Chapter Forty-Six

I went back to Vilma Brazil. I sure as heck wasn't going back to Howard Hughes, or what was left of him.

It was 4:00 pm and she was knocking back a Bacardi Breezer in the dressing room.

"Hey, kid! You made it out in one pretty unslavered-over piece. How is old Howie? He was really hot for me once, you know. He was gonna make me a star."

"He was gonna make any girl a star. He's living dead in Las Vegas and glad of it. What can I say?"

Vilma shook her peroxided fright wig. "He used to be quite the dude. Slicked-back black hair. Pencil-thin mustache. But he was always a tad strange. Hey, so was I."

"Weren't we all?"

"She was a werewolf princess, you said."

I nodded at Vilma's conclusion. The girl in that photograph, the girl in the mirror, had been just that: young, innocent, tender, and supernaturally gifted. Her daddy's pride and joy. And his biggest disappointment in her choice of mates. She had been playing Juliet to some unknown teen vampire's Romeo.

Neither of their houses would have permitted such a union, or could have permitted them to live after making such a union. Add a little Othello and Desdemona to the mix. Murderous possessiveness. By fathers of their children, by clans of their very different lifeblood.

"Who was the head of the vampire syndicate back in the forties when Las Vegas was busy being born and mortal mob bosses thought they'd rule the roost?" I asked Vilma.

"Only one, not heard of since. He was going to build the most stupendous hotel-casino in Las Vegas before the vampires lost the war. He was going to call it-"

"The Inferno." I knew the answer as I said it. The Inferno had fallen only to rise like a phoenix eighty years later. How much time was that to a vampire? The blink of an undead eye.

Vilma lifted a drawn-on eyebrow almost to her thinning hairline in recognition of my lucky strike.

"Yeah. I remember now. He was going to name it the Styx or something hellish. The vampire crew was from the house of... it's been so long. House of Wrathescu. The vampire king was Wilhelm XII. He has not been heard of since but may be only taking a vampire nap, as we humans would reckon it."

"He was Juliet's dream lover?"

"He was no one's dream unless you wanted a nightmare. You've seen what form of eternal life Howard won. No, this Wilhelm was old and corrupt. Not the stuff of films or Goth girls' romantic dreams. But I recall that he had a son of the spirit, one bright and blazing comet that he had bitten into the clan. A toothsome young vampire."

"His name?"

"Something vaguely and tantalizingly Christian. A prince among vampires. Foreign, from the land where werewolves were put to torture and the test as nowhere else. Kind of funny that a vampire-werewolf romance would end the Werewolf-Vampire War here in Vegas. I don't know the details. Howard would "

My fingernails were biting into my palms until my blood and dread seemed to well up together to my brain.

"And the name of this vampire prince?"

"Christopher," Vilma said. "I heard talk about that. Some humans considered the name part blasphemy, part undead hubris. Christopher is the saint said to have carried the Christ child safely across a river. The vampire named Christopher was said to carry away Christian maidens. No girl or woman, it is said, could resist him. So you get the poor little rich werewolf girl and her bitter end. Yet you say a vampire died beside her? Can't believe that would be our pretty boy."

Dead bodies were dead bodies. Even supers, when killed by the proper means, dissolved into mere bones and dust like mortals. Who knew for sure just what these two dead lovers had been? Who knew who or what they would have become had they not been killed?

Maybe whoever had killed them had known, or guessed.

Chapter Forty-Seven

I left Vilma with more questions than answers. Chief among them was: who and what was Christophe?

The name was suspiciously akin to Christopher, but Christophe felt a lot older to me, as old as the serpent in the garden. And maybe the serpent had been a better catch for a woman like Eve than one lousy apple.

Maybe Christophe-Cocaine-Snow was the key to the mystery of Sunset Park. Maybe he was the key to the history of vampires and werewolves in Las Vegas.

Maybe he was the key to my own role in all these events, past and present.

Inquiring reporters want to know.

I remembered the Cocaine groupie I was suspected of killing. She'd mentioned online discussion groups where my accessory-buddy was known as the Ice Prick, possessed of a potent Brimstone Kiss.

