Vampire Sunrise

Chapter Seventeen

 
FIRST THING I did when I got inside and alone at the cottage was to call Ric. I'd learned my lesson.
"Cicereau sent a limo for you and said 'please'?" He chuckled. "Now I really don't trust him. Anyway, I've found a quirky little lead at the morgue. Keep your cell on vibrate and on your body at all times."
"Any place special I should keep it?"
"Don't tempt me with interesting options. I'm a sick man."
He sounded perfectly fine, except I was starting to find his waking mental blank on his Karnak ordeal a bit eerie. Was Mama just a shrink or a head-shrinking witch doctor?
While I showered upstairs with Quick watching our "guests" in the driveway below, I mused aloud about the proper attire for a meeting with a chastened werewolf mob boss. I was curious if the Enchanted Cottage's newly emerged and still invisible lady's maid had the skills of a consulate advisor in a foreign country.
I emerged from the shower.
Hanging from the chrome dress fixture I'd bought at Wichita's Prairie Rose dress shop when it went out of business in the Crash of '08 was a black sixties pantsuit. It had wide bell-bottom legs and a riding-style jacket over a white ruffle-cuffed and neck-ruffled blouse. Retro Edwardian. Very Mrs. Emma Peel of The Avengers.
One couldn't get more properly kick-ass than Diana Riggs's Mrs. Peel, so I happily donned it along with a pair of square-toed, gray patent-leather sling-backs. The shoes were also highly kick-ass. Metal cleats underlay those sturdy square toes.
The silver familiar chain looped itself thrice around my neck, dangling a sinister six-inch white rhinestone hand with each finger dipped in a pointed marquis-cut scarlet rhinestone "fingernail." Butler and Wilson from the days of lovely '80s excess.
Grrrr. Snap! My, what big claws I have.
I pulled my black hair into a low ponytail at my nape and reluctantly decided against wearing a fedora. Vegas was not fedora country. Though the pantsuit wasn't pinstriped, it broadcast a nice air of Broadway musical mobster, so when the Devil tries to "drag you under by the sharp lapels of your checkered coat" you can do your own dragging back. Cesar Cicereau, not I, was going to be the dragee at this meet.
I'd learned as a TV reporter that dressing for the assignment unconsciously positions people-and now even unhumans-to act according to your scenario, not theirs.
The outfit, though modest, had another tactical advantage. Sansouci, a highly heterosexual hunk, would fall like a ton of testosterone for this shady lady maybe-dominatrix outfit.
Score two for the Enchanted Cottage's anonymous personal closet shopper.
I went downstairs to make sure the kitchen witch had refreshed Quicksilver's water and food bowls. He'd come inside to greet me, and now laid his handsome head on graceful, deerlike forelegs to sigh dramatically.
"You're a good dog," I told him, "but these big tough werewolf bad guys get so twitchy around wolfhounds. Me and my Mrs. Peel pantsuit can handle them."
"GEHENNA" WAS THE Jewish version of Hell, a place where both soul and body could be destroyed in "unquenchable fire," if I remembered the Gospel of Mark from Our Lady of the Lake Convent School religion classes.
Here in Las Vegas, the Inferno Hotel had copped the "unquenchable fire" theme-park look. The Gehenna had settled for deeply, darkly, dangerously, enticingly menacing.
The sprawling hotel-casino crouched on the flat landscape like a supersized Bruce Wayne batcave or maybe a charcoal-colored, glassy tidal wave frozen in mid-storm-surge. It made wolfish gray into a direr shade of black.
The limo paused at a side entrance. I strode past bracketing musclemen, through a row of glass doors, and into the cool shadowy interior, my eyes momentarily blinded.
Blinking fast put two more hunks of wolfish muscle and Sansouci into focus between them. He was pocketing the tiny earphone that had announced my arrival.
"I'll escort Miss Street from here," he said, taking my upper arm in a grip part courtesy and part custody. "You're not carrying," he noted, eyeing the sleek pantsuit and not-so-sleek me in it. I'm more tennis player than fashion model and stand almost six feet in heels.
For answer the ruby fingernails of the glittering hand on my ruffled chest morphed into scarlet snake heads and hissed. Sound effects were a new manifestation of the silver familiar, in operation only since our subterranean march on the Karnak 's undead minions just days ago.
The memory made me shiver a bit.
