One furtive glance at his face caught a fading gleam of something green and tentative as a root in his harsh gaze.
He hadn’t lasted all those postvampire centuries because he had kept any nugget of humanity that could be read as . . . hurt? No. I was thinking in my limited human way and that was no way to survive among unhumans.
“Get out.” His voice was harder and colder than mine had been.
“I was planning to.”
“Get. Out.”
I saw the blood tide, maybe the cherry vodka from my Virtual Virgins, rising in his eye whites and yanked the door handle open behind my back, slipping through, heart pounding so loud I knew he’d hear it for yards, as he’d scent my blood for a mile, maybe.
Dolly waited to enfold me in the parking lot, her neon chartreuse halo of pixie dust security announcing she was no Eldorado to mess with. She had never looked more like a fortress.
Chapter Twenty-three
AFTER HE’D LEFT the Spider Skull, Sansouci had made an immediate blood and booty phone call to Carmella, the three-time divorcée, a handsome but stringy cougar of a woman in her late forties.
Carmella was the only one of his blood “wives” he didn’t like.
She was also the only one who craved being drained to the very edge of mortality. Sometimes he needed to remind himself of the centuries of raging, senseless survival. Especially after seeing, flirting with, wanting Delilah. She got under his skin the way he was supposed to want to get under hers. Like an addiction.
He did all the things with Carmella he supposed Delilah was imagining he did. Twice.
He left his client when she was sated in every way possible and he was sick of himself. His ancient, wholly human shadow-self seemed to be tailing him through the glitz of the Las Vegas Strip.
Sansouci decided to finish his unhappy evening out by stopping for a nightcap at Chez Shez. He could atone there for what he’d refrained from doing—and what he’d just done to make up for his restraint—by patronizing the artificial blood on tap. Penance, they’d labeled it when he’d been a monk. Nowadays even that word was out of date.
Gentle Fawn, the day-shift employee Shez called Fawnschwartz, had been replaced for the evening hours by a tall black woman with green eyes who suspiciously resembled Grizelle, the Inferno Hotel’s security head. Had the ancient Egyptian godling developed a crush on a twenty-first-century shape-shifter?
Good luck with that, Sansouci thought.
He hunkered over the stone cup inset with semiprecious stones and filled with the chilled bloodwine “Hastur” had given him before disappearing into the shop’s rear. The smooth jade felt cold in his undead hands, though the artificial bloodwine inside tasted like lukewarm cinnamon mouthwash.
Could he live on this swill forever? Or for as long as Delilah lived her mayfly’s seconds of existence until . . . 2168, say? Delilah would be old and frail and he’d be . . . sorry he hadn’t turned her and facing more centuries of mere survival alone.
His hands lifted back from the goblet in fists of frustration. What he treasured about Delilah was her smarts so oddly combined with innocence and integrity. Giving her his endless blood-craving life would destroy that.
“The bloodwine does not appeal?”
Sansouci looked up to see Shezmou, once Lord of the Slaughter and now Vegas Strip huckster of fine wine and oils, standing behind him. Looming, rather. He was the living flesh of a god from a long-dead civilization and the city’s latest buzz-worthy supernatural.
“It sates without satisfying,” Sansouci admitted. “Like my recent date.”
“Dates. Ah. I know this word. There are many palm trees in this great city of eternal lightning and sprouting water and artificial thunder, but none offer the sustenance of dates.”
Sansouci smiled. How could you not like this ancient big lug Delilah had hauled back from the Karnak Hotel’s sinister vampire empire? The “thunder” Shez referred to was the roar of the Mirage’s Strip-facing volcano erupting on schedule.
“Have you seen the Mighty Delilah of late?” Shez asked.
Sansouci smiled again. He knew his private obsession had earned the undying public gratitude of the chained god she’d freed from millennia of captivity.
“Yes,” he admitted.
“She was in good health and state of mind?”
“When I left her.”
Shez’s brow wrinkled under the shoulder-brushing white linen headdress that reminded Sanscouci of the kepi caps the French Foreign Legion wore in the desert.
“You should not have left her if there was any question about that,” he told Sansouci.