Maybe I should do a little online cruising.

I headed home to the Castle Nightwine cottage, where my laptop worked without a hard-wire connection, thanks to whatever resident unseen elves or brownies of the Internet hung around the place.

Quicksilver arrived home just after I did, bouncing through his ajar window like a huge, furry beach ball. He was glad to see me. Why did I think I'd been under his distant scrutiny on my jaunt to the Twin Peaks?

Because I was becoming the belle of unseen surveillance here in Las Vegas.

First, there were Nightwine's local security cameras and Cicereau's stolen videos of me at the Inferno, not to mention Snow's access to all of the Inferno pics. Then there was Quicksilver's literal tailing of my movements, which I welcomed. And there was Snow's possible remote viewing via the silver shape-shifting familiar attached to my epidermis.

And then there was Ric, who so far seemed to rely on just background checks and calling to ask where I was and where I was going to be when. Yay, Ric! He was a bit over-zealous, but at least just simply human. So far. The line between protective and possessive with all these... er, entities, was razor-edge thin.

I got online and Groggled the Seven Deadly Sins and Cocaine. Six hundred thousand entries came up. I Groggled "brimstone kiss" and got a million. (Groggle billed itself as "the drinking person's search engine" and seized fewer copyrights than its more famous predecessor.)

Okay.

There were a ton of Web sites with names like cocainefreaks.com, sevendivinesins.com, and brimstonesluts.com.

That "sluts" group looked promising.

I avoided logging in or signing up, but was still able to peek in on a few discussion chains, message boards, and forums. The subject called "orgasmicidyll" caught my eye, now that I knew the feeling.

"Omigod!" began one gushing entry. "I got it. The Kiss. After the January 16th show. First, the Scarf. Like hot freezing acid around my neck. The Kiss was Cold, then Hot, then Searing! I am so totaled! It is better than a jackrabbit vibrator and it lasts, oh, soooo loooong. I live for the next one, if I can be the first and only femme to get a second shot at Sweet Oblivion. Cocaine's got to slip up sometime, and I pray that it's with me."

What the heck was a jackrabbit vibrator? I personally did not expect much from a jackrabbit except long furry ears. I might, now that I'd been in Las Vegas, expect something from... a tiger. Or a lion... or an alpha wolf... or the right unrotted vampire... or an FBI guy. But not from a rabbit of any sexual persuasion whatsoever. Might as well get it on with a rat! But then a lot of women later concluded that they had.

But these Cocaine-aholics were unabashed addicts.

I read a few more entries, trying not to heave at the idolizing prose. "Exquisite. Indescribable. White Lightning. Albino e-XXX-tasy. I'd never had any patience with teases of either gender and Cocaine sure had these poor twits on the ropes.

"The Holy Day," one demented kissee wrote, "was my Independence Day, July 4. I was right in the middle of the mosh pit line. His scarf felt like a falling feather from an archangel's wing and then came the Brimstone Kiss, all pulsing volcanic fury like the Devil's own fiery breath. It seemed to go on forever and I never wanted it to end."

Well, it had, honey. Get over it, Irma seconded me.

All of the groupies used cutesy login names: Cherry Tomato, Hasbeenhad, Candycaine, Powdered Sugar, Kissycat.

I glanced at the signature for the woman who thought being enslaved by a Brimstone Kiss was her Independence Day.

Lilith.

Hey, someone on this list might already have used Delilah even. Both were classical Old Testament names, classical lady vamp names. Didn't mean that I was that Delilah. Or that this Lilith was... my Lilith.

Still, my look-alike Lilith had been working in Vegas. She'd had the opportunity to see the Seven Deadly Sins, even to get caught up in mosh pit gropings. No! I couldn't imagine my look-alike clawing in a mosh pit for a melodramatic smooch from a self-important... freak.

I hated to think so anyway, but I couldn't know for sure. Then something prodded my memory that made my blood chill and set like strawberry Jell-O in all my veins.

"I've been waiting for you," had been Snow's opening line when he came up behind me at the Inferno Bar the first time I'd encountered him.

