WHEN I DROVE Dolly under the porte cochere of the nearby coach house at 4:00 P.M., Godfrey was waiting by the driveway.

How long had he been there? I wondered, primed to feel guilty about Ric's and my late, leisurely lunch at the Bahama Breeze at the juncture of Howard Hughes Center Road and Parkway near Paradise and Flamingo. That's where and when I explained my and Helena 's hit-and-run cross-country trip. I even promised Ric a Vampire Sunrise soon.

My tale bemused and amused him. He was also too unquestioning. I realized Helena 's therapeutic hypnotism had put her in the back of his mind so that I could remain up front to tend and pamper him. My respect for her tripled.

The restaurant was so very Vegas, and the piña coladas were almost as good as my homemade cocktails. They even allowed Quicksilver inside for a grilled steak kabob... as long as he ate it under the table and from my skewer.

When we reached the estate, Godfrey was unruffled.

"Good day, Miss, Master Quicksilver. Splendid to see you back, Mr. Montoya. I am posted here to take your belongings, Miss, and establish Master Quicksilver at the cottage. We presume you will drive Mr. Montoya to his place of residence. Should you require a change of costume, this bag will suit your needs."

He took our paper shopping bags and handed another to Ric in Dolly's passenger seat.

Quick jumped out of the backseat and ran to the top of the Enchanted Cottage's semicircular stairs, barking once in protest at being left behind as I drove back out on Sunset Road.

Ric suddenly slapped his forehead with a palm. "Say. We need to pick up my Corvette."

Omigod! I wasn't about to stimulate bad memories by breezing past the Karnak 's parking lot for a look-see. Maybe Ric's gal pal, Captain Kennedy Malloy of the LVMPD, could check into that. I imagined a delicate and unpleasant conversation:

"And why can't Ric Montoya deal with getting his own car from the Karnak parking ramp, Miss Street?" Malloy would ask in icy disbelief.

"He's still recovering from my raising him from the dead," I'd reply. "It's best he doesn't deal with the little things for a while."

"And I am a 'little thing'?"

Actually, like many women in authority, she was way more petite than I was.

No, asking Malloy to retrieve Ric's car wouldn't work. My best bet for that was my friends, the parking valet demons. They went crazy over vintage rides and Ric's bronze Stringray was one, if not as venerable as my own Dolly.

I texted Ric's home address to Hermie at the Karnak and requested the car's "discreet" return to his home address garage. Ric must have parked the Vette on the Karnak grounds and demons had an infallible nose for Old Detroit metal. Foreign models just didn't do it for them.

What I really needed to find out was what Ric's mental wheels could remember.

"Worry about your ride later, hombre," I purred in a kittenish way I'd picked up from late-night TV movies. "You look good in my passenger seat for now." Was I turning into your usual manipulative fatal femme or not?

His hand smoothed the red leather interior. "I'd rather drive."

"When you're better."

"I can get better?"

I grinned to hear that cheeky optimism back. Ric was pretty quick with the quips for a dead man. My hands tightened on the big steering wheel with the finger indentations sculpted on the underside. I had a lot of verbal tap-dancing on the truth ahead of me.

We soon reached his rambling house in an established Vegas gated community. I parked Dolly inside the courtyard, so Old Mexico. At Ric's Alamo-massive dark wood front door I suddenly realized he'd been found naked. No house keys.

"Ah, we're still missing your personal effects," I told him.

"No problem."

His fingers tapped out a pattern too quick to see on the security keypad. The heavy door jerked ajar as the system beeped. Ric's short-term memory might be AWOL, but he recalled the important things. I was glad to be one of them.

The house was cool and dark, shuttered against the peak late-afternoon heat. We turned on lights as we went through the public rooms right to the bedroom and into the master bathroom beyond.

"Sorry, Del," he said, yanking out the impeccable knot he'd only put into the new tie a couple hours before. "I really need a shave and a real shower. I feel like I've been through... I don't know, been crawling through some rank slimy jungle for hours. Like my skin is crawling. Except for my back, of course."

