Meet Me, Delilah Street

EVERYONE HAS FAMILY issues, but my issues are that I don't have any family. My fresh new business card reads Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, but my old personal card could have read Delilah Street, Unadoptable Orphan.

I was supposedly named after the street where I was found abandoned as an infant in Wichita, Kansas. (I guess I should just thank God and DC Comics it wasn't Lois Lane.) I've googled and groggled (the drinking person's search engine) the World Wide Web for Delilah Streets and not a single bloody one of them shows up in Kansas.

Whoever my forebears are, they gave me the Black Irish, Snow White coloring that is catnip to vampires: corpse-pale skin and dead-of-night-black hair. By age twelve I was fighting off aspiring juvie rapists with retractable fangs and body odor that mixed blood, sweat, and semen. Really made me enjoy being a girl.

My growing-up years of group homes in Wichita are history now that I'm twenty-four and on my own. I had a good job reporting the paranormal beat for WTCH-TV in Kansas -until a jealous weather witch forecaster forced me out.

Now I'm a freelance investigator in wicked, mysterious post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas. Vegas was wicked, of course, long before the turn of the twenty-first century brought all the bogeymen and -women of myth and legends out of the closet and into human lives and society. Now, in 2013, Vegas is crawling with vamps and half-weres and all-werewolf mobs and celebrity zombies and who knows what else.

My ambitions are simple.

One, staying alive. (Being turned into an immortal vampire doesn't count.)

Two, being able to make love in the missionary position without having panic attacks. (Whoever thought someone would aim for the missionary position?) Position hadn't been an issue until recently and neither had sex. I've finally found a man I want to make love with, ex-FBI guy Ricardo Montoya-aka the Cadaver Kid. He's tall, dark, handsome, Hispanic, and my brand-new horizontal ambition. He has my back-and my front-at every opportunity.

And three, tracking down "Lilith Quince"-my spitting image-to find out if she is a twin, double, clone, or simulacrum. Or if she is even alive. Seeing her/me being autopsied on Crime Scene Instincts V: Las Vegas one rerun-TV night in Wichita brought me to Sin City in the first place.

Lucky me, Lilith became the most desirable corpse ever featured on the internationally franchised show. I knew Millennium Revelation pop culture and taste tended toward the dark-now I know how dark.

When the CSI cameras showed a discreet maggot camping out in a nostril that held a tiny blue topaz stud like my very own, Lilith's corpse was dubbed "Maggie" and a fantasy franchise was born. Maggie is the It Girl of 2013: Maggie dolls and merchandise are hot and so are bootleg Maggie films, outtakes, and my hide, if anyone could snag it-dead or alive. One werewolf mobster almost did already.

At least ambition number four is now a done deal: identifying the embracing skeletons Ric and I discovered in Vegas's Sunset Park just after I hit town and just before the town hit me back, hard.

I discovered more than Ric and corpses in Sunset Park. I found an ally who has heavenly blue eyes and is seriously gray and hairy. That's my dog, Quicksilver. He's a wolfhound-wolf cross I saved from death at the pound. He returns the favor with fang, claw, and warm, paranormally talented tongue.

(I have a soft spot for dogs-especially since Achilles, my valiant little Lhasa apso in Wichita, died from blood poisoning after biting a vampire who was trying to bite me. Achilles' ashes rest in a dragon-decorated jar on my mantel, but I haven't given up the ghost on him.)

That mantel is located in the Enchanted Cottage on the Hector Nightwine estate. Hector rents it to me cheap because, as producer of the many worldwide CSI franchises, he's presumably guilty of offing my possible twin on national TV.

When Hector's CSI show made Lilith Quince into a macabre international sex symbol, he inadvertently made me, Delilah Street, a wanted woman. Not for myself alone, mind you, but for the naked and dead image of another woman, who may not be dead.

Hector doesn't have a conscience, just a profit motive. He's banking on my finding Lilith or becoming her for his enduring financial benefit.

