MIRROR WALKING.
Was that the name for what I did? I mulled Madrigal's words and ideas after I left him and the theater area.
Maybe what I'd told Captain Malloy wasn't bullshit. I was a predator. I'd come stalking three men in the past twenty-four hours: Snow, Madrigal and now perhaps the most dangerous of all.
Meanwhile, mirror walking was of no use. I could only walk around the immense exterior of the Gehenna hotel and casino as day turned to night, hoping to catch sight of my next prey leaving. The constant movement helped me forget my killer cramps, and I looked like Security making rounds.
Quicksilver was with me, but on "shadow" alert. That meant he remained invisible until needed. He was such a brilliant dog. I only told him "shadow," once, and he had my back with nobody the wiser.
So I could pretend to be a tough mean street-walking investigator and know I had an awesome ace in the hole. In fact, Quicksilver was so discreet even I forgot about his presence at times.
Finally, I spotted a black-clad man leaving the massive hotel's back service area. It was after ten p.m. but I thought I recognized the man's not-quite-muscle-bound movements, as graceful as a Grizelle's in white tiger form.
He was big and tough, but had a brain. And, more important, I thought, a sense of humor. And he was definitely heterosexual. My newly awakened senses told me that. My newly awakened senses also told me he had recognized my newly awakened senses.
True, he had seen me escorted off the Gehenna premises to become dog meat or werewolf meat, if there was a difference, but I'd sensed a tad of regret. In this town even tads of regrets are hard to come by.
I was willing to bet that an urban werewolf's daily sex lust was stronger than the monthly, moon-driven killing lust. One must live to kill another day. I had no idea where he'd go, but was prepared to dive into the Sinkhole's migrating underbelly again, if necessary. Instead, he led me to a private club off the Strip.
The windowless entrance was disturbingly unlabeled. I could be entering a sex or a fight club. The clientele could be gay or straight or blended. Human or unhuman. Or blended.
Hey, these motorcycle boots were made for riding, so they're going to walk wherever they want to. Attitude is all. I'd learned that in the group homes.
After taking off my fake badge (but leaving on my police belt, around here it would probably just be taken as fetish fashion), I approached the blank door and kicked it a few times, then stood to the side.
It opened, a long black gun barrel sticking out.
"You going to use that thing or just think about it?" I asked in a husky tone.
A man's head came peering around the door's edge.
I pushed the door with all my weight and caught gun-barrel and gunman's neck in the crack and pressed for dear life. Mine.
"I'm here to see a man about some business," I said. "You think I might do that?"
Sputtering curses, he eyed my motorcycle boots and tight leather pants through the crack, then my mirror-shaded eyes and angel-white hair. I'd learned from the Snow mystique.
"Ah, yeah. Our clients like your breed of cat."
Hmm. Would that be biker chic, tough chick, or ambiguous human/unhuman stock? Guess I'd have an opportunity to find out inside. I showed the doorman a lot of teeth-either a smile or a feral grin, you choose-and eased in when he opened the door.
Inside was totally smoky. It smelled like a pot factory cheek-by-jowl with a cigar bar. Very guy. I sighed internally to see some eyes that shone green, gold and silver in the half-light. Lots of unhumans here. Lots of bad boys. Where was my particular bad boy?
I started swaggering around the room, hunting. I felt so undercover. It would have been fun if it hadn't been so dangerous. Finally, in one of several booths along the perimeter, I spotted my prey. He was sitting alone nursing... an Albino Vampire.
My eyes opened wide behind the mirror shades. I'd invented that drink at Snow's Inferno Bar. Why was the muscle for a rival hotel-casino owner downing such a girly cocktail in this haven of testosterone?
I approached as quietly as I could.
"Sit down," Sansouci said, not looking my way. "Order you one?"
When I said nothing, he hefted the white cocktail in its martini glass and added. "I figured this would tell you where I was sitting. The drink is getting legendary at your hangout, the Inferno Bar. Order one. The cretins here will stop thinking I've lost my edge and realize I was just using it to troll for a hot babe."
Damn! He'd caught me tailing him, and worse, guessed who I was, wig and all. I sat.
"How did you spot me?"
"I didn't."
Before I could follow up on that mystifying comment, a barmaid in a black leather frilled apron and cap appeared. "Um, sir or whatever?"
"Scotch. Straight up," I said for simplicity's sake.
She wriggled away, exposing a short bustle of white eyelet.
"Amusing," he said, eyeing my outfit. "Your boyfriend know you're out on your own?"
"Boyfriend?"
Sansouci put his fingers to his temples, as if massaging a headache. "Don't be cute. You're too clued in for that after the showdown last full moon at the Starlight Lodge. You should know the cast and denouement of every bad scene in Vegas goes out on the CinSim telegraph. So what's your deal here? I'm listening."
"You're not going to call out the canines?"
"Lupines. No."
"Why not? You let me be taken off to Starlight Lodge to be eaten."
There was a pause. "That's not the way I'd like to see you eaten."
