I became conscious again still pressed to him hip to hip, mouth to mouth, my bare back draped over the upholding bar of his forearm.

Snow suddenly broke the kiss, a curse under his exhausted breath.

I couldn't stand on my own power and my lips remained parted from the Brimstone Kiss.

He cursed again, so softly I couldn't hear the word or what god or devil he invoked.

That arm moved, lifting me tighter against his chest, part bare lukewarm skin, part cool bleached leather. His hands molded me to him, circling on my back, in the tendrils of my hair at my neck. I knew the lassitude that possessed me. I'd met it with Ric. Postcoital stupor. But this had been only a kiss. Hadn't it?

He took advantage. He shifted again until my lax lips became a bezel for his erect nipple. I gritted my teeth. Not reciprocal. Never reciprocal.

But I was so sleepy. So very sated...

And by now, my body was mindlessly stimulated.

I finally stirred, my arms struggling to push him away. His chest rumbled against me, under me. His heartbeat was steady, strong, and rhythmic. Heartbeat. Proof he was not a vampire, although some post-Millennium Revelation vamps could be a different breed abiding by different characteristics and rules.

I shut my eyes. He pressed my head against him, his hand tangled in my hair.

The distant part of my mind I'd deadened for this dreaded moment noted that I was still sleepwalking like a zombie succubus, or some recently killed creature whose nerves and muscles still twitched with counterfeit life.

He seemed somehow uncontrolled as well. He loosened his grip.

I shook my head until I seemed to hear something rattle inside and reared away, pulling my gown shut, pulling my mind and will together.

I'd suffered the Brimstone Kiss. For ages longer than the most frantic mosh-pit groupie.

And I had not climaxed, not even once, and especially not many times.

Good! For once it wasn't Irma talking in my head, only me. Loud and clear. Go suck yourself, Snow! I'm done! It's over. I fulfilled my part of the bargain and I bet you didn't even get off yourself. Too bad.

Ordinarily, my invisible inner friend Irma would be this spitting mad on my behalf, but I'd exiled her far inside. Not even she could witness my voluntary degradation. No one would know of this but Snow and myself, and that was two too many.

I had only hollow threats to offer, but the words came from my soft center, spit out hard. A mirrored threat. From me to him. I was good with mirrors.

"Someday you'll beg to kiss me. Someday everything you value will be at risk."

"And what will you do, then, Delilah?" he asked.

"Something you won't like. And I'll use you as coldly as you used me."

I was drawing myself up in indignation, trying to banish a sickening wave of inner disgust at what my outer self had done, when I noticed that Snow was standing dazed himself.

The sunglasses were in his hand and he was putting them over eyes that were all glittering magenta facets again.

"I'm sorry, Delilah," he said.

Could I believe this? What nerve!

"I'd hoped you'd be the one woman in the world who's impervious to the Brimstone Kiss. I'd really hoped it was you."

My righteous anger revived me, and my temper.

"It was me, right here and now. And I'm here to testify that this rotten deal did not result in giving me one orgasm, stud. Not one. Zero, Mr. Multiple Answer to a Woman's Prayer. I did not come from your infamous Brimstone Kiss. You are a dud."

He actually smiled. "Your spirit is remarkably resilient. A good thing. We have a man to free from a nexus of vampires. Would you rather do it naked? Without the services of your familiar?"

The word "naked" scorched me; the word "familiar" also, but I now knew the artifact for shield and weapon.

While I stood there, gathering strength, trying to escape the strange, timeless bubble in which he could wrap himself at will, he held out his arms for me to see.

The forearm-long silver cuffs called to me.

We are yours, they said.

And I realized that I was...free... of the silver familiar. Free of Snow's unsuspected attachment. Of his lock-of-hair turned trap.

I'm not sure I believed Snow in saying that it answered only to me, but it had even shielded me against its source tonight. It had saved my flesh if not my soul a few times earlier. I was used to its incursions, its presence, and its useful applications as a weapon of defense and aggression.

Yet it was of Snow. I wanted nothing of his to ever touch me again.

But I could use it. Especially now. To save Ric.

So my recent state of mindless sexual thralldom was not the most humiliating moment of my life.

That moment was still forthcoming.

I lifted both arms straight out. Let Snow's pallid fingers that had so recently twined in my hair touch my shoulders.

And the silver familiar came weaving and quivering, warm and liquid and enthralling, over my skin, melding with me, arming me, perhaps disarming me.

Snow snapped his fingers.

"Grizelle, Miss Street needs clothes more suitable to stalking vampires. I need to change myself. Of course, as usual, we have no time whatsoever."

I turned to eye his security chief who'd appeared from nowhere again. She must have seen me plastered half-naked to her master's body like a temple virgin, to which I was still way too close. I wanted to descend to the ninth circle of his ersatz Dante's Inferno and stay there for eternity.

Grizelle had no time for my sensitivities, but snapped shut her cell phone.

"You will require actual outfitting," she said, finally glancing my way, mightily imposed upon. "Follow me."

I did, finally, understand the phrase "mortified to death."

But this wasn't about me and my pride or even my sanity.

Grizelle led me to a cool, blue-lit room where she pulled black leather catsuits from a row of Ikea-looking white wood and glass cabinets.

"I suppose you want to retreat to human-style privacy," she said, waving me to a room around the corner.

She'd made modesty sound like the refuge of the feeble-minded.

I dashed to the security of some privacy, letting my tarnished, once-loved vintage gown fall into an abused crumple at my feet. My slick thighs reminded me my body had responded if my mind and will hadn't. Then I thought of what Ric might have faced and be facing. That knocked me out of my self-pity party. He was my beloved, not some demonic manipulator, and he was worth any price I could pay.

The tight pants zipped up the side and the leather was steel-studded everywhere to foil vampire teeth, but the creatures had supernatural strength that might allow them to tear your head off without a tooth touching you.

To counter that, a ninja-style hood and neck-and-shoulder piece reminded me of what the older nuns at Our Lady of the Lake Convent wore despite modernization, a very medieval wimple, only here the same form was studded black leather instead of starched linen.

Somehow, I suspected that nun-like starched linen might be the better defense.

I cringed there naked while changing, imagining what those good, long-gone nuns would think of me right now...

An image of a bare female arm thrusting a sword out of a body of water was so vivid in my mind it almost knocked me over. Excelsior, a female voice-not Irma's-said. Not Excalibur. Excelsior. Onward. Upward. I guess that meant I couldn't sink any lower than I had earlier tonight. Even Irma was still AWOL. Her usual nervy, naughty advice wouldn't be welcome after an encounter like that.

Okay. Joan of Arc had heard voices too and she didn't let that stop her. In fact, she let that start her.

I pulled on the thigh-high, flat-heeled boots that shielded my femoral arteries. My returned silver familiar assumed the likeness of steel mail for the second time in an hour, forming not a bustier but a protective vest up to my ears and down over my knuckles like the long, fingerless gloves prom-going girls in Loretta Cicereau's day would wear in pastel shades of lace. Nothing could easily breach my elbows and wrists, or the vulnerable neck where both carotid and heart-bound jugular came within almost kissing contact of each other.

There was nothing lacy about my protective armor except its amazingly light weight. I bounded around the corner, regrets shoved far away for pawing over later, thinking only of confronting the literal fiends who assuredly had Ric and who would assuredly do far more vicious things than kiss.

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