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  Silver Zombie

  ( Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator - 4 )

  Carole Nelson Douglas

  Zombies and Witches and Vamps . . . Oh, My!

  What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas — at least that's Delilah Street's hope. With Sin City's vampire and werewolf mobs wanting to cash in her chips once and for all, she's retreating with her partner Ric Montoya and half-wolfhound Quicksilver to her Kansas birthplace. Unfortunately, when it comes to finding trouble, there's no place like home. . . .

  It doesn't take long before Delilah realizes she's not in Vegas anymore. Zombie cowboys and spectral cattle drives are kicking up dust, the local weather girls are total witches who forecast perfect storms, and some Hollywood fanatic is recasting zombies as the greatest stars of the silver screen. And speaking of silver, Delilah's special affinity for the all-purpose monster-repellent leads her posse straight down a silver brick road — and into a not-so-fun house of mirrors — putting her face-to-face with her dicey past and a mystery woman named Lilith, who's a real dead ringer for Delilah. The key word being dead.

  Silver Zombie

  (The fourth book in the Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator series)

  A novel by Carole Nelson Douglas

  For Racie Rhyne,

  my super-supportive, artistic sister-in-law

  and Delilah’s best friend

  Meet Me, Delilah Street

  EVERYONE HAS FAMILY issues, but my issues are that I don’t have any family. My new business card reads Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, but my old personal card could have read Delilah Street, Unadoptable Orphan.

  I was supposedly named after the street where I was found abandoned as an infant in Wichita, Kansas. (I guess I should just thank God and DC Comics it wasn’t Lois Lane.) I’ve googled and groggled (the drinking person’s search engine) the World Wide Web for Delilah Streets and not a single bloody one of them shows up in Kansas.

  Whoever my forebears were, they gave me the Black Irish, Snow White coloring that is catnip to vampires: corpse-pale skin and dead-of-night-black hair. By age twelve I was fighting off aspiring juvie rapists with retractable fangs and body odor that mixed blood, sweat, and semen. Really made me enjoy being a girl.

  My growing-up years of group homes in Wichita are history now that I’m twenty-four and on my own. I had a good job reporting the paranormal beat for WTCH-TV in Kansas—until the station’s jealous weather witch forecaster forced me out.

  Now I’m a freelance investigator in wicked, mysterious post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas. Vegas was wicked, of course, long before the turn of the twenty-first century brought all the bogeymen and women of myth and legends out of the closet and into human lives and society. Now, in 2013, Vegas is crawling with vamps and half-weres and all-werewolf mobs and celebrity zombies and who-knows-what-else.

  My ambitions are simple.

  One, staying alive. (Being turned into an immortal vampire doesn’t count.)

  Two, being able to make love on my back without having panic attacks. (Whoever thought someone would aim for the missionary position?) Position hadn’t been an issue until recently and neither had sex, until I finally found a man I want to make love with, ex-FBI guy Ricardo Montoya—aka the Cadaver Kid. He’s tall, dark, handsome, Hispanic, and my brand-new horizontal ambition. He has my back—and my front—at every opportunity.

  And, three, tracking down Lilith Quince—my spitting image—to find out if she is a twin, double, clone, or simulacrum. Or if she is even still alive. It’s rumored some CSI V bodies are real … corpses. Seeing her/me being autopsied on Crime Scene Instincts V: Las Vegas one rerun-TV night in Wichita brought me to Sin City in the first place.

  Lucky me, Lilith became the most desirable corpse ever featured on the internationally franchised show. Millennium Revelation pop culture and taste tend toward the dark—now I know how dark. When Hector’s CSI show made Lilith Quince into a macabre worldwide sex symbol, he inadvertently made me, Delilah Street, a wanted woman. Not for myself alone, mind you, but for the naked and dead image of another woman.

  The CSI cameras showed a discreet maggot camping out in a nostril that held a tiny blue topaz stud like my very own, so Lilith in filmed corpse form was dubbed Maggie and became the It Girl of 2013: Maggie dolls and merchandise are hot and so are bootleg Maggie films, outtakes, and my hide, if anyone could snag it—dead or alive. One werewolf mobster almost did already.