“She was safer after I left her.”
Shezmou hauled him off the zebra-hide stool by the nape of his modern turtleneck knit.
“You would endanger the Mighty Delilah?”
Sansouci twisted out of the god’s choking grip, relishing exercising force against him. “Why do you call her ‘the Mighty Delilah’?”
“She freed me from four millennia of immobility.”
“Delilah’s merely mortal. How’d she do that?”
Shezmou pulled another stool up to the bar and braced a hip on it. “You must understand that what you see before you is a mere sliver of my former self.”
“An impressive sliver,” Sansouci conceded, eyeing six-and-half feet of terra-cotta-colored muscle wearing only what would be called a skimpy kilt these days and eyeliner, plus collar and headgear, including a heavy braided wig that mimicked a lion’s mane.
“We gods are supposed to impress mere mortal men,” Shez said.
“I’m not mortal anymore.”
“Once you were. I accept the company of a foul blood-imbiber only because the Mighty Delilah says you represent a powerful mogul in this city, one called Caesar. Even while imprisoned in my pillar image, I’d heard that name mentioned. It was used with fear by the debased Egyptian sect of blood drinkers who’d infected an entire once-proud race of my subjects.”
“My ‘Cesar’ is not your ‘Caesar.’ Julius Caesar lived two millennia ago. Cesar Cicereau has been a force in Las Vegas only since its founding seventy-five years ago.”
“A paltry span,” Shez noted, “even for a human.”
“Too long for my taste,” Sansouci said. “Cicereau’s an entirely inferior modern breed of dictator. I work for him only to pay a debt owed by my . . . tribe.”
“All bloodsuckers.”
“We all started as mortals. And were converted forcibly.”
“Not I, though I must admit it pains me to think that the Mighty Delilah may soon falter and pass away. I owe her my freedom and the restitution of justice to the ancient beliefs of Memphis and Thebes.”
“How’d she actually free you?”
Shezmou rose to go behind the bar and uncork a lavishly bottled and labeled wine. He filled another jeweled cup and returned to sit on the stool, staring reflectively into his image in the polished sheet of bronze behind the various containers of wine and oil and manufactured blood.
He lifted large, cupped hands. “My likeness resided on a pillar twenty feet high. I was depicted standing in the boat of the sun, fully human, with twin stars above my headdress with the sacred cobra rising at its forefront. Unlike all the other pillar gods in that vast temple underground, my wrists and ankles wore manacles connected by chains of gold. Well, a layer of gold, the flesh of the gods, over silver.”
“Gold overlay on silver. That’s called vermeil nowadays,” Sansouci said. “Silver’s more Delilah’s style, and I’d think that underlying metal was the key to your release.”
“There is some reason the Silver Pharaoh exists, but I’m not yet sure why.” Shezmou sipped reminiscently from his cup. “That last sentence was good. I used a contraction. That would please the Mighty Delilah.” He smiled. “She is small, but curious and agile, like a . . . a monkey.”
Sansouci interred a smile behind the cup of his palm. Shez didn’t have a notable sense of humor. Monkey was hardly the animal he’d a
ssociate with Delilah, although it was a good standby for any smart human in the mind of an ancient god.
Shez continued to reminisce between sips of wine, like any modern dude in a bar.
“She alone,” he went on, “of any human worshipper in thousands of years, climbed the stone-etched trunk of my leg and swung from my insufficiently golden bonds, breaking them. I heard a crack as of ancient thunder between my stone ears. My fleshly representation fell to earth with the broken chains, and I was there with my strong arms to catch and break the fall of my fragile mortal rescuer.”
Sansouci sipped too, unaware of the taste in his mouth, coursing through his veins. Delilah’s sense of adventure and enterprise had freed a god from bondage. Could she free a vampire as well?
“She freed me,” Shez’s deep Darth Vader voice mused. “I saved her. Now she is my”—Shezmou frowned—“personal representative who seeks peace and unity between my local sponsor and all your powerful Las Vegas lords who desire to sell the profitable fruits of my mighty winepress.”
Sansouci nodded solemnly, drawing more artificial blood into his system.