The only thing Hector and I have in common is loving old black-and-white films. The Enchanted Cottage is based on a setting from a 1945 movie. A shy-to-the-point-of-invisible staff of who-knows-what supernaturals run the place, and I suspect it's supplied with the wicked stepmother's mirror from Snow White. Although it's been mum with me so far, I do see dead people in it.

The most complicated beings in my brave new world are the CinSims. Cinema Simulacrums are created when fresh zombie bodies illegally imported from Mexico are blended with classic black-and-white film characters. The resulting "live" personas are wholly owned entertainment entities leased to various Vegas enterprises.

Hector and Ric blame the Immortality Mob for the brisk business in zombie CinSims, but can't prove it. Hector wants to wrest the CinSims from the mob's control into his. Ric aches to stop the traffic in illegally imported zombies. It's personal-he was forced to work in the trade as a child.

I'd like to help them both out, and not just because I'm a former investigative reporter crusading against human and inhuman exploitation. My own freedom is on the line from several merciless and downright repellent factions trying to make life after the Millennium Revelation literal Hell.

Luckily, I have some new, off-the-chart abilities simmering myself, most involving silver-from the silver nitrate in black-and-white films to sterling silver to mirrors and reflective surfaces in general.

Which reminds me of one more sorta sidekick: a freaky shape-changing lock of hair from the albino rock star who owns the Inferno Hotel. The guy goes by three names: Christophe for business, Cocaine when fronting his Seven Deadly Sins rock band, and Snow to his intimates. He seems to consider me one of them, but no way do I want to be.

While thinking of my lost Achilles, I made the mistake of touching that long white lock of Snow's hair. The damn thing became a sterling silver familiar no jeweler's saw or torch can remove from my body. Since it transforms into different pieces of often-protective jewelry, it's handy at times. I consider it a variety of talisman-cum-leech.

That attitude sums up my issues with the rock star-hotelier, who enslaves groupies with a one-time mosh pit "Brimstone Kiss."

Then I discovered why those postconcert kisses are so bloody irresistible... and Snow forced me to submit to his soul-stealing smooch in exchange for his help in saving Ric from being vamped to death. This kiss-off stand-off between us is not over.

I've been called a "silver medium," but I don't aim to be medium at anything. I won't do things halfway. I intend to expose every dirty supernatural secret in Las Vegas, if necessary, to find out who I really am, and who's been bad and who's been good in my new Millennium Revelation neighborhood.

Chapter One

DEAD TIRED, I headed "home" in the early evening Las Vegas Strip traffic. Instead of sugarplums-or even three cherries in a slot machine window-other, far less delightful, images danced in my head.

I was only two days of sleep deprivation past an endless night fighting Vegas's hidden ancient Egyptian underworld of bloodthirsty supernaturals. My cup of nightmares was sure to runneth over for weeks with visions of zombie mummies, hyena carcasses, and vampires in eyeliner.

Even worse would be visual reruns of Ric chained to a dungeon wall under the Karnak Hotel, victim of a vicious suck-fest. That was the ancient Egyptian vampire empire's version of waterboarding as they sought the secret of his ability to raise the dead.

Now my investigative partner was out of the Karnak 's supernaturally infested bowels and alive, barely, in a high-rise suite at the rival Inferno Hotel. In an hour, Ricardo Montoya had gone from the pit of Hell to the heavens, or the Vegas version of both.

Following Ric's and my separate life-threatening investigations at the Karnak, I was alive but iffy on the matter of my soul and sanity. Ric was in a coma-possibly more dead than alive-and possibly possessed of a more compromised soul than I was.

I'd been too frantic to do anything but hover over Ric for hours and was finally heading home under doctor's orders to "freshen up" before returning to his comatose side.

Good advice.

Getting myself together enough to drive my big black '56 Caddy, Dolly, through brassy Vegas Strip traffic forced me to focus. My heart felt a faint ping of security when the Nightwine estate's iron side gates opened automatically to admit us.

After parking Dolly near the carriage house, I could hardly wait to enter my soothing rental digs and start to feel human again. In a city built on flash and flesh, unhuman seemed the dominant life, or death, form.

