“Please don’t. I don’t want you shedding any scales on Dolly’s interior.”
Manny, more formally Manniphilpestiles, grinned. “No, ma’am.”
Parking valet demons in Vegas coveted Old Detroit steel. Manny always babied Dolly up the Inferno parking ramp because he knew I’d make Wiener schnitzel of his tail—the figurative and literal one—if he didn’t.
Dolly was parked under the porte cochere so I zipped inside for my keys. I returned to find Quicksilver in the back and Manny riding shotgun. Wow. Quick must like the friendly demon to cede his place to him. Quick could make faster work of Manny’s tail than I could.
Here’s a secret to making sure that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas: cultivate the hotel and casino staffs. Big shots and whales you have always with you and they come and they go, but the seemingly little fish are canny friends to have in a pinch.
“You drive like my aunt Zegaconphistia,” Manny complained as I floated Dolly onto Sunset Road. He still wriggled down into the red leather upholstery like a cat in a faux fur shop.
Soon the lights of the Strip were getting us tourist stares, but Dolly cruised up to the Inferno’s frenetic entrance unmolested. The moment I disembarked, Manny slid into the driver’s seat.
“I know. No more than fifteen miles an hour in the ramp. Still the best ride in Vegas.” He patted Dolly’s dashboard and moved away at barely above idle.
Quicksilver had leaped out to escort me inside, so we joined the throngs shuffling in. It was nine-ten p.m., the start of Snow’s break between the two nightly Seven Deadly Sins shows and I intended to have more than a word with him.
Quick got a lot of awed glances, but he was taken for a service dog. He had that all-business look about him, and his leather collar encouraged people to assume his thick gray body fur obscured a harness.
Of course, not everybody employed by the Inferno could be described as people.
One of them loomed into my path, a tall, sleek black woman wearing a short zebra-striped dress and fuchsia lipstick vivid enough to snarl traffic.
Ooh, our favorite fashion-forward shape-shifter is here, Irma warned.
“Fresh from a garden party?” Grizelle asked in a put-down tone.
True, nineteen-forties daytime frocks had a frothy, innocent air.
“No dogs.” Grizelle’s face and voice were harder than granite as her luridly green eyes moved from my floral print to Quicksilver’s flashing fangs.
Snow’s security chief cherished a major hate for me, one part deserved and three parts not. But that one part had been a lulu.
“I intend to see Snow,” I said, scrupulously avoiding the verbs “want” and “need.”
“Besides,” I added, “Asta the wire-haired terrier is acting out just fifty feet away at the bar.”
“He’s a CinSim. Your dog is not.”
Quick growled so deeply it sounded like he had laryngitis. He’d taken a hunk out of Grizelle’s hide once when her inner white tiger had attacked me.
“No dogs,” she repeated.
“I’ll leave him with Asta, then. I’m sure you’ll report my visit to Snow before I can reach the elevator.”
Quick and I walked on, his growl still rumbling in his throat.
He peeled off at the bar, though, sitting beside Nick’s stool where all the gathered lady tourists and CinSims started cooing at Quicksilver for being so big and strong and having such great hair. You’d think he was a Fabio CinSim, perish the thought. Thank God that had been a color film era.
The private elevator was waiting for me, doors ajar. I whisked up sixty-some stories fast enough to make my ears pop.
The elevator door opened on the penthouse foyer and rooms decorated like the interior of a giant ice sculpture snowflake, all white and silver and cold. Against this dazzling background stood Snow, up close and way too personal in his onstage outfit of skin-tight white leather open to the navel above a jeweled fly, the only color in the entire scene. I was amazed there wasn’t a follow spotlight on it. Then I realized there probably was when he was onstage.
“Was it necessary to ruffle Grizelle’s fur?” he asked.
“No, but it was fun.”
“I have a feeling this visit will not be fun. At least not as much as our last encounter.”
I was glad his back was turned as he headed for the glittering bar, though I couldn’t help wondering if the whiplashes I’d transferred from Ric to him were still present. I was startled to notice the Metropolis cyborg standing statue-still and apparently dormant beside the bar setup.