“Then, of course,” Shezmou added with a windy sigh, “if the current debased pharaoh corulers return to their foul blood-drinking ways, I will rise up to my full form as Lord of the Slaughter and pull off their heads and those of their evil minions and throw them all into my relentless winepress for crushing.”
Ouch. Sansouci’s steamy dreams of being rescued and rescuing crashed to the Strip like the body of Loretta’s reanimated dead lover. Delilah had yet another dedicated protector, besides Ric and Quicksilver, and this one hated and destroyed vampires.
“So,” he told Shez, “you’re like the giant up the beanstalk, crushing our bones and drinking our blood.”
“I do not . . . don’t . . . know your myths and gods and your hierarchies. Only the Mighty Delilah.”
“You called her fragile yourself.”
“Might is more than physical durability, friend. It is what you will to make of yourself.”
Sansouci gazed into those utterly dark, ancient eyes. “What if I choose to . . . convert from blood to . . . this.” He gestured at the bland contents of his jeweled cup.
“Then Shezmou would declare that you have done more than his entire debased race of worshippers have done.” His huge hand clapped Sansouci’s shoulder, nearly dislocating it. “This is just what the ancient one atop the Karnak has accomplished with his blood-hued brew. You know who I mean, the living mummy, ho-war dhu-ooz. I will create a tablet for you, Sandsoozi.”
Sansouci blinked, interpreting as fast as he could. “Thank you, Shez. I think you mean you’ll set up a tab, so I can patronize your gilded cobra heads daily for bloodwine. And your mummified patron is called ‘Howard Hughes’ in this incarnation.” He doubted Delilah knew how much he knew about all her contacts.
“Why do you wish to make this transformation of yourself, Sandsoozi?”
“I was once a Lord of the Slaughter myself.”
“Indeed. In what time or place or cause? You were not a god, as I am.”
“No, but I served one. I took the life and blood of his enemies in war, and called it just. Like you, I’d once wielded sacred oil and water during peacetime, but it was war that made my method of existence possible.”
Shez thought, then nodded. “I too would rather mash grapes and seeds than the heads of the damned unjust. Their blood as it spatters my lips tastes foul. I must brew much wine to banish the inadvertent sins that have tainted even so little of my flesh.”
“You can . . . taste who is damned from their blood?”
“A mere . . . what you say, side effect, like the inebriation that results from too much healthy wine. Forget the tablet. I like you. I wish to aid you in your quest to be worthy of the Mighty Delilah.”
“I didn’t say anything about my reasons.”
“You did not have to. Who does not aspire to She Who Frees a God? You are my guest whenever you choose to drink at Chez Shez.”
“Thanks.” Sansouci raised his glass of Blood Lite.
“It is good when gods and men can sit together and talk.” Shez nodded his head until the beaded ends of his heavy braided wig danced on his doughty shoulders.
Sansouci was getting mighty tired of feeling outclassed.
Chapter Twenty-four
NOW THAT MY dreams had ditched the alien abduction and examination mode, there was no place my subconscious could not go.
I woke up the next morning with a grab bag of horrible memories fading from my mind.
Dr. Frankenstein had me on his ancient Egyptian bloodletting stone slab again, only he was showing an unnatural interest in my toes . . . Loretta Cicereau and I were twin sisters in the mobster’s family photo from the 1940s, with a young, lanky Howard Hughes replacing Sansouci and Vida morphed into a busty Jane Russell. Only Cesar Cicereau was unaltered except for wolfish fangs. . . .
So when my old-fashioned white phone rang in the Enchanted Cottage bedroom I picked it up with relief, hoping Godfrey had dialed me from the main house with news I was to breakfast in the servants’ quarters, my favorite way to start the day.
It was indeed exactly that invitation. I sighed as I hung up the receiver and lay back. Godfrey and the maid, Molly, fed Nightwine’s occasional guests and Molly made popovers to die for.
I idly tested inside my lower lip for sore spots, but Sansouci’s “sampling” procedure had been alarmingly symptom free. A vampire bite that went down as smoothly as aged scotch was a thing to respect and fear.