  At least ambition number four is now a done deal: Identifying the embracing skeletons Ric and I discovered in Vegas’s Sunset Park just after I hit town and just before the town hit me back, hard.

  I discovered more than Ric and corpses in Sunset Park. I found an ally who has heavenly blue eyes and is seriously gray and hairy. That’s my dog, Quicksilver. He’s a wolfhound-wolf cross I saved from death at the pound. He returns the favor with fang, claw, and warm, paranormally talented tongue.

  (I have a soft spot for dogs—especially since Achilles, my valiant little Lhasa apso in Wichita, died from blood poisoning after biting a vampire who was trying to bite me. Achilles’ ashes rest in a dragon-decorated jar on my mantel, but I haven’t given up the ghost on him.)

  Oh, the location of that mantel might be of interest. It’s in the Enchanted Cottage on the Hector Nightwine estate. Hector rents the place to me cheap because, as the CSI franchise producer, he’s presumably guilty of offing my possible twin on national TV. Hector doesn’t really have a conscience, just a profit motive. He’s banking on my finding Lilith or becoming her for his enduring financial benefit.

  The only thing Hector and I share is a love of old black-and-white films. The Enchanted Cottage duplicates a setting from a 1945 movie. A shy-to-the-point-of-invisible staff of who-knows-what supernaturals run the place, and I suspect it’s supplied with the wicked stepmother’s mirror from Snow White. Although it’s been mum with me so far, I do see dead people in it.

  The most complicated beings in my brave new world are the CinSims. Cinema Simulacrums are created by blending fresh zombie bodies illegally imported from Mexico with classic black-and-white film characters. The resulting “live” personas are wholly owned entertainment entities leased to various Vegas enterprises.

  Hector and Ric blame the Immortality Mob for the brisk business in zombie CinSims, but can’t prove it. Hector wants to wrest the CinSims from the mob’s control into his. Ric aches to stop the traffic in illegally imported zombies. It’s personal—he was forced to work in the trade as a child.

  I’d like to help them both out, and not just because I’m a former investigative reporter crusading against human and unhuman exploitation. My own freedom is threatened by various merciless and sometimes downright repellent factions bent on making life after the Millennium Revelation literal Hell.

  Luckily, I have some new, off-the-chart abilities simmering myself, most involving silver—from the silver nitrate in black-and-white films to sterling silver to mirrors and reflective surfaces in general.

  Which reminds me of one more sorta sidekick: a freaky shape-changing lock of hair from the albino rock star who owns the Inferno Hotel. The guy goes by three names: Christophe for business; Cocaine, when fronting his Seven Deadly Sins rock band, and Snow to his intimates. He seems to consider me one of them, but no way do I want to be.

  While thinking of my lost Achilles, I made the mistake of touching one long white lock of Snow’s hair he’d sent me as a mocking gift. The damn thing became a sterling silver familiar no jeweler’s saw or torch can remove from my body. Since it transforms into different pieces of often-protective jewelry, it’s handy at times. I consider it a variety of talisman-cum-leech.

  That attitude sums up my issues with the rock star– h
otelier, who enslaves groupies with a onetime mosh-pit “Brimstone Kiss.”

  Then I discovered why those post-concert kisses are so bloody irresistible … and Snow forced me to submit to his soul-stealing smooch in exchange for his help in saving Ric from being vamped to death. This kiss-off standoff between us is not over.

  I’ve been called a “silver medium,” but I don’t aim to be medium at anything. I won’t do things halfway. I intend to expose every dirty supernatural secret in Las Vegas, if necessary, to find out who I really am, and who’s being bad and who’s being good in my new Millennium Revelation neighborhood.

  Chapter One

  ACOYOTE YIPPED in the desert night surrounding Las Vegas.

  Its sharp introductory barks escalated into a full, soulful howl at the moon.

  I straightened from my feral crouch to listen.

  Then I smiled.

  That lonesome coyote might be the only natural critter within hearing tonight.

  Even the glowing yellow moon, half full, looked pretty unnatural. Its blade-straight inner edge reminded me of a giant casino chip split down the middle.

