Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

"The boy."

"Why do you say that?"

"They were just kids."

"She was immortal werewolf spawn."

"Not her fault! Or her choice. She was her father's daughter, and I wouldn’t care to be in her shoes."

"Shoes. Tell me again what shoes she wore?"

"Platform heels. Satin. Navy satin. Made her taller. Older, she thought. She wanted to be older, so no one could control her."

"She's way older now." Ric frowned. "Do you think her father could have had her killed?"

"Her father?"

"You saw him."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"The pack is everything. With eternal life, family is less. He could sire more cubs. More beta bitches and more alpha bastards."

Ric ran his hands over my back and butt. "'Del. I know he's despicable. He also uses the CinSims like toilet paper and Mexican zombies as cheap labor. He may even be behind that stuff in Juarez. That's why I want to bring him down so badly. Help me."

Wow. Even I knew how seductive it was to have a man asking, "Help me."

I lifted myself away. "How will we find out about her guy?"

"Detective work," he said, sitting up and making extreme love to my bare shoulder. "Delilah. We'll never be free to live our own lives until we solve this murder."

I made that "we'll" into an "I" in my mind. Where could I find out about this dead, forgotten guy? Somewhere in Las Vegas.

Ric would be looking.

So would I.

I just wished I could fully trust him enough to tell him all the other aspects of my search. About my strange facilities and Lilith. Yet, despite my complete unveiling and satisfaction tonight, I'd still only literally unzipped a tiny sliver of Ric's soul. That wasn’t enough.

I'd been born suspicious, raised alien and alone, and suspicious I would live…or die.

I went back to Vilma Brazil. I sure as heck wasn’t going back to Howard Hughes, or what was left of him.

It was 4:00 pm and she was knocking back a Bacardi Breezer in the dressing room.

"Hey, kid! You made it out in one pretty unslavered-over piece. How is old Howie? He was really hot for me once, you know. He was gonna make me a star."

"He was gonna make any girl a star. He's living dead in Las Vegas and glad of it. What can I say?"

Vilma shook her peroxided fright wig. "He used to be quite the dude. Slicked-back black hair. Pencil-thin mustache. But he was always a tad strange. Hey, so was I."

"Weren't we all?"

"She was a werewolf princess, you said."

I nodded at Vilma's conclusion. The girl in that photograph, the girl in the mirror, had been just that: young, innocent, tender, and supernaturally gifted. Her daddy's pride and joy. And his biggest disappointment in her choice of mates. She had been playing Juliet to some unknown teen vampire's Romeo.

Neither of their houses would have permitted such a union, or could have permitted them to live after making such a union. Add a little Othello and Desdemona to the mix. Murderous possessiveness. By fathers of their children, by clans of their very different lifeblood.

"Who was the head of the vampire syndicate back in the forties when Las Vegas was busy being born and mortal mob bosses thought they'd rule the roost?" I asked Vilma.

"Only one, not heard of since. He was going to build the most stupendous hotel-casino in Las Vegas before the vampires lost the war. He was going to call it-"

"The Inferno." I knew the answer as I said it. The Inferno had fallen only to rise like a phoenix eighty years later. How much time was that to a vampire? The blink of an undead eye.

Vilma lifted a drawn-on eyebrow almost to her thinning hairline in recognition of my lucky strike.

"Yeah. I remember now. He was going to name it the Styx or something hellish. The vampire crew was from the house of…it's been so long. House of Wrathescu. The vampire king was Wilhelm XII. He has not been heard of since but may be only taking a vampire nap, as we humans would reckon it."

"He was Juliet's dream lover?"

"He was no one's dream unless you wanted a nightmare. You've seen what form of eternal life Howard won. No, this Wilhelm was old and corrupt. Not the stuff of films or Goth girls' romantic dreams. But I recall that he had a son of the spirit, one bright and blazing comet that he had bitten into the clan. A toothsome young vampire."

"His name?"

"Something vaguely and tantalizingly Christian. A prince among vampires. Foreign, from the land where werewolves were put to torture and the test as nowhere else. Kind of funny that a vampire-werewolf romance would end the Werewolf-Vampire War here in Vegas. I don’t know the details. Howard would "

My fingernails were biting into my palms until my blood and dread seemed to well up together to my brain.

"And the name of this vampire prince?"

"Christopher," Vilma said. "I heard talk about that. Some humans considered the name part blasphemy, part undead hubris. Christopher is the saint said to have carried the Christ child safely across a river. The vampire named Christopher was said to carry away Christian maidens. No girl or woman, it is said, could resist him. So you get the poor little rich werewolf girl and her bitter end. Yet you say a vampire died beside her? Can't believe that would be our pretty boy."

Dead bodies were dead bodies. Even supers, when killed by the proper means, dissolved into mere bones and dust like mortals. Who knew for sure just what these two dead lovers had been? Who knew who or what they would have become had they not been killed?

Maybe whoever had killed them had known, or guessed.

I left Vilma with more questions than answers. Chief among them was: who and what was Christophe?

The name was suspiciously akin to Christopher, but Christophe felt a lot older to me, as old as the serpent in the garden. And maybe the serpent had been a better catch for a woman like Eve than one lousy apple.

Maybe Christophe-Cocaine-Snow was the key to the mystery of Sunset Park. Maybe he was the key to the history of vampires and werewolves in Las Vegas.

Maybe he was the key to my own role in all these events, past and present.

Inquiring reporters want to know.

I remembered the Cocaine groupie I was suspected of killing. She'd mentioned online discussion groups where my accessory-buddy was known as the Ice Prick, possessed of a potent Brimstone Kiss.

Maybe I should do a little online cruising.

I headed home to the Castle Nightwine cottage, where my laptop worked without a hard-wire connection, thanks to whatever resident unseen elves or brownies of the Internet hung around the place.

Quicksilver arrived home just after I did, bouncing through his ajar window like a huge, furry beach ball. He was glad to see me. Why did I think I'd been under his distant scrutiny on my jaunt to the Twin Peaks?

Because I was becoming the belle of unseen surveillance here in Las Vegas.

First, there were Nightwine's local security cameras and Cicereau's stolen videos of me at the Inferno, not to mention Snow's access to all of the Inferno pics. Then there was Quicksilver's literal tailing of my movements, which I welcomed. And there was Snow's possible remote viewing via the silver shape-shifting familiar attached to my epidermis.

And then there was Ric, who so far seemed to rely on just background checks and calling to ask where I was and where I was going to be when. Yay, Ric! He was a bit over-zealous, but at least just simply human. So far. The line between protective and possessive with all these…er, entities, was razor-edge thin.

I got online and Groggled the Seven Deadly Sins and Cocaine. Six hundred thousand entries came up. I Groggled "brimstone kiss" and got a million. (Groggle billed itself as "the drinking person's search engine" and seized fewer copyrights than its more famous predecessor.)