I’d worn my air-sole sneakers for my Strip stroll—the silver familiar was so ashamed of my unfashionable look it was hiding out as a toe-ring—so I was more pipsqueak than usual measuring up to her. But height is attitude, not altitude.
So I showed some.
“New job as a shop doorman, Grizelle? Was Snow so miffed by your last foiled attempt to stop my Inferno comings and goings that he fired you?” I taunted. “Naughty, naughty kitty. Maybe I can put in a good word for you with Nightwine Productions, Inc.”
“I don’t do door duty anywhere,” she answered. “I was just leaving after I saw the low-rent party hanging around inside. Seeing as you’re entering, I’ll stick around awhile longer.” She fanned the taloned fingers of her right hand.
“Delilah,” said a deep male voice from within.
I promptly did a do-si-do around Grizelle’s statuesque presence and doffed my sunglasses. I still had to blink for several seconds to see in the comparatively dim interior.
What I saw was tall, dark-haired, and not unhandsome, but unfortunately, it was not my indebted demigod, Shezmou.
“Sansouci,” I said with surprise. “Fancy finding you here. Needing a manicure? Or just a good chiropractic neck adjustment?”
I’m no squirt, but most men of my acquaintance flirt with six-foot-something. Now—between the head muscle for both the werewolf mob and Snow’s hellish Inferno operation—I was feeling distinctly outgunned.
Yet intrigued.
“I didn’t know you two knew each other,” I commented, switching my gaze from Sansouci to Grizelle like a nervous, well, gazelle. She scared me a lot more than he did, perhaps because I’d done her boss wrong in a very big way.
The pause became what you could call pregnant.
Grizelle tossed her mane of spangled dreadlocks that much resembled an Egyptian wig. I wondered if Shezmou had seen her yet. They’d make an awesome power couple.
“The doors are barred for now,” Grizelle told me. “You can gawk a bit and then you should leave. I’m here for a private business conference with the owner.”
“Me too.” Sansouci’s wolfish grin looked really rakish on a closeted vampire, trust me. “I represent the Gehenna werewolves,” he continued, “but I have time to show you and the little lady around.”
He had a gift for irritating in stereo.
“Oh?” I said. “You’ll want to include me. I can show you around. Shez and I are business partners. Where is he?”
“Shez is male?” Grizelle sounded both surprised and condescending.
She eyed the polished chrome, copper, and gold metallic walls and shelves of semiprecious stone jars. A similar display of gilded wine bottles topped an ebony-and-turquoise bar on another wall.
“I should have guessed,” she added.
“I wouldn’t call Shez a ‘girly man’ to his face,” I warned her.
Looking around without engaging my reflections too much, I saw a surprisingly modest space, part bar and part boutique, just as I’d envisioned, but unattended. I smelled the pine, sesame, and almond oils used in Shezmou’s potions, though not the castor oil, thank goodness. Methought Chez Shez needed a more fashion-forward signature scent. Time for that later.
Then a glass-beaded curtain behind the counter shimmied and remained swaying like a belly dancer’s skirt at the entrance of a slight young woman wearing nothing more than a mahogany spray tan, a tissue-thin strapless white-linen sheath, and an Urban Decay “smoky eye” to die for.
The curtains’ colored beads echoed the red, blue, and green glass on wide ancient Egyptian collars. Their gentle clicking reminded me of the waist-circling, oversize rosaries the older nuns at Our Lady of the Lake convent school had worn … and the sound of the millions of flesh-eating beetles occupying the Karnak underworld.
“Are you Mr. Mou’s one p.m. appointments?” the girl asked. Her eye-whites dazzled as her focus darted between all three of us.
Mr. Mou? Irma interjected. The quick start-up forced our foreign friend Shezmou to employ one of the dimmer bulbs on the marquee.
I was inclined to cut the young woman slack. She was barely twenty, not a ripe old lady of twenty-four like me.
“Mr. Souci?” she inquired hopefully, nailing the only man in the room.
“At your service,” he said smoothly. He knew no other way to deliver a line to a female. “You can call me ‘San.’”
