Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

By then we’d arrived and Ric’s garage door was opening at Dolly’s approach as its interior light went on. Luckily, Ric’s Vette was a space saver. Dolly could glide her three thousand-plus pounds right in. She’s a big girl and proud of it.

Ric and I were entering the connecting courtyard before the system could close the garage door after us, so Quicksilver lingered behind to ensure nothing even as low and slender as a rattlesnake had slipped in unnoticed.

I loved the moonlit courtyard and the soothing splash of its copper fountain recycling water to the lush foliage. It felt so Old Mexico. Ric loved the stucco wall niches between climbing vines dripping blossoms and rich scent, where he could back me into the dark for butterfly and brimstone kisses.

Quicksilver whined impatiently and then lapped noisily at the fountain pool. He was big enough to sound like a herd of thirty water buffalo.

“I bet he’s jealous,” Ric said, turning to stare at the wolfish lapper.

Quick stared back and stopped drinking, wearing his innocent-dog look.

“Why don’t we leave him on guard duty out here?” Ric suggested.

I walked over to Quick, who promptly sat and gazed at me with his limpid baby blues. My hand brushed his head and neck, fingering the silver medallions on his collar, now all sliced in half, like the moon.

“Okay?” I asked.

Could a dog roll his eyes? Mine did. I took that as a yes.

Ric and I walked through the heavy hacienda-style wooden front door as it opened for us. Ric’s house might not contain the Enchanted Cottage’s invisible helpers, but he had high tech.

“I don’t see any ritzy liquor cabinets,” I mentioned as Ric took my hand and hustled me through the dim living room.

“We don’t need liquor. We’re running on liquid silver.”

“You actually like sharing a bit of my silver magic. Concealing your one silver iris most of the time isn’t a drag?”

In the dark living room Ric stopped to grasp my upper arms, even then his palms unable to stop caressing my velvety, metal-studded suit.

“I like us sharing everything. What’s not to like about you saving my life if the only side effect is a cool silver eye I can cover with a contact lens?”

“Maybe your eye doesn’t reflect an aspect of my silver talents. Maybe the color was leached from your eye, rather than added. I didn’t even know I had any silver mojo until I came to Vegas.”

“Delilah, querida. I really don’t care about the why and wherefore of my quirky eye right now. What I don’t know is how Christophe’s rescue party kept their hands off you in this thing. Mmm, that warm velvety black stretchy stuff embedded with all those silver metal mega-goose bumps except here. … What’s the matter? You’re holding back.”

I felt like such a fraud for not telling Ric I might have brought him back from the dead with the leftovers of Snow’s Brimstone Kiss, not my own determined CPR.

“I’m … not used to such blatant booty calls.”

Ric laughed, a rich and wonderful sound I thought I’d never hear again only a few days ago. “Shy Delilah,” he crooned. “Don’t you know that’s even more seductive? Yeah, this is a booty call. We’re going into the lighted bathroom and you’re going to strip me naked, shy girl, but then we’ll go into the dark bedroom and I’m going to make love to you in that suit like you’ve never had it before.”

“But Ric, I’ve only ever … had … you before.”

“Maybe not like this. We’ve both got the silver mojo now, and I’ve figured out how to use it some. There’s no telling what we can do together.”

“Who knows what the silver eye will do for, or against, you. I don’t think sex is going to prove anything.”

“Aw, Del, sex proves everything. Our connection was white-hot from the first, with our finding those not-so-dead embracing skeletons in Sunset Park. … What should I call that co-ed dowsing moment? A sensual shudder?”

“Nicely put,” I admitted. He was right. We’d had it all from the first. Sex and death and dark delight.

I swallowed. “This could be dangerous. My silver talents, your quicksilver eye. We could … spontaneously combust.”

“Yeah, baby.”

“You’re killing the mood with that word.”

“Sí, Señorita Paloma.” His kisses avoided my mouth, tracing my temple and cheekbone, along my jawline down to the side of my neck to the drumming pulse there.

The sweet spot for teenage boys and vampires.

I twisted my shoulder away from his lover’s grip. I didn’t want to play vampire games. It wasn’t safe sex.

Allowing myself to tease the site of the vampire bat bite that had introduced Ric to puberty in the Mexican desert had made it an instant highway for the real Millennium Revelation vampires to nearly suck him dry and kill him. I wanted no more neck-nibbling, even if it had been a basic foreplay move since cave days.

“I’m back now, Delilah,” Ric reminded me. “Better than ever.”

“Your ego never went missing, for sure,” I teased. “You really want me to strip you ?”

It wasn’t like I’d never been there before, but I’d never been the doer, mostly the do-ee. Convent school and a squeamish fetish for avoiding vampire hickeys will do that to a girl.

I knew once we hit the bathroom spotlights I was going to blush. Pale skin is made for baring every hang-up, but this was what I’d wanted so desperately, Ric alive and vital again. Why did I always find it easier to make war than love? Why was Ric hell-bent on taking me over every hurdle in my once-sheltered life? Why did sex have to be so revealing?

No wonder Quicksilver had wanted to get lost, fast. For the first time, I wondered about his doggy sex life, maybe the reason for all those solo midnight runs of his. TMS. Too much speculation.

Actually, undressing Ric was a good ice-breaker. The racing-style suit Velcroed open at the extremities and then down from the mandarin-collared neck to the, um, crotch. He stood there like Vitruvian Man with his legs braced and arms out while I went to work high, low, and center. Men can be so out there.

I smiled as he turned his muscular, desert-dusky back to me, the bright lights revealing no trace of the ugly whip welts my tear-salted kisses had smoothed into faint silver scars. My forefinger traced the Catherine’s wheel of strokes thinner than barbed wire, each touch evoking his audible purrs of pleasure.

I’d done this.

My silver talents and whatever remnant of Snow’s Brimstone Kiss that had lingered on my lips had made the site of untold old pain into a new erotic zone.

Even as my fingers explored the wonder of what my lips had wrought, I winced.

How could I anticipate that Snow would absorb every slash the child Ric had borne as fresh wounds while I healed the old sites? What weird connection had been going on?

Ric was right again. In a paranormal world, every gift seems mated with a curse.

Now, as I played Ric’s faded scars like a harpist, I couldn’t help thinking of Snow. Could my pleasure-giving here slowly undo the damage done days and miles away at the Inferno Hotel? How much, over how many times? Or would the exchange of damage last forever?

I recalled Snow, fatalistic and as supernaturally cool as ever when we’d last met … the first time after Grizelle had told me what I’d done. My knees had been knocking, but the impervious rock-star persona Snow flaunted for the world had shown no signs of craving vengeance.

Why would he? He now had a greater power over me than any werewolf mob boss or undead Karnak pharaoh or vampire Howard Hughes … or even Ric.

My guilt. I’d deliberately chosen to undo the last seven lashes of Ric’s pain even after I knew each healing touch was scourging Snow. My punishment, so far, was cringing at the memory of Snow every time I made love with Ric. I suspected there was far worse to come.