Dancing With Werewolves (29 page)

Chapter Forty-Nine

The winners clung together, weeping, unable to leave the foot of the deserted stage.

The losers ebbed away to the Inferno Bar, or to the gaming tables and the rest rooms, where they probably surveyed their tragic, bereft faces in the mirror and gave them soul kisses.

Horse hockey!
I caught up with the crew that had made for the Inferno Bar.

“. . . hung like a horse,” one of the losers was saying.

Ludicrous. I was an objective reporter. You can’t, uh, snow me. Hung like a hunky mortal man, if I had to make a guesstimate. That I could was a bit annoying.

“My God, that scarf! I’d give anything to have it around my neck. I bet it feels just like his hair.”

One of the true believers focused on me, stroking my wig in a creepy way. “You felt it. The scarf. What was it like?”

I wanted to say “China-silk import chiffon, really cheap.”

I said, “Like air, clouds, steam heat.”

Man, this was easy; I had them swooning on their bar stools. I ordered an Albino Vampire to up the ante. They hadn’t realized that option existed, so I was swarmed.

“It’s a house drink,” I said, “really smooth and creamy.”

It hurt not to claim credit as I watched the cash register
ca-ching
at a rapid rate as Albino Vampires were served all around.

A hard-faced brunette wiggled onto the bar stool beside me after pushing off a blitzed blonde to make room for herself. “You’re new in town.”

“Right.”

“Do you know about the Club?”

Yeah. You put it on your steering wheel to keep creeps from stealing your car. “Club?”

She leaned way nearer than I needed. There were vampires, and there were vamps. “Club AV/DC.”

Okay. I wasn’t born yesterday even if I was from Kansas. AC/DC meant alternating current or alternative lifestyle. The latter meaning was a code word for folks who swung both ways. Bisexuals. Also nowadays, bi-humans or unhumans. Different strokes for different folks, and
very
different folks, but this gender preference stuff had all gotten a lot more complicated after the Millennium Revelation.

AV/DC, on the other hand, might mean Albino Vampire/Doting Cows.

The brunette pressed a card into my sweaty palm. “We meet every night. Have a few drinks. Dance. Watch Cocaine impersonators. You might like the scene.”

No, I needed to
research
the scene. “Thanks! Impersonators?” Her breath riffled the phony hair around my neck. “You won’t need to lose out on any Brimstone Kisses there.”

My blood, predictably, ran cold. Was she was hinting that an illegal vampire club had attached itself to a star? Snow.

Is that what had made Lilith a shadow in my mirror?

                                                                                          * * * *

Naturally I showed up at a gathering the next night in a one-story shop near downtown that had obviously gone belly up. Times were tough even in Las Vegas. This felt a lot like going to an AA meeting, not that Alcoholics Anonymous had ever been my thing. I’d covered the organization as a reporter. I found the religious bent hokey but it had worked for a lot of people, including the TV station owner. The news biz still ran on eighty-proof for blood.

The Cocaine Club occupied an end spot in the usual one-story strip shopping centers that dominate Las Vegas off the Strip with a capital S.

I brought a covered casserole, as requested, even though I had to buy it at Albertson’s deli and heat it in the cottage microwave, then transport it in a padded aluminum wrapping. Anything to look properly domestic while getting my . . . rocks didn’t quite apply to girls . . . hormones off. I set the casserole, Velveeta and macaroni, down beside the huge aluminum coffee urn. Like that was the only drug here. Yeah. You could smell Albino leather here like perfumed pheromones.

The women—and the attendees all were women; apparently the Brimstone Kiss didn’t do cross-gender—had that frantically worn look of desperate housewives. They were the same personally enterprising women who had made romance cover model Fabio a household name for a brief shining moment thirty years ago. Given the usual male incapacity for dealing with women beyond sex, generation, and child support, I could get these babes’ fantasies.

