Carole Douglas - Brimstone Kiss

Snow wasn't performing until later. No white leather catsuit open from throat to navel. He was wearing a white silk Italian suit with white ostrich cowboy boots, only the roach-stomping pointed toe-tips visible, a white poet's shirt open at the neck to show off the pink ruby dog collar around his albino-white neck, and the usual black sunglasses.

I stood. Ric was tall but Snow was taller. Ric could salsa with the werewolves, but Snow could rock with the Seven Deadly Sins.

He held out his hands and I moved into his ballroom embrace.

How could so much white be so hot? White-hot maybe?

I really had no rhythm and I couldn't dance. Ric overcame that with his sexy human, Hispanic warmth. Snow overcame everything with his icy unhuman perfection and command. He led a dance partner like a cobra, fast, sleek, sinister.

I could feel his hands sucking the warmth and courage from my body as we foxtrotted around the dance floor, alone in the crowd. For such a high-profile personality, an international rock star and Vegas kingpin, Snow could become oddly invisible to the mob at will.

He pressed me close, moved his hand from my shoulder blade to my lower back, took the other to cradle it on his shoulder, then tangoed me like a puppet over the floor. I felt like a girl in a Parisian Apache dance, slung from pillar to post, winning the battle of the sexes through submission.

Snow had made a career on being ridiculously sexy. I had made a career on being totally impervious to sexy ploys. I was the objective reporter. Incorruptible. He was corruption personified. I knew he wanted me, but he wanted me ruined. That would never happen.

He stopped the sweep around the dance floor, released me. "You are really as tempting as an Albino Vampire in that ensemble. Is that why you wore it? What do you want from me?"

I quoted Patrick McGoohan as Number Six in The Prisoner. (I'm a vintage film junkie, occasionally even if it was on TV in color.) "Information," I intoned.

"Always your petty self-serving goals. Always nothing really interesting."

"You have got me so wrong, Snow. Self-serving is your modus operandi. What I want to know might help you and your Vegas empire. Interested now?"

"In what you're up to? Always."

"In what I know or don't know. Always."

He shrugged. It only enhanced the lines of his three-thousand-dollar suit. Armani, I bet. "The office, I suppose. You're so tediously dedicated to business rather than pleasure."

"Here," I retorted, "business is pleasure, and damnation."

His fingertip touched the blue topaz stone nestled on my breastbone. It grew suddenly warm, as did his tone. "You've been plumbing the depths of personal pleasure lately. It makes you very…persuasive. Come to my office, Delilah, where we can talk in private."

As if we weren't in some bizarre bubble when he moved through the public places of his empire… I followed in his wake, feeling a little like Captain Ahab. "Whales" were big spenders and gamblers in Vegas. I bet that Snow was a "great white whale" when it came to the top rank of hotel-casino owners.

At the door to his office he hesitated to allow me to enter first. As I did, he plucked the gardenia from my hair, inhaled its heavy, sweet aroma, and then put it in the buttonhole of my suit lapel. It had become a midnight-red rose wafting almost narcoleptic scent.

He sat in the white leather executive chair behind the desk, tented his long white fingers and let me gaze at my tiny reflection in those jet-black lenses.

I felt like a suspect up before a homicide cop. There were those "depths of personal pleasure" I'd been delving with Ric in the presence of Snow's lock of long white hair turned body jewelry, turned snitch. There was my secret plan to attempt to reform hooked Snow groupies into free women I hadn't yet done anything about. Soon.

I sighed as if bored and sat on one of the white leather and steel chairs facing his desk.

"I'm investigating the identity of the male skeleton found in the Sunset Park grave."

"For whom?"

"For myself."

There was a long silence.

Snow's pale lips smiled. "For whom else?"

This time I shrugged. I doubted it did for my vintage suit what a shrug did for his Armani. Most easily available vintage clothes that survived were ordinary ready-made. A working girl couldn't afford the rest.

"There are…other interested parties," I conceded, rather pleased to have some cards to put on the invisible table between us.

"Parties, plural?"

That had increased his interest. "Yes." I didn't often have a chance to sound smug in front of Snow. I kept Night wine's and Hughes's names to myself.

"You're not saying who."

"No. I'm just saying that if you prove to be a reliable source, I might tell you the outcome."

"'Might'."

"Might."

He laughed as he swung the expensive chair from side to side. "I have my own very special and rather creepy operatives I could send to your bedroom by night to extract anything I want from your conscious or unconscious mind."

"Don't doubt it. My dog would eviscerate whatever it was, human or unhuman."

"Don't doubt it. You have interesting allies. But I have more. So, quit playing around and tell me what you know."

"Apparently your omnipotent allies haven't found this out yet," I said.

"Omnipotence is not a fail-safe substitute for one old-fashioned investigative reporter with the information-gathering instincts of Hell's pit-bull."

I kept still. Was that a compliment? I kinda thought it was and it wasn't even sexist. Must be this Katharine Hepburn power suit. She was a stainless steel hellion.

"The rumor is you're a vamp."

"The rumor is wrong."

"Then you wouldn't have any insight on who the vampire was who shared the Sunset Park grave with Cicereau's daughter."

"Cicereau's daughter?" He sounded impressed. "So that's who it was. Obviously Daddy Cesar didn't tell you that. Who did?"

"My sources are protected."

"Not enough."

I shrugged. Damn, I liked the effect of my buttressed shoulders. I felt like I could knock a lumberjack off a log with them.

Apparently they impressed Snow. He capitulated and answered, in depth.

"No. I don't know what vampire led young Miss Cicereau to bliss and butchery," he said reluctantly. "Vampires were keeping a low profile then. They'd let Cicereau and his werewolf pack get the jump on them. The Gallic werewolves had come to raw western America with Folies-Bergère ambitions and lots of francs. That attracted some of the more powerful Parisian vampires over too, and they had big dreams for a stunning hotel called the Inferno. The French vampires were used to a society where werewolves had been vigorously persecuted since medieval times and the vamps were civic heroes."

"Vampires were French heroes?"

"Who do you think had the ears-and probably throats-of Marat, Robespierre and Danton during the French Revolution, the bloodiest political rebellion in relatively modern Western civilization history? Who encouraged the reign of Queen Guillotine and the rain of severed heads into baskets while truncated necks shot out gouts of blood? Madame Defarge was Reine of the Cite…and the vampires. Her famed knitting needles made fast work of any aristocrat who didn't die quickly enough. They called her needles the Fer-de-Lance, iron spear, after the venomous pit vipers of the south and central Americas.

"It was a world triumph for the blood-based breed. They almost got one of theirs elected president of the French Assembly. They still mourn their loss of influence in recent centuries."

I sat back, silent in the face of Snow's convincing description of events two hundred and twenty years ago. His tales of French supernatural centuries after Caressa Teagarden's fairy tales of devouring dragons in the river Seine jibed more than was comfortable for me.