I’M NOT FAMOUS for following instructions. I left Quicksilver at home in the cottage, chewing on an Awesome Gnawsome stick.
I didn’t want to get known around Vegas as a dog and his girl. It was too easy in post–Millennium Revelation days, and especially here, to get tagged by the company you keep.
Besides, I had more than a clue about who the new “in” entrepreneur in town was … and who had helped set him up in business, besides the marketing genius of me.
Even a low-end Strip address takes cash money.
The moon’s intensity may wax and wane, but the sun is pretty much always on full power during the southern Nevada daylight hours, spreading warm vibes and skin cancer as the tourists soak it up from under funny hats, their white-creamed noses topped by very dark sunglasses.
My Black Irish–pale complexion had made high-SPF sunscreen a constant companion even in a come-and-go sunshine state like Kansas. Sunglasses were my constant accessory too, partly to hide the fabled baby-blues I share with my elusive double, Lilith Quince, but I put Lilith out of my mind before she drove me out of it instead.
Hector’s description of sleazy businesses took my Strip walk toward downtown and the last surviving, nonimploded hotel-casinos of the town’s fifties and sixties heyday, when the Rat Pack of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr., ran wild in Vegas instead of werewolf mobsters.
After weaving almost to the streetlamps to miss a steamy tourist array of sun-baked Goth and punk leather, I spotted a stunning gold-and-ebony sign above a shop frontage.
CHEZ SHEZ, the gilt letters read, just as I’d recommended.
“Chez”—pronounced as in “the wonderful one-horse shay”—was French for “house of.” “Shez” was short for “Shezmou,” the ancient Egyptian name for “vengeful, beheading demon under-god who’s got great hands for neck-twisting as well as wine-pouring and massage.”
The line of women wasn’t blocks long, but they did almost kick me to the curb, literally. I’d been dodging ill-intentioned Jimmy Choos since Sheena, the weather witch at WTCH-TV in Kansas, so I simply hopped and skipped around them to the front door, which was manned by … a woman.
Of my acquaintance.
She was also one don’t-cross tiger of a female, Grizelle, Snow’s shape-shifting security chief at the Inferno Hotel.
Right now she was all woman, six-foot-three of ridiculously high-priced and small-sized designer suit and stiletto heels on a velvet-black frame. Her skin was moiré black taffeta, subtly marked with the shadow of tiger stripes. Little-known fact: all spotted and striped cats have skin to match. Grizelle in human form was almost as formidable as her six-hundred-pound white-tiger self. Her eyes were jungle green and her manicure was vampire red.
I’d worn my air-sole sneakers for my Strip stroll—the silver familiar was so ashamed of my unfashionable look it was hiding out as a toe-ring—so I was more pipsqueak than usual measuring up to her. But height is attitude, not altitude.
So I showed some.
“New job as a shop doorman, Grizelle? Was Snow so miffed by your last foiled attempt to stop my Inferno comings and goings that he fired you?” I taunted. “Naughty, naughty kitty. Maybe I can put in a good word for you with Nightwine Productions, Inc.”
“I don’t do door duty anywhere,” she answered. “I was just leaving after I saw the low-rent party hanging around inside. Seeing as you’re entering, I’ll stick around awhile longer.” She fanned the taloned fingers of her right hand.
“Delilah,” said a deep male voice from within.
I promptly did a do-si-do around Grizelle’s statuesque presence and doffed my sunglasses. I still had to blink for several seconds to see in the comparatively dim interior.
What I saw was tall, dark-haired, and not unhandsome, but unfortunately, it was not my indebted demigod, Shezmou.
“Sansouci,” I said with surprise. “Fancy finding you here. Needing a manicure? Or just a good chiropractic neck adjustment?”
I’m no squirt, but most men of my acquaintance flirt with six-foot-something. Now—between the head muscle for both the werewolf mob and Snow’s hellish Inferno operation—I was feeling distinctly outgunned.
Yet intrigued.
“I didn’t know you two knew each other,” I commented, switching my gaze from Sansouci to Grizelle like a nervous, well, gazelle. She scared me a lot more than he did, perhaps because I’d done her boss wrong in a very big way.
The pause became what you could call pregnant.
Grizelle tossed her mane of spangled dreadlocks that much resembled an Egyptian wig. I wondered if Shezmou had seen her yet. They’d make an awesome power couple.
“The doors are barred for now,” Grizelle told me. “You can gawk a bit and then you should leave. I’m here for a private business conference with the owner.”
“Me too.” Sansouci’s wolfish grin looked really rakish on a closeted vampire, trust me. “I represent the Gehenna werewolves,” he continued, “but I have time to show you and the little lady around.”
He had a gift for irritating in stereo.
“Oh?” I said. “You’ll want to include me. I can show you around. Shez and I are business partners. Where is he?”
