Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

He stood and opened his arms like a showman, an albino Buffalo Bill doffing his hat and taking a bow. “A CinSim, of course, is doing my show tonight.”

I stood too.

“A CinSim of yourself? How?”

“Simplicity itself.” Snow shot his cuffs, enjoying his Green Room showman’s suit, revealing the new Technicolor emeralds in his white-gold cuff links. “I had myself recorded on vintage black-and-white film, then ordered the CinSim from the Immortality Mob.”

“One can do that?”

“They’re the mob. They fill orders for anything from anyone with the money.”

“And your … zombie CinSim can’t bestow the Brimstone Kiss?” I asked to be certain.

“Why would it? The Brimstone Kiss is extremely personal.” He moved closer, his voice softer. “Hadn’t you noticed? Oh, that’s right. You never got the multiorgasmic effect. You were too busy, as usual, Delilah, detesting the easy O and sacrificing yourself to a Judas kiss to save your own true love. You’re much like Maria, the worker’s champion who was made into the emotionless über-robot in Metropolis. You, too, believe ‘the heart must mediate between the head and the hands.’ But the heart harbors all the seven deadly sins, Delilah. Anger, Greed, Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Lust. …” He listed all the members of his Seven Deadly Sins rock band but himself.

His cool right hand slid around to the small of my back and my entire spine tingled. I was right. It was naked. My back. So was his palm.

I froze in shock and defense.

“Have I forgotten one?” he asked.

“Pride, I believe.”

“And Pride.” He named his own role in the band so softly that I turned my head to hear it even as he stepped closer.

Pride made me hold my ground.

By turning my head aside, I’d put us into a perfect tango position, tightly together but facing in opposite directions.

I tried to insert my hands between us, between his chest and mine, to push him off.

Who are you kidding, kid? Irma was nattering nervously in my head. This guy’s got the ripped body of that giant white marble statue of David at Caesar’s Palace. That Michelangelo sure knew how to do guys. Wink. Who knew an Old Testament sheep boy could be so hunky? What else here of interest do you think might be giant?

Shut up, I ordered her. I can’t think.

That’s the point, baby. … Irma’s voice faded.

I really did need to think, to put all sorts of incidents and innuendos in my life together. Item: the lightningstrike scars I’d seen on Snow’s chest in his performance catsuit. Item: the new star-shaped scar on Ric’s neck that so needed my attention.

This wasn’t just about sex, but life and death, which made sense. Risk. Love. Hate. Hope. I was beginning to put all the mysteries within an enigma together and started to say it aloud, step by step, to Snow, of all people.

“The Brimstone Kiss became the Resurrection Kiss in the Hell underneath the Karnak,” I told him, my voice more breathless than I liked, catching the frantic rhythm of Irma’s heated running internal commentary.

“I was there,” he reminded me. “I warned you.”

“It became something else in the hotel bridal suite you so ironically donated as Ric’s recovery room.”

“When I became your proxy whipping boy, you mean?”

I wet my lips, nervous and ashamed. I instantly knew the moment he’d seen that gesture of weakness, because he pulled me closer, forcing contact, forcing confession.

“I didn’t want you as a whipping boy,” I told him hotly. “I never would have tolerated owing you for that. I was simply healing Ric.”

My self-defense sounded lame.

“So Grizelle reported,” Snow said, “when her fury permitted her human speech after it was all over.”

“Did you call her off me?”

“Why would I do that?”

“You wanted to save your revenge for yourself?”

“Or I just wanted to save you … for myself.”

I was not going there. “Grizelle didn’t tell you how I healed Ric?”

In the extended silence, I saw there was something I knew and he didn’t.

Finally!

My hands stopped fighting his custody. Now I knew what buttons to push where. His Brimstone Kiss had affected me and mine beyond belief. For good or ill? I didn’t know yet. Could I return the “favor”? Did remnants of his Brimstone Kiss still linger on my lips? Was he as vulnerable to me as I was to him? Would he hate that as much as I had? A coward wouldn’t want to know.

I did.

“Here’s how I heal, and in your case, hurt,” I said, feeling breathlessly bold.

My rogue fingers slipped the middle mother-of-pearl buttons on his shirt open. So easy with silk. Almost an “easy O.” No big surprise, except I could feel a tiny tremor of shock as my warm fingers touched Snow’s supercool flesh. His or my shock, I didn’t know. Or care.

I leaned away to—why the hell not?— wrench the shirt open. Snow’s strong hands at my back kept me from over-balancing, accommodating my attack. He would.

“Delilah, do you know what you’re doing?” he asked. Softly.

“Yes. Do you? I don’t think so.”

Having bared the center of his albino chest, I stared at the lightning bolt scar tissue, shiny and silver, meeting from all four corners of his torso at the breastbone above those abs of stone and below those pecs of marble.

His white leather performance catsuits cut to the navel flaunted these anti-ink tattoos onstage for all and anyone to see. Who or what had inflicted them. Real lightning? A fire? Torture, even? Fiery torture?

“A great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch.” He had just quoted an ancient mystic to me. Was the great star not just Cocaine of the Seven Deadly Sins rock band, but a true falling angel? Even Lucifer himself, which means “light”? And the “wormwood” was regret for all that was lost? Heaven exchanged for the Inferno Hotel and the Nine Circles of Dante’s Hell beneath it?

I knew what I needed to do. I brushed my parted lips over the solid center where the lightning-strike scars met, over his heart, if he had one, and then repeated the gesture with my tongue. It was like licking frost from a steel pole in a Wichita winter—an icy, tingling shock.

Well, he wasn’t a vampire. That was a dead issue. I felt his heart stumble and then jackrabbit under my palm.

Did he feel the pleasure effect, though? Or just shock?

“Second Circle of Hell, woman,” he muttered, his voice soft but so deep in his chest that my hands sensed its breath-catching vibration.

Oh, he did feel it. I had what every woman in Vegas and beyond wanted. I had Snow in the palms of my hands.

My heart was beating pretty wildly by then. Triumph almost felt like erotic excitement. I was the puppet master here.

I ran my lips and tongue diagonally across his chest from rib to opposite nipple. His audible intake of breath tautened his pec for my attack. His hands were digging into my shoulder blades, pulling me closer.

That was ballsy, Irma gasped.

She was right. The scars made a giant X on his torso, but the nipples weren’t part of the zone. I just couldn’t resist payback for how he’d pulled my gown down to my waist so unnecessarily during the Brimstone Kiss.

This really was rather fun, salving my conscience while driving a sex symbol crazy. Any way you want it …

I opened the one button on his blazer and unclasped some way-too-Texan silver belt buckle courtesy of the Emerald City makeover attraction.

I was expecting his knees to buckle at any moment, but no such luck.

“Pleasure,” I pointed out rather redundantly, “for pain. I can offer it in equal parts. Have I made up for one whiplash yet?”