“They never knew you . . . remained?” I asked.
“Staked, headless vampire. Drained monk and robe. An uncommon couple, yet the only two-plus-two their superstitious but holy medieval minds needed. They burned the bodies and my robe, and put up a gravestone for me on an empty plot.”
“What name did it read?”
“None of your business, Delilah Street. I have lost everything of my past. Concealing my original identity is the only thing I am pleased about.”
“After all these centuries? At least you have an identity to guard. Even my name isn’t really my own,” I admitted.
His thumb stroked my neck, the callus on it oddly human, then withdrew. “Stage name?”
“I said I was a reporter, not an actress.”
“Could have fooled me, drama queen.”
He was trying to distract me, but I wasn’t buying it.
“I was an abandoned infant supposedly found on Delilah Street, only there’s no such address where I grew up, in Wichita, Kansas. You want to forget who you were and I want to find out who I am.”
“‘Aren’t we a pair’?” Sansouci quoted the melancholy classic song, leaning back in the velvet banquette.
He was showing some of the lazy surrender he’d been recounting during his tale of his simultaneous first time of being bitten and biting, of his virtual virginhood lost. He was the usual cynical Sansouci again. Maybe.
Either my cocktail recipe or telling his tale had returned Sansouci into the deceptively laid-back persona he automatically used to lull human or werewolf fears. He’d had centuries to perfect that. I could see how modern women got hooked on the tension between his sensually knowing exterior and deeply dangerous needs. It was tantalizing.
He licked his lower lip without being conscious of the fact, considering me. “No more questions?”
“Dozens. How did you . . . live?”
“Animal blood repelled me. I soon realized I needed a large supply of victims who wouldn’t be missed. I’d chosen God as a master because I knew my temperament wouldn’t bow long to any temporal lord, but I’d shown a knack for swordplay. Can you guess? We’re talking the fourteenth century here.”
“You’re talking the fourteenth century. I can’t believe the changes you’ve seen. From . . . warlords to twenty-first-century gangsters.”
“That breed has changed the least of all, Delilah. What did I do with myself for the next seven or eight hundred years?”
“I have no idea.”
“You’re an inquiring reporter. You pride yourself on putting two and two together. You tell me. Psych me out.”
He leaned back, narrowed eyes challenging me to “undress” his mind-set, even his soul, to dissect his vampire nature overlaid on a young, naive, obedient, chaste monk of an unthinkably alien time to modern me.
Kinda like me a few months ago. I’d let Sansouci unnerve me. It was time to reverse the situation.
“The Irish then were disenfranchised in their own land,” I said. “First by the Normans, then by the English. They became wanderers, like the Jews. Bards and . . . mercenaries roaming all lands even into the nineteenth and twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Even today, a lot of the freelance journalists braving the Mideast wars and meltdowns to report for the American news networks are Irish. Still, you didn’t crave pay or treasures to live, but blood. Do you play an instrument?” I asked, hunting clues.
He considered, then said, “Only women now.”
His voice, the tone, the implications were meant to distract me. They did.
How did a monk learn to be so sexy? To eat, dummy!
Paging back to my Our Lady of the Lake convent school classes allowed me to access a lot of religious history.
I closed my eyes and recited. “It was the end of four of five hundred years of rabid Viking butchery and terrorism in the British Isles and Europe, but the developing nations were seething with war, even to sending knights on crusade to the Holy Land, the Middle East.”
My fingers tapped on the table.
“What instrument are you playing?” Sansouci taunted me.
I studied their dark reflection as my fingers pantomimed a riff on the black glass.
“Castanets,” I said, realizing what my unconscious was telling me. “Spain was under siege by Moors in that period. Wait.” I sat up straight. “Yours isn’t a night’s tale, like around the campfire. It’s a knight’s tale. You joined the monk warriors who fought to hold Muslims back from Europe and reclaim the Holy Land.”
“Because . . . ?”
“Battle was butchery then. Blood was everywhere. Your liquid diet would go unnoticed.”
“More than that, we battled for the cause of heaven. Our foes deserved to die.”
“Maybe their leaders did, not the foot soldiers.”
“It was warrior to warrior then, knight to Saracen. Drinking their blood only further eradicated them from the face of the earth.”
“You didn’t turn any?”
“Never. Why? A vampire turns a human only from desperation.”
“What makes a vampire desperate except lack of blood?”
“Utter hatred or revenge . . . or establishing a link with a mortal he or she can’t bear to lose. It’s always beauty that destroys the beast, Delilah.”
“Then you never had any human connection in all those centuries?”
“Only brothers at arms, and they came and went, as the wars came and went.”
“Why were you turned in the first place? You were already dead and out of the way.”
“The most common of the seven deadly sins. Greed.”
“Greed? You were a penniless monk.’
“I recognized my assailant after I staked him, a trusted retainer of my elder brother’s. Apparently Gowan feared I’d tire of the abbey and take what mere happenstance had earned him. I was his superior in everything but order of birth.”
“I don’t doubt it. He’s long moldering in the grave and you’ve lasted.” I sipped again. “How did you . . . convert from battlefield to bedroom?”
“The times did it for me. I ran out of ‘holy’ wars sometime in the eighteenth century. Then I looked for ‘just’ wars on the side of the foot soldiers, not the rulers, and finally I realized by the mid-nineteenth century that war was just war, no ‘justice for all’ in them at all. I hadn’t chosen to be a vampire but I could choose to dine from humanity’s enemies until the modern age made it clear they weren’t to be found on a battlefield.”
“So you turned to literally living off women.”
“No. I still honored my vows of poverty and chastity.”
“You?”
“You’re not the only aging virgin to hit Las Vegas, Delilah.”
“Oh, come on! Your harem?”
