Virtual Virgin

Chapter Twenty-two




MY FINGERTIPS INCHED the cocktail glass Sansouci had put dead center on the little table toward my side of it. The flavored and colored vodka, added to the innocuous cherry cola, had produced a bright bloodred brew suitable for virginal wedding nights and vampire orgies.

I didn’t dare look at Sansouci, and that wasn’t totally about him being a vampire and also a vampire angry with me.

It was about me being angry with me.

“I’m sorry. I do that,” I said, not looking anywhere but into the cherry-amber depths of my drink. “That’s what I was trained to do as a reporter. Approach story subjects in a mode they feel comfortable with and then get their stories.”

“And why do you need stories?”

“It . . . they explain things. About the way the world truly works, about what this person has gone through and knows that other people may need to know and . . . benefit from.”

“You’re an idealistic tattletale?”

“Not anymore.” I dared one sip of the strong drink, lowering my head to the glass, going for being as low-profile as dirt. “Now I do it to save my sanity and maybe a few people’s, um, lives.”

“You mean their mortality, their humanity? Everything I don’t have.”

Ouch. “That’s my mistake. I don’t think of you that bigoted way.”

“What way do you think of me?”

“If the Las Vegas Strip was a line, with all the people and paranormals I know on either side of it, I’d want you on my side.”

I could feel him shift position, lift the glass, and drink deeply.

“I’ve taken a lot of lives, and you’ve saved lives.” He observed this as an interesting phenomenon, not as murder and not-murder. “You saved a bunch of tourist lives at the Gehenna when you exorcised Loretta’s ghost in that spectacular fashion.”

“Really? She’s managed to come back in physical form and wants to destroy Ric and me.”

“Didn’t you listen to her story? I could have told you lovely little Loretta was and is as willful and power-hungry as the gangster father she hates. Being Cicereau’s victim only deepened the blood fury already in her.”

“I’ve seen a photo from the nineteen forties of Loretta with her father, you, and a good-looking woman.”

“Girl,” Sansouci corrected.

“Girl?”

“Cicereau’s arm candy. She was only a few years older than Loretta, whom he had killed at age sixteen. So?”

“You were there as a bodyguard. I can almost see the outline of the gun in the dinner jacket pocket your right hand was in.”

“No, you couldn’t. I wouldn’t do that. I carry it in an underarm holster or the small of my back. Keep that in mind if you ever get the occasion, or urge, to pat me down.” He had resumed flirting, a mode I could handle. “Loose guns go off, slip out of your hand. Your imagination was running away with you. But I’m intrigued that you looked me over so thoroughly.”

“And that chorus girl . . . ?”

“Vida. An aspiring actress. Don’t laugh; she had some chops and Cesar had promised her auditions outside his master bedroom.”

“What happened to her?

“She . . . moved on. He was not a monogamous mobster. None of them are. No need.”

“When did she move on?”

Sansouci consulted his very long memory bank. “After Cicereau went berserk over the Loretta business.”

“That was after you were indentured to him?”

“Same time. It was one big ugly meltdown.”

“You admitted that you witnessed Cicereau kill his own daughter so viciously.”

“I was there under duress. He was teaching me a lesson too when he killed Prince Krzysztof.”

“What lesson? That he could cut off your blood supply, your harem?’

“No. I can always revert to draining the traditional single source, and they’re everywhere, my dear Delilah. Why all the questions?”

“Maybe Cicereau killed Vida too.”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t seem concerned. Didn’t she . . . like you?”

“Maybe.” Sansouci shook his head. “Cicereau had fourteen master vampires buried and held in concrete coffins somewhere in the Mojave. I was the sole one aboveground. One werewolf was released . . . and sacrificed to the vampires in exchange for the masters’ voluntary ‘hibernation.’ A part-time blooder like myself was of value to neither side, except for Cicereau’s amusement.”

“Why were you saved?”

“If you can call it that. The vampires thought I would find and release the masters.”

I caught my breath. “And have you?”

“Not yet.”

“Will you?”

“Time will tell what I will or will not do, Delilah Street, not you. Cicereau, being werewolf, did unto his competitor vampires as he’d do unto another pack. He scattered and buried each one. Vampires, though, are lone wolves who usually prey individually. Then came the Millennium Revelation of the many supernaturals who had hidden from the humans. The old-style vampire wouldn’t fare so well today. Besides, they tend to bicker when gathered in political groups. They’re on separate power trips. What I do takes discipline.”

That’s something the huge “pack” of organized vampires right under the Strip had, but I was here to learn the lay of the land, not utterly remake it.

