Virtual Virgin

Chapter Twenty




THE SCENE IN the health club lobby was like being trapped backstage at a major beauty pageant. Thin, fit, tall, busty young women were milling everywhere, wearing full makeup that concealed their undead pallor.

They lounged at the health bar, warming up with bottled blood in trendy concoctions that abused fruits and vegetables. They used the metal railing along the stairs to the second floor as a ballet barre, stretching toned torsos, endless legs, and supple arms into supernaturally unnatural positions that would have snapped human bones.

They gathered at the front glass doors, prancing and preening like racehorses at the starting gate.

And I had to get through them.

Bursting out of the boss’s office door gave me an edge of surprise. For about fifteen feet.

I shook my hair to fall into my face and kept my head down, squared my shoulders, and slammed one foot down in front of the other so my heels echoed rifle-shot-style on the terrazzo floor. Concealing my silver dagger-bearing right hand in my ample skirt folds, I lifted my left hand high and slowly lowered it, pointing imperiously to the front door.

Vida herself had said I looked like her. Maybe enough to pull off a short stroll.

Around me, I sensed these self-absorbed beauties pausing in their occupations, turning their attention on me. The ones crowding the door parted for my passage. My left hand pushed the left glass door open so hard it banged against the glass window-wall.

A cracking sound cascaded into a shower of broken glass that tinkled like the very highest keys on a piano. I was still striding away toward the street, Delilah Street, not daring to look back.

When the second of the double glass doors resounded as it slammed open, I broke into a full-out run. Thanks to GPS, I had an aerial memory of the area’s layout, and I angled across to the next dark building. I dodged around the Dumpsters at its rear, my footsteps obscured by the sharp high yips of once-human hounds.

Speed was not on my side, and I knew they could scent my blood, but my shortcut had zipped me into the back parking lot of the Rave Machine. Darting through the highest SUVs and pickups, I noticed a lot of non-California license plates. These patrons were unwary tourists who didn’t know Corona supported a hornet’s nest of vampires. All their black-clad mock-Goth and high-sepia steampunk fantasies were about to come to life in living color, red bleeding into the monotone crowds.

I burst into the back hall, bouncing off lines holding up both sides of the walls . . . the restroom queues.

“Go to the end of the line,” a few wasted girls in black lipstick snarled at me.

“Just what I intend,” I snarled back. “I’d stay in the restroom if you don’t want to be vampire bait.”

Meanwhile, the bleary-eyed guys, some in black eyeliner, whistled and noticed me.

“Schoolteacher,” one drawled, and others took up the refrain. “We’ll muss you up, teach.”

One guy with a leer and abs of corrugated cardboard tried to block my way. When I elbowed him hard, he folded and slid down against the wall. You just can’t drink and drug and then molest women properly.

“Vintage is a waste on punks like you,” I told them.

Irritating, immature blowhards they might be, but pathetic victims-to-be they were sure to be.

The relentless screeching of the music in the hollow two-story box ahead was already filing my nerves to the quick. Was the high-pitched end of the clamor the first wave of vampire victims or just bad-rock white noise? And where was Lilith?

A ring of deserted tables hugged the walls. Everybody was dancing. I guess it was either move with the hyperactivity or sit on the sidelines and go blind and deaf to stay sane. Okay, I’m a party pooper.

I glided by some tables, snagging a faux leather jacket to cover my out-of-sync dress.

A central open staircase mimicked the La Vida Loca layout, so I fought my way to its foot, being drawn into crazy mob moves on the way there.

A pale hand grabbed my shoulder.

I turned.

“Sorry. I thought you were a guy,” one of the workout-gear-clad vamp chicks said.

I knew what she was right away. Her eyes widened with lust as her mouth gaped open until the fangs appeared, heading for my neck. In the hectic lighting, I could see drops of drool on the fang-tips. Seriously unsanitary.

My silver dagger stabbed through the flimsy shiny fabric of my borrowed jacket. I was scared enough to stick it in under her rib cage and twist, hoping the silver familiar knew what it was doing. The feel of blade tip rebounding off bone and then sinking deep into gushy heart of darkness was so repellent, I stopped the attack.

