Virtual Virgin

Chapter Nineteen

A BORED GIRL at the reception desk yawned and slammed a clipboard toward the high counter and me.

She was wearing an orange tank top, enough butterfly tattoos to sponsor a Costa Rican tour, and her hair was striped magenta and blue.

I’d had too many doctor’s office clipboards slammed at me during my recent traumatic sentimental journey back to Wichita, so I slapped it back down on her desk.

“Just visiting,” I said. “I don’t read any permission pleas. I don’t sign any papers or pay any admission fees.”

Her Slinky-supple spine straightened right up. “Uh, sure. Here’s a visitor’s pass, but it’s only good until morning. You’re late.”

“Is that a personal message?”

“Uh, no. Only, the open house is almost over. You’ve got less than an hour to try us out.”

“And what has La Vida Loca got I might want to try out?”

“Look behind you. Wall-to-wall classes. An awesome lap pool, and a totally kew-ool juice and wine bar.” She narrowed her tar-pit eyeliner at me. “I see you shop last century. La Vida Loca will have you out of those nineteen-forties fat farm dresses and into sixties anorexic Alice-in-Wonderland white tights and French nape-bows in no time.”

“Is this a chain?”

“Shut your mouth with duct tape!”

Somehow the imagery had turned very creepy.

“This is a one-and-only totally spa-experience health club,” the receptionist said. “We specialize in after-hours workouts for the working girl.”

“Who’s the boss?”

“Our owner and CEO is leading the Zumba Zapata class and should be down in a few minutes. Step up to the bar and have an energy drink on the house.”

Anybody is a fool for a freebie, me not excluded. I plopped myself on a bar-height stool at what looked like an old-fashioned soda fountain with chrome taps and stainless steel mixing machines.

Lilith was missing out on a fun detour down Delilah Street.

“What can I getcha?” The tanned, collegiate-looking blond guy wearing the cop mustache behind the counter looked so California.

I studied the handwritten menu above the work area. Between graphics of smiling and fan-dancing fruits and veggies I perused a funky list of smoothie names, like Bloody Mary Contrary and Vegetarian Voodoo.

“I’ll have a Red Zombie.” Since I’d created a Silver Zombie cocktail I was curious about the nonalcoholic fresh and fruity version.

“Freshly squeezed,” he said with a wink.

“Pomegranate,” I suggested.

The mixer machine was whirring like a speedboat engine, so I didn’t hear his answer.

He turned to put a tall beer glass of scarlet liquid down at my place.

“Cranberry?” I tried next.

He shrugged and returned to polishing the chrome and stainless steel for the next day. I’d just have to use my connoisseur’s nose and tasting tongue.

I had the glass rim at my lips when a hand from behind me snatched it away.

“A glass of sparkling water for the lady,” a low, contralto voice ordered. “She’s the designated driver type.”

I turned indignantly, already pointing at the chorus line of fruits and veggies on the sign above.

“Merely mixers, my dear, not the hard stuff actually on tap. Let’s have a look at you.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

I slipped off the stool and turned to stand nose-to-nose with her. My designated fairy godmother was a tall brunette poured into a peacock-blue leotard. White skin, dark hair and eyes, with that coal-black mane pinned off her neck in a forties updo. Not a drop of sweat showed on her or the leotard she rode in with. Not a bit of a hitch in her breathing.

I managed to remain as cool as one of the line-dancing cucumbers above us. “The Vida in La Vida Loca, I assume.”

Very red lipstick made her teeth look supernaturally white as she smiled, particularly the pointed canines. Or it could be Crest strips. And a genetic tendency to sharp incisors.

“Ihateyourguts,” I got out and closed my eyes. “Just something I wanted to get off my chest once before I die.”

She leaned past me. I peeked to see her claiming my abandoned Red Zombie.

“Welcome to Delilah Street, Delilah. Let’s talk in my office. Take your sparking water.” She eyed the bartender. “I’ll lock up the health bar, Bane.”

While I followed her past the steel-and-birch suspended staircase, a flock of fit young women thronged up it in thong leotards and tights. All were pale, thin, muscular, wearing the same Revlon red lipstick as my hostess, the thick creamy old-fashioned kind that caked and would peel off with a bit of your lips as it got old. Kinda a metaphor for vampires.

They slowed, their eyes fixed on me as they ran into one another and formed a clot on the stairs, predatory pupils dilating, lips parted, and not from exercise.

“Come along,” Vida ordered, emphatic.

I skedaddled after her through a pale birch door. Better one-on-one. The office furniture beyond was more silver-and-blond Nordic modern with accents of scarlet leather and silk. My hostess finished wrapping a sarong around her hips, Dorothy Lamour or Hedy Lamarr come to life from some native girl film of this woman’s prime, the nineteen freaking forties.

