Except I already had my own really butch wolfhound-wolf-cross dog named Quicksilver, and Sansouci was a vampire.
Not everybody knew the truth about Sansouci. Just me, in fact. Taken either way, Sansouci sported extremely white and handsome canines, which now flashed at me like a fishing lure.
“And where’s your boyfriend, the Cadaver Kid?” he asked.
“Ric’s in Mexico,” I reported, “rounding up demon drug lords and feral zombies in a multinational policing operation. And what have you done for the good of humanity and world peace lately?”
“Looked you up. Or down.”
His glance slowly skied the curves of the sweetheart neckline on my fifties black velvet top.
“One spike heel to the kneecap and you’d fold,” I pointed out.
“Maybe. But I’d take you down with me.”
Flirting with Sansouci was dangerous, which was why I enjoyed it so much.
And I was dressed to kill. The velvet bodice topped a ballerina-length, full, dark gray taffeta skirt that made solid me look so Audrey Hepburn–girlish you’d want to take me to brunch at Tiffany’s … until you noticed I was wearing silver-metal-laced gladiator-goth-style high heels that also worked well as weapons.
Sansouci had, and was looking even more lean and hungry.
“So,” I asked, “why’d your mangy, murderous werewolf boss let you off-leash from headquarters at the Gehenna Hotel?”
You’d think a female human paranormal investigator like me would sympathize with werewolves. We shared that three-days-a-month temporary-insanity-and-blood thing.
Yet I liked Sansouci precisely because he hated his werewolf overlord, Cesar Cicereau. Sansouci had been a hostage in the uneasy peace between the werewolves and the vampires that had lasted since Las Vegas’s 1940s founding all the Way to Where We Were, 2013. That added up to seventy-five years. Good thing Sansouci was immortal.
And most vamps still suffered from that twelve-hour-a-day “impotency handicap,” not that I’d dare use the phrase with Sansouci. Being an ex-reporter, accuracy was my middle name. Anyone who survived as a vampire gigolo was good to go 24/7. His breed of New Model Vampire had been in the making since the 1930s, a daylight vamp who sipped from a willing harem of female donors. Killing them softly with sex, not death, and they loved him for it.
Not I.
“Why’d you come all the way over to the Inferno,” I prodded Sansouci, “where you’re not welcome, from the Gehenna, where you’re really not welcome?”
“We have a problem.”
We? I lifted my eyebrows.
Nick Charles, the official Inferno barfly, rushed to my side. Yeah. That Nick Charles, the 1930s book and movie lush–detective with the witty wife and hyperactive terrier, Asta.
The entire trio was black-and-white and gray all over. They were Cinema Simulacrums, aka SinCims. Vegas throngs with black-and-white movie characters overlaid on zombies to give the tourists some semi-“live” entertainment they could not only gawk at, but actually talk to. Which was happening right now.
“Look here, my good man.” Nick Charles accosted Sansouci with a hand on the concealed gun in his tuxedo jacket pocket. “You’re not to pester our Inferno patrons.”
Asta’s teeth were tugging on one leg of Sansouci’s black designer jeans while Nicky’s sleek wife, Nora, was running a languid hand inside his jean jacket and down his firm pecs and abs to frisk him. Friskily. Face it, Nick Charles has a retro-cool pencil-thin mustache, a tipsy wit, and ace deductive ability, but he’s not exactly buff in modern terms.
“You have the most annoying allies, Street,” Sansouci said with an impressive shrug. “Get these reanimated vintage-film freakos off me. We have business to discuss.”
“I’m okay, Family Charles,” I assured my friends. Then I ordered Brimstone Kisses from the human barman and we adjourned to a table for two.