A horrid burnt acid smell and a stream like Vida’s cigarette smoke rose between us while our eyes held. Her pupils vanished up into her eye sockets as blood suffused the whites, whose blood, I had no idea. Not mine seemed enough to hope for at the moment.

She fell onto the first steps as I skirted her form and galloped up the stairs two at a time, soundless in the cacophony, desperate for an overhead view. How would I ever spot Lilith in this crowd? She blended in like pot in a look-alike spider plant field.

From the second-story balcony, I saw that the vamp girls were not only already inside, they had mingled, warming up their victim’s blood by boogying them into a dance fever. Their colorful workout wear made them stand out among the undertaker-black clad clientele like carnivorous Easter bunnies in a bat cave.

Great. Up here, I had a bead on every one of those fang-girl, grrrl-power bloodsuckers and no anti-aircraft guns to mow them down with. Even if I’d had a flamethrower handy, I’d do as good a job killing their victims as they would.

Helpless witness is not a role I care to take.

A pair of icy hands grasped my shoulders from behind.

I spun around and away from the two-story drop over the railing, punching my forearms outward to break the contact. My college martial arts moves were rusty, but a sideways kick caught the shadowy form in the abs.

“You are mean on the other side of the mirror,” a voice huffed out. Lilith’s.

I kept my dodging, defensive crouch. “You oughta know mean. What’re you doing up here?”

“Quick smoke. They don’t allow it down below.”

“That’s the only thing they don’t allow.”

Lilith edged into the light reflected from below, crossing her bare forearms over her lean middle. Figures like spiked worms were churning over her flesh.

“I managed to hurt you?” I tried to sound disbelieving. Our mama was a vampire. I knew I wasn’t one. Didn’t mean Lilith was taint-free.

“Not that bad.” Lilith showed her teeth as her breath hissed in. They were reasonably square and blunt. “If I don’t hold my defensive ink back, you’d be baled in barbed wire. Guess I startled you.”

“We’ve never . . . touched before.”

“And won’t do it again,” Lilith swore. “I won’t bite, promise.”

“Unless you’re a vampire.”

“Not yet. I wanted to ask you—discreetly for me—where the Phi Delta Dingbats cheerleader types on the dance floor all came from. They look more your style than mine or Rave Machine’s.”

She joined me at the railing, curling her hands around the top round bar.

The phantom tattoo poured over her hands like living lace and vanished into the dark surface. Her body ink must be metallic-based, discharging into the nearest inert metal. It made me wonder if my recently discovered trick of converting an involuntary copper intrauterine device into sterling silver endometriosis was a unique feature in Vida’s offspring. Maybe I wasn’t the only bionic baby.

“Have your dark tattoos always been mobile?” I asked.

“They come and go like a rash, without my asking. Why?”

“Inquiring reporter.”

“Right. Hold it over me that you’re a professional at something besides being a hard case, why don’t you?”

“Good sister, bad sister,” I said with a grin, feeling oddly mischievous, considering the situation. Lilith smothered a smirk.

“You’re okay, I’m okay,” I told her, “but those ‘dingbats’ below are a bunch of vampire girls about to go wild.”

“No shit! That’s why you retreated up here. Great view of the carnage.”

“No retreat. I’m a proactive chick. I’m trying to figure out how to stop them all. Right now they’re busy enjoying toying with their food.”

“You get down there and manage to stake one, the others are going to eat fast and run.”

“No staking. Like the metal railing in your hands, everything in this building is constructed of glass or metal. That’s what I’m seeing from up here. Not one sliver of wood. It might as well have been built as a vampire people-trap.”

“By who?”

“Whom.”

Lilith stuck her tongue out at me. Black Old English script read “Screwest thou.” Kinda demony, Sis.

“That should be reading ‘Mothersucker,’” I said.

“Huh? You sorta swear? Ms. Goody Two-hundred-shoes?”

“Mother is a vampire and she runs a health club just a few doors down Delilah Street for awesomely toned girl vamps. I’m surprised you opted out from meeting her.”

“I don’t care what she is and what she does where. This is your quest, Dee.”

“Her name is Vida and I have a picture of her on my computer. It’s several decades old, but she looks the same.”

“Hope those genes run in the family,” Lilith quipped, but she was keeping her billboard tongue bridled. She leaned over the railing. “Those dippy college types are really going to make this party into a bloodbath?”

