Carole Douglas - Brimstone Kiss

We walked for what I guessed were three Las Vegas Strip blocks. I figured we were at the back of the Inferno layout.

The area opened up into an underground plain of stones and arches. Through one of the arches rows of huge freight elevators were disgorging men and women wearing the same metal-imbedded wetsuits we did, except they were less shiny, and had Inferno security force badges on the shoulders. They were pulling trolleys loaded with racks of weapons, everything from machine guns to shotguns to swords and axes to flame-throwers.

Behind them came another cadre of wet-suited people.

I froze when one of the new men walked up to me, a sword belt hung over one shoulder and a nasty-looking machine pistol on a bandolier over the other, squinting to fix my face in his focus.

"Sansouci." Only the green eyes gave him away. In the fury of a fight, we'd know our own by the uniform only. And it would be a furious fight, given the weaponry.

I eyed Snow's back. He'd believed me, at least, about the numbers and killing instincts of the Karnak crew.

"You're here because-?" I asked Sansouci.

"Christophe convinced Cicereau the Karnak vampires posed a clear and present danger to us all. I'm guessing that you're behind this."

"Why?'

"Ever since you hit town, things have been going to Hell." He looked around with a raised eyebrow. "My orders are to protect our forces first and kill vampires second, but I'll watch your back."

"Why?"

"I like the looks of it."

"You haven't seen it."

"I go on instinct."

"Christophe didn't tell you the Karnak vampires are holding Ric and he knows stuff they're almost dying to find out?"

"Shit. No. I'm sorry. Christophe's people didn't mention that. Cicereau wouldn't give a fang about an ex-FBI man."

"And you?"

"I told you. I like you and your back, sight unseen. If he's your main man and if vampires want him that bad, I'll watch his back if we find him too."

I raised an eyebrow. Maybe Sansouci could be an ally, after all. "You help save Ric and I'll"-I really couldn't offer him anything he'd want-"try to return the favor some day."

He nodded briskly. "Fair enough."

"You don't mind going after your… kind?"

"These creatures aren't my 'kind', vampire or not." Sansouci frowned at me. "I've never seen even you so pale, baby pale. How'd you get Christophe to go to war?"

"My silver Irish tongue?" My knee-jerk, defensive quip had come too close to the truth. And Sansouci was no fool. I could feel my cheeks flaming as if I suddenly stood over a campfire.

"Huh. You paid his price, whatever it was, didn't you?"

"So did Cicereau, evidently."

Checkmate.

We turned to watch the Inferno forces and Cicereau's muscle men sling weapons over and torsos and every limbs. The echoes of the din were almost deafening.

Sansouci grinned. "Super-fine equipment. Never did cotton to mummies. The werewolves are only in human form right now, but they're fierce fighters even so, and needed some exercise." He eyed me again. "We going to run into those devil-dogs again?"

"Hyenas with eternal, supernatural strength."

"Good." Sansouci hefted his bandoliers tighter over his wide shoulders. "Thanks for the mission."

I stood alone. I felt as edged as a weapon, ready to turn my shame and fury against whoever opposed us. When Grizelle strode over, weapon-hung and holding a sword belt for me, I tightened with dislike.

"I'm your partner. I've got the flame-thrower, you've got the sword. Slash and burn is our game. Vamps are super-fast and super-powerful. No mercy is the only way to deal with them. You ready?"

I nodded. I was ultra-ready to show no mercy to someone. "What about… your boss?"

"What about him?"

"Who's his partner if you're with me?"

"Like you'd worry?" Her white smile showed the teeth of the tiger. She nodded to the dark river's edge.

I saw a tongue of stone pier thrusting out into the dark water where the river had widened into a lake as far as was visible in this dim underworld. A lone black figure stood at the end of the pier, one dead-white, ungauntleted hand throwing a veil of what appeared to be gray powder into the water.

He spoke, intoned, words that echoed off the stones.

"In the names of the murderers and the maidens and time immemorial, I command your ashes to congeal. I command you, La Gargouille, to rise."

Shivers coursed under my leather wetsuit as I remembered Caressa Teagarden's tales of her ancestor, the gargoyle carver of Notre Dame. This was not a mere gargoyle that Snow was summoning. This was the dragon of the Seine itself, supposedly burned to ashes by a holy cardinal.

Who was Snow that he could cast ashes on the water to rise as serpentine flesh and scale? What was he? Devil or angel… or something even more or less, using powers holy or hellish?

But that was then, the legend of the water dragon, in Medieval France, and this was now in Middle-evil Earth, and it was becoming reality.

The dark river water boiled like a vast pot of oil. Then a huge, pale-scaled form came rising, dripping gouts black as old blood, folding its webbed wings against its massive curved sides.

Only one head crowned its long, serpent-supple neck, but it bowed to Snow who leaped upon it. Up he rose to the cavern apex on that thorny, massive brow.

"This is a rescue mission, a raid," Snow's rock-concert voice boomed off the rock walls and water. "We will stop all opposition forces encountered with whatever means suits their breed and any mortal and immortal allies they may have.

"My mount's fiery breath will sear our foes dead; until they number few enough to get past. At that point we'll be hand-to-hand. Grizelle and I will lead, along with Sansouci of the Cicereau syndicate. Each fighter must be on the alert for a mortal prisoner, a Latino man of great value to the vampires-and a prize for our party. He'll be hidden and well-guarded."

The dragon began stalking, its huge body as hidden as the bulk of an iceberg, down the shallow river, towing an armada of empty shallow-bottomed barges. Its cave-entrance-size nostrils snorted mists of steam.

The armed forces shouted in triumph at the size and power of their leading edge, and waded to the thigh-tops into the fearsome dark shallows to scramble aboard the barges.

"Where are they going?" I asked Grizelle

She picked me up like a doll.

"Where we are. Along the doom-driven river Styx to the sacred river of the Egyptian dead and the temple of Karnak. I'm here on orders that you don't get your feet wet in Hell or in the river of blood that will soon flow under the Karnak."

The dozen or so barges were shaped like long-necked Viking craft with dragon figureheads.

Gliding along without the aid of oars in the deeper middle of the river, they were as silent in motion as ghost ships.

Armed warriors lined their sides. One thought of shields when envisioning Vikings, but these fighters wore their shields. I would bet the steel-studded wetsuits were fashioned of some impervious blend of materials that made them as supple as second skins and tougher than crocodile hide, chain mail or Kevlar.

The dragon's rear was a dinosaur-size mountain blocking everything ahead, a beaten metal wall of gorgeous scales. Every so often its submerged tail would twitch out of the oily water, splashing the fighters and making their Viking ships wallow wildly.

No wonder this uniform I wore was based on a modern wetsuit. Inside my own impervious body armor, I felt empty and anxious.

I couldn't believe I'd set this awesome force in motion.

I couldn't believe Snow as a dragon-rider, despite his stage shtick, much less as a dragon-raiser.

Some entrepreneur had imported the historical London Bridge to the Arizona desert as a tourist attraction back in the last century, making it a bridge over untroubled sand. The dragon, La Gargouille, though, had been called up from its own ashes. Why was Snow the custodian of such a legendary creature and how could he raise the dead beast?