I wandered to the window wall that framed a black velvet painting of high-rise Vegas lights and glitter. Some buildings were dotted by functional yellow work lights and red aviation warning lights. They were still under construction, giant erector-set skeletons of vertical concrete columns intersected by horizontal steel I beams. I imagined the pharaohs gazing on such a sight and wondering how the heck our twenty-first-century civilization had built ladders straight up to the sky.
One such ugly behemoth crowded the fiery exterior sheath of the Inferno itself. Somebody somewhere owned every bit of near-strip land.
Snow appeared ghostlike behind me in the reflecting window glass. An opaque Silver Zombie glass seemed to levitate from his to my hand. His other hand held a milky Albino Vampire martini.
“I have thirty-five minutes,” he said. “Will that suffice?”
“Easily.” I turned from the bewitching nightscape and set the drink down on an end table by the cushy white leather sofas that undulated through the spacious room like a giant anaconda. “Just what are you trying to do, adopt Ric?”
“Excuse me if I sit.” He did as promised on a sofa arm. “I spend a lot of time pounding hardwood floors nights.” He demonstrated by lifting a foot shod in a white snakeskin boot. PETA would have his ass even though I wouldn’t on a bet.
“You certainly don’t tire of meddling in my life,” I said.
“Works both ways, Delilah.” Snow idly slouched down onto the couch. “Inviting Montoya to move in here is purely a business offer. I need to protect the Metropolis CinSim and your . . .”
“Partner.”
“. . . your partner has had the bad or good luck to have a unique relationship with the most desired object in the supernatural firmament, which I own. The arrangement has nothing to do with you.”
“I am not going to let you use Ric’s powers to protect your greed.”
“My offer would protect Montoya as well. You know better than he does what supernatural scum will be on his tail now. They mean to have the hidden power of the Metropolis robot, and they’ll want the man who evoked and controls her.”
“Ric doesn’t get off on putting other . . . entities through the ringer, like you do.”
“A better man, no argument, but neither of us can make use of a dead man.”
That’s a trick answer, Irma warned. Snow may not be a ‘man,’ so he isn’t really conceding moral superiority to Ric.
While I searched for a withering retort, Snow’s sunglasses took aim at my feet.
“What on earth are those?”
I looked down to confront the forgotten peep-toe heels with marabou insteps. I felt my face flush with embarrassed fury.
“I had to leave home in a hurry.”
“Not a criticism. I can see some entranced lover painting your toenails scarlet in those shoes and then sucking them. The toes, I mean. One by one.”
My damn bare toes shriveled back like the dying Wicked Witch of the West’s stripe-stockinged feet in the ruby red slippers.
“That kind of inflammatory chitchat is just why I don’t want Ric under your roof. He wouldn’t understand you’re a . . .”
He waited, sipping the Albino Vampire. I eyed the raspberry liqueur shining like a lost jewel at the bottom of the martini glass. It reminded me of a tiny pool of dropped nail enamel . . . or blood.
“I’m a what?” The sunglasses tilted up, Snow’s version of an innocent look.
The trouble was nobody knew just what variety of supernatural he was.
“A . . . debauched sensualist addicted to the adoration of groupies.”
“Thanks, but I can be discreet around Montoya. Can you?”
“That makes it sounds like we have something to hide. He knows about the Brimstone Kiss.”
“Does anybody really know about it, Delilah? Besides you and me?”
Long, guitar-string supple fingers lifted to the blood bruise on his throat, his head tilting back a bit, as if to touch a talisman. That damn sexual hot spot had nothing to do with his extorted Brimstone Kiss. It was a souvenir of a more recent encounter that was my fault entirely. The mark would drive the groupies crazy if he stroked it onstage and I wouldn’t put it past him to put the gesture into his repertoire.
Why isn’t your damn hickey fading? Irma was echoing my own question. Although it does look hot. Leaving physical evidence of one of your more impetuous and misguided moments, how stupid is that?
