Virtual Virgin

Chapter Thirty-six

“I’M IMPRESSED,” RIC said.

“By what?”

“You know just where the penthouse elevator is at the Inferno. I had to hunt it up.”

“But you’d used the Nine Circles of Hell elevators when I caught up with you.”

“Before that, I mean,” he explained, “when I checked out Christophe’s personal setup before I investigated his entertainment section.”

“It’s good you’ve at last had a chat with him, man to man. Or whatever he is.”

“He does play the mystery card, doesn’t he?”

“So you went from the penthouse to the Lust level? Anything he said?”

“I visited the Inferno Bar too, to check with Godfrey’s alter ego, Nick Charles, and company. That Asta is cute, not to mention Nora, but Quicksilver, of course, is Serious Dog.”

“You are the thorough investigator. We’d better plan for a second act tonight,” I told him as the elevator arrived and swallowed us up. “This announcement and celebration is scheduled for the break Snow has between evening stage shows. It’s just a stop before we move on elsewhere to party hard.”

“Okay. Time to flaunt our fine feathers and for some bubbly and a toast to the latest Christophe triumph, and we’re off to where . . . ? The Venetian?”

I nodded happily.

“I’m not moving in with Christophe,” Ric whispered in my ear. “Trust me.”

“One thing about that facedown in the desert. What does El Finado mean?”

“What?” Ric mocked. “You’re not keeping up with your Spanish dictionary?”

“El Demonio’s real men, the actual human vermin, were chanting that as they perished.”

“Did they? I was in my own Zen place then. They must have gotten the gender wrong. You know Spanish has masculine and feminine words.”

“Sí, señor.” I copped a feel of the Spanish masculine.

“Del.” He laughed and swung his hips back. “The elevator has a security camera. Concentrate on your Spanish grammar until later. El Finado is like El Muerto. My culture doesn’t fear death and the dead as Anglo culture does. We personalize concepts like Death.”

“Like El Muerto is Death, our guy with the scythe, only he’s got the grinning skull down cold.”

“Right.”

“So if El Muerto is Death, who is El Finado?”

“A corpse. The corpse. That’s what a corpse is called.”

Oh. My heart stopped.

Maybe I was La Finada. That’s what the dying men would have called out if they were addressing the femicide army. Or maybe not. Some words don’t have a feminine version in Spanish.

The elevator spit us out into the White Zone.

Snow wasn’t immediately visible, as he usually was, like Godfrey. I felt a ping of unease as Ric and I moved into the main room. Maybe everybody was finado, and it had all happened while we were riding up in the sixty-story elevator.

I’d expected a murmuring, champagne-swilling crowd and waiters skating by with appetizers and Appletinis. The place was as silent as a tomb, a gorgeously designed and posh tomb, but deadly quiet nevertheless.

The penthouse was . . . deserted. I was walking through a dream.

“There’s one thing I envy Christophe,” Ric admitted. “I love the view from here.” He swept me to the window wall.

Far down the Strip I spotted the huge lit billboard for Madrigal and the fey girls. Once it had advertised the iconic big cat magicians Siegfried and Roy, a sad reminder of how even decades of Vegas headlining could vanish in one tragic moment. Nothing lasted.

“It’s a shame,” Ric said, “that huge construction next door is blocking our view.”

“I’m amazed Snow would tolerate that kind of infringement. I guess somebody paid a bunch of billions to smuggle their new concept against the Inferno.”

“Let me tell you, the Lust level right here is pretty spectacular. What? Delilah, I’m saying you should take a stroll down there, chica. Discover what, or who you find. It’s pretty illuminating.”

I knew I should give him heck for that when I heard the elevator arrive.

We turned.

Another couple entered the foyer.

Grizelle and . . . Snow in full white leather rock-concert regalia.

Ric took a deep breath next to me. He’d never seen Snow’s raunchy rock uniform up close and Grizelle was wearing a strapless sheath of magenta sequins that showed lots of her black skin with its glistening pattern of charcoal gray tiger stripes.

They made a spectacular pair. Both tall, she black and runway-beautiful. He platinum blond-on-blond.

“This is it?” I demanded.

I looked around, then realized why the place felt so deserted. No Silver Zombie was plunked against the wall like a family suit of armor.

But the bar, I saw, now boasted a silver ice bucket on a tripod and a bottle of Cristal champagne. And four flutes full of bubbly all in a row.

“This is it?” I asked again.

I was right. Ric and I were the show break.