“Is it possible,” I wondered, “that suspending those vampires’ lives and power gave werewolf mobster Cicereau some extended mortality?”

“Maybe. I was expendable because I wasn’t like them. I remembered I wasn’t always vampire.” He stated the obvious with a mocking sideways glance. “Several hundred years ago, give a century or two, I was the second son of a landowner in Ireland.”

“I knew you had Black Irish roots like me,” I couldn’t help exclaiming, like we were distant cousins. I could hear Irma saying, Back off, girl.

Sansouci wasn’t buying either. “You gonna put that on the nightly news, Delilah? This is my story, not yours, for a change.”

I winced, but was relieved to hear him use my first name again, so relieved that I sipped my fresh drink again. The added alcohol warmed my insides, but my fingers were still ice white and ice cold on the glass.

Sansouci addressed his tale to the skull’s interior facade of molded plastic bone, the reverse of the Silver Zombie’s robot suit. A faint Irish accent embroidered his tale, something I was always a sucker for.

“The eldest son got the fiefdom, with the might of England soon to come at him. For me, it was either the Church or the itinerant sword—”

“So you became a mercenary, and still are to this day.”

“Street, shut up. You must have been a lousy reporter. Why didn’t you just make it up yourself?” He eyed me, hard. “So I became a monk.”

“You?” I flash-carded my visions of his Las Vegas blood harem, all lounging belly dancers wearing no more than veils and glittering coin belts, like the Metropolis Whore of Babylon. “Monks are . . . poor and lorded over by the abbot and the order rules and—”

“Celibate.” He grinned with rakish pleasure as my illusions came tumbling down.

“How can . . . how could—?”

“Story? Mine?”

I relaxed a bit. Everybody ached to tell his or her story. Sansouci was enjoying shocking the saltwater out of me. That was what a good reporter wanted, an interview subject invested in amazing and surprising his audience.

I nodded and supported my face on my fists, a rapt audience of one myself now. I finally had my Interview with the Vampire. Anne Rice, eat your new, angel-hooked heart out!

“The Church was a refuge then,” he said. “My vows were solemn. Poverty, obedience, celibacy. Obedience was the hardest.”

If Irma were here, I’d be rolling my eyes at her.

“I was sixteen. We worked from sunrise to sunset then. I was hoeing the chard patch, meditating on Our Lord’s crown of thorns like a good boy. I’d forgotten that vespers might toll for evening prayers in the monastery, a severe failing for a monk.”

I nodded, spellbound.

He reached out, his hand huge, I noticed for the first time. His fingers brushed back and replaced the hair falling onto my shoulders. His cold undead thumb found my carotid artery with its first gesture. My skin felt clammy, but I’d worked myself up into quite an anxious fever, I told myself. I could use a . . . cold compress.

Yikes, Irma broke through. He’s got us by the pulse point.

“You’ve never felt a vampire bite,” Sansouci said as caressingly as his thumb rested on my neck. “I don’t know how it is for anyone else, but in my time and place, there was no sensation at first, just a barely sensed pressure.” His thumb pressure intensified. I felt the tension all through my body. “Then the slightest . . . tingle and then the impinging edge of something . . . small but hard, though not like steel.”

His thumbnail impressed my skin.

“And then a flood of what doctors now would describe as anesthetic with an aphrodisiac overtone, but in my time and with my youth I only knew it felt like . . . surrender. The surrender of sleep, even a spiritual surrender, as an acolyte gave to the will of God and the abbey. My vows lulled me.”

I knew certain martial arts grips could stop the flow of blood to the brain. I felt dizzy and breathless, but Sansouci’s touch hadn’t tightened. I was doing this to myself, and I almost sensed craving the sort of surrender he was describing. Utter.

So I let the vampire gaze at and touch the side of my naked neck, nostalgically. He was trusting me with his story, the most important thing in his long immortal life. I let him speak uninterrupted. A reporter has to take big risks for the big story.

The pressure of his thumb relented. His hand stayed anchored on my flesh, his red-rimmed eyes still stared intently into mine.

“I woke in the neighboring woods, hearing the monks calling as they sought me with torches. My hoe lay in the chard patch where I’d dropped it. I heard the rustles of the night as I never had before, thirsted for what I thought was the body and blood of Christ as I never had before.

“One monk had found my abandoned hoe and began circling the spot after the others had vanished around the abbey’s great hulk, their calls growing faint, as was any sense I had of belonging to that scene, to those people, to those mortals. Do you feel faint, Delilah?”

I did. He spoke on.

