I went back to Vilma Brazil.
I sure as heck wasn’t going back to Howard Hughes, or what was left of him.
It was 4:00 P.M. and she was knocking back a Bacardi Breezer in the dressing room.
“Hey, kid! You made it out in one pretty unslavered-over piece. How is old Howie? He was really hot for me once, you know. He was gonna make me a star.”
“He was gonna make any girl a star. He’s living dead in Las Vegas and glad of it. What can I say?”
Vilma shook her peroxided fright wig. “He used to be quite the dude. Slicked-back black hair. Pencil-thin mustache. But he was always a tad strange. Hey, so was I.”
“Weren’t we all?”
“She was a werewolf princess, you said.”
I nodded at Vilma’s conclusion. The girl in that photograph, the girl in the mirror, had been just that: young, innocent, tender, and supernaturally gifted. Her daddy’s pride and joy. And his biggest disappointment in her choice of mates. She had been playing Juliet to some unknown teen vampire’s Romeo.
Neither of their houses would have permitted such a union, or could have permitted them to live after making such a union. Add a little Othello and Desdemona to the mix. Murderous possessiveness. By fathers of their children, by clans of their very different lifeblood.
“Who was the head of the vampire syndicate back in the forties when Las Vegas was busy being born and mortal mob bosses thought they’d rule the roost?” I asked Vilma.
“Only one, not heard of since. He was going to build the most stupendous hotel-casino in Las Vegas before the vampires lost the war. He was going to call it—”
“The Inferno.” I knew the answer as I said it. The Inferno had fallen only to rise like a phoenix eighty years later. How much time was that to a vampire? The blink of an undead eye.
Vilma lifted a drawn-on eyebrow almost to her thinning hairline in recognition of my lucky strike.
“Yeah. I remember now. He was going to name it the Styx or something hellish. The vampire crew was from the house of . . . it’s been so long. House of Wrathescu. The vampire king was Wilhelm XII. He has not been heard of since but may only taking a vampire nap, as we humans would reckon it.”
“He was Juliet’s dream lover?”
“He was no one’s dream unless you wanted a nightmare. You’ve seen what form of eternal life Howard won. No, this Wilhelm was old and corrupt. Not the stuff of films or Goth girls’ romantic dreams. But I recall that he had a son of the spirit, one bright and blazing comet that he had bitten into the clan. A toothsome young vampire.”
“His name?”
“Something vaguely and tantalizingly Christian. A prince among vampires. Foreign, from the land where werewolves were put to torture and the test as nowhere else. Kind of funny that a vampire-werewolf romance would end the Werewolf-Vampire War here in Vegas. I don’t know the details. Howard would.”
My fingernails were biting into my palms until my blood and dread seemed to well up together to my brain.
“And the name of this vampire prince?”
“Christopher,” Vilma said. “I heard talk about that. Some humans considered the name part blasphemy, part undead hubris. Christopher is the saint said to have carried the Christ child safely across a river. The vampire named Christopher was said to carry away Christian maidens. No girl or woman, it is said, could resist him. So you get the poor little rich werewolf girl and her bitter end. Yet you say a vampire died beside her? Can’t believe that would be our pretty boy.”
Dead bodies were dead bodies. Even supers, when killed by the proper means, dissolved into mere bones and dust like mortals. Who knew for sure just what these two dead lovers had been? Who knew who or what they would have become had they not been killed?
Maybe whoever had killed them had known, or guessed.