“You stayed true to froglike Cicereau with a suave number like Sansouci around oozing forbidden sex for the price of a little blood? Why?”
“Simple, Delilah. I knew too much. Not about Loretta, or I’d have risked leaving, but too much about Cesar’s shady criminal activities, not to mention the supernatural ones. I’d been ‘dropped off’ as an infant myself. All I knew of my family was a couple crazy old aunts in the Midwest and I ditched both of them when I was sixteen. I was on my own and doing my best.”
I kept silent. That was as close to an apology as she’d come yet. I didn’t believe her story about Sansouci. It went against human nature that a trapped and neglected trophy mistress like Vida wouldn’t at least have revenge sex with her sugar daddy’s handsome bodyguard, if not give blood.
Good question. Did daylight vampires ever have sex for the sake of it, or only when it netted blood?
Vida was watching me while trying to hide it. “How is Sansouci?” she asked too casually to feel that way.
“Same old, same old, I suppose. Hates Cicereau, loves women.”
“You said his forelock has more silver.”
“Only to a very keen observer, like me, after seeing the sixty-five-year-old photo.”
“His daylight lifestyle will shorten his immortality.”
“By a century or two, maybe. He doesn’t seem worried.”
“He never did. Does he like you, Delilah? You look quite a bit like me. Especially in those vintage rags you’re wearing.”
“Why should you care?” These were the first roster of questions she’d asked about me, besides wanting to know Ric’s history.
Then I got it. Sansouci could be my father! He was Black Irish. He’d been around Vida for years. He was the one who’d want revenge sex . . . with Vida. He had good reason to cuckold Cicereau even if a blood donation wasn’t in the picture.
The idea of Sansouci as Daddy made my skin crawl and wrung my stomach. Vida was right. He did act attracted to me. Still, Cicereau was more likely to be my father when you looked at the Gehenna Hotel habitués. Another revolting, stomach-churning idea. I recalled his lust for the
This cast of likely suspects for my father was getting more twisted than the family freakiness in
“You have no reason to be honest,” I told Vida, forcing myself to be so hard-headed I sounded cold. “You’ve let Lilith and me fend for ourselves since infanthood and grow up in a separate nest of lies. Maybe you fooled yourself into thinking you were doing the best for us, but you got out of Vegas, got out of motherhood, and now you’re running some chichi California fitness club, and you’re out only a few thousand dollars for my high school scholarship. I appreciate being your charity-of-the-month for four years, but all I want from you is our father’s identity, Lilith’s and mine. Then I’ll vanish like a bag of trash left for the garbage collector. I won’t even tell Lilith, so she won’t bother you, not that she’d be inclined.”
Vida leaned her gorgeous, made-up forties face on the elbow she braced on her desk.
“I’d like to help you out, Delilah, but you really ought to leave now.”
“I’m not leaving until I have the answers I need.”
“Too bad, because my workout girls are all done with their routines and hepped up and about to harvest the rave attendees up the street. Just up Delilah Street.” She pointed beyond me with a sharp scarlet fingernail. “I own both enterprises, you see. It works out very well. That’s one thing I learned from Vegas and Cesar Cicereau, owning competing venues just ups the ante for the savvy CEO.”
I was on my high-heeled feet. “Your vamps are hitting the rave club? You let Lilith stay there?”
“No, my dear. You did.”
I ran to the door, pausing when I heard high-pitched tittering outside. Excited feminine twittering.
I turned my back to the door and faced my mother as the silver familiar abandoned its old-timey charm bracelet and reshaped itself into a dagger in my right hand, a dagger with a cross-shaped haft, of course, as hokey as that old superstition was.
“You must have been the one,” I told Vida even as I realized it, “who was made vampire so Howard Hughes could get turned by a beautiful woman.”
I didn’t need a confirmation. A look of paralyzed fury froze her face into a horrific mask. Mama as a snaky- tressed Medusa would never leave my memory.
“That’s the beauty of being undead now. I don’t need men anymore, Delilah, I prey on them. Exclusively. My girls are not so persnickety.”
I turned and yanked open the door. Zombies on speed were one nightmare I’d already navigated. Aerobic vampire chicks were about to become another can of worms entirely.
Chapter Twenty
THE SCENE IN the health club lobby was like being trapped backstage at a major beauty pageant. Thin, fit, tall, busty young women were milling everywhere, wearing full makeup that concealed their undead pallor.
They lounged at the health bar, warming up with bottled blood in trendy concoctions that abused fruits and vegetables. They used the metal railing along the stairs to the second floor as a ballet barre, stretching toned torsos, endless legs, and supple arms into supernaturally unnatural positions that would have snapped human bones.
They gathered at the front glass doors, prancing and preening like racehorses at the starting gate.
And I had to get through them.
Bursting out of the boss’s office door gave me an edge of surprise. For about fifteen feet.
I shook my hair to fall into my face and kept my head down, squared my shoulders, and slammed one foot down in front of the other so my heels echoed rifle-shot-style on the terrazzo floor. Concealing my silver dagger- bearing right hand in my ample skirt folds, I lifted my left hand high and slowly lowered it, pointing imperiously to the front door.
Vida herself had said I looked like her. Maybe enough to pull off a short stroll.
Around me, I sensed these self-absorbed beauties pausing in their occupations, turning their attention on me. The ones crowding the door parted for my passage. My left hand pushed the left glass door open so hard it banged against the glass window-wall.
A cracking sound cascaded into a shower of broken glass that tinkled like the very highest keys on a piano. I was still striding away toward the street, Delilah Street, not daring to look back.
When the second of the double glass doors resounded as it slammed open, I broke into a full-out run. Thanks to GPS, I had an aerial memory of the area’s layout, and I angled across to the next dark building. I dodged around the Dumpsters at its rear, my footsteps obscured by the sharp high yips of once-human hounds.
Speed was not on my side, and I knew they could scent my blood, but my shortcut had zipped me into the back parking lot of the Rave Machine. Darting through the highest SUVs and pickups, I noticed a lot of non-California license plates. These patrons were unwary tourists who didn’t know Corona supported a hornet’s nest of vampires. All their black-clad mock-Goth and high-sepia steampunk fantasies were about to come to life in living color, red bleeding into the monotone crowds.
I burst into the back hall, bouncing off lines holding up both sides of the walls . . . the restroom queues.
“Go to the end of the line,” a few wasted girls in black lipstick snarled at me.
“Just what I intend,” I snarled back. “I’d stay in the restroom if you don’t want to be vampire bait.”
Meanwhile, the bleary-eyed guys, some in black eyeliner, whistled and noticed me.
“Schoolteacher,” one drawled, and others took up the refrain. “We’ll muss you up, teach.”
One guy with a leer and abs of corrugated cardboard tried to block my way. When I elbowed him hard, he folded and slid down against the wall. You just can’t drink and drug and then molest women properly.
“Vintage is a waste on punks like you,” I told them.
