role in the band so softly that I turned my head to hear it even as he stepped closer.
Pride made me hold my ground.
By turning my head aside, I'd put us into a perfect tango position, tightly together but facing in opposite directions.
I tried to insert my hands between us, between his chest and mine, to push him off.
Who are you kidding, kid? Irma was nattering nervously in my head. This guy's got the ripped body of that giant white marble statue of David at Caesar's Palace. That Michelangelo sure knew how to do guys. Wink. Who knew an Old Testament sheep boy could be so hunky? What else here of interest do you think might be giant?
Shut up, I ordered her. I can't think.
That's the point, baby. ... Irma's voice faded.
I really did need to think, to put all sorts of incidents and innuendos in my life together. Item: the lightningstrike scars I'd seen on Snow's chest in his performance catsuit. Item: the new star-shaped scar on Ric's neck that so needed my attention.
This wasn't just about sex, but life and death, which made sense. Risk. Love. Hate. Hope. I was beginning to put all the mysteries within an enigma together and started to say it aloud, step by step, to Snow, of all people.
"The Brimstone Kiss became the Resurrection Kiss in the Hell underneath the Karnak," I told him, my voice more breathless than I liked, catching the frantic rhythm of Irma's heated running internal commentary.
"I was there," he reminded me. "I warned you."
"It became something else in the hotel bridal suite you so ironically donated as Ric's recovery room."
"When I became your proxy whipping boy, you mean?"
I wet my lips, nervous and ashamed. I instantly knew the moment he'd seen that gesture of weakness, because he pulled me closer, forcing contact, forcing confession.
"I didn't want you as a whipping boy," I told him hotly. "I never would have tolerated owing you for that. I was simply healing Ric."
My self-defense sounded lame.
"So Grizelle reported," Snow said, "when her fury permitted her human speech after it was all over."
"Did you call her off me?"
"Why would I do that?"
"You wanted to save your revenge for yourself?"
"Or I just wanted to save you ... for myself."
I was not going there. "Grizelle didn't tell you how I healed Ric?"
In the extended silence, I saw there was something I knew and he didn't.
Finally!
My hands stopped fighting his custody. Now I knew what buttons to push where. His Brimstone Kiss had affected me and mine beyond belief. For good or ill? I didn't know yet. Could I return the "favor"? Did remnants of his Brimstone Kiss still linger on my lips? Was he as vulnerable to me as I was to him? Would he hate that as much as I had? A coward wouldn't want to know.
I did.
"Here's how I heal, and in your case, hurt," I said, feeling breathlessly bold.
My rogue fingers slipped the middle mother-of-pearl buttons on his shirt open. So easy with silk. Almost an "easy O." No big surprise, except I could feel a tiny tremor of shock as my warm fingers touched Snow's supercool flesh. His or my shock, I didn't know. Or care.
I leaned away to - why the hell not? - wrench the shirt open. Snow's strong hands at my back kept me from over-balancing, accommodating my attack. He would.
"Delilah, do you know what you're doing?" he asked. Softly.
"Yes. Do you? I don't think so."
Having bared the center of his albino chest, I stared at the lightning bolt scar tissue, shiny and silver, meeting from all four corners of his torso at the breastbone above those abs of stone and below those pecs of marble.
His white leather performance catsuits cut to the navel flaunted these anti-ink tattoos onstage for all and anyone to see. Who or what had inflicted them. Real lightning? A fire? Torture, even? Fiery torture?
"A great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch." He had just quoted an ancient mystic to me. Was the great star not just Cocaine of the Seven Deadly Sins rock band, but a true falling angel? Even Lucifer himself, which means "light"? And the "wormwood" was regret for all that was lost? Heaven exchanged for the Inferno Hotel and the Nine Circles of Dante's Hell beneath it?
I knew what I needed to do. I brushed my parted lips over the solid center where the lightning-strike scars met, over his heart, if he had one, and then repeated the