Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

For Racie Rhyne,

my super-supportive, artistic sister-in-law

and Delilah’s best friend

EVERYONE HAS FAMILY issues, but my issues are that I don’t have any family. My new business card reads Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, but my old personal card could have read Delilah Street, Unadoptable Orphan.

I was supposedly named after the street where I was found abandoned as an infant in Wichita, Kansas. (I guess I should just thank God and DC Comics it wasn’t Lois Lane.) I’ve googled and groggled (the drinking person’s search engine) the World Wide Web for Delilah Streets and not a single bloody one of them shows up in Kansas.

Whoever my forebears were, they gave me the Black Irish, Snow White coloring that is catnip to vampires: corpse-pale skin and dead-of-night-black hair. By age twelve I was fighting off aspiring juvie rapists with retractable fangs and body odor that mixed blood, sweat, and semen. Really made me enjoy being a girl.

My growing-up years of group homes in Wichita are history now that I’m twenty-four and on my own. I had a good job reporting the paranormal beat for WTCH-TV in Kansas—until the station’s jealous weather witch forecaster forced me out.

Now I’m a freelance investigator in wicked, mysterious post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas. Vegas was wicked, of course, long before the turn of the twenty-first century brought all the bogeymen and women of myth and legends out of the closet and into human lives and society. Now, in 2013, Vegas is crawling with vamps and half-weres and all-werewolf mobs and celebrity zombies and who-knows-what-else.

My ambitions are simple.

One, staying alive. (Being turned into an immortal vampire doesn’t count.)

Two, being able to make love on my back without having panic attacks. (Whoever thought someone would aim for the missionary position?) Position hadn’t been an issue until recently and neither had sex, until I finally found a man I want to make love with, ex-FBI guy Ricardo Montoya—aka the Cadaver Kid. He’s tall, dark, handsome, Hispanic, and my brand-new horizontal ambition. He has my back—and my front—at every opportunity.

And, three, tracking down Lilith Quince—my spitting image—to find out if she is a twin, double, clone, or simulacrum. Or if she is even still alive. It’s rumored some CSI V bodies are real … corpses. Seeing her/me being autopsied on Crime Scene Instincts V: Las Vegas one rerun-TV night in Wichita brought me to Sin City in the first place.

Lucky me, Lilith became the most desirable corpse ever featured on the internationally franchised show. Millennium Revelation pop culture and taste tend toward the dark—now I know how dark. When Hector’s CSI show made Lilith Quince into a macabre worldwide sex symbol, he inadvertently made me, Delilah Street, a wanted woman. Not for myself alone, mind you, but for the naked and dead image of another woman.

The CSI cameras showed a discreet maggot camping out in a nostril that held a tiny blue topaz stud like my very own, so Lilith in filmed corpse form was dubbed Maggie and became the It Girl of 2013: Maggie dolls and merchandise are hot and so are bootleg Maggie films, outtakes, and my hide, if anyone could snag it—dead or alive. One werewolf mobster almost did already.

At least ambition number four is now a done deal: Identifying the embracing skeletons Ric and I discovered in Vegas’s Sunset Park just after I hit town and just before the town hit me back, hard.

I discovered more than Ric and corpses in Sunset Park. I found an ally who has heavenly blue eyes and is seriously gray and hairy. That’s my dog, Quicksilver. He’s a wolfhound-wolf cross I saved from death at the pound. He returns the favor with fang, claw, and warm, paranormally talented tongue.

(I have a soft spot for dogs—especially since Achilles, my valiant little Lhasa apso in Wichita, died from blood poisoning after biting a vampire who was trying to bite me. Achilles’ ashes rest in a dragon-decorated jar on my mantel, but I haven’t given up the ghost on him.)

Oh, the location of that mantel might be of interest. It’s in the Enchanted Cottage on the Hector Nightwine estate. Hector rents the place to me cheap because, as the CSI franchise producer, he’s presumably guilty of offing my possible twin on national TV. Hector doesn’t really have a conscience, just a profit motive. He’s banking on my finding Lilith or becoming her for his enduring financial benefit.

The only thing Hector and I share is a love of old black-and-white films. The Enchanted Cottage duplicates a setting from a 1945 movie. A shy-to-the-point-of-invisible staff of who-knows-what supernaturals run the place, and I suspect it’s supplied with the wicked stepmother’s mirror from Snow White. Although it’s been mum with me so far, I do see dead people in it.

The most complicated beings in my brave new world are the CinSims. Cinema Simulacrums are created by blending fresh zombie bodies illegally imported from Mexico with classic black-and-white film characters. The resulting “live” personas are wholly owned entertainment entities leased to various Vegas enterprises.

Hector and Ric blame the Immortality Mob for the brisk business in zombie CinSims, but can’t prove it. Hector wants to wrest the CinSims from the mob’s control into his. Ric aches to stop the traffic in illegally imported zombies. It’s personal—he was forced to work in the trade as a child.

I’d like to help them both out, and not just because I’m a former investigative reporter crusading against human and unhuman exploitation. My own freedom is threatened by various merciless and sometimes downright repellent factions bent on making life after the Millennium Revelation literal Hell.

Luckily, I have some new, off-the-chart abilities simmering myself, most involving silver—from the silver nitrate in black-and-white films to sterling silver to mirrors and reflective surfaces in general.

Which reminds me of one more sorta sidekick: a freaky shape-changing lock of hair from the albino rock star who owns the Inferno Hotel. The guy goes by three names: Christophe for business; Cocaine, when fronting his Seven Deadly Sins rock band, and Snow to his intimates. He seems to consider me one of them, but no way do I want to be.

While thinking of my lost Achilles, I made the mistake of touching one long white lock of Snow’s hair he’d sent me as a mocking gift. The damn thing became a sterling silver familiar no jeweler’s saw or torch can remove from my body. Since it transforms into different pieces of often-protective jewelry, it’s handy at times. I consider it a variety of talisman-cum-leech.

That attitude sums up my issues with the rock star– hotelier, who enslaves groupies with a onetime mosh-pit “Brimstone Kiss.”

Then I discovered why those post-concert kisses are so bloody irresistible … and Snow forced me to submit to his soul-stealing smooch in exchange for his help in saving Ric from being vamped to death. This kiss-off standoff between us is not over.

I’ve been called a “silver medium,” but I don’t aim to be medium at anything. I won’t do things halfway. I intend to expose every dirty supernatural secret in Las Vegas, if necessary, to find out who I really am, and who’s being bad and who’s being good in my new Millennium Revelation neighborhood.

ACOYOTE YIPPED in the desert night surrounding Las Vegas.