My cell phone yodeled from the pocket of the leather jacket I’d used the night before. I hated to leave my comfy bed to hear anything that might interfere with a sunny, chatty breakfast with my favorite CinSims. I sighed again and rolled over to snag the bag without getting out of bed. In a moment the hopefully normal again little rectangle was clamped to my ear.
“Good you’re awake so early and rested up,” Ric’s voice boomed in my ear. “You’ll never guess who paid me a surprise visit last night.”
Uh-oh, Irma warned. We know a truckload of folks who could tell tales on you to Ric.
“Uh . . .” I said.
“You and Quicksilver would kill me if I didn’t share the pleasure of my unexpected company. Breakfast?”
“Um . . .” I was being really brilliant.
“I’ll swing by and we can decide on the place then.”
“Ah, Ric—”
But he’d hung up without giving me any clue to whom I’d be meeting besides him and where we’d be going and what I should wear.
I’d dropped last night’s outfit on the bed’s end. Since the wardrobe witch hadn’t had an invisible hand in selecting the clothes, they were still piled there. I checked the empty chrome dress-shop rack on the wall outside my bottomless closet.
Empty no more. From it hung a plain white shirt, a black “boyfriend” blazer, and gray boot-cut jeans.
Was I supposed to go as a CinSim?
I might sleep in a high four-poster bed under the cottage eaves, but the attached bathroom was high tech. I was sure it had more showerheads than Vida’s all-girl health club, and an infrared drying system that reminded me of the abandoned tanning beds at the now-defunct Rave Machine.
The familiar disliked getting wet so it morphed into a banana clip to hold up my hair. I liked the effect so much I told it to “stay” as I would Quicksilver, not expecting obedience, as I didn’t with Quicksilver.
Surprise. It remained in place, allowing me to keep the tumbled curls down the back of my head effect. I grabbed some fresh underwear, dressed, and jammed my feet into boot-style mules, ready to greet whosoever or whatever showed up with Ric in my driveway.
As a last thought, I used the bureau mirror to tease the curls forward on my neck, realizing how accustomed I’d become to hiding what I refused to call hickeys. Loathsome word. And maybe deed. Sansouci’s admitted self-interest didn’t mean he’d lied about what dark and dirty things Ric’s little q
uirk might lead to.
I glowered at the idea, glad to see my image mimic my emotions. No Lilith here. I didn’t so much as glance in the hall mirror when I left. I’d had quite enough of my so-called kin for a while.
Clattering down the stairs, I met Quicksilver grinning and panting at the bottom. He knew he was invited, wherever we were going. With whomever. I could always stop at the mansion’s kitchen door and take a rain check on the (sob) homemade popovers.
Ric’s Corvette was already idling in the driveway, as throaty as a movie queen. Quick perked his ears and I raised my eyebrows when we saw that Ric wasn’t the only figure unkinking a tall frame to exit the low car and greet us.
“Tallgrass!” I IDed his companion with welcome disbelief. “What lured you out of Kansas?”
Ric’s former FBI mentor hitched up the belt under his belly to match his standing position as he adjusted his straw cowboy hat into its groove in his thick black hair. Otherwise he was lean and well-done, his Native American skin seamed with sun and wind and wisdom.
Quicksilver rushed to greet him with a nudge of noses, paws momentarily braced on his shoulders like a bear’s. Both were pretty prominent in the nose department.
“So where are we all going for this breakfast outing?” I asked Ric when Quick put all fours back on the driveway. “In that car?”
“You and the dog can take Dolly.”
“I propose we take a stroll across the courtyard instead. Godfrey and Molly can lay out a spread for us all. Quicksilver’s welcome there, unlike in most restaurants.”
Ric looked from me to Quick to Leonard Tallgrass. “You’d have a chance to see some well-established CinSims at work,” he told his friend. “The ones you saw in Wichita were fresh out of the film canister.”
“Sure.” Tallgrass winked at me and Quicksilver. “If these two didn’t have blue eyes, they could almost pass as those black-and-white movie escapees. I sure didn’t know CinSims can cook.”
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