“You! Out of those filthy borrowed camos.”

My heart hiccupped and my own adrenaline surged in a nasty confusion of defiance, anxiety, and excitement tinged with an undeniable sexual edge.

“So,” I answered in a voice as guttural, “you’re pissed at me because I tagged along without official permission, or more important, your permission, Señor Montoya, sir! I thought you didn’t go into the military like your foster dad wanted, but now you’ve turned into an ungrateful, backassward martinet as far as I’m concerned.”

I snapped off a mock salute as a muscle in Ric’s cheek pulsed, Clint Eastwood-style.

“Isn’t that a tad hypocritical?” I demanded further. “After all, you and Tallgrass did the same thing to the whole undercover raid unit, and followed your own private mission. To say nothing about the dog, what my dog thinks about that too.”

He stood there, wide stance braced, glowering.

“So,” I said. “You first! Out of those filthy camos.”

“With pleasure!”

His hands lifted to undo the top closure, then ripped right through the fastenings to bare his body from throat to hips in one tearing gesture. Speaking of ripped . . . A veil of sweat still glistened on firm pecs nicely accessorized with rock-hard nipples over subtly six-packed abs. The effect was so romance-cover drop-dead, I gulped.

His hands reached for the pants drawstring below his navel, but if I saw one more hard thing I was likely to lose my self-respect and throw myself at his naked, um, feet.

“Stop,” I ordered. “I could say ‘God, you’re beautiful when you’re angry’ but I won’t do fight club sex. It’s an unhealthy distortion of the power exchange between a couple.”

Ric approached me, laughing. “You never miss the nuances.” His fingers toyed with my camo top opening. “Take off these filthy clothes, por favor, paloma. You need to get naked, and clean.”

“So saying please is going to make me cooperate?”

He took my balled right fist and stroked it down from his collarbone to hip bone. My fingers uncurled at first touch to give my palm a languorous, warm, skin-tingling, undulating ride. “Slowing down will make you see reason.”

“Fine. But I get the shower first.”

I stomped away, bulling through the first shut door I saw. I hoped to God it wasn’t a closet because I dearly needed a dignified exit.

The shower stall was tiny, but tiled, at least. After losing the clothes, I teased a feeble cold stream out of the corroded head. With pipes clanking, it finally worked up a warming gush. And this was a three-star motel in Rough Guides! I shut my eyes to let the dust and ugly gruesome sights of the day and night wash away.

Something big and bare and dry pushed me face against the shower wall. I wasn’t exactly surprised. I’d already turned my cheek to one side, welcoming the expected full body press. Ric’s thumb streaked the available cheek, his voice even more caressing than his gesture.

“With that tan spray on you remind me of the old Hollywood pinup I encountered on the Inferno’s Lust level, Maria Montez. New look. Almost a new woman, chica. I hate that you came down to this hellhole, but I love having you here. We’re going to need a discussion, after I get off my standard three. You set the bar high the night before I left for Mexico. No wonder Samson couldn’t resist Delilah.”

“Kinda tight in here,” I pointed out.

“Why do you think I came?” His voice went even lower, intimate. “You still made an unauthorized trip across the border. I’m going to have to do a serious body search on you.”

He turned me into his arms. “The mouth is often used to conceal forbidden objects.” His search was thorough and probing. His hands paused on my breasts. “Definitely contraband, requiring careful inspection and attention.”

A pulse between my legs was pounding in rhythm with my heart. We were safe, we were alive, and we were in total sexual sync.

He drew away, resuming his role. “I’m afraid I’ll have to finish up with the standard procedure. Assume the position, face the wall.” He spun me into place.

He pulled my hips far from the wall and pushed the half-damp hair off my neck. In a few seconds I was coming myself, loving his lips, tongue, and teeth doing shivery things to my nape, his pelvis locked and rocking with mine.

“New place, new position,” I agreed, breathing hard.

“Besides, we won’t want to sleep on the bed. There are sanitized sleeping bags in the Jeep. I’ll bring one in. No reason we can’t share.”

“Information too,” I said pointedly, but he was turning me around, pulling me into his arms and the skimpy shower stream. I had to close my eyes again as warm water rinsed my tan-in-a-bottle away and his kisses washed over them.