He lifted me to sit atop the long bathroom countertop and began to take off the clothes I'd just seen him put on. I was beginning to get why men went to strip clubs.

The slip-on shoes and silky socks went first, then the men's bedroom "butler" stand got the pants, shirt, and tie.

"You really like these things?" he asked of the briefs.

"Ah, yeah." Trust the Swiss to engineer underwear to its most smoothly structured second-skin state.

Ric touched his neck bandage just below the beard line, then picked up an electric razor that looked like a Martian spaceship probe from The War of the Worlds.

I put a hand on his wrist. "Some like it rough."

Actually, I wanted to get past the settling-in process to the thing all men hate: talking it over. I'd probably have to sleep with him first, which was fine with me.

He hesitated, then put down the razor and turned his bare brown back to me.

"You already knew," he said.

"The other night, when I slept over in the den. I woke up first. You'd turned over in your sleep."

"Damn! I never do that."

"It was my fault. I can't sleep on my back so you forgot to keep your back out of the light."

"I thought you acted kind of... weird that morning."

"Never try to fool an ex-FBI man." I ran a finger down his shoulder blade.

He shut his eyes in remembered past pain and present pleasure. "So when and where'd you get the Midol touch, paloma?"

"Every miracle has its price."

"My mom must have told you what and why. She swore it was just between us when I was ten years old."

"You were a child and she was acting as your psychologist. Things change. People change."

"You changed me."

"Superficially."

"No. You changed my past. You replaced my past with whatever you did to me last night. I'd be a fool to resent that, but I need to know what and why, just as you did."

My fingers plucked the faint silver skeins of scars on his back like a harp, sending shivers of sensual pleasure through his frame.

He caught my wrists in his hands, then in a one-handed grip.

"No, Delilah. You don't play me to distraction. I know I'm foggy about a lot of things. First a shower, then bed, then you spill your guts. S��?"

I laughed as he pulled me off the countertop and tugged me toward the shower. It was one of those glass curves with a tiled wall and floor and sprays versatile enough for a car wash.

"I'm still dressed!" I objected, but I kicked off my casual mules as I went with him.

"Then you'll have to get all those wet things off when we're done. I'm not letting you loose to work your wiles. Trust me."

I couldn't stop laughing as he turned on the water. I shut my eyes to the warm tropical waterfalls of modern plumbing.

After all I remembered going through, and all he couldn't remember going through, that simple chlorinated city water seemed to rinse our skins and souls clean.

Ric peeled me out of my sopping top and jeans until I was as naked and free as he was. Well, except for the silver familiar. It had curled down into a big toe ring, either shy or savvy about staying out of the way. Anyway, our impromptu coed shower had us both feeling safe and happy, even though that could never last.

"My bed this time, a real bed?" Ric asked. "You can be on top."

Beds were my b��te noire, thanks to childhood nightmares. I couldn't bear to lie on my back, feel pinned. But if Ric was my bed and lay under me...

When we waltzed into the bedroom, smooching, and I finally dared really look at his bed, I melted like a shelled M &M.

The sheets were black satin, all the better to set off my Snow White skin. The many piled pillows were encased in blue satin, to set off my ballad-black hair and blue eyes.

Now I could harbor no doubt this man was as terminally crazy about me as I was about him. Color-coordinated bed linens, can you dig it? I shut my eyes. This felt like a continuation of the Inferno bridal suite wedding night, when I kissed my comatose prince whole and awake again.

"I've wanted you here for a long time," he said. "I guess you can tell."

"It's only been weeks, Montoya," I reminded him as I pushed him down, under me. Ric could sweep me away like a swooning bondage princess or let me ride him like a Valkyrie. What a guy. Thanks to Helena 's shrink insights, I understood that his sexual versatility was adapting to my conflicting needs for both trust and independence... surrender and control.

Say, maybe I could accomplish another bit of sexual healing, as the song said.

I had to shut my eyes to block the image of his dead-to-the-world body crawling with black leeches and blue-winged tsetse flies feeding on his genitals as well as every inch of skin.