Sansouci wasn't scared of big bad red rhinestones. In fact, he eyed them with a glint of vampire lust.
"Vegas does keep our hotel-casinos freezing," he said, smiling to detect my involuntary shiver.
Sansouci was a couple inches taller than I, broader and more muscular. With his forest-green eyes and his black hair strafed with silvery highlights, what a handsome dog he was! No wonder I'd taken him for a member of the werewolf mob, not a vampire.
"You know that Cicereau hates me and it's mutual," I said.
"Then why did you come?"
"Because you said 'please.'"
"The flunkies said 'please.'"
I shrugged his hand off my arm as we stepped through verdigris and copper doors into a private elevator. "And I wondered why Cicereau sent forces to aid Christophe. They don't strike me as brothers-in-arms."
"They're mortal enemies," Sansouci confirmed, "but thanks to you we've found a more worrisome breed of immortal enemies right under our noses."
I smiled tightly. Sansouci would give me credit. He was actually a stand-up guy for a bloodsucker. Cesar Cicereau was a Vegas founding father. He gave no one credit.
This elevator car was a lot more elaborate, and forest-like, than the public ones that led to guest floors and that I'd taken before to Cicereau's offices up top.
Exotic woods with black, white, golden, and red grains as tight as shades of wolf fur were carved into a thick tree-like bas-relief against a dusky, deep amber-tint mirror that glinted like wolf eyes around me. I felt surrounded by an Art Nouveau woodcut in living color, not stark CinSim black-and-white.
So awesomely beautiful! Someone in the Gehenna werewolf pack had the soul of an artist.
"How's Montoya doing?" Sansouci asked as the floors whisked by.
"Better than could be expected."
"I guess his FBI nickname of 'Cadaver Kid' proved more appropriate than anybody suspected."
"You're fishing, Sansouci. I don't take bait. Ric is doing fine and so am I."
"Cesar Cicereau isn't."
The elevator halted but I hit the STOP button to keep the doors from opening. "I should care? He wanted to use me. When I escaped that fate he tried to kill and eat me."
"Those whom the gods cannot use they then destroy."
"The actual quote is: 'Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.'"
Sansouci grinned, damnably roguish, Clark Gable-style. I "got" the devoted harem of human ladies who served as his moveable feast with no loss of life beyond what a blood donation site would take.
"You were born mad as a hornet," he said, "so it was hardly a fair fight, Delilah. You won't believe what the Old Man has been reduced to since you last saw him."
"You care? You're a political prisoner. At least you said so."
"I care when things happen in this town that are more supernatural than we're used to dealing with." His voice lowered to a mock-wolfish growl. "Can we move on, or do you like being penned in a small steel box with me?"
Oooh, shades of being buried alive with a vampire. No thanks! I hit the red STOP button again so it popped out and the doors slid silently open.
"This is the office level," I noted. "Reached by a different elevator."
"Right. The boss's private car, but the same office, scene of our martial arts dance in the dark when you first broke in, I still don't know how-"
Good. My mirror-walking talents were still a mystery to Sansouci and therefore his boss. I hustled down the hall, eager to find out what had become of Cicereau.
The office was empty. I paused in the doorway, eyeing the mirrored wet bar that had been my entrance and exit point. To an observer I would have looked like someone hankering for a drink.
Sansouci brushed past me to the humongous executive chair behind the desk, where he stood staring at the computer screen.
I'd sat there when I'd secretly returned to download the 1940s photo of Cicereau with his "family." That had included an infinitesimally younger version of Sansouci... the usual towering Vegas chorus-girl arm candy, Vida... and Cesar's teenage daughter, Loretta, soon to be his murder victim for the sin of loving a vampire prince, not a werewolf.
"Look," Sansouci ordered.
I reluctantly rounded the desk to stand beside him. Sansouci was equally effective as seducer and slayer. I kept my distance when I could.
The blank black screen I stared at was like the famed electronic billboard in Times Square. Big bright moving crimson letters paraded endlessly across it: ASK DELILAH STREET.
"So now I'm an oracle?" I asked.
"To Cesar Cicereau you are. And maybe his salvation."
Sansouci looked somber but I wanted to laugh.
I wasn't sure about anybody's salvation in the world that existed after the Millennium Revelation, least of all mine, but Cesar Cicereau would be on the bottom of my Most Likely To Be Saved list.
