“We want our money back.”
“The band’s
“
“Yeah. What’s the gunk on the floor?”
I kicked the electrical cord out of the “coffin” with its blackened glass tubes and ran to the balcony railing, gazing down.
Some of the lights were slowly warming up and coming on again.
I’d hoped for nice tidy Buffyverse piles of dust. Instead, I saw puddles of bloodred.
Dazed, formerly cool ravers had ripped off their sunglasses and were wandering the half-lit dance floor, keeping their dancing shoes out of the vamp girl Jell-O.
“What is this stuff, Silly Putty?”
“That hot babe I was dancing with ran out on me when the lights all went out.”
“Ouch. Mine gave me an Indian burn on the arm when she vamoosed.”
Up in rafters, I commented to Lilith, “More like a sunburn.”
“Awesome.” She leaned so far over the railing I had to grab the back of her low-rise jeans. “What did we do?”
And mostly me. I was almost too exhausted to explain.
“When this was a real health club,” I said, “it was so totally California it offered suntanning machines that are banned nowadays. They use ultraviolet light, the artificial equivalent of sunlight, deadly to vamps. The mirror ball fractured that lethal light into a thousand laser stakes spinning down onto the dance floor in a few seconds.”
“So what’s the Venusian Palace effect?”
“It’s one of those new hotel-condo towers, part of a nine billion dollar development.”
“I hear that right? Nine
“It was built before the Great Recession. Anyway, the hotel-condo walls were all made of concave curved glass. When the Nevada sun hits the surface it creates a beam of concentrated solar energy that can melt plastic and singe hair. It was burning the patrons in the pool area. You get the same effect when you focus a magnifying glass on a piece of paper on a hot sidewalk.”
“
“Now that the vamp girls are history we could go down the street and confront our mama together, safely.”
“Not interested. I’ll let you keep on doing the heavy lifting, Dee. Click those simpy heels together and get us home to Vegas.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“What? I’m stuck in this nowhere town on a street with your name?”
“Maybe if we walked back to the exact place we showed up along this street.”
“I am not an ‘exact’ chick.” Lilith frowned. “Besides, that’s quite a hike and we’d have to go through all those geeky guys looking for Ms. Goodbar down there. I’m just along for the ride,” she said.
I shook my head at Irma’s comment and pulled my cell phone from my pocket. The address on Delilah Street in Corona, California, was still on the backlit screen. The folks living here would have no idea what lurked around the corner. What would Vida do now?
Or us? We weren’t on fey paths anymore. How would we get home? These heels of mine were just anonymous vintage wear. They didn’t have a “click” option.
My smartphone did, though.
I wandered toward my own improvised Venusian death ray—the open, upright tanning bed. All right! The vertical bulbs’ blackened centers acted as a mirror backing. I could see my image vaguely reflected in the vertical glass array, with Lilith shadowing me.
In for a penny, out for a pounding. Could I make another giant leap for humankind, or would I zap us both into scattered atoms of fairy dust?
I sighed and pulled up Vegas on the phone’s map app, targeting Sunset Park.
No way did I want to aim exactly for my front door and have Hector Nightwine’s ever-present spy cams reveal his Enchanted Cottage was far more than a reconstructed movie set.
I closed my eyes and hit the button and wished on a star—or a planet, my inspiration, Venus—for good luck. I may even have clicked my peep-toe heels together
Nothing. I felt nothing, not even a breath of wind.
Then I heard something pounding toward me and opened my eyes.
Wow. I saw an oncoming bolt of cold lightning, greyhound big and fast and, duh, gray. It almost knocked off my heels. Also, it battered my ears with barking and a bunch of really too hot, slimy, and thorough ear licks for a public park.
“Quicksilver,
He finally obeyed and gamboled around me in circles of joyful greeting without jolting the phone out of my hand or me off my feet.
Me.
Solo.
Lilith was nowhere to be seen.
I did worry. I’d gotten Lilith and me to the current address of our foggy vampire roots. Vida. I kinda felt for her. I kinda feared her. Now what were we going to do about it?
Me. I. By myself. Not quite.
I still had a long high-heeled walk home ahead of me. Me and my succulent toes.
Which Quicksilver, confined to the ground by my command, had done a play bow to lick.
I doubted that was what Snow had in mind, but it sure did tickle.
Chapter Twenty-one
“BIG DAY YESTERDAY,” Ric’s voice told me.
It read 12:52. Why was Ric calling me so late at night after what had truly been a long day?
Wait! Sunshine fell on the bedroom floorboards. Quicksilver lay curled around his giant stainless steel water dish by the dormer windows. It was not last night, it was morning.
Or what passed for it with me, which appeared to be the afternoon.
“Delilah? Are you awake?”
“Barely.”
“I know we need to do a postmortem on Loretta in Hell and me on the Nine Circles’ Lust level and seeing
“I saw you speak on that subject,” I murmured. “You were very good.
“You did? I’ve never given a formal speech in my life.”
Oh. That had been a dream. Right.
“Well, you’d be very commanding if you did.”
“They’re flying people in from the West Coast and Midwest, so this could run late into the evening. I hate to
