The dowsing and finding I get. Ordinary people can do that for water, or even gemstones and precious metals. I know that from my ... long and inglorious past. Finding is one thing, but raising the dead as zombies? How?"
"The dowsing rod and Ric's special talent do the finding. It takes a few drops of his blood on the dowsing rod to actually raise the bodies."
Sansouci did what I wanted from him. He speculated like a predator. "And if one had pints and pints of that dead-raising blood?"
"Oh, my God! The twin pharaohs' vamp troops weren't consuming Ric's blood. They had their own inbred stock for that then. They were taking it. For use later to raise any dead they wanted resurrected."
"You're just feeling me out to confirm your own suspicions, Delilah. Flattering, but useless. I have no idea why they'd want that power, but their having it can't be good for the rest of us."
"And Ric."
"Always Ric with you." He swept off the sunglasses in the shade, those emerald-hard eyes looking for something in me I had no desire to ever show him. "Call me green with envy," he said wryly, "but I can't deny he's a good man in a bad world. If he's still 'just' a man."
The words chilled me more than his gemstone gaze.
Sansouci, any vampire, was something of a soul-shifter as well. Once he'd been mortal and human, and he remembered that time. Now he was immortal and unhuman. He knew way more about merciless adaptation and accommodation than a fierce shape-shifter like Grizelle had ever had to learn.
That's why he scared me even more, in his fashion.
I was glad to be getting out of town this afternoon, even if it meant looking my past bogeymen in the face.
Chapter Six
PACKING FOR KANSAS had forced me to dig out one of my conservative TV reporter suits. The Enchanted Cottage's invisible "personal shopper" apparently wouldn't touch anything so contemporary and commonplace. My chrome multihanger bought from a closing dress shop remained bare.
What a wardrobe witch! She - or he - had never bothered with my growing collection of casual jeans and tops since arriving in Las Vegas, either. That made me realize my new locale had dropped the whole, mid-tier "working woman" wardrobe out of my life. But that was Vegas. You either tromped the hot streets in flip-flops, surfing shorts, and fanny packs, or you hit the hot spots in glitz and glamour.
I checked my email on the office/den computer one last time ... in fact, it was noonish, so Ric was outside tooting Dolly's horn and Quicksilver was adding the exclamation of a sharp bark to each toot. Guys just don't want to let a girl have fun.
Only ... I glimpsed several occasional but familiar email addys, fresh since the wee hours of this morning. Several bore the .sup extension for the hot new "supernatural" domain. I was hearing from infernobait, stone-donsnow, snowgasm224, cocainiac, snowkissedslut, all at the web address, kissedoffsnow.sup, and brimfulbabe and others from the original leading Snow fan site, snowkissedsluts.sup.
The subject lines were ominous. "It's OVER!" "Who wants JUST a FREAKING scarf except an Undead Elvis freak???" "Glad I kicked the KISS."
Ignoring the impatient outside clamor, I opened some of the messages, heart pounding.
My God, I was right. Snow was no longer closing his shows by lassoing his mosh-pit fans with a silk scarf and making them swoon from the multi-orgasms of the Brimstone Kiss.
How long had this been not going on?
That's what these women had been feverishly texting each other about. The emails were meant to update the older blog members. I saw my name mentioned, usually with gratitude that I'd convinced them to go "cold Kiss" and forget about hoping for a second round of bliss. It sounded like they'd all "gone electric," anyway.
I was shocked. Could I have been the last Brimstone Kissee? This was no time to do the math. I grabbed my duffel bag and hustled out to install it in Dolly's huge trunk.
Ric sat behind the convertible's big red-and-chrome steering wheel, clapping sarcastically. Quicksilver sat in the backseat, his big red tongue lolling out like he was getting heatstroke from waiting for me.
"All right," I said, jumping into the passenger seat. "Let's roll."
My sigh on takeoff blew off any more thought of Snow and all his works for now.
At first, I'd been surprised by how much I resisted leaving Vegas on its own for a week. Now that I'd put various bigwigs of my acquaintance into