Oh, please! Irma was hopping annoyed, and so was I. The girl was going into standing swoon mode at one glimpse of Sansouci’s deep-set green eyes and one sentence from his even deeper hypnotic voice. Vampire, dearie, and the kind that feeds on women.
“Ms. … Gray Zelle?” She next fastened a hopeful hazel eye on me, since I looked a lot less dangerous than Grizelle.
I stepped politely aside.
The young woman took one look at Grizelle’s haughty carnivore expression and fastened her gaze on me again for dear life. “And you are?”
“Ms. Street, but you can call me Delilah. What’s your name?”
“Fawn Schwartz.”
“Well, Fawn, I am Mr. Mou’s silent partner.”
“You’re, uh, talking.”
“‘Silent partner’ is a business expression. Shez wants to see me first. Alone. Trust me.”
Sansouci raised an eyebrow. Grizelle lifted a sneering upper lip to showcase her carnivore canines. I was glad to ditch the pair when Fawn parted the clicking curtains and I ducked through. Irma and I.
The shop front looks promising but could use some hipper upgrades, she told me.
At this point, merchandising was hardly my main concern. If Christophe, aka Snow, and Cicereau were battling for an interest in Chez Shez, I wanted to make sure they had to deal with me, which both would loathe. I had a feeling the real silent partner in this setup would like that just fine.
The fluorescent-lit manufacturing area was much bigger than the storefront. Shezmou was working his grape press, the sinewy arm and back muscles of his cinnamon-hued torso gleaming with enough sweat to put him in a well-oiled Mr. Universe contest. Given the new female option of women ogling men these twenty-first-century days, as a product front man he was a Name Brand born.
At the click of the bead curtains his bewigged head turned. He gave the huge cheesecloth wad of grapes one last wring and wiped his reddened hands on a piece of white linen. One would be reminded of an ancient housewife, if one wished to commit suicide and say so.
“You are welcome,” he addressed me, “O Deliverer of Shezmou, to my house of fine wines and oils. Thus Delilah has wrought, and I, Shezmou, deliver, reversing our roles as my own nature must also move from wine to balm, and eternal death to eternal life.”
Gods require lots of wordy preamble, so I just smiled and nodded.
If I hadn’t noticed that Shezmou’s twenty-foot incised image on a Karnak Hotel subterranean pillar included actual wrist and ankle chains to keep him inanimate, Shez wouldn’t have been freed from millennia of bondage. His captivity had ensured that the Egyptian vampires could rampage without facing any Afterlife music.
Egyptian vampires?
Yup, they were the only ancient culture to have no bloodsucker mythology. Yet, sometime between 5000 and 3000 B.C., the problem had become severe enough that even the royal line was tainted. Many high-ranking mummy heads, including King Tut’s, had been severed before wrapping to ensure no awkward resurrections here on earth.
Almost all world religions offer a “separate and save” option for the Afterlife. Not the Egyptians under secret vampire rule. Once infested with vampires, Egyptian culture froze in time, feasting on their own in perpetuity and occasionally sampling stray latter-day humans.
Shezmou had been the demigod, or demon, who twisted off the heads of the damned and cast them into Egyptian Hell. With him in chains, vampires had centuries to create and re-create their own thirsty breed unchallenged.
All those deathless big bad vampires were still ruling the Underworld beneath the Karnak Hotel and Casino. I k
new something they didn’t, not even their twin brother-sister pharaohs. A big bad modern vampire secretly owned the Karnak and pulled Vegas strings from atop the Strip hotel, and he had twenty-first-century ambitions. Luckily, he and I had an uneasy but mutual understanding. So I had an unseen ally here.
“I was not expecting to receive the mighty Delilah,” Shezmou said.
Ric had adroitly impressed the ancient godling with my namesake’s Biblical exploit of cutting off Samson’s hair to sap his strength. I’m sure Shez didn’t want me snipping off any of his wig strands.
“I thought two others of the Upperworld also sought audience?” Shezmou asked me.
“They await without, mighty Shezmou.” Okay. Being suddenly thrown into an ancient surviving culture, vampire or not, brought out my high-school Shakespeare play dialogue.
Shez grinned at me. “I owe my liberator a great debt. It is good that you are wise enough to pour sweet oil on my godhead.”
