“WHY THE SMIRK?” Ric asked, swinging an arm over my shoulder. Navigating the shifting sands made us swagger toward the road, bumping hips and weapons systems.
I was not about to convey Irma’s saucy thoughts to my guy.
“Look at Quicksilver,” I told him instead.
As usual, Dolly had her top down, and Quick had raced ahead to jump into her backseat. “He’s ready to roll.”
The wolf-spitz family dominated the wolfhound in Quicksilver’s looks, so he was a “smiley” dog, with the perked ears and grinning face that looked ever so friendly. It was hard to tell when he was just happy to see you, or ready to attack. His paler beige face showed a gray lupine widow’s peak, but his eyes were a lovely “spacious skies” shade of blue, a trait that came from a rare wolfhound gene.
“Do zombies make him nervous?” Ric asked. “Any ordinary dog wouldn’t know whether to attack or bury ’em like a bone. These Zobos rambling out here like Xanax addicts must really confuse the issue.”
I patted Quick between the ears before working the car keys out of my duty belt and going around to Dolly’s driver’s seat while Ric stowed my night vision goggles in the trunk.
Ric imitated Quick and bounded over the convertible’s closed front door into the passenger seat, just to prove he was fully recovered from the Karnak Hotel mob vampire attack.
I was hoping he was out to prove something else tonight.
“When we go to Wichita, we share the driving,” Ric said, glancing at the luminous dial of his seriously multi-function watch. As a former FBI agent, he knew where to get all the latest paramilitary gizmos.
I’d never let anyone else drive Dolly before. Well, except for the Inferno and Karnak Hotel demon parking valets, and those occasions had been emergencies. Dolly had been my BFF since I bought her at a Kansas farm sale five years ago, when I’d been nineteen. Her looks were electric. Licorice-black body paint, channel-stitched red leather interior, and white convertible top. I didn’t lightly let other hands curl around her extra-large pizza-size steering wheel.
“Sure,” I told Ric, meaning our road trip. “We go halves all the way to yellow-brick-road country. I don’t know why you’re so keen to leave Vegas for the boonies right away.”
By then I had Dolly’s three hundred and sixty-five vintage horses kicked in and we—slowly—moved through the abrasive sand-drifted road toward the highway.
“You do let her stretch out all her horses on the freeway, right?” Ric asked.
“Actually, I don’t like state highway patrol stops.”
“No problem. You just gotta know where they typically lie in wait.”
“You do?”
“First thing you figure out in the FBI. We didn’t like local cop stops, either.”
I heaved a dramatic sigh. “I’m installing a fuzz buster before we go anywhere, speed demon.”
Ric’s grin in the moonlight was as white as Quicksilver’s. “What a waste of money when you’ve got an inboard one riding shotgun.”
His hand stroked my nearest inner thigh. “Any Navy Seal would salivate to have this Inferno Hotel battle suit. As impenetrable as Teflon, you say, yet the surface feels as smooth as velveteen.” His strokes became longer and Dolly swerved a bit. “No steel studs here, chica? You’d think Snow of all … people would know how much vamps like femoral arteries and would have ordered the fang-repellent studding everywhere.”
By now I was mucho glad the suit was also waterproof. Did I even remember the naïve virgin who’d thought she was getting her period the first time she’d met Mr. ex-FBI smoothie in Vegas’s Sunset Park a mere couple of months ago? I kept my eyes on the rough road and parted my totally armored thighs a teasing bit more. Sex in a high-tech wet suit was suddenly looking really hot.
Too bad Ric didn’t realize this was just necessary physical therapy.
Yowsa! Irma managed to get in as she broke out of solitary for a weak moment—mine.
“This is going to be quite a road trip, Montoya,” I muttered.
Behind us, Quicksilver stopped the heavy doggy panting and gave a sharp yip, like a basso coyote alert. Was he jealous of me getting all the petting or …
“Holy smoke!” I yelled, choking my grip on the steering wheel.
As we neared the lonesome gray of the interstate, a black hedge of fog had materialized from the concrete pavement, rolling toward Dolly’s chrome front bumper like a solid wave of storm cloud.
“Flash flood?” I murmured uncertainly.
“That’s no flash flood,” Ric shouted, grabbing the fifteen-shot automatic from the very visible shoulder holster over his racing suit.
I looked hard. Yes, the wave was more solid than water … and sported moonlit fangs.
I accelerated. Dolly’s bumper bullets plowed through a fender-high onslaught of furred shoulders and snarling, snapping maws.
