Carole Douglas - Brimstone Kiss

"You mean finding and claiming supernaturals nowadays is like the Space Race way back when: an international competition that's part politics and part profit? Cool idea, Del, but why would the appearance of the unhumans be anything more orchestrated than them popping up from pockets of superstition here and there?"

"I'm serious, Ric. I looked this up once as part of my job reporting the paranormal beat in Kansas. The first reports of supernaturals appearing followed the path of midnight through all the time zones. Midnight when the second millennium started."

"That's an odd thing to check on."

"Watching the dot-of-midnight celebrations progress all over the globe on TV was the key night of my pre-teen life."

"I thought I was the key night of your life."

"Well, now. But back then I was only eleven. Seeing the global celebrations and feeling a sense of world unity made me decide to be one of those reporters holding a microphone, spreading the good news."

Ric, smiling, tucked my hair behind one ear. Nobody had ever played with my hair in my life. Maybe that was my vampire bat bite.

"And you did indeed get to hold a mike back in Kansas. Why'd you give up your TV reporter job?"

Explaining about Lilith's CSI cameo role as a corpse was too complicated a subject for our flirtatious picnic. Besides, if Ric knew that my "twin" Lilith made me a universal object of abduction, or worse, he'd get over-protective and never want me running around town solo.

"Oh, one of those phony vamps, the anchorman, stole my paranormal news beat. Then his weather witch girlfriend blew away my rented bungalow. I figured I needed another scene."

"And Hector Nightwine ended up your landlord, how?"

"He can use a good reporter. CSI is the biggest TV franchise in the world. He needs case ideas."

"So you marched in there and talked him into a job."

"Sort of. Quicksilver marched in there with me."

"And the cottage?"

"Rental housing is sky high in Vegas and what place would take a hundred-and-fifty-pound dog?"

"He's that big?"

"He's my big bad wolf, you better believe it."

Ric frowned. "Possessive too." He leaned in to kiss behind the ear he had bared. "But you still need very close watching by me," he murmured. "And Nightwine wants you to find out who both of the corpses are?"

Nightwine and someone else even creepier.

"Right," I said. "I've suddenly got this weird ability to see the girl victim whole and alive in my cottage mirror, just like I suddenly got a weird ability to get it on in the park with a hot guy with a weird ability to dowse for the dead. So I now know she's Cicereau's daughter. Or was sixty-some years ago."

"Whoa!" Ric drew back, all business. "Cicereau's daughter. That's big news."

"I only confirmed it when I sneaked an old photo off his office computer. Then I got caught."

"That's how you ended up at his mountain lodge as werewolf pack bait. Jesus, Del! If that CinSim butler of Nightwine's hadn't tipped me off to where you were, you'd be buried out there. I need to nail the identity of the dead Sunset Park guy fast. You'll get the Cicereau syndicate on your tail any day now for knowing his daughter is one of the two corpses. Once the police can announce both identities, it's out in the open and you won't be worth going after any more."

He gave me a steamy look. "You won't be worth going after in that way."

I leaned into his shoulder. He buried his mouth in my hair.

"Sorry to be slow on the uptake, Del. I didn't have much time right after that night to think about how and why, only what."

"I know." I took his hands in mine. They'd been barbed-wire-torn raw meat after he'd used the razor-sharp fencing material to dowse for the dead beneath Cicereau's hideaway. "How did you actually raise zombies, instead of just locating corpses?"

"As I mentioned-blood. My blood. You have to shed a bit of blood to raise rather than find the dead. At least I do. I don't do that anymore if I can help it. I raised enough zombie slaves for those vile coyotes who'd owned me since I was four years old. I'd sworn never to do it again."

I cringed to hear this again, Ric's determination to never raise zombies for anyone's purpose, vile or even merely using them as curiosities. I'd thought growing up in group homes was rough. Now, to save me, Ric had revisited his years of childhood enslavement by smugglers- coyotes- and done the one thing he'd sworn off forever. I had to change the mood.

"Okay, hombre," I said, reaching under his tie to undo a button of his shirt. "Tell me how the poor orphan Mexican desert boy learned to be so slick and sexy."

I'd distracted him, as I'd hoped.

"You're pretty slick and sexy yourself."

"I was a later bloomer. You obviously managed to sow your wild oats, as they said in olden days, when I was still in knee-highs.

"Knee-highs, huh? Very sexy in the right context. Catholic schoolgirl look."

"I did that high school uniform bit. An all-girl high school. Catholic, natch."

"Good girl. I attended an all-boys prep school run by Christian brothers. We had uniforms too."

"Ooh, you must have looked delish in a uniform. No wonder the girls were all crazy about you." I undid another button and he caught his breath.

"As a matter of fact, they were." He was teasing back, waiting to see how far I'd go. "I was the hot new kid. I'd made the news a couple years back as 'feral boy,' but my adopted mother had given me every behavioral test in the book; taught me English, plus a few other languages; civilized manners; gave me an accelerated learning program. After that, the hotties from the nearby girls' prep school were ready to put me through every test drive they could think of."

"It must have been… guy heaven."

"Yeah. I couldn't believe my luck. They were all on the pill and they planned to get all the thrills they could before settling into a semi-arranged marriage with some WASP Stepford husband."

"Didn't the other guys get jealous? Wasn't being from Mexico a problem?"

"This was D.C. Lots of foreign ambassadors' kids and wealthy elite kids attend such schools. Besides, my adopted mother had taught me all the romance languages. Castilian Spanish, French and Italian. I have a gift for languages."

"Impressive. You can use your French on me any time It sure says romance. Wow. You aren't only good-looking, but smart."

He recognized the line guys usually give girls and laughed. I undid another button and slid my whole hand inside his shirt to get him back on the right track. "So what were these preppie girls like?"

"Like? For one thing, they'd never paw me in a public park, just to make me forget that I broke my vow never to raise any more zombies."

I drew back, caught.

"Not that they wouldn't paw me in a public park just for the heck of it."

I slapped him lightly on the chest for leading me on while I was leading him on. "I'm jealous."

"Don't be," he said. "I found out their game by senior year. I was the hot ethnic flavor of the year. A way to defy their parents, have some kicks and not get bored. I was just a diversion."

"That you are." I toyed with his nipple again.

"Delilah, stop that! You wanted to know. Listen, some wanted their parents to know they were seeing me, just to jerk them around. Others never wanted anyone to know but their very best friends. Guess how I found out?"

"Very best friends can be treacherous. 'Them', Ric? You were a serial gigolo?"

"Yeah. I was young, they were ready and so was I. It was too easy to be right."

"And I'm hard."

"Yes. What really turned me off was why I wasn't good enough to date for real."

"Which was?"

"It wasn't my Mexican blood. It wasn't my lurid background. One of the other guys told me why, finally, meaning to piss me off. It was that my adopted parents weren't high enough on the Washington social register."