Oh, my lord! Irma said. Did that sound tacky. And hot.
“Now I practice a modern profession,” Shezmou’s Darth Vader baritone continued. “I must seem … ordinary to conduct commerce. So speak as if I were your … equal. Just between us.”
“Sure, Shez.”
His grinned widened. “You enjoy that, Delilah.”
“Sure do, Shez.”
“I observe that small women enjoy ordering large men around.”
“Your human avatar is only six-feet-five, Shez. And I am tall for my gender.”
“Do not I know it.”
“If I may suggest, to get along in the Upperworld, cultivate contractions.”
“I am not a woman in childbirth,” he said, frowning. “Dealing with such matters is my little brother Bez’s profession.”
Bes, rechristened “Bez” by Ric and me just because it went better with Shez, was the dwarfish god of randy sex and … subsequent childbirth. Logical, these Vulcans and Egyptians.
“Don’t you know it,” I repeated Shez’s earlier phrase in a more casual way. “And I’m not a woman in childbirth, either.”
“No, you are … ah, you’re slim and limber, although high for your sex.”
“You’re shortly going to meet a female almost as tall as you, Shez.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. Before that, I want to make sure you’re properly represented. I assume your boss … er, overlord, has a link to the storefront.”
“Yes. A link, as in a chain, only this chain is embedded in a fine glass box lid. See.”
Shez gestured to a twenty-five-inch flat-screen monitor on an ivory-inlaid table of exquisite Egyptian workmanship.
I sat on the zebra skin X-bench (sorry about that, ancient zebra) and awakened the computer link with a touch.
“Aren’t you looking Stripside sloppy today, my dear Delilah?” Howard Hughes’s shrunken face mouthed into a fish-eye webcam lens. “What do you think of my new shop concept?”
“That it’s mine.”
Hughes shrugged. He’d had himself made into a vampire at almost his last breath to retain his financial kingdom. With his long beard and hair and gaunt look of pained disappointment, he alarmingly resembled a plastic Jesus figure.
“She who thinks is clever,” Hughes chanted. “He who does owns the world.”
“Come on, Howard. You know this concept—and Shez’s enthusiasm for it—is my idea.”
“Do you have a contract in writing?”
“I expect you to provide one.”
“Forty percent for Hughes Tools and Tchotchkes.”
“So like you to overreach, Mr. Hughes. Ten percent.”
“Thirty.”
“Twenty,” I said.
“Twenty-five to me. Oh, twenty-four. Your age, nicely symbolic,” he cackled. “And only fair. I am an old, old man.”
“And ever were and always will be.”
Hughes’s blasted face wrinkled with a rather charming smile. “Give me credit, and I will give you the world.”
“‘I’ll.’ We’re teaching Shez speech with contractions today. Better for the future talk shows.”
“Always on top of things, Delilah. Speaking of which, you walked off with my priceless film artifact, the first cinematic Cleopatra’s coiled brass serpent bra.”
“Yours and welcome to it back. I’d rather wear the push-up bra you invented for Jane Russell. All that heavy metal is cold.”
“Like your cold heart, perhaps? Oh, all right. Twenty percent to me and my mammary artifact back.”
Hughes’s webcam revealed a buxom vampire nurse behind him rattling his IV pole to hang a fresh bag of sterilized blood before the image faded.
“He is a strange creature,” Shez noted, “and by rights I should have twisted his fanged head from his stringy neck, but he is not of my people and has been most accommodating to me and my arts of the wine and oil press.”
“You’re a god in hiding from your should-be worshippers. And it’s he’s.”
“If you had to recite hieroglyphics aloud, you’d sound most artificial also.”
“Agreed, partner. Speaking of ‘greed,’ it’s time to meet the high-end Strip mouthpieces.”
“These ‘mouthpieces’ are a variety of musician?”
“Very much so. The music of coins.”
I preceded Shez through the Glass Curtain, but I fear that Grizelle and Sansouci stood to attention only when the Lord of the Slaughter stepped into the showroom.
Grizelle growled, and for a shocked microsecond shifted into her white-tiger form.
