The bright lights of Vegas in the distance seemed to mock our dark, desperate circumstances. I tried to take Ric’s mind off his injuries by keeping him talking.
“How did you know where I was?” I asked.
His head lay against the headrest as he watched the off-full moon race us through the blue-tinted glass roof panel.
He smiled, thinly.
“When I could check my cell phone, I found your message and was alarmed enough to go to your guest house on Nightwine’s premises.”
I smiled. Premises. He still talked law enforcement despite being a free agent now.
“It’s a cottage.”
“Whatever, it still has the Hound of Hell for an unwelcoming committee of one. He was howling and snarling and bounding at the front door. I was standing there about to get out a credit card to B and E into the place—”
“Break and enter? Could you?”
“Sure. This CinSim in black tie and tails who talks like a British butler shows up, only he’s American. He lets me in, then orders ‘Master Quicksilver’ back from the door and into the closest corner to be ‘a good bad dog.’ Then he tells me he’s ‘most concerned.’ Seems a cousin of his at the Inferno has a friend who sometimes hangs out at the Gehenna. He told him that ‘Mr. Cicereau and some of his less savory associates have taken our Miss Street for a ride’ out to someplace called the Starlight Lodge near the Paiute Golf Club on Spring Mountain, and that it would ‘behoove’ me to look into that ‘post haste.’ ”
“The butler dude was Godfrey, Nightwine’s major domo. He looks after everything around the estate, including me.”
What I don’t explain, because I can’t just yet, is how and why the CinSims have a secret communication network. Nor can I imagine why an Inferno CinSim would haunt the rival Gehenna, but I know who it was. That farewell butt pinch on being escorted from Cicereau’s office makes sense now. My really, really secret admirer and the CinSim tattletale had been Claude, the Invisible Man. Curiouser and curiouser.
“I’m glad you looked me up,” I told Ric, eyeing his face as the city streetlights swept it rhythmically.
His normally warm complexion was still a cold gray color as the Corvette slowed to the speed limit and lurched onto Sunset Road under my iffy in-town shifting, although the knack was coming back fast. I knew if I pulled up to an emergency room Ric would never forgive me and I didn’t know where any were in this town, anyway.
There was no place to go but home.
Wait! Shouldn’t that mantra be: there’s no place like home?
I finally punched in the security code to my private entry gate and drove into Nightwine’s ultra-secure estate. Ric could barely walk into my enchanted cottage, and I could barely hold him up. Like head wounds, hand wounds bleed profusely, and the flesh on Ric’s hands had to be hash.
Not one freaking grumpy helpful domestic dwarf was in sight. Things could be worse. I was alive when I wasn’t supposed to be, but the only person I deeply cared about was damaged beyond repair.
Ric swayed as he stood in the entry hall, dripping blood on the slate tiles. He was still shaky, more cream than coffee in his face color.
Before I could install him on the couch and call Nightwine to send a doctor, I heard a thump at one of the cottage’s windows. Next came a scrabbling sound, and then Quicksilver bounded into the main room, limping and looking ragged.
Not another victim to tend simultaneously!
Before I could even acknowledge his presence, Quick made one great arching leap toward Ric, knocking him onto his back on the floor. Ric lifted his crossed arms just in time to keep Quicksilver from lunging onto his neck, taking the brunt of the dog’s weight on his forearms.
Oh my God! Two wounded alpha males, still at each other’s throats! Just what they, and I, didn’t need!
“Get this monster off me, Del!” Ric yelled through gritted teeth. “This damn dog has never liked me and now that I’m down—I can’t use my hands to fight him off!”
I was crawling on top of Quick, grabbing for the dog’s massive shoulders, ordering him to leave Ric, to get off . . . ! Bad dog!
Quicksilver ignored me. He was too busy sniffing at Ric’s bloody hands, a true bloodhound, and whimpering at me in-between, licking my hands with soft wet swaths of tongue. One canine swipe managed to give Snow’s bracelet such a thorough slobbery bath that it migrated to my upper arm and coiled there like a scared snake.
I grabbed Quick’s collar; if I half-throttled him the dog would have to back off.