“As soon as this set ends.”

Lilith looked around what would be the flies area in a theater, the dark top story above the stage where backdrops and other theatrical effects would be stored out of sight, out of mind.

We were on a level with all the light fixtures.

“What about that gigantic cheesy mirrored ball in the center of the dance floor,” Lilith asked. “Can’t you do some mojo with that?’

“I could try exiting through it, if I wanted to come out on the other end fractured into tiny pieces.”

“You’re stuck here, then. Good. I hate to watch massacres alone. Look. There’s a mirror behind the bar.”

“Not glass I can use. Highly polished chrome. It distorts, see? I’d come through the S-shaped woman.”

“Oh, yeah. Kinda cool. Everybody looks like pig faces in it already. Some of these lights might hurt the vamps.”

“Neon hasn’t kept them off the Vegas Strip. Strobe lights only mask how superfast they can move when preying, or fighting. It also makes their pale faces look sexy to humans, so they can paralyze prey before the kill.”

“Sunlight can kill them, though?”

“Supposedly. Don’t you know the common remedies?”

“I’ve been locked up in mirror-world.”

Now was not the time to explore what my remote “twin” had been up to during my twenty-four years of existence. Still, Lilith’s simplistic questions reminded me of Sansouci, the “daylight” vampire. Sunglasses allowed him high-noon strolling time.

“Maybe you could use your superpowers to smash a huge hole in the roof—” Lilith was saying.

“And let the starlight in? Three hundred million light-years isn’t going to make any planet-Earth vamp go nova.”

I couldn’t get lost in centuries of legends and hearsay about what killed vampires. Vida was right. Yet Sansouci was a new-model vamp and he’d kept sunlight from his eyes. Sunlight had to be bad for vampire eyes, at least.

With all these lights here . . . and still the vamps were hopping around like Paris Hilton in a Manhattan nightclub spotting an Excess Hollywood camera. When the strobe light hit them, I noticed that their fangs had come out to play. Zero hour was approaching fast.

Their dance partners, male and female, were too busy being cool in black leather and shades—cat’s-eye-shaped shades, Snow-type expensive European shades, mirror shades, eye-slit shades, wraparound shades, round scholarly John Lennon shades, Sansouci aviator shades, glitter-framed shades, Matrix shades, cool hot shades—to notice anything outside their rum-and-Coke and cocaine hazes.

I had to escape looming doom mode and think like Vegas thought. Corporate. I had to get into the head of Forties arm-candy Vida knuckling under to Cesar Cicereau and watching hard as he took over what would become Vegas when it was as low-end and unglitzy as Delilah Street—pardon my low-esteem self description—was today. Or a few years ago. Vida the entrepreneur, building a new immortal life in California.

That’s when I realized that Rave Machine had to be the first club she’d owned. The gym down the street was the new, improved version, with a vamp-only membership. This had been a real health club she’d bought and had now turned into a literal tourist trap.

I turned to Lilith. “Where were you getting your quick smoke? There are smoke alarms all over this ceiling.”

She eyed the dark spaces between the huge light fixtures. “Yeah, I saw them. I thought they were security cameras at first, but then I tumbled. So I ducked behind one of those doors.”

“What doors?”

“Step back from the railing and this pit of whacked-out lights and you’ll be able to focus on them.”

Sure enough, we were standing on a balcony. A row of blank metal doors were set back about ten feet.

I eyed Lilith’s skin-tight everything. “Where do you carry smokes?”

She worked something out of her front jeans pocket with a mighty wriggle. To some—men—it might be provocative. To me it was a time waster.

She finally withdrew a slim rectangular metal case. “Vintage, baby. The lighter is built into one end. Isn’t it cool?”

I raised an eyebrow she couldn’t see in the shadows. Maybe there was hope for her yet.

“So the doors are unlocked. What’s in there?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Crap. It’s dark.”

“Not if you light one candle in the darkness.”

“Religious crap.”

I grabbed her elbow—I almost got a shock—and pulled her to a door. “This one?”

“I guess.”

“We haven’t time to play ‘you-don’t-care.’”

