Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

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 nightview 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 naive werewolf girl, a mixed-blood Mafia princess-"

"Some very powerful individuals like naive 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."

As usual, Snow had implied more than he gave away. The next day I looked up the address of the coroner's office…Most municipalities had medical examiners nowadays, but Vegas still called its head man for dealing with dead bodies a coroner.

An online map site showed the Clark County Coroner's office located on a two-block-long street north of busy Charleston Boulevard, the east-west street that also featured a lot of vintage shops, I noticed as Dolly and I cruised along Charleston with the top down.

I figured I'd need fresh air coming back from the county morgue.

Pinto Lane was not far from Our Lady of Las Vegas Convent school. I was reminded of poor Father Black. Imagine if he saw me driving Miss Dolly these days! My vintage Caddy was as long and black as a hearse, but the red interior and white ragtop gave her a jaunty rather than a funereal look. Still, I could smuggle a few dead bodies in her huge trunk, if I wanted to.

Smuggling dead bodies made me think of Ric. I didn't know if he'd be proud or annoyed that I was taking the investigation by the horns and waltzing right over to interrogate the coroner himself. Having been a reporter gave me the nerve to ask anybody anything, but without official credentials, I wasn’t sure that nerve alone would work.

The low-profile morgue building had sculptural brushed aluminum lettering on the outside. I made out the name, Grady Bahr, Coroner.

Dolly dwarfed the other cars and vans in the lot. I slammed the door with a satisfying thump and went in through the glass door into a lobby that looked like a dentist's office waiting room.

A young woman at the walk-up window eyed my blue suit and hot pink pumps. I figured Business Brazen would work on coroners as well as rock stars.