“Grizelle,” Snow invited his security chief-cum-arm-candy.

She plucked up two of the flutes to give to me and Ric. Seeing the haughty shape-shifter fetch was worth about ten cents.

Snow ambled to the window, Tallgrass style, a champagne flute in his pale, ringed hands.

“You’re here for the birth of a billboard,” he said, nodding to the Strip scenery.

Even as he spoke, of course, there appeared a Times Square scrolling–light billboard, with a scarily larger-than-life-size image of Snow prerecorded with audio that was piped onto the Strip and into the penthouse.

Way to hold a press conference, dude! I downed some champagne.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the filmed Snow far below but way larger than life announced. “I give you the Inferno’s newest expansion and Vegas’s most dazzling must-see, must-go-to venue, the Metropolis.”

Half the view outside the window shifted, crumbled, sank, as if the earth had set on the moon. A total reverse of reality.

The massive construction framework next to the Inferno melted as the concealing curtain it really was—painted with a faux facade—fell like a finished Christo building wrap.

Behind the curtain towered a golden glass and metal skyscraper surmounted by a five-tiered horned-roofed Babel, all from the silent film, Metropolis, except it was maybe sixty-five stories high.

What an astounding, instant Dubai architectural-excess sort of monument. This was definitely Ric’s and my week for seeing giant icons in the sky, and I for one was sick of it.

“There it is,” Snow said. “My new Metropolis Tower. Casinos, nightclubs, five-star dining venues below, lavish suites above. All yours, Montoya, except for the profits, of course, which you’d never take anyway. Below the pinnacle, a Vegas landmark that is protection in itself. Above, your own penthouse, a floor for the Silver Zombie. Utter security. A headquarters for your new crusades. Every technological and magical investigative tool you can imagine. You’re King of the World.”

Ric turned to pin down Snow with a hawkish gaze. “And you’re not overlord of it? You’re not even on the premises?”

“You rule. Call me a . . . neighbor . . . with a financial interest in the crass commercial machine that will fuel your work to destroy the zombie and drug trade.”

“You’re serious?” Ric responded to the one thing that tempted him, not beauty and excess and money, but power against evil. “I can continue my incursions against the cartels?”

“Expand them, Montoya. Think as big as the edifice I’ve built for you.”

Ric hesitated, cast me a glance. “And Delilah?”

“Your partner. Your lover. She can live with you there, or be a frequent visitor and ally staying low-profile and down-Strip on Nightwine’s secure estate. Nothing changes but your immense resources in the fight against international crime.

“Grizelle.” Snow turned to order his security chief. “Second-show performance time nipping at my heels. Take Señor Montoya and Miss Street on a tour of this new facility, and his new possibilities.”

Ric hesitated, stared out the window at the glimmering golden vista, and then turned his gaze to me. He wore his brown contact lens and looked perfectly normal, as well as perfect.

“Go ahead. I’ll be right along.” I lifted my Lalique flute. “After I finish the expensive champagne.”

Grizelle glared at me, and then at her boss, but took Ric’s arm in hers.

“Consider me your personal wiki on all things Metropolis,” she told him in a royal white-tiger purr few mortal men could resist.

Ric could, but he was taking some time to measure the law enforcement benefits against the personal debits. Still, Grizelle had major femme fatale paws on him and used her hypnotic green gaze to put him into a limbo of confusion.

The private elevator opened its stainless steel maw to swallow them.

I turned on Snow to present my own stainless steel maw.

“You’re quite the seducer.” My crisp cool voice matched the champagne without the producing any heady bubbles. “I just didn’t realize you targeted men as well. An entire Las Vegas tower as a funding agency and headquarters and home base? What is that new Metropolis tower, really Christophe, The Daily Planet?”

Snow strode to the bar and returned with the champagne bottle to fill my glass to the brim.

“You’re not tired of champagne, Delilah, but you’re aching for battle for some reason. I’ve finessed your high card from you, admit it. You should also admit that protecting Ricardo Montoya comes second to safeguarding your ego. I can offer him so much more security than you can.”

“Speaking of seconds, don’t you have another show to do?”

He refilled his own glass and faced off against me. “You know I have a CinSim substitute available to play me onstage. I can stay here and argue with you all night if you want. And enjoy it. As you will.”

I eyed his obvious, post-Elvis getup. “No wonder a CinSim can step in for you any time. Your act is a flashy, cheap, neo-Strip cliché, and so are you. Ric is not an attraction to be bought away from a competitor.”