“Shez is male?” Grizelle sounded both surprised and condescending.
She eyed the polished chrome, copper, and gold metallic walls and shelves of semiprecious stone jars. A similar display of gilded wine bottles topped an ebony-and-turquoise bar on another wall.
“I should have guessed,” she added.
“I wouldn’t call Shez a ‘girly man’ to his face,” I warned her.
Looking around without engaging my reflections too much, I saw a surprisingly modest space, part bar and part boutique, just as I’d envisioned, but unattended. I smelled the pine, sesame, and almond oils used in Shezmou’s potions, though not the castor oil, thank goodness. Methought Chez Shez needed a more fashion-forward signature scent. Time for that later.
Then a glass-beaded curtain behind the counter shimmied and remained swaying like a belly dancer’s skirt at the entrance of a slight young woman wearing nothing more than a mahogany spray tan, a tissue-thin strapless white-linen sheath, and an Urban Decay “smoky eye” to die for.
The curtains’ colored beads echoed the red, blue, and green glass on wide ancient Egyptian collars. Their gentle clicking reminded me of the waist-circling, oversize rosaries the older nuns at Our Lady of the Lake convent school had worn … and the sound of the millions of flesh-eating beetles occupying the Karnak underworld.
“Are you Mr. Mou’s one p.m. appointments?” the girl asked. Her eye-whites dazzled as her focus darted between all three of us.
Mr. Mou? Irma interjected. The quick start-up forced our foreign friend Shezmou to employ one of the dimmer bulbs on the marquee.
I was inclined to cut the young woman slack. She was barely twenty, not a ripe old lady of twenty-four like me.
“Mr. Souci?” she inquired hopefully, nailing the only man in the room.
“At your service,” he said smoothly. He knew no other way to deliver a line to a female. “You can call me ‘San.’”
Oh, please! Irma was hopping annoyed, and so was I. The girl was going into standing swoon mode at one glimpse of Sansouci’s deep-set green eyes and one sentence from his even deeper hypnotic voice. Vampire, dearie, and the kind that feeds on women.
“Ms. … Gray Zelle?” She next fastened a hopeful hazel eye on me, since I looked a lot less dangerous than Grizelle.
I stepped politely aside.
The young woman took one look at Grizelle’s haughty carnivore expression and fastened her gaze on me again for dear life. “And you are?”
“Ms. Street, but you can call me Delilah. What’s your name?”
“Fawn Schwartz.”
“Well, Fawn, I am Mr. Mou’s silent partner.”
“You’re, uh, talking.”
“‘Silent partner’ is a business expression. Shez wants to see me first. Alone. Trust me.”
Sansouci raised an eyebrow. Grizelle lifted a sneering upper lip to showcase her carnivore canines. I was glad to ditch the pair when Fawn parted the clicking curtains and I ducked through. Irma and I.
The shop front looks promising but could use some hipper upgrades, she told me.
At this point, merchandising was hardly my main concern. If Christophe, aka Snow, and Cicereau were battling for an interest in Chez Shez, I wanted to make sure they had to deal with me, which both would loathe. I had a feeling the real silent partner in this setup would like that just fine.
The fluorescent-lit manufacturing area was much bigger than the storefront. Shezmou was working his grape press, the sinewy arm and back muscles of his cinnamon-hued torso gleaming with enough sweat to put him in a well-oiled Mr. Universe contest. Given the new female option of women ogling men these twenty-first-century days, as a product front man he was a Name Brand born.
At the click of the bead curtains his bewigged head turned. He gave the huge cheesecloth wad of grapes one last wring and wiped his reddened hands on a piece of white linen. One would be reminded of an ancient housewife, if one wished to commit suicide and say so.
“You are welcome,” he addressed me, “O Deliverer of Shezmou, to my house of fine wines and oils. Thus Delilah has wrought, and I, Shezmou, deliver, reversing our roles as my own nature must also move from wine to balm, and eternal death to eternal life.”
Gods require lots of wordy preamble, so I just smiled and nodded.
If I hadn’t noticed that Shezmou’s twenty-foot incised image on a Karnak Hotel subterranean pillar included actual wrist and ankle chains to keep him inanimate, Shez wouldn’t have been freed from millennia of bondage. His captivity had ensured that the Egyptian vampires could rampage without facing any Afterlife music.
Egyptian vampires?
Yup, they were the only ancient culture to have no bloodsucker mythology. Yet, sometime between 5000 and 3000 B.C., the problem had become severe enough that even the royal line was tainted. Many high-ranking mummy heads, including King Tut’s, had been severed before wrapping to ensure no awkward resurrections here on earth.
Almost all world religions offer a “separate and save” option for the Afterlife. Not the Egyptians under secret vampire rule. Once infested with vampires, Egyptian culture froze in time, feasting on their own in perpetuity and occasionally sampling stray latter-day humans.