"I don't like Cicereau, man or beast," Sansouci admitted, "but I like what's happening to him even less. It doesn't bode well for our little supernatural playpen here in the Nevada desert."
"'Our?' Leave me out of that category."
He stared at my chest, which didn't need the enhancement of ruffles. The pointed ruby rhinestone fingernails were now dripping pendants of mock blood drops.
So sue me. I was a bit on the supernatural side myself these days.
"The 'Cadaver Kid' truly lives up to his rep now," Sansouci went on, "and you ain't just a wayward orphan CSI corpse anymore. Remember, I watched you raise the beloved dead."
That cold shiver hit me again. "Wayward orphan?" Sansouci had been researching my background. Nothing supernatural about that. He'd also been speculating about what Ric and I had been and become before and after the recent rescue mission under the Karnak Hotel.
"You combine the worst of human and super, you know that?" I told him. "Snoop and lech. And leech," I added, because it was a handy play on words.
"Also the best, maybe? Just hang on, let me show you why Cesar wants to see you so badly."
SANSOUCI BENT TO touch the screen, banishing my name to bring up a mini-movie.
The scene was so dark it looked filmed in black-and-white. Once the action started, scarlet ropes of fresh, spilled blood whiplashed across the somber screen and even spattered the camera lens. These were outtakes too violent even for Hector Nightwine's gruesome CSI V TV show.
I jolted back as if I were a target. "What the hell? This was filmed at this hotel?"
"Security cameras." Sansouci touched a corner of the screen so the scene shrank and became more comprehensible.
A dark shambling figure was churning through five or six uniformed people trying to block its path. One by one the guards were seized, slashed in a major artery, and tossed aside, spewing blood like human fountains.
The daylight vampire did the voice-over while we both intently watched the bloodbath, for different reasons.
"Whatever weapon he's using cuts down along the arteries, not across," Sansouci pointed out with creepy expertise, "cuts through tissue and muscle and bone. Maximum blood. Wasteful."
Sansouci sounded clinical but I saw him bite his lip. Then lick it. For a vampire, this must resemble watching the Roman Circus, bloody stimulating and even entertaining.
The last guard standing wheeled to run. In an instant the man's face did a 180 turn over the shoulder, eyes popping. The huge shadow bent over him as jets of arterial blood flared into a hellish halo over the victim's head.
A limp lump of fabric and flesh was tossed aside as the marauder moved on, out of camera range.
My pulse was pounding. This was mass slaughter and the site was clearly deep inside the Gehenna.
"Don't the hotel security cameras move to follow intruders?" I asked.
"Yeah, but it learns. After this, it batted down the other cameras like King Kong grabbing airplanes from the top of the Empire State Building."
"What, or who, is it?"
"Some hellish new supernatural. It got all the way to the public areas before the alarms went off. It must have retreated, or hidden. This is the second incursion in twenty hours. The first almost caught Cicereau alone in his office, staring at the ' Ask Delilah Street ' message that's taken over his computer."
"He can't think I'm doing this?"
"He doesn't think; he fears. He does believe you know something about what's going on."
"No, I don't. So I might as well leave now."
His hand caught my upper arm, way too tight this time. "No. I think you may know something about what's going on too. You're staying and talking to the boss." His expression softened. "Besides, I know you'll enjoy seeing him again."
I jerked my arm away, mostly because he finally let me. That's what I liked about Sansouci. He was a thug but he didn't overplay the role.
Now he had me curious.
"Delilah," he added, "you're a major player in this town now."
Huh? I didn't try to translate that. Sure, I'd freaked everybody out by seeming to raise Ric from the dead but maybe they just hadn't tried CPR on him. And they hadn't possessed the magic of the Brimstone Kiss once removed.
Why the hell hadn't Snow tried that supernatural kiss thing on Ric himself? Afraid of being labeled gay? That was such a delightful new way to mentally slander Snow that I hardly paid attention when Sansouci hustled me out of the office back to the elevator.
I MULLED OVER the murders on the security tapes while we were whisked up another few floors. Las Vegas kingpins were addicted to heights far above the madding crowd.
The taped scene was disturbingly brutal. Werewolves relished a chase and vampires liked to linger quietly over a fresh drink. This marauder had a relentlessly machinelike air I'd seen in action before. It reminded me of something, but the link stayed vague.