“Mi virgen, mi amor, mi mujer, mi vida,” he murmured. “I missed you already. I didn’t want to leave you behind. It’s just that I’d go crazy if anything happened to you.”

I think he tasted my tears of joy in the cascading water.

“You like our little game, yes? Why not reverse roles next time. We’re an equal opportunity couple, right?”

“Right. And I promise to speak softly and carry a big nightstick.”

Ooh la la, Irma sighed before I could shut her commentary down cold just as the shower did the same thing to us.

I couldn’t help thinking Sansouci had been right. I’d let myself be lulled into sexy mock-vampire turn-ons. Who hadn’t these days?

Not me, Irma boasted, but I wanna be.

I ignored her. I’d interviewed enough psychologists, and confided enough in Ric’s foster-mother shrink, to know that love and trust were part of any erotic game. As kinky went, this interlude was minor league. As for me realizing that Ric would love and want me even when I’d pissed him off, it was major.

I DREAMED THAT night I was the Silver Zombie.

Maybe it was because I was sharing a sleeping bag with Ric, which is such close quarters. Maybe I’d been obsessing about it . . . her . . . too much.

Somehow I was inside its glamorous shell, even inside its unplumbed mind. . . .

I LIFT MY mechanical metal arm, strong and smooth. I notice my house of elaborately sculptured wood has received a brand-new coat of sterling silver, so it shines like the carapace of a bug.

I’m trapped inside, body and soul.

I’ve heard of a girl named Alice who outgrew a house once, but I have always lived inside, it seems. I’m not growing or shrinking, I’m getting no smaller, no larger, imprisoned upright in the dark like this. Buried alive like a gagged mummy in a case leaned against the wall.

I must stand and wait.

My memories are a jumble of fresh and incredibly stale.

One memory is of movement, awkward, stiff. I’m a knight in a ponderous suit of armor made of plaster and plastic wood. Another memory is of dancing, as light as air, wearing only scarves of silk chiffon. Blue chiffon. Like a Blue Angel.

I’m an idealistic girl stung by social injustice. Haunted children look to me for salvation as to a mother. Now I’m a powerful and seductive goddess or a cabaret chanteuse . . . maybe even, someday, a monstrous bride of a famous monster.

I can be anything anyone would care to make of me.

For a moment the dancing angel’s free, soaring movements make my prison a smothering coffin again. I feel the plaster, wet and heavy, wrapped around my face and body like a mummy’s bindings. No! I am not a mummy! I am young, young. I need to move, breathe.

Oh, but I am old, old too, shrinking like that girl, Alice, my body the walls that are collapsing around me.

The biblical Tower of Babel flashes through my mind, and a shining city where trains fly alongside aeroplanes, an entire towering futuristic city made from hubris and light, like Lucifer, the fallen angel. I see screaming thousands rioting and drowning. I see a woman in a green gown and a man all in white, like a ghost. I see world war and world peace.

Perhaps . . . I am eternal.

Who am I? What am I? Who will tell me? Who will shape me, free me, use me, destroy me?

I glimpse again the man with the searching eye of a camera . . . the one with a silver eye that sees past the plastic and wood of my coffin to my hidden human heart beating inside.

WHAT A NIGHTMARE! Buried alive.

I blinked awake, trying to figure out if I was dreaming or hallucinating. In the dim light, I searched for the vague bulk of Quicksilver sleeping in front of the door. No, he’d stayed with Tallgrass tonight.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the night lights of Juarez leaking around the skimpy curtains over the window, I made out Ric’s sleeping form next to me. One way or another, I had my nightly guard.

I was surprised to see a supple silver chain linking us, my familiar reaching out to Ric in the night. Was that why I’d dreamed of the mechanical woman from Metropolis? That idle thought made my dream seem more like being in a comic book rather than a movie. Maybe I’d snagged a small part in Superman’s Depression-era Art Deco “Metropolis” that was inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis film.

