Carole Douglas - Vampire Sunrise

And did I know if Lilith was alive or dead? No, but I’d seen that the autopsy scene process could be manipulated, by anyone, even Lilith.

It wasn’t until I got home to the Enchanted Cottage and checked myself in the bathroom mirror that I spotted the tiny blue topaz nostril jewel Erlene had slapped on my nose while slamming on my autopsy shield. She could obey a clipboard instruction sheet like crazy.

That touch made me Lilith down to this betraying trademark I’d worn in Kansas and ditched weeks ago when I realized the Lilith CSI V corpse had sported it too.

Hector Nightwine, the Demon Director of Sunset Road, didn’t miss a thing.

BY 3:00 P.M. the next day I’d put in a long shift watching over Ric and returned to the Enchanted Cottage, where the estate internal phone line was blinking a message. Nightwine was old-fashioned that way.

A jubilant-sounding Hector was summoning me to his palatial office to view “outtakes” on the giant screen hidden behind his expensive wood paneling. I was curious enough to go straight to his office in the main house for the peep show.

I don’t know if he was behind the camera himself but the sequence was… exquisite. My Lilith features were glimpsed through the thin Lexan shield like a fugitive reflection in a moving car window. The high-tech medical spatter guard seemed almost a modern knight’s visored helmet. I resembled a pale somber Joan of Arc behind it.

As I spoke the nonsensical lines the camera angles switched between the cuts into the corpse’s wan skin welling whip lines of blood to my converging face and hand. Closer and closer the camera came… to my vivid mouth and eyes behind the semi-obscuring plastic… to my pale hands with their bloody perfect false fingernails holding the orchid, which in close-up could be seen to tremble as if the petals breathed… to the wet, pulsing fetal curl of the modern Worm Ouroboros, the lowly maggot.

I held my breath at the morbid beauty of it and heard my own voice-over as some mystical unintelligible poem.

“Maggie lives!” Hector crowed as the segment ended.

He slammed something down hard on his massive wooden desk.

“Don’t thank me. I do have my spies on the set. I heard you expressed some interest… no thanks, please, my dear Miss Street. I know you are the sentimental sort.”

He prodded something across his desktop. I recoiled at first, thinking it might be one of his repugnantly anonymous edibles.

No. It was ultramodern, a solid block of Plexiglas the size of a notepad square. I leaned close to comprehend it. A clear cube with something inside, something embedded.

I blinked.

I saw my hand, bloody-nailed but flaunting the most perfect manicure I would ever sport. My face and blue eyes lurked behind it through a futuristic plastic veil. My long red fake forefinger nail was just barely touching the maggot atop the exotic flower, glistening like Renaissance mother-of-pearl. These parts of me were from a film still, a photo.

The orchid and the maggot-Lord, that sounded like an antiromance novel’s title!-were preserved in plastic, now eternally frozen in 3-D, like those encased desert scorpions and tarantulas sold in tourist shops across the Southwest states.

“This is the numbered First,” Nightwine said, his voice trembling with triumph, “of a limited edition of a million pouring out of the Mexican workshops. Fast work, eh? All yours, Delilah, for a very good job. Thanks to you, the Maggie franchise lives!”

I pushed myself out of the heavy chair and picked up the slick square. Its contents were only a reproduction. As in lost wax jewelry casting, the original models, floral and insect, were sacrificed to make the mold.

Nightwine was rerunning his footage, drooling.

He didn’t notice me leave his office.

Thank God.

Who would believe this hardened group-home orphan who had refused to cry for herself from toddlerhood on had been brought to the brink of shedding a tear for a dead maggot?

THAT EVENING I managed to pay another low-profile visit to the Inferno. Although the nurses had reported regularly to my cell phone that Ric was still comatose but “building up strength,” I needed to check on him. At least daily. And discreetly.

I did not want to see, or be seen by, Snow, either in rock idol or CEO guise. That meant I’d be wise to avoid his associates, like the house watchcat Grizelle and even my dear friend detective Nick Charles at the Inferno Bar.

I picked 11:30 P.M., when Snow was finishing up his second show and Grizelle was nearby to beat off the nightly Brimstone Kiss groupies if the usual security couldn’t handle them. I wore touristy garb from a cheap Strip souvenir shop: loose cotton slacks and gaudy white T-shirt, fanny pack, and billed cap screaming VEGAS! in living sequined color.

Not even the Invisible Man was around to pinch my scuttling butt as I made for the rear freight elevators, then switched to the main ones. I arrived unobserved except by the cruising mirrored security balls that only reported overt oddities.

Outside the bridal suite accommodations where Ric was building iron-rich blood while Helena ’s psychedelic “spell” kept his mind and emotions in healing suspended animation, I paused.

Hmm, Irma noted. It’s more than odd that no one is questioning our surreptitious comings and goings. I smell conspiracy. Is everyone pretending you’re pulling the wool over their eyes because you’re such a sad case these days? You are becoming the pity fuck of the whole damn Inferno Hotel staff, girl!

That hurt.

Although Irma had always told me the truth when no one else would, I shrugged off her concerns. What mattered was getting Ric through this and figuring out how to protect us both in the future.

In post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas? Sure it was an impossible dream. So was what Ric and I had, and I was determined we would have again: life, love, and a plan to kick supernatural ass.

AS I’D HOPED, Ric had stablized since Helena had “bewitched” him. He was off all IV drips and functioning normally, though still in a deep sleep most of the time, especially at night. Even the nurses weren’t on during the graveyard shift from eleven to seven, the one still on duty told me.

“He’s looking good,” said the heavy-set brownette, name tag “Inez.” “I leave at eleven so if you wanta take over on your own, chica…”

She must have taken letting-go lessons from Helena Troy Burnside. I didn’t need further encouragement. I approached Ric’s bedside as softly as a cat over the plush gold carpeting. God, I hadn’t been kidding myself thinking of him as a sleeping prince.

The color had crept back into his skin. Its golden brown shade only made the black of hair and eyelashes and beard stubble look more dramatic. My hormones surprised me with a surge so strong I didn’t know myself. Oh, baby, you have come a long way.

The blood-infusion IV pole was gone, leaving Ric totally unattached to tubes.

Oooh, I could attach to him mucho plenty, me on top of the poor sick man and administering play CPR. Delilah ! Control yourself. Irma was keeping quiet. This was my libidinous moment. And then, the demons of doubt flailed me. Maybe the Brimstone Kiss was too potent to unleash on a live guy. Maybe it would reverse itself, and Ric’s state of recovery.

From loving lust I plunged back into self-doubt.

Rats. It wouldn’t hurt to sit with the sick and look.

I AWOKE, SENSING a nightmare.

Not mine, for once.

Ric was murmuring and stirring under the covers.

I’d fallen asleep bent over in the bedside chair, my arms and head braced on the bed, even my casual clothes feeling tight and sticky.