I grabbed the nineteen-thirties cigarette case from Lilith’s hand, my palm loving the incised Art Deco lines it felt, the sleek compactness . . . thinking Vida would know and love this artifact of her era . . . rats, sentimentality sucked! My thumb found the strike wheel and pushed hard. A sturdy little flame flared into life . . .

. . . and its tiny glare reflected off long glass tubes lining the top of a bullet-shaped coffin on the floor in the small chamber built to house only it.

“The vampires sleep in this space cocoon thingie and there are roomfuls of them up here?” Lilith asked, sounding in awe for the first time I’d ever heard her do so.

I didn’t have time to explain. “Help me drag this out of the room.”

“It looks heavy.”

It ain’t heavy, it’s my maybe baby sister, and she is sometimes very dense.

Thanks, Irma.

“You like to flaunt those hard-candy girlie biceps?” I challenged Lilith. “Use ’em.”

Together, but mostly me, we manhandled the awkward “coffin” out of the room and through the open door. We heaved it upright on the outside wall, where it looked mighty like a space-age mummy case.

I raced back into the room, striking Lilith’s ninety-year-old lighter time and again before it ran out of fluid, hunting two things: a loose old-fashioned male plug lying around and a female receptacle, known in the building trades as an “outlet,” in the wall.

Sometimes they are pain in the neck to connect and sometimes they make beautiful music together.

I returned to the balcony flushed with effort. Lilith was leaning her crossed arms on the railing, looking down. “The vamp girls are really slingin’ hash now. And those dumb guys are keeping their sunglassed eyes glued on the girls’ gyrating hips, baby, not their lips. That’s guys for you.”

“Stand back by the doors,” I said.

She turned. The upright tubes lining both the bottom and the top of the plugged-in case were tinging and buzzing and blushing pink and yellow. “You don’t tell me what to do, Dee.”

“Lilith! What happens next could blind you. Nose to the wall. Cup your hands around your face when you get there.”

“And you?

“I’m gonna aim this little Venusian Palace death ray and then do the same as I told you.”

Lilith was boot-scuffling her way to the wall like a reluctantly obedient three-year-old. That girl had issues. “The Venusian Palace is a Vegas Strip residence tower behind the Gehenna Hotel.”

“Right. Remind me to tell later you how it made the news. We are about to invent Vampire Fire.”

She reluctantly helped me (so much for her muscle tank top) manhandle the “coffin” (so aptly named by Lilith), to face the Dancing with the Stars super-ultra-huge mirror ball trophy hanging above the crazy-lit floor below.

“Now,” I ordered her. “Nose to the wall, eyes shut, and hands cupping your face.”

She cozied herself up to the painted concrete like it was a six-foot-two hunk. “I’m going to think beautiful thoughts. Of your boyfriend.”

“Whatever makes you docile.”

Every muscle in my body was shaking from overextension as I turned myself into the wall and cupped my own hands to put my eyes totally in the dark.

Below, the music was reaching its climax with the shrill of police sirens amping up the mix. I could picture the gyrating couples, vampire and human, reaching the end of the set with a mutual—but so misguided on both sides—mass predatory pounce . . . except the mirror ball was (I hoped but dared not look) broadcasting a strange new light into the frenetic mix below.

The sirens and guitars shrieked and my spine burned with the bites of a thousand fire ants as a totally atonal mass scream of dying vampires joined the last chords.

I heard an electrical apocalypse.

All the breakers in the place burned out at once, even through the light-reddened flesh of my hands I glimpsed when the house went dark as the vampires went down.

First, there was silence.

Then, the buzz of people muttering discontent. Questions floated up.

“Where’re the freaking lights?”

“We’re blind as bats.”

“This is a gyp joint.”

“We want our money back.”

“The band’s really unplugged!”

“Eeew, goo.”

“Yeah. What’s the gunk on the floor?”

I kicked the electrical cord out of the “coffin” with its blackened glass tubes and ran to the balcony railing, gazing down.

Some of the lights were slowly warming up and coming on again.

I’d hoped for nice tidy Buffyverse piles of dust. Instead, I saw puddles of bloodred.

Dazed, formerly cool ravers had ripped off their sunglasses and were wandering the half-lit dance floor, keeping their dancing shoes out of the vamp girl Jell-O.

“What is this stuff, Silly Putty?”

“That hot babe I was dancing with ran out on me when the lights all went out.”