The elevator opened on the foyer to Cicereau's penthouse.
I entered another elaborately carved and gilded chamber of stylized tree trunks thick enough to form a prison wall.
Here we also faced six disturbingly lupine guards, hairy enough to resemble hulking Victorian gentlemen with side-whiskers, say the Mr. Hyde side of Dr. Jekyll.
These weren't the fully human Cicereau pack members who usually faced the public. Nor had they been sent to Christophe as "soldiers" for the war against the Karnak crew. These were Cicereau's paw-picked bodyguards, the weres who never fully reverted to human for some reason, like the half-were biker gangs on the Vegas streets.
That thought reminded me of my least favorite fledgling half-were, Vegas cop Irving Haskell. He was not among this elite pack yet, thank Larry Talbot.
In fact, I wished I was facing a tormented, self-hating werewolf like the "Larry Talbot" persona actor Lon Chaney Jr. had pioneered. In 1941 The Wolf Man classic horror film portrayed the title character as all angsty dude, with my devoted CinSim and all-around character actor, Claude Rains, playing his father figure.
Back in 2009, the film was remade with Benicio Del Toro in the wolfman role and Sir Anthony Hopkins in the Rains part. Goes to show you the old thriller classics had more universal appeal than critics at the time thought.
Changing into something worse than you thought you were is a major psychic nightmare of the human condition.
Unfortunately, Cesar Cicereau felt no regrets at having to tear out human throats as often as I got my periods. He was in his inner sanctum, a bedroom with three rock-hewn tiers leading up to the huge round bed.
A semicircular plasma TV faced the bed with my name up in lights on it, in red LED moving dots, like the computer screen below, only Times Square bigger.
ASK DELILAH STREET.
Like Howard Hughes in his scraggly late-life incarnation as a vampire, the stocky, fleshy-faced Cicereau would not enhance an orgy movie set. Especially now that I could see the beads of sweat on his unshaven upper lip from twenty feet away.
He growled when he spotted me, clawing the olive-green brocade coverlet with fingernails so ragged they snagged the expensive threads. Otherwise he resembled your stereotypical mob boss: middle-aged, constipated with power, and about as attractive as week-old corned beef and cabbage in a Dumpster.
"Okay," he barked at me. "Talk."
A sudden flutter in the treelike lattice of vines above his bed made me look up. I spotted Phasia twining her fluid fey form snakelike through the thick leaves. Even higher above, I spotted her "sister," Sylphia, whose body glimmered like a glam-rock eye-shadow counter at Sephora.
The pair had sweet unearthly faces and skinny Barbie-doll-like limbs. No larger than eight-year-old human children, they were apparent adults of their kind. Phasia's pearly skin had a snakish pattern, as Grizelle's black human skin showed a tiger-striped one.
I'd never seen either fey sister shape-shift into snake or spider, but they harbored characteristics of both.
I wasn't surprised to look farther into the room's bordering shadows to see Madrigal, the Gehenna strongman magician, also on guard with his performing familiars. Things were bad if Cicereau was trusting to magical guardians rather than to his extensive wolf pack.
"I have no idea why my name has shown up on your personal and public hotel electronics," I told the boss. "I'm just a paranormal investigator. Maybe you need an exorcist."
"You hit it on the spot, sister. That's exactly what I need." He eyed me hungrily. "Get out," he ordered the werewolf guards. "You too."
I felt Sansouci's custodial hand drop away. The thick carpeting was too cushy for footsteps to be heard, yet I sensed the vampire retreating as silently as the werewolves.
Only Madrigal remained. Our glances crossed but we remained equally expressionless. It wouldn't do to remind the erratic Cicereau that we had known each other, however briefly. The mob boss would no doubt be reassured to know that the fey sisters, at least, hated me the way tween groupies hate a rival for a boy-band member. Madrigal was theirs.
Cicereau began jabbing at a gigantic remote control device with dozens of buttons.
"This is what I've been seeing for two damn days anytime I look at any screen in the whole damn hotel."
I turned to watch the semicircular screen behind my back. The upper two-thirds of a human figure appeared, a young girl wearing shades of blue. She talked too, in an accusing baby-doll voice.
