Carole Douglas - Brimstone Kiss

Snow wore a black velour jogging suit. He'd had the forethought not to appear in the costume that would forever remind me of my humiliation.

"You're not dead," he pointed out.

"And he is? They take his blood pressure every hour. It's low, but steady."

"There are many ways to be dead and undead these Millennium Revelation days, Delilah. You may have invented a new one."

"What? Me? Only me? It was your supposedly potent Brimstone Kiss I may have passed on. Maybe that was all you, and nothing to do with me."

"And you'd like to think 'love' revived him? That's why you're so angry with me?"

"That's as likely as a proxy kiss from… whatever you are. Besides, I thought you didn't do men."

A small smile touched those pale lips. "You don't know who or what I do. I just came up to see if you needed anything."

"Less of you. If it didn't make sense to treat Ric here, I'd have him out of the Inferno in no time."

"This suite has been donated to him, not for your sake. I only came to warn you that you'll need to be prepared. We have no idea what's come back in Ricardo Montoya's body. Not even Grizelle."

"I do. Ric Montoya. He'll need time to mend, and more time to come to terms with that vicious torture, but I can tell you he never cracked. He never conceded anything, not his services in raising the dead, not a clue to how he did it. Nothing. Nada."

Snow moved forward to put a hand on Quicksilver's head. The dog growled softly but never took his eyes off Ric, with rapid sideways glances to myself. If I gave the word, he'd tear Snow's hand off.

It was his guitar slashing right hand, too. I was tempted. I deserved something back for my useless exercise in self-humiliation.

"This one probably knows better than we do what he'll be like," Snow said, not moving his hand. "But he can't speak."

Quick gave a short, sharp bark. Snow removed his right hand and lifted his left.

A small blindingly iridescent object was in it. A computer flash drive. He handed it to me. A peace offering? As if ever!

"You might want to stop publicly insisting on tracking down the killer of my groupie after you see that."

"Why?"

"Just look at the recording, Delilah."

"It's the hotel security record of the night of the murder?" I guessed, curious at last. "From the Dumpster area where the body was left? You kept it secret?"

"It's my hotel, my Dumpster, my security recording, my groupie. I didn't think the police needed to see it."

"You are so bad." I took the thumb drive, eagerly. This could exonerate me.

By the time I'd opened up and turned on my laptop computer on a nearby table, Snow had left as silently as he'd come. He wasn't nicknamed Snow for nothing. For soft and silent snow.

It took me a couple minutes to move my mind from Ric to tasks like operating a computer, but I finally clicked the drive into the proper port.

The first image spotlighted the empty delivery area and the Dumpster. I fast-forwarded until I spotted a person in the frame. Two persons. I recognized my groupie, even in the dim black and white light of night. She was facing the security camera and mauling someone whose back was to me.

The groupie was pleading, grabbing, begging. Her hands were reaching for the other person's neck, almost as if to tear off the face, pull out the hair.

I got the shivers, remembering her clinging assault inside the Inferno after Snow had left me that evening. That crazy woman was like glue, invading my space. I saw the object of her obsession lift an arm and bat her away. The elbow caught the groupie in the forehead.

She fell hard and crashed the back of her head into a metal dolly leaning against the Dumpster side.

The other person turned to leave, face caught by the camera.

Myself, reaching up to pin my disheveled hair back into a French twist.

I stood up.

Lilith!

Then she really wasn't dead!

But we are, honey, Irma said, emerging again. At least legally.

And how! Lilith was a murderer?

That babe's gotta be taken for you, unless you can find and produce Lilith to clear yourself. You'd turn her over to Homicide to face the gas chamber after going to all that trouble to find her? No way.

I slapped my palms hard on the desktop, until they stung, trying to feel something. Snow had admitted he kept a lot of things from me. Now I knew he kept them from the police as well.

Something about the recording bothered me, but I was too exhausted to name it.

Was this a bone thrown to a woman who'd failed the Brimstone Kiss test and had almost lost her lover? Or something to hold over her head? Because, surely, he had kept the original.

I glanced to the bed and Ric, my sleeping prince.

The doctor had assured me the coma would lift soon. "He's young, vigorous. It's best he 'sleep' while he's recovering from nearly total exsanguination."

Perhaps a kiss-my newly empowered kiss-would awaken him. First, I needed to mentally purify my lips and mind and emotions.

I went over, knelt, put my hand on his cool, pale one.

I felt a chill circling my ankle. I hadn't even noticed where the silver familiar had ebbed during all the tumult. It now slithered softly up my leg and then my side and finally down my arm to become a simple braided-chain bracelet on my wrist.

Ric always loved me wearing silver.

Quicksilver, whimpering, laid the soft furred length of his muzzle on my hand.

I leaned, leaned, leaned slowly inward, until I could kiss Ric's cool, pale cheek. The dark lashes fluttered on his skin, then lifted slightly like a curtain of black snow.

" Del. " The word was a croak, but even with his eyes closed he knew me, knew I was there.

The joy was overwhelming.

His face turned at last toward mine, eyelids struggling open.

How I thirsted for the glimpse of recognition and recovery in those dark Spanish eyes that I loved…

And I got it, my heart thumping with triumph…

Except…

I slowly realized that one dark iris had turned bright reflective silver, like a mirror.

Carole Nelson Douglas' nonfiction and fiction writing has received more than 50 nominations and awards. After a career as a feature writer/reporter and editor for the St Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota, she moved to Texas to write fiction full time. More than 40 novels later, many of her books have appeared on mystery, fantasy, and romance bestseller lists.

A graduate of the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, she was a finalist in Vogue magazine's Prix de Paris writing competition (won earlier by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis) and earned degrees in English literature and Speech and Theater, with a minor in philosophy. While working in journalism, she was the first woman elected to the executive board of The Newspaper Guild's Twin Cities local, the first woman show chairman of the local's annual Gridiron Show, and the first permanent woman member of the St. Paul Pioneer Press's Opinion Pages and Editorial Board.

She was also the first woman to reinvent the Sherlock Holmes world from a female viewpoint with Good Night, Mr. Holmes, a New York Times Notable Book of 1991 and winner of American Mystery and Romantic Times magazine awards.

All of Douglas 's novels use a mainstream matrix to blend elements of mystery or fantasy with contemporary issues and psychological realism. A literary chameleon with an agenda, Douglas has reinvented the roles of women in a variety of fiction forms.

Currently she concentrates on the Irene Adler suspense novels and something a bit different. Douglas's 13-book contemporary Midnight Louie mystery series features a hard-boiled feline P.I. in Las Vegas, whose part-time, first-furperson narration satirizes the rogue male detective of American detective fiction. ("You never know what madness and mayhem you'll find in Douglas 's mysteries," said the San Francisco Chronicle, but you can count on it to be "wild, witty, and utterly irresistible.")