Carole Douglas - Virtual Virgin

“You rule. Call me a . . . neighbor . . . with a financial interest in the crass commercial machine that will fuel your work to destroy the zombie and drug trade.”

“You’re serious?” Ric responded to the one thing that tempted him, not beauty and excess and money, but power against evil. “I can continue my incursions against the cartels?”

“Expand them, Montoya. Think as big as the edifice I’ve built for you.”

Ric hesitated, cast me a glance. “And Delilah?”

“Your partner. Your lover. She can live with you there, or be a frequent visitor and ally staying low-profile and down-Strip on Nightwine’s secure estate. Nothing changes but your immense resources in the fight against international crime.

“Grizelle.” Snow turned to order his security chief. “Second-show performance time nipping at my heels. Take Señor Montoya and Miss Street on a tour of this new facility, and his new possibilities.”

Ric hesitated, stared out the window at the glimmering golden vista, and then turned his gaze to me. He wore his brown contact lens and looked perfectly normal, as well as perfect.

“Go ahead. I’ll be right along.” I lifted my Lalique flute. “After I finish the expensive champagne.”

Grizelle glared at me, and then at her boss, but took Ric’s arm in hers.

“Consider me your personal wiki on all things Metropolis ,” she told him in a royal white-tiger purr few mortal men could resist.

Ric could, but he was taking some time to measure the law enforcement benefits against the personal debits. Still, Grizelle had major femme fatale paws on him and used her hypnotic green gaze to put him into a limbo of confusion.

The private elevator opened its stainless steel maw to swallow them.

I turned on Snow to present my own stainless steel maw.

“You’re quite the seducer.” My crisp cool voice matched the champagne without the producing any heady bubbles. “I just didn’t realize you targeted men as well. An entire Las Vegas tower as a funding agency and headquarters and home base? What is that new Metropolis tower, really Christophe, The Daily Planet?”

Snow strode to the bar and returned with the champagne bottle to fill my glass to the brim.

“You’re not tired of champagne, Delilah, but you’re aching for battle for some reason. I’ve finessed your high card from you, admit it. You should also admit that protecting Ricardo Montoya comes second to safeguarding your ego. I can offer him so much more security than you can.”

“Speaking of seconds, don’t you have another show to do?”

He refilled his own glass and faced off against me. “You know I have a CinSim substitute available to play me onstage. I can stay here and argue with you all night if you want. And enjoy it. As you will.”

I eyed his obvious, post-Elvis getup. “No wonder a CinSim can step in for you any time. Your act is a flashy, cheap, neo-Strip cliché, and so are you. Ric is not an attraction to be bought away from a competitor.”

“And you’ve always been my competitor.”

“Hardly. You’re a leech. I created two cocktails on your premises and you copped them for the profits.”

“The Albino Vampire cocktail was your admittedly inspired way of flashing me the bird of paradise,” he said. “The Brimstone Kiss was an accidental tribute . . . to me and my stage show, used to . . . seduce . . . a hard-boiled CinSim at my Inferno bar into giving up some information that would save your sacred Ric. Who is used and who using? Are you so pure, Delilah, and I so damned?”

He went to a white Louie XVI desk I’d never noticed on the fringe of his main room, ripped something off a horizontal notebook, and returned to flourish it in front of my nose.

“That gown you’re wearing is seriously schizophrenic, by the way, as modest as a red lamé bikini on a nun. I like it way too much for anyone’s sanity.”

The check drowned out all commentary. Forty thousand dollars. My ears buzzed.

“Your royalties so far on the Inferno house cocktails,” Snow said. “More will ensue. I pay my debts.”

“I don’t want your money,” I said automatically.

“Better to take that than what you really want of me.”

“This is not about any of us or what we want. It’s all about Ric.”

Those words came from the most fearful voice of my heart crying out, much as I hated to parade that raw fear in front of Snow.

“Ric can’t be killed,” I said. “I’ve seen it twice in a few days. The first time was the Murderers Level Seven in your ersatz Hell. A poisoned centaur arrow couldn’t down him. I wanted to believe it was a surface scratch, but I later saw there was no mark at all from a wound meant to torment even dead men and that would be devastating to mortals.

“I saw it again against El Demonio. Ric cannot be killed. El Demonio is dead, maybe, but . . . El Finado isn’t.”

“El Finado?”

“At first I thought the phrase referred to a defeated Torbellino. Finished. But no, it means ‘corpse.’ It’s what the cartel scum called Ric in Juarez when he took El Demonio Torbellino down . . . just two nights ago. ‘The dead body. Corpse.’”

I froze like the Silver Zombie at attention, feeling the enormity of my fear and the suspicion I’d repressed so fiercely and at my idiocy in downloading it here and now.

I let Snow lead me like a lamb to the bar and refill my champagne flute even though my head was reeling almost more than my emotions. I drank and started to feel my fingertips and toes again, but my heart remained ice cold.

“Ric doesn’t need me, or you,” I told him. “Or your Metropolis Tower, or the bloody Silver Zombie. He can not be killed. He’s a vampire. I made him one by bringing him back from the dead. I can’t allow myself to be . . . fed upon. I just can’t.”

I stood panting, emptied, exhausted by the truth I’d fought to keep from touching me.

Snow edged away, then circled my tensed and furious form.

“You won back Ric’s life . . . forever. That should make you very happy,” he said. Carefully. “It’s everything you fought for with every fiber of your being, with every beat of your human heart, everything that you believe in.”

I took a deep breath, but it shook, and shook me. “You’ve always known what he had to become to stay alive, Snow. I hate you for knowing that and letting me dream on, but that changes nothing. What matters is that Ric’s not . . . normal anymore.”

“And you are?”

“I never was, was I? But Ric had . . . overcome all that. He’d sailed through the Millennium Revelation. Turned tragedy into triumph. Predestination into freedom. An ancient folk ability into a modern phenomenon. He’s taken on the supernatural drug lords and human traffickers and won. Yet now he’s not mortal! They won. He’s no longer human.”

“And you are?’

“I don’t know. I do know I can’t be . . . drained, for love or money. I am more than my blood, or my bloodline. Sansouci claimed you needed me. You, who need nothing. You with your Hell below and your Metropolis above. Tell me what you need me to do, Angel of Death, to make Ric mortal again.”

“Can’t be done, Delilah. That was over under the Karnak Hotel even as you transferred my Brimstone Kiss to his lips. Impossible desire can’t reverse anything.”

“I kissed him alive. What can I do now to kiss him undead?”

“Even true love is sometimes lust, Delilah. The Seven Deadly Sins must always have their tribute. Fortunately, you have tendencies despite yourself.”

“Tendencies?”

“You’re far from perfect, and that’s perfectly human.”

Why did he have to rub in that I wasn’t a supernatural, like him and Sansouci and everybody I knew, including . . . Ric now.