"So. You're a sexist pig among wolves." As a career woman, I always deflected sexy talk on the job. Although there didn't seem to be much point any more.
"I like you, Delilah. I like your looks and your style. You don't want to hear it, one of us can leave."
"'Like'. You allowed to do that a lot working for Cicereau?"
"You think?"
"No. Listen, you know I'm taken. I might like you, though, under other circumstances."
He smiled around the edge of the Albino Vampire. "That not lying stuff is a weakness. You're not above seducing me a little to your side."
"Not now. But that's all show and no go."
"I know." The waitress dropped the scotch in front of me. Sansouci gave her a twenty-dollar bill, told her to keep the change, and switched our drinks. "I have a weakness for 'show'. What do you want?"
"I need to know about Cicereau's history."
"Why?"
"A dead girl."
He went quiet. "You're just a girl yourself, you know." His voice was morose. So maybe he was physically thirty-five, a decade older than I. Plus a few more decades supernatural time. Just how long were werewolves living now, as opposed to then?
I bit my lip. I was such a faker.
"But with guts," he added.
This time I went quiet.
"You really want to dig up all that old stuff?" he prodded.
"No. But I have to."
"Why?"
"She's asking me to."
He reared away from me, his head against the high booth backboard. "Who?"
"That's one thing I need from you. Her name. I call her 'Jeanie'."
"Like in a lamp?"
I shook my head. "Like in the old song about the girl with light brown hair."
"Yours isn't light," he said, leaning forward, speaking fast and low, "but black as night. If you were a werewolf, you'd be almost impossible to see on a midnight run."
"If I were a werewolf I would have changed with all the mobsters at Starlight Lodge last full moon. You'd make a handsome werewolf, though." I nodded at his own black hair stroked by dramatic strands of silver.
His smile had an odd edge. "Thanks. So you've imagined me in lupine form."
"Why didn't I see you when I was running for my life from the pack?"
"Cicereau doesn't reward his lieutenants that way, only the soldiers."
"Was killing his daughter and her lover back in the forties a job for the lieutenants? For you?"
He took a long swallow of his drink before answering. "She was sleeping with the wrong supernatural."
"A killing offense?"
"Not...usually. Maybe just marking, or maiming if Cicereau was in a bad mood."
My questions were making Sansouci uneasy. He twisted on his bench seat.
"Her lover was vampire." I made it a statement.
His fingers turned the low thick glass in front of him around and around. "Yes."
"Why were they killed with two different weapons and buried together?"
Sansouci licked his lips. His big knuckles tightened enough to shatter the glass. I was glad he wasn't in werewolf form.
"This is why Cicereau is beside himself about them being unearthed. He's furious you escaped the hunt and that his crew was shredded by zombies. He figures you had something to do with that, but he doesn't know you were involved with revealing the bodies too. There could be an all-unhuman pow-wow called about this."
"Sorry to get all the supers in a snit. Finding the dead couple was an accident."
But I wasn't so sure now. Ric had been dowsing in Sunset Park for reasons more serious than entertaining kids and hick girls from Kansas. He was a consultant expert in finding the dead. Who had he been working for when we found those buried bodies? The police? Or someone way less official? I couldn't let Sansouci see my doubts.
"I know the female victim was Cicereau's daughter. All I'm asking for right now is her first name."
"Why do you want to know?"
"I don't want to know. I have to."
"Why? Cicereau already hankers for your head for escaping his trap. Why keep maddening the beast?"
"I'm the one who found them, rotted to only bones. It was like unearthing Romeo and Juliet. I'd never seen anything that awful. I have to put them to proper rest. They have to be reburied by others than their murderers."
"This is a mission?"
I nodded. "I see dead people."
"And Montoya digs them up. Yeah, I know his rep. Cadaver Kid. Oh, beautiful! You and Mr. Mojo Man are about to become prime targets in this town, you know that?"
I nodded and sipped the Albino Vampire. "This is really good, isn't it?"
"Yeah." Sansouci sounded odd. "Really good," he added in a different tone.
"Why do you come to this place, for the Albino Vampires?"
"I figured I had to let you catch me someplace. This is quiet, private and in a bad enough area of town anything could happen to you and no one would much notice."
"So you could happen to me?"
"Maybe. It's dangerous for you to be here whether I am or not. What made you think I'd help you? Why me?"
I made a face. "You like me? I like you? You like-a-me and I like-a-you..."
I'd gone into that vintage film ditty from a quaint musical called Meet Me in St. Louis. I was always living through something once removed. No wonder mirrors were my thing.
"Don't." Sansouci wasn't looking at me, but his voice was strangely thick. "Nothing is ever that simple. Nothing is what it seems. No one is. Not even you, angel-face."
"That expression is so Bogart as Sam Spade."
"The man had integrity."
"I think you do too."
The silence held for a long time.
"You haven't the slightest idea," he said.
"That's why I need you."
He eyed me hard. "Don't sling words like 'need' around like that. They're weapons."
"I didn't mean to... hurt you."
"What the fuck makes you think you can?"
