Silver Zombie dspi-4 Read online

  “And what’s with the major eyeliner?” Sansouci asked. “He looks like the Rudolph Valentino CinSim at the Karnak.”

  “It worked for Johnny Depp. Re-creating his ancient beauty potions is like a religion with Shez. He isn’t shy about marketing his products.”

  “How’d you get mixed up with him? What kind of super is he?” Sansouci asked.

  “Ah … his job for his big boss was about the same as what you and Grizelle do for yours.”

  “So he’s paranormal muscle of some kind.”

  “You could say that.”

  “And his hobby is making wine and … perfumes?”

  “That’s his physical therapy.”

  “For what?”

  “PTS.”

  “Post-traumatic stress? This guy doesn’t look like an army vet. You’re losing me, Delilah, not that I wouldn’t like to find you in a dark, deserted cul-de-sac.”

  “Don’t you have enough women in your blood-bank harem already, Sansouci?”

  “Yeah, but I can always use a fresh item on the menu.”

  Sansouci was a modern, civilized vamp. He sipped a little from enough adoring ladyloves to live without killing, at least just for blood.

  “See those cobra-headed gold taps Shez was mentioning?” I said, eager to distract him from his favorite target, me.

  “Yeah. Not beer on tap, I hope,” he said. “That wouldn’t be smart, given the high prices on the beauty potions. Just the bottles are worth a bundle. Malachite, lapis lazuli, tiger’s-eye.” His gaze had drifted to Grizelle, who was interrogating Shez without him even knowing it.

  “Sterile artificial blood,” I whispered in Sansouci’s ear this time. “Totally legal and dependent on no living creature’s circulatory system. Interested?”

  “Hell, no. Would I drink near beer on a bet? Blood on tap? You’ve obviously never had vampire sex. Where’s the seduction? Where’s the danger? Where’s the warmth, the beating heart, the heat? Where’s the fun, Street? Huh? You like it hard, don’t you? You don’t like life, or death, too easy.”

  His eyes were on the hair covering my neck. His eyelids had almost closed as one outer upper lip lifted over his teeth in a classic Elvis-sneer, but his voice went so low and deep I felt the vibration in my veins. I also felt myself swaying toward him like a cobra to a snake charmer.

  I jerked away. “Where’s the profit, you should be asking.”

  He hissed out a sigh of frustration, and then finally gave the gilded faucets a serious survey.

  “Those look like real gold,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “Okay. I give Metrosexual Boy that. Blood would look deliciously tasty flowing from those eighteen-karat snake fangs. It would appeal to the kind of upwardly mobile vamp who sniffs cocaine.” His eyes narrowed to malachite-hard slits. “Your sponsor at the Inferno could market the hell out of a product like that. That might nudge your amateur cocktails off his featured drink board.”

  Yeah. Christophe, aka Cocaine of the Seven Deadly Sins rock band, aka Snow, knew how to market danger and death. And he’d stolen my Albino Vampire and Brimstone Kiss cocktails recipes for his bar after I’d invented them there on the spot.

  But there were other rich entrepreneur hoteliers in town, and only one of them was undead for sure. And only I knew who he was for sure. Did I want to share with Sansouci?

  He claimed to feel the “warmth,” something Howard Hughes would never have been capable of, man or vampire. We both were at odds with his boss, Cesar Cicereau. I could use an ally on the dark side.

  Cozying up to Sansouci might make Ric uneasy. Still, Sansouci, representing Cicereau, had been a major player in Ric’s rescue party. So had Snow. Which one did I prefer to confide in? Sansouci was wrong about me. The answer I liked was easy. Him.

  “Try the tap,” I advised Sansouci. “You’re a new breed of vamp. This is a fresh type of blood from an inventive new source. What can it hurt?”

  He eyed my mouth while I spoke as if he wanted to eat it.

  Holy Hathor! Shez’s seductive ancient scents sure brought out new hormone levels in the old town.

  “If I lived on brewed blood out of a golden spigot,” Sansouci said, “I wouldn’t need to sup on a nightly harem. I could concentrate on one lady. Would you like that, Delilah?”

  “Would you?”

  “You’re the monogamous sort,” he mused. “I might like your type for a change of pace. I confess I find fidelity really hot, but it’s not available.”

