“I don’t. I find it charming, and very telltale.” Sansouci laughed as he swept his display off the table and back into his pockets. “These are only the easily portable . . . accessories of my trade. Care to know more?”
“No,” I swore. “I think I’d better leave.”
“Not before you tell me
He suddenly pulled me close again with one arm while his other hand lifted the hair off my nape. My face was smothered in his jacket shoulder. In an instant I was held immobile, although the skull rocked after his sudden move.
“I thought so,” he murmured in my ear. “You didn’t ask about this, and here I am an expert at your disposal, fearless reporter. Señor Montoya’s been sampling your tasty neck. Regularly.”
“It’s just a hickey. Hickeys,” I mumbled against his jacket. “I hate that word.”
“Not just a hickey. Hickeys.” His thumb stroked the freshest one and I couldn’t stop a wince. I jerked away, but he held me tight.
He whispered the next words into my hair, but I heard every damning syllable. It was a taunt and an intimacy and a diagnosis. “Can’t deny it. Broke the skin, Luscious.”
I pushed off, fighting his custody, more flushed and angry and anxious than before. “As if you wouldn’t,” I hissed back at him. “He gets . . . overenthusiastic. A bat bite in the Mexican desert spurred his first wet dream, okay? It’s a tiny, harmless kink.”
God, why was I telling him this?
“Like you’d know, virtual virgin.”
“He doesn’t have . . . fangs.”
“Teeth enough to be interesting. You let him?”
“I love him.”
Sansouci let me go. The silver familiar lay coldly around my neck. I put my hand up to feel a bristly crown of thorns. It had allowed him to touch me when I’d wanted to intrigue him into testing my blood, but this was too much for us both.
“Manhandle me like that again,” I told Sansouci, “and you’ll lose a body part.”
“No desire to, now that I know what I suspected is right. This is serious, Delilah, and you know it. That’s why you cozied up to me to pry out some facts of vampire life, so to speak. You’re like any vamp-tramp-in-training —”
I belted him in the mouth before I could even think.
The shock shut him up, and me too.
Not very ladylike. I didn’t approve when women did that to men who said things they didn’t like in forties movies. It made them “dames,” I guess.
Sansouci felt his jaw. “Bit my tongue. You drew blood, Delilah. How does that feel?”
“Annoying, like your behavior. You’re the only vampire I—”
“Trust?”
“Don’t fool yourself. The only one I know I can ask.”
There was always Howard Hughes, but asking lecherous Uncle Howie about plain sex, not to mention vampire sex, was way too icky. Warped, even. Especially if he was my father. At least I was convinced that Sansouci’s attitude toward Vida was far too neutral for him to be a candidate.
“You weren’t going to tell me the one piece of information that really mattered.” He sat back, shaking his head. “I overstepped, but it was for your own good.”
“The bastards always say that. Ric is not a vampire.”
“Let’s say not. But you’re worried sick. Vampires did drain him dead.”
“Maybe. . . . I’m not buying that. Whatever happened, they didn’t . . . turn him.”
“You just don’t want to accept responsibility for raising the dead. Why not? Your lover does? He dowses for them.”
“If it was me who brought him back, maybe I shouldn’t have.”
“I saw it. Snow saw it. The Gehenna werewolves saw it. Everybody in the rescue party did. One of the great love scenes never on the silver screen.” He picked up his drink to toast me. “Here’s looking at you, kid. You willed Ric Montoya back from the dead. Now you have to live with it. Everybody throws that term around. ‘Turn,’ like it’s a damn dance move.”
I shook out my hair to make sure my nape was covered and sipped my Virtual Virgin. Was I starting to be sorry about what I’d named the drink. . . .
“I don’t know about those things,” I said. “I only know the vamp boys in the group homes were always after me and I would die before I’d be bitten.” I sounded weary, a mistake in strategy.
“You’re right. That’s not a real bite on your neck, just a love nip, huh?”
“They say . . . I’ve heard . . . People can be turned if a vampire drains all your blood, or you’ve been bitten and you then bite the vampire. Or from toilet seats. I don’t know!”
“And you hate that condition more than anything,” Sansouci said with a quirk of his lips. “Not knowing.”
I was relieved to spot no blood on them. “So what’s it like being a vampire forever?”
“Like my brother figured when he wanted me more than dead and out of the way. He wanted me to suffer. He knew that the religious vocation I’d chosen would make my undead eternity as a bloodsucker into unliving hell.”
“Ric would be like that.” I shut my eyes.
“I don’t think he’s a vampire.” Sansouci’s hand covered my fist on the table, his thumb stroking mine. It was truly a consoling gesture.
“Not?” I looked up, my eyes full of question and hope.
“But it’s not good. I said your blood had an intoxicating effervescence.”
“I’ve got pink champagne in my veins?”
“That, and circumstances. Part of the vampire/prey dysfunctional relationship is that being bitten can hook you on biting. You mentioned a boyhood vampire bat bite. Then the Karnak vampires made it a group party. It’s possible Montoya’s becoming addicted to your blood, which would make him your personal human ‘lifestyle’ vampire. All addicts want more and more. All addicts have a built-in denial factor for why they do what they can’t resist. For a girl who hated the idea of being vamp-bit, you’re on the royal road to serious risk. It’s not his fault, but it’s a fact.”
My fist lifted to shake his chilly vampire hand off mine.
I hit it down again so hard the black glass cracked from rim to rim like an instant spiderweb.
Sansouci’s head leaned back against the red velvet upholstery. He did look like a knight.
“Love the new cracked glass tabletop, Delilah. Now. Here’s the way it is, the way I see it, and you’re going to have to deal with it.”
I listened with all my heart, and my head.
“Montoya loves you.”
I knew that.
“I want you.”
I knew and used that.
“And Snow . . . Snow needs you for some reason even I can’t guess.”
Need? Snow? That one had me stumped.
“Unless you’re willing to juggle lovers, and I doubt you are . . . yet, you’re going to have to decide who you’re safest with, and who’s safest with you.”
My only answer was silence. It was time to head home and mull what Sanscouci had told me and what he’d told me without knowing it.
He drained his glass. “Even your Virtual Virgin packs a kick, but a tentative one.”
“It’s the cherry vodka you laced it with, not my innocent nonalcoholic recipe.”
“Cherry vodka.” He repeated . . . caressed . . . my words with a searching look.
My inner alarms went on red alert. I was Sansouci’s chief prey these twenty-first century days. For all his apparent sophistication and benign blood-drinking, he’d been a savage warrior many more centuries than he’d been a dedicated monk or a cultish “life coach” for lonely ladies.
