Dancing With Werewolves (35 page)

I jerked my head up to face him. “You’d been visited by a vampire!”

My heart almost stopped.
No!
Once vampire-bitten, a human was forever susceptible to the breed’s spell. It couldn’t have been worse if he’d told me he had cancer.

He nodded, and lifted an arm to catch my first falling tear on a fingertip. “Yes, Delilah.” He smiled tenderly. “But it was a vampire bat.”

“A real bat?” What did that mean? Was that better or worse? “Are you sure it was the real thing?”

“In the Chihuahua desert? What else? It was a bat, the same blood-sucking parasite that was named after real vampires, a Mexican bat. There are millions of them. I was mistaken for a burro, probably because my hair was uncut and covered my neck.”

“Then you’re not . . . infected by an undead human vampire bite?”

“No.” He stirred under me, lifted his hips and my weight with the move, the gesture saying sexy things again.

“No. But the next night I was visited by a vision of a dancing girl with writhing hips and naked breasts and she kissed me on the neck in that very same spot, and I had become a man.”

I got it. That had been his first turn-on. Wet dream. Weird maybe, but harmless, right? And my heart ached for the lonely boy in the desert, sleeping with donkeys and goats. There must be more, much more, to Ric’s story, but this whispered confession had soothed my immediate panic.

He watched me accept that and put his arm back down. I wriggled up his body and placed my hand on his heart again. The rate had quieted nicely and he was half-soft between my legs again. If pseudo-vampire dancing girls and vampire bats did it for him, I was ready to throw myself into the part.

I breathed hotly on his neck, my hand gauging his pulse rate. I ran the tip of my tongue over the bruised spot, and then my lips. My many kisses added up to a month of goodnight visitations. He was breathing hard and his heart was racing, boy and man ready for so much more. So I bore down hard and sucked a series of moans out of him, then teased his skin with my teeth. I was a very
bad
batgirl.

“Delilah!”

I sat up and pushed him into me and tore my Spandex top over my head. Luckily I was wearing a bra I’d bought during my post-Sunset Park shopping spree. I have to admit that Irma’s taste has always been way sleazier than mine, and she’d been in firm control that day. Ric’s hands twitched, but remained out of play. I was in control now, in control of the vertical. I moved up and down slowly, my body swallowing that tantalizing length again and again, rocking and rolling.

Ric was gasping. “You’ve never been so aggressive before,
mi tigre hembra
.”

“I’ve never almost lost you before.”

“It was worth it, then. We’ll have to do that again,” he panted, caught between a moan and a laugh.

“I’ll have to do this again too.”

I could feel him on the brink of explosion; I collapsed down upon him, sinking my teeth hard into the vampire bat spot. My spot.

We came together, I screaming, Ric adding an inciting basso of satisfaction to the clan vocalizations. Los Lobos had seen to it there’d always be a call of the wild in our encounters.

I pushed myself back up finally, looking down at him. And he finally moved his arms, his hands on my hips, his fingers toying with the thin sterling silver hip-hung chain I wore for him under everything, impaling me gently down deep onto him one last time. For now.

Sweat evaporated slowly and sweetly on our bodies. Ric’s face gleamed like a golden idol’s in the funky old-fashioned cottage lamplight. I could feel him softening in me, a sensation as engaging as a thick milk chocolate bar melting in your mouth.

Ric reached a hand up to brush my hair off my damp neck. “
Te amo
,” he said softly.

I’d never said, “I love you” to another person, only to Achilles.

And I’d never yet said it to Quicksilver, although I did.

I’d always had a mental block about saying it and had never had anyone much worth saying it to, except for the occasional transient stranger in my life who might have done me a small, unexpected kindness, and saying that would have been overkill, although I did silently love him or her for it.

Ric had done far more for me than that, but I still had a block about saying the words now.
I love you
.

“
Te amo
,” I heard myself telling Ric, smiling. In Spanish the words came much more easily.
Te amo, te amo, te amo
, I thought.

We stayed there, locked together, smiling at each other for a long time.

Like gourmet coffee and chocolate, it was almost better than sex.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Okay. Woman. Man. And Dog. Silver mirror-medium, corpse-finder, and walking, trotting first-aid kit. I guess we’re the new Triad in town.

Las Vegas, place your bets, figure your odds, and hang on to your secrets as best you can, because we are here to break your bank!

That’s what I thought when I woke up alone in my cottage bed the morning after the face-off in the Spring Mountains. Ric had left long before morning. He needed to get back to the mountains by night to round up his zombies.

“They only respond to me for now,” he explained. “I don’t want any zombie wranglers capturing them. In the old days, they had to be fresh. Then the big combines had them flash-frozen and shipped to the States for assignment.”

“Like fish sticks?”
Euww.

Ric nodded, steel-jawed. “Today the Immortality Mob has preservatives for the harvest. They scour mass death sites, preferably those due to natural disaster. War and massacres tend to chop off limbs. It gets more expensive.”

“Who is the Immortality Mob? Nightwine used that phrase.”

