Carole Douglas - Vampire Sunrise

“I’ll find a way to make it fashionable. People of any era fall for that.”

I pictured the Twin Pharaohs sitting on their thrones side by side, golden IV poles beside them. Then I recalled the albino cobras that I’d seen flanking the dais in what you might call “real” life, but I wouldn’t.

“You could route the IVs through the uraeus,” I suggested, “the royal cobra symbol. Make a daily ceremony of it for the royals and the whole court.”

His watery eyes gleamed. “What a swell idea, Delilah. Boobs and brains. I always liked that combination, you notice. I may have to hire you full-time. You’ll make a moral man and vampire of me yet.”

He watched my skeptical reaction. “Don’t forget the house toast here at the Karnak, Delilah.”

“What would that be, Mr. Hughes? ‘To Mummy’?”

He actually cracked another smile, exposing sharp brown teeth that would never sink into a rare porterhouse steak or a neck again. Did I feel another flash of pity for his phobic afterlife?

“Every billionaire needs a court jester these days. No. The house toast on this occasion is to you, Delilah Street, and our continuing business association.”

He lifted the clear tubing that conveyed the thin pink fluid that kept him undead. As I raised my glass, he intoned, “You live again, you live again forever, here you are young once more forever.”

“I still consider myself pretty young, Mr. Hughes.”

“And pretty too. Call me Howard. Those words are not mine. They’ve been uttered for millennia during the final phase of the mummification ritual. I have made it my own motto.”

“You do realize I’m a freelance investigator. I work for whomever I choose.”

“You’ll find, as you’ve begun to suspect, that choice is not what it once was in this time and this place. Still, your mobility and contacts with all the parties in our little war of superpowers here in Vegas make you useful.”

He shook his head sadly.

“Only, however, for as long as you’re able to please all of us equally, if not all at the same time.”

I drained the Lord of Blood’s wineglass and rose to leave.

“I’ll need to change into my street clothes.”

“‘Street’ clothes,” Howard Hughes giggled. He was very old and perhaps a trifle senile.

A CinSim Cleopatra appeared in the doorway to escort me back to the bathing chamber. It wasn’t Theda, though, but her nineteen thirties version, Claudette Colbert, glittering in a silver-gray winged metal headdress I coveted so much I could feel the familiar arm cuffs bracing for flight to my forehead, and mentally headed them off. No!

Claudette had slinked through that entire 1934 film in gowns of hokey Hollywood glam lamé. She even wore a collar of oversized pearls, not exactly a desert kingdom staple.

Still, I choked back an urge to curtsy and left, wondering how I’d get out of here after I was out of the queen costume and into my own clothes.

As I turned to exit the main room, the double doors leading to the penthouse broke open, both at once.

Now what?

“MORE UNEXPECTED GUESTS?” Hughes gurgled. “For me?”

I turned, braced for a pack of fanged mummies. And me with all my major arteries exposed by my dancing girl outfit.

The silver familiar, restrained no longer, was expanding into growing lengths of chain mail around my naked midriff, and then it stopped, cold. Maybe my hokey gold-metal bra offended its sensibilities.

I grabbed the nearest weapon, Hughes’s metal IV pole.

If I ripped out his IV using it as a lance, tough.

A big brown hand stayed my arm.

Not Hughes’s brown-spotted, curve-nailed claw.

I turned back to face the impassive Shezmou.

“Wait,” he ordered.

Is that any way to treat a Deliverer?

When I spun back to face the door, I was floored by the oncoming leaping furred length and weight of an attacking royal hyena.

I screamed and fell back against Shezmou. Where’s your grateful god when you need him? My arms and hands had lifted instinctively to guard my throat.

Too late! Canine claws scratched my shoulders as a hot wave of animal breath scorched my face and closed eyes. Wet saliva swiped me from cheek to forehead, deafening my ears in between.

My eyelashes were almost glued shut, but I was able to stagger back and open them.

I was waltzing with a huge canine form as tall as myself, my arms pushing off the powerful furred chest.

Someone grabbed the creature’s collar at my shoulder height and pulled it off me.

Collar?

“Quicksilver?” I screamed, looking from blue eyes to the brown ones behind them. “Ric?” I looked back and forth again. “Ric? Quicksilver?”

“Where did you find him?” I asked as Quick dropped down to four-legged height.

Both looked remarkably well and even smug.

“More unexpected company,” came Howard Hughes’s long-suffering quaver. “Nurses! I need you. Shezmou will let them out when this abominably unsanitary reunion is over. Send in the crime scene cleaners then.”

I heard a fading clatter and cooing, but could not have cared less. The Cleos had vanished too. I sank weak-kneed onto the sofa, running my hand over Quicksilver’s furred head and shoulders, not believing he was alive.

He sat, his huge head even with mine, soulful blue eyes fixed on me.

“I thought you were… you were-”

He whimpered in that understanding way dogs have, and licked my upper arms and shoulders. It was only then that I saw his overeager greeting had left huge red claw marks on my Sunset Park-pinkened skin.

Two long, warm licks and my skin was lily-pale again, even the remaining sunburn erased.

I turned to Ric, who’d sat beside me, and ran my fond hands over his face and shoulders too. He was wearing his Sinkhole five o’clock shadow and weathered gang leathers and felt yummy solid.

“You are freaking amazing, Montoya. You found Quicksilver like you said. You raised him from the dead? How? Where? How did you two find me up here?”

Ric eyed my face hungrily, in his own way lapping up my amazement and joy.

“He’s still totally mortal,” Ric said. “I found you once I found him. You always say he could track you through anything. That included the Karnak complex up to the highest floor.”

My restless fingers were petting their forms like a blind person’s seeing through feel alone. Ric’s smooth warm skin, Quick’s warm rough coat. I kissed them both, and the Brimstone Effect seemed utterly gone from my lips and my soul. I wondered if my painful apology to Snow had undone its lingering power.

I preferred plain, mortal joy and the reunion we shared.

My fingers curled around Quick’s collar, feeling that the silver circles had thinned to the faintest crescent slivers. My other hand skimmed down Ric’s back, feeling only smooth unwelted muscle.

“How did you find him?” I asked Ric.

Ric’s grin was white as snow. “Actually, Haskell found him in the Sinkhole.”

“Half-balled Haskell? That creepy ex-cop who would have raped me if he could?”

“That’s a colorful nickname you gave him, Del,” Ric said, “but it no longer applies. Actually, Quicksilver found Haskell. I doubt this dog ever forgets. Haskell threatened to shoot Quicksilver, remember? So you penned up the dog when Haskell tried as much to molest as arrest you at the Enchanted Cottage.”

“You caught up with the creep later in the Sinkhole and beat him up.”

“Right. Then somebody or something came along and gave him half a castration. Fast-forward to now. Quicksilver surfaced in the Sinkhole after the gods brought the walls of the Karnak feed lot tumbling down, encountered the bad guy, and finished the job.