Shezmou had been the demigod, or demon, who twisted off the heads of the damned and cast them into Egyptian Hell. With him in chains, vampires had centuries to create and re-create their own thirsty breed unchallenged.
All those deathless big bad vampires were still ruling the Underworld beneath the Karnak Hotel and Casino. I knew something they didn’t, not even their twin brother-sister pharaohs. A big bad modern vampire secretly owned the Karnak and pulled Vegas strings from atop the Strip hotel, and he had twenty-first-century ambitions. Luckily, he and I had an uneasy but mutual understanding. So I had an unseen ally here.
“I was not expecting to receive the mighty Delilah,” Shezmou said.
Ric had adroitly impressed the ancient godling with my namesake’s Biblical exploit of cutting off Samson’s hair to sap his strength. I’m sure Shez didn’t want me snipping off any of his wig strands.
“I thought two others of the Upperworld also sought audience?” Shezmou asked me.
“They await without, mighty Shezmou.” Okay. Being suddenly thrown into an ancient surviving culture, vampire or not, brought out my high-school Shakespeare play dialogue.
Shez grinned at me. “I owe my liberator a great debt. It is good that you are wise enough to pour sweet oil on my godhead.”
Oh, my lord! Irma said. Did that sound tacky. And hot.
“Now I practice a modern profession,” Shezmou’s Darth Vader baritone continued. “I must seem … ordinary to conduct commerce. So speak as if I were your … equal. Just between us.”
“Sure, Shez.”
His grinned widened. “You enjoy that, Delilah.”
“Sure do, Shez.”
“I observe that small women enjoy ordering large men around.”
“Your human avatar is only six-feet-five, Shez. And I am tall for my gender.”
“Do not I know it.”
“If I may suggest, to get along in the Upperworld, cultivate contractions.”
“I am not a woman in childbirth,” he said, frowning. “Dealing with such matters is my little brother Bez’s profession.”
Bes, rechristened “Bez” by Ric and me just because it went better with Shez, was the dwarfish god of randy sex and … subsequent childbirth. Logical, these Vulcans and Egyptians.
“Don’t you know it,” I repeated Shez’s earlier phrase in a more casual way. “And I’m not a woman in childbirth, either.”
“No, you are … ah, you’re slim and limber, although high for your sex.”
“You’re shortly going to meet a female almost as tall as you, Shez.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. Before that, I want to make sure you’re properly represented. I assume your boss … er, overlord, has a link to the storefront.”
“Yes. A link, as in a chain, only this chain is embedded in a fine glass box lid. See.”
Shez gestured to a twenty-five-inch flat-screen monitor on an ivory-inlaid table of exquisite Egyptian workmanship.
I sat on the zebra skin X-bench (sorry about that, ancient zebra) and awakened the computer link with a touch.
“Aren’t you looking Stripside sloppy today, my dear Delilah?” Howard Hughes’s shrunken face mouthed into a fish-eye webcam lens. “What do you think of my new shop concept?”
“That it’s mine.”
Hughes shrugged. He’d had himself made into a vampire at almost his last breath to retain his financial kingdom. With his long beard and hair and gaunt look of pained disappointment, he alarmingly resembled a plastic Jesus figure.
“She who thinks is clever,” Hughes chanted. “He who does owns the world.”
“Come on, Howard. You know this concept—and Shez’s enthusiasm for it—is my idea.”
“Do you have a contract in writing?”
“I expect you to provide one.”
“Forty percent for Hughes Tools and Tchotchkes.”
“So like you to overreach, Mr. Hughes. Ten percent.”
“Thirty.”
“Twenty,” I said.
“Twenty-five to me. Oh, twenty-four. Your age, nicely symbolic,” he cackled. “And only fair. I am an old, old man.”
“And ever were and always will be.”
Hughes’s blasted face wrinkled with a rather charming smile. “Give me credit, and I will give you the world.”
“‘I’ll.’ We’re teaching Shez speech with contractions today. Better for the future talk shows.”
“Always on top of things, Delilah. Speaking of which, you walked off with my priceless film artifact, the first cinematic Cleopatra’s coiled brass serpent bra.”
“Yours and welcome to it back. I’d rather wear the push-up bra you invented for Jane Russell. All that heavy metal is cold.”
“Like your cold heart, perhaps? Oh, all right. Twenty percent to me and my mammary artifact back.”
Hughes’s webcam revealed a buxom vampire nurse behind him rattling his IV pole to hang a fresh bag of sterilized blood before the image faded.
“He is a strange creature,” Shez noted, “and by rights I should have twisted his fanged head from his stringy neck, but he is not of my people and has been most accommodating to me and my arts of the wine and oil press.”