His ready erection then at my presence was his miracle, not mine, and I blessed his foster mother (yeah, she'd approve) for giving him this pleasant, delayed return to reality. Maybe I could extend it.

I glimpsed a familiar glint behind his head and pulled away the color-coordinated pillows.

"You have a mirrored headboard, Montoya?"

"I bought it before I knew you and about your mirror magic," he protested.

But his protests, however sincere, were too late. I'd spotted the chrome border and churchlike spires at the top framing the beveled mirror squares.

"This is so tacky," I said. "You have really gone over to Vegas glitz. Hunt-club Virginia bluebloods would be shocked. Stay right there."

I raced into the master bath and the huge closet, snagging the sky-blue tie and a similarly smooth, silky black one to match the d��cor honoring moi.

Irma was trying to urge me to tasteful restraint, but that was exactly what I had in mind.

He'd been found in the Land of the Book of the Dead, slumped half sitting against a wall, his wrists in chains above his head.

I reappeared with the ties swagged around my hips entwined with the double glints of my own hip chain and the silver familiar. Belly-dancing gear was Ric's Achilles' heel.

"Delilah," he said, his voice both a warning and a goad.

"Stay right there," I answered, unleashing the ties and looping them around his wrists and the headboard spires. "I'm going to kiss you all over until you beg for mercy."

The map of his face and body bites was burned into my memory. My Brimstone Kiss lips were going to visit the site of every atrocity, erased maybe, but still needing a sensory remodeling. Pleasure where pain had been. So simple.

He took it for an erotic game. That showed how far I had come, repressed Kansas orphan me. I could seduce Ric into taking this healing necessity that admitted how deeply he'd been lost, how close he'd been to a tortured-to-death vampire victim, as Delilah's naughty little bedroom improvisation.

That we were here, able to make love and deceive ourselves, just a little, to get us through the night, testified to our mutual loyalty. I untied him just as playfully as I'd confined him.

"Don't stop now," he complained as his arms wrapped around me. "I'd love to do this same thing to you." His luxurious, probing kisses punctuated a list of druthers.

"Here, paloma... on my midnight black sheets... your white naked body on your back... I'd make you moan... like you made me moan... when you made my back... your personal paranormal playground... and my old scars... my new erotic zone."

Oh, oh, oh. I so wanted what he did. I was almost climaxing before his arms lifted my torso so he could impale my soft center and take me for a wild ride on a bucking bronco, my long hair whipping around my face and neck like a mane.

Ric was back, stallion-strong, loving me more than ever. His release matched mine and justified everything. For the first time, I felt less soiled by the Brimstone Kiss. For the first time, I felt a throb of inner peace that I had taken and given that potent kiss in such quick succession.

Everything was getting back to what it'd been Before.

Before the Karnak Hotel vampire Pharaohs had lured Ric into their power.

Before I risked my free will and traded Snow the addictive Brimstone Kiss for Snow's help in rescuing Ric.

Before my attempts at the Kiss of Life, aka CPR, failed and I resorted to a last, passionate farewell kiss... tainted by the brimstone of compromise yet containing the new gift of the Resurrection Kiss.

That scenario was a lot for one Latin lover to absorb so I concentrated on our reunion and union, until we collapsed on each other in waves of fulfillment.

"This is wild," Ric said. "I have this whole new erotic zone." He wriggled his back into the satin sheets as I laughed.

"But," he added, "I don't remember anything from early that afternoon a week ago when I went to check out the Karnak until you were tongue-lashing my back with your velvet lips last night. How'd you find Helena anyway? Why didn't she stay?"

"She said what you needed was me, hombre, and she was right. You'd mentioned your father's full name once. Philip Burnside. I'm a reporter. Once is enough." I considered. "Not with everything."

"Nope. Forget it. No more sex until I know what's going on from A to Z," he threatened, getting up to leave the bed and the bedroom. He showed me his naked back without a qualm. I wished I could be as forthright about what he wanted to know.

He returned with a bottle of roja wine, no brand I recognized but a vintage as red and smooth and warm as blood. We drank it out of big bubble glasses as we leaned against piled satin pillows the color of my eyes.

