Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

He was breathing hard, but still able to speak. “Oh, Delilah,” he said putting his mouth on the hair covering my ear. “Do you think I’d be crazy enough to let you cut my hair, or tell you that?”

I’d heard that rumble with my cheek and ear pressed against his chest.

“Do you feel like this onstage?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“Like they’re all in the palm of your hand?”

His soft laughter stopped when I applied my tongue again and ran it down to his navel.

“How far do these lightning scars go?” I asked, parting the zipper on his pants.

“From Heaven to Hell and back again. How far are you going to go?”

He sounded amused now, and more in control than I wanted, but his breath was coming quick and shallow.

I took stock. My cheeks burned and my lips tingled. It was either go down, to Hell, or up, to Heaven. Low road or high road.

I’d proved my theory. The silvered tissue of scarred skin was subject to my healing, soothing, and even surreal sexual influence. So I’d also proved that I could undo Snow as much as he had undone me. We were tied at the moment. His hands shifted to the top of my shoulders, ready to assist me in sinking to a new level of competitive sensuality.

Instead, I surprised us both and went up, my fingers ripping open his top shirt buttons and pulling the string tie loose and his collar agape to tilt my face sideways and suck vampire-hard at the hollow of his throat.

Who was helpless and exposed now? I wanted to ask as his head reared back. He would have spoken, maybe even objected, but I breathed—or hissed— shhhh without missing a beat. So he let me have my way with him.

Only … his hands fanned on my bare lower back and tilted my strong, silver-laced, satin-clad pelvic bones against his.

To feel every throb of his climax.

That forced me to break my punishing kiss and stumble back to establish my balance in every way. I kept my head tilted at an inquisitive angle. “One? Maybe two lashes paid for now, would you grant me that?”

Snow had let himself sink onto the narrow hard arm of a theater chair, his clothes still split open a provocative smidge down the middle, from the pulse visibly galloping in his throat to Gehenna. Not a bad look. I’d have been a killer GQ advertising director too.

So.

Delilah, the small and meek, had just had a very personal peek behind the façade.

The Great and Powerful Snow was just another man behind the curtain in need of a really good blow job.

AFTER THIS PIECE of impromptu performance “art,” I was more than ready to retreat behind the closed door of the suite’s powder room off the entry hall.

The last time I’d made a pit stop on the way out of a major hotel-casino’s penthouse suite, it had been to wash off blood spatter after ridding werewolf mobster Cesar Cicereau of a reanimated victim at the Gehenna Hotel in Vegas.

Now, I just wanted to avoid Snow for a while.

When I entered, I discovered this was a kiss-off point for the ladies.

Here I’d been hopelessly Midwestern again, thinking vacationing married couples used this suite. Duh. It was for big spenders and their hired ladies of the night. No wonder it offered the high-tech fantasy makeover. I began to suspect the guest programmed his fantasy tart into the process. The lights in here should have been tinted red, but they, too, were green, as was anything reflected by the mirror.

I twisted to view the back of my gown … gorgeous bias-cut green satin folds, tight through the torso and flaring into a mermaid skirt with a train. Yup, cut down to rear cleavage, which was accented with a rhinestone pin in a peacock tail design. How ironic that Snow fixated on bare white backs when his own was now hash, thanks to me. If he indeed bore no marks, the only way I’d find out would be with a rematch.

Speaking of marks … I lifted the heavy waves of unbraided hair off my neck, but no matter which way I turned and twisted, I could just barely glimpse Ric’s love bruise.

Well, look at you wearing a fairly fresh new skank tattoo yourself.

Dry up, Irma, I thought.

And then I turned to face myself in the mirror. I hadn’t heard Irma. “Lilith” stared back at me.

I knew her because she wasn’t a mirror image. She wore low-rise jeans that underlined an “outie” belly button, pierced by a familiar blue topaz stud, whereas mine was an “innie.”

That kind of summed up our opposing personalities, but we actually differed in this minor way? I’d assumed we were identical in everything physical, for some reason.

“Here you are,” Lilith went on, “back in Wichita, living it up in the ‘whale’ suite. Watching boring old movies. Riding our old friend Snow hard and putting him up wet. I love it.”

“That’s between him and me,” I said. “Or maybe you are.”

“Nope, I never got even one orgasmic shiver out of Ice Prick. I guess he likes using you better.”

“Why are you here again? Oh. Maybe it’s the current theme. Wicked Witch green. A little envy going on, Lilith?”

“What you don’t know, Delilah, would fill a chasm.”

“You know I saw your Wichita police mug shots. You got me in trouble here years ago. You were acting out and showing up on my record.”

“I freaked out after that gross incident you know about now. I guess subconsciously I was trying to make Wichita too hot to hold me so I had to leave eventually. You sure weren’t going to bust out.”

She made a face. “I didn’t know we were, like, the Corsican twins until that happened.”

My mind did another rapid vintage movie rerun. The Corsican Brothers were guys, obviously, separated at birth, but they found each again because they felt each other’s pain.

“Home run, kid,” Lilith said, as the reference registered on my face. “I couldn’t stick around and wait for you to turn bean-grinder and smell the Starbucks.” Lilith sounded guilty anyway. “That ugly doctor stuff drove me to act out … and finally move on. I hitched all the way to the Sunshine State to find Mother Dearest, though it turns out she didn’t want either of us.”

“We have a mother?”

“Most people do, even us.”

“Where is she? Oh.” I remembered the La Vida Loca checks sent to Our Lady of the Lake. “ Corona, California?”

Lilith shrugged tattooed shoulders. The designs weren’t pretty, just blots of dark ink. She looked hollow-eyed and gaunt and too indifferent to really be that way.

“Lil … are you all right?”

“Right as acid rain,” she answered bitterly, looking toward the ceiling and rolling heavenly blue-green eyes emphasized by seriously smoked-out eyeliner. “Watch your back, Dee. There’s more than Snow with a hard-on for it. Some very bad supers are on our tails and in our future. Okay?”

She winked out like a night-light with a dead battery.

MY STREET CLOTHES, the unexciting navy suit, hung from a hook. On the malachite sink counter lay a set of mint-hued French underwear and a Red Carpet–level emerald-green metallic gift bag I couldn’t resist exploring.

Immediately, a sinuous chill whipped up my spine and down my arm to cuff my right wrist in a circle of “eyes” from the peacock tail pin. It was so heavy it slipped down my hand a little and into the top of the bag. Apparently the familiar was as curious as I was.

I pulled out green crystal bottles of beauty potions, even some old-time Emeraude perfume, green silk designer scarves, and emerald baubles inset in thick wrist cuffs.

I left all that heavy stuff out on the counter, but slipped out of the gown and let it coil into the empty bag. No way was I leaving another evening dress behind for Snow to send me later with an enclosed lock of his insidious silken white hair. I did not need twin familiars.