"Delilah knows what you did, Daddy. I've been telling her everything so that soon everyone will know. You had me killed, your own daughter. You slaughtered me and my first beau. Poor Prince Krzysztof. You hated that my boyfriend was vampire but I'm only half werewolf. I had a human mother. What was so wrong about our love? Only your hatred. Delilah knows everything, Daddy. I told her it all."
I watched in frozen disbelief. Thanks, kid. I help find your forgotten murdered bones in Sunset Park. I listen to your vintage sob story in my home-turf mirror, and you snitch on me to your mob boss father in living LED.
Take it easy, whispered Irma. Cicereau wanted you here because he can use you. Otherwise he'd have offed you without asking questions. Find out what he needs.
"Yeah," the mobster crooned as if he'd overheard Irma. "That's what my darling daughter would be broadcasting on every TV screen in the hotel if we'd let her. We've had to shut down the Sports Book section," he added indignantly.
Uh-oh. That's where all the lucrative sports bets were made, an area of cushy seats like the world's biggest home theater. Multiple screens ran every football, baseball, basketball, soccer game, and horse or car race in the world. The bets were major.
Cicereau muttered on. "Vengeful little brat has been haunting all my most profitable venues. Even the slot machines are going nutso. You know those video poker machines with the gloved magician hands and dancing wand the tourists love to watch?"
I did. I loved to watch 'em too, truth be told. It was so Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo! Disney Cinderella fairy godmother. I loved the way the animated white gloves and wand turned tricks on the slot machine screen like a chicken-ranch brothel baby on speed.
"I know the machines you mean," I conceded. "Cool."
"Not so 'cool' if the magical gloved hands are grabbing cash out of the tourists' hot little paddies, or even going for their necks and trying to throttle the life out of them."
No more than Las Vegas casinos and other gaming hot spots did every day, I mused as he ranted on.
"If you know so much, Miss Delilah Street, aka Maggie, maybe you know how to get my dead daughter the hell out of my hotel and my life. The sixty-years-buried dead have a lot of nerve showing up where they're not wanted and where they ought to damn well know that by fucking now."
Yes, he was a callous monster of a mobster and I personally would love to see him hounded to the gates of the nearest madhouse by Daughter Dearest.
However, I was in a much more vulnerable form than she: physical and mortal. My first problem was figuring out why she'd dragged me into her family revenge fantasy. Second issue: Why was she showing up here and now?
"It's bad enough," Cicereau groused, "I got a freakish serial killer loose in my operation. I don't need some long-gone daughter giving me public lip."
He was right. He was caught in a pincer attack between the living undead and the dead. Any bad publicity on either front could cripple his operation. Who wanted to check into a hotel where an unstoppable invader could skewer your carotid artery or the boss's dead daughter could show up in Debbie Does Dallas on your hotel room flat-screen and take all the fun out of X-rated?
Cicereau pointed a smaller remote control at me.
"I was willing to bring you into my hotel family to make hay on the Maggie craze. Now my crazy daughter is taking over all my venues and taunting me with your name, Delilah Street. You will either rid me of this ghost or you will be one. In about five seconds."
He pulled yet another remote control device out from under the covers. A pearl-gripped Uzi. What you might call in Paris a d'Uzi. It was way over-the-top showy but no less effective.
"I need absolute privacy," I told him, "and a single screen where Loretta and I can speak girl-to-girl."
"My office computer? She screwed that up too."
"No, that's too 'you.' What's the most secure screen setup in the hotel?"
Cicereau frowned, then bellowed, "Sansouci!"
He appeared in the bedroom door.
"You heard that?" Cicereau said.
Sansouci nodded. Vampires had supersensitive hearing? Maybe.
"And?" Cicereau aimed the Uzi at his high-end hostage, but what use was an Uzi against an immortal vampire? Guess Cicereau didn't know that I knew Sansouci's real breed.
"Eye in the sky," the daylight vamp said. "I'll take her there."
"Not a bad idea but, shit," said Cicereau, "you do realize that bitch daughter of mine could use the security surveillance system to broadcast her wild charges over the whole hotel?"
"Then we need to get there fast." Sansouci took my arm again, which I was beginning to like when it involved a quick exit. We swung out the door and out of direct Uzi range into the hall.
"Can you exorcise that ghost in the machine?" he asked.
"I can try."
Trouble was, did I want to spare Cesar Cicereau the juvenile justice he so richly deserved from his murdered daughter?