We sped past levels of Hell at its most horrible, carousel passengers aloof from the angst and the agony. It was if we had been forged into a glass menagerie mythological beast of legend and time.
The heaving belly and pounding hooves beneath us finally slowed.
Ric slid off the centaur’s smooth side and waited to catch me on my own dismount.
The centaur held out a hand and Ric delivered the promised bow to it.
“Wait,” I said, eyeing the creature from switching horse tail to shoulder and then the human head and torso. “The claw wounds are healed.”
The human head spoke for the first time, eyeing each of us in turn. “A good deed in Hell is unheard of. Sympathy heals, but there is none of it below, even for the sympathizer. Best not return, riders.”
With that he cantered away to his eternal round of harrying corpses.
I looked around to see an empty, steel-doored elevator, doors starting to close. We leaped to get on the single car, where I confronted a floor selection panel with a lot of Roman numerals, not Arabic numbers.
“We’re at the V, Vestibule level,” Ric assured me. “That’s above both Limbo and Lust. Hit M as in Main, Delilah, and we’ll be back in the real hell-raising Las Vegas, instead of the surreal Hell of Dante.”
A V is inside an M. V for Victory. I hit the button on the floor panel. Ric and I ascended for several suspenseful seconds. When the car stopped, the doors opened on a mob of waiting tourists. We were back on Vegas street-life level again, where sin was still busy being born instead of being punished.
Sweet.
Chapter Twelve
“DOES MY BLOODY armpit show?” Ric asked as we speed-walked from the elevator area into the slipstream of casino crowds.
I stopped to let him gain a couple steps on me, eyeing the left side of his suit coat, then caught up.
“Not at all with your arm down. The real question is, does it hurt?”
“Not at all with my arm down.” His smile broadened to showcase the usual Montoya confidence, that smile like a scimitar slash of white lightning against his bronzed south-of-the-border complexion.
How could you not buy a used Lamborghini from this guy? Irma murmured.
“Honest. It doesn’t hurt at all anymore,” Ric was protesting. “Don’t be such a mother hen, Del. You must have seen some illusion, a fluke, maybe some spray from the blood river.”
I slowed my pace as his down-shifted to blend in with the tourists. By then we were among the crowds milling on the dance floor that surrounds the Inferno Bar and gives it that eternal one-o’clock-in-the-morning nightclub ambiance.
“Say, Daisy Mae,” a familiar voice hailed me. I turned to see Nora Charles in a striped long chiffon evening gown heading for us in a whirlwind of gray and white. “Good to see you two kids together again, as they said of Nicky and me for movie after movie.”
“Daisy Mae?” Ric questioned Nora’s nickname for me.
Nora eyed my bare feet. “Daisy Mae, from that new newspaper comic strip, Li’l Abner. My dear mother, Delta Mae—honestly and truly that was her name—told me it’s not good to be barefoot in a briar-patch world, dear, and especially on a dance floor. Here, take mine.”
Nora stepped back beside Ric, leaving a pair of silver satin thirties pumps standing empty on the blond wood floor.
While I stared, aghast, at the shoes, Nora murmured to Ric, “I see your visit to the L level was productive, dear boy.” I looked up to see her fingernails playfully running down his chest, just a centimeter away from actual contact, and Ric . . . blushing? Certainly his bronze skin showed a touch of burgundy. Nora was such a sophisticated flirt. Maybe that was why she was considered the perfect wife by men of her era. Hopefully that now didn’t include Ric!
“I can’t take your shoes,” I told Nora.
“Of course you can! I have dozens from the finest Hollywood designers.”
“But . . .” Balancing a hand on Ric’s shoulder—the poor guy was trapped between us now—I poked the shoe vamp opening with a testing big toe.
Holy high heels! The thing was physical. I pushed my toes all the way in, feeling like Cinderella trying on the glass slipper. Not a bad fit. First I cop a pair of ruby red slippers from the Emerald City Makeover Experience in Wichita, and now I’m being loaned CinSim shoes actually worn in the wildly popular Thin Man movie series.
Once my other foot was shod I didn’t feel shrimpy, and backwoodsy, next to Ric and Nora. Hey! That combo sounded way too good together. I slipped my left arm around Ric’s right one.
“Thanks, Nora. I’ll drop the shoes back to the Inferno Bar tomorrow.”
“Please don’t. I’m looking forward to an update in outfits and having no shoes will force the boss to order one.”
She smiled and wiggled her barely gray toes so the frothy hem of her gown did the cha-cha. The skirt was a floor-brusher anyway, so Nora wouldn’t look shoeless unless she chose to reveal it. With a swift turn and swirl of voluminous chiffon, she returned to the bar.
“Wow,” Ric said. “Having Nora Charles for a fairy godmother must be a kick for a film nut like you. Sexy shoes.”
I liked the glitzy shoes peeping out from my bell-bottoms, but the nightclub dance scene always on around the Inferno Bar was way more formal night and day than my casual outfit.
CinSim fans, known as “CinSymbiants” or “CinSymbs,” dressed up as their favorite movie stars to come here and boogie. That meant they painted their faces and any visible skin white and wore only clothing in white, black, silver, and shades of gray.
I tried to smooth my hair. “You’re always Mr. Cool,” I told Ric, “but I must look like a disheveled escapee from Hell the centaur dragged in.”
As I spoke, the silver familiar shivered up my spine and draped my collar bones with some dressy bling.
“It’s a tough job, being a mirror-jumping, life-saving do-gooder.” Ric grinned as he tweaked the ends of my hair.
The teasing gesture had pulled my face up. I was about to shake my hair loose when I saw his expression, and then I didn’t want to.
He stepped close, closer as the crowds parted expertly to flow around us.“Actually, I’m more than in the mood for dallying with an escapee from Hell. Before the floor dropped out from under us on the elevator and put us on that murderous lower level, I was forced to interview a bunch of hot screen mamas from the forties serving as call girls in the Inferno’s lower depths. Those black-haired film fatales—Jane Russell, Ava Gardner, or Yvonne de Carlo—couldn’t hold a candle to you You’d know all their names better than I would.”
“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.”