Virtual Virgin dspi-5 Read online

  “Time will tell what I will or will not do, Delilah Street, not you. Cicereau, being werewolf, did unto his competitor vampires as he’d do unto another pack. He scattered and buried each one. Vampires, though, are lone wolves who usually prey individually. Then came the Millennium Revelation of the many supernaturals who had hidden from the humans. The old-style vampire wouldn’t fare so well today. Besides, they tend to bicker when gathered in political groups. They’re on separate power trips. What I do takes discipline.”

  That’s something the huge “pack” of organized vampires right under the Strip had, but I was here to learn the lay of the land, not utterly remake it.

  “Is it possible,” I wondered, “that suspending those vampires’ lives and power gave werewolf mobster Cicereau some extended mortality?”

  “Maybe. I was expendable because I wasn’t like them. I remembered I wasn’t always vampire.” He stated the obvious with a mocking sideways glance. “Several hundred years ago, give a century or two, I was the second son of a landowner in Ireland.”

  “I knew you had Black Irish roots like me,” I couldn’t help exclaiming, like we were distant cousins. I could hear Irma saying, Back off, girl.

  Sansouci wasn’t buying either. “You gonna put that on the nightly news, Delilah? This is my story, not yours, for a change.”

  I winced, but was relieved to hear him use my first name again, so relieved that I sipped my fresh drink again. The added alcohol warmed my insides, but my fingers were still ice white and ice cold on the glass.

  Sansouci addressed his tale to the skull’s interior facade of molded plastic bone, the reverse of the Silver Zombie’s robot suit. A faint Irish accent embroidered his tale, something I was always a sucker for.

  “The eldest son got the fiefdom, with the might of England soon to come at him. For me, it was either the Church or the itinerant sword—”

  “So you became a mercenary, and still are to this day.”

  “Street, shut up. You must have been a lousy reporter. Why didn’t you just make it up yourself?” He eyed me, hard. “So I became a monk.”

  “You?” I flash-carded my visions of his Las Vegas blood harem, all lounging belly dancers wearing no more than veils and glittering coin belts, like the Metropolis Whore of Babylon. “Monks are . . . poor and lorded over by the abbot and the order rules and—”

  “Celibate.” He grinned with rakish pleasure as my illusions came tumbling down.

  “How can . . . how could—?”

  “Story? Mine?”

  I relaxed a bit. Everybody ached to tell his or her story. Sansouci was enjoying shocking the saltwater out of me. That was what a good reporter wanted, an interview subject invested in amazing and surprising his audience.

  I nodded and supported my face on my fists, a rapt audience of one myself now. I finally had my Interview with the Vampire. Anne Rice, eat your new, angel-hooked heart out!

  “The Church was a refuge then,” he said. “My vows were solemn. Poverty, obedience, celibacy. Obedience was the hardest.”

  If Irma were here, I’d be rolling my eyes at her.

  “I was sixteen. We worked from sunrise to sunset then. I was hoeing the chard patch, meditating on Our Lord’s crown of thorns like a good boy. I’d forgotten that vespers might toll for evening prayers in the monastery, a severe failing for a monk.”

  I nodded, spellbound.

  He reached out, his hand huge, I noticed for the first time. His fingers brushed back and replaced the hair falling onto my shoulders. His cold undead thumb found my carotid artery with its first gesture. My skin felt clammy, but I’d worked myself up into quite an anxious fever, I told myself. I could use a . . . cold compress.

  Yikes, Irma broke through. He’s got us by the pulse point.

  “You’ve never felt a vampire bite,” Sansouci said as caressingly as his thumb rested on my neck. “I don’t know how it is for anyone else, but in my time and place, there was no sensation at first, just a barely sensed pressure.” His thumb pressure intensified. I felt the tension all through my body. “Then the slightest . . . tingle and then the impinging edge of something . . . small but hard, though not like steel.”

  His thumbnail impressed my skin.

  “And then a flood of what doctors now would describe as anesthetic with an aphrodisiac overtone, but in my time and with my youth I only knew it felt like . . . surrender. The surrender of sleep, even a spiritual surrender, as an acolyte gave to the will of God and the abbey. My vows lulled me.”