  Fidelity? From a vampire with a harem? I suppose the novelty would last … for a while. We were back to talking sex and blood, again, and a deep nagging doubt tugged at my composure.

  “Look,” I said. “Try the new brew. Some vamp has to be the first. Why not you?”

  His grin was lethal. “Yeah. Some vamp has to be the first. Why not with you?”

  “I’m taken.”

  “Granted.” Sansouci eyed the cobra-headed spigot. “I’m taken too, indentured by Cicereau’s Blood Price. I don’t expect that condition to last forever. Come on and watch. I’ll toast you with the first … what? Mug? Glass. What’s this Shezmou going to serve his make-believe blood in?”

  “I have no idea.” I turned to our host. “Shez?”

  “At your command, Deliverer.” His impressive presence dwarfed even Sansouci and me. I glimpsed Grizelle scowling over his bare red-bronzed shoulder.

  “We have a first customer for the house vintage,” I said. “Can you pour a … draft?”

  “With pleasure.” Shez swept a gold-band-wristed arm over Sansouci’s broad shoulders and muscled him to the bar. He plucked a jeweled gold cup from the shelves and filled it at the tap, jerking the cobra neck to a broken right angle with relish.

  A thin ruby stream pissed into the cup.

  “Nothing from here goes to the police lab, right?” Sansouci asked.

  Grizelle snorted.

  Sansouci took the cup from Shezmou’s dark hands into his own pale ones. For the first time, I recognized Sansouci as Black Irish, like me. Just how old was he? In pre-vampire years?

  He lifted the rim to his lips, threw back his head with the abandon of a howling wolf, and downed the liquid in one gulp like a shot of booze.

  Three previously held breaths suddenly whooshed through the small showroom.

  Sansouci lifted his cup Viking-style. “Brewer. Another round. Most satisfying,” he declared, eyeing me, “but not quite up to what one finds at the Inferno Bar.”

  This was a reference to me, not Grizelle, who nevertheless growled softly as she edged closer to tower over me.

  “First,” she told me in a hissing feline whisper, “you betray my master, Christophe. Now you hoodwink Cicereau’s security chief, who is apparently a blood addict. When will you abandon your beloved Ric? You fought me for his redemption. I predict that one day soon you will fight for his death.”

  When it came to Mean Girls, Grizelle was top of the heap, claws down.

  “You’re just annoyed at not being the center of attention,” I answered. “Shez is now the prize impressive supernatural on display on the Strip.”

  “When does he join the Chippendales show at the Rio?”

  “Never. Trading on his macho appeal is beneath Shez’s dignity. He’s an artist of the old school, a wizard with herbs and spices and wine grapes and sometimes … souls.”

  “Soiled souls, like yours?” Grizelle asked, her contralto voice sinking to an even more sinister whispered hiss.

  “I know what you owe my master for stealing his Brimstone Kiss and sacrificing his very skin for your lover’s pleasure,” she told me in a low, furious growl. “Montoya’s scars were old and no longer pained him physically. My master suffered the fresh and brutal physical burden of years’ worth of whipping in one session. I only realized you had to be the source when it was far too late. Christophe is more than Cocaine or Snow. He’ll call in your debt one day, believe it. I can’t wait to help that happen.”

  Lordy! I’d be
en besieged by two sets of seething green eyes that wanted more than I was willing to give them this morning. Way too much excitement for a Kansas girl.

  Someone loomed behind me. “If you talk of souls,” Shez told Grizelle, “I don’t wish to hear it. This is only my … day job.”

  I nodded encouragingly. Shez was getting the lingo fast.

  “You don’t wish to see me at my night job,” he told both his corporate suitors. “It is too rough for the likes of you.”

  Sansouci’s dark eyebrows peaked like Mephistopheles’ with curiosity, while Grizelle merely looked haughty.

  “The mighty Delilah,” Shez went on, to my glee, “is my … mouthpiece. You must negotiate with her. I weary of deciding too much. I prefer formulating my preparations or taking swift action. This talk of business and percentages and of ‘cloning the shops’ is annoying. My workplace is not … isn’t the place for discussing such boring things. You must deal with the mighty Delilah if you wish to bargain, or my serving girl, Fawnschwartz, if you wish to purchase.”

  Shez withdrew through the tinkling glass bead curtains.