“A shadow crept up on the lone laboring monk. I could see as never before in the dark. I could see what had happened and what I was now. Only the shadow of myself. I crept up on the alien shadow.”

My instincts urged me to bite my lip from the suspense, but I resisted.

“The shadow felled the monk, and I felled the shadow. I broke the wooden hoe handle over my robed thigh and impaled the monster’s chest with its thick, jagged end. It had carried a sword. I dragged its body into the woods and cut off its head, then stripped it of clothes and donned them, leaving my empty robe beside it. I returned to kneel over my former fellow monk.

“Then I drank him dry between mutters of miserere cordias.”

God have mercy on me. I knew that’s what the Latin phrase meant. On me too.

I sat, breathing and wishing I could disguise that function. And this had happened centuries ago. Centuries. I was speaking to the last living witness, a vampire.

“They never knew you . . . remained?” I asked.

“Staked, headless vampire. Drained monk and robe. An uncommon couple, yet the only two-plus-two their superstitious but holy medieval minds needed. They burned the bodies and my robe, and put up a gravestone for me on an empty plot.”

“What name did it read?”

“None of your business, Delilah Street. I have lost everything of my past. Concealing my original identity is the only thing I am pleased about.”

“After all these centuries? At least you have an identity to guard. Even my name isn’t really my own,” I admitted.

His thumb stroked my neck, the callus on it oddly human, then withdrew. “Stage name?”

“I said I was a reporter, not an actress.”

“Could have fooled me, drama queen.”

He was trying to distract me, but I wasn’t buying it.

“I was an abandoned infant supposedly found on Delilah Street, only there’s no such address where I grew up, in Wichita, Kansas. You want to forget who you were and I want to find out who I am.”

“‘Aren’t we a pair’?” Sansouci quoted the melancholy classic song, leaning back in the velvet banquette.

He was showing some of the lazy surrender he’d been recounting during his tale of his simultaneous first time of being bitten and biting, of his virtual virginhood lost. He was the usual cynical Sansouci again. Maybe.

Either my cocktail recipe or telling his tale had returned Sansouci into the deceptively laid-back persona he automatically used to lull human or werewolf fears. He’d had centuries to perfect that. I could see how modern women got hooked on the tension between his sensually knowing exterior and deeply dangerous needs. It was tantalizing.

He licked his lower lip without being conscious of the fact, considering me. “No more questions?”

“Dozens. How did you . . . live?”

“Animal blood repelled me. I soon realized I needed a large supply of victims who wouldn’t be missed. I’d chosen God as a master because I knew my temperament wouldn’t bow long to any temporal lord, but I’d shown a knack for swordplay. Can you guess? We’re talking the fourteenth century here.”

“You’re talking the fourteenth century. I can’t believe the changes you’ve seen. From . . . warlords to twenty-first-century gangsters.”

“That breed has changed the least of all, Delilah. What did I do with myself for the next seven or eight hundred years?”

“I have no idea.”

“You’re an inquiring reporter. You pride yourself on putting two and two together. You tell me. Psych me out.”

He leaned back, narrowed eyes challenging me to “undress” his mind-set, even his soul, to dissect his vampire nature overlaid on a young, naive, obedient, chaste monk of an unthinkably alien time to modern me.

Kinda like me a few months ago. I’d let Sansouci unnerve me. It was time to reverse the situation.

“The Irish then were disenfranchised in their own land,” I said. “First by the Normans, then by the English. They became wanderers, like the Jews. Bards and . . . mercenaries roaming all lands even into the nineteenth and twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Even today, a lot of the freelance journalists braving the Mideast wars and meltdowns to report for the American news networks are Irish. Still, you didn’t crave pay or treasures to live, but blood. Do you play an instrument?” I asked, hunting clues.

He considered, then said, “Only women now.”

His voice, the tone, the implications were meant to distract me. They did.

How did a monk learn to be so sexy? To eat, dummy!

Paging back to my Our Lady of the Lake convent school classes allowed me to access a lot of religious history.

I closed my eyes and recited. “It was the end of four of five hundred years of rabid Viking butchery and terrorism in the British Isles and Europe, but the developing nations were seething with war, even to sending knights on crusade to the Holy Land, the Middle East.”

My fingers tapped on the table.

“What instrument are you playing?” Sansouci taunted me.

I studied their dark reflection as my fingers pantomimed a riff on the black glass.

“Castanets,” I said, realizing what my unconscious was telling me. “Spain was under siege by Moors in that period. Wait.” I sat up straight. “Yours isn’t a night’s tale, like around the campfire. It’s a knight’s tale. You joined the monk warriors who fought to hold Muslims back from Europe and reclaim the Holy Land.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Battle was butchery then. Blood was everywhere. Your liquid diet would go unnoticed.”

