Virtual Virgin

Chapter Thirteen

A LONG, LONG hot walk later we were ensconced in a classy room at the Crystal Phoenix Hotel across from the Inferno. Neither of us had wanted to sleep where Snow had told us to, for mutual but different reasons.

We had made it to the king-size bed, if not fully undressed, and I had made it on my back like Everywoman.

Now we lay beside each other in dreamy satisfaction, gazing up at the gilt ceiling, a softly reflective surface of gold leaf.

“Gilt” was the right word. The Phoenix would never be so obvious as to install a mirror over its beds, but seeing our hazy figures reflected above us, I guiltily recalled Snow’s first words to me, that our twined black and white long tresses would look sexy in the mirror above his bed. An even more evil thought, maybe Lilith could spy down on us. There wasn’t mirror enough here to do more than glow, thank . . . uh, badness.

Back then, I’d had no clue about my paranormal partiality to silver-backed mirrors and other reflective surfaces. Right now, my silver familiar was a ring clamped onto my belly button, wearing a zircon teardrop. Or maybe the semiprecious stone was meant to emulate sweat.

Of course a rock star would have ambitions of bedding anything female new in town that moved. And of course said female would feel rotten for harboring any pulse of response to such a blatant booty caller.

Ric shook my hand, which was wrapped around his. “Now can we talk?”

“Guys never want to talk after sex. I read it in Cosmo Unplugged.”

“Usually murderous ex-ghosts don’t show up as foreplay.”

“So we talk. Forget Snow’s visions of making us in-house dependents. On to Metropolis. What did you think of the movie?”

“I didn’t stick around to see it.”

“What? I swallowed my pride and sent you up there specifically to see the complete, uncut edition. It’s vital you see it now that Her Serene Silverness has imprinted on you like a duckling on its mama.”

“That’s exactly why I didn’t swallow my pride and get herded into his penthouse theater for a long, awkward sit-down with him observing my every reaction. Plus, he had the robot there and she, uh, came on to me.”

“What?”

“She sort of . . . wakes up when I’m around. I didn’t want Snow witnessing that again, calculating how he can use that fact and me and . . . it. His penthouse has this vast semicircular screen and theater house with only six seats in the place. Kinda sad. I think he was expecting you to be there too.”

“Well, here’s to doing the unexpected. So you left?’

“Right. I wanted to thoroughly check out the ‘CinSim experience’ at Inferno areas other than the very public bar before I make any decisions about anything involving the Silver Zombie.”

“For the big picture, you need to see the uncut film, mi amigo, and you just blew the one opportunity on the planet to do that.”

“You saw it. I can rely on your reporter savvy.”

“Secondhand won’t cut it here. The Silver Zombie responds only to you. You need to know her inside and out.”

Ric winced. “Not that intimately, I hope.” He glanced at his suit coat, crumpled on the floor. “There’s no blood at all there. Or on me. Satisfied?”

“Yes, but I did see it at the time.”

“Must have been a reflection from the boiling river of blood.”

“Is that the Styx?”

“No. The Phlegethon.”

“Ick. That sounds like something green you’d cough up.”

“The name is based on the word ‘phlegm,’ and Hell was supposed to be icky in those days. Dante wrote in his own Italian Tuscan language, not the usual Latin, and he used Greek mythology and words. I know one thing. Where we escaped from was not part of the Inferno Hotel’s Dante theme attractions.”

“We were deposited in the real Hell?”

“Maybe we’ll figure it out if we discuss larger issues, like why and how you tried to contain Loretta Cicereau and how and why she got loose to track me through the Seventh Circle of Hell. You’ve never explained much about your solo adventures at the Gehenna Hotel. I respect your right to conduct your own investigations, as I do mine, but we weren’t as together then. Now that my hide is on the line, Del, I need full details.”

So I explained that the Gehenna house magician, Madrigal, had rescued two nestling fey he’d found on their own. His human touch banned them from Feyland, so they’d become eternally attached to him.