“Quicksilver, no!” I shouted as the gray tide flowed around Dolly’s red taillights into the desert beyond.
The dog was already over the rear door and on the desert floor, giving chase.
“Quicksilver, no!” I shouted again. I’d recognized the pack’s breed, and mere werewolves would have been an improvement.
“Quicksilver, come back.” Yeah, like a locomotive would spin on a dime and jump its tracks.
“Quicksilver, leave kitty!” I screamed at the top of my lungs in as deep and commanding a voice as my female vocal cords could manage.
I squealed Dolly into a too-rapid right onto the empty highway to look for results.
Ric regarded me as if I was insane.
By then I’d roughed up Dolly’s brake shoes, but had avoided a fishtail as the car stopped. To my surprise, I saw Quicksilver’s form lofting into a long leap over the trunk and into the backseat.
“Good dog, good boy,” I said in that exaggerated praising tone deluded dog “owners” use.
Ric was still watching me as if I was nuts. “‘Leave kitty’?”
“It’s the one command he’ll obey for our walks in Sunset Park.” I shrugged apology. “If it’s late and deserted I let him off leash. Of course that’s when the cats come out.”
“So the only way you can call back Killer Dog is to scream ‘Leave kitty’ for all the world to hear?”
“It did work. And it’s not easy to turn a hundred-and-fifty-pound half-wolfhound from prey.”
“Nor a hundred-and-eighty-pound man,” Ric added with a mock ogle. “Did you have to call out the hounds on me? Where’d they all go?”
I turned with Ric to eye Quicksilver’s “aren’t-I-really-good-to-listen-to-you?” smiling mug and the desert beyond.
A bright flash of gold was moving across the valley floor, the darker mountains looming behind it.
“What on earth?” I asked. “Some moonlight phenomenon, like the purported green flash at sunset?”
“What under the earth,” Ric said, stretching out of his seat to see. “Holy smoke is right. Picture a tomb painting writ large.”
“My God. It’s not—” I looked again.
Now I saw the smoky flowing cloud that had rushed us was racing to meet the flash of moving moonlit gold that led an army of shadows over the sere ground. A solid-gold royal chariot. Behind that spectacular artifact came the Karnak Hotel’s hidden horde of ancient Egyptian vampires taking a run behind their desert steeds, with hyenas serving as their pack of hounds.
“I never noticed these mountains looked like pyramids, from a distance,” I breathed. “The royal hyenas just flowed right through us.”
Ric nodded as we watched the distant spectacle.
“I never saw the critters personally, but from your description and what we’ve just seen, the hyenas may have a spirit or ghostly existence as well as a way-too-physical one. They’ll sic the Karnak royal vampire chariot corps on us now that we’ve had a close encounter. Better floor it.”
“And Quicksilver just chased them! That dog would tackle Godzilla.”
Not to mention a six-hundred-pound white tiger. No way was I telling Ric that Quick had faced off Snow’s security shape-shifter, Grizelle, while I was busy erasing Ric’s childhood whip scars in the Inferno bridal suite.
Long story, for both of us. Ric hadn’t totally recalled his ordeal as mass vampire bait and I was still acting as his lover-cum–private nurse, protecting him as he thought he protected me. Maybe that was love, or maybe it was fooling yourself.
Whatever, I’d discovered even natural hyenas are really ugly customers, more weirdly related to felines than canines, with jaws that can snap and grind bones like the cannibal giant lurking up Jack’s fairy-tale beanstalk. The thought of even their spectral forms cozying up to Dolly’s paint job … ick. Hyena ectoplasm must resemble the wet cheesecloth fake mediums spit up in séances.
I was still shaking my head as I revved Dolly down the blessed ribbon of smooth concrete that would take us away from this prickly desert of cacti and khaki-colored carnivores, live and undead.
Ric frowned at my speedometer until I pushed the needle up to ninety. Then he tuned the radio full up on a Spanish-language station, so that trumpets and five-string guitars hailed our return to civilization.
Ric caught me eyeing his profile. “No traffic cops lying in wait until we approach Salt Cedar.”
“That’s right. Ex-FBI guy likes to take lawless midnight spins out into the desert dark.”
“You’ve learned way too much about my deepest darkest secrets since I was unconscious in Christophe’s bridal suite mainlining other people’s blood.” He smiled his promised revenge. “I’ll have to show you some new tricks, then.”
“We’re heading straight to your home ground.”
I checked the rearview mirror, pleased to see only the distant headlights of a semi. “Why were the Karnak vampire armies out for a run?”