“More than that, we battled for the cause of heaven. Our foes deserved to die.”

“Maybe their leaders did, not the foot soldiers.”

“It was warrior to warrior then, knight to Saracen. Drinking their blood only further eradicated them from the face of the earth.”

“You didn’t turn any?”

“Never. Why? A vampire turns a human only from desperation.”

“What makes a vampire desperate except lack of blood?”

“Utter hatred or revenge . . . or establishing a link with a mortal he or she can’t bear to lose. It’s always beauty that destroys the beast, Delilah.”

“Then you never had any human connection in all those centuries?”

“Only brothers at arms, and they came and went, as the wars came and went.”

“Why were you turned in the first place? You were already dead and out of the way.”

“The most common of the seven deadly sins. Greed.”

“Greed? You were a penniless monk.’

“I recognized my assailant after I staked him, a trusted retainer of my elder brother’s. Apparently Gowan feared I’d tire of the abbey and take what mere happenstance had earned him. I was his superior in everything but order of birth.”

“I don’t doubt it. He’s long moldering in the grave and you’ve lasted.” I sipped again. “How did you . . . convert from battlefield to bedroom?”

“The times did it for me. I ran out of ‘holy’ wars sometime in the eighteenth century. Then I looked for ‘just’ wars on the side of the foot soldiers, not the rulers, and finally I realized by the mid-nineteenth century that war was just war, no ‘justice for all’ in them at all. I hadn’t chosen to be a vampire but I could choose to dine from humanity’s enemies until the modern age made it clear they weren’t to be found on a battlefield.”

“So you turned to literally living off women.”

“No. I still honored my vows of poverty and chastity.”

“You?”

“You’re not the only aging virgin to hit Las Vegas, Delilah.”

“Oh, come on! Your harem?”

“By the earlier twentieth century it was harder to find anyone deserving to die in war, certainly not enough to keep me going. Women, however, were starting to discover what they wanted, including passion that included a controlled bit of danger. I discovered I could survive on multiple small doses of blood.”

“That doesn’t make you a virgin.”

“I’ve never had sex without blood, without involuntary need. For that reason, I consider myself true to my vows of celibacy to this day. I’ve never really made love to a woman, just for the sake of it. I have never loved. I think you might know what I mean now.”

“And, in your eyes, that makes you a virgin?”

“A virtual virgin, anyway,” he said, with a wry twist to his smile and a raise of his glass. “Just as you still are, really.”

“So in your mind virginity has to do with innocence despite experience. Or experience despite innocence.”

He nodded. “All you are now, Delilah, is an experienced virgin, in my expert opinion of the same state.”

That reminded me of the Silver Zombie, who combined the extremes of innocence and experience through the actress and split personalities of the saintly and salacious Maria character. I wondered if that’s why she disturbed me so deeply, along with her obvious dependence on Ric.

Sansouci’s head lolled back against the red velvet upholstery. He did look like a knight, a Technicolor effigy of a stone knight in some aged graveyard forever England or Ireland.

“Now,” he asked. “What did you really want from me other than a very long life story?”

“The doctors wouldn’t let me donate blood to Ric when he was drained at the Karnak. I want to know what’s wrong with it.”

“Your blood? You want an in-the-field analysis? You want me to make it?”

“I know you can . . . control yourself.”

“Maybe not. You’re obviously worried that something is up with your blood. I might go berserk. I do scare you, don’t I?”

“Sometimes.”

“Good.”

“If you were to take a sample . . . a tiny sample, where would it be?”

“On my tongue.”

“I meant on me.”

“Oh.” Sansouci obviously relished the chance to inspect me again. “Any erotic zone will do.” His eyes made a leisurely Grand Tour. “Lips. Neck.” They followed my snowy ruffles halfway down. “Breasts.”

I was shocked enough to show it. Blood as mother’s milk.

“Delilah.” His gently corrective voice was even more seductive. “Are you going to force me to say nipples in mixed company?”

“Oh, shit.”

He shrugged, continuing. “Tits.”

Oh, shit!

“Fingertips. Navel. And, my favorite, thighs.” His expression turned smugly angelic. “Inner thighs.”

“I meant places that are showing. My favorite is a fingertip.”

“So school nurse, Delilah. Sterile. Impersonal.”

“Exactly. And where would you learn about school nurses, Brother Monk?”

“From one of my circle of current donors. Oddly, she prefers the fingertips too. Must like role reversal. Not on your luscious glossed lips, Delilah? That’s the only place you need or use cosmetics and you do them up right.”