“Oh, yeah.” Ric nodded. “I’ve seen the billboards. He’s the muscleman illusionist and those two Tinker-Bell types are his tiny assistants.”

“They may look ‘Tinker-Bell,’ but they’re venomous . . . and jealously possessive of Madrigal. Cicereau had caught me snooping around his hotel and . . . this is where my mirror-twin, Lilith, comes in . . . she’d had an anonymous nonspeaking role on one episode of CSI V, Vegas. Our glass-coffin-ready looks and her lack of clothing made her a very desirable collectible image worldwide. Cicereau wanted to build a magic act around Madrigal with me as the hot new naked corpse from the CSI franchise.”

“I’ve seen some of that, but the quality was so bad I never realized it was supposed to represent you. What nonsense!”

“What? You don’t think I’d make a hot naked corpse?”

“Yes, but . . . no.” He laughed and ran his palm down my arm. “I’m screwed no matter how I answer that question. Why would you want to?”

“I didn’t. So what was ‘nonsense’?”

“That show’s crime scene procedure isn’t authentic. Technicians don’t act as detectives. So tell me how you avoided becoming an undead pinup girl?”

“Madrigal’s fey assistants helped me escape from the Gehenna because they wanted me away from their man.”

“So what has that to do with the mobster’s daughter coming after me?”

“I used the fey girls to bind Loretta Cicereau in Madrigal’s main mirror after I’d lured her resurrected lover, who’d been brought back as a killing machine of mismated bone and patchwork flesh, into a reflection of Loretta on the empty air outside Cesar Cicereau’s penthouse floor.”

Ric made the connection. “I get it. Loretta’s reanimated dead love was the mystery meat at the coroner’s facility when I met you there that time. How’d the gangster’s dead daughter get out of the fey stir you put her in, and why’s she so pissed at me?”

“For one, she wants me to know what it’s like to have a lover offed. Also, she blames your dead-dowsing talents for raising her and her vampire prince, Krzysztof, from their undiscovered grave in Sunset Park. They had a horrible death—”

“Don’t we all risk that?” Ric murmured. His distance-focused eyes were probably rerunning his tortuous time under the Karnak Hotel’s ancient Egyptian–themed superstructure.

Every key figure in the rescue party—Sansouci, Snow, and Grizelle, the Inferno security chief—was certain Ric had passed the point of death when we finally found him. I still refused to believe my secondhand Brimstone Kiss had revived him when I hadn’t been able to pound a heartbeat back into his chest and had given him a passionate farewell kiss. The usefulness of the so-called Kiss of Life had been debunked years ago, and that wasn’t what I was trying. I wasn’t a miracle worker who thought I could save Peter Pan if I clapped my hands or puckered my lips, although I did believe in fairies if they were the terrifying fey.

But somehow I did bring Ric back to consciousness.

“Loretta’s fury springs not so much from the dying,” I said after a silence, “as what was done to the victims beforehand. I have to say Cesar Cicereau deserves whatever she can dish out.”

Ric eyed me again, quizzical. “You never mentioned ‘beforehand’ details.”

“You weren’t there and I wasn’t eager to dwell on them. When I was ‘exorcising’ the Gehenna Hotel of Loretta’s ghost, she accused her father of worse atrocities than filicide. He picked a vicious gangster way to punish the cross-supernatural pair, and probably to show his own lack of mercy. Cicereau’s men castrated and killed Loretta’s lover—” Ric’s intent listening expression tightened. “I was about to say ‘young lover,’ but he was a youthful vampire several hundred years old. Then they raped Loretta right there beside his body and killed her too.

“She must have lived long enough to turn and clutch his body in her arms,” I theorized. “That’s why we found the skeletons embracing. That sight touched every Vegas crime professional involved in reclaiming the bones, except that sadistic cop, Haskell. So the young couple had been discovered making love, all right, but that moment was profaned. Maybe not such a great subject for postcoital chitchat, huh?”

