Carole Douglas - Brimstone Kiss

"They staked him."

That didn't jibe with the physical evidence. The coroner hadn't mentioned finding any evidence of a stake, although it could have crumbled to dust in the dry desert air in almost seventy years.

Still, I winced at the anger and pain in her light, young woman's voice.

"They held you down?"

She nodded. "And then they… cut off his pleasure parts."

That severed flesh would decay in the grave, leaving no evidence of the mutilation.

"You saw?" I breathed.

"Then they cut off his head."

True. The spinal vertebrae had been separated at the neck and the detached head put back in place. Grisly Bahr had found that anomaly right away, deducing the male victim had been vampire and the amputation had "killed" him for good.

"They put a chip from the proposed Inferno Hotel in his"-her voice fractured-"mouth, like the holy Host, and scattered thirty silver dollars over his disintegrating body. And then they turned their attention to me."

"Attention?" I didn't really want to know. I was feeling this, not just hearing it.

Rivers of furious blood suffused my face. If this mirror revenant hadn't been holding my wrist with a death grip, I would have made a fist, torn away, and gone Cicereau-hunting that instant.

Her sweet young voice droned on like a zombie's, no current emotion in the dreadful words.

"I was beyond despair, Delilah. I opened my mouth to curse my father-but one of his pack betas leaped down on me, raped me in a burning instant, and howled to cover my screams as he shot a silver bullet into my broken heart and body."

Bones would show no evidence of rape.

I fought to control my outrage. I was a silver medium. Maybe I could become a living "silver bullet" that would take Cesar Cicereau down, all the way down to the Hell he deserved.

At that moment, his daughter was far more real than any vision of Lilith. The mirror reflected my fingernails pressing red crescents into the girl's pale skin. We still bridged the gap with only our arms between my reality and her Mirrorland world.

I sensed she couldn't feel the pain my grip was inflicting on her. It was nothing compared to her past, anyway.

"What do you want?" I asked. My voice rasped. "To be avenged?"

"No."

No? Then why hold me captive and appalled in my own mirror?

"I want my lover back."

My breath came out so hard and fast it fogged the mirror, monetarily concealing her smooth, soft face. I could only confront her outrageous request.

I'd gladly go after Cicereau to avenge her and myself. But… to raise a vampire destroyed so totally no flesh remained…even Snow would tell me that was a fool's quest. No one reasonable would take it on.

"Who was he?" I asked briskly. I was a damned paranormal investigator, wasn't I? No task too impossible. Time to step up and live up to your own business card, Street!

She smiled like all young girls in love, damn her. "He had a very important assignment. The Old World vampires had sent him to scout a beachhead in Las Vegas."

Beachhead? What kind of word was that for this teen kitten to use? Oh. Military talk. Right. She had met and fallen for her foreign vampire just after WWII. European vamp culture had probably been as decimated as the human population by Hitler's rampage. Jews, Gypsies, gays, anyone "different" had been immolated. Why not hidden clots of vampires?

So the vamps hankered to start over in America, like a lot of DPs. Displaced Persons, as anyone who watched History Channel knew, is what refugees from the European slaughter were called then.

"The Inferno Hotel of today was a dream in your day, then?" I asked her. So Snow had claimed, but I didn't take his word on anything.

"It was a dream my father needed to stop, like all of mine."

"Your lover is not just sleeping vampire flesh." I had to make her face the facts. "He's only bones, as you are today. You, at least, have a mirror half-life. He is only history. He can't be seen in mirrors, if vampire lore is correct."

"I surfaced when you and your lover found us in Sunset Park. I floated up to the sunlight and sand, to feel you, to share our joy with you and Ric."

"You know his name?" I don't know why that bothered me more than anything, that she should know as much about me as I about her. She was dead, damn it!

"I know a lot that you know. We bonded, all four of us."

Shit! The implications were too intimidating to tote up. My first paranormally powered pairing with Ric over the murdered lovers' grave was not, as I'd thought, a psychic echo of ecstasy swiftly ended in mid-rapture. It was this very active spirit's way of drawing us into the true love that had spurred a brutal vengeance killing.

"Only the men resist." She smiled, girl to girl, woman to woman. "They are less intuitive, less trusting."

I knew I should be less trusting now.

"Isn't there someone you would do anything to save?" she asked.

A couple months ago, I would have said, Achilles. He was my incredibly loyal little dog who died in Kansas defending me.

Yes, I knew that was pathetic. My nearest and dearest had been my dog for almost the first quarter-century of my life. It just showed how far I'd come in a few weeks. I'd grown up in the heartland a girl who was afraid of sex more than death in a world that had suddenly blurred the lines between the two.

Was there anyone I'd do anything to save? Now I could say, Ric.

How could I say now that even a dead girl's hopes for the man she'd loved to death were undoable? Maybe I'd just have to find out how much of the impossible was possible in the Millennium Revelation Las Vegas.

Who and what her lover was.

Maybe in the course of doing that, I'd find out more about who and what I was.

We smiled at each other and slowly released our clasped arms.

"What was his name, your lover?" I asked quickly. That might reveal much about the vampire presence in Vegas, past, present and future. That might explain the outcome of the werewolf-vampire war and stop another one today. One word. One name.

But someone or something was calling her. She glanced backward, fearful. With a regretful look, she faded into the Mirrorland shadows behind her and the shadowed hall behind me. My arm slipped through the dead zone of air between reality and reflection to my side.

We'd each withdrawn back into the limits of our worlds, whatever they were, but a deal had been sealed. I had yet another "client" for solving the motives for such a heinous double murder, a client who perhaps held the key clue to doing that.

Then I realized that I'd forgotten to get my new client's first name.

The next morning, I again scoured the daily paper. I couldn't believe the violent showdown at Cesar Cicereau's Starlight Lodge a few days ago was still off the local media radar. Could he really keep the press in the dark about his secret mountain killing ground? What an ugly amount of power.

While skimming the Las Vegas online Review-Journal, I was astounded to spot an item about Caressa Teagarden, "one of the last living legends of the early film era." Seems she'd recently relocated to the Las Vegas Sunset City retirement community

I'd been assigned to interview her at Wichita 's Sunset City franchise just before I left the Kansas TV station a couple months ago. Unlike senior citizens who had flocked to Sun City retirement communities until death did them part since the 1950s, senior citizens in today's Sunset Cities seemed to live on forever. Rumor had it that the North Koreans, through various experiments, had invented a method of replacing death with a "twilight awake" state. A thing like that would rake in billions. Think Donald Trump paying to be preserved in amber, comb-over and all. Forever.