And it was utter silence. I ached to hear the shrill pulse of the half dozen rock bands writhing to the beat outside the skull, for the screen to brighten with the waitress’s supernaturally perfect face offering a refill.
I was sure my heartbeat was audible too, especially to him, and shut my eyes.
“Who the hell do you think you are, Delilah Street?” the harsh whisper came again.
“Desperate?” I tried. “And overconfident.”
I heard the movement of fabric on velvet. My throat tightened against my damn flippant Goth collar, anticipating the fanged assault.
A bit of light flickered over my closed eyelids. I eased them open a slit.
Sansouci had finished draining his glass and called up the virtual waitress.
“Two doubles,” he snarled at the screen as it illuminated his face, emphasizing broad cheekbones, a bone-snapping strong jaw, and the widow’s peak of his black hair against pale skin.
No wonder I’d taken him for a werewolf, as everyone else did.
His face turned my way. The redness rimming his eyes had shrunken and darkened, like dried blood, but his eye whites still glared blue from the black light that penetrated even the skull booths. “Meanwhile, why am I here, now, at your service?”
“I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt.”
“Or maybe you will make up my mind. Decades are weeks to the immortal.”
His laugh held overtones of a melancholy lilt. I guessed that some inborn ruefulness of his particular vampire history and nature kept me alive and untouched right now.
“Well, hold onto your virtual virginhood,” Sansouci advised, “because you’re going to get more ‘story’ than even you wanted now.”
I glanced up. He looked just as intense and grim as before, but a tiny emerald gleam sparked deep in his eyes. “Guess your method works, Delilah Street.”
I cautiously changed position to ease my frozen muscles, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring into the skull’s black portholes to nothing.
“I’m not Dear Abby, Delilah. I’m not your big brother, but you seem to think I can tell you what you’re so eager to know. Time for the hard stuff, so drink up. And then I’ll tell you a night’s tale you won’t soon forget.”
Chapter Twenty-two
MY FINGERTIPS INCHED the cocktail glass Sansouci had put dead center on the little table toward my side of it. The flavored and colored vodka, added to the innocuous cherry cola, had produced a bright bloodred brew suitable for virginal wedding nights and vampire orgies.
I didn’t dare look at Sansouci, and that wasn’t totally about him being a vampire and also a vampire angry with me.
It was about me being angry with me.
“I’m sorry. I do that,” I said, not looking anywhere but into the cherry-amber depths of my drink. “That’s what I was trained to do as a reporter. Approach story subjects in a mode they feel comfortable with and then get their stories.”
“And why do you need stories?”
“It . . . they explain things. About the way the world truly works, about what this person has gone through and knows that other people may need to know and . . . benefit from.”
“You’re an idealistic tattletale?”
“Not anymore.” I dared one sip of the strong drink, lowering my head to the glass, going for being as low-profile as dirt. “Now I do it to save my sanity and maybe a few people’s, um, lives.”
“You mean their mortality, their humanity? Everything I don’t have.”
Ouch. “That’s my mistake. I don’t think of you that bigoted way.”
“What way do you think of me?”
“If the Las Vegas Strip was a line, with all the people and paranormals I know on either side of it, I’d want you on my side.”
I could feel him shift position, lift the glass, and drink deeply.
“I’ve taken a lot of lives, and you’ve saved lives.” He observed this as an interesting phenomenon, not as murder and not-murder. “You saved a bunch of tourist lives at the Gehenna when you exorcised Loretta’s ghost in that spectacular fashion.”
“Really? She’s managed to come back in physical form and wants to destroy Ric and me.”
“Didn’t you listen to her story? I could have told you lovely little Loretta was and is as willful and power-hungry as the gangster father she hates. Being Cicereau’s victim only deepened the blood fury already in her.”
“I’ve seen a photo from the nineteen forties of Loretta with her father, you, and a good-looking woman.”
“Girl,” Sansouci corrected.
“Girl?”