Ric’s frown of disbelief and horror had deepened with the details of my story. “Weird. That kind of gratuitous sexual brutality has ancient historic roots, and it’s showing up again?”

“Hold that grisly thought.” I rolled off the bed, grabbed my bell-bottoms, and headed for the bathroom. “Time to shower out the kinks and tune our heads into war, not love.”

Most Las Vegas bathrooms these days could serve Roman emperors. I entered a wonderland of wall-to-wall marble and mirrors, soaking tubs and whirlpools, foot baths and anatomically adaptable massaging showerheads and driers, not to mention obscenely multifunction bidets.

Somewhere in all this in-your-face and funky excess were hidden extremely discreet actual toilets.

Ric followed me in, whistling at the shining high-tech water and action toys. “Do you think the master bath on my proposed private floor at the Inferno could have all this?”

“And more, much more decadent. Trust Snow. Also probably a stainless steel service bay for the robot.”

“Now here’s a good question. Do CinSims sleep?”

“Maybe standing up, like horses.”

Ric began shrugging off his unbuttoned shirt, his only remaining article of clothing. I was relieved to confirm there was no blood on it, nor on his skin. Somehow Loretta had managed to wing only his suit coat. “I know humans can do other things standing up than sleep.”

“Again?” I asked, pleased to find him unharmed but not unarmed, so to speak.

“The first time was fast and dirty. This will be slow and clean.”

FRESHLY SCRUBBED AND fully dressed, and thus feeling extremely virtuous for fornicators, Ric and I lounged together in the bedroom sofa area before giving up the posh room that was ours until morning. This had actually felt like a mini-vacation, moreso than our recent road trip to Wichita.

“I hate to ruin the mood,” Ric said, “but what the werewolf mob did to the teen lovers sounds like transferring life-force rituals for dead Viking chieftains.”

“I have a feeling my stomach is not going to like this.”

“It’s . . . horrible and sexist, yes. A slave girl is sacrificed. It begins with her being raped by men in the chieftain’s guard.”

By then, I was pulsing with fury. “Yeah, testosterone-driven cultures always come up with reasons to torture and defile women.”

“Then it gets ugly. She’s sent into the tents of warriors and traders, who explain they’re raping her out of love for their dead leader. Finally she is taken into a tent on the Viking ship bearing the chief’s body, where six men rape her before strangling and stabbing her.”

“Any chance you can raise some Viking chieftains to feed to Loretta and the fey girls?”

“That isn’t so different from parts of Africa today, where men believe that raping virgins will cure them of AIDS.”

“Some days I could sneak back into Dr. Frankenstein’s lab under the Karnak Hotel and whip up a nuclear bomb that targets only testosterone-bearers, you excepted. Is there a reason you further ruined my view of the inhumane human race? Yes, Loretta was raped and shot. What are you saying? Cicereau is a resurrected Viking as well as a werewolf?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised to find a long line of werewolves among the Vikings and other Northern marauders, but no. I’m saying the drug cartels’ horrible violence to innocent men, women, and children in Mexico often repeats those ghastly primitive rituals. I’ve long suspected the drug lords are either employing academic experts in perverse human behavior or some sort of demonic sadism consultant. Perhaps they have since the early twentieth century. Look at the tribal wars in Africa. And Cicereau was a chieftain of his tribe, disciplining a disobedient child. Haven’t you wondered why he’s lived so long? Werewolves aren’t ordinarily immortal, like vampires.”

“I did wonder,” I said. “Sansouci was with Cicereau back in the forties, but he was a hostage from the defeated vampires indentured to Cesar. So why has Cicereau lasted as long as he has? Maybe the Immortality Mob is involved.”

“Or maybe the mob is the defeated vampires of seventy years ago in corporate clothing. Sansouci, along with Big Bad Howard Hughes, makes two closeted vamps operating aboveground in Vegas. I know you’ve found the Gehenna muscleman a handy information source, but a vampire could turn on you, or turn you, any time.”

“No. Sansouci’s got a constant blood supply. He’s Sir Sipalittle-a-lot.”