“By the earlier twentieth century it was harder to find anyone deserving to die in war, certainly not enough to keep me going. Women, however, were starting to discover what they wanted, including passion that included a controlled bit of danger. I discovered I could survive on multiple small doses of blood.”
“That doesn’t make you a virgin.”
“I’ve never had sex without blood, without involuntary need. For that reason, I consider myself true to my vows of celibacy to this day. I’ve never really made love to a woman, just for the sake of it. I have never loved. I think you might know what I mean now.”
“And, in your eyes, that makes you a virgin?”
“A virtual virgin, anyway,” he said, with a wry twist to his smile and a raise of his glass. “Just as you still are, really.”
“So in your mind virginity has to do with innocence despite experience. Or experience despite innocence.”
He nodded. “All you are now, Delilah, is an experienced virgin, in my expert opinion of the same state.”
That reminded me of the Silver Zombie, who combined the extremes of innocence and experience through the actress and split personalities of the saintly and salacious Maria character. I wondered if that’s why she disturbed me so deeply, along with her obvious dependence on Ric.
Sansouci’s head lolled back against the red velvet upholstery. He did look like a knight, a Technicolor effigy of a stone knight in some aged graveyard forever England or Ireland.
“Now,” he asked. “What did you really want from me other than a very long life story?”
“The doctors wouldn’t let me donate blood to Ric when he was drained at the Karnak. I want to know what’s wrong with it.”
“Your blood? You want an in-the-field analysis? You want me to make it?”
“I know you can . . . control yourself.”
“Maybe not. You’re obviously worried that something is up with your blood. I might go berserk. I do scare you, don’t I?”
“Sometimes.”
“Good.”
“If you were to take a sample . . . a tiny sample, where would it be?”
“On my tongue.”
“I meant on me.”
“Oh.” Sansouci obviously relished the chance to inspect me again. “Any erotic zone will do.” His eyes made a leisurely Grand Tour. “Lips. Neck.” They followed my snowy ruffles halfway down. “Breasts.”
I was shocked enough to show it. Blood as mother’s milk.
“Delilah.” His gently corrective voice was even more seductive. “Are you going to force me to say nipples in mixed company?”
“Oh, shit.”
He shrugged, continuing. “Tits.”
Oh, shit!
“Fingertips. Navel. And, my favorite, thighs.” His expression turned smugly angelic. “Inner thighs.”
“I meant places that are showing. My favorite is a fingertip.”
“So school nurse, Delilah. Sterile. Impersonal.”
“Exactly. And where would you learn about school nurses, Brother Monk?”
“From one of my circle of current donors. Oddly, she prefers the fingertips too. Must like role reversal. Not on your luscious glossed lips, Delilah? That’s the only place you need or use cosmetics and you do them up right.”
“Thank you, Mr. Urban Decay. I love your Pocket Rocket lip gloss too. I recall you being afraid my Resurrection Kiss might have the reverse effect on you. It could put you back where you belong. Really dead.”
“I said I wasn’t sure of what your kiss would do now. I’m not afraid.”
“It might be lethal.”
“You need to know this. Your kiss has already revived Montoya. He’s immune. You’ll never know if your kiss can thrill or kill another man if you don’t test it out. Try me. I like danger.”
“Such a brave little lab rat. Fingertip,” I said severely, extending my forefinger, print up.
He took my hand in his, his thumb caressing the inside of my wrist, which felt way too good. I liked danger too, I was discovering. His dark head bent to my fingers. I felt like a medieval lady having her hand kissed. All the paintings of that period teemed with languid ladies being led around by the hand. Sanscouci would have had a field day if he hadn’t been hunting the battlefields then.
“You’ll feel a tiny prick, like from a school nurse, Delilah,” he murmured. “Your fingertip will hardly sense it.”
And he was right, it didn’t, because he pulled my hand and arm over his shoulder to draw me into his arms. His lips were on mine before I could say “Close sesame.”
I could have elbowed or kneed him, but I’d never let another man kiss me besides Ric—Snow’s Brimstone smooch certainly didn’t count. I couldn’t be sure Snow had ever been human, and Sansouci had. I needed to know what about my blood was so exotic or toxic it couldn’t be transfused to Ric. I now feared it could have a vampire taint. Would my half-vamp fading Brimstone Kiss have special effects on someone other than Ric?
Amazing what situations the ace reporter’s “need to know” could get an inquisitive woman into. I no longer wondered why the combination of scared and excited was so many women’s downfall.
I wasn’t falling at the moment, just a very close observer testing as much as Sansouci was. His tongue-tip slicked back and forth along my closed lips until that relentless tickle made them part. His tongue plunged inside for one hot, deep moment, mimicking a much more intimate incursion, before withdrawing. What a tease he was.
Sansouci sat back, visibly tasting me on his own lips. Tease.
“I avoided taking advantage,” he said, “by prolonging the contact past the anesthetic phase to the aphrodisiac effect. Anything you’re feeling now is purely natural.” His quickly lowered eyelids failed to conceal desire-swollen black pupils. “Perhaps not purely.”
“Besides a quick kick, what did you get out of it?” I asked.
He nodded like the connoisseur he was acting as at the moment. “Very rare. New to me. I’ve dallied in an intercontinental pool of blood over the centuries. You’re type AB. Maybe AB positive. Very rare,” he repeated.
I frowned, making a mental note to look that type up.
Sansouci rinsed his mouth with a swallow of the Virtual Virgin loaded. “For the record, your period is coming in six days. The flow will be heavy and the expected painful. I’m not getting the usual coppery tang. Somewhat metallic, still. Silver? Some vampires may be weakened by silver but I’m feeling . . . none of your business. Each person’s blood reminds me of a distinctive color. This is silver blue, like that zombie cocktail of yours, but not anemic, quite a hearty and even robust overtone. Rich but not cloying.”