  I knew certain martial arts grips could stop the flow of blood to the brain. I felt dizzy and breathless, but Sansouci’s touch hadn’t tightened. I was doing this to myself, and I almost sensed craving the sort of surrender he was describing. Utter.

  So I let the vampire gaze at and touch the side of my naked neck, nostalgically. He was trusting me with his story, the most important thing in his long immortal life. I let him speak uninterrupted. A reporter has to take big risks for the big story.

  The pressure of his thumb relented. His hand stayed anchored on my flesh, his red-rimmed eyes still stared intently into mine.

  “I woke in the neighboring woods, hearing the monks calling as they sought me with torches. My hoe lay in the chard patch where I’d dropped it. I heard the rustles of the night as I never had before, thirsted for what I thought was the body and blood of Christ as I never had before.

  “One monk had found my abandoned hoe and began circling the spot after the others had vanished around the abbey’s great hulk, their calls growing faint, as was any sense I had of belonging to that scene, to those people, to those mortals. Do you feel faint, Delilah?”

  I did. He spoke on.

  “A shadow crept up on the lone laboring monk. I could see as never before in the dark. I could see what had happened and what I was now. Only the shadow of myself. I crept up on the alien shadow.”

  My instincts urged me to bite my lip from the suspense, but I resisted.

  “The shadow felled the monk, and I felled the shadow. I broke the wooden hoe handle over my robed thigh and impaled the monster’s chest with its thick, jagged end. It had carried a sword. I dragged its body into the woods and cut off its head, then stripped it of clothes and donned them, leaving my empty robe beside it. I returned to kneel over my former fellow monk.

  “Then I drank him dry between mutters of miserere cordias.”

  God have mercy on me. I knew that’s what the Latin phrase meant. On me too.

  I sat, breathing and wishing I could disguise that function. And this had happened centuries ago. Centuries. I was speaking to the last living witness, a vampire.

  “They never knew you . . . remained?” I asked.

  “Staked, headless vampire. Drained monk and robe. An uncommon couple, yet the only two-plus-two their superstitious but holy medieval minds needed. They burned the bodies and my robe, and put up a gravestone for me on an empty plot.”

  “What name did it read?”

  “None of your business, Delilah Street. I have lost everything of my past. Concealing my original identity is the only thing I am pleased about.”

  “After all these centuries? At least you have an identity to guard. Even my name isn’t really my own,” I admitted.

  His thumb stroked my neck, the callus on it oddly human, then withdrew. “Stage name?”

  “I said I was a reporter, not an actress.”

  “Could have fooled me, drama queen.”

  He was trying to distract me, but I wasn’t buying it.

  “I was an abandoned infant supposedly found on Delilah Street, only there’s no such address where I grew up, in Wichita, Kansas. You want to forget who you were and I want to find out who I am.”

  “‘Aren’t we a pair’?” Sansouci quoted the melancholy classic song, leaning back in the velvet banquette.

  He was showing some of the lazy surrender he’d been recounting during his tale of his simultaneous first time of being bitten and biting, of his virtual virginho
od lost. He was the usual cynical Sansouci again. Maybe.

  Either my cocktail recipe or telling his tale had returned Sansouci into the deceptively laid-back persona he automatically used to lull human or werewolf fears. He’d had centuries to perfect that. I could see how modern women got hooked on the tension between his sensually knowing exterior and deeply dangerous needs. It was tantalizing.

  He licked his lower lip without being conscious of the fact, considering me. “No more questions?”

  “Dozens. How did you . . . live?”

  “Animal blood repelled me. I soon realized I needed a large supply of victims who wouldn’t be missed. I’d chosen God as a master because I knew my temperament wouldn’t bow long to any temporal lord, but I’d shown a knack for swordplay. Can you guess? We’re talking the fourteenth century here.”

  “You’re talking the fourteenth century. I can’t believe the changes you’ve seen. From . . . warlords to twenty-first-century gangsters.”