I'd taken it for a corny pickup line. Now I knew that Snow was a lot of things, most of them scary or despicable, but he wasn't corny.

He'd mistaken me for Lilith.

And had covered his error so fast and smoothly that I'd never tumbled to it.

"Oooh," warned Irma. "That is one major bad boy! He might have killed Lilith. He had her snowed, for sure. Better stay out of his contrail."

True, but the answers I wanted might lie there too.

I definitely had to consider Snow as the revived Christopher, or a progenitor or descendent thereof. Certainly, he was the force behind the resurgent Inferno, which was a gauntlet thrown down before the werewolf lords who had run Las Vegas since vanquishing or bonding with the human mobsters here in the late forties and fifties.

The only vampire trace that had existed since then was Howard Hughes' investment in the decrepit hotel at the south end of the Strip. So Christophe had come out of nowhere a few years ago, fronting his rock band, collecting his groupies, and bringing the dead and buried concept of the Inferno up from the ashes.

No wonder Cicereau was worried.

So was I.

And there was only one place where I could go to find out the truth and set my worries to rest. And I'd better go undercover.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Night found me back at the Inferno, dressed so no one I knew could spot me, hopefully. And I meant No One. Especially not Snow.

I didn't go to Deja-Vous. The boss man knew everything that happened there.

Estate sales for older folks often sold funky wigs as well as potty chairs, useful for Halloween. So tonight I wore a glossy head of synthetic cinnamon-colored locks, straight and shoulder-length. I'd rustled up some stretchy double-knit nineteen-sixties slacks and a glittery tube-top, and then added gray-tinted heart-shaped sunglasses to subdue the color of my eyes.

I avoided the Inferno Bar and my pal Nicky to cross the dance floor toward the concert stage. I waved my ticket and struggled forward an hour before the show to stand packed with the other Snow groupies in the mosh pit.

The stage was six feet above the seats. Watching the stage from up front was a literal pain in the neck, but the groupies around me were percolating like happy little coffee beans, wired and jumping up and down to survey the bare stage and the instrument layout, to glimpse a roadie moving a mike or placing a water bottle. A lot of them were done up like Goth girls. Purple-and-black witchy wigs, tats, chains, leather, sunglasses rendered them unforgettable, but anonymous. Whatever their fashion statement, all the women sighed and swooned at anything alive on that stage, no matter the gender. Everything was a buildup to the entrance of the Seven Deadly Sins and its lead singer.

"My girlfriend's made it," a wild-eyed blonde next to me said to no one in particular.

"With Cocaine?" a woman behind me gurgled.

"She got the Kiss."

"Ohmigod! When?"

"Two years ago. After the Live Again! concert. She's in the downtown club. I've been coming for three months straight now but I've never gotten close enough to the stage to see more than his hair."

I was impressed. "You must have moved to Las Vegas."

I was met by a circle of shocked gazes.

"Oh, yeah," an older woman said. "We all do. You're not a confirmed Cocaine fan unless you move here to see every one of his performances."

"But your jobs-?"

"They have McDonalds everywhere, honey."

"Don't tell me you didn't move here for him?" another one demanded.

"Well, I did move here-"

I was about to say for other reasons, but these crazed women had no other reasons. If they had known the silver "love beads" around my vintage sixties neck came from the hair of the love object himself they would have torn me apart for souvenirs.

I wanted to feel superior to these obsessed groupies but I was beginning to wonder if maybe there wasn't something wrong with me to be immune to their idol. Well, mostly immune. And there was something wrong with me. I'd always suspected it and now was coming to admit it. Part of that something was good and strong, and part of it maybe was not very good, and also strong.

Even with the armor of my reporter's cynicism, even with having seen and spoken to-been touched by- Snow up close and personal, I was beginning to feel the fever. The jittery, longing, excited group mania. My feet should have been hurting from standing on carpeted concrete for so long, but I was hopping from burning sole to sole like the rest of them-young, old, and in-between-hopping and hoping and shivering with belly-deep excitement.

"It's him!"

"He always comes on last, idiot! That's only the guy who puts all the different guitars in place."