"Because... I'm instinctively fond of dogs. Because... I see something in you, big bad werewolf. Maybe a bit of humanity-"
"Don't." He half rose and glared at me across the booth. "'Don't go looking for humanity in Las Vegas after the Millennium Revelation. In me or anyone like me."
"What are you like?"
He sat back down. "You don't even know enough to be dangerous. You are danger."
"What are you like?"
His teeth grated the glass edge as he drank again, swallowed, drilled a glance at me. His green eyes glittered like a rain forest after a downpour. He really did look like he'd like to eat me, the hard way. "I'm not werewolf."
So why should realizing that someone is not a werewolf scare the shinola out of me?
I kept my fingers casually loose around the foot of my martini glass. I didn't move.
But my mind and heart were racing together. I'd convinced myself that Sansouci favored me over Detective Haskell. I thought it might be because of my girlish ways. But girlish ways hadn't saved Cicereau's daughter. I'd told myself that an unchanged werewolf was domesticated, like Rover. That they were normal except for the three-or-so-day moon madness thing. Not too different from the average woman with PMS.
But Sansouci wasn't a werewolf. I'd never see those strands of silver gleaming on a noble canine brow in the moonlight. Well, at least I wouldn't have to drill him with a silver bullet or Quicksilver wouldn't have to run him down and tear him to pieces to protect me.
"You tell me what you are," I said quietly.
"'Humanity'," he quoted me with derision. And a shade of bitterness? "You're looking in all the wrong places for all the wrong things, little girl."
"I have to start somewhere."
"You're not going to stop, are you? You're going to pick away at the immortal wounds in this town until you bring apocalypse down upon yourself... and everybody else."
"I just want to put a ghost to rest. It's me she stares at from my hall mirror, so tragically unhappy. She was no more than, what? Seventeen?"
"Loretta."
"What?"
"Her name." Sansouci washed his face with one big hand. I'd never see him with a sharp furry snout and mini-mountain ranges of fangs, with dark curved claws on those big hands. What would I see him as? More than this, certainly.
"Loretta," I repeated. "It's pretty," I decided, picturing the blue-gowned girl in my mirror.
"Seventeen." Sansouci answered me like a robot, still distracted about facing what had happened to the boss's daughter.
He was staring into his drink as if it was a magic mirror with Loretta's young face floating in it.
"Loretta was a cute girl," I said softly. Sansouci was in a semi-feral state at the moment. He might snap my neck as easily as look at me. "I suppose she was just the boss's underage daughter to you."
"Not quite." He clipped off the words like spit.
I knew I looked puzzled.
"I was her bodyguard."
"Oh." And then I saw. "For a long time?"
"For a long time, as human reckoning goes. Since she was a young child."
"And then your orders changed overnight?"
"Then everything changed."
"Why?"
"You have your mirror-maiden's first name. You should get out of here before I decide to eat you, Little Red Riding Hood."
"You're not a werewolf and anyway, the moon isn't right."
"Any night is a full moon for my kind." His eyes glittered with anger. "You pretty young things look so sweet, so tender, but you play with the fire of your own body heat without reckoning on pushing everything male over the edge."
"Blame the victim?"
I jumped when his fist pounded the table and grabbed the stem of my Albino Vampire to keep it from tipping over. I was partial to the drink even if it was a rip-off. His heavier glass just washed expensive Scotch over the side.
"'Love' is the poison that killed Loretta Cicereau," Sansouci said. "'Humanity' was never in the game. I don't have any of it anymore."
"You wouldn't be so angry if you didn't."
That huge hand caught me by the back of the neck and dragged me out of my seat and across the table until he could whisper in my ear.
"What am I? I am vampire. I am a daylight vampire. Every day and night is prey time for me." I felt his teeth and then tongue brush my pounding carotid artery. His breath was lukewarm on my face, not hot like a canine's. Like Quicksilver's. What was a vampire doing working for a werewolf mob? He was still spitting words like nails.
"You came to me. You followed me. You put me to the question. How did I know you tailed me? You're menstruating. I can smell your blood. It's like catnip to a tiger. You're so ready for me. I can take you to places darker than the Sinkhole and make you enjoy it."
All right, I was really scared now. Human or unhuman, this was a man who'd been asked to jettison his protective instincts to kill the young girl he'd guarded. That he'd hated doing that was to his credit. That he'd do the same to a girl he admittedly liked was pre-proven.
I faced down his angry stare, though, literally shaking in my boots, but nowhere else, until he broke the impasse by brushing his lips hard against mine, a sharp fang raking my bottom lip. I was shoved back into my seat, tasting my own blood.
At least I was proven right. My pasty-skinned looks attracted vampires. Even the big boys. They wouldn't want to use me up too soon. Waste me outright. I really shouldn't be alone with this guy. As he had tried to tell me.
I wondered how Loretta had felt when her own bodyguard as well as her father turned on her.
"So you killed her," I speculated, not believing I was pushing a super and a murderer to confess. Inquiring reporters need to know the way vamps need to suck O-negative.