Virtual Virgin

Chapter Twenty-three

AFTER HE’D LEFT the Spider Skull, Sansouci had made an immediate blood and booty phone call to Carmella, the three-time divorcée, a handsome but stringy cougar of a woman in her late forties.

Carmella was the only one of his blood “wives” he didn’t like.

She was also the only one who craved being drained to the very edge of mortality. Sometimes he needed to remind himself of the centuries of raging, senseless survival. Especially after seeing, flirting with, wanting Delilah. She got under his skin the way he was supposed to want to get under hers. Like an addiction.

He did all the things with Carmella he supposed Delilah was imagining he did. Twice.

He left his client when she was sated in every way possible and he was sick of himself. His ancient, wholly human shadow-self seemed to be tailing him through the glitz of the Las Vegas Strip.

Sansouci decided to finish his unhappy evening out by stopping for a nightcap at Chez Shez. He could atone there for what he’d refrained from doing—and what he’d just done to make up for his restraint—by patronizing the artificial blood on tap. Penance, they’d labeled it when he’d been a monk. Nowadays even that word was out of date.

Gentle Fawn, the day-shift employee Shez called Fawnschwartz, had been replaced for the evening hours by a tall black woman with green eyes who suspiciously resembled Grizelle, the Inferno Hotel’s security head. Had the ancient Egyptian godling developed a crush on a twenty-first-century shape-shifter?

Good luck with that, Sansouci thought.

He hunkered over the stone cup inset with semiprecious stones and filled with the chilled bloodwine “Hastur” had given him before disappearing into the shop’s rear. The smooth jade felt cold in his undead hands, though the artificial bloodwine inside tasted like lukewarm cinnamon mouthwash.

Could he live on this swill forever? Or for as long as Delilah lived her mayfly’s seconds of existence until . . . 2168, say? Delilah would be old and frail and he’d be . . . sorry he hadn’t turned her and facing more centuries of mere survival alone.

His hands lifted back from the goblet in fists of frustration. What he treasured about Delilah was her smarts so oddly combined with innocence and integrity. Giving her his endless blood-craving life would destroy that.

“The bloodwine does not appeal?”

Sansouci looked up to see Shezmou, once Lord of the Slaughter and now Vegas Strip huckster of fine wine and oils, standing behind him. Looming, rather. He was the living flesh of a god from a long-dead civilization and the city’s latest buzz-worthy supernatural.

“It sates without satisfying,” Sansouci admitted. “Like my recent date.”

“Dates. Ah. I know this word. There are many palm trees in this great city of eternal lightning and sprouting water and artificial thunder, but none offer the sustenance of dates.”

Sansouci smiled. How could you not like this ancient big lug Delilah had hauled back from the Karnak Hotel’s sinister vampire empire? The “thunder” Shez referred to was the roar of the Mirage’s Strip-facing volcano erupting on schedule.

“Have you seen the Mighty Delilah of late?” Shez asked.

Sansouci smiled again. He knew his private obsession had earned the undying public gratitude of the chained god she’d freed from millennia of captivity.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“She was in good health and state of mind?”

“When I left her.”

Shez’s brow wrinkled under the shoulder-brushing white linen headdress that reminded Sanscouci of the kepi caps the French Foreign Legion wore in the desert.

“You should not have left her if there was any question about that,” he told Sansouci.

“She was safer after I left her.”

Shezmou hauled him off the zebra-hide stool by the nape of his modern turtleneck knit.

“You would endanger the Mighty Delilah?”

Sansouci twisted out of the god’s choking grip, relishing exercising force against him. “Why do you call her ‘the Mighty Delilah’?”

“She freed me from four millennia of immobility.”

“Delilah’s merely mortal. How’d she do that?”

Shezmou pulled another stool up to the bar and braced a hip on it. “You must understand that what you see before you is a mere sliver of my former self.”

“An impressive sliver,” Sansouci conceded, eyeing six-and-half feet of terra-cotta-colored muscle wearing only what would be called a skimpy kilt these days and eyeliner, plus collar and headgear, including a heavy braided wig that mimicked a lion’s mane.

“We gods are supposed to impress mere mortal men,” Shez said.

“I’m not mortal anymore.”

“Once you were. I accept the company of a foul blood-imbiber only because the Mighty Delilah says you represent a powerful mogul in this city, one called Caesar. Even while imprisoned in my pillar image, I’d heard that name mentioned. It was used with fear by the debased Egyptian sect of blood drinkers who’d infected an entire once-proud race of my subjects.”

“My ‘Cesar’ is not your ‘Caesar.’ Julius Caesar lived two millennia ago. Cesar Cicereau has been a force in Las Vegas only since its founding seventy-five years ago.”

“A paltry span,” Shez noted, “even for a human.”

“Too long for my taste,” Sansouci said. “Cicereau’s an entirely inferior modern breed of dictator. I work for him only to pay a debt owed by my . . . tribe.”

“All bloodsuckers.”

“We all started as mortals. And were converted forcibly.”

“Not I, though I must admit it pains me to think that the Mighty Delilah may soon falter and pass away. I owe her my freedom and the restitution of justice to the ancient beliefs of Memphis and Thebes.”