“Thank you, Mr. Urban Decay. I love your Pocket Rocket lip gloss too. I recall you being afraid my Resurrection Kiss might have the reverse effect on you. It could put you back where you belong. Really dead.”

“I said I wasn’t sure of what your kiss would do now. I’m not afraid.”

“It might be lethal.”

“You need to know this. Your kiss has already revived Montoya. He’s immune. You’ll never know if your kiss can thrill or kill another man if you don’t test it out. Try me. I like danger.”

“Such a brave little lab rat. Fingertip,” I said severely, extending my forefinger, print up.

He took my hand in his, his thumb caressing the inside of my wrist, which felt way too good. I liked danger too, I was discovering. His dark head bent to my fingers. I felt like a medieval lady having her hand kissed. All the paintings of that period teemed with languid ladies being led around by the hand. Sanscouci would have had a field day if he hadn’t been hunting the battlefields then.

“You’ll feel a tiny prick, like from a school nurse, Delilah,” he murmured. “Your fingertip will hardly sense it.”

And he was right, it didn’t, because he pulled my hand and arm over his shoulder to draw me into his arms. His lips were on mine before I could say “Close sesame.”

I could have elbowed or kneed him, but I’d never let another man kiss me besides Ric—Snow’s Brimstone smooch certainly didn’t count. I couldn’t be sure Snow had ever been human, and Sansouci had. I needed to know what about my blood was so exotic or toxic it couldn’t be transfused to Ric. I now feared it could have a vampire taint. Would my half-vamp fading Brimstone Kiss have special effects on someone other than Ric?

Amazing what situations the ace reporter’s “need to know” could get an inquisitive woman into. I no longer wondered why the combination of scared and excited was so many women’s downfall.

I wasn’t falling at the moment, just a very close observer testing as much as Sansouci was. His tongue-tip slicked back and forth along my closed lips until that relentless tickle made them part. His tongue plunged inside for one hot, deep moment, mimicking a much more intimate incursion, before withdrawing. What a tease he was.

Sansouci sat back, visibly tasting me on his own lips. Tease.

“I avoided taking advantage,” he said, “by prolonging the contact past the anesthetic phase to the aphrodisiac effect. Anything you’re feeling now is purely natural.” His quickly lowered eyelids failed to conceal desire-swollen black pupils. “Perhaps not purely.”

“Besides a quick kick, what did you get out of it?” I asked.

He nodded like the connoisseur he was acting as at the moment. “Very rare. New to me. I’ve dallied in an intercontinental pool of blood over the centuries. You’re type AB. Maybe AB positive. Very rare,” he repeated.

I frowned, making a mental note to look that type up.

Sansouci rinsed his mouth with a swallow of the Virtual Virgin loaded. “For the record, your period is coming in six days. The flow will be heavy and the expected painful. I’m not getting the usual coppery tang. Somewhat metallic, still. Silver? Some vampires may be weakened by silver but I’m feeling . . . none of your business. Each person’s blood reminds me of a distinctive color. This is silver blue, like that zombie cocktail of yours, but not anemic, quite a hearty and even robust overtone. Rich but not cloying.”

“Who’s the freaking school nurse now?” I asked, feeling my cheeks warm at the mention of my period. I didn’t want to even think why a vampire would be able to sense that.

His laugh was low as he leaned near again. “Piqued, Delilah? I’m being too analytical? I admit I enjoyed a unique effervescent quality some might become addicted to. I might too, but I don’t want your blood. How was the taste test for you?”

“Quick and dirty, as I expected. Grow up, Sanscouci.” I knew my request was ridiculous to a seven- or eight-hundred-year-old vampire, but guys will be guys.

“You’re not retching with revulsion.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re an expert at this, right? Like a dentist.”

I was pleased, though. As the lyrics in the classic Casablanca movie song went, “a kiss is just a kiss” and that’s what I’d wanted to know. Sansouci had enjoyed that moment on the level of a stolen sexual buzz, but didn’t find it an orgasmic occasion. I was no longer passing on any remainder of the Brimstone Kiss effect to the man in the street. Or vampire.

At least not on the lips.

“So this is what you do. Kiss and run. Tell me about the harem.”

“They’re ordinary women with no men in their lives, for some reason. Young. Old. In between. Maybe they were abused when children and need the edge of mock violence to feel alive. Maybe they’ve lost someone who can never, ever come back. Maybe they’re just too busy to meet and date and mate. Maybe, Delilah, they just like me and what I do for them.”

“What do they get out of it?”