“And you’ve always been my competitor.”

“Hardly. You’re a leech. I created two cocktails on your premises and you copped them for the profits.”

“The Albino Vampire cocktail was your admittedly inspired way of flashing me the bird of paradise,” he said. “The Brimstone Kiss was an accidental tribute . . . to me and my stage show, used to . . . seduce . . . a hard-boiled CinSim at my Inferno bar into giving up some information that would save your sacred Ric. Who is used and who using? Are you so pure, Delilah, and I so damned?”

He went to a white Louie XVI desk I’d never noticed on the fringe of his main room, ripped something off a horizontal notebook, and returned to flourish it in front of my nose.

“That gown you’re wearing is seriously schizophrenic, by the way, as modest as a red lamé bikini on a nun. I like it way too much for anyone’s sanity.”

The check drowned out all commentary. Forty thousand dollars. My ears buzzed.

“Your royalties so far on the Inferno house cocktails,” Snow said. “More will ensue. I pay my debts.”

“I don’t want your money,” I said automatically.

“Better to take that than what you really want of me.”

“This is not about any of us or what we want. It’s all about Ric.”

Those words came from the most fearful voice of my heart crying out, much as I hated to parade that raw fear in front of Snow.

“Ric can’t be killed,” I said. “I’ve seen it twice in a few days. The first time was the Murderers Level Seven in your ersatz Hell. A poisoned centaur arrow couldn’t down him. I wanted to believe it was a surface scratch, but I later saw there was no mark at all from a wound meant to torment even dead men and that would be devastating to mortals.

“I saw it again against El Demonio. Ric cannot be killed. El Demonio is dead, maybe, but . . . El Finado isn’t.”

“El Finado?”

“At first I thought the phrase referred to a defeated Torbellino. Finished. But no, it means ‘corpse.’ It’s what the cartel scum called Ric in Juarez when he took El Demonio Torbellino down . . . just two nights ago. ‘The dead body. Corpse.’”

I froze like the Silver Zombie at attention, feeling the enormity of my fear and the suspicion I’d repressed so fiercely and at my idiocy in downloading it here and now.

I let Snow lead me like a lamb to the bar and refill my champagne flute even though my head was reeling almost more than my emotions. I drank and started to feel my fingertips and toes again, but my heart remained ice cold.

“Ric doesn’t need me, or you,” I told him. “Or your Metropolis Tower, or the bloody Silver Zombie. He cannot be killed. He’s a vampire. I made him one by bringing him back from the dead. I can’t allow myself to be . . . fed upon. I just can’t.”

I stood panting, emptied, exhausted by the truth I’d fought to keep from touching me.

Snow edged away, then circled my tensed and furious form.

“You won back Ric’s life . . . forever. That should make you very happy,” he said. Carefully. “It’s everything you fought for with every fiber of your being, with every beat of your human heart, everything that you believe in.”

I took a deep breath, but it shook, and shook me. “You’ve always known what he had to become to stay alive, Snow. I hate you for knowing that and letting me dream on, but that changes nothing. What matters is that Ric’s not . . . normal anymore.”

“And you are?”

“I never was, was I? But Ric had . . . overcome all that. He’d sailed through the Millennium Revelation. Turned tragedy into triumph. Predestination into freedom. An ancient folk ability into a modern phenomenon. He’s taken on the supernatural drug lords and human traffickers and won. Yet now he’s not mortal! They won. He’s no longer human.”

“And you are?’

“I don’t know. I do know I can’t be . . . drained, for love or money. I am more than my blood, or my bloodline. Sansouci claimed you needed me. You, who need nothing. You with your Hell below and your Metropolis above. Tell me what you need me to do, Angel of Death, to make Ric mortal again.”

“Can’t be done, Delilah. That was over under the Karnak Hotel even as you transferred my Brimstone Kiss to his lips. Impossible desire can’t reverse anything.”

“I kissed him alive. What can I do now to kiss him undead?”

“Even true love is sometimes lust, Delilah. The Seven Deadly Sins must always have their tribute. Fortunately, you have tendencies despite yourself.”

“Tendencies?”

“You’re far from perfect, and that’s perfectly human.”

Why did he have to rub in that I wasn’t a supernatural, like him and Sansouci and everybody I knew, including . . . Ric now.

“And you don’t really hate me.” Snow moved toward me. “Hate is inspired by something you see of yourself in someone else that you’re not ready to admit.”