On the other hand, despite my early childhood experiences, I was beginning to think I really liked most men: Ric . . . my male guard dog, Quicksilver . . . maybe even, on a particularly generous day, my unAmerican Idol Snow . . . and could cut them some serious slack under the right circumstances.

“You have a Web site?” I asked the aggressive chick whose shoulders would rival a defensive lineman’s. It had been listed on the card: brimstonesluts.com.

“Definitely. It’s an online world. I hear you almost got the Kiss last night.”

“Yeah. So close.” My fingernails tapped the table as I poured steaming amber liquid into my Styrofoam cup. The cup was white, but beyond that it was nothing the real Snow would touch on a bet.

“That’s okay, honey. There are more of us than them.” Her consoling hand-clutch almost stapled my knuckles together, thanks to her painted claws.

“What exactly does a Brimstone Kiss do?”

“Take you to paradise.”

“What kind of paradise?” I was not the type to take even a free pass to heaven. One never knew what one was getting.

“I don’t know! The recipients are all too incoherent to say. Pleasure Central, I guess. And nobody comes back down to write memoirs.”

Hearsay. I was all for nirvana, but I had to have a free sample first.

I left the group meeting with a lot of questions.

Most of them were for Snow, if he would answer. Or if I could make him.

Chapter Fifty

I was beginning to pick up a pattern.

Then. Now.

Christopher. Christophe. Krzysztof, maybe. Who knows what other variations?

My charm bracelet had changed into a silver circle of lips. Cold silver lips.

I suppose Snow knew where I was going around Las Vegas, knew what I was doing.

Whoever he was, Christopher or Christophe, he was a complex being, probably supernatural, and he wanted something from me I wouldn’t freely give. So he was just Cicereau in mime make-up as far as I was concerned.

I made sure to hit the Inferno the next night long after the show, when the sweat of performance and the sweet brain-freezing liquidity of the Brimstone Kisses were history. I wondered if he was affected at all, felt anything profound himself. Nah. Most womanizers weren’t that sensitive.

I donned a royal blue poplin suit I’d used for attending political lunches for WTCH-TV and hot pink fifties pumps. The silver familiar apparently approved of the footwear, because it immediately slithered up my arm and down my side and leg to become a slender ankle bracelet. Call my look Business Brazen.

Nick Charles offered me an Albino Vampire at the bar, but I declined. Didn’t need any high-octane oral stimulants tonight.

Snow showed up in black this time: slacks, jacket, silk shirt, and sunglasses. Maybe he homed in on my silver accessory, which still sported buttoned lip charms. Like his lips were sealed. Right.

Snow gathered me into a half-time rumba. He’d been expecting me. So I got right to the point.

“Why do you do it?” I asked.

“Dance?”

“Snow all those women.”

“Because I can?”

“So. You’re a human drug.”

“Who says I’m human?”

“I wish you were.”

“Why?”

“I might like you. A little.”

He stepped back and stood apart from me, holding my hands in the extravagant open posture of a dance that had frozen in time. “I like
you
. A little.”

“Then we’re even.”

“No. Never even.” He smiled and swept me into a
Dancing with the Stars
gallop around the dance floor. I felt quite breathless, but then I always felt breathless with Snow.

“Are you Christopher?” I asked in hard inquiring reporter mode.

“Who is Christopher?”

“A saint.”

“No.”

“A sinner?”

“Sometimes.”

“A user?”

“Even you say I’m a drug. Not a user.”

He was too right. I tried another tack.

“I’m searching for a killer.”

“You’re a hunter. And a victim. And a—”

He stopped speaking. I really wanted to know what his third evaluation of me was. I wanted to know as badly as any Snow groupie wanted a Brimstone Kiss. So of course I couldn’t let on.

And I was . . . a woman who needed answers. To puzzles, to people, to unhumans.

“Snow. You both hinder and help me. Why?”

“Perhaps you need both.”

“That answer stinks!”