  I wasn’t used to working under moonglow. Usually Sin City’s gigantic bouquet of neon lights backlit my night-crawling expeditions.

  Tonight, though, my beat was a raw desert landscape of distant mountains that made the flat valley floor into a huge, empty, open maw surrounded by massive saw teeth. I stood at its center, the moonlight reflecting from the steel studs embedding the arms, legs, and torso of my form-adapting black catsuit.

  “Bite me,” I whispered at the jaundiced half-werewolf moon, “and you’ll get a jawful of broken fangs.”

  Something came barreling out of the darkness right for me, as if answering my invitation. Fast and furred, the yellow-beige flowing blur grew ears, hackles, and hulking shoulders as it neared—like a panting locomotive with a boar’s-head cowcatcher.

  I turned sideways as it charged by, kicking up sand chest-high. Then it wheeled and leaped for my throat.

  “Quick,” I shouted, using the word as a name, not a command. A huge pink tongue swiped my jaw and slimed my costly, FBI-approved night vision goggles. Only borrowed, alas.

  I couldn’t wipe the wet lenses clean on my steel-studded outfit. Scuff City. So I swept off the goggles and shook my head at the grinning wolfish face now at standing height. My waist.

  “Quicksilver, you’re supposed to find prey, not me,” I told him.

  I fished in the secondhand cop utility belt swagging my hips for a microfiber cloth, then glanced around. All around. The new bone-reading night vision lenses had tinted everything a Beatles-submarine yellow. I pushed them, cleaned, atop my head like sunglasses.

  It was pleasant to see the true moonshine-silvered landscape, cool and serene. Silver is my talisman, including this silver-gray dog who’s half wolfhound, half wolf, and all partner. Quicksilver is more lupine than K-9, and just what a girl needs for a bodyguard and buddy after the Millennium Revelation.

  Hmm. A hummock of Joshua tree–tall cactus was edging into sharper focus. I snapped the lens strap back around my head and the lenses down over my eyes. Several hummocks of cacti were shuffling toward me. Quicksilver had accomplished his Australian sheep dog act, after all.

  I drew the police baton at my hip. The idea was to serve and protect, not to hurt.

  And not to be hurt.

  The closer they came, the bigger they got. Human figures, three of them. These were professionally big guys, the kind who walk with beefed-up arms out from their sides at acute angles, with thigh-heavy legs pushing their feet apart so they make a waddle into a threat.

  Muscle, in the classic PI term.

  And you just a slip of a girl, Irma commented sardonically.

  Shut up, I told my inboard invisible friend since orphanage days. I’m on the tall and solid side. Quick and I can handle these Three Stooges.

  Sadly, that’s about all they were. As much as twentieth-century zombie movies celebrated a dogged will to ambulate, the New Millennium’s feral zombies share the same lack of social graces, not to mention coordination.

  Quicksilver immediately trotted to circle behind them and nip at their shambling heels or backsides if necessary.

  The three were still shod and wore “rent”ed suits … not the hired kind, but the tattered variety rent apart by werewolf fangs and claws. Their dim memories of being torn to death by Cesar Cicereau’s werewolf mob didn’t make them want to gnaw brains yet, but somewhere deep down they must still be plenty pissed.

  Nor were they visibly rotting on the hoof. In fact, their pre-chewed condition put them in more danger from predators than the other way around. Those mortal wounds had never healed, but remained blood-crusted scars of their last stand some twenty to seventy years ago. Werewolf chieftain Cicereau had been offing competition since Vegas began in the 1940s. The Millennium Revelation had unfolded a lot of mysteries along with all the variations of supernatural underworld creatures it had coughed up.

  Still, three guys heading for a lone woman was never a safe situation, even if she had a hundred-and-fifty-pound dog in attendance.

  “Okay, fellas,” I told them, brandishing my club, “welcome to Rancho Second Chance-o.”

  That stopped them dead in their tracks.

  Or perhaps what had stopped them was sighting the low bunkhouse and corral behind me, where a horse lifted its head to nicker. Home, sweet, home on the range. Don’t ask me why, but horses have a soothing effect on feral zombies.

