That’s something the huge “pack” of organized vampires right under the Strip had, but I was here to learn the lay of the land, not utterly remake it.
“Is it possible,” I wondered, “that suspending those vampires’ lives and power gave werewolf mobster Cicereau some extended mortality?”
“Maybe. I was expendable because I wasn’t like them. I remembered I wasn’t always vampire.” He stated the obvious with a mocking sideways glance. “Several hundred years ago, give a century or two, I was the second son of a landowner in Ireland.”
“I
Sansouci wasn’t buying either. “You gonna put that on the nightly news, Delilah? This is
I winced, but was relieved to hear him use my first name again, so relieved that I sipped my fresh drink again. The added alcohol warmed my insides, but my fingers were still ice white and ice cold on the glass.
Sansouci addressed his tale to the skull’s interior facade of molded plastic bone, the reverse of the Silver Zombie’s robot suit. A faint Irish accent embroidered his tale, something I was always a sucker for.
“The eldest son got the fiefdom, with the might of England soon to come at him. For me, it was either the Church or the itinerant sword—”
“So you became a mercenary, and still are to this day.”
“Street, shut up. You must have been a lousy reporter. Why didn’t you just make it up yourself?” He eyed me, hard. “So I became a monk.”
“You?” I flash-carded my visions of his Las Vegas blood harem, all lounging belly dancers wearing no more than veils and glittering coin belts, like the
“Celibate.” He grinned with rakish pleasure as my illusions came tumbling down.
“How can . . . how could—?”
“Story? Mine?”
I relaxed a bit. Everybody ached to tell his or her story. Sansouci was enjoying shocking the saltwater out of me. That was what a good reporter wanted, an interview subject invested in amazing and surprising his audience.
I nodded and supported my face on my fists, a rapt audience of one myself now. I finally had
“The Church was a refuge then,” he said. “My vows were solemn. Poverty, obedience, celibacy. Obedience was the hardest.”
If Irma were here, I’d be rolling my eyes at her.
“I was sixteen. We worked from sunrise to sunset then. I was hoeing the chard patch, meditating on Our Lord’s crown of thorns like a good boy. I’d forgotten that vespers might toll for evening prayers in the monastery, a severe failing for a monk.”
I nodded, spellbound.
He reached out, his hand huge, I noticed for the first time. His fingers brushed back and replaced the hair falling onto my shoulders. His cold undead thumb found my carotid artery with its first gesture. My skin felt clammy, but I’d worked myself up into quite an anxious fever, I told myself. I could use a . . . cold compress.
“You’ve never felt a vampire bite,” Sansouci said as caressingly as his thumb rested on my neck. “I don’t know how it is for anyone else, but in my time and place, there was no sensation at first, just a barely sensed pressure.” His thumb pressure intensified. I felt the tension all through my body. “Then the slightest . . . tingle and then the impinging edge of something . . . small but hard, though not like steel.”
His thumbnail impressed my skin.
“And then a flood of what doctors now would describe as anesthetic with an aphrodisiac overtone, but in my time and with my youth I only knew it felt like . . . surrender. The surrender of sleep, even a spiritual surrender, as an acolyte gave to the will of God and the abbey. My vows lulled me.”
I knew certain martial arts grips could stop the flow of blood to the brain. I felt dizzy and breathless, but Sansouci’s touch hadn’t tightened. I was doing this to myself, and I almost sensed craving the sort of surrender he was describing. Utter.
So I let the vampire gaze at and touch the side of my naked neck, nostalgically. He was trusting me with his story, the most important thing in his long immortal life. I let him speak uninterrupted. A reporter has to take big risks for the big story.
The pressure of his thumb relented. His hand stayed anchored on my flesh, his red-rimmed eyes still stared intently into mine.
“I woke in the neighboring woods, hearing the monks calling as they sought me with torches. My hoe lay in the chard patch where I’d dropped it. I heard the rustles of the night as I never had before, thirsted for what I thought was the body and blood of Christ as I never had before.
“One monk had found my abandoned hoe and began circling the spot after the others had vanished around the abbey’s great hulk, their calls growing faint, as was any sense I had of belonging to that scene, to those people, to those mortals. Do you feel faint, Delilah?”
I did. He spoke on.
“A shadow crept up on the lone laboring monk. I could see as never before in the dark. I could see what had happened and what I was now. Only the shadow of myself. I crept up on the alien shadow.”
My instincts urged me to bite my lip from the suspense, but I resisted.
“The shadow felled the monk, and I felled the shadow. I broke the wooden hoe handle over my robed thigh and impaled the monster’s chest with its thick, jagged end. It had carried a sword. I dragged its body into the woods and cut off its head, then stripped it of clothes and donned them, leaving my empty robe beside it. I returned to kneel over my former fellow monk.
“Then I drank him dry between mutters of
I sat, breathing and wishing I could disguise that function. And this had happened centuries ago. Centuries. I was speaking to the last living witness, a vampire.
“They never knew you . . . remained?” I asked.
“Staked, headless vampire. Drained monk and robe. An uncommon couple, yet the only two-plus-two their superstitious but holy medieval minds needed. They burned the bodies and my robe, and put up a gravestone for me on an empty plot.”
“What name did it read?”
“None of your business, Delilah Street. I have lost everything of my past. Concealing my original identity is the only thing I am pleased about.”
“After all these centuries? At least you have an identity to guard. Even my name isn’t really my own,” I admitted.
His thumb stroked my neck, the callus on it oddly human, then withdrew. “Stage name?”
“I said I was a reporter, not an actress.”
“Could have fooled me, drama queen.”
He was trying to distract me, but I wasn’t buying it.
“I was an abandoned infant supposedly found on Delilah Street, only there’s no such address where I grew up, in Wichita, Kansas. You want to forget who you were and I want to find out who I am.”
“‘Aren’t we a pair’?” Sansouci quoted the melancholy classic song, leaning back in the velvet banquette.
He was showing some of the lazy surrender he’d been recounting during his tale of his simultaneous first time of being bitten and biting, of his virtual virginhood lost. He was the usual cynical Sansouci again. Maybe.
Either my cocktail recipe or telling his tale had returned Sansouci into the deceptively laid-back persona he automatically used to lull human or werewolf fears. He’d had centuries to perfect that. I could see how modern women got hooked on the tension between his sensually knowing exterior and deeply dangerous needs. It was