“We don’t know. We can guess. Listen. I’ve got to go. I shouldn’t have left them there unclaimed earlier tonight. But—”

Now the zombies sounded like lost luggage. I could understand Ric’s fury in wanting to end this trade in human skin and bone if not souls.

“Can’t you . . . put them back?”

He took my hand, held it to his beating heart. “There’s no going back. For any of us.”

                                                                                          * * * *

I closed the cottage door behind Ric just before Quicksilver returned from his run nattily groomed and not limping any more.

Ric had noticed the rakes on my legs and arms before he left and said, “If Wonderdog wants to lick you all better, I don’t want to be here to see it.”

I hadn’t considered substituting Quicksilver’s healing tongue for Neosporin, but did after Ric left. Quick sat quietly, gazing limpidly at me with those Tiffany gift box-blue eyes. Maybe his healing gift had been exhausted on Ric and himself. His tail dusted the floor with a touch of eagerness. Maybe I’d better let Quick keep his tongue to himself in my case.

I took a shower, anointed my wounds and hit the bed, dreading nightmares.

They came with a vengeance: a harrowing rerun of vamp boys with my blood on their fangs, of me/Lilith levitating nude and snake-bound and vampire-bit, of running, running, running through a rocky wasteland, of hurting, burning, falling, of a Paiute Indian shaman bending over me, chanting alien words and dripping the soothing, warm balm of a dessert succulent plant on my wounds. Weren’t they the tribe that invented the famous and ultimately tragic Ghost Dance?

I awoke and stretched, determined to think only of the happy outcomes of the night before. Despite the nightmares real and dreamed, this one morning all was right with my world.

Snow’s silver familiar chose that moment to make its move from a limpid chain around my neck into a cold silver garter at the top of my right thigh.

Garter belts and
silk stockings, Snow?
You and Howard Hughes wish!
It’ll be a cold day in Hell.

Which I am really looking forward to making come true in your case.

But first I had to report to my boss, Hector Nightwine.

                                                                                          * * * *

The black-and-white photograph of Cicereau with his teenage daughter occupied the huge center screen of Nightwine’s media wall.

“Excellent,” he gloated. “That copyright-stealing thug! Try to rip off my rights to Maggie, will he? I’ll smear Cicereau’s messy supernatural private life all over the world’s television sets. Child murder is not popular anywhere, even these days.”

“We have no proof,” I pointed out.

He hauled out a pair of half glasses with iridescent frames, and then snapped off the enlarged image I’d taken from Cicereau’s computer.

“
Las Vegas CSI V
is a fictional show,” he said.

“You’re as liable for being sued as anyone, and Cicereau might go farther than that.”

Nightwine chuckled and grabbed a fistful of what looked like mixed nuts from a crystal bowl on his desk. “Have some?”

“I’m on a new diet.”

My new diet was based on eating food that didn’t try to crawl away on you.

“
Tsk.
You certainly don’t need to lose an ounce. I managed to get some black-market footage of your act at the Gehenna.”

“What!”

“You can never underestimate Maggie fans. I must watch them like a hawk. They were ready to burn a million DVDs and hustle them internationally. Naturally, I waited until their job was done and unofficially seized the lot. They’ll go like hotcakes and Cicereau can’t do a thing about it.”

“
Hector!
I haven’t given permission, and I never will.”

“Who’s to say it wasn’t really Lilith herself? I’d give you a generous cut, of course.”

“I’ve gotten enough cuts in your service, thank you. No. Absolutely not, not if you want any more work out of me. And don’t whine. I also want the recording of Ric and me in Sunset Park. The enlarged, closeup and personal version you made from the distant spy camera footage.”

“Have mercy, Delilah. That is one of the best cinematic ‘meets’ ever, and I did the final cut on it. Let me keep a copy for my private collection.”

“No.”

Actually, I think he liked it when I put my foot down. He pouted instead of whining and slaked his congenital greed with three fistfuls of nuts. They crunched like walnuts, but I didn’t like the jointed black leggy “crumbs” that fell to his desktop.

“Agreed on the recordings,” he grumbled through his gluttony. “For a yummy-soft bit of female you drive a hard bargain.”

“Back to the case,” I said. “We don’t know everything yet.”

“Of course not, but I can go to script on this. The existence of a series of Inferno chip designs prove
someone
—if not Christophe himself—was keeping the concept alive all these decades. I love the hunky vampire prince getting whacked and someone else getting the Inferno hotel and casino off the ground decades later. A real weeper for the supernatural set.”

“This is all still speculation, Hector. Christophe may not like that.”

“I’ll make the Inferno owner black, maybe a warlock, and call the place the . . . the Snake Pit. As for the true facts, what else is there to know?”

“There’s got to be more to it, that sad hit and secret burial of two young lovers. Cicereau didn’t banish all the vampires just by killing a couple of lovesick kids, even if one of them was his own. And why kill them?”

“He’s a very, very bad man, and wolf?” Hector asked archly, cracking open a nut with his teeth and gobbling the wriggling white meat inside. “But I like it, Delilah. You think like a movie mogul.”

