in the Emerald Tunnel.
Snow continued playing tour guide.
"You must be dying to know what I'm doing here. Please sit, Delilah, and prepare to observe the wonder of the century."
I placed my long-stemmed glass in the chair's builtin beverage holder and arranged myself. My satin gown seemed to be made of green linguini, it draped so easily over me and the chair, but when I leaned back I felt a chill. The leather was room temperature and cool. My back was bare from tailbone up as the leather accepted the pressure of my skin. My naturally pale, unblemished skin.
If I'd been asked to lie on a reclining chair of thorns I couldn't have been more pained.
Seeing Snow again had focused my mind on the whip strikes I'd transferred to him from Ric. Were they still raw? In an ordinary human being, they surely would be.
No matter how luxe and silken the surroundings, that unspoken fear rubbed my expectations raw. The cushy ambiance prickled me all the more as I pictured that supernaturally white skin beneath the silk shirt festered and scabbing and feverish, no matter how much Snow always mastered cool.
Or ... not. That was the bed of nails he had me on, constructed from my too-vivid imagination and my guilt.
"I don't understand why you're here," I blurted.
He'd taken his own chair, sitting forward as taller men will, leaning his forearms on his knees, pure white hands loosely laced together, not putting his back flat against the leather back. Was he trying to make me think the worst?
A reporter knows only to push. I eyed my wristwatch, squinting at a hard-to-read greenish abalone-shell dial now encrusted with green garnets. I assumed emeralds would not be bestowed on the wives of even gambling whales.
"What," I asked, "is Vegas impresario Christophe doing at a remote casino operation like Emerald City in Wichita? Not even you can jet back to Vegas in time for your seven p.m. show," I pointed out. "Unless you have dragon wings."
His pale lips split in a smile that revealed yet whiter teeth. "Can you have caught me out in a trade secret, Delilah?"
"You're a shape-shifting dragon?"
I dearly hoped so. That would make him a major new supernatural on the Millennium Revelation map and way too inhuman - and huge - for me to worry about having hurt.
That was the crazy part. I was worried I'd hurt the impervious Snow when he probably had the power to destroy me six times over with a wave of his little finger. I looked closely. That milk-white digit now flaunted a peridot-set green-gold ring.
Apparently he hadn't escaped the Emerald City Green Room's do-over as thoroughly as he'd thought.
Snow set his white riverboat gambler's hat on the empty chair seat next to him. He tilted back his profile and throat and ran his fingers through his tied-back hair, releasing it to his shoulders, smiling at the blank screen straight ahead.
I charged ahead. "You can't convince me you'd be interested in investing in some over-the-rainbow casino property in Wichita, Kansas."
"Oh, but I am." He finally sat back and directed the sunglasses' blind gaze my way. "And, since you've turned up at this opportune moment, I'm here to show you a movie."
What is it with these guys? Irma crabbed. First Ric and now Snow. We're lounging around here like blond bombshell Jean Harlow and Mr. Rock Star Hottie wants to watch a movie with us? Your chances of even copping us another hickey here are zero, baby.
I sipped the slightly bitter taste of green anise in the absinthe, glad Irma was right. This was a rare retro moment in La-la Land. Private screening. Major Red Carpet slinky gown. Retro cocktail. I glanced again at Snow. Irma was right again. That bleached Southern Comfort, Rhett Butler outfit didn't do him a disservice.
Tomorrow is another day, baby, I told Irma.
Then "Rhett" hit the twentieth century's greatest contribution to humanity, the remote control. The minute he did, reels of a silent black-and-white film began flickering on the screen, and my pulse started doing the jitterbug.
I sat forward, no longer worried about exposing my uneasily naked back to Snow, Rhett, or whoever. The scenes and figures I watched were pretty jitterbuggy too. That's the way silent films were seen in the early days, like 1927, in that herky-jerky motion.
Immediately, I recognized the astonishing, luminous images of an imagined ultramodern city combining the space opera scenery of Flash Gordon with the despair of a union movement for robotic workers.
Some would say