  “That breed has changed the least of all, Delilah. What did I do with myself for the next seven or eight hundred years?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “You’re an inquiring reporter. You pride yourself on putting two and two together. You tell me. Psych me out.”

  He leaned back, narrowed eyes challenging me to “undress” his mind-set, even his soul, to dissect his vampire nature overlaid on a young, naive, obedient, chaste monk of an unthinkably alien time to modern me.

  Kinda like me a few months ago. I’d let Sansouci unnerve me. It was time to reverse the situation.

  “The Irish then were disenfranchised in their own land,” I said. “First by the Normans, then by the English. They became wanderers, like the Jews. Bards and . . . mercenaries roaming all lands even into the nineteenth and twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Even today, a lot of the freelance journalists braving the Mideast wars and meltdowns to report for the American news networks are Irish. Still, you didn’t crave pay or treasures to live, but blood. Do you play an instrument?” I asked, hunting clues.

  He considered, then said, “Only women now.”

  His voice, the tone, the implications were meant to distract me. They did.

  How did a monk learn to be so sexy? To eat, dummy!

  Paging back to my Our Lady of the Lake convent school classes allowed me to access a lot of religious history.

  I closed my eyes and recited. “It was the end of four of five hundred years of rabid Viking butchery and terrorism in the British Isles and Europe, but the developing nations were seething with war, even to sending knights on crusade to the Holy Land, the Middle East.”

  My fingers tapped on the table.

  “What instrument are you playing?” Sansouci taunted me.

  I studied their dark reflection as my fingers pantomimed a riff on the black glass.

  “Castanets,” I said, realizing what my unconscious was telling me. “Spain was under siege by Moors in that period. Wait.” I sat up straight. “Yours isn’t a night’s tale, like around the campfire. It’s a knight’s tale. You joined the monk warriors who fought to hold Muslims back from Europe and reclaim the Holy Land.”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Battle was butchery then. Blood was everywhere. Your liquid diet would go unnoticed.”

  “More than that, we battled for the cause of heaven. Our foes deserved to die.”

  “Maybe their leaders did, not the foot soldiers.”

  “It was warrior to warrior then, knight to Saracen. Drinking their blood only further eradicated them from the face of the earth.”

  “You didn’t turn any?”

  “Never. Why? A vampire turns a human only from desperation.”

  “What makes a vampire desperate except lack of blood?”

  “Utter hatred or revenge . . . or establishing a link with a mortal he or she can’t bear to lose. It’s always beauty that destroys the beast, Delilah.”

  “Then you never had any human connection in all those centuries?”

  “Only brothers at arms, and they came and went, as the wars came and went.”

  “Why were you turned in the first place? You were already dead and out of the way.”

  “The most common of the seven deadly sins. Greed.”

  “Greed? You were a penniless monk.’

  “I recognized my assailant after I staked him, a trusted retainer of my elder brother’s. Apparently Gowan feared I’d tire of the abbey and take what mere happenstance had earned him. I was his superior in everything but order of birth.”

  “I don’t doubt it. He’s long moldering in the grave and you’ve lasted.” I sipped again. “How did you . . . convert from battlefield to bedroom?”

  “The times did it for me. I ran out of ‘holy’ wars sometime in the eighteenth century. Then I looked for ‘just’ wars on the side of the foot soldiers, not the rulers, and finally I realized by the mid-nineteenth century that war was just war, no ‘justice for all’ in them at all. I hadn’t chosen to be a vampire but I could choose to dine from humanity’s enemies until the modern age made it clear they weren’t to be found on a battlefield.”

  “So you turned to literally living off women.”

  “No. I still honored my vows of poverty and chastity.”

  “You?”

  “You’re not the only aging virgin to hit Las Vegas, Delilah.”

  “Oh, come on! Your harem?”

  “By the earlier twentieth century it was harder to find anyone deserving to die in war, certainly not enough to keep me going. Women, however, were starting to discover what they wanted, including passion that included a controlled bit of danger. I discovered I could survive on multiple small doses of blood.”

  “That doesn’t make you a virgin.”

