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  “Yeah? They were all probably Howard Hughes rejects.”

  “Not you,” Ric said. “Even Hughes’s old, broken-down vampire self has a soft spot for you. Speaking of soft spots . . .” Ric’s hands on my hips pulled my pelvis against his while our mutual gaze never broke.

  I’d come a long way since I’d been a skittish virgin and we’d first done the salsa among the werewolves at Los Lobos nightclub just months ago. Our brush with danger—and Ric’s puzzling sojourn among the Lust level’s available females—had revved both our libidos.

  I smiled like the Mona Lisa, put my hands on his shoulders, and let my CinSim-slipper-shod feet do the walking, or shuffling, to the music we suddenly heard, “Bolero.” Those slow Latin steps in Nora’s borrowed heels produced a wiggle in the palms of his hands on my bare hips, which I could feel going from cozy-warm to fever-hot fast.

  “Get a room,” a low ironic voice commented in passing.

  I whipped my head around, indignant, only to see the back of Snow’s white-suited form threading through the dancers like an unseen ghost. Some stopped in their tracks anyway, as if sensing an invisible wind. Just as Ric and I had stopped, melded together.

  The nerve,” I muttered. “He’s on another of his ghost walks through his domain, felt but not seen.”

  Ric nodded as he drew me closer. “The nerve. He wants me to move in here to babysit the Silver Zombie.”

  “Live at the Inferno? As if I’d want you back where you were in a coma, inhabiting what amounted to an ICU in the hotel bridal suite.”

  “We could make it a bridal suite, period,” he said, feet moving in the mock-intercourse rhythm that kept our hips swaying three inches apart and then glued together again in an altogether indecent way. Our conversation continued in that same tantalizing way, murmured, private, always sexy under the surface, each coming together in almost a kiss, but not quite. It was like the famous Cary Grant–Ingrid Bergman serial kiss dialogue scene when the decency code forbade long kisses.

  “This isn’t a proposal, hombre?” I asked, brushing my lips along his jaw.

  “Only for dirty dancing. Seriously. Christophe offered me an entire floor, and you a private elevator entrance.”

  “After experiencing one of his private elevators today, I think not.”

  “Not a bad deal, Delilah.” His mouth pushed under my hair so his words vibrated against my ear. “Your Enchanted Cottage is teeming with unseen little helpers, not to mention Hector’s intrusive security-voyeurism. No real privacy. My house may be technologically smart, but it’s not secure on a level to keep out Loretta Cicereau’s fey new physical form, not to mention El Demonio’s zombie legions.”

  “So you’re actually thinking about changing residences?” I tilted my head to let his tongue take full liberties.

  “Right now, paloma, all I’m thinking is that we do need a room . . . somewhere. And soon.”

  “Not here,” I said.

  Not with Christophe so close, Irma seconded for my ears only. The last time you made healing love to Ric here, our favorite hotelier paid the price in pain.

  Snow loved rubbing that in as much as Irma, now that we both knew the touch of my lips could undo the secondhand scars I’d unintentionally inflicted any time I chose.

  Since any lip-lock mojo I had resulted from Snow’s Brimstone Kiss in the first place, you could say I owed it to him. Even if I could ever zone out and regard such healing intimacy as not quite sex for me, I’d learned from healing Ric it would be certain orgasmic pleasure for him and that was a deal breaker.

  I liked to think of myself as true to my friends and a one-man woman with a conscience. Snow seemed bound to prove that everyone had her price.

  Past secret history apart, I could understand why Snow would want Ric on board. Mi amor had dowsed the Silver Zombie from the film screen, a fully 3-D entity. That was a first even in this newly paranormal world, and Ric was the only one in it who had a prayer of controlling her. Plus, I knew he felt obliged to help her, to help any zombie he’d raised.

  Talk about voyeurs. Hector Nightwine was a piker. I bet Snow would love Ric and me getting romantic under his own admittedly big-as-a-small-country roof, knowing how creepy I’d feel about it now. Get a room! Somewhere else for sure.