“Ouch. Mine gave me an Indian burn on the arm when she vamoosed.”

Up in rafters, I commented to Lilith, “More like a sunburn.”

“Awesome.” She leaned so far over the railing I had to grab the back of her low-rise jeans. “What did we do?”

Now it’s ‘we,’ Irma pointed out, when it was really thee and me.

And mostly me. I was almost too exhausted to explain.

“When this was a real health club,” I said, “it was so totally California it offered suntanning machines that are banned nowadays. They use ultraviolet light, the artificial equivalent of sunlight, deadly to vamps. The mirror ball fractured that lethal light into a thousand laser stakes spinning down onto the dance floor in a few seconds.”

“So what’s the Venusian Palace effect?”

“It’s one of those new hotel-condo towers, part of a nine billion dollar development.”

“I hear that right? Nine billion?”

“It was built before the Great Recession. Anyway, the hotel-condo walls were all made of concave curved glass. When the Nevada sun hits the surface it creates a beam of concentrated solar energy that can melt plastic and singe hair. It was burning the patrons in the pool area. You get the same effect when you focus a magnifying glass on a piece of paper on a hot sidewalk.”

“You focus your stupid magnifying glass on the National Enquirer pages on the Las Vegas Strip. How that burning hair thing happens is way too nerdy and painful for me,” Lilith said. “You ready to blow this joint? If I only had one in my hand.”

“Now that the vamp girls are history we could go down the street and confront our mama together, safely.”

“Not interested. I’ll let you keep on doing the heavy lifting, Dee. Click those simpy heels together and get us home to Vegas.”

“I’m not sure I can.”

“What? I’m stuck in this nowhere town on a street with your name?”

“Maybe if we walked back to the exact place we showed up along this street.”

“I am not an ‘exact’ chick.” Lilith frowned. “Besides, that’s quite a hike and we’d have to go through all those geeky guys looking for Ms. Goodbar down there. I’m just along for the ride,” she said.

Dare I say ‘whined’?

I shook my head at Irma’s comment and pulled my cell phone from my pocket. The address on Delilah Street in Corona, California, was still on the backlit screen. The folks living here would have no idea what lurked around the corner. What would Vida do now?

Or us? We weren’t on fey paths anymore. How would we get home? These heels of mine were just anonymous vintage wear. They didn’t have a “click” option.

My smartphone did, though.

I wandered toward my own improvised Venusian death ray—the open, upright tanning bed. All right! The vertical bulbs’ blackened centers acted as a mirror backing. I could see my image vaguely reflected in the vertical glass array, with Lilith shadowing me.

In for a penny, out for a pounding. Could I make another giant leap for humankind, or would I zap us both into scattered atoms of fairy dust?

I sighed and pulled up Vegas on the phone’s map app, targeting Sunset Park.

No way did I want to aim exactly for my front door and have Hector Nightwine’s ever-present spy cams reveal his Enchanted Cottage was far more than a reconstructed movie set.

I closed my eyes and hit the button and wished on a star—or a planet, my inspiration, Venus—for good luck. I may even have clicked my peep-toe heels together ever so softly. . . .

Nothing. I felt nothing, not even a breath of wind.

Then I heard something pounding toward me and opened my eyes.

Wow. I saw an oncoming bolt of cold lightning, greyhound big and fast and, duh, gray. It almost knocked off my heels. Also, it battered my ears with barking and a bunch of really too hot, slimy, and thorough ear licks for a public park.

“Quicksilver, down! Good dog. Down. Happy to see you too. You’re my ever-lovin’ American Express card. Shouldn’t have left home without you.”

He finally obeyed and gamboled around me in circles of joyful greeting without jolting the phone out of my hand or me off my feet.

Me.

Solo.

Lilith was nowhere to be seen.

Don’t worry. We’re not going to lose that psycho hitchhiker this easy.

I did worry. I’d gotten Lilith and me to the current address of our foggy vampire roots. Vida. I kinda felt for her. I kinda feared her. Now what were we going to do about it?

Me. I. By myself. Not quite.

I still had a long high-heeled walk home ahead of me. Me and my succulent toes.

Which Quicksilver, confined to the ground by my command, had done a play bow to lick.

I doubted that was what Snow had in mind, but it sure did tickle.