I headed for the Enchanted Cottage, then stopped. Its Hobbity front door formed a gray wooden frame for something black-and-white and silver all over that stood before it, blocking my way. Yes, this "something" was also "someone" I welcomed seeing. My favorite CinSim.

"Godfrey!" My voice quivered with mingled grief and joy.

"My dear Miss Street," he began in the brisk tones of that fine actor, William Powell, playing the ultra-competent My Man Godfrey in the 1936 romantic comedy film classic. "How splendid to see you alive and well and back on the premises."

Godfrey was my landlord's butler and looked more than double my age. He was actually three or four times it, depending whether you counted birth dates or film dates. Godfrey was as formal as an English tea caddy, but he'd been my first real friend in Las Vegas. That he was a Silver Screen movie image imposed on a zombie body "canvas" made him no less dear to me.

"Where is our Master Quicksilver?" he asked, worried and glancing behind me.

That's what an old-school butler like Godfrey called my adopted hundred-and-fifty-pound dog: "Master Quicksilver." Godfrey honored my canine companion by addressing him as he would a young male human. Quicksilver indeed had awesome qualities above and beyond the ordinary dog.

Godfrey's always amusing formality helped me focus even more. Stiff upper lip and all. Right.

"Quick's fine, Godfrey. I left him guarding Ric at the Inferno."

"Ah." Godfrey's pencil-thin black mustache twitched ever so slightly with sympathy. "I understand Mr. Montoya is secure and doing well in Christophe's magnificent establishment."

I noticed Godfrey hadn't described Ric as he had me, "alive and well."

"How do you know what's... happened?" I asked.

"Word gets out," he murmured, as discreet as ever.

"'Word.'" My stress-dulled mind grabbed that one piece of mental flotsam and clung to it.

APPARENTLY, "WORD" HAD been thorough enough to make everyone I knew uncomfortable with the "alive" designation for Ric's current state.

That kicked me back into reliving the nightmare of Ric's rescue. I saw our war party retreating quickly through a trail of downed Egyptian warriors, attack mummies, and hyenas as the underground River Nile became one of the rivers of Hell flowing beneath Snow's Inferno Hotel.

Snow's security head, Grizelle, a six-feet-something black supermodel type who can turn that catwalk strut into the stalking stride of a six-hundred-pound white tiger, had borne Ric's unconscious body along so fast she was out of sight.

Snow, acting fast like the big shot he was, had already arranged a state-of-the-art hospital suite in the hotel. No outsiders would know what had happened to Ric. The Vegas bigwigs involved wanted news of a rival supernatural vampire empire at the Karnak kept secret.

I was just as eager to keep Ric's one paranormal power private.

When I caught up with Grizelle at the hotel's forty-second-floor high-roller penthouses, I'd found Snow's designated hospital site was the bridal suite. Ouch.

Snow always played Mr. Discreet, but, like the scorpion, his every move could bear a sting in its tail. My "bridegroom" might never awaken.

I couldn't carp about the setup.

Ric was soon ensconced in a hospital bed so accessorized it resembled a Bowflex home gym. He had twenty-four-hour guards and nursing care. As he slept, blood dripped around-the-clock into his circulatory system, an oddly vampiric process.

That last memory of him made me shudder now.

" MISS STREET." GODFREY gently broke into my dark trip down bad-memory lane. "You're not here to brood, but to rest, recover, and change clothes. Please go inside and do that."

"Oh. Yes. Yes, Godfrey." I looked down at the shopping bags dangling in my hands. "Thanks for packing me some things to use at the Inferno. I'm going right back, of course. Directly back."

"Of course." He used that agreeable tone that didn't quite gibe with what he just said. "I'll wait here until you're safely inside."

"Getting pushy, are we, Godfrey?" I smiled. "I'm supersafe on Nightwine's ultrasecure estate. I'm just not safe alone inside myself right now."

I let Godfrey feel useful. He took and slid my key card into the door slot, nodding good-bye as I shuffled my boot-clad feet over the threshold. Everything inside looked the same, but seemed oddly alien.