If it wasn’t Snow I hated, it was the damn calculated stagy sexiness of a breed I despised, a woman-using rock star who actually had the charisma and—could it be?—the soul to seduce the upright, maybe uptight, liberated woman I liked to think was me.

Oh . . . not God.

Champagne is a fast drunk. And anger is an aphrodisiac.

I learned that lesson for once and all when I stood hypnotized, watching Snow’s white snakeskin boot-toes slide across the plush carpet. I couldn’t read his intentions . . . hostile or worse, personal.

I wanted to face off Snow, to lift my eyes to his cheatin’ heart and sunglasses, but they insisted on keeping a groupie’s mosh-pit-eye view and moved from those boots up to his white-leather-clasped thighs and . . . tight-stretched leather-swathed pelvis and . . . torso bared from the hip-slung belt above the jeweled fly to sculpted chest muscles endorsed by Jack Frost with jagged edges of scar tissue and . . . to a corded neck branded with the cheesy purple passion emblem of my most inflamed soul kiss at the hollow of his throat . . . to his pale white lips . . . that a woman might want to kiss until they reddened . . . or to bite until they bled.

The Snow groupies online had called him Ice Prick. I liked the sound of that, ice meeting fire, ice melting into me. They’d tossed around imagined dimensions, as if for rainfall. Didn’t matter, just the sky raining down moisture, just the earth giving ground.

I could see why the groupies found him totally tasty. I’d already dipped an ‘impudent toe’ into that pool of sexy whitewater and found it unforgettable. I’d seen how my mouth and lips could blaze a hot, warming trail over his albino skin, his scars, his Sanscouci tits, over the entire bleached, muscled, beloved Carrara marble of Michelangelo’s David come to life.

Did I want him groveling at my feet—toes would do—or conquering me utterly?

I was your typical conflicted modern woman. And he knew it.

His hand cupped the back of my skull, brought my lips to the hollow of his throat. “Yes, I know.”

I told you he was obvious.

I tried and failed to shake off his erotic spell. My lips met the familiar cool skin—once surprising myself at the Emerald City, now surprising no one here, neither of us—and fastened hard with intent to suck another soul-shaking orgasm out of him. Just to prove . . . I didn’t know what, that I could be a vampire too? That I might as well be one now?

At this moment I believed he’d let me chain him between two pillars, his dark-glasses-shielded eyes blinded by the light, and die from pleasure. I wanted to feel those pillars shake, rattle, and roll, because of me.

Except . . .

Shoot. Biblical femme fatales weren’t my style. Not really.

I broke the contact and stepped away, admiring the still smoldering trace of my handiwork on his perfect body.

“So I’m human,” I said. “You’re not. How can I help Ric be even better than both of us?”

“Admit the truth about him, as long as you’re at it.” Snow stepped back, unshaken by my about-face, to drain his champagne glass.

Every little thing he did was magic, or so I thought, watching my blood bruise seem to throb on his throat as he drank. I was developing a serious addiction problem. I understood Sanscouci now.

Ric loves you.

And me, him.

I want you.

And I like him, an honest vampire in a naughty world, bless him.

And Snow needs you.

That is probably true, but I don’t know why. And not knowing why is my most unacceptable condition.

Snow began pacing the lush carpet. “You can’t hide from me or yourself anymore, Delilah. You have to understand what’s happening. In the desert, Montoya called on the Silver Zombie. You called on me.”

“No. I didn’t. I’d never ask you for help.”

“Never? Why, Delilah? Why never?’

“I . . . don’t do that.”

“Maybe you should try it sometimes. Everybody needs help sometimes.”

“Even you?”

“Especially me now that I’m . . . defaced.”

Oh, kick me in the conscience, why don’t you? “I didn’t consciously call on you.” I’d remembered calling to the heavens for help, to any force anywhere.

“You did. And I came.”

Well, that was unfortunately too true, a few days before in Wichita.

“I just wanted to save Ric. He had the Silver Zombie to call on. You’re saying you had to butt in with the Seven Deadly Sins because of me?”

“The Sins only come when called.” Snow paced close again, tossed his long hair so the very ends sizzled across my skin. “And only you can call on me.”

“I didn’t ask for that favor. It was Ric drawing down the power of the Silver Zombie that saved that situation in the Valley of Guadalupe.”

“He survived it, Delilah. We all need more than mere survival.”

I recalled a favorite line: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Snow had certainly been that man tonight as he rang down the false front to reveal the new Metropolis he’d already built with a lot of money and also magic, probably.