I was asking an existential question. He wanted to take me down to brass tacks. What does that mean, anyway? I was about to learn what it meant to Sansouci when he was ready to play me.

“I’ll show you.” He reached into the side pockets of his light cotton jacket and started laying items on the black glass where their reflection made twins of everything. “This is my tool kit now, not lances and swords and daggers.”

I recognized the first item, a flash drive lozenge.

“Dirty movies for the cell phone?” I asked.

“No. A vibrator, and not just any vibrator.” As he picked it up the surface shimmered through an electric rainbow of colors changing form in his hand. “This is the Swiss army knife of vibrators, small and portable but with eighty-six different shapes and functions.”

I tried not to stare at it bug-eyed. Huh? Call me an amateur. I’d just achieved supine. He pushed forward some small round rubber bands. I was thinking condoms, but was glad I hadn’t tried to be the A-student and sung out my guess.

“Silken bonds, expandable to any length or situation. Second-most popular. Of course you’ve never . . .”

I was taking the fifth.

“A pair of chorus-girl earrings?” I gawked when the sparkling pair of three-inch red-carpet shoulder-dusters hit the tabletop next.

“We’re back to that naughty word again, Delilah. Nipple clamps. Vibrating. Unisex too. They also work as actual earrings. They’d look hotter than hell with your current outfit. I don’t suppose you’d . . . ?” He held them up so they caught the light like Whore of Babylon pasties.

By now my cool white skin had overheated with a blush. Heartland-naive sucked.

“Yes,” he said, a wicked spring-green sparkle in his eyes, “that’s the effect I’m going for, but it’s called a flush. Just how far down do your flushes go?”

“You’re teasing me in payback for prying your history out of you,” I accused.

And, I realized, it was also because little boys like to torment little girls they like with scary objects like frogs and snakes, that Sansouci’s display was an adult version of the same scenario.

The next item was a nest of tangled chains of various lengths. “Some of my clients have numerous piercings and rings. These offer myriad decorative and functional combinations with onboard equipment. Your silver familiar ever assume any titillating forms?”

“Never,” I said, vehement, only then remembering a time or two . . . I felt my blush go scarlet. “I hate that,” I ground out. “I hate that my skin type does that.”

“I don’t. I find it charming, and very telltale.” Sansouci laughed as he swept his display off the table and back into his pockets. “These are only the easily portable . . . accessories of my trade. Care to know more?”

“No,” I swore. “I think I’d better leave.”

“Not before you tell me your real story,’” Sansouci said softly. “Your real reason for why we’re here, your interrogating me.”

He suddenly pulled me close again with one arm while his other hand lifted the hair off my nape. My face was smothered in his jacket shoulder. In an instant I was held immobile, although the skull rocked after his sudden move.

“I thought so,” he murmured in my ear. “You didn’t ask about this, and here I am an expert at your disposal, fearless reporter. Señor Montoya’s been sampling your tasty neck. Regularly.”

“It’s just a hickey. Hickeys,” I mumbled against his jacket. “I hate that word.”

“Not just a hickey. Hickeys.” His thumb stroked the freshest one and I couldn’t stop a wince. I jerked away, but he held me tight.

He whispered the next words into my hair, but I heard every damning syllable. It was a taunt and an intimacy and a diagnosis. “Can’t deny it. Broke the skin, Luscious.”

I pushed off, fighting his custody, more flushed and angry and anxious than before. “As if you wouldn’t,” I hissed back at him. “He gets . . . overenthusiastic. A bat bite in the Mexican desert spurred his first wet dream, okay? It’s a tiny, harmless kink.”

God, why was I telling him this?

“Like you’d know, virtual virgin.”

“He doesn’t have . . . fangs.”

“Teeth enough to be interesting. You let him?”

“I love him.”

Sansouci let me go. The silver familiar lay coldly around my neck. I put my hand up to feel a bristly crown of thorns. It had allowed him to touch me when I’d wanted to intrigue him into testing my blood, but this was too much for us both.

“Manhandle me like that again,” I told Sansouci, “and you’ll lose a body part.”

“No desire to, now that I know what I suspected is right. This is serious, Delilah, and you know it. That’s why you cozied up to me to pry out some facts of vampire life, so to speak. You’re like any vamp-tramp-in-training—”

I belted him in the mouth before I could even think.

The shock shut him up, and me too.

Not very ladylike. I didn’t approve when women did that to men who said things they didn’t like in forties movies. It made them “dames,” I guess.

Sansouci felt his jaw. “Bit my tongue. You drew blood, Delilah. How does that feel?”

“Annoying, like your behavior. You’re the only vampire I—”

“Trust?”