I stood with my back to the closed door. “You’re Cesar Cicereau’s Vida.”

She froze like a statue of an Egyptian goddess. Her spine became stone, every disc visible and incised like a hieroglyph, and her voice came out raw and god-awesome. “Don’t ever use a possessive of that name and mine in my presence again, Delilah.”

She turned, smiling and gorgeous. “Now sit. I won’t bite.”

Her dark-chocolate eyes threw me a half-humorous, half-challenging look as sharp as a perfectly aimed dart.

I couldn’t help admiring her style, maybe because we’d both adapted it from glamorous but hard-boiled forties film dames. The only difference was Vida had done it naturally in her time. I’d done it unnaturally decades later, hiding in dark empty group-home rec rooms, watching old midnight movies with a nail-file weapon clutched in my hand.

“You were expecting me?” I slunk to the red leather sling chair in front of the desk.

It might mean I was a nonchalant shady lady. It might mean I was scared out of my vintage-loving mind. Take your pick. Mom was my literal role model? And she could eat me. Gee, a whole bunch of fairy tales rolled into one.

I leaned forward to set my water glass on the white sharkskin desktop. “I’m well over twenty-one now, you know. What’s the foamy red stuff about? Blood beer?”

“Never you mind.” She leaned behind her and selected a crystal decanter from a line of liquor bottles. “Feel free to spike your water, since you’re such a big girl now. Albino Scotch should suit you.”

I shook my head, blinking. Red Zombie, white scotch?

“This is California.” Vida sipped my former drink, my former supposed veggie refresher.

“Why did you leave Las Vegas?” I asked her. “When did you leave?”

“Don’t you mean, ‘Why did I leave you’? And Lilith. Where is she, by the way?”

I jerked my head to the vague air behind me. “Preferred the rave up the . . . street to exploring. I guess I’m glad she’s safe, at least.”

“Lilith is never ‘safe.’ It’s against her nature.” She smiled again, which was more disturbing than if she’d hissed and bared her fangs. “On the other hand, I always knew you’d find me, Delilah. You’re the explorer.”

“Vampires can’t reproduce.”

“No time for niceties, I see. What vampires can and cannot do is a tangle of mixed mythologies, my dear.”

“And our father?”

Vida shrugged and sipped. “It’s not for me to say. There are . . . candidates. Some,” she added as her fangs showed, “forced upon me.”

Oh, Lordy. First I’d worried for years I’d been raped as a child and I just get over that false assumption and now I get to worry I’m a product of rape. Can’t women ever get free of such ugly personal histories?

“I saw a photo of you in the old days on Cicereau’s computer,” I told her so she’d know I was an effective investigator. “It was something of a family shot, if you include that to mean ‘Family’ in the mob fashion.”

“How did you get access to Cesar’s computer?”

“Broke in.”

“To his office at the Gehenna? Nicely done.” She leaned back to pull out a drawer. In a moment, she’d inserted an unfiltered cigarette in a long black holder twined by a rhinestone snake. It could have been flaunted by Audrey Hepburn or Cruella de Vil.

I went into knee-jerk covet mode. “That’s from an old movie, isn’t it?”

“One of the advantages of living near Hollywood. Lots of prop shops.”

I frowned. “You shouldn’t—” Then I shut up.

“Smoke? One of the advantages of being undead. I can continue bad habits.” Her slightly opened lips emitted a serpentine stream.

“You can’t smoke. You don’t breathe.”

“Think about vampires. We walk, we talk, we suck and swallow blood. Smoke is just a pale substitute.”

I thought about it. Only air vibrating the vocal cords produced speech. Yet, party tricksters I’d seen blowing smoke rings didn’t inhale. They just held the smoke in their mouths, puckered their lips and let it drift out in circles. A vampire’s oral pleasures must be as fleeting.

“So . . . Lilith and I were twins of a nicotine-addicted pre-vampire mother.”

“You preceded the smoking, but otherwise it was quite a rare situation, which is why I kept it utterly secret.”

“Even from us.”

“Especially from you.”

“Vampirism isn’t inheritable.”

Vida shrugged. “Who’s to say, if not you and Lilith?”

“That’s it? You gave birth to us and called it quits? You don’t care? Then, why did this place”—I nodded at the slick surroundings—“send money to help me attend Our Lady of the Lake, a Catholic institution that would be anathema to vampires, and vice versa?”

Vida leaned forward to tap an inch of ash off her cigarette. The ashtray on her desk was an open crystal palm, the head, heart, and lifelines etched deep and long. I watched with dismay. Mama looked like an under-thirty hottie. Lilith would groove on that, but I’d hoped for something cuddlier, or at least with a conscience.