Now Snow stood watching me. Waiting for me. I eyed the pulse in his throat and leaned forward to place my fingers on the beating blue-purple bruise.

“Why won’t this fade?” I asked.

“Maybe a succubus comes every night to renew it. Do you have any succubus tendencies, Delilah?”

“In your dreams.”

“That’s the place.”

I managed a smile.

Sansouci’s mantra replayed in my head.

Ric loves you.

I want you.

Snow needs you.

And I needed, maybe wanted, all of the above.

“You are the Silver Zombie, Delilah.” Snow had recognized my confusion and indecision and zeroed in. “You are the bleeding-heart purity of Mother Maria and you are the hot-blooded temptress who drives men to extremes, maybe bad, but maybe good despite themselves. The Silver Zombie is celibacy and sexuality in one contradictory, addictive package. Don’t think I don’t know all about that. But you, on the other hand, know nothing of my curse.”

“Curse?” That sobered me up fast. I stepped back. “You’ve been cursed. For how long?”

A white eyebrow lifted above the black sunglasses. A reporter soon learns nobody ever wants to tell you his or her age. Especially nowadays.

“How?” I asked next.

“Isn’t it obvious why I keep the groupies in their mosh pit forever? I can only give pleasure, never receive it.”

No! Yes. That would explain the Brimstone Kiss, the ultimate dead-end pleasure trip for women. It wouldn’t explain . . .

“But . . . when I . . . we—”

Can a smile both calm and sting?

“Every curse has an antidote, Delilah,” Snow said. “That’s the quest that keeps me going for . . . however long I have been. You can always find an antidote. Sometime. Somewhere. Somebody.”

I’d truly been shocked sober.

“You’re going to have to decide who you’re safest with, and who’s safest with you.” Sansouci’s words again.

Or, I added mentally: who I most want and need to save and who most wants and needs to save me.

Not a cakewalk.

No, indeed.

I left without another word.

Finis for now.

AT HOME IN the Enchanted Cottage, I worked on dozing off with my e-reader on my stomach.

My red velvet gown had disappeared into the cottage’s bottomless closet, probably snuggling up to the green silk one from Wichita and the ivory satin thirties wedding dress Ric had unbuttoned all seventy-two buttons of, up the sleeves and down the back. The Mrs. Peel section was Sansouci’s. I’ve always been a versatile chick.

I’ve set the ruby red slippers on my dresser as a reminder.

No, they’re not a reminder of the night’s intense discoveries.

What I need to remember was that Dorothy had finally got her head and heart together and figured a way home from Oz.

Ric had called to say he was trying out an overnight at the Metropolis. He sounded as eager as a Boy Scout on a camping trip. I’d promised to come and see in the morning.

Sansouci was somewhere in the night ministering to needy cougar and choir girl alike, imagining I could someday be his sole companion for a short off-road idyll in his long, long life span.

Snow was still onstage, his unhealed back wounds massaged by tight leather, making him writhe even more incitingly for the groupies in the mosh pit. In post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, someone’s pleasure is all too often someone else’s pain.

Quicksilver is lying under my bedroom window, gnawing on a treat whose source I don’t want to know.

“Me Delilah, you Quicksilver,” I say.

He looks up with those winter-blue eyes, jaws calmly cracking unlabeled animal sinews.

“I rescued you in Sunset Park, you rescue me everywhere else.”

Chomp, chomp. Smile, smile.

“I master. You . . . sidekick.”

Pause. Paws crossed. Really adorable posture, not so adorable expression. Silence.

“We both should leave Vegas and relocate to a monastery in Tibet. What do you say?”

Pause. Growl. Leap up, nose open window. Vanish for the night to exercise his needs to chase prey and enticing bitches.

Males! Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

Correction: given recent events, they can’t live without me.

So I finally exit to Dreamland, where I’m climbing the seventeen-foot height of the Caesars Palace reproduction of Michelangelo’s David like I’d once climbed the pillar likeness of Shezmou to free the chained demon god of the slaughter by bringing his avatar to earth and commercial success on the Las Vegas Strip.

Michelangelo loved men and the male form. I’m not indifferent. In my dream, I find I can turn David’s sculpted muscles of white Carrara marble, cold stone, into living flesh tones with the kisses of my brimstone mouth, but it will take a really long, long time to cover all that territory.

I guess I can make the climb with a little help from my friends, lover and would-be lovers, and my frenemies.