“Don’t fool yourself. The only one I know I can ask.”

There was always Howard Hughes, but asking lecherous Uncle Howie about plain sex, not to mention vampire sex, was way too icky. Warped, even. Especially if he was my father. At least I was convinced that Sansouci’s attitude toward Vida was far too neutral for him to be a candidate.

“You weren’t going to tell me the one piece of information that really mattered.” He sat back, shaking his head. “I overstepped, but it was for your own good.”

“The bastards always say that. Ric is not a vampire.”

“Let’s say not. But you’re worried sick. Vampires did drain him dead.”

“Maybe. . . . I’m not buying that. Whatever happened, they didn’t . . . turn him.”

“You just don’t want to accept responsibility for raising the dead. Why not? Your lover does? He dowses for them.”

“If it was me who brought him back, maybe I shouldn’t have.”

“I saw it. Snow saw it. The Gehenna werewolves saw it. Everybody in the rescue party did. One of the great love scenes never on the silver screen.” He picked up his drink to toast me. “Here’s looking at you, kid. You willed Ric Montoya back from the dead. Now you have to live with it. Everybody throws that term around. ‘Turn,’ like it’s a damn dance move.”

I shook out my hair to make sure my nape was covered and sipped my Virtual Virgin. Was I starting to be sorry about what I’d named the drink. . . .

“I don’t know about those things,” I said. “I only know the vamp boys in the group homes were always after me and I would die before I’d be bitten.” I sounded weary, a mistake in strategy.

“You’re right. That’s not a real bite on your neck, just a love nip, huh?”

“They say . . . I’ve heard . . . People can be turned if a vampire drains all your blood, or you’ve been bitten and you then bite the vampire. Or from toilet seats. I don’t know!”

“And you hate that condition more than anything,” Sansouci said with a quirk of his lips. “Not knowing.”

I was relieved to spot no blood on them. “So what’s it like being a vampire forever?”

“Like my brother figured when he wanted me more than dead and out of the way. He wanted me to suffer. He knew that the religious vocation I’d chosen would make my undead eternity as a bloodsucker into unliving hell.”

“Ric would be like that.” I shut my eyes.

“I don’t think he’s a vampire.” Sansouci’s hand covered my fist on the table, his thumb stroking mine. It was truly a consoling gesture.

“Not?” I looked up, my eyes full of question and hope.

“But it’s not good. I said your blood had an intoxicating effervescence.”

“I’ve got pink champagne in my veins?”

“That, and circumstances. Part of the vampire/prey dysfunctional relationship is that being bitten can hook you on biting. You mentioned a boyhood vampire bat bite. Then the Karnak vampires made it a group party. It’s possible Montoya’s becoming addicted to your blood, which would make him your personal human ‘lifestyle’ vampire. All addicts want more and more. All addicts have a built-in denial factor for why they do what they can’t resist. For a girl who hated the idea of being vamp-bit, you’re on the royal road to serious risk. It’s not his fault, but it’s a fact.”

My fist lifted to shake his chilly vampire hand off mine.

I hit it down again so hard the black glass cracked from rim to rim like an instant spiderweb.

Sansouci’s head leaned back against the red velvet upholstery. He did look like a knight.

“Love the new cracked glass tabletop, Delilah. Now. Here’s the way it is, the way I see it, and you’re going to have to deal with it.”

I listened with all my heart, and my head.

“Montoya loves you.”

I knew that.

“I want you.”

I knew and used that.

“And Snow . . . Snow needs you for some reason even I can’t guess.”

Need? Snow? That one had me stumped.

“Unless you’re willing to juggle lovers, and I doubt you are . . . yet, you’re going to have to decide who you’re safest with, and who’s safest with you.”

My only answer was silence. It was time to head home and mull what Sanscouci had told me and what he’d told me without knowing it.

He drained his glass. “Even your Virtual Virgin packs a kick, but a tentative one.”

“It’s the cherry vodka you laced it with, not my innocent nonalcoholic recipe.”

“Cherry vodka.” He repeated . . . caressed . . . my words with a searching look.

My inner alarms went on red alert. I was Sansouci’s chief prey these twenty-first century days. For all his apparent sophistication and benign blood-drinking, he’d been a savage warrior many more centuries than he’d been a dedicated monk or a cultish “life coach” for lonely ladies.

“I need to move on,” I said.

“In your life, or at this moment?”

“Both. How do I . . . we . . . exit this Goth carnival ride? And I like my life,” I announced, sitting forward on the banquette, in case he had any doubts.

I needed to pass him to get out.

