Carole Douglas - Vampire Sunrise

“How long have you gone without sleep, Delilah? That lovely pale complexion of yours looks as blue as skim milk under your eyes.”

I blinked at her, too weary-and wary-to admit I was afraid of Ric’s dreams.

“We’ll talk on the plane,” she told me. “It’ll be more comfortable.”

The endless drone of jet engines and those cramped rows of seats? I doubted it. Here it was so clean and peaceful I would have wanted to stay if I wasn’t frantic about getting back to Ric.

At least I’d made it home to meet the parents.

I HAD TO hand it to Helena Burnside.

She didn’t smirk once when I was Alice-in-Wonder-landed to Andrews Air Force Base southeast of D.C. and driven up to a waiting small private jet. Shortly after we were up, up, and away as the sun sank slowly in the west. It was almost 8:00 P.M. and the three-hour time difference meant we’d chase the sunset all the way, arriving at about the same hour we’d left.

I’d gone wide-eyed when I spotted the turn-off for Andrews and don’t think I blinked until we were airborne and sitting in cushy leather chairs that had more positions than a yoga class.

“You can catch up on your sleep,” Helena suggested, “or we can have a drink and talk. Your call.”

“We need to talk and I need a drink.”

“Fine. Any druthers?”

I’d followed her to a built-in cabinet whose exotic wood doors concealed an awesome wall of branded bottles. Guess this wasn’t Alice ’s Restaurant, as in the old song by Arlo Guthrie, but Alice’s Bar.

“I’ll concoct something,” I said. “Hmmm, no white chocolate liqueur aboard for an Albino Vampire.”

“This is usually a guy’s plane, Delilah. No sweet girly liquors allowed. An Albino Vampire? That does sound intriguing.”

Wait until she met Snow, which she would. He may deny being a literal vampire but he was a money-sucking albino casino owner, so I’d named the drink to irk him.

“Vodka’s a manly drink,” I said, spotting a crown-shaped vodka bottle of cut and frosted glass touched with gilt. Hmm, this Regalia Gold was something decadently pricey the Inferno bar might feature. “I’ll whip up something apropos. I seem to have a way with spirits.”

Into a highball glass I poured a jigger or so of the high-end vodka-though I’d have preferred pepper vodka-and a half jigger of cinnamon schnapps, then five ounces of orange juice from an under-counter mini-refrigerator. Feeling frisky, I added two jiggers of orange-flavored cognac from a fancy little bottle. Finally, in went a scant half-jigger of rich thick red grenadine to sink to the bottom. Sweet! I did it all over again and brought the second drink to Ric’s mother.

“It matches the sunset,” she commented, lifting her glass. We settled into our chairs to watch the sun painting the horizon dark watercolor hues through the windows. “We should be shadowing the sunset like Sam Spade on a case all the way west.”

She eyed her vivid glass. “ Umm . Subtle yet spicy… for modern women like us. What will you name this concoction, Delilah? It looks like a Tequila Sunrise.”

“No tequila in it. How about a… Vampire Sunrise?”

“Don’t vampires retire to their coffins to sleep all day about then?”

“So says the legend. Let’s drink to that.”

We clicked rims even as I was thinking that, whenever they grabbed some shut-eye, the Karnak vampires threatened to become the major force in Vegas. They made Cicereau’s Gehenna werewolves look tame.

I kicked off my shoes.

“Panty hose? Why don’t you peel out of those unbearably unbreathable things in the executive washroom?”

I grinned. “How did you know I don’t usually wear them?”

“No sane woman does these days.”

No sane woman. I thought that over while I wriggled the hose down past the shy silver hip chain in a bathroom three times the size of a commercial jet’s biffy. I’d worn nylon bikini briefs underneath the panty hose to make them slide on better, so I was still decent enough for an Our Lady of the Lake Convent School girl.

Pretty sharp lady, Irma said as I rolled the hose into a ball and washed my hands. Watch yourself around her. We don’t know where she’s coming from. And she is a shrink. She’d frown on me for sure. Want you to dump me. You’ve already had me on “mute” too long.

I won’t dump you, I told her. It’s just been so stressful lately.

Because you’ve been doing things you didn’t want witnesses for.

That’s enough! I slammed a door shut in my mind. I’d never done that to Irma before.

Yet she was right. Helena Troy Burnside had transformd Ric from a feral child before the Millennium Revelation into a secure and dedicated man in a world where nothing was certain anymore but change. She wouldn’t be easy to fool.

I returned to the main cabin to find her pensively watching the sunset blaze of purple and orange turn lavender and yellow, like a fading bruise.

What should I tell her about Ric?

With his paranormally healing tongue, my wonder dog, Quicksilver, had licked Ric’s skin clear of the sores from the vampire tsetse-fly bites. I couldn’t conceal that ragged hole in his neck from when he served as the “catch of the day” for the Twin Pharaohs’ bloodthirsty undead minions at the Karnak Hotel three nights ago.

I sat down, my calves rubbing together and giving me a mental flash of how inciting Ric would find my bare legs under this prim, uniform-suggestive suit. I’m your stewardess, Delilah. Fly me, as the old airline ad went.

Here I didn’t even know if Ric was coming out of his coma, with or without a soul, if you believed in that sort of thing, and I was thinking about us having sex.

Helena looked away from the window to me as I picked up my Vampire Sunrise for a sip.

“How long have you and Ric been sleeping together, Delilah?”

“Ah-” I got my mind doing mental math. That would short-circuit intimate memories. “A few weeks.”

She was smiling at me like the Madonna, all-wise and a bit rueful.

“I’m not exactly Ric’s mother,” she said, “but the relationship is close enough to that, so I don’t really need to know certain things. You might want to shutter some strong memories. I do sense you and Ric share unconventional and trying childhoods. You seem to be a good match. And, no, mild bondage during sex is not abnormal, especially when the woman is terrified of losing control because of a forgotten childhood trauma. It might be just what the doctor would order. In matters of sex, if it’s effective, it’s right.”

This “old-fashioned” girl was flushing like a red light. I could feel the heat suffusing my pale chest and face, scarlet against the white and navy of my outfit. I was vividly patriotic at the moment.

She laughed softly.

“Are you… psychic?” I asked. “You can read minds?”

“I always was intuitive,” Helena explained, looking out the window as she sipped my “ Sunrise, Sunset”-colored cocktail. The sentimental song about love and life ran through my mind, not vampires. “It was really only close observation, in the way Sherlock Holmes practiced it. His methods, as he called them, were learned from a brilliant diagnostician, a doctor Arthur Conan Doyle studied under.”

“Really? The fictional Sherlock Holmes was inspired by a doctor?”

“Maybe there were always those who had millennial gifts.” She sighed, perhaps thinking of Ric. “After the Millennium Revelation, I found my ‘insights’ became much more literal. I can ‘see’ high-impact or traumatic incidents from my patients’ past. It’s not like ‘reading minds,’ though.” She eyed me again. “It’s like surfing Web pages really fast. Skittering images and emotions. I sense a lot of upheaval in you.”