“Then why are you here?”

“I need to know what Las Vegas vampire got it on with a werewolf mob boss’s daughter in the late forties.”

“You want me to just give it to you?”

“Ah, what are we discussing?”

“Your perennial caution flatters me. What I’m saying is, you don’t want to work for it. You don’t want to cheat me out of it, you just want me to hand it to you.”

“I don’t want that. I
need
that. I don’t have time for games.”

“Want and need. Interesting concepts. Close, but very different, after all. What if I said that I needed you to beg for what you want?”

“I’d say, Styx it!”

He laughed. “You’re clever, if lazy. Your blundering investigation happens to have hit upon the moment when the werewolves won the Werewolf-Vampire War. Neither side will thank you for exposing that long-buried secret.”

“I don’t like either side.”

“I’m sure the feeling is mutual and will become even more intense, given time. All right. You have knocked over all my defenses. I am helpless. I’ll give you what you want, although it most certainly will
not
be . . . what you need.”

Somehow this easy, even indolent, capitulation got my pulses throbbing in all the wrong places, as it was intended to.

“I know who she was, the dead girl in Sunset Park,” I added. Fiercely.

The fact was, I
cared
about who she was. And I cared about who she could have been had someone not decided to staple her sternum with silver bullets. Even if she had been a werewolf. Everything alive started out as innocent and trusting and helpless and deserving as any human baby. Even wolves. Maybe even me.

Not Snow.

“You know who she was,” Snow repeated, sounding interested and alert. Obviously, he didn’t, and wanted to. “Can you prove it?”

Dammit, no. But . . . soon. “Yes.”

“Then you need to have proof of her partner in crime, and punishment. Of a sort.”

I nodded.

Snow turned and strode through the tourist-clogged casino.

I trotted behind to catch up. Interesting. No one reacted to him. Onstage he was instant opium. Offstage, mingling with the hoi polloi, he was invisible. Except to me.

He didn’t take me to his office, but to a private bullet elevator to the sky.

Could you say Hyatt? The elevator was all glass outside and all mirrors inside. The sight of Snow reflected into eternity unnerved me more than visions of Lilith and me repeated into infinity. I exercised my new mirror magic and turned the surface to a golden autumnal color with falling leaves and lots of golden Lhasa apsos and taffy-colored spaniels capering.

Snow saw that and touched my arm. “Delilah. No need to fight me. I’m giving you what you want.”

He’d made me think that I was a sell-out. I felt tears as hard as amber forming.

“My quarters,” he said, preceding me out of the elevator.

What a Snow groupie wouldn’t give for this moment! I thought about what I was giving up by relying on his inner knowledge of Las Vegas. I’d rather be working this out with Ric. I should have told him where I was going, what I was doing. But Lilith’s trail was my own particular obsession, and Snow understood obsession, at least from being the object of it.

The double doors to his domain were white-mirrored Plexiglas, in which he was a looming black-and-white presence and I was the humble goose girl. The white tiger from his office sat on its huge haunches before the door.

“Grizelle, my guest and I need privacy and a couple of your best Albino Vampires.”

The tiger’s growl almost deafened me, but its stripes became narrow and then vertical and the huge green eyes tilted and shrank. A black woman over six feet tall with snow-white hair and emerald eyes stood before us, her ebony skin tattooed with charcoal stripes like watered silk and barely covered by a high-fashion black leather miniskirt and halter-top outfit, probably Thierry Muglar and about eight thousand dollars. But maybe she had mugged the hot European designer for it.

“Sure, boss,” the were-tiger bitch said, eyeing me like an invading ant she’d like to use to spice her cocoa.

Beyond the doors everything was white except for the black night-view from a wall of windows. Whereas the Paris restaurant window’s framed a view of the Bellagio’s dancing fountains, this penthouse looked down on the periodically exploding artificial volcano at Steve Wynn’s Treasure Island setup. Fire, flame. Orange and crimson damnation. A roar like a pep squad of distant lions, or tigers.