Now Irma was ragging on me. It was bad enough that Ric had noticed the mark, maybe even envied it a little. Lord, I hated this super-bite-human world, even when it was human-bite-super.
“That,” I told Snow—and Irma—“is the unfortunate result of an experiment. I needed to know if any disastrous remnants of your damn Brimstone Kiss remained in my . . . system. Don’t get your ego up. It was an experiment I couldn’t try on anybody else. Responsibly.”
“I could say that so was your Brimstone Kiss from me. An experiment.”
“Good. Then any . . . side effects on either of our parts . . . were purely accidental.”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ‘purely.’” He sipped from the cocktail I’d named to annoy him. Now he had a means to annoy me.
“Why hasn’t the mark faded yet?”
Snow shrugged. “An albino’s skin is seriously sensitive. I thought you knew that, Delilah.”
“You’re about as sensitive as a Brillo pad. Ric told me you treat the Silver Zombie like an artifact instead of an unhuman being.”
“He’s right. I’m not sure exactly what I have in my possession.”
“Well, it won’t be Ric. Over my dead body.”
“And none of us want that, do we?’
“I fought off half a dozen vampy boys in my Wichita days. No bloodsucker is going to turn me now. Maybe you are an albino vampire.” I nodded at the glass in his hand, almost empty except for the glob of raspberry liqueur at the bottom.
Snow tilted back his glass and his neck to flaunt my blood bruise as he sucked down the last of the drink. Did I have damnably good aim. The mark was perfectly placed to make a pendant for the black leather collar he wore onstage. He set the empty martini glass on the same end table that held my untouched Silver Zombie.
“Whatever I call it, or her, I’ll protect the Silver Zombie at all costs. And Ricardo Montoya too.”
He stood, so I had to stand also to avoid communing with his crotch.
“I’m the only one in Vegas who has a . . . prayer . . . of doing that with El Demonio and the Immortality Mob and my rival moguls coming for it, and him,” Snow said. “I’ll even protect you, whether you like it or not.”
His smile was tight. “Now do trot those impudent toes of yours out of my sight. I have a show to do and, according to you, groupies to grope.”
I heaved a huge sigh as I checked my watch. The familiar had remained static in this form all day and night, but Grizelle would be waiting to pounce on me in about two minutes if I didn’t leave soon. It was clear I’d have to convince Ric to stay out Snow’s “protection” without confessing the rock star had a habit of compromising women, even me.
It’s hard to be perfectly honest these post–Millennium Revelation days, Irma consoled me as I left the penthouse.
“It’s hard to be that way anytime and anywhere,” I muttered.
In the foyer, the elevator doors opened on a thankfully empty car and a Grizelle-free zone.
Time to collect Quicksilver and finally call it a night, with me safe at home in my Enchanted Cottage.
Chapter Eighteen
SO MUCH FOR anticipated sweet dreams.
I’d come home and thrown myself across the bed on my stomach to think, without changing clothes, but first I’d kicked the damn frou-frou shoes halfway to the baseboard.
I must have dozed off for a short time.
A nightmare woke me up not long after midnight. I’d witnessed the ranting false Maria about to be burned at the stake . . . and then she turned into me instead of back into the robot.
No reassurance was handy. Quicksilver was out. Whether he tracked down lady canines or rogue supers on these midnight expeditions, he had his own doggie private life to live too.
So, groggy and disoriented, almost sleepwalking, I found the toppled pair of heels on the cold wooden floor and jammed them on my feet before wandering into the hall to make sure I was still me and still here in the Enchanted Cottage.
Sure enough, there I stood in the funky-framed hall mirror, still wearing my Loretta-era lilac frock, only with nightmare-tousled hair.
I was just wondering where Loretta was now when my reflection made a face.
“Lame outfit.”
It wasn’t Irma talking so I wasn’t surprised to face my doppelganger mimicking me down to my feathery insteps in the mirror.
“You always hide in plain sight,” I told Lilith, as I gazed at her . . . me.
“You’re always too chicken to venture too far into my world, ducks,” she complained in return.
“Loretta Cicereau is haunting it pretty hard these days.”
