“I need to move on,” I said.
“In your life, or at this moment?”
“Both. How do I . . . we . . . exit this Goth carnival ride? And I like my life,” I announced, sitting forward on the banquette, in case he had any doubts.
I needed to pass him to get out.
“Excuse me,” I suggested.
Sansouci tilted his head, as if analyzing a lot more about me than my words.
“Sure thing, Luscious.” Sansouci’s smile was as smooth as corn silk. He cracked the skull’s tufted velvet doors and the jaws yawned open, admitting screams of laughter and tortured electric guitars.
His exit left the suspended unit swaying hard. I poised on the booth’s bottom lip trying to gauge the jump to terra firma. I made the leap unassisted, taking the impact with my bent knees.
“Impressive,” he said.
“I’m used to exiting hovering helicopters. A state-fair ride is a snap.”
“Helicopters?”
I’d truly surprised him, since most such exits happen during troop deployments during wars. I was a veteran of the journalism wars.
“The WTCH-TV ’copter. Weather coverage was a big deal in Wichita when I was a reporter there.”
“Weather. TV-station ’copter. Right. Let me get you to the door. Spider Skull gets . . . raucous after dark.”
I sensed the female-unfriendly eyes all around. Or too friendly, I should say. Even today, women on business errands at night were considered fair game.
“No one will mess with me,” he assured me.
Irma! Some support here?
“Did you say something?” Sansouci leaned nearer to hear my words.
“Nope.”
I was still frothing at getting Irma’s usual sass in a situation that was making me uneasier by the second. I’d thought I could handle Sansouci. Maybe if I somehow finessed him into a fatherly role . . . which escorting me to the door surely was.
We were there, at the usual blank steel-door nightclubs this town favored.
I heard murmurs behind us complaining about my leaving.
Sansouci blocked all that noise and ugliness with his body, his big warrior’s body pinning me to the steel door, protective as a wall, intimate as a . . . well, my mind didn’t want to go there.
His eyes searched my face, marking my panic with a look . . . a look somehow both satisfied and . . . tender.
I felt all the superhuman strength I’d told him I’d want on my side when worst came to worst and it was holding me suspended in a bell-jar moment I’d never anticipated..
I had the most awful suspicion . . . instinct . . . that Sanscouci wanted to . . . kiss me . . . good night. Like a freaking prom date.
He didn’t want to taste my blood, which should have been a relief. He wanted to taste my emotions, which were even more intimately mine, far beyond some fluid pounding through my veins.
“I’d consider breaking that vow of mine for the first time with you. No blood, just what you’re sensing now.” His husky undertone seemed to vibrate in my bones.
“Gee, thanks. What part of ‘taken already’ don’t you get?”
“Undead life is long.”
I averted my face. And his followed like steel to a magnet.
“Delilah,” he said, willing me to look at him.
And nothing more.
I wasn’t breathing, I was panting, a wild animal, cornered.
His expression melted with mine, his face following my evasive features as I turned my head left and then right and found only a steel door against my fevered cheeks, his eyes locked on mine, a dark emerald forest I was plunging into like a hunted animal. A unicorn. Virtual virgins.
If I kissed him . . . if I let him kiss me . . . now, here . . .
Nothing was keeping me pinned here but me. I forced my eyes to focus far to the side and addressed the empty air so I didn’t have to see him, to see what was coming.
“I’ve been here before,” I said, my voice hard and cold. “Before I ever bled for the first time. In the group homes with the sick, crazy vamp boys pinning me against walls, wanting my blood both ways. Hungry. Horrible. They smelled of death and murder, old blood and new lusts. Their skins were moonscapes of scars and pus-oozing pits. They were revolting and I only had a diamond-dust embedded nail file to fight them off. But I did. So. Let me go.”
I felt his presence retreating before it was physical fact. It was if I’d knocked a moon out of orbit around a planet it had been bound to by gravity.
One furtive glance at his face caught a fading gleam of something green and tentative as a root in his harsh gaze.
He hadn’t lasted all those postvampire centuries because he had kept any nugget of humanity that could be read as . . . hurt? No. I was thinking in my limited human way and that was no way to survive among unhumans.
“Get out.” His voice was harder and colder than mine had been.
“I was planning to.”
“Get. Out.”
I saw the blood tide, maybe the cherry vodka from my Virtual Virgins, rising in his eye whites and yanked the door handle open behind my back, slipping through, heart pounding so loud I knew he’d hear it for yards, as he’d scent my blood for a mile, maybe.
Dolly waited to enfold me in the parking lot, her neon chartreuse halo of pixie dust security announcing she was no Eldorado to mess with. She had never looked more like a fortress.
Chapter Twenty-three
AFTER HE’D LEFT the Spider Skull, Sansouci had made an immediate blood and booty phone call to Carmella, the three-time divorcée, a handsome but stringy cougar of a woman in her late forties.
Carmella was the only one of his blood “wives” he didn’t like.
She was also the only one who craved being drained to the very edge of mortality. Sometimes he needed to remind himself of the centuries of raging, senseless survival. Especially after seeing, flirting with, wanting Delilah. She got under his skin the way he was supposed to want to get under hers. Like an addiction.
He did all the things with Carmella he supposed Delilah was imagining he did. Twice.
He left his client when she was sated in every way possible and he was sick of himself. His ancient, wholly human shadow-self seemed to be tailing him through the glitz of the Las Vegas Strip.
Sansouci decided to finish his unhappy evening out by stopping for a nightcap at Chez Shez. He could atone there for what he’d refrained from doing—and what he’d just done to make up for his restraint—by patronizing the artificial blood on tap. Penance, they’d labeled it when he’d been a monk. Nowadays even that word was out of date.
Gentle Fawn, the day-shift employee Shez called Fawnschwartz, had been replaced for the evening hours by
