“Such an honorable man for a vampire. So methodical. One would almost say…canonical.”
Can a vampire turn pale? At that moment Damien’s blood-thirsty skin seems whiter than Vesper’s fur, than the bed linen, than bone and fang.
“I may not have…long,” he says. “Yet I find even this half-life too precious to lose.”
“Cheer up.” Miss Delilah Street is displaying a shocking amount of insensitivity to the dying man, even if he is vampire. “You have a savior, remember?”
“Must you put it that way?”
“Yes, indeed. I will end the suspense. She is Miss Nelda Livingstone—ironic last name, yes?—and she is wholly willing to give you every last drop of blood and die and live again as a vampire.”
“Nelda! She has faced the most pain of them all! It cannot be Nelda. It will not be Nelda. I would rather perish.”
“Then she will be condemned to a living death, for she loves you. I now see you clearly love her. There is no reason you should not be joined in eternal matrimony.”
“God, no!”
“God, yes!” Miss Delilah Street says, leaning so close to Damien that Vesper leaps up and hisses. “What were you, and where were you, when you were bitten into a vampire?”
His waxen hands try to ward off her burning blue eyes and biting voice. I recognize a fellow truth seeker at her most ruthless.
“It was long ago. Centuries,” he says.
“When, Damien?”
“The twelfth century.”
“You must have been young,” she notes.
“Thirty-four.”
“Where?”
“England,” he admits.
“Where in England, Damien? You know you cannot lie.”
“At Gracethorn Abbey.”
“You were bitten at an abbey?”
“Yes.”
“Turned there?”
“Yes!”
“You were a monk there?”
No words issued from his whiter-than-death face.
“Damien?”
“I was…the Abbott.”
Of course, think I. Damien Abbott.
Miss Delilah Street jumps up. “Vesper. You, out. Midnight Louie, see to it.”
We felines obey as one, as if demons were on our tails.
Miss Delilah, in fact, strides out hot on our heels.
She jerks open the door to Wrathbones, admitting the noise of merriment and anger and passion and debauchery.
“Nelda, you are needed inside. Quick!”
Miss Delilah slams the outer door shut and locks it after Miss Nelda comes running in, white-faced herself, straight for the open bedroom door, which Miss Delilah shuts firmly after her.
Then she unlocks and opens the outer door and approaches the nearby table.
“It is all right,” she tells the assembled clients of Damien Abbott. “Thank you all for coming and your time. You may go now. We will be in touch. Damien will be fine.”
Amid the buzz and wondering and questions, Miss Delilah retreats and shuts herself in with Vesper and me.
Even a hardened street sleuth like me has to wonder—or not wonder at all—what is going to happen on that red-velvet-spread bed.
Miss Delilah Street folds her arms over her highly sufficient chest and keeps an eye on the outer door. I recognize top-alert guard duty from when my mama used to take us kits out to learn the ways of the world.
I would not want to try to pass Miss Delilah Street right now.
HOW SHE KNOWS WE will get an unwelcome visitor, I do not know. Me, my shivs are already primed.
The door breaks open and shatters to nothing, filled by a fury straight from hell. The noisy occupants of Wrathbones fall silent and sit frozen behind it, as if caught in a huge glass ball, like Wasp-Wing. The hovering pixie shrills once and vanishes. Vesper growls like a tiger and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with me.
I eye our invader. It is Vyrle, only she is now seven feet tall and her hair is a floor-length cloak of fluttering, snapping, sparkling red and yellow and black flames that surrounds her figure and snarling elongated face—eyes, nostrils and lips slanted upward in an expression of evil incarnate.
The only recognizable thing about her are the telltale wooden platform shoes, currently sprouting sharp claws two inches long. I would not rub my muzzle there at the moment.
“I thought you got the message,” Miss Delilah Street says. “You are not welcome here.”
“He is mine!” the deep yet eerily feminine voice tolls like a bell. “Mine.”
“Not at the moment.”
“Mine for centuries, stolen from me, from my palaces under the hill, from my court, from my company.”
“History does not support your claim.”
The creature’s bereft cry creates a crack in the invisible glass ball of frozen reality behind her. “He was almost mine, before a vampire gypsy turned him. I assumed a foul, stumbling, stinking form here and sought for two years to lure him to the Sinkhole, where my powers can flower. That human female is with him now and weak and soft and powerless.”
“But I am not.”
“You! You are nothing but a meddler.”
Midnight Louie has been called such a thing before, by those who underestimated me. I hope that Miss Delilah Street is being underestimated too. I know better than to interfere. Sometimes it is wiser to be Zen than kung fu.