My fingers curled around the thick black leather, over the round silver medallions circling it like little moons. Before my eyes, those medallions, as liquid as quicksilver, changed shape, going slightly off circle. Like they were . . . waning. With the moon! Of course! Quick probably did have wolf in him. Which made him . . . what? Lethal?
Before I could get clear on what this might mean, the silver snake on my upper arm split into dozens of hair-fine chains and slithered back down to my wrist, binding my hands. Why? I didn’t know, but I sensed intent and urgency. Was this familiar mine, or Snow’s? For me or against me? It had never hurt me, although it had taunted me. Okay, so who am I to argue with a silver-tongued Devil?
“Ric! Give Quicksilver your hands.” I can’t believe I’m urging this.
“Are you crazy?”
“No. Maybe. Moon madness. Give Quicksilver your hands. That’s what he wants, what he needs.”
“Del, he wants to eat me!”
“He’s not that kind of wolf. He’s a wolfhound. Unless you’re a closet werewolf, let him at you.”
Ric, shocked, stared into my eyes. In that strange, mesmerizing moment, Quicksilver slipped my grip on his transformed collar and strained forward to lick a swath up Ric’s raised right hand.
Somehow moonlight had entered the room, maybe when Quicksilver had busted through his usual window. A silver aura blossomed in the air. The unearthly light made Ric’s bloodied white shirt fabric gleam again like chain mail. It made my bracelet of many chains lightning-bolt bright. It made the off-round metal moons on Quicksilver’s collar glow in the semi-dark.
I heard a ghastly searing sound of flesh melting. No! What have I done? What have I permitted to be done?
Ric’s hands burned white-hot under the passage of Quicksilver’s fire-red tongue. He screamed, despite himself and probably a lot of training.
My tears must have looked silver as they sizzled down my face. I screamed too.
The only one who didn’t scream was Quicksilver. He was busy licking Ric’s hand, as dogs will.
Even shouts of pain and dismay were not enough to express our human anguish at this ignorant assault. The gruesome dog-lapping sound stopped as the silver effusion of moonlight faded. I gazed at Ric’s mutilated hands, cringing. One palm gleamed with saliva where Quicksilver had licked. The skin was . . . fresh, unbloodied. Whole.
Ric saw where I was looking, at what I had seen.
He eyed Quicksilver’s muzzle, as big as a young bear’s, all white fangs and overheated red tongue, all grin that can be either canine friendliness or canine threat.
Ric bit down hard on his lower lip and nodded.
The moments of uncertainty were over. Time was moving again. The minute frozen in a net of quicksilver slipped into a new minute.
I sat back on my heels, exhausted by fear and wonder, to watch Quicksilver lick Ric’s wounds clean, stroke by stroke, banishing bloody silk and shredded flesh, leaving healed skin behind.
“Dogs lick their wounds,” I told Ric, I told me, told the damn dog who knew better than both of us combined what had happened here. Maybe it wasn’t any of us, but the enchanted cottage. Then there was the rational explanation, and I’m sticking to it. “There’s a bacteria-banishing element in dog saliva. It works in the wild.”
“On dogs and wolves,” Ric pointed out.
The skepticism told me his hands were feeling better.
“Maybe you’ve got some canine DNA.”
“No.” Ric sat up, pushing Quicksilver back on his haunches. Dogs always overdo it. Ric wiped his hands on his shirttails. They came away clean, whole, perfect.
“Ick! Poison dog lips!” I said, quoting Lucy from the
Charlie Brown strip for comic relief. Charles Schulz
was with us again. The Kennedy Center Awards now
reanimated a “national cultural treasure” each year as
well as honoring those in their first lives.
“Right.” Ric was watching Quicksilver wash his own hairy body with an amazingly large, supple tongue, especially the private area.
I moved to help Ric up. Instead, he pulled me down against him on the floor for a long, penetrating kiss. He wasn’t too shabby in the tongue department either.
I heard a faint, muffled growl.
“Ric. The dog might be . . . um, you know. Jealous.”
Ric’s hands on me were strong and certain. “He doesn’t like this, I don’t like his public grooming habits. He’ll just have to get used to it.”
“Maybe you’ll have to get used to each other.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Ric’s voice had become a soft, possessive growl.