"Do you remember anything about your kidnapping?" I asked.

"Was that what it was? I, um, remember heading to the Karnak Hotel and Casino. Grisly Bahr had alerted me by phone that someone from there had just contacted the coroner's office with suspicious questions about the male corpse from the Sunset Park grave."

"And you didn't pause to tell me where you were going?"

"Bother you with a slender lead at an established hotel?"

"You'd just lectured me about keeping current on who was doing what, where. In fact, I was trying to call you that day to say I'd checked out the Karnak the day before and it was crawling with vamps."

"I found out soon enough, but I don't remember much yet. So what are they like?"

"As old as the ancient tomb paintings and as eternally young-looking. I'd only gotten out, and that barely, thanks to my mirror magic skills. I didn't realize until the next day that the folks in charge were obsessively interested in the zombies you pulled out of the ground at Cesar Cicereau's Starlight Lodge."

"You're saying that my raising the zombies to protect you in the mountains last month tipped these Karnak vampires off to my, um, talent?"

"Yes. You saved my skin from being mounted in the werewolf mobster trophy teepee."

"Why should these Karnak vamps care? So I stopped another Vegas hotel mogul's hit squad. You'd think they'd thank me."

"I'm sure they would have, had you cooperated. They want someone who can raise really old vampires, the ugly, ruthless bloodsuckers, not the modern half-and-half kind. We both know how you feel about raising the dead for other people's gain."

"I will never sell bodies and souls into slavery again."

"Admirable. I will never starve again, or eat turnips again." His grin showed I'd lightened his dark mood by evoking Scarlett O'Hara's famed turning-point vow. "Holy Hathor, Montoya! You must have made that all too clear to the Karnak vamps.

"They decided to induct you into their club so you'd want to do what they wanted. When the expedition from the other Vegas hotels found you, the Karnak vamps had sucked you dry, Ric. They'd used every bloodsucker they had access to, even leeches and vampire tsetse flies. You were-"

He shook his head. "I don't remember anything after arriving at the Karnak lobby. I recall a huge hyena-headed statue of a god I'd never seen or heard of before in the main check-in area."

"They'd already ID'ed you, as they had me, and were waiting to pounce. Luckily. I doubt we'll ever know what kind of t��te-��-t��te you had with the terrifyingly self-absorbed Twin Pharaohs who rule the Karnak."

"Twins?"

"Kephron and Kepherati, two of the most incestuous brother-sister royal twins the River Nile ever birthed. It's a long story, but I found archaeological evidence on the web that the ancient Egyptians had vampires among them."

"Naw. Their culture keyed on death and resurrection, life and the afterlife, true, but I've never heard of Egyptian vampires. Anne Rice had an 'immortal' mummy running around World War I England in one novel, but I don't think he sucked blood. The Egyptians are almost the only ancient world culture without vampire lore."

"No more."

"Quoth the raven?" he asked, leaning forward to kiss me long and deep and totally without fangs.

"Poe's raven was carping about 'nevermore.'"

"No more, nevermore, what's the diff? I'm okay, you're okay. We're so more than okay together."

I wished I believed that as easily as he did. It was indeed all too easy to soften into his arms and strum my fingers over the silvery scar strings on his now sensually tuned back and celebrate life and love and libido.

"Then how did you know where I was and what was going on?" he asked when our embrace took a time-out.

Eternal ex-FBI man, asking questions. The habit of intellectualizing would probably save his sanity. I smiled and resumed my narrative.

"The clue I'd found was that some Egyptian tombs, from the most ancient and lost to the most celebrated finds of modern times, including King Tut, contained a weird potted artifact of a gilded headless animal hide hanging from a lotus plant."

"Headless? Like the 'bone boy' in the Sunset Park grave?"

"Mentally acute and decidedly not dead," I said, smiling. "That's my boy."

"This 'artifact' was the symbol of beheaded vampires in the Egyptian tombs, the proof that even pharaohs like Tutankhamen could be vampires?"