By now Ric’s profile was as clear as if outlined by a thin wire of neon, every feature sharp. I could see his eyelids vibrating with the hyperactivity of REM sleep, the dreaming stage I’d just left. I wondered what dreams, or nightmares, he was having tonight. Me in his arms? Or has the Silver Zombie seized his subconscious, the way she’d mastered mine?

HE’S A BOY again, in his seventh year of captivity to the human and zombie trafficker named Torbellino and his gang of coyotes.

Our Lady of Guadalupe has come to his dreams for years, perhaps even to his waking moments, her face melting with compassion for his loneliness, her pressed-together palms praying for him.

Now he’s mesmerized by the woman’s tantalizing image behind the smoke of a dirty magazine’s cigar ad. Now she’s come to life, dancing for him in her sheer skirt with her bare breasts gleaming at the tips. He’s mesmerized, never having imagined anything like this.

But he likes it. He likes it even when he feels the needle fangs of a vampire bat he hesitates to tear away for fear the almost-naked woman gyrating in the cloud of smoke will vanish if he wakes from his dream trance and moves.

Pleasure seeps from him like smoke, and then he wakes up, pulling the soft bat body from his neck with a sharp spasm of pain. It flies away, but the woman has vanished, as he feared. Maybe he should feel shame. He’s seen the women dragged into the cabin of Torbellino and his men and has clenched his fists and squeezed his eyes shut, but this woman is different.

She likes him. She likes what she does for him, likes to ease his pain and fear.

He doubts the Virgin of Guadalupe will ever appear to him again.

But this vision will.

Chapter Thirty-three

A KNOCK ON the door caught me slapping on some lip gloss late the next morning just as my stomach was growling up a storm.

So was the other side of the door.

I opened it pronto to find Quicksilver on perk-eared, lifted-lip alert next to Leonard Tallgrass. He and Tallgrass managed to look both worried and sheepish.

“So . . . how are you guys?” Tallgrass asked, not examining the room behind me with his usual law-enforcement sweep.

“Starving,” I said. “Ric will be out of what passes for a shower in a minute. What brought you two here?”

“The need to kill time,” Tallgrass said. “If your stomach is growling, we know how to feed it. The sun is shining. It’ll be a fine day. We could do the town until the heat of early afternoon, then take a siesta until it’s time to go back to the desert and kick butt.”

“Sounds great,” Ric said from behind me. “I worked up quite an appetite last night.”

“Scouting on the desert,” I added quickly.

“Peace at any cost,” Tallgrass murmured. “You two ready to do the Ciudad Juarez tourist shuffle?”

BREAKFAST WAS A very late brunch in the open patio section of a giant restaurant complex off the Plaza del Sol called Mariachiville.

More English than Spanish echoed off the colorfully tiled fountains, while parrots chattered in the surrounding jacaranda trees. Those gorgeous lilac-blur trumpet flowers were blowing in the wind with mariachi band fervor. Scents of hot peppers and cilantro mingled with the perfume of tropical blooms. The waitstaff was young, vibrant, and bilingual. I was ready to book a return trip to Juarez for a romantic getaway with Ric at a five-star hotel.

Dream on, Irma advised.

Over glasses of Negra Modelo beer Ric and Tallgrass were muttering about “rendezvousing” with military “big shots” and “borrowing” some firepower bearing numbers and alphabet letters instead of names.

“Quick and I go along tonight, no matter what?” I inserted into their intense, whispering dialogue.

Tallgrass looked at Ric, who nodded impatiently. “Of course. You and the dog have your built-in defense systems. You’ve proven that time and again. I get to solo head-to-head with El Demonio, though.” His expression relaxed into a grin. “Unless my ass is being whupped. Then, I expect all of you to play some really killer backup.”

The technical talk ended when the waiter wafted platter-size dishes of heavy pottery holding the kind of ammunition I dig—nachos, fresh guacamole, fiery salsa, tomatillos and chipotle sauce, enchiladas, tacos, jalapeño and habanero peppers.

This menu could melt down zombies, not to mention start a hot border war with the digestive system. We finished with smooth, sweetly bland crème caramel all around.

“I can see why tourists won’t give up on this border city.” Ric’s smile lit up the entire area and even the big blue sky above it. “I won’t give it over to the gangs and cartels either,” he added, his glance darkening.