I heard the click of Quicksilver’s nails fade and then thump as he leaped out of his doggie door. This scene was obviously way too mushy for a wolfhound to witness.
Ric ran his hands down my arms, relishing their flexibility and strength as much as the feel of me. That had to stop. Right here, right now. I took hold of his wrists.
“You need to rest those hands. Recover.”
“They’re fine now. I’m fine.”
I didn’t answer, just pushed his wrists to the floor above his head and held them there.
He stilled beneath me, his eyes questioning.
“Rest,” I said. It was an order. I must have developed this irresistibly firm bedside manner since my brief stint as a nurse.
“I’m fine, Del. No one laid a finger on me when I showed up with the reinforcements. My hands only caught it from holding onto a whirligig of barbed wire for so long.”
“Are you sure you’re fine? Everywhere? I’ll have to see. Just don’t move.”
I felt a triumphant surge of life restored in every cell. I felt strong and alive. I felt . . . very hot. I had to have something right now, and I knew what it was. And according to Ric, it was fine.
I rolled over to wriggle out of my black stretch leggings and pull out the precious Cicereau photo saved on the small flash drive, which had stayed put and come through everything without any visible damage. Spandex rocks!
I rolled back over to straddle Ric’s hips and unclasped his belt, unhooked his pants, ripped down the zipper, pushed all that aside, and pulled what I wanted through the slit in his silken shorts. It was still in that delicious state of becoming all that it could be, but I was far from through.
I lay atop him and stopped whatever he’d been about to say or do with a fingertip to his lips. Despite all he’d been through, only his top shirt button was undone. I undid another two and put my left hand over his heart. My right hand pushed the shirt collar aside until I could see the faint blue bruise at the side of his throat. When I’d exposed it, his heart rate quickened.
“Tell me about this,” I whispered, stroking it with my forefinger.
“It’s a love bite. You ought to know. You did it the first day you met me, mi tigre hembra.”
Calling me “tigress” was only inciting me tooth and nail. “Why is it such a turn-on for you, mi hombre?”
“Lord, Del, you were there, in the park when that bolt of sheer sex coursed through us. You didn’t even remember turning your head into me and biting my throat. That made me come. No woman’s ever done that, given me an orgasm that way.”
“I must be pretty potent.” I ran a fingernail over the mark and felt his heart leap against the palm of my hand. Something else leapt against me.
“Del—” His voice and breath were ragged.
My own pulses thundered to feel him ready but pinned beneath me. But he kept his arms and hands still, giving me the lead I’d asked for. Demanded.
“We know now it was earth magic,” he said, “borrowed lust, but it worked to bond us.”
“No woman has ever bitten you in passion before? Anybody or anything else I should know about?”
He smiled slowly, flirting in foreplay. “I said no woman had ever bitten me there before.”
I let my fingernail trail hard over “there.” His heart rate doubled again, fluttering like a caged hawk in my hand.
“Who has then?”
“Are you jealous?”
“Madly. I want to know why you want what you do, so I can give it to you better.”
His face sobered. No more teasing evasion. I took my finger from his throat, my hand from his heart, kissed the flutter, and laid my head on his chest to hear the deeper hollow thud of his heart through his body.
“I was a boy,” Ric whispered finally, though we were alone and Nightwine’s devices were disabled and no one else could overhear. He was speaking from a place he’d never wanted to go back to. I knew that place well.
“In Mexico. Dirt-poor Mexican desert. Still, there were cattle, burros, goats, and peasants to try to live off the bitter land. I was . . . an orphan, like you. I slept with the burros at night. I used to see visions of Our Lady of Guadalupe sometimes. I could even smell the roses that are her sign. She comforted me like a mother come to give her son a goodnight kiss.
“I never could remember such a . . . legendary thing as a kiss. I grew up among evil men and brutalized animals. But I was on the fringe of manhood, maybe twelve. One night the burros were restless. I slept and dreamed and something came to me and kissed me on the neck. My first kiss. It was long and sweet and I sensed it in my sleep and didn’t ever want to wake up. When I did, my neck and throat ached. I was glad to feel that, to prolong the mother’s kiss I longed for. I touched the place, the site of the miracle, of the Virgin’s compassion, smelling roses. My fingers came away wet with my own blood.”