  “Delilah.” Ric’s desire-deepened voice thrummed on my throat and sent all thoughts flying. “We’re safe now. The music is hot and so am I, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “Oh, I’d noticed. You’re carrying concealed . . . a dowsing rod.”

  “That’s right.” His lips moved to my neck as his breath and tongue warmed my skin and inner chambers. Then he whispered, “I want you. I want you fast and flat on your back, under me. I’ll take the Inferno bar for a bed right here and now if you don’t think of a private place pronto.”

  This “under me” talk got me simmering now that I could finally make love on my back without panicking from my childhood phobia. Once a fear is conquered, the new freedom can become addictive. Doing it on the Inferno bar with the liquor bottles from my cocktail recipes winking above us sounded even hotter.

  “You’d do that, would you?” I murmured. “Right here, right now?

  “In a heartbeat.”

  I wished I was wearing flame-red chiffon and scarlet spike heels. “All right. I give up. We’ll get a room.”

  “I don’t guarantee we’ll make it to the bed.”

  “Let’s just make it to the registration desk and improvise from there.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  A LONG, LONG hot walk later we were ensconced in a classy room at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel across from the Inferno. Neither of us had wanted to sleep where Snow had told us to, for mutual but different reasons.

  We had made it to the king-size bed, if not fully undressed, and I had made it on my back like Everywoman.

  Now we lay beside each other in dreamy satisfaction, gazing up at the gilt ceiling, a softly reflective surface of gold leaf.

  “Gilt” was the right word. The Phoenix would never be so obvious as to install a mirror over its beds, but seeing our hazy figures reflected above us, I guiltily recalled Snow’s first words to me, that our twined black and white long tresses would look sexy in the mirror above his bed. An even more evil thought, maybe Lilith could spy down on us. There wasn’t mirror enough here to do more than glow, thank . . . uh, badness.

  Back then, I’d had no clue about my paranormal partiality to silver-backed mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Right now, my silver familiar was a ring clamped onto my belly button, wearing a zircon teardrop. Or maybe the semiprecious stone was meant to emulate sweat.

  Of course a rock star would have ambitions of bedding anything female new in town that moved. And of course said female would feel rotten for harboring any pulse of response to such a blatant booty caller.

  Ric shook my hand, which was wrapped around his. “Now can we talk?”

  “Guys never want to talk after sex. I read it in Cosmo Unplugged.”

  “Usually murderous ex-ghosts don’t show up as foreplay.”

  “So we talk. Forget Snow’s visions of making us in-house dependents. On to Metropolis. What did you think of the movie?”

  “I didn’t stick around to see it.”

  “What? I swallowed my pride and sent you up there specifically to see the complete, uncut edition. It’s vital you see it now that Her Serene Silverness has imprinted on you like a duckling on its mama.”

  “That’s exactly why I didn’t swallow my pride and get herded into his penthouse theater for a long, awkward sit-down with him observing my every reaction. Plus, he had the robot there and she, uh, came on to me.”

  “What?”

  “She sort of . . . wakes up when I’m around. I didn’t want Snow witnessing that again, calculating how he can use that fact and me and . . . it. His penthouse has this vast semicircular screen and theater house with only six seats in the place. Kinda sad. I think he was expecting you to be there too.”

  �
��Well, here’s to doing the unexpected. So you left?’

  “Right. I wanted to thoroughly check out the ‘CinSim experience’ at Inferno areas other than the very public bar before I make any decisions about anything involving the Silver Zombie.”

  “For the big picture, you need to see the uncut film, mi amigo, and you just blew the one opportunity on the planet to do that.”

  “You saw it. I can rely on your reporter savvy.”

  “Secondhand won’t cut it here. The Silver Zombie responds only to you. You need to know her inside and out.”

  Ric winced. “Not that intimately, I hope.” He glanced at his suit coat, crumpled on the floor. “There’s no blood at all there. Or on me. Satisfied?”

  “Yes, but I did see it at the time.”

  “Must have been a reflection from the boiling river of blood.”

  “Is that the Styx?”

  “No. The Phlegethon.”

  “Ick. That sounds like something green you’d cough up.”

