Virtual Virgin

by the light, and die from pleasure. I wanted to feel those pillars shake, rattle, and roll, because of me.

Except . . .

Shoot. Biblical femme fatales weren’t my style. Not really.

I broke the contact and stepped away, admiring the still smoldering trace of my handiwork on his perfect body.

“So I’m human,” I said. “You’re not. How can I help Ric be even better than both of us?”

“Admit the truth about him, as long as you’re at it.” Snow stepped back, unshaken by my about-face, to drain his champagne glass.

Every little thing he did was magic, or so I thought, watching my blood bruise seem to throb on his throat as he drank. I was developing a serious addiction problem. I understood Sanscouci now.

Ric loves you.

And me, him.

I want you.

And I like him, an honest vampire in a naughty world, bless him.

And Snow needs you.

That is probably true, but I don’t know why. And not knowing why is my most unacceptable condition.

Snow began pacing the lush carpet. “You can’t hide from me or yourself anymore, Delilah. You have to understand what’s happening. In the desert, Montoya called on the Silver Zombie. You called on me.”

“No. I didn’t. I’d never ask you for help.”

“Never? Why, Delilah? Why never?’

“I . . . don’t do that.”

“Maybe you should try it sometimes. Everybody needs help sometimes.”

“Even you?”

“Especially me now that I’m . . . defaced.”

Oh, kick me in the conscience, why don’t you? “I didn’t consciously call on you.” I’d remembered calling to the heavens for help, to any force anywhere.

“You did. And I came.”

Well, that was unfortunately too true, a few days before in Wichita.

“I just wanted to save Ric. He had the Silver Zombie to call on. You’re saying you had to butt in with the Seven Deadly Sins because of me?”

“The Sins only come when called.” Snow paced close again, tossed his long hair so the very ends sizzled across my skin. “And only you can call on me.”

“I didn’t ask for that favor. It was Ric drawing down the power of the Silver Zombie that saved that situation in the Valley of Guadalupe.”

“He survived it, Delilah. We all need more than mere survival.”

I recalled a favorite line: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Snow had certainly been that man tonight as he rang down the false front to reveal the new Metropolis he’d already built with a lot of money and also magic, probably.

Now Snow stood watching me. Waiting for me. I eyed the pulse in his throat and leaned forward to place my fingers on the beating blue-purple bruise.

“Why won’t this fade?” I asked.

“Maybe a succubus comes every night to renew it. Do you have any succubus tendencies, Delilah?”

“In your dreams.”

“That’s the place.”

I managed a smile.

Sansouci’s mantra replayed in my head.

Ric loves you.

I want you.

Snow needs you.

And I needed, maybe wanted, all of the above.

“You are the Silver Zombie, Delilah.” Snow had recognized my confusion and indecision and zeroed in. “You are the bleeding-heart purity of Mother Maria and you are the hot-blooded temptress who drives men to extremes, maybe bad, but maybe good despite themselves. The Silver Zombie is celibacy and sexuality in one contradictory, addictive package. Don’t think I don’t know all about that. But you, on the other hand, know nothing of my curse.”

“Curse?” That sobered me up fast. I stepped back. “You’ve been cursed. For how long?”

A white eyebrow lifted above the black sunglasses. A reporter soon learns nobody ever wants to tell you his or her age. Especially nowadays.

“How?” I asked next.

“Isn’t it obvious why I keep the groupies in their mosh pit forever? I can only give pleasure, never receive it.”

No! Yes. That would explain the Brimstone Kiss, the ultimate dead-end pleasure trip for women. It wouldn’t explain . . .

“But . . . when I . . . we—”

Can a smile both calm and sting?

“Every curse has an antidote, Delilah,” Snow said. “That’s the quest that keeps me going for . . . however long I have been. You can always find an antidote. Sometime. Somewhere. Somebody.”

I’d truly been shocked sober.

“You’re going to have to decide who you’re safest with, and who’s safest with you.” Sansouci’s words again.

Or, I added mentally: who I most want and need to save and who most wants and needs to save me.

Not a cakewalk.

No, indeed.

I left without another word.

Finis for now.

AT HOME IN the Enchanted Cottage, I worked on dozing off with my e-reader on my stomach.

My red velvet gown had disappeared into the cottage’s bottomless closet, probably snuggling up to the green silk one from Wichita and the ivory satin thirties wedding dress Ric had unbuttoned all seventy-two buttons of, up the sleeves and down the back. The Mrs. Peel section was Sansouci’s. I’ve always been a versatile chick.

I’ve set the ruby red slippers on my dresser as a reminder.

No, they’re not a reminder of the night’s intense discoveries.

What I need to remember was that Dorothy had finally got her head and heart together and figured a way home from Oz.

Ric had called to say he was trying out an overnight at the Metropolis. He sounded as eager as a Boy Scout on a camping trip. I’d promised to come and see in the morning.

Sansouci was somewhere in the night ministering to needy cougar and choir girl alike, imagining I could someday be his sole companion for a short off-road idyll in his long, long life span.

Snow was still onstage, his unhealed back wounds massaged by tight leather, making him writhe even more incitingly for the groupies in the mosh pit. In post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, someone’s pleasure is all too often someone else’s pain.

Quicksilver is lying under my bedroom window, gnawing on a treat whose source I don’t want to know.

“Me Delilah, you Quicksilver,” I say.

He looks up with those winter-blue eyes, jaws calmly cracking unlabeled animal sinews.

“I rescued you in Sunset Park, you rescue me everywhere else.”

Chomp, chomp. Smile, smile.

“I master. You . . . sidekick.”

Pause. Paws crossed. Really adorable posture, not so adorable expression. Silence.