I notice something glitter at Miss Delilah Street’s right wrist. The finest silver chain…Changeling silver. It could harm Wasp-Wing if not undercover and under control. Are Vesper and I going to be treated to a manifestation of the infamous silver familiar born from the long lovelock of the Inferno Hotel’s albino rock star owner, Christophe? Who knows what powers he commands? Not anyone in Vegas.
“When meddling is successful in my world,” Miss Delilah Street purrs at this horrific entity, “they call it ‘case closed.’ Get out of here.”
A roar and shattering sounds echo all around us, Vesper and I cling together, clawing our shivs into the floor boards to stay put, our coats rippling. Nice.
“I am queen,” our invader declares.
I see the fine silver chain on Miss Delilah Street’s wrist is spinning and turning as if her bone and body were a loom. A glittering web is churning up her arm and shoulders and down her other arm, shining like the full moon.
Vesper and my pupils slit, as against the morning sunlight.
Vyrle’s engorged furious figure spits thorn darts and daggers in a blinding blitz from the cold flames of her cloak of many colors.
Miss Delilah lifts her arms across her body and above her head unfolding lacy silver metal wings that look as delicate as cracked crystal. The queen’s weapons stop, fall into nothing as her final wail peaks and fades and the glass behind her cracks from side to side and she vanishes into the bluster and rowdy noise and commotion that is again Wrathbones.
Nothing is left behind. Only her wooden platform high heels that I had rubbed my face against to draw attention to the thorn nubs that pocked them. The earthy odors I had scented on the dart impaling the fallen Damien reminded me of a certain tree all kits learn to avoid climbing because of its lethal claws of poisonous propensity.
Miss Delilah Street’s powers of observation and deduction are all that I could wish for in a human partner.
Miss Delilah fists her hands on her hips as a silver tinsel rain evaporates into the air around her until she is bare of all visible jewelry.
“Good riddance! What a witch!”
She bends to pick up a shoe, running her finger along the newly clawed platforms.
“We are seeing her true ‘sole’,” she says with a wry smile. “These have sprouted acacia thorns like the one that skewered Damien. I had my suspicions when I removed the clawed dart from Damien, but you, Louie, detected the strong acacia scent of Vyrle’s wooden platform shoes in their harmless guise,” she tells me. “Many plants have both benign and malign applications. This thorn-bearing tree is used in perfumes, medicines
, and herbal preparations,. It is also protected by the Fey, who can use its poison qualities, as you sensed. You and I and little vampire Vesper have just the met their Dread Queen, Louie. I guess a cat may look at a queen, after all, and rat on her too.”
“Ooh,” Vesper purrs in my ear. “You are much better than you look.”
That is more than somewhat promising.
BY NOW THE BEDROOM door has opened and the bedazzled lovers are creeping out.
“We heard a kind of mewing out here,” Nelda says, brushing back her hair with a blush.
All that storm and fury. Were they dead to the world!
“Not to worry,” says Miss D. “I was just shopping for a new pair of shoes.” She waves one. “You will not be seeing the imposing and possessive Vyrle any more, Damien. You may be a vampire, but she was not of this world.”
“She was the one who staked me with a claw?” he asks.
“Wooden, from the acacia tree.”
“How did you know—?” Nelda asks, shuddering. “Also about my deepest secret feelings?”
“The deduction process was simple. If someone hates Damien enough to kill him softly and slowly, someone must love him enough to make that would-be murderer jealous.”
“Of me? Or of my…companions,” Damien asks.
“Of you all. Of us all, humans and unhumans. Vyrle is something else, something greedy and merciless. Fey. She almost had a handsome abbot in her power at Gracethorn Abbey centuries ago, but vampires are immune unless they venture into a former Fey touch-point, like the Sinkhole.”
“Miss Street,” he says, “Grateful as I am for your detective and matchmaking talents, you assembled all my appointments. I could have sipped from the innocent five you dismissed tonight. Even though Nelda’s been turned, we will have to continue as usual anyway, and find Nelda clients in addition to mine.”
“Call it a couple’s practice.” She shrugs. “Look, Damien. I go for long-term satisfaction on my cases. Even humans would rather drink deeply of life than sip it up in installments.”
Damien remains silent, but I do believe he blushes. Fresh blood will do wonders.
Miss Delilah adds. “To keep from killing your victims, you gave up centuries of celibacy to become a daylight vampire. If you can’t be celibate, you can at least have a life partner, and Nelda will benefit from being a daylight vampire. Your version can walk without harm in daylight by wearing sunglasses. Research shows vitamin D in sunlight is good for people with MS, which is not a blood-related malady. Come on; you and Nelda have too much love and compassion not to share it with others. You can live on love.”
Nelda nods. “I lived on two hours a week. Now I have eternity.” She smiles seductively over her shoulder—nervous Nelda!—and returns to the bedroom.