“You’re a god in hiding from your should-be worshippers. And it’s he’s.”
“If you had to recite hieroglyphics aloud, you’d sound most artificial also.”
“Agreed, partner. Speaking of ‘greed,’ it’s time to meet the high-end Strip mouthpieces.”
“These ‘mouthpieces’ are a variety of musician?”
“Very much so. The music of coins.”
I preceded Shez through the Glass Curtain, but I fear that Grizelle and Sansouci stood to attention only when the Lord of the Slaughter stepped into the showroom.
Grizelle growled, and for a shocked microsecond shifted into her white-tiger form.
“Meet my business partner, Shezmou,” I said while she corrected her impulse. “He’s the genius behind the vintage wines, scents, and oils this establishment offers the Las Vegas attraction world.”
Shez shook his bewigged, glass-bead-swagged, and braided mane, and growled godlike approval.
Sanscouci muttered, “Holy Seared Shitakes. This is a Clash of the Titans.”
He edged my way, arms folded on his chest, while the two larger-than-life types eyed each other like enemies and lovers. “Starting your own harem with Bijou Boy there, Street?”
“Jealous, Mr. Souci?”
Sansouci winced. “What I do for my boss. What’s with the guy’s albino kilt? And I don’t get this boozy beauty parlor concept.”
“You haven’t sampled his wines yet.”
Shez’s divine super-sharp hearing whipped his impressive head our way. “Mr. Souci may sample any bottle he pleases, but he should not drink the massage oils.”
Sansouci’s almost-emerald eyes rolled like Quicksilver’s when he heard me try a ridiculous command, like “Stop.”
“I do not sell beer,” Shez went on, “although I could brew it. The two gold taps at the end of the bar are a special house brew, ideal for”—Shez frowned, striving to be modern and hip—“the nightclub set.” He regarded me quizzically. I supposed that he’d been watching TV in his spare time at the roomy laboratory Hughes had provided atop the Karnak Hotel. “Night … stick. Does that not mean, ah, the police?”
I realized then that Shez had first met me wearing my used cop duty belt with the attached billy club. I’d left all that fighting gear home. Perhaps a mistake, I thought, as I eyed the three deadly paranormals in the room with little mortal unarmed me and poor Fawn Schwartz.
“The Police is a music icon,” Grizelle purred to Shezmou. “You seem new to our entertainment-centered world. I could introduce you to the Seven Deadly Sins rock band at the Inferno Hotel tonight.”
“Rocks I know from my native soil and sins are my specialty,” Shez answered, being far more provocative than he knew.
Beside me, Sansouci growled in his turn. “I’m supposed to get his attention away from that sleek Inferno cat-woman? Cicereau had no idea he had any competition.”
“I’m a partner in this operation,” I told him. “You can make points with me.”
I hadn’t meant to flirt, just to make Sansouci feel better. That was an Our Lady of the Lake convent school girl-graduate problem. We always wanted to make everyone feel better … in an abstract, selfless, spiritual way. Not a good ploy with vampires.
Sansouci was about as spiritual as a machete.
“You don’t want to talk ‘points’ with me, Delilah, without being ready to deliver.” He flashed a grin broad enough to showcase the strong white canine teeth he usually kept under lip and key. “That why Shez calls you Deliverer?”
Mistake. Another one.
Trying to distract Sansouci to give Shez and Grizelle some one-on-one time, I’d upped the sexual and homicidal tension in the shop so you could cut it with a diamond saw. I guess Shez hadn’t been off a pillar for a millennium too many.
I was just a mortal wearing loose tee and shorts, the tourist uniform.
By comparison, Grizelle was prime Las Vegas Strip showgirl with a Siegfried and Roy pedigree. She was the modern equivalent of a Vegas goddess, much as I hated to admit it.
“What’s off between you and Grizelle?” Sansouci whispered, standing way closer than necessary.
“We tangled.”
“Seriously?” He leered at her, not me. “Girl-to-girl. I’d have liked to see that.”
“Rein it in, Romeo. It was tiger-to-girl.”
“You were the girl and walked away without bone-deep tracks in your face?” He stepped back to eye me as if I’d grown a unicorn horn. “Hey, Delilah. I know you have the nerve act sharp with Christophe and Cicereau, but Grizelle? Tell me another fey tale.”
“It was one of my more desperate moments.”
“You two hellcats were fighting over the Cadaver Kid, I bet.”
I just nodded. Sansouci didn’t need to know Ric had still been comatose at the time.
“Grizelle must go for the Latin lover type,” he said, frowning at Shez. When I just stared, disbelieving, he added. “What? This Shez guy is Mediterranean, right?”
“Just barely.” Egypt did border the southern seashore, but the ancient population came from the cradle of Africa, not Asia or Europe.
“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 been 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.