I’d heard this with tears welling behind my eyes—who would dream that Ric Montoya’s successful, attractive present was built upon such a barren, hurtful, lonely past? His last sentence chilled my soul, though, and even my surging libido.
I jerked my head up to face him. “You’d been visited by a vampire!”
My heart almost stopped. No! Once vampire-bitten, a human was forever susceptible to the breed’s spell. It couldn’t have been worse if he’d told me he had cancer.
He nodded, and lifted an arm to catch my first falling tear on a fingertip. “Yes, Delilah.” He smiled tenderly. “But it was a vampire bat.”
“A real bat?” What did that mean? Was that better or worse? “Are you sure it was the real thing?”
“In the Chihuahua desert? What else? It was a bat, the same blood-sucking parasite that was named after real vampires, a Mexican bat. There are millions of them. I was mistaken for a burro, probably because my hair was uncut and covered my neck.”
“Then you’re not . . . infected by an undead human vampire bite?”
“No.” He stirred under me, lifted his hips and my weight with the move, the gesture saying sexy things again.
“No. But the next night I was visited by a vision of a dancing girl with writhing hips and naked breasts and she kissed me on the neck in that very same spot, and I had become a man.”
I got it. That had been his first turn-on. Wet dream. Weird maybe, but harmless, right? And my heart ached for the lonely boy in the desert, sleeping with donkeys and goats. There must be more, much more, to Ric’s story, but this whispered confession had soothed my immediate panic.
He watched me accept that and put his arm back down. I wriggled up his body and placed my hand on his heart again. The rate had quieted nicely and he was half-soft between my legs again. If pseudo-vampire dancing girls and vampire bats did it for him, I was ready to throw myself into the part.
I breathed hotly on his neck, my hand gauging his pulse rate. I ran the tip of my tongue over the bruised spot, and then my lips. My many kisses added up to a month of goodnight visitations. He was breathing hard and his heart was racing, boy and man ready for so much more. So I bore down hard and sucked a series of moans out of him, then teased his skin with my teeth. I was a very bad batgirl.
“Delilah!”
I sat up and pushed him into me and tore my Spandex top over my head. Luckily I was wearing a bra I’d bought during my post-Sunset Park shopping spree. I have to admit that Irma’s taste has always been way sleazier than mine, and she’d been in firm control that day. Ric’s hands twitched, but remained out of play. I was in control now, in control of the vertical. I moved up and down slowly, my body swallowing that tantalizing length again and again, rocking and rolling.
Ric was gasping. “You’ve never been so aggressive before, mi tigre hembra.”
“I’ve never almost lost you before.”
“It was worth it, then. We’ll have to do that again,” he panted, caught between a moan and a laugh.
“I’ll have to do this again too.”
I could feel him on the brink of explosion; I collapsed down upon him, sinking my teeth hard into the vampire bat spot. My spot.
We came together, I screaming, Ric adding an inciting basso of satisfaction to the clan vocalizations. Los Lobos had seen to it there’d always be a call of the wild in our encounters.
I pushed myself back up finally, looking down at him. And he finally moved his arms, his hands on my hips, his fingers toying with the thin sterling silver hip-hung chain I wore for him under everything, impaling me gently down deep onto him one last time. For now.
Sweat evaporated slowly and sweetly on our bodies. Ric’s face gleamed like a golden idol’s in the funky old-fashioned cottage lamplight. I could feel him softening in me, a sensation as engaging as a thick milk chocolate bar melting in your mouth.
Ric reached a hand up to brush my hair off my damp neck. “Te amo,” he said softly.
I’d never said, “I love you” to another person, only to Achilles.
And I’d never yet said it to Quicksilver, although I did.
I’d always had a mental block about saying it and had never had anyone much worth saying it to, except for the occasional transient stranger in my life who might have done me a small, unexpected kindness, and saying that would have been overkill, although I did silently love him or her for it.
Ric had done far more for me than that, but I still had a block about saying the words now. I love you.
“Te amo,” I heard myself telling Ric, smiling. In Spanish the words came much more easily. Te amo, te amo, te amo, I thought.
We stayed there, locked together, smiling at each other for a long time.
Like gourmet coffee and chocolate, it was almost better than sex.