced as in “the wonderful one-horse shay”—was French for “house of.” “Shez” was short for “Shezmou,” the ancient Egyptian name for “vengeful, beheading demon under-god who’s got great hands for neck-twisting as well as wine-pouring and massage.”
The line of women wasn’t blocks long, but they did almost kick me to the curb, literally. I’d been dodging ill-intentioned Jimmy Choos since Sheena, the weather witch at WTCH-TV in Kansas, so I simply hopped and skipped around them to the front door, which was manned by … a woman.
Of my acquaintance.
She was also one don’t-cross tiger of a female, Grizelle, Snow’s shape-shifting security chief at the Inferno Hotel.
Right now she was all woman, six-foot-three of ridiculously high-priced and small-sized designer suit and stiletto heels on a velvet-black frame. Her skin was moiré black taffeta, subtly marked with the shadow of tiger stripes. Little-known fact: all spotted and striped cats have skin to match. Grizelle in human form was almost as formidable as her six-hundred-pound white-tiger self. Her eyes were jungle green and her manicure was vampire red.
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