  “How rude,” Grizelle growled.

  I smiled and shrugged. “He’s the creative genius.”

  “‘Mighty Delilah,’” Grizelle spat.

  “You had to have been there.”

  “Where?” Sansouci asked immediately.

  “None of your business. Now. I’m going to be unavailable for a week or so. I suggest you two meet with your principals and each draw up a business plan I can review on my return.

  “I wouldn’t advise slipping back to deal directly with Shez. He looks like a big, easygoing lug, and does indeed have a softer side, but he has quite a demonic temper and I can’t be responsible for your safety unless I’m present.”

  “You … responsible for our safety?” Shadows of Grizelle’s white whiskers were coming and going on her dusky face as her human upper lip curled with fury, the urge to shift barely under her control. Her long red fingernails fanned in and out. “I could eat you alive, and almost did once.”

  Sansouci just smiled, on firm ground again, and donned his deep black sunglasses. “Looks like the mighty Delilah could use an escort to see her safely out.”

  I jerked my arm out of Sansouci’s firm custody. No way did I want it to look like I needed male intervention in front of Grizelle.

  She remained, pacing the shop, studying its wares, and terrifying the young clerk with a thoughtful, hungry look.

  Sansouci led me down the street to the awning over a deserted doorway.

  “What did you do to frost Grizelle’s whiskers?” he asked, admiringly. “I knew you were capable of rushing into the lion’s den, but she is no cat to mess with.”

  “We had a discussion. It ended in a draw.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “That’s all I’m going to tell you. And you gave yourself away to Grizelle as a vampire, not the presumed werewolf everyone takes you for.”

  “I wouldn’t mind giving myself away to her, were she a client of mine, in her human form. She’s not one to gossip, Delilah. Besides, she respects vamps more than wolf boys.”

  “You need her respect?”

  “It’ll help negotiations when you return, remember? Come on, Delilah. I’m your pal. I was in Montoya’s rescue party. I went into that damn fey maze under the Gehenna with you. You will award me the franchise, right?”

  “The word is ‘negotiations.’ It’s not prearranged, even for frenemies like you.”

  “I’ve been promoted to a frenemy? That sounds promising. Love-hate relationships can be damn stimulating.”

  “Cool it. I don’t want phone-line chat. I only came outside with you because I want to ask you something about Ric’s time with the Karnak vampires.”

  “Beyond nasty.”

  “I know that.”

  “He has the stones of a statue, I’ll say that, to resist giving them the information they wanted despite the leeches and the vampire tsetse flies and the lords of the blood-dance siccing every vamp in the place on him.”

  “I know that. I don’t need a play-by-play. I’m beginning to wonder if they did get what they wanted. They’ve been quiet since then.”

  “Montoya did not give them a word, I’d never believe that,” Sansouci said.

  “Your faith is touching,” I said, my grin going crooked even as I produced it. I took a deep breath. “What if they weren’t just torturing him by draining every last drop of blood?”

  “Yeah, they did that. He was dead, Delilah, until you put those ruby-glossed lips of yours on his. Your CPR chest-thumps didn’t revive him. Your kiss did.” Sansouci’s expression grew grave. “Now that I think about it, a kiss than can revive a corpse might off a vampire. Maybe you and I don’t have a future, after all.”

  “Of course we don’t! What I’m wondering, all of a sudden, is if the damn twin pharaohs got exactly what they wanted.”

  His forehead wrinkled under the rakish forelock of silver-streaked black hair, but his eyes remained an unread mystery behind the shades.

  Then he nodded ever so slightly and slowly.

  “Ric dowses for the dead. He can raise them. The dowsing and finding I get. Ordinary people can do that for water, or even gemstones and precious metals. I know that from my … long and inglorious past. Finding is one thing, but raising the dead as zombies? How?”

  “The dowsing rod and Ric’s special talent do the finding. It takes a few drops of his blood on the dowsing rod to actually raise the bodies.”

  Sansouci did what I wanted from him. He speculated like a predator. “And if one had pints and pints of that dead-raising blood?”

  “Oh, my God! The twin pharaohs’ vamp troops weren’t consuming Ric’s blood. They had their own inbred stock for that then. They were taking it. For use later to raise any dead they wanted resurrected.”

