Carole Douglas - Brimstone Kiss

Ric's neck was another matter and no job for Quick. The gauze bandage awkwardly taped to the spot leached Rorschach blots of blood and required changing hourly. The nurses wouldn't let me touch the dressing, nor Ric, who was drugged into a twilight state.

I watched each clean bandage slowly darken with leaking blood and studied the resulting blot like Caressa Teagarden reading tea leaves. Once the image reminded me of the African continent. Once it looked like the profile of John Barrymore, no, Johnny Depp. Another time like a teapot. Another like a starfish. Then the wad of gauze would be changed and a fresh canvas was taped to his neck without my glimpsing the wound beneath.

Seeing it once had been enough. I'd eyed a huge, bloody hole, not a mere double-fang gash, but a gouge. I hated to think how many vampires had supped there.

I held my own hands as I leaned forward in the bedside chair after the nurse left, wringing them in an agony of guilt. Had the small sensual ritual of our love affair opened a road to an empire of vampires?

Had I, playing mock-vampire at that easily excited site, somehow extended an invitation to the unhuman? The ancient Egyptian vampires had used that small bruise, used the blood beneath the skin as a highway to Hell, playing on Ric's sleeping innocence, plundering his lifeblood bit by bit as torture, draining him to the brink of death. If I hadn't, if we hadn't, maybe…

"Let him sleep and your conscience as well. You both need a long rest."

For a moment I thought it was Irma, back from going underground during the battle with the undead. I appreciated the lack of distraction.

No such luck. I turned to see Grizelle looming behind me in her imposing human form.

"What are you doing here?"

"I've returned from taking your dog out. He refuses to relieve himself here and spirit cannot conquer body forever."

I'd been so hypnotized watching Ric that I'd never noticed any comings and goings except as remote irritations.

"He is a valiant warrior," she went on matter-of-factly, "but even great warriors must piss."

"A valiant warrior?" I wasn't surprised because I'd seen Quicksilver at the attack, but I was amazed the great Grizelle would bestow any praise on me and mine.

"For a canine," she added with a wave of her ebony hand. The long lacquered fingernails for an instant seemed to lengthen into actual, awesome claws.

I glanced at Quick, worried. He was giving Grizelle that mischievous canine grin that said he reveled in her grudging respect.

I was so worried about everyone and every thing I loved now, maybe because I loved only two-and one lay like a sleeping prince in a forest of metal stands and snaking plastic tubing.

"I carried him naked from that dungeon," Grizelle continued a low whisper.

"I know. Thank you," I whispered back with that same sickroom intensity.

"I don't need your thanks. You need to understand what I know."

"What you know?"

"His wounds, except for the throat tear, were superficial, but his back is a maze of whip welt scars."

I tensed to realize that what Ric had fought to keep secret from me was casual knowledge to this bizarre unhuman shapeshifter and Snow flunky.

"I know, but he can't know that."

"Those are old, outer scars," she went on, "but they still sear his mind. He now has new, inner scars, and they have seared his soul. You have only revived him to feel them fully."

"So he should be dead, unfeeling, or undead, with no soul to feel anything instead?"

"You've no idea what you've done, have you?"

"I saved him, I hope, maybe at the cost of my own soul. I don't know yet what that demonic Brimstone Kiss did to me, and I don't care. I'll deal."

"I meant, what you've done to my master."

I embraced myself to contain a shiver. I didn't know which scared me more: this intimidating goddess of a woman-cat calling Snow her "master," or her hints and allegations about the state of Ric's and my mere human souls.

"What I've done to him! Your 'master' has forced me to taint everything I hold most dear just to slake his own ego."

Grizelle was silent for a long while. When she spoke, it was closer to a growl than a whisper.

"If you're strong enough to wrest this man back from the Land of the Wandering Dead, you're strong enough to undo the damage you've done. If you live long enough yourself."

I guess she meant that as a pep talk.

I had plenty of time to think, sitting there beside Ric's hospital-style bed. My discovery of the hidden vampire empire at the Karnak and its interest in raising truly "ancient" vamps would shake the city to its supernatural foundations.

Cesar Cicereau and his werewolf mob were the biggest losers. They'd won the werewolf-vampire war for the city decades ago, but a powerful vampire strain had been building secretly and subterraneously all along. The Karnak was far more than a new hotel-casino on the Strip. It was a visible announcement that the vamps were back, big-time: not assimilated vamps, or pseudo vamp wannabes, or even newly evolved "daylight" vamps like Sansouci. These were ruthless, Old World, blood-thirsty, power-hungry vamps with ambition and access to new Millennium Revelation methods of blended science and magic to raise more of their kind.

By sending Sansouci and support forces to Snow, Cicereau admitted the times were changing. I could see a lot of new alliances, and contentions, arising between everyone from Snow and Cicereau to Hector Nightwine and the CinSims to Howard Hughes and everyone else.

And Snow? If I could get my head around our personal wrangle, I'd admit he'd probably been the most up-and-coming force in pre-Karnak Vegas. In some ways he struck me as a kind of guardian, but one whose hands were tied. He hadn't played Brimstone Kiss with me as simply a sexual game, which was some comfort. It was a "job interview" of sorts. He was searching for a woman unsusceptible to the orgasmic kiss. I, with my virginal and murky non-sexual background, must have seemed a darned good candidate for resisting the Kiss. Which I had, but not enough to suit him, and not enough to avoid passing it on as a life-restoring force.

Lucky for Ric you agreed to the smooch, Irma said softly in the back of my mind, but we didn't totally resist the ecstasy, sister. My toes are still curling.

Shut up, I told her. I'm thinking.

As soon as Ric is recovered, I had a lot of things to do, like settle what's happening with the CinSims, who violated their set boundaries to help me. And I must find Lilith. Is she a Snow kissee who failed the test too? They knew each other before I hit town. Does she know about me? Or care?

And now Snow thinks I've perverted the Kiss to a function it should never have had. Can I kiss just anyone back from the dead? Kinda doubt it. The emotional mojo I poured into Ric was love and desperation-driven. It came from the connection we formed inadvertently dowsing for the dead together in Sunset Park. Is Snow right? I have I doomed Ric to become some quasi-alive zombie monster?

No, honey. Irma broke into my thoughts again. Even the mighty Snow can't know that for sure. How do you think he got all that long white hair? Dude's obviously a worrywart.

She made me laugh at last. Why borrow trouble? Ric and I would cope with whatever this second chance at life and love offered.

"Tomorrow," I told myself firmly in the immortal words of Scarlett O'Hara, "is another day."

"He won't be fully conscious for another day or two," said someone behind me what may have been minutes or hours later.

I felt my shoulders tighten even more at the sound of Snow's vibrant stage-seasoned voice.

"We won't know what you've made of him until then," he added.

I lashed myself around in the bedside chair. "And what about what you've made of me?"