“The Catholic church and vampires both have long, tortured traditions,” Vida said mysteriously, “and more in common these days than you might think.”

“I must have been born here in Corona on Delilah Street.”

“No. I left you to be found here in Corona, on Delilah Street. The area wasn’t much of anything then.”

“And how does that leave me ending up in Wichita?”

“You know social services.” Vida shrugged. “They take a lot upon themselves in dealing with helpless wards of the state.”

“Don’t divert my focus to little me. What about prime-time you? In that photo from the nineteen forties, you were obviously Cicereau’s shockingly younger arm candy.”

“No possessives when you speak of him! There was life after Cesar.”

“I was born in eighty-eight, twelve years before the Millennium Revelation in 2000 to 2001. You would have been . . .”

“Yes, Delilah. An older unwed mother.” Vida simpered mockingly, more at herself than at my struggles to solve the logistics of my birth.

“Fifty-eight years old, if you were eighteen in Cicereau’s photograph. It doesn’t add up.”

“That’s right.” Vida’s long red-enameled fingernails probed her desk drawer again. She extracted something small and white and tossed it to the desk in front of me.

I stared at my own baby business card, three months old, designed when I hit Vegas and wanted to declare myself.

Vida sucked more smoke into her mouth. This time the stream puffed out with her words. “You bill yourself as a paranormal investigator these days, and I guess you did find me. More nice work.”

I stared at my own name, sitting in a building with a matching street address, interrogating my own mother. So be it.

“Vida,” I noted in my most objective reporter voice. “That’s the Spanish word for ‘life.’ Ironic, isn’t it?”

“No kidding. When I was your age I expected to have a long and happy one, I just didn’t anticipate how very long it would be.”

“What happened? In Cicereau’s ‘family’ photo everybody looked content with their roles. He was the satisfied middle-aged mogul getting short on hairline and large on waistline. Loretta was maybe sixteen and glowing in probably her first long gown. You were chorus-girl gorgeous in your slinky long slit skirt with a lush silk flower in your hair. Even Sanscouci looked a tad younger, the silver streak in his forelock muted, and him looking all casual hand-in-dinner-jacket-pocket fully armed. The stalwart bodyguard.”

Can a vampire’s face go paler? Vida’s was giving Snow’s albino complexion a run for the money. She stood behind her desk, spreading her bloodred-tipped claws on the surface, glaring at me.

“I see you still believe in fairy tales, Delilah. Keep that snapshot in your mind’s eye and forget looking for the man . . . or woman . . . behind the curtain.”

“Nope. Pulling back curtains is my business. Besides, everyone in that photo is a mess. I know now Sansouci had been freshly indentured to the werewolf mob by his own kind. Cicereau slaughtered Loretta and her ancient vampire young lover not long after that.”

Vida sat down slowly, leaning on her hands as if she was, say, eighty years old.

“Cesar killed Loretta?”

“How can you know about me and not about them?”

She sighed out some more smoke. “I wanted to forget about all of them. I couldn’t forget about you. Cesar was power hungry and brutal, but I can’t believe he’d kill his own daughter.”

“Believe. I was instrumental a few months ago in finding Loretta and her lover’s buried bodies in Sunset Park. Then Loretta’s ghost went so crazy she conspired with the Karnak Hotel vampires to resurrect her boyfriend, now she’s going after mine in the process.”

“Karnak? Vampires? Not on my radar. Though, from what you say, it’s no wonder Cesar ‘retired’ me for a while soon after that photograph. I thought he just wanted an even younger woman, but he wanted witnesses gone.” Vida interrogated me in turn. “Who is he, your ‘boyfriend’?”

“You wouldn’t have known him. Ric is mortal. He’s a crime consultant formerly with the FBI.”

“Good family, then?”

That made me want to laugh. Here was Vida sounding proprietary about my associates after all this time, and me wondering whether to cite Ric’s poverty-stricken peasant Mexican roots or his foster family’s impeccable Washington WASP credentials.

He wouldn’t deny either one, so I just said, “Good man.”

Vida’s tone turned cynical. “I suppose you don’t exactly have family to brag about.”

“Maybe I could, if I knew who my father was.”

“Doesn’t this cast of characters so far convince you that you don’t want to know?”

“You mentioned Cesar took you back.”

“He was a grieving father. He claimed Loretta had ‘gone missing.’”

“Thanks to him. But thanks to Ric and me, she’s back, and not the better for it. So I’m still doing the math. You remained with Cicereau for years, knowing what he was?”

“Knowing and seeing are two different things, Delilah. So he went off with the ‘boys’ to Starlight Lodge in the mountains for three days a month. My periods actually got in sync with the full-moon schedule. Convenient for Cesar.”

“Creepy. And more than I wanted to know.”