“Huh?”

“Vamp tramp pipeline. He’s a gigolo with a string of willing clients, all donating just enough blood to make it exciting for them and sustaining for him.”

“Good for him, as long as he stays true to the harem. I don’t want anyone sucking on your neck besides me.”

His lowering head nudged my chin back as kissing lips and tasting tongue forged a trail from the hollow of my throat to under my left ear.

While my heartbeat did a startled sprint, in the dark shadow of my hair he imprinted a love bruise on my ultrawhite skin. It burned almost but not quite too much. Put me on an edge I couldn’t resist.

Despite my lifelong fear of vampire bites—or maybe because of it—my body throbbed with liquid heat in all the right places. Ric almost never broke the skin, but these moments alarmed as much as they excited me. He pulled away, kissing my lips almost as long and hard, and ran a hand down my torso that had surged against his with a will of its own.

“You’ve really got to let us get back to cases, chica.”

As if I’d started it again.

Really, now that I was out of my overaged virgin box, I was still freaked by how easily men spotted that and how much I was getting to like it. I was facing a whole new world most other people had long visited by my age of twenty-four, commonly called “carnal knowledge.”

Loretta’s ghost had once claimed credit for Ric’s and my instant sexual connection when we met and dowsed together in Sunset Park. She told me her and Krzysztof’s passion had leaped to us, and in this new paranormally quirky world, she might have had a point.

Thoughts of undying undead love were too morbid, or personal, for me. I pulled away from Ric, reluctantly becoming investigative reporter again.

“Sansouci called the double killing ‘the Blood Price.’”

“That’s a very Mafia concept, and now like the drug cartels too,” Ric said. “Cicereau probably wanted a male heir, so the female, especially a disobedient female hooking up with a male not of his selection, was expendable.”

“He certainly will force anyone to work in his Vegas empire—magician, vampire, or little me in the guise of my double, the CSI autopsy queen, Lilith.”

“Why’d you keep that surprise under wraps for so long?” Ric asked, his dark eyes narrowed to indicate he was teasing. “Afraid of some really direct competition?”

“She’s why I came to Vegas. Lilith supposedly was one of the TV series’ actual corpses, who kill themselves for the immortality of being taped during their autopsy on the number one show in the world. But Hector seems to want me to replace her, or . . . find her. I don’t know what he really wants, or what Lilith really is, spirit, doppelganger, sister, or evil spirit.”

“Nightwine is a wild card among Vegas powers that be,” Ric mused. “As with Christophe at the Inferno, exactly what paranormal he is, if any, remains a mystery. I knew Nightwine had some hidden motive for keeping you under his thumb and oversight at the Enchanted Cottage. Still, it’s a cool place for you to live, cheap and secure. But playing landlord is not charity on his part.”

“I could sue him for using my ‘image’ without authorization, and told him so when I first came to town.”

“What about your mirror-chase of Lilith? Is she ever going to show up on our side?”

“I did confront her outside a mirror once, in a back alleyway. Inside or out of a mirror, she’s rebellious, bitter, savvy, and in that alley she left me to the oncoming hyena pack from the vampire empire.”

“Lilith. The rebellious teenager you never had a chance to be. Instead, you grew up as the innocent, loyal, inquisitive, defensive, smart girl.”

“Sometimes you’re eerily perceptive, Montoya.”

“Try having a renowned child psychologist for a foster mother.”

Mention of Helena Troy Burnside made me think of my CinSim foster dad, super defense lawyer Perry Mason. I wondered if he could force Snow to release a copy of Metropolis to us because we fought to help the Inferno head man keep it. No, even Perry Mason wouldn’t intimidate Snow.

That idea led to another that perked me up like the Silver Zombie with Ric in the sights of her blank oval eyes.

“Ric! I bet I know where else we can see an uncut copy of Metropolis!”

“Back at the restored vintage movie theater near Wichita? No more road trips to weather witch country.”

“Oh, this will be a very short trip.”