  I stepped aside to let the trio stumble into the ranch’s safety zone surrounded by silver barbed wire fencing. That’s when a pack of shadows rushed me from the surrounding sagebrush, from every last bush.

  A coyote pack!

  No time to play zombie tourists.

  My night stick prodded all three Zobo butts hard to keep them moving, and I raised my right arm just as the lead coyote leaped for my throat. With my leather-gloved palms at both ends, I managed to wedge the police baton between its fangs, then twist my upper body. That threw the alpha male off to the side in time for me to knee the next coyote in the leaping chest, so it fell back.

  Quicksilver, snarling and snapping up a storm, was harrying ears and tails and flanks to drive back the middle of the pack of five. Coyotes don’t weigh much, maybe thirty pounds, and neither Quick nor I wanted to kill them. These were just desert dogs, doing what comes naturally. It’s actually harder to fight off opponents you only want to discourage.

  From the grunting sounds behind me, the zombies had roused to kick away coyotes trying to slip through the barbed wire isolating the corral, protecting the nervous horses that had bunched and whinnied.

  Quick raced over to add the discouragement of his big bad wolf teeth, while I shouted and flailed with my baton, trying not to break any animal’s delicate leg.

  Between the kick-dancing zombies, Quicksilver’s slashing speed and teeth, and my shouts and hard knocks, the coyote pack was retreating, snarling, with ears down.

  The oncoming dirt-bike roar of a Ranger RZR utility vehicle spitting up twin funnels of sand and snapped-off brush finished the job. The coyotes vanished into the moonlight-dappled sand as if made of it.

  The ATV ground its noisy way to the enclave’s open gate. I followed, dusting off my supple yet rhino-hide-tough Inferno Hotel catsuit. The driver doffed his helmet and goggles. My Vegas-based, designer suit–wearing ex-FBI guy was looking provocatively off-Road and Track.

  Oooh, chica, Irma purred in my mind. Our Ricardo is flaunting his muy macho mode. My motor is revving.

  Yup, my uninvited alter ego is the Queen of Shallow.

  “Coyotes?” Ric greeted me. “Are they okay?”

  Quicksilver circled the Ranger to sniff its huge tire footprint, hackles raised.

  “A bit bruised and cut,” I said. “We pick a time were-wolves aren’t out and then run into their innocent little brothers on a tear.”

  “They must be hungry to pack in fives,” he said. “Coyotes
generally stick to mated sets or run in threes.”

  “Like zombies?” I asked, nodding at the stolid waiting trio.

  “Just more stragglers from that lot I resurrected at Cicereau’s Starlight Lodge.”

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  “Keep them out of the zombie trade, at least. You bring something back from the dead, in whatever state, you’re kinda responsible for it.”

  His words left me speechless. My tough FBI guy didn’t know it, but I may have done exactly that with him.

  “I really understand,” I said in a serious tone that slipped past him. His mind was still on the wandering zombies.

  “The rest have scattered pretty far,” he said, “but I won’t need you and Quicksilver for roundups after this. Didn’t know if Cayuse here”—he slapped the Ranger’s sand-blasted engine cover—“would work to round up stray Zobos. It sure does. They shy like horses at unnatural sounds.”

  “Jeez, Ric. A man and his wheels. You’ve named that mobile mechanical monster of overbearing tires and sheer ruckus?”

  “You’ve got Dolly.”

  He nodded at the barely visible black bulk of my ’56 Caddy convertible. Her full name was Dolly Parton, and she had the awesome chrome “bumper bullets” to prove it. She was parked on the dirt road that was way too far from the highway asphalt for my taste and her black-satin finish.

  “Come inside.” Ric dismounted easily in his spandex race driver jumpsuit. “I’ll show you the setup. We need to get these Zobos tucked away for the night and the next few weeks. Now that they’ve got horses to tend and guard— and are safe behind silver wire—they’re ready for rehab.”

  “Rehabilitation for what? Basket weaving?”

  “I don’t know yet. I just can’t leave any known dead wandering around to be meat for the Immortality Mob.”

  I followed him inside the rambling barbed wire, shaking my head and muttering “Cayuse?”