Snow’s Man in Black outfit made him the central attraction even in his colorless color scheme. His shirts always opened to the brink of his hip-slung belt and I noticed with surprise for the first time that his chest was hair-free, but was emblazoned by a vertical and horizontal slash of feathered scarring, as if a lightning bolt or Jack Frost had struck him cold dead.

Were these the scars from the finger of God casting him from Heaven to Hell? Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling had been lounging, languid, and an easy mark for the touch of the energized forefinger of God.

Lucifer would have been active. Aggressive. All pride and archangel flight against the light. It would have taken a divine body blow to send him down, down, spiraling into Hell, or into Hell on earth. He would bear divine scars for his rebellion.

I was unaccountably curious about those marks, but they were not my mission here and now.

Grizelle, indeed lean and lanky in her human form, brought in a silver tray with two Albino Vampires on it. I didn’t reflect in the tray, and she smirked as I observed that. Were my powers muted here? Or did she just want me to think so?

Like Madrigal’s familiars, Snow’s right-hand assistants didn’t like me.

But then, whoever had, and I’d survived them all.

“You found the chip designs in my office,” Snow noted, sitting and sipping like any busy chief executive taking five.

“Right. The Inferno has a history in Las Vegas. It was just . . . cut short.”

“The founding father disappeared. You were right. He was a vampire. I find it hard to believe he ever became the lover of a naïve werewolf girl, a mixed-blood Mafia princess—”

“Some very powerful individuals like naïve girls. Must make them feel potent.”

Snow’s lips twitched, rather than smiled. Behind his opaque black sunglasses his eyes were the usual mystery.

“And vampires like to prey on the innocent,” I added. “Makes them feel
bad
.”

“Quite true. Opposites attract. The alliance of werewolves and mob bosses was unfortunate for the Blood Immortals. They must sleep, and sleep makes one vulnerable.”

I could second that statement. Sometimes I wished I never slept, never dreamed.

“Do you sleep?” I asked.

“Soundly,” he said. “Eight hours like ordinary humans.”

“You’re not an ordinary human, if you boast about that.”

“No. Are you?”

“Mostly.”

“What parts are not?”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. “Can I prove who the dead man in Sunset Park was?”

“Have you talked to the coroner?”

“Not yet. I don’t know what to ask him.”

“Ask if the male victim’s heart had mesquite slivers in it.”

“A stake?”

“Or your lover’s dowsing rod splinters. The wands peel free of bark when they dowse. That very power drives deep beneath the surface, finding and altering, perhaps.”

“You’re saying Ric accidentally staked the male victim, decades after the original crime?”

“Possibly. Not knowing. Not all of us know our own powers. Not all of us control our powers.”

I sipped the pallid cocktail. It was delicious, if I did say so myself, down to the liquor-soaked cherry in the bottom, which was still sweet.

Ric. Did he dowse for more than he knew? Did the act of dowsing change what the rod found? “Not all of us know our own powers.” Snow had seemed to sweep Ric and myself up in his mystic trail of bewitchment and hidden purposes.

“Will solving the identity of the dead couple in Sunset Park achieve anything?” I asked.

“It will win you Hector Nightwine’s regard. It will upset various powerful and vicious personages around town, which will make you someone to reckon with, and possibly destroy.”

“And you?”

“It may suit me very much, as you do, Delilah Street.” He lifted his Albino Vampire and ticked rims with mine.

“I don’t like being used.”

“No one does, you more than most, but one day you will beg me for a Brimstone Kiss.”

“Not damn likely.”

“No, merely certain.” Those cold white lips drew in more of my own creation, the Albino Vampire cocktail. “Check with the coroner on the boy’s body. It wouldn’t hurt to cultivate the coroner, as only you can. You’ll be seeing a lot of him from now on, one way or another.”