"I thought so. Meanwhile, the Peter Lorre CinSim at the Karnak has many shared movie ties to the Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains CinSims at the Inferno. He'd seen me captured, and then escape. He must have realized your capture was act two of the royal twins' ambitious scenario. When he saw you being held and forced to suck winding cloths, the 'better angels of his being' emerged from behind the creepy criminal roles and came to the rescue."

"CinSims have 'better angels'?"

"A theory of mine. I think the actors are taking over the roles. It was an incredible string of events. The Karnak's Peter Lorre 'Ugarte' Casablanca CinSim somehow managed to break his venue moorings and get a physical token I'd lost at the Karnak to me at the Inferno Bar as a veiled warning.

"He did it using the Inferno's Humphrey Bogart 'Rick Blaine' CinSim, who broke free of the lower-level Casablanca key club and got to the William Powell 'Nick Charles' CinSim at the Inferno Bar. Nicky somehow tipped off his 'cousin' William Powell CinSim, Godfrey, at Hector's estate. Who told me to get to the Inferno Bar to pump Rick Blaine of all the things he didn't think he knew."

"Gosh, Delilah! I need one of those star maps of Hollywood, Las Vegas-style, to follow this scenario."

"Consider it as a CinSim chain reaction, and damn efficient in its dysfunctional way. Trust me. We've got a long ways to go before we understand the hows and whys of CinSims.

"Anyway, I was called to the Inferno Bar in my best thirties velvet gown to evoke Rick Blaine's film ladylove, Ilsa/Ingrid Bergman. I picked his brain like a noir femme fatale.

"When the Inferno's Rick Blaine physically produced the case of Lip Venom I'd unknowingly dropped during my escape from the Karnak, I realized someone at the Karnak wanted me to go back there, bad.

"I also realized that you weren't answering my calls because of the usual Vegas Strip cell-phone dead zone, but were actually missing. That's when I finally grasped that the Royal Pains had been much more interested in your zombie-raising act than my minor mirror magic."

"This is," Ric asked, "where Christophe and his rock-star persona's Brimstone Kiss come in?"

Ouch. "Right."

"I've heard of the Brimstone Kiss," he said dismissively, the way even the best guys sometimes don't get girls with long-distance but potent crushes. "Heartthrob singers always sucker the fangirls with some sexy stage shtick."

Nobody does it like Snow does, Irma singsonged softly in my ear.

I gritted my teeth and gave Ric a palatable song-and-dance.

"Exactly right. Only, Snow has some ulterior motive for kissing strangers. He takes it semi-seriously and insisted I accept the infamous kiss if I wanted his help invading the Karnak and springing you."

I hoped I'd sounded casual enough.

"Some freaking stage kiss?" Ric asked. "You'd think a rock star could get whole harems of a lot more than kisses in the dressing room every night."

"It's like a job application. The dude thinks he's going to find Cinderella or something. I didn't pass the glass lip-lock test."

"He kissed you? You let him?"

I didn't think Ric was ready for the potential multiple orgasm part yet. Maybe never.

"You know I've never been the groupie type. I admit I found it pretty humiliating and sure hated the idea of kissing another man when I was rounding up a rescue party for you, mi amor. But it proved worth the hassle. Ric, he raised a dragon from its ashes to help take down the mummy legions!"

"No big deal. I can raise zombies. So back to this kiss thing-"

"That was a big deal. I really, really didn't want to be unfaithful to you but I guessed he was the only Vegas mogul who could or would save you."

"I can see you were between a rock and a soft place. A kiss is just a kiss," Ric consoled me, ironically quoting the song from Casablanca.

"Not Snow's," I admitted. "The mosh-pit women who get it are forever addicted to trying to get another, but they never do."

"Women go nuts over those rock idols."

"Once was enough for me, since it got you back."

I didn't mention how very specifically it got him "back." From the dead.

"I can dig the bastard would want to kiss you but it's awful petty to make a guy's girlfriend give out just to revive a dead dragon and take on a pack of vampire mummies."

I laughed, as he meant me to do, glad this iffy confession was over.

After all, a kiss is just a kiss unless it's a key to immortality.
    
 

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