Max recognizes one of the guards at the border crossing. They exchange a few words in Spanish and he waves us through. It’s good because I’m not sure I want to try to explain the rust-colored stains covering my clothes.
Max drives me back to my car. He watches me climb gingerly out. “Can you drive?”
I massage my side. The scrape caused by the stake is healed. The path the bullet tore through my side is healed. Now it’s just the skin pulling tight as it regenerates over the wounds that makes me wince when I move.
“Yeah. I’m a little stiff but by the time I get home, I’ll be fine.”
Max watches as I get into my car and crank the engine before he motions for me to roll down the window.
“Thanks, Anna. You did good tonight. I owe you one.”
Okay, here’s my chance to tell him what I planned to tell him. To go fuck himself. To never call me again. To go to one of his vampire whores the next time he needs help.
What am I waiting for?
Max is leaning toward the window, smiling. He looks more like the Max I remembered. Superman, defending truth, justice, and the American way …
Shit.
I smile back.
And drive away.
MONSTER MASH
A DELILAH STREET, PARANORMAL INVESTIGATOR, CASE
Carole Nelson Douglas
Sansouci, the main muscle for the Las Vegas werewolf mob, caught up with me at the neutral territory of the Inferno Hotel bar.
“Muscle” was no cliché when it came to Sansouci. I stand almost six feet in heels, and talking to him made me tilt up my chin, but then, I’m not afraid to lead with it.
“Delilah Street,” he greeted me, or maybe purr-growled.
Everybody assumed Sansouci was a werewolf. Yeah, with the silver forelock in his jet-black hair, the forest green eyes, and a long, lean build, you could picture him chasing the full moon in a thick fur coat, a creature of ferocity and grace.
Except I already had my own really butch wolfhound-wolf-cross dog named Quicksilver, and Sansouci was a vampire.
Not everybody knew the truth about Sansouci. Just me, in fact. Taken either way, Sansouci sported extremely white and handsome canines, which now flashed at me like a fishing lure.
“And where’s your boyfriend, the Cadaver Kid?” he asked.
“Ric’s in Mexico,” I reported, “rounding up demon drug lords and feral zombies in a multinational policing operation. And what have
“Looked you up. Or down.”
His glance slowly skied the curves of the sweetheart neckline on my fifties black velvet top.
“One spike heel to the kneecap and you’d fold,” I pointed out.
“Maybe. But I’d take you down with me.”
Flirting with Sansouci was dangerous, which was why I enjoyed it so much.
And I
Sansouci had, and was looking even more lean and hungry.
“So,” I asked, “why’d your mangy, murderous werewolf boss let you off-leash from headquarters at the Gehenna Hotel?”
You’d think a female human paranormal investigator like me would sympathize with werewolves. We shared that three-days-a-month temporary-insanity-and-blood thing.
Yet I liked Sansouci precisely because he hated his werewolf overlord, Cesar Cicereau. Sansouci had been a hostage in the uneasy peace between the werewolves and the vampires that had lasted since Las Vegas’s 1940s founding all the Way to Where We Were, 2013. That added up to seventy-five years. Good thing Sansouci was immortal.
And most vamps still suffered from that twelve-hour-a-day “impotency handicap,” not that I’d dare use the phrase with Sansouci. Being an ex-reporter, accuracy was my middle name. Anyone who survived as a vampire gigolo was good to go 24/7. His breed of New Model Vampire had been in the making since the 1930s, a daylight vamp who sipped from a willing harem of female donors. Killing them softly with sex, not death, and they loved him for it.
Not I.
“Why’d you come all the way over to the Inferno,” I prodded Sansouci, “where you’re not welcome, from the Gehenna, where you’re
“We have a problem.”
Nick Charles, the official Inferno barfly, rushed to my side. Yeah.
The entire trio was black-and-white and gray all over. They were Cinema Simulacrums, aka SinCims. Vegas throngs with black-and-white movie characters overlaid on zombies to give the tourists some semi-“live” entertainment they could not only gawk at, but actually talk to. Which was happening right now.
“Look here, my good man.” Nick Charles accosted Sansouci with a hand on the concealed gun in his tuxedo jacket pocket. “You’re not to pester our Inferno patrons.”
Asta’s teeth were tugging on one leg of Sansouci’s black designer jeans while Nicky’s sleek wife, Nora, was running a languid hand inside his jean jacket and down his firm pecs and abs to frisk him. Friskily. Face it, Nick Charles has a retro-cool pencil-thin mustache, a tipsy wit, and ace deductive ability, but he’s not exactly buff in modern terms.
“You have the most annoying allies, Street,” Sansouci said with an impressive shrug. “Get these reanimated vintage-film freakos off me. We have business to discuss.”
“I’m okay, Family Charles,” I assured my friends. Then I ordered Brimstone Kisses from the human barman and we adjourned to a table for two.
“I’m actually celebrating a private party here with some of my CinSim pals,” I said, sipping the spicy cocktail of my own concoction. “What’s going wrong at the Gehenna now?”
“Yeah,” Sansouci seconded me, “Cicereau does seem accident-prone, particularly when it comes to the supernatural set.” He slugged down my spicy liquor-loaded concoction in three gulps. “When are you going to invent a cocktail in my honor?”
“You don’t claim the Vampire Sunrise?”
“I’m not that kind of vamp.”
“The ‘Sansouci’ sounds comatose. Hardly you.”
“More like Cicereau lately.”
“You saying
“That would be nice, if you could arrange it. I know a few dozen vamps who’d like to catch him snoozing and kill him without tasting a drop of his rotten blood. But, no, he’s the same power-hungry, brutal, dumb mob boss as ever. Except he’s been cursed.”