“Cicereau’s arm candy. She was only a few years older than Loretta, whom he had killed at age sixteen. So?”
“You were there as a bodyguard. I can almost see the outline of the gun in the dinner jacket pocket your right hand was in.”
“No, you couldn’t. I wouldn’t do that. I carry it in an underarm holster or the small of my back. Keep that in mind if you ever get the occasion, or urge, to pat me down.” He had resumed flirting, a mode I could handle. “Loose guns go off, slip out of your hand. Your imagination was running away with you. But I’m intrigued that you looked me over so thoroughly.”
“And that chorus girl . . . ?”
“Vida. An aspiring actress. Don’t laugh; she had some chops and Cesar had promised her auditions outside his master bedroom.”
“What happened to her?
“She . . . moved on. He was not a monogamous mobster. None of them are. No need.”
“When did she move on?”
Sansouci consulted his very long memory bank. “After Cicereau went berserk over the Loretta business.”
“That was after you were indentured to him?”
“Same time. It was one big ugly meltdown.”
“You admitted that you witnessed Cicereau kill his own daughter so viciously.”
“I was there under duress. He was teaching me a lesson too when he killed Prince Krzysztof.”
“What lesson? That he could cut off your blood supply, your harem?’
“No. I can always revert to draining the traditional single source, and they’re everywhere, my dear Delilah. Why all the questions?”
“Maybe Cicereau killed Vida too.”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t seem concerned. Didn’t she . . . like you?”
“Maybe.” Sansouci shook his head. “Cicereau had fourteen master vampires buried and held in concrete coffins somewhere in the Mojave. I was the sole one aboveground. One werewolf was released . . . and sacrificed to the vampires in exchange for the masters’ voluntary ‘hibernation.’ A part-time blooder like myself was of value to neither side, except for Cicereau’s amusement.”
“Why were you saved?”
“If you can call it that. The vampires thought I would find and release the masters.”
I caught my breath. “And have you?”
“Not yet.”
“Will you?”
“Time will tell what I will or will not do, Delilah Street, not you. Cicereau, being werewolf, did unto his competitor vampires as he’d do unto another pack. He scattered and buried each one. Vampires, though, are lone wolves who usually prey individually. Then came the Millennium Revelation of the many supernaturals who had hidden from the humans. The old-style vampire wouldn’t fare so well today. Besides, they tend to bicker when gathered in political groups. They’re on separate power trips. What I do takes discipline.”
That’s something the huge “pack” of organized vampires right under the Strip had, but I was here to learn the lay of the land, not utterly remake it.
“Is it possible,” I wondered, “that suspending those vampires’ lives and power gave werewolf mobster Cicereau some extended mortality?”
“Maybe. I was expendable because I wasn’t like them. I remembered I wasn’t always vampire.” He stated the obvious with a mocking sideways glance. “Several hundred years ago, give a century or two, I was the second son of a landowner in Ireland.”
“I knew you had Black Irish roots like me,” I couldn’t help exclaiming, like we were distant cousins. I could hear Irma saying, Back off, girl.
Sansouci wasn’t buying either. “You gonna put that on the nightly news, Delilah? This is my story, not yours, for a change.”
I winced, but was relieved to hear him use my first name again, so relieved that I sipped my fresh drink again. The added alcohol warmed my insides, but my fingers were still ice white and ice cold on the glass.
Sansouci addressed his tale to the skull’s interior facade of molded plastic bone, the reverse of the Silver Zombie’s robot suit. A faint Irish accent embroidered his tale, something I was always a sucker for.
“The eldest son got the fiefdom, with the might of England soon to come at him. For me, it was either the Church or the itinerant sword—”
“So you became a mercenary, and still are to this day.”
“Street, shut up. You must have been a lousy reporter. Why didn’t you just make it up yourself?” He eyed me, hard. “So I became a monk.”