Vida smiled. “Odd how a woman’s blood cycle unnerves even other women. Now I know how to stop your incessant questions.”

“What about Sansouci? He’s the obvious suspect for turning you vampire.”

Vida’s dark eyes blinked twice in her impassive face. The involuntary tic broadcast a strong emotional reaction, from what I’d glimpsed of her. Her long fingers picked up the extreme cigarette holder to cover her discomposure.

“Sansouci. He tried to recruit me for his harem, but I was too savvy to fall for that.”

“You stayed true to froglike Cicereau with a suave number like Sansouci around oozing forbidden sex for the price of a little blood? Why?”

“Simple, Delilah. I knew too much. Not about Loretta, or I’d have risked leaving, but too much about Cesar’s shady criminal activities, not to mention the supernatural ones. I’d been ‘dropped off’ as an infant myself. All I knew of my family was a couple crazy old aunts in the Midwest and I ditched both of them when I was sixteen. I was on my own and doing my best.”

I kept silent. That was as close to an apology as she’d come yet. I didn’t believe her story about Sansouci. It went against human nature that a trapped and neglected trophy mistress like Vida wouldn’t at least have revenge sex with her sugar daddy’s handsome bodyguard, if not give blood.

Good question. Did daylight vampires ever have sex for the sake of it, or only when it netted blood?

Vida was watching me while trying to hide it. “How is Sansouci?” she asked too casually to feel that way.

“Same old, same old, I suppose. Hates Cicereau, loves women.”

“You said his forelock has more silver.”

“Only to a very keen observer, like me, after seeing the sixty-five-year-old photo.”

“His daylight lifestyle will shorten his immortality.”

“By a century or two, maybe. He doesn’t seem worried.”

“He never did. Does he like you, Delilah? You look quite a bit like me. Especially in those vintage rags you’re wearing.”

“Why should you care?” These were the first roster of questions she’d asked about me, besides wanting to know Ric’s history.

Then I got it. Sansouci could be my father! He was Black Irish. He’d been around Vida for years. He was the one who’d want revenge sex . . . with Vida. He had good reason to cuckold Cicereau even if a blood donation wasn’t in the picture.

The idea of Sansouci as Daddy made my skin crawl and wrung my stomach. Vida was right. He did act attracted to me. Still, Cicereau was more likely to be my father when you looked at the Gehenna Hotel habitués. Another revolting, stomach-churning idea. I recalled his lust for the CSI-autopsy image of Lilith, aka me.

This cast of likely suspects for my father was getting more twisted than the family freakiness in Oedipus Rex and Hamlet put together.

“You have no reason to be honest,” I told Vida, forcing myself to be so hard-headed I sounded cold. “You’ve let Lilith and me fend for ourselves since infanthood and grow up in a separate nest of lies. Maybe you fooled yourself into thinking you were doing the best for us, but you got out of Vegas, got out of motherhood, and now you’re running some chichi California fitness club, and you’re out only a few thousand dollars for my high school scholarship. I appreciate being your charity-of-the-month for four years, but all I want from you is our father’s identity, Lilith’s and mine. Then I’ll vanish like a bag of trash left for the garbage collector. I won’t even tell Lilith, so she won’t bother you, not that she’d be inclined.”

Vida leaned her gorgeous, made-up forties face on the elbow she braced on her desk.

“I’d like to help you out, Delilah, but you really ought to leave now.”

“I’m not leaving until I have the answers I need.”

“Too bad, because my workout girls are all done with their routines and hepped up and about to harvest the rave attendees up the street. Just up Delilah Street.” She pointed beyond me with a sharp scarlet fingernail. “I own both enterprises, you see. It works out very well. That’s one thing I learned from Vegas and Cesar Cicereau, owning competing venues just ups the ante for the savvy CEO.”

I was on my high-heeled feet. “Your vamps are hitting the rave club? You let Lilith stay there?”

“No, my dear. You did.”

I ran to the door, pausing when I heard high-pitched tittering outside. Excited feminine twittering.

I turned my back to the door and faced my mother as the silver familiar abandoned its old-timey charm bracelet and reshaped itself into a dagger in my right hand, a dagger with a cross-shaped haft, of course, as hokey as that old superstition was.

“You must have been the one,” I told Vida even as I realized it, “who was made vampire so Howard Hughes could get turned by a beautiful woman.”

I didn’t need a confirmation. A look of paralyzed fury froze her face into a horrific mask. Mama as a snaky-tressed Medusa would never leave my memory.

“That’s the beauty of being undead now. I don’t need men anymore, Delilah, I prey on them. Exclusively. My girls are not so persnickety.”

I turned and yanked open the door. Zombies on speed were one nightmare I’d already navigated. Aerobic vampire chicks were about to become another can of worms entirely.