Damien is torn, but lingers to question my partner more.
“I was pretty out of it, but what did you mean in the alley when you first arrived and said you ‘brake for butterflies?’”
I give Vesper a lick and a promise to keep her attention and wait for the Divine Miss D to answer the vamp. I have been wondering about that myself.
Miss Delilah Street smiles. “To understand, you need to know about Dolly.”
“A friend of yours?”
“Sort of. She is four thousand pounds of shiny black Old Detroit metal and wears chrome like Mae West draped herself in diamonds.”
“A car?”
“Oh, please. She is a 1956 Cadillac Biaritz cream puff I got at an estate sale when I was on scholarship in college. She can outrun a Porsche and outmuscle a Hummer.”
“Rather like you,” he says with his own smile.
Nice fangs. Shiny and white. I always admire a guy with good grooming.
“Maybe. Anyway, when your messenger pixie, Wasp-Wing, came barreling straight for me and my ‘Changeling silver,’ on the Strip, she got caught in Dolly’s slipstream and almost crashed on the windshield, except that she looked like butterfly, and I always avoid hitting them.”
“You have my thanks, but I remain curious as to why.”
Miss Delilah folds her arms and cocks her head. I smell a reminiscence coming on.
“Before I found Dolly and could drive myself,” Miss Delilah Street says, “I was on a road trip with some college classmates heading for an out-of-town basketball game. A monarch butterfly hit the windshield. It got caught in the windshield wipers, its wings totally intact. They fluttered there at sixty miles an hour, looking alive.
“I asked the guy driving to pull over so we could at least free it. The Monarch had to be dead, but those wings were so alive as they fluttered, so beautiful and miraculously whole.
“He would not even slow down. We would be ‘late” for the precious ‘game.’ Sick at heart, I watched those wings flutter and kiss the windshield as if performing a dance just for me for forty damn miles.”
“But the butterfly was dead,” the vampire says. “Why would you care?”
“It was still beautiful, and so alive in its way.”
“That story says something remarkable about you, Delilah Street.”
“It says something remarkable about you.”
He gets the point and nods. Humbly.
“I have secretly hated my lot in undead life all these centuries.” the vampire confesses. “Even when I could convert in recent years to sipping human life rather than taking it. I divorced myself from feeling, as you had to while you watched, the sole attentive audience, while the butterfly wings did their fatal danse macabre. But you are right. The imitation of life is life in its way.”
He turns to regard the doorway to Nelda. “I hated the idea of her losing and wasting her precious life on loving a dead thing, but you say love is immortal.”
“I say to each his and her own,” Miss Delilah Street answers. “Should I leave Midnight Louie with Vesper, or return him to his usual haunts along the Vegas Strip?”
“I say we should leave it up to them,” he says with a smile while Wasp-Wing dances above everyone’s heads in excitement like a butterfly, expecting many interesting future fetches.
I nuzzle Vesper’s perfect pink nose. I say that Damien Abbott is one stand-up vampire.
THE THIRD TALE
INTRODUCTION
“a bittersweet story that resolves an old conflict in the world of classic monster films.”
—Library Journal
“Loretta had good reason to haunt her murderous father,” Delilah said. “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.”
The noir urban fantasy series that features Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, is set in a Las Vegas of rival supernatural power brokers, such as the albino rock star who owns the Inferno Hotel and casino, and the werewolf mob boss, Cesar Cicereau, who runs the Gehenna entertainment empire.
Delilah has no love for Cicereau, who tried to kill her, so getting a plump fee from him is sweet. Yet…have the mob boss’s cheapskate ways backfired and caused a siege of movie monsters that could drive his tourist trade away?
Yes, there are monsters at large, but Delilah will discover that the purely human “green-eyed monster” of jealousy Shakespeare described is the most lethal of all.
“The way you walked was thorny, though no fault of your own,
but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears
run to a predestined end. Now you will have peace for eternity.”
—Maria Ouspenskaya’s Gypsy woman could be speaking of actor
Lon Chaney Jr. as well as the Wolf Man in the famous film of that name
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-gr
owled.
Everybody assumed Sansouci was a werewolf. Yeah, with that silver forelock in his jet black hair, forest-green eyes and a buff 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. Whether he was taken for either predator, vamp or wolf, Sansouci sported extremely white and pointed canine teeth, 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 multi-national 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 demure, fifties-vintage 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 full, ballerina-length dark gray taffeta skirt that made solid me look so corseted-waist, Audrey Hepburn-girlish you’d want to take me to brunch at Tiffany’s…until you noticed I was wearing gladiator-Goth-style spike 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 vampires that had lasted since Las Vegas’s 1940s founding all the way to Where We Were now. That added up to seventy-five years. Good thing Sansouci was immortal.
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