“You?” I flash-carded my visions of his Las Vegas blood harem, all lounging belly dancers wearing no more than veils and glittering coin belts, like the Metropolis Whore of Babylon. “Monks are . . . poor and lorded over by the abbot and the order rules and—”
“Celibate.” He grinned with rakish pleasure as my illusions came tumbling down.
“How can . . . how could—?”
“Story? Mine?”
I relaxed a bit. Everybody ached to tell his or her story. Sansouci was enjoying shocking the saltwater out of me. That was what a good reporter wanted, an interview subject invested in amazing and surprising his audience.
I nodded and supported my face on my fists, a rapt audience of one myself now. I finally had my Interview with the Vampire. Anne Rice, eat your new, angel-hooked heart out!
“The Church was a refuge then,” he said. “My vows were solemn. Poverty, obedience, celibacy. Obedience was the hardest.”
If Irma were here, I’d be rolling my eyes at her.
“I was sixteen. We worked from sunrise to sunset then. I was hoeing the chard patch, meditating on Our Lord’s crown of thorns like a good boy. I’d forgotten that vespers might toll for evening prayers in the monastery, a severe failing for a monk.”
I nodded, spellbound.
He reached out, his hand huge, I noticed for the first time. His fingers brushed back and replaced the hair falling onto my shoulders. His cold undead thumb found my carotid artery with its first gesture. My skin felt clammy, but I’d worked myself up into quite an anxious fever, I told myself. I could use a . . . cold compress.
Yikes, Irma broke through. He’s got us by the pulse point.
“You’ve never felt a vampire bite,” Sansouci said as caressingly as his thumb rested on my neck. “I don’t know how it is for anyone else, but in my time and place, there was no sensation at first, just a barely sensed pressure.” His thumb pressure intensified. I felt the tension all through my body. “Then the slightest . . . tingle and then the impinging edge of something . . . small but hard, though not like steel.”
His thumbnail impressed my skin.
“And then a flood of what doctors now would describe as anesthetic with an aphrodisiac overtone, but in my time and with my youth I only knew it felt like . . . surrender. The surrender of sleep, even a spiritual surrender, as an acolyte gave to the will of God and the abbey. My vows lulled me.”
I knew certain martial arts grips could stop the flow of blood to the brain. I felt dizzy and breathless, but Sansouci’s touch hadn’t tightened. I was doing this to myself, and I almost sensed craving the sort of surrender he was describing. Utter.
So I let the vampire gaze at and touch the side of my naked neck, nostalgically. He was trusting me with his story, the most important thing in his long immortal life. I let him speak uninterrupted. A reporter has to take big risks for the big story.
The pressure of his thumb relented. His hand stayed anchored on my flesh, his red-rimmed eyes still stared intently into mine.
“I woke in the neighboring woods, hearing the monks calling as they sought me with torches. My hoe lay in the chard patch where I’d dropped it. I heard the rustles of the night as I never had before, thirsted for what I thought was the body and blood of Christ as I never had before.
“One monk had found my abandoned hoe and began circling the spot after the others had vanished around the abbey’s great hulk, their calls growing faint, as was any sense I had of belonging to that scene, to those people, to those mortals. Do you feel faint, Delilah?”
I did. He spoke on.
“A shadow crept up on the lone laboring monk. I could see as never before in the dark. I could see what had happened and what I was now. Only the shadow of myself. I crept up on the alien shadow.”
My instincts urged me to bite my lip from the suspense, but I resisted.
“The shadow felled the monk, and I felled the shadow. I broke the wooden hoe handle over my robed thigh and impaled the monster’s chest with its thick, jagged end. It had carried a sword. I dragged its body into the woods and cut off its head, then stripped it of clothes and donned them, leaving my empty robe beside it. I returned to kneel over my former fellow monk.
“Then I drank him dry between mutters of miserere cordias.”
God have mercy on me. I knew that’s what the Latin phrase meant. On me too.
I sat, breathing and wishing I could disguise that function. And this had happened centuries ago. Centuries. I was speaking to the last living witness, a vampire.