"The tabloids say he's screwing Lust."

"No, she's boffing some record mogul."

"She's craaaaazyy," wailed a fan.

"If it's anybody in the band, it's Envy. All that evil green costuming."

"That why you're wearing poison green tonight?"

I had to fight to keep in the frontlines, which I needed to do to be seen as a major Cocaine freak. Personally, I'd never gotten the point in writhing around for the attention of some unreachable star. I thought briefly of Ric, who was plenty sexy without having to sell it, and was squeezed back a whole row in position when I didn't concentrate on keeping my hard-won place, so I had to elbow forward again.

These fevered close quarters were forging a mob. When the band members strode on stage one by one, everybody jumped up to see them. I found myself pushed forward into the second row. Oh, good. We'd be able to see their feet and feel their sweat.

Then the fireworks started. I saw the giant dragon heads descending. Wasn't that in Revelations? The Devil coming down as the Dragon? Snow the Devil? Somehow I didn't think so. Or maybe so. As he slid down the head of one of the dragon's two heads to the stage in his patented entrance, I felt my silver beads elongate into a long strand, circle my throat once like a choker, then dangle into a long loop down between my breasts to my belly button. Every bead was as cold as ice. Or sleet. Or Snow.

The distraction allowed the surging groupies to push me another three rows back. Damn it! This groupie routine required the chutzpah and concentration of being in an estate sale line.

I wormed my way forward as the instruments warmed up to ear-splitting level. I was back in row two, where I wanted to be: too far to be swept up in Snow's Brimstone Kiss, right in the middle of the action to register on the minds of the Cocaine groupies, to be seen as one of them. To join their club and pick their brains. What was left of them.

The music revved up. It was overwhelming down here in the mosh pit. My bones vibrated to the beat. Every time some nice hefty middle-aged lady tried to squeeze me out of my row I pushed back, with interest.

Time ceased. It was all deep bass vibrations and amped-up raw rock music. Snow looked cool in his open Byron shirt and seam-splittingly tight white leather pants. I had to admit he was a riveting performer, his voice hard-driving sandpaper on the hard rock stuff, then slow, low, and sincere on the ballads. Right. That's when the women switched from screaming that drowned out even their idol's voice to moaning and swooning.

It was a long two-hour set. For me. During the intermission, the women babbled all around me, their milling tension holding me upright when I was about ready to sit down on the cold concrete to rest my bones and eardrums. Except I'd have been stomped.

The second set went much faster, Lust and Envy bracketing Snow with their colorful writhing forms. By then I didn't envy them their proximity to the kingpin and I was as incapable of feeling lust as a loaf of Italian bread.

After the encore, I was embraced by the hysteria and a wave of screaming and pushing women as Snow bent to the mosh pit to sweep up a few lucky fans for the Brimstone Kiss. Didn't that name imply the Devil? Wickedness sells. Or pseudo-wickedness.

I fought to keep my second tier position and actually glimpsed the idol up close. He wore numerous white silk scarves around his neck, the better to snare the chosen groupie. One swooped up the woman in the poison green outfit. The scarf lingered behind, the only material token of her Brimstone moment.

Everyone around me was surging forward. The mob was literally pushing me up, like a buoying wave. My God, I was next in line! A loop of silk chiffon snared my neck. I was pushed up, up toward Snow's ice-god face and hair. No! I was here to infiltrate the fans, not ace them out. I grabbed the sides of the scarf, feeling a cold slither as the silver necklace became a wrist to elbow bracelet on my right arm. I stared into a tiny reflection of myself on curved black mirror shades. I felt my mind, my essence yearning toward my medium, silvered glass.

The scarf slithered around my neck, ebbed away. I fell back hard, aware of glittering black sunglasses looking elsewhere. Another woman was lofted on the wave of raving humanity and claimed a kiss from those frost-white lips. She shrieked in bereavement as he moved on.

"Oh, you poor thing!!!" A woman was weeping and embracing me. "You almost made it. It's so tragic. So close."

Right. I almost made it. An excellent position for me in the Cocaine groupie world. Almost favored. And in. In like... Lilith?

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