“How’d she actually free you?”

Shezmou rose to go behind the bar and uncork a lavishly bottled and labeled wine. He filled another jeweled cup and returned to sit on the stool, staring reflectively into his image in the polished sheet of bronze behind the various containers of wine and oil and manufactured blood.

He lifted large, cupped hands. “My likeness resided on a pillar twenty feet high. I was depicted standing in the boat of the sun, fully human, with twin stars above my headdress with the sacred cobra rising at its forefront. Unlike all the other pillar gods in that vast temple underground, my wrists and ankles wore manacles connected by chains of gold. Well, a layer of gold, the flesh of the gods, over silver.”

“Gold overlay on silver. That’s called vermeil nowadays,” Sansouci said. “Silver’s more Delilah’s style, and I’d think that underlying metal was the key to your release.”

“There is some reason the Silver Pharaoh exists, but I’m not yet sure why.” Shezmou sipped reminiscently from his cup. “That last sentence was good. I used a contraction. That would please the Mighty Delilah.” He smiled. “She is small, but curious and agile, like a . . . a monkey.”

Sansouci interred a smile behind the cup of his palm. Shez didn’t have a notable sense of humor. Monkey was hardly the animal he’d associate with Delilah, although it was a good standby for any smart human in the mind of an ancient god.

Shez continued to reminisce between sips of wine, like any modern dude in a bar.

“She alone,” he went on, “of any human worshipper in thousands of years, climbed the stone-etched trunk of my leg and swung from my insufficiently golden bonds, breaking them. I heard a crack as of ancient thunder between my stone ears. My fleshly representation fell to earth with the broken chains, and I was there with my strong arms to catch and break the fall of my fragile mortal rescuer.”

Sansouci sipped too, unaware of the taste in his mouth, coursing through his veins. Delilah’s sense of adventure and enterprise had freed a god from bondage. Could she free a vampire as well?

“She freed me,” Shez’s deep Darth Vader voice mused. “I saved her. Now she is my”—Shezmou frowned—“personal representative who seeks peace and unity between my local sponsor and all your powerful Las Vegas lords who desire to sell the profitable fruits of my mighty winepress.”

Sansouci nodded solemnly, drawing more artificial blood into his system.

“Then, of course,” Shezmou added with a windy sigh, “if the current debased pharaoh corulers return to their foul blood-drinking ways, I will rise up to my full form as Lord of the Slaughter and pull off their heads and those of their evil minions and throw them all into my relentless winepress for crushing.”

Ouch. Sansouci’s steamy dreams of being rescued and rescuing crashed to the Strip like the body of Loretta’s reanimated dead lover. Delilah had yet another dedicated protector, besides Ric and Quicksilver, and this one hated and destroyed vampires.

“So,” he told Shez, “you’re like the giant up the beanstalk, crushing our bones and drinking our blood.”

“I do not . . . don’t . . . know your myths and gods and your hierarchies. Only the Mighty Delilah.”

“You called her fragile yourself.”

“Might is more than physical durability, friend. It is what you will to make of yourself.”

Sansouci gazed into those utterly dark, ancient eyes. “What if I choose to . . . convert from blood to . . . this.” He gestured at the bland contents of his jeweled cup.

“Then Shezmou would declare that you have done more than his entire debased race of worshippers have done.” His huge hand clapped Sansouci’s shoulder, nearly dislocating it. “This is just what the ancient one atop the Karnak has accomplished with his blood-hued brew. You know who I mean, the living mummy, ho-war dhu-ooz. I will create a tablet for you, Sandsoozi.”

Sansouci blinked, interpreting as fast as he could. “Thank you, Shez. I think you mean you’ll set up a tab, so I can patronize your gilded cobra heads daily for bloodwine. And your mummified patron is called ‘Howard Hughes’ in this incarnation.” He doubted Delilah knew how much he knew about all her contacts.

“Why do you wish to make this transformation of yourself, Sandsoozi?”

“I was once a Lord of the Slaughter myself.”

“Indeed. In what time or place or cause? You were not a god, as I am.”

“No, but I served one. I took the life and blood of his enemies in war, and called it just. Like you, I’d once wielded sacred oil and water during peacetime, but it was war that made my method of existence possible.”

Shez thought, then nodded. “I too would rather mash grapes and seeds than the heads of the damned unjust. Their blood as it spatters my lips tastes foul. I must brew much wine to banish the inadvertent sins that have tainted even so little of my flesh.”

“You can . . . taste who is damned from their blood?”

“A mere . . . what you say, side effect, like the inebriation that results from too much healthy wine. Forget the tablet. I like you. I wish to aid you in your quest to be worthy of the Mighty Delilah.”

“I didn’t say anything about my reasons.”

“You did not have to. Who does not aspire to She Who Frees a God? You are my guest whenever you choose to drink at Chez Shez.”

“Thanks.” Sansouci raised his glass of Blood Lite.

“It is good when gods and men can sit together and talk.” Shez nodded his head until the beaded ends of his heavy braided wig danced on his doughty shoulders.

Sansouci was getting mighty tired of feeling outclassed.