“Meet my business partner, Shezmou,” I said while she corrected her impulse. “He’s the genius behind the vintage wines, scents, and oils this establishment offers the Las Vegas attraction world.”
Shez shook his bewigged, glass-bead-swagged, and braided mane, and growled godlike approval.
Sanscouci muttered, “Holy Seared Shitakes. This is a Clash of the Titans.”
He edged my way, arms folded on his chest, while the two larger-than-life types eyed each other like enemies and lovers. “Starting your own harem with Bijou Boy there, Street?”
“Jealous, Mr. Souci?”
Sansouci winced. “What I do for my boss. What’s with the guy’s albino kilt? And I don’t get this boozy beauty parlor concept.”
“You haven’t sampled his wines yet.”
Shez’s divine super-sharp hearing whipped his impressive head our way. “Mr. Souci may sample any bottle he pleases, but he should not drink the massage oils.”
Sansouci’s almost-emerald eyes rolled like Quicksilver’s when he heard me try a ridiculous command, like “Stop.”
“I do not sell beer,” Shez went on, “although I could brew it. The two gold taps at the end of the bar are a special house brew, ideal for”—Shez frowned, striving to be modern and hip—“the nightclub set.” He regarded me quizzically. I supposed that he’d been watching TV in his spare time at the roomy laboratory Hughes had provided atop the Karnak Hotel. “Night … stick. Does that not mean, ah, the police?”
I realized then that Shez had first met me wearing my used cop duty belt with the attached billy club. I’d left all that fighting gear home. Perhaps a mistake, I thought, as I eyed the three deadly paranormals in the room with little mortal unarmed me and poor Fawn Schwartz.
“The Police is a music icon,” Grizelle purred to Shezmou. “You seem new to our entertainment-centered world. I could introduce you to the Seven Deadly Sins rock band at the Inferno Hotel tonight.”
“Rocks I know from my native soil and sins are my specialty,” Shez answered, being far more provocative than he knew.
Beside me, Sansouci growled in his turn. “I’m supposed to get his attention away from that sleek Inferno cat-woman? Cicereau had no idea he had any competition.”
“I’m a partner in this operation,” I told him. “You can make points with me.”
I hadn’t meant to flirt, just to make Sansouci feel better. That was an Our Lady of the Lake convent school girl-graduate probl
em. We always wanted to make everyone feel better … in an abstract, selfless, spiritual way. Not a good ploy with vampires.
Sansouci was about as spiritual as a machete.
“You don’t want to talk ‘points’ with me, Delilah, without being ready to deliver.” He flashed a grin broad enough to showcase the strong white canine teeth he usually kept under lip and key. “That why Shez calls you Deliverer?”
Mistake. Another one.
Trying to distract Sansouci to give Shez and Grizelle some one-on-one time, I’d upped the sexual and homicidal tension in the shop so you could cut it with a diamond saw. I guess Shez hadn’t been off a pillar for a millennium too many.
I was just a mortal wearing loose tee and shorts, the tourist uniform.
By comparison, Grizelle was prime Las Vegas Strip showgirl with a Siegfried and Roy pedigree. She was the modern equivalent of a Vegas goddess, much as I hated to admit it.
“What’s off between you and Grizelle?” Sansouci whispered, standing way closer than necessary.
“We tangled.”
“Seriously?” He leered at her, not me. “Girl-to-girl. I’d have liked to see that.”
“Rein it in, Romeo. It was tiger-to-girl.”
“You were the girl and walked away without bone-deep tracks in your face?” He stepped back to eye me as if I’d grown a unicorn horn. “Hey, Delilah. I know you have the nerve act sharp with Christophe and Cicereau, but Grizelle? Tell me another fey tale.”
“It was one of my more desperate moments.”
“You two hellcats were fighting over the Cadaver Kid, I bet.”
I just nodded. Sansouci didn’t need to know Ric had still been comatose at the time.
“Grizelle must go for the Latin lover type,” he said, frowning at Shez. When I just stared, disbelieving, he added. “What? This Shez guy is Mediterranean, right?”
“Just barely.” Egypt did border the southern seashore, but the ancient population came from the cradle of Africa, not Asia or Europe.
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