I felt like I'd been on a two-day bender-like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend-although alcohol hadn't been my downfall. Since I work freelance, weekends don't have the significance for a 24/7 on-call snoop like me that they hold for the forty-hour-a-week wage slave I used to be.

Life in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas is one long-one might even say eternal-Lost Weekend anyway. Before the millennium turned, party-hearty Vegas was full up with social vices... drinking, dicing, doing anyone and any illegal substances in sight.

Me, here and now, I'd just OD'ed on fighting supernatural crime. I ached from ankle to angst, but mostly I was mentally sucked dry.

I'd left the Enchanted Cottage thirty-six hours earlier a relatively well-adjusted woman with a mildly important mission... handling a rogue CinSim at the Inferno Hotel. That was more a public relations assignment than a serious case for a fledgling paranormal investigator.

Here I was coming home a virtual zombie, a husk who'd danced cheek-to-cheek with sex and death and destruction and-even more blasphemously-perhaps given life.

When I left my fairy-tale digs I hadn't anticipated meeting a particularly iconic CinSim: Humphrey Bogart as "gin joint" owner Rick Blaine in the 1942 film classic Casablanca. Who wouldn't want to share a bar with Mr. Noir Guy, even if he was just a CinSim?

Once placed, CinSims are chipped to stay where put, within a room or a set range of so many feet. They are property on loan. One of them strolling off assigned premises, even in their home hotel, was big news.

Wouldn't you know it was tough-guy Bogart/Blaine who'd wandered from his proper place in the hellfire bowels of the Inferno Hotel? He'd made it all the way to the ground-level bar. There he'd asked for me, Delilah Street. Well, he didn't exactly ask for me, personally.

He'd muttered about a woman of my description: "black and blue." That's me on a police blotter-black hair, blue eyes. Add a funeral-lily pale complexion and red lips and you have Snow White wearing Lip Venom gloss.

Since my "summoning" then and my exhausted return now, my attire had gone from a midnight-blue velvet gown among my personal vintage clothes collection to an armored catsuit fit for a sixties James Bond movie action climax.

The steel-studded, patent-leather suit and crotch-high flat-heeled boots I wore, sans the black mail hood, were unnaturally light and tight and adapted to the wearer's physical dimensions, permanently.

At least Grizelle said so.

That's why I'd worn the thing home under a jersey caftan. The suit moved like muscle with my weary body and kept me upright, thanks to spandex and some possibly supernatural spell known only to Snow.

For all its creepy flexibility, the outfit felt as hard as a scarab's shiny carapace. Inside it my joints creaked as if cased in concrete. My mind felt duller than a battle-worn sword and my heart heavier than a black hole filled with lead.

How odd that instead of a weapon I now toted something as trivial as a Prada shopping bag loaded with my clothes from my original dress-up outing to the Inferno. I pulled out midnight-blue sequined pumps-call them Dorothy Gale in mourning-and matching evening bag, and a tiny but significant container of Lip Venom plumping gloss.

All very chichi, yet to me the limp blue velvet vintage gown draping the crook of my arm was now about as attractive as a vamp-drained corpse.

I let it slide to the floor with the shoes and bag as soon as I crossed the cottage threshold, the beginning of my personal safety zone.

There was no place like the Enchanted Cottage for R &R.

My landlord, another triple threat like Snow-TV producer, film buff, and morbidity entrepreneur Hector Nightwine-had duplicated a film set as a livable guest house on his estate.

I can't swallow the fairy tale that quaint settings create a stage for true love, as happened in that movie. Still, since the Enchanted Cottage had been recreated in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, what had been merely "charming" before was now actually "charmed," in the sense of hosting a mostly unseen magical staff.

Yup, I knew that lodging me here was like reinventing Snow White with pixies and gnomes instead of workaholic dwarfs. The best part was these shy, often unseen creatures worked for me, not Hector.

And work they did, leaving no domestic duties to distract this kick-ass late-model Snow White from just how bad things looked for her Prince Charming.