Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

Ric reached a hand up to brush my hair off my damp neck. "Te amo," he said softly.

I'd never said, "I love you" to another person, only to Achilles.

And I'd never yet said it to Quicksilver, although I did.

I'd always had a mental block about saying it and had never had anyone much worth saying it to, except for the occasional transient stranger in my life who might have done me a small, unexpected kindness, and saying that would have been overkill, although I did silently love him or her for it.

Ric had done far more for me than that, but I still had a block about saying the words now. I love you.

"Te amo," I heard myself telling Ric, smiling. In Spanish the words came much more easily. Te amo, te amo, te amo, I thought.

We stayed there, locked together, smiling at each other for a long time.

Like gourmet coffee and chocolate, it was almost better than sex.

Okay. Woman. Man. And Dog. Silver mirror-medium, corpse-finder, and walking, trotting first-aid kit. I guess we're the new Triad in town.

Las Vegas, place your bets, figure your odds, and hang on to your secrets as best you can, because we are here to break your bank!

That's what I thought when I woke up alone in my cottage bed the morning after the face-off in the Spring Mountains. Ric had left long before morning. He needed to get back to the mountains by night to round up his zombies.

"They only respond to me for now," he explained. "I don't want any zombie wranglers capturing them. In the old days, they had to be fresh. Then the big combines had them flash-frozen and shipped to the States for assignment."

"Like fish sticks?" Ewww.

Ric nodded, steel-jawed. "Today the Immortality Mob has preservatives for the harvest. They scour mass death sites, preferably those due to natural disaster. War and massacres tend to chop off limbs. It gets more expensive."

"Who is the Immortality Mob? Nightwine used that phrase."

"We don't know. We can guess. Listen. I've got to go. I shouldn't have left them there unclaimed earlier tonight. But-"

Now the zombies sounded like lost luggage. I could understand Ric's fury in wanting to end this trade in human skin and bone if not souls. "Can't you…put them back?" He took my hand, held it to his beating heart. "There's no going back. For any of us."

I closed the cottage door behind Ric just before Quicksilver returned from his run nattily groomed and not limping any more.

Ric had noticed the rakes on my legs and arms before he left and said, "If Wonderdog wants to lick you all better, I don't want to be here to see it."

I hadn't considered substituting Quicksilver's healing tongue for Neosporin, but did after Ric left. Quick sat quietly, gazing limpidly at me with those Tiffany gift box-blue eyes. Maybe his healing gift had been exhausted on Ric and himself. His tail dusted the floor with a touch of eagerness. Maybe I'd better let Quick keep his tongue to himself in my case.

I took a shower, anointed my wounds and hit the bed, dreading nightmares.

They came with a vengeance: a harrowing rerun of vamp boys with my blood on their fangs, of me/Lilith levitating nude and snake-bound and vampire-bit, of running, running, running through a rocky wasteland, of hurting, burning, falling, of a Paiute Indian shaman bending over me, chanting alien words and dripping the soothing, warm balm of a dessert succulent plant on my wounds. Weren't they the tribe that invented the famous and ultimately tragic Ghost Dance?

I awoke and stretched, determined to think only of the happy outcomes of the night before. Despite the nightmares real and dreamed, this one morning all was right with my world.

Snow's silver familiar chose that moment to make its move from a limpid chain around my neck into a cold silver garter at the top of my right thigh.

Garter belts and silk stockings, Snow? You and Howard Hughes wish! It'll be a cold day in Hell.

Which I am really looking forward to making come true in your case.

But first I had to report to my boss, Hector Nightwine.

The black-and-white photograph of Cicereau with his teenage daughter occupied the huge center screen of Nightwine's media wall.

"Excellent," he gloated. "That copyright-stealing thug! Try to rip off my rights to Maggie, will he? I'll smear Cicereau's messy supernatural private life all over the world's television sets. Child murder is not popular anywhere, even these days."

"We have no proof," I pointed out.

He hauled out a pair of half glasses with iridescent frames, and then snapped off the enlarged image I'd taken from Cicereau's computer.

"Las Vegas CSI V is a fictional show," he said.

"You're as liable for being sued as anyone, and Cicereau might go farther than that."

Nightwine chuckled and grabbed a fistful of what looked like mixed nuts from a crystal bowl on his desk. "Have some?"

"I'm on a new diet."

My new diet was based on eating food that didn't try to crawl away on you.

"Tsk. You certainly don't need to lose an ounce. I managed to get some black-market footage of your act at the Gehenna."

"What!"

"You can never underestimate Maggie fans. I must watch them like a hawk. They were ready to burn a million DVDs and hustle them internationally. Naturally, I waited until their job was done and unofficially seized the lot. They'll go like hotcakes and Cicereau can't do a thing about it."

"Hector! I haven't given permission, and I never will."

"Who's to say it wasn’t really Lilith herself? I'd give you a generous cut, of course."

"I've gotten enough cuts in your service, thank you. No. Absolutely not, not if you want any more work out of me. And don't whine. I also want the recording of Rick and me in Sunset Park. The enlarged, close-up and personal version you made from the distant spy camera footage."

"Have mercy, Delilah. That is one of the best cinematic 'meets' ever, and I did the final cut on it. Let me keep a copy for my private collection."

"No."

Actually, I think he liked it when I put my foot down. He pouted instead of whining and slaked his congenital greed with three fistfuls of nuts. They crunched like walnuts, but I didn't like the jointed black leggy "crumbs" that fell to his desktop.

"Agreed on the recordings," he grumbled through his gluttony. "For a yummy-soft bit of female you drive a hard bargain."

"Back to the case," I said. "We don't know everything yet."

"Of course not, but I can go to script on this. The existence of a series of Inferno chip designs prove someone- if not Christophe himself-was keeping the concept alive all these decades. I love the hunky vampire prince getting whacked and someone else getting the Inferno hotel and casino off the ground decades later. A real weeper for the supernatural set."

"This is all still speculation, Hector. Christophe may not like that."

"I'll make the Inferno owner black, maybe a warlock, and call the place the…the Snake Pit. As for the true facts, what else is there to know?"

"There's got to be more to it, that sad hit and secret burial of two young lovers. Cicereau didn't banish all the vampires just by killing a couple of lovesick kids, even if one of them was his own. And why kill them?"

"He's a very, very bad man, and wolf?" Hector asked archly, cracking open a nut with his teeth and gobbling the wriggling white meat inside. "But I like it, Delilah. You think like a movie mogul."

So I started thinking like a screenwriter. I stared at the photo of Cicereau with the daughter who had come calling in my cottage mirror ever since Ric and I had found her body, but whose name I didn't even know. Yet. She deserved a name on a gravestone.