  “The name is based on the word ‘phlegm,’ and Hell was supposed to be icky in those days. Dante wrote in his own Italian Tuscan language, not the usual Latin, and he used Greek mythology and words. I know one thing. Where we escaped from was not part of the Inferno Hotel’s Dante theme attractions.”

  “We were deposited in the real Hell?”

  “Maybe we’ll figure it out if we discuss larger issues, like why and how you tried to contain Loretta Cicereau and how and why she got loose to track me through the Seventh Circle of Hell. You’ve never explained much about your solo adventures at the Gehenna Hotel. I respect your right to conduct your own investigations, as I do mine, but we weren’t as together then. Now that my hide is on the line, Del, I need full details.”

  So I explained that the Gehenna house magician, Madrigal, had rescued two nestling fey he’d found on their own. His human touch banned them from Feyland, so they’d become eternally attached to him.

  “Oh, yeah.” Ric nodded. “I’ve seen the billboards. He’s the muscleman illusionist and those two Tinker-Bell types are his tiny assistants.”

  “They may look ‘Tinker-Bell,’ but they’re venomous . . . and jealously possessive of Madrigal. Cicereau had caught me snooping around his hotel and . . . this is where my mirror-twin, Lilith, comes in . . . she’d had an anonymous nonspeaking role on one episode of CSI V, Vegas. Our glass-coffin-ready looks and her lack of clothing made her a very desirable collectible image worldwide. Cicereau wanted to build a magic act around Madrigal with me as the hot new naked corpse from the CSI franchise.”

  “I’ve seen some of that, but the quality was so bad I never realized it was supposed to represent you. What nonsense!”

  “What? You don’t think I’d make a hot naked corpse?”

  “Yes, but . . . no.” He laughed and ran his palm down my arm. “I’m screwed no matter how I answer that question. Why would you want to?”

  “I didn’t. So what was ‘nonsense’?”

  “That show’s crime scene procedure isn’t authentic. Technicians don’t act as detectives. So tell me how you avoided becoming an undead pinup girl?”

  “Madrigal’s fey assistants helped me escape from the Gehenna because they wanted me away from their man.”

  “So what has that to do with the mobster’s daughter coming after me?”

  “I used the fey girls to bind Loretta Cicereau in Madrigal’s main mirror after I’d lured her resurrected lover, who’d been brought back as a killing machine of mismated bone and patchwork flesh, into a reflection of Loretta on the empty air outside Cesar Cicereau’s penthouse floor.”

  Ric made the connection. “I get it. Loretta’s reanimated dead love was the mystery meat at the coroner’s facility when I met you there that time. How’d the gangster’s dead daughter get out of the fey stir you put her in, and why’s she so pissed at me?”

  “For one, she wants me to know what it’s like to have a lover offed. Also, she blames your dead-dowsing talents for raising her and her vampire prince, Krzysztof, from their undiscovered grave in Sunset Park. They had a horrible death—”

  “Don’t we all risk that?” Ric murmured. His distance-focused eyes were probably rerunning his tortuous time under the Karnak Hotel’s ancient Egyptian–themed superstructure.

  Every key figure in the rescue party—Sansouci, Snow, and Grizelle, the Inferno security chief—was certain Ric had passed the point of death when we finally found him. I still refused to believe my secondhand Brimstone Kiss had revived him when I hadn’t been able to pound a heartbeat back into his chest and had given him a passionate farewell kiss. The usefulness of the so-called Kiss of Life had been debunked years ago, and that wasn’t what I was trying. I wasn’t a miracle worker who thought I could save Peter Pan if I clapped my hands or puckered my lips, although I did believe in fairies if they were the terrifying fey.

  But somehow I did bring Ric back to consciousness.

  “Loretta’s fury springs not so much from the dying,” I said after a silence, “as what was done to the victims beforehand. I have to say Cesar Cicereau deserves whatever she can dish out.”

  Ric eyed me again, quizzical. “You never mentioned ‘beforehand’ details.”