“Our scouting expedition to their secret underworld did destroy the centuries-kept herd of human cattle they bred to feed on.”
“Only after we released those poor souls to their long-delayed Afterlife,” I said. “Howard Hughes is hoping his work with the wine-god we freed will get them all on brewed blood substitute.”
“Howard Hughes was a demented genius of a human being and now he’s a vampire, Del, not your Big Daddy. You can’t trust him.”
For a wild moment, I speculated that maybe he could be … my daddy, that is. Anybody could be, from Hector Nightwine to coroner Grisly Bahr to, hey … Donald Trump. That’s the catch when you’re an abandoned baby. You could be anybody. Or anything.
Ric was still in warning mode.
“And don’t let the big, loin-clothed lug you freed from two thousand years of pillar duty under the Karnak lull your defensive instincts. That wine-loving Shezmou dude had a double role in ancient Egyptian mythology. His other specialty was Lord of the Slaughter. So, before everybody in the Vegas vampire empire can get nicely-nicely civilized via some Hughes invention, they still have to seek prey.”
“What’s out here to prey on?”
“Isolated ranches. I imagine the worker vamps can subsist on herd animals without killing them, if they have to, and the twin Pharaohs would get first dibs on any human herders.”
“What about the Zobos and your horses?”
“The silver barbed wire will repel them.”
“Vampires? I thought it was werewolves that silver bullets can hurt.”
“Silver is one of the oldest vampire repellents. It fell out of favor in the days of the cross and holy water, but ancient Egyptians wouldn’t be subject to Christian symbols. Silver recovered much of its mojo after the Millennium Revelation.”
I touched my hip. My own silver familiar often went undercover as a slim chain.
“Your newly silver eye?” I asked.
“Yet to be seen,” he answered, “but promising.”
“Silver barbed wire. Where’d you get that stuff?”
“Custom-made. I have contacts in the Mexican jewelry trade on both sides of the border.”
“Sterling silver? Isn’t that metal too soft to make effective barbed wire?”
“I gave it the evil eye after it was nailed down around the compound.”
“So you’ve … used … your silver iris?”
“Sure. If you got it, use it. My concentrated stare produced a cool blue aura around the wire. Then it hardened like your silver familiar did when you touched Cocaine’s albino lovelock and it morphed into a solid form. My amped-up wire proved diamond jeweler’s saw-and torch-resistant, just like Snow’s pretty-pretty white hair. I’m betting this wire now has some supernatural power that makes predators of the paranormal sort back off.”
“And how do you know this wire is impenetrable?”
Ric grinned as widely as Quicksilver. “First, my Taxco amigos tested it with saw and torch. Second, I have a feeling silver is our lucky charm. Even your super-dog has those changeable silver circles on his collar. Time I shared the bounty, babe.”
“You know I hate to be called that.”
“Yeah, but you’re hogging the driving and you can’t do anything about it now. Or this.”
His hand returned to my inner thigh and didn’t look to be leaving until we hit Vegas. Gotta say the bouncy road feel wasn’t hurting anything, either. Dolly’s vintage shocks were set to velvet vibrate. That Ric. From comatose to cocky after just two dangerous missions. Delilah the secret sex therapist was very happy.
“Where does your silver body jewelry thingy go, anyway?” Rick asked, “when you wear that skintight super-suit?”
This was the man who so memorably removed my new werewolf salsa club duds and twenty-four-year-old virginity in front of his bathroom mirror (before I started seeing dead people in looking glasses) asking. I blushed anyway, but only the half-man in the moon could see that with us zipping down the deserted straight-pin road at almost a hundred miles an hour.
“When you got cozy with what would be my bikini wax job—if I had one—eight miles back,” I admitted, “the silver familiar, ah, migrated to a less active erotic zone. Sometimes it doesn’t like crowds.”
Ric’s rhythmic caresses stopped. “Living up to its name, I see. But I don’t see. Where?”
While he examined me for a clue, I watched the speedometer. It took a mile, less than a minute, for him to get it.
Ric sounded smug. “Elementary, my dear Watson. I detect two new symmetrically placed oversize silver studs on the chest of your catsuit. Hmm, spiked studs. Muy provocative. Your familiar isn’t being shy, Del, it’s upping the erotic ante. However or wherever that outfit opens and shuts, I’m going to take my time finding out.”
Behind us a huge sigh and agitation on the leather upholstery indicated that Quicksilver was settling down on the backseat for a resigned doggy snooze before he spent the night on outside patrol. He’d always been an ultrasmart and sensitive dog.