Put me on hold and put yourself in a cul-de-sac with a vampire, right. Irma was back, gloating.

“Excuse me,” I suggested.

Sansouci tilted his head, as if analyzing a lot more about me than my words.

He has us at his mercy. Umm.

“Sure thing, Luscious.” Sansouci’s smile was as smooth as corn silk. He cracked the skull’s tufted velvet doors and the jaws yawned open, admitting screams of laughter and tortured electric guitars.

His exit left the suspended unit swaying hard. I poised on the booth’s bottom lip trying to gauge the jump to terra firma. I made the leap unassisted, taking the impact with my bent knees.

“Impressive,” he said.

“I’m used to exiting hovering helicopters. A state-fair ride is a snap.”

“Helicopters?”

I’d truly surprised him, since most such exits happen during troop deployments during wars. I was a veteran of the journalism wars.

“The WTCH-TV ’copter. Weather coverage was a big deal in Wichita when I was a reporter there.”

“Weather. TV-station ’copter. Right. Let me get you to the door. Spider Skull gets . . . raucous after dark.”

I sensed the female-unfriendly eyes all around. Or too friendly, I should say. Even today, women on business errands at night were considered fair game.

“No one will mess with me,” he assured me.

Count me out on that.

Irma! Some support here?

“Did you say something?” Sansouci leaned nearer to hear my words.

“Nope.”

I was still frothing at getting Irma’s usual sass in a situation that was making me uneasier by the second. I’d thought I could handle Sansouci. Maybe if I somehow finessed him into a fatherly role . . . which escorting me to the door surely was.

We were there, at the usual blank steel-door nightclubs this town favored.

I heard murmurs behind us complaining about my leaving.

Sansouci blocked all that noise and ugliness with his body, his big warrior’s body pinning me to the steel door, protective as a wall, intimate as a . . . well, my mind didn’t want to go there.

His eyes searched my face, marking my panic with a look . . . a look somehow both satisfied and . . . tender.

I felt all the superhuman strength I’d told him I’d want on my side when worst came to worst and it was holding me suspended in a bell-jar moment I’d never anticipated..

I had the most awful suspicion . . . instinct . . . that Sanscouci wanted to . . . kiss me . . . good night. Like a freaking prom date.

He didn’t want to taste my blood, which should have been a relief. He wanted to taste my emotions, which were even more intimately mine, far beyond some fluid pounding through my veins.

“I’d consider breaking that vow of mine for the first time with you. No blood, just what you’re sensing now.” His husky undertone seemed to vibrate in my bones.

“Gee, thanks. What part of ‘taken already’ don’t you get?”

“Undead life is long.”

I averted my face. And his followed like steel to a magnet.

“Delilah,” he said, willing me to look at him.

And nothing more.

I’m outta here, Irma announced, fleeing.

I wasn’t breathing, I was panting, a wild animal, cornered.

His expression melted with mine, his face following my evasive features as I turned my head left and then right and found only a steel door against my fevered cheeks, his eyes locked on mine, a dark emerald forest I was plunging into like a hunted animal. A unicorn. Virtual virgins.

If I kissed him . . . if I let him kiss me . . . now, here . . . No!

Nothing was keeping me pinned here but me. I forced my eyes to focus far to the side and addressed the empty air so I didn’t have to see him, to see what was coming.

“I’ve been here before,” I said, my voice hard and cold. “Before I ever bled for the first time. In the group homes with the sick, crazy vamp boys pinning me against walls, wanting my blood both ways. Hungry. Horrible. They smelled of death and murder, old blood and new lusts. Their skins were moonscapes of scars and pus-oozing pits. They were revolting and I only had a diamond-dust embedded nail file to fight them off. But I did. So. Let me go.”

I felt his presence retreating before it was physical fact. It was if I’d knocked a moon out of orbit around a planet it had been bound to by gravity.

One furtive glance at his face caught a fading gleam of something green and tentative as a root in his harsh gaze.

He hadn’t lasted all those postvampire centuries because he had kept any nugget of humanity that could be read as . . . hurt? No. I was thinking in my limited human way and that was no way to survive among unhumans.

“Get out.” His voice was harder and colder than mine had been.

“I was planning to.”

“Get. Out.”

I saw the blood tide, maybe the cherry vodka from my Virtual Virgins, rising in his eye whites and yanked the door handle open behind my back, slipping through, heart pounding so loud I knew he’d hear it for yards, as he’d scent my blood for a mile, maybe.

Dolly waited to enfold me in the parking lot, her neon chartreuse halo of pixie dust security announcing she was no Eldorado to mess with. She had never looked more like a fortress.