"SIX hundred years," Ric mused as we returned to the now-welcome heat outside and our sizzling cars. "Where do you want to go for lunch?"
"Someplace where they don't serve six-hundred-year-old food."
He suggested we stop at a deli en route to Sunset Road and picnic in the park; then Dolly and I would be the next thing to home.
By the time we settled under the concrete awning on the concrete picnic table, with our feet resting on the attached benches, it was well past high noon and the joggers were long gone. We'd laid our jackets aside, and probably looked like a couple of office workers on a lunch break.
If anyone had overheard us, they would have gotten over that assumption.
"A six-hundred-year-old male adolescent," I said between munching on low-fat turkey and rye. "Indubitably a vampire, Dr. Van Helsing."
Ric nodded. "We've seen a few recent converts to the clan in Vegas, but not any established vamps. What about Kansas?"
"Same thing. Half-blood vamps, usually punk kids and even some fake ones."
"Some humans like to mimic the vampire lifestyle. Artificial fangs and carotid artery cocktails."
"Icky."
Ric drank from the longneck Dos Equis at his side. He'd bought a six-pack, so I had my own and some to spare.
"If it's consensual all around, though," he said, "there's nothing traditional law enforcement can do." His pupils darkened. "And you seem to like keeping my vampire bat bite site active. Is that 'icky?'"
"Let me see." I slipped my fingers under his shirt collar on the left side of his neck. Stroked softly along the thin silk shirt fabric. Ric's eyes closed and his lips parted. I moved my hand down to feel his pounding heartbeat and strum his hard nipple with my fingernail.
"Delilah," he said. I think that was all he was capable of saying at the moment.
"I've got some buttons I can discreetly push wherever we are. You bet I like that, Señor Montoya."
He leaned close to kiss the taste of the beer from my mouth.
"I've got my weird buttons too," I pointed out. "But there's more than wannabe vamps going on. Look at the half-weres who stay in a semi-human wolf state permanently. It's like someone's been messing with the traditional mythology."
"Someone has been messing with all traditional mythologies."
"What Hector Nightwine calls the Immortality Mob," I suggested.
"Catchy name, but I doubt it's just one entity. A lot of big corporate money is invested in making Vegas the most hip and future-forward place on the planet. But it's hard to keep up nowadays, with new 'manifestations' turning up all over the globe."
"Keeping up with the Joneses could mean playing ring-around-the-world."
"You mean finding and claiming supernaturals nowadays is like the Space Race way back when: an international competition that's part politics and part profit? Cool idea, Del, but why would the appearance of the unhumans be anything more orchestrated than them popping up from pockets of superstition here and there?"
"I'm serious, Ric. I looked this up once as part of my job reporting the paranormal beat in Kansas. The first reports of supernaturals appearing followed the path of midnight through all the time zones. Midnight when the second millennium started."
"That's an odd thing to check on."
"Watching the dot-of-midnight celebrations progress all over the globe on TV was the key night of my pre-teen life."
"I thought I was the key night of your life."
"Well, now. But back then I was only eleven. Seeing the global celebrations and feeling a sense of world unity made me decide to be one of those reporters holding a microphone, spreading the good news."
Ric, smiling, tucked my hair behind one ear. Nobody had ever played with my hair in my life. Maybe that was my vampire bat bite.
"And you did indeed get to hold a mike back in Kansas. Why'd you give up your TV reporter job?"
Explaining about Lilith's CSI cameo role as a corpse was too complicated a subject for our flirtatious picnic. Besides, if Ric knew that my "twin" Lilith made me a universal object of abduction, or worse, he'd get over-protective and never want me running around town solo.
"Oh, one of those phony vamps, the anchorman, stole my paranormal news beat. Then his weather witch girlfriend blew away my rented bungalow. I figured I needed another scene."
"And Hector Nightwine ended up your landlord, how?"
"He can use a good reporter. CSI is the biggest TV franchise in the world. He needs case ideas."
"So you marched in there and talked him into a job."
"Sort of. Quicksilver marched in there with me."
"And the cottage?"
"Rental housing is sky high in Vegas and what place would take a hundred-and-fifty-pound dog?"
"He's that big?"
"He's my big bad wolf, you better believe it."
Ric frowned. "Possessive too." He leaned in to kiss behind the ear he had bared. "But you still need very close watching by me," he murmured. "And Nightwine wants you to find out who both of the corpses are?"
Nightwine and someone else even creepier.
"Right," I said. "I've suddenly got this weird ability to see the girl victim whole and alive in my cottage mirror, just like I suddenly got a weird ability to get it on in the park with a hot guy with a weird ability to dowse for the dead. So I now know she's Cicereau's daughter. Or was sixty-some years ago."
"Whoa!" Ric drew back, all business. "Cicereau's daughter. That's big news."
"I only confirmed it when I sneaked an old photo off his office computer. Then I got caught."
"That's how you ended up at his mountain lodge as werewolf pack bait. Jesus, Del! If that CinSim butler of Nightwine's hadn't tipped me off to where you were, you'd be buried out there. I need to nail the identity of the dead Sunset Park guy fast. You'll get the Cicereau syndicate on your tail any day now for knowing his daughter is one of the two corpses. Once the police can announce both identities, it's out in the open and you won't be worth going after any more."
He gave me a steamy look. "You won't be worth going after in that way."
I leaned into his shoulder. He buried his mouth in my hair.
"Sorry to be slow on the uptake, Del. I didn't have much time right after that night to think about how and why, only what."
"I know." I took his hands in mine. They'd been barbed-wire-torn raw meat after he'd used the razor-sharp fencing material to dowse for the dead beneath Cicereau's hideaway. "How did you actually raise zombies, instead of just locating corpses?"
"As I mentioned-blood. My blood. You have to shed a bit of blood to raise rather than find the dead. At least I do. I don't do that anymore if I can help it. I raised enough zombie slaves for those vile coyotes who'd owned me since I was four years old. I'd sworn never to do it again."
I cringed to hear this again, Ric's determination to never raise zombies for anyone's purpose, vile or even merely using them as curiosities. I'd thought growing up in group homes was rough. Now, to save me, Ric had revisited his years of childhood enslavement by smugglers-coyotes-and done the one thing he'd sworn off forever. I had to change the mood.
"Okay, hombre," I said, reaching under his tie to undo a button of his shirt. "Tell me how the poor orphan Mexican desert boy learned to be so slick and sexy."
I'd distracted him, as I'd hoped.