  “I’ve never had sex without blood, without involuntary need. For that reason, I consider myself true to my vows of celibacy to this day. I’ve never really made love to a woman, just for the sake of it. I have never loved. I think you might know what I mean now.”

  “And, in your eyes, that makes you a virgin?”

  “A virtual virgin, anyway,” he said, with a wry twist to his smile and a raise of his glass. “Just as you still are, really.”

  “So in your mind virginity has to do with innocence despite experience. Or experience despite innocence.”

  He nodded. “All you are now, Delilah, is an experienced virgin, in my expert opinion of the same state.”

  That reminded me of the Silver Zombie, who combined the extremes of innocence and experience through the actress and split personalities of the saintly and salacious Maria character. I wondered if that’s why she disturbed me so deeply, along with her obvious dependence on Ric.

  Sansouci’s head lolled back against the red velvet upholstery. He did look like a knight, a Technicolor effigy of a stone knight in some aged graveyard forever England or Ireland.

  “Now,” he asked. “What did you really want from me other than a very long life story?”

  “The doctors wouldn’t let me donate blood to Ric when he was drained at the Karnak. I want to know what’s wrong with it.”

  “Your blood? You want an in-the-field analysis? You want me to make it?”

  “I know you can . . . control yourself.”

  “Maybe not. You’re obviously worried that something is up with your blood. I might go berserk. I do scare you, don’t I?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Good.”

  “If you were to take a sample . . . a tiny sample, where would it be?”

  “On my tongue.”

  “I meant on me.”

  “Oh.” Sansouci obviously relished the chance to inspect me again. “Any erotic zone will do.” His eyes made a leisurely Grand Tour. “Lips. Neck.” They followed my snowy ruffles halfway down. “Breasts.”

  I was shocked enough to show it. Blood as mother’s milk.

  “Delilah.” His gently corrective voice was even more seductive. “Are you going to force me to say nip
ples in mixed company?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  He shrugged, continuing. “Tits.”

  Oh, shit!

  “Fingertips. Navel. And, my favorite, thighs.” His expression turned smugly angelic. “Inner thighs.”

  “I meant places that are showing. My favorite is a fingertip.”

  “So school nurse, Delilah. Sterile. Impersonal.”

  “Exactly. And where would you learn about school nurses, Brother Monk?”

  “From one of my circle of current donors. Oddly, she prefers the fingertips too. Must like role reversal. Not on your luscious glossed lips, Delilah? That’s the only place you need or use cosmetics and you do them up right.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Urban Decay. I love your Pocket Rocket lip gloss too. I recall you being afraid my Resurrection Kiss might have the reverse effect on you. It could put you back where you belong. Really dead.”

  “I said I wasn’t sure of what your kiss would do now. I’m not afraid.”

  “It might be lethal.”

  “You need to know this. Your kiss has already revived Montoya. He’s immune. You’ll never know if your kiss can thrill or kill another man if you don’t test it out. Try me. I like danger.”

  “Such a brave little lab rat. Fingertip,” I said severely, extending my forefinger, print up.

  He took my hand in his, his thumb caressing the inside of my wrist, which felt way too good. I liked danger too, I was discovering. His dark head bent to my fingers. I felt like a medieval lady having her hand kissed. All the paintings of that period teemed with languid ladies being led around by the hand. Sanscouci would have had a field day if he hadn’t been hunting the battlefields then.

  “You’ll feel a tiny prick, like from a school nurse, Delilah,” he murmured. “Your fingertip will hardly sense it.”

  And he was right, it didn’t, because he pulled my hand and arm over his shoulder to draw me into his arms. His lips were on mine before I could say “Close sesame.”

  I could have elbowed or kneed him, but I’d never let another man kiss me besides Ric—Snow’s Brimstone smooch certainly didn’t count. I couldn’t be sure Snow had ever been human, and Sansouci had. I needed to know what about my blood was so exotic or toxic it couldn’t be transfused to Ric. I now feared it could have a vampire taint. Would my half-vamp fading Brimstone Kiss have special effects on someone other than Ric?