Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

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 un-American 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.

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."