I was sure my heartbeat was audible too, especially to him, and shut my eyes.
“Who the hell do you think you are, Delilah Street?” the harsh whisper came again.
“Desperate?” I tried. “And overconfident.”
I heard the movement of fabric on velvet. My throat tightened against my damn flippant Goth collar, anticipating the fanged assault.
A bit of light flickered over my closed eyelids. I eased them open a slit.
Sansouci had finished draining his glass and called up the virtual waitress.
“Two doubles,” he snarled at the screen as it illuminated his face, emphasizing broad cheekbones, a bone- snapping strong jaw, and the widow’s peak of his black hair against pale skin.
No wonder I’d taken him for a werewolf, as everyone else did.
His face turned my way. The redness rimming his eyes had shrunken and darkened, like dried blood, but his eye whites still glared blue from the black light that penetrated even the skull booths. “Meanwhile, why am I here, now, at your service?”
“I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt.”
“Or maybe you will make up my mind. Decades are weeks to the immortal.”
His laugh held overtones of a melancholy lilt. I guessed that some inborn ruefulness of his particular vampire history and nature kept me alive and untouched right now.
“Well, hold onto your virtual virginhood,” Sansouci advised, “because you’re going to get more ‘story’ than even you wanted now.”
I glanced up. He looked just as intense and grim as before, but a tiny emerald gleam sparked deep in his eyes. “Guess your method works, Delilah Street.”
I cautiously changed position to ease my frozen muscles, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring into the skull’s black portholes to nothing.
“I’m not Dear Abby, Delilah. I’m not your big brother, but you seem to think I can tell you what you’re so eager to know. Time for the hard stuff, so drink up. And then I’ll tell you a night’s tale you won’t soon forget.”
Chapter Twenty-two
MY FINGERTIPS INCHED the cocktail glass Sansouci had put dead center on the little table toward my side of it. The flavored and colored vodka, added to the innocuous cherry cola, had produced a bright bloodred brew suitable for virginal wedding nights and vampire orgies.
I didn’t dare look at Sansouci, and that wasn’t totally about him being a vampire and also a vampire angry with me.
It was about
“I’m sorry. I do that,” I said, not looking anywhere but into the cherry-amber depths of my drink. “That’s what I was trained to do as a reporter. Approach story subjects in a mode they feel comfortable with and then get their stories.”
“And why do you need stories?”
“It . . . they explain things. About the way the world truly works, about what this person has gone through and knows that other people may need to know and . . . benefit from.”
“You’re an idealistic tattletale?”
“Not anymore.” I dared one sip of the strong drink, lowering my head to the glass, going for being as low- profile as dirt. “Now I do it to save my sanity and maybe a few people’s, um, lives.”
“You mean their mortality, their humanity? Everything I
“What way do you think of me?”
“If the Las Vegas Strip was a line, with all the people and paranormals I know on either side of it, I’d want you on my side.”
I could feel him shift position, lift the glass, and drink deeply.
“I’ve taken a lot of lives, and you’ve saved lives.” He observed this as an interesting phenomenon, not as murder and not-murder. “You saved a bunch of tourist lives at the Gehenna when you exorcised Loretta’s ghost in that spectacular fashion.”
“Really? She’s managed to come back in physical form and wants to destroy Ric and me.”
“Didn’t you listen to her story? I could have told you lovely little Loretta was and is as willful and power- hungry as the gangster father she hates. Being Cicereau’s victim only deepened the blood fury already in her.”
“I’ve seen a photo from the nineteen forties of Loretta with her father, you, and a good-looking woman.”
“Girl,” Sansouci corrected.
“Girl?”
“Cicereau’s arm candy. She was only a few years older than Loretta, whom he had killed at age sixteen. So?”
“You were there as a bodyguard. I can almost see the outline of the gun in the dinner jacket pocket your right hand was in.”
“No, you couldn’t. I wouldn’t do that. I carry it in an underarm holster or the small of my back. Keep that in mind if you ever get the occasion, or urge, to pat me down.” He had resumed flirting, a mode I could handle. “Loose guns go off, slip out of your hand. Your imagination was running away with you. But I’m intrigued that you looked me over so thoroughly.”
“And that chorus girl . . . ?”
“Vida. An aspiring actress. Don’t laugh; she had some chops and Cesar had promised her auditions outside his master bedroom.”
“What happened to her?
“She . . . moved on. He was not a monogamous mobster. None of them are. No need.”
“When did she move on?”
Sansouci consulted his very long memory bank. “After Cicereau went berserk over the Loretta business.”
“That was after you were indentured to him?”
“Same time. It was one big ugly meltdown.”
“You admitted that you witnessed Cicereau kill his own daughter so viciously.”
“I was there under duress. He was teaching me a lesson too when he killed Prince Krzysztof.”
“What lesson? That he could cut off your blood supply, your harem?’
“No. I can always revert to draining the traditional single source, and they’re everywhere, my dear Delilah. Why all the questions?”
“Maybe Cicereau killed Vida too.”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t seem concerned. Didn’t she . . . like you?”
“Maybe.” Sansouci shook his head. “Cicereau had fourteen master vampires buried and held in concrete coffins somewhere in the Mojave. I was the sole one aboveground. One werewolf was released . . . and sacrificed to the vampires in exchange for the masters’ voluntary ‘hibernation.’ A part-time blooder like myself was of value to neither side, except for Cicereau’s amusement.”
“Why were you saved?”
“If you can call it that. The vampires thought I would find and release the masters.”
I caught my breath. “And have you?”
“Not yet.”
“Will you?”
“Time will tell what I will or will not do, Delilah Street, not you. Cicereau, being werewolf, did unto his competitor vampires as he’d do unto another pack. He scattered and buried each one. Vampires, though, are lone wolves who usually prey individually. Then came the Millennium Revelation of the many supernaturals who had hidden from the humans. The old-style vampire wouldn’t fare so well today. Besides, they tend to bicker when gathered in political groups. They’re on separate power trips. What I do takes discipline.”