  “You’re just feeling me out to confirm your own suspicions, Delilah. Flattering, but useless. I have no idea why they’d want that power, but their having it can’t be good for the rest of us.”

  “And Ric.”

  “Always Ric with you.” He swept off the sunglasses in the shade, those emerald-hard eyes looking for something in me I had no desire to ever show him. “Call me green with envy,” he said wryly, “but I can’t deny he’s a good man in a bad world. If he’s still ‘just’ a man.”

  The words chilled me more than his gemstone gaze.

  Sansouci, any vampire, was something of a soul-shifter as well. Once he’d been mortal and human, and he remembered that time. Now he was immortal and unhuman. He knew way more about merciless adaptation and accommodation than a fierce shape-shifter like Grizelle had ever had to learn.

  That’s why he scared me even more, in his fashion.

  I was glad to be getting out of town this afternoon, even if it meant looking my past bogeymen in the face.

  Chapter Six

  PACKING FOR KANSAS had forced me to dig out one of my conservative TV reporter suits. The Enchanted Cottage’s invisible “personal shopper” apparently wouldn’t touch anything so contemporary and commonplace. My chrome multihanger bought from a closing dress shop remained bare.

  What a wardrobe witch! She—or he—had never bothered with my growing collection of casual jeans and tops since arriving in Las Vegas, either. That made me realize my new locale had dropped the whole, mid-tier “working woman” wardrobe out of my life. But that was Vegas. You either tromped the hot streets in flip-flops, surfing shorts, and fanny packs, or you hit the hot spots in glitz and glamour.

  I checked my email on the office/den computer one last time … in fact, it was noonish, so Ric was outside tooting Dolly’s horn and Quicksilver was adding the exclamation of a sharp bark to each toot. Guys just don’t want to let a girl have fun.

  Only … I glimpsed several occasional but familiar email addys, fresh since the wee hours of this morning. Several bore the .sup extension for the hot new “supernatural” domain. I was hearing
from infernobait, stone-donsnow, snowgasm224, cocainiac, snowkissedslut, all at the web address, kissedoffsnow.sup, and brimfulbabe and others from the original leading Snow fan site, snowkissedsluts.sup.

  The subject lines were ominous. “It’s OVER!” “Who wants JUST a FREAKING scarf except an Undead Elvis freak???” “Glad I kicked the KISS.”

  Ignoring the impatient outside clamor, I opened some of the messages, heart pounding.

  My God, I was right. Snow was no longer closing his shows by lassoing his mosh-pit fans with a silk scarf and making them swoon from the multi-orgasms of the Brimstone Kiss.

  How long had this been not going on?

  That’s what these women had been feverishly texting each other about. The emails were meant to update the older blog members. I saw my name mentioned, usually with gratitude that I’d convinced them to go “cold Kiss” and forget about hoping for a second round of bliss. It sounded like they’d all “gone electric,” anyway.

  I was shocked. Could I have been the last Brimstone Kissee? This was no time to do the math. I grabbed my duffel bag and hustled out to install it in Dolly’s huge trunk.

  Ric sat behind the convertible’s big red-and-chrome steering wheel, clapping sarcastically. Quicksilver sat in the backseat, his big red tongue lolling out like he was getting heatstroke from waiting for me.

  “All right,” I said, jumping into the passenger seat. “Let’s roll.”

  My sigh on takeoff blew off any more thought of Snow and all his works for now.

  At first, I’d been surprised by how much I resisted leaving Vegas on its own for a week. Now that I’d put various bigwigs of my acquaintance into suspended animation, I felt much better about abandoning the city to its overlords for a while.

  Somehow I’d become a freelance gadfly-combination-warrior maid-of-all-work for werewolf mobster Cesar Cicereau, undercover vampire entrepreneur Howard Hughes, and rock star–supernatural question mark Christophe/Cocaine/Snow. Not to mention my landlord, media boss Hector Nightwine.

  Pursuing hot new attractions like Shez and his offbeat enterprise was the Vegas mogul’s favorite competitive sport. They’d all be a lot less likely to get up to anything really despicable as long as negotiations over Chez Shez remained in limbo. Much as I wasn’t crazy about seeing Wichita again, I was pleased at the prospect of not having to face evil on a cosmic scale for a whole week.