  “You weren’t there and I wasn’t eager to dwell on them. When I was ‘exorcising’ the Gehenna Hotel of Loretta’s ghost, she accused her father of worse atrocities than filicide. He picked a vicious gangster way to punish the cross-supernatural pair, and probably to show his own lack of mercy. Cicereau’s men castrated and killed Loretta’s lover—” Ric’s intent listening expression tightened. “I was about to say ‘young lover,’ but he was a youthful vampire several hundred years old. Then they raped Loretta right there beside his body and killed her too.

  “She must have lived long enough to turn and clutch his body in her arms,” I theorized. “That’s why we found the skeletons embracing. That sight touched every Vegas crime professional involved in reclaiming the bones, except that sadistic cop, Haskell. So the young couple had been discovered making love, all right, but that moment was profaned. Maybe not such a great subject for postcoital chitchat, huh?”

  Ric’s frown of disbelief and horror had deepened with the details of my story. “Weird. That kind of gratuitous sexual brutality has ancient historic roots, and it’s showing up again?”

  “Hold that grisly thought.” I rolled off the bed, grabbed my bell-bottoms, and headed for the bathroom. “Time to shower out the kinks and tune our heads into war, not love.”

  Most Las Vegas bathrooms these days could serve Roman emperors. I entered a wonderland of wall-to-wall marble and mirrors, soaking tubs and whirlpools, foot baths and anatomically adaptable massaging showerheads and driers, not to mention obscenely multifunction bidets.

  Somewhere in all this in-your-face and funky excess were hidden extremely discreet actual toilets.

  Ric followed me in, whistling at the shining high-tech water and action toys. “Do you think the master bath on my proposed private floor at the Inferno could have all this?”

  “And more, much more decadent. Trust Snow. Also probably a stainless steel service bay for the robot.”

  “Now here’s a good question. Do CinSims sleep?”

  “Maybe standing up, like horses.”

  Ric began shrugging off his unbuttoned shirt, his only remaining article of clothing. I was relieved to confirm there was no blood on it, nor on his skin. Somehow Loretta had managed to wing only his suit coat. “I know humans can do other things standing up than sleep.”

  “Again?” I asked, pleased to find him unharmed but not unarmed, so to speak.

  “The first time was fast and dirty. This will be slow and clean.”

  FRESHLY SCRUBBED AND fully dressed, and thus feeling extremely virtuous for fornicators, Ric and I lounged together in the bedroom sofa area before giving up the posh room that was ours until morning. This had actually felt like a mini-vacation, moreso than our recent road trip to Wichita.

  “I hat
e to ruin the mood,” Ric said, “but what the werewolf mob did to the teen lovers sounds like transferring life-force rituals for dead Viking chieftains.”

  “I have a feeling my stomach is not going to like this.”

  “It’s . . . horrible and sexist, yes. A slave girl is sacrificed. It begins with her being raped by men in the chieftain’s guard.”

  By then, I was pulsing with fury. “Yeah, testosterone-driven cultures always come up with reasons to torture and defile women.”

  “Then it gets ugly. She’s sent into the tents of warriors and traders, who explain they’re raping her out of love for their dead leader. Finally she is taken into a tent on the Viking ship bearing the chief’s body, where six men rape her before strangling and stabbing her.”

  “Any chance you can raise some Viking chieftains to feed to Loretta and the fey girls?”

  “That isn’t so different from parts of Africa today, where men believe that raping virgins will cure them of AIDS.”

  “Some days I could sneak back into Dr. Frankenstein’s lab under the Karnak Hotel and whip up a nuclear bomb that targets only testosterone-bearers, you excepted. Is there a reason you further ruined my view of the inhumane human race? Yes, Loretta was raped and shot. What are you saying? Cicereau is a resurrected Viking as well as a werewolf?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised to find a long line of werewolves among the Vikings and other Northern marauders, but no. I’m saying the drug cartels’ horrible violence to innocent men, women, and children in Mexico often repeats those ghastly primitive rituals. I’ve long suspected the drug lords are either employing academic experts in perverse human behavior or some sort of demonic sadism consultant. Perhaps they have since the early twentieth century. Look at the tribal wars in Africa. And Cicereau was a chieftain of his tribe, disciplining a disobedient child. Haven’t you wondered why he’s lived so long? Werewolves aren’t ordinarily immortal, like vampires.”