So I started thinking like a screenwriter. I stared at the photo of Cicereau with the daughter who had come calling in my cottage mirror ever since Ric and I had found her body, but whose name I didn’t even know. Yet. She deserved a name on a gravestone.

The shock of Cicereau’s paternity had kept me from even noticing others in the group shot until I viewed them life-sized on Nightwine’s seven-foot screen.

The three guys in pinstriped, broad-shouldered suits were obviously nameless bodyguards, two in fedoras. The young one with the slicked back dark hair and pencil-thin mustache had a roguish Clark Gable forelock falling onto his forehead. Close-up, I spotted a thin streak of silver running through it. One-two-three,
woof!
Sansouci didn’t look a day older today, except for the heavier silver streak job.
Hmm
. He’d shown me a flicker of humanity. Him I might be able to deal with.

And since when had werewolves become so long-lived? It was much easier to off a marauding werewolf with silver bullets than to find a vampire’s sleepy-time lair, dig him or her up by night, and then do the stake routine. Everyone figured that nowadays full-blooded werewolves were rare, shot to extinction all over the globe like the wolves themselves, rather than dying of old age. But what if they weren’t?

At the photo’s edge stood one of those tall, glam chorus-girl types as common to Las Vegas as palm trees and with about the same IQ I tended to notice them as much as I do the trees. But her clothes were a hoot.

She wore a long white crepe gown. Its huge forties shoulder pads sparkled with rhinestones. The neck was high . . . but a narrow open slit ran from the hollow of her throat to her waist, and I bet the back was wide open. The skirt was draped toward her left hip in the Grecian goddess style popular in that era, and a spangled dark crimson flower pinned it there. A matching exotic bloom nestled above her right temple amid her elaborately upswept dark hair.

That’s when it struck me that a lot of women in the forties looked like the Black Dahlia, that I could do a great job of it myself.
Hmmm.
Samba, rumba, tango. Chichi Latin dances and clubs. I bet Ric would flip if he saw me in that getup.

Look at you! Irma interrupted. Used to avoid your own image in mirrors and dress only for work. Now you’re walking through mirrors and morphing into the Vamp of Las Vegas. You go, girl!

Hector too was gazing on beauty bare and having his own private thoughts, which he now said aloud.

“I’ve decided to launch a new spin-off,” he announced. “
Las Vegas CSI: The Vintage Collection
. It’ll unearth all the unsolved crimes of the Werewolf-Vampire War era, use the music of the period.”

“That’s such a rip-off of
Cold Case
,” I pointed out. The crime show was in its umpteenth year.

Hector’s huge shoulders shrugged off my comment. “I can do an extended miniseries too.
Dead and Alive: The Making of Las Vegas.”

I turned to stare at him.

“Don’t look so surprised, Delilah. Your vintage clothing has inspired me. You dig up the past crimes; I film ’em. I could even cast you in some juicy bit parts.”

I sure hated to hear the words “juicy bits” and me in the same sentence from Nightwine. Still, the role of Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, on and off the screen appealed to me.

“It’d pay way better than a non-speaking role.” His rum-raisin-brown eyes gazed dreamily into the distance. “A cameo role would keep Lilith’s image alive.”

And such a role would perpetuate the obsession of the creeps who were out to capture, debase, and destroy her. No wonder she’d gone missing, if she wasn’t already really and truly dead, and I had my doubts. On the other hand, my doing this for Hector might draw out Lilith . . . .  I was curious about her. Surely she’d be curious about me. Meanwhile, Hector was screenwriting aloud.

“You’d be . . . the Black-and-White Dahlia, a misty, mysterious glamorous noir film dame glimpsed in distant shots, like Alfred Hitchcock always showing up as a passing extra in his films. All you’d have to do is look good, do some moody voice-overs, and float around.”

“I’m not Hitchcock and I doubt you are, either.”

“Who could be? He was the master of nuanced black-and-white film suspense and even managed to do some fairly interesting things in color. And, Delilah, I could hire your dead-dowsing swain as a consultant. Might reduce those pesky out-of-town trips of his,
hmmm
? Keep him here in town more.”

Okay. How did Nightwine know about Ric’s trips? The charming vintage cottage dial-phone must be tapped! Fine. Ric and my calls would be all-cell phone all the time from now on.

But Hector’s grand vision had hit a nerve with my reporter’s instincts.

Everybody accepted Las Vegas as a fantasy destination, as larger than life. Nobody had reexamined the city and its tawdry criminal past since long before the Millennium Revelation, when the addition of supernaturals to the landscape had seemed like just another entertaining Vegas excess.

A Cirque du Soleil for creatures of the night.

“You don’t have to okay the whole vision just now, Delilah.”

I could hear Hector crunching contentedly on something disgusting behind me.

“If you reveal their past to the public,” I turned to point out, “every shady human and unhuman in town will be out to get you. Me. Us.”

“Just keep looking at what’s going on, what went on, and you’ll find something I can use on my shows.”

“Or . . . something really,
really
bad will find me.”

Nightwine shrugged and smacked his lips.

“Every modern girl’s looking for Mr. Right.”

THE END