“Sounds way too much like Vegas today.”

“Look, Ric.” I punched up an Albino Vampire martini that lifted from the wide arm-tray like a ballerina on a music box, sans cheap melody. “I sat through Night of the Living Dead for you outdoors in Dolly’s front seat, in a hokey restored drive-in off a deserted state highway in Kansas. You need to see Metropolis to understand the creature you raised from the film Snow located and obtained back in Wichita. She’s got a silver-metal crush on you and the demon drug lord who held you prisoner as a child wanted her really bad. But we’ve got her.”

“Snow owns her, and the film.”

“Snow needs us to control her, as only you can, and to decipher her role in this wacky mob-run supernatural hierarchy . . .”

“As only you can,” he finished. “Okay. I’ll watch this ancient and endless art-house flick. But I need necking and petting privileges.”

I looked around. I had to admit the cushy seats and the dark empty theater was making me, um, pliable, way more pliable than any metal woman.

Ric took advantage of my silent okay to push away the hair on my nape and engage in his favorite turn-on, and now mine, a clinging, stinging kiss turned passion bruise. I was nervous about how close our ritual was to welcoming a vampire intimacy. Still, I’d become hooked on this shadowy secrecy, on hiding the visible proof of our passion, on the danger of edging near where vampires and vamp tramps went for sex and blood. Maybe I’d been a naive fool all my earlier life to fight the darker side of love.

His lips released. I felt a faint bloody rawness on the hot surface, glossing his lips as they moved along my skin. It wasn’t a bite, merely sexy suction. He softly nuzzled his way onto the public side of my neck, lips lingering at the hollow of my white-skinned throat.

“You’d look hot with my mark here.”

Matching hickeys with Snow? I felt a shudder of guilt and anxiety. I think not.

My fingertips shushed his lips. “Really. We need to watch this film. Self-defense.”

“It’s full dark and we’re alone in a major luxe environment. And you just taste so good.” He grinned. “All right. I’ll satisfy myself with these gourmet cheese curls. Jeez! Hector Nightwine is one of a kind, taking the popcorn out of the pop culture.”

I didn’t tell him I hoped they were just cheese. Hector’s appetite ran to suspect foods, like white-chocolate-covered maggots.

I sipped the Albino Vampire, leaving a lip-gloss imprint on the rim. Ric sipped his, leaving a similar but fainter version of my imprint, part my lip gloss, and not part blood, I hoped. Made me wonder about the whole history and point of lip painting. . . .

The movie screen opened on black emblazoned with white letters.

“Right off I can see this is going to be an action opus,” Ric commented.

I gave him a friendly punch on the arm. “The first Star Wars movie used that pompous rolling text gimmick, remember?”

“Hokey,” Ric grumbled, but he tilted back in his body-hugging leather seat. I did the same, feeling like tiny Dwan supported by the huge, padded leathery palm of King Kong.

Once the starring city of Metropolis in all its corrupt futuristic glamour of the world of 2000 as imagined in 1927 took center stage, it was impossible to take your eyes off the screen. The production was German, and the prophetic scenes of skull-capped male workers marching like convicts into the “forced” labor of the mechanical age was chilling.

Meanwhile, the white-clad, golden-blond sons of the corporate masters gamboled in Olympic-style games in an Eternal Garden—of Eden?—and were visited by gorgeous girls in evening gowns of sheer chiffon and feathers.

Ric leaned over to rest his head on my shoulder. “How come you don’t wear any outfits from that era?”

“The style was ‘boyishly’ chic,” I pointed out.

“Huh?”

“This was the first time women showed bare arms and legs. They were the major erotic zones of the era.”

“If you say so.” Ric shook his head. “Now that you mention it, that glitter hides the fact that all those girls’ chests are flat as two-by-fours. Not my druthers.”

“Duh.”

“Who’s the guy in the eyeliner and riding britches who’s always swooning?”

“That’s the hero, the evil manufacturer’s son. Both genders wore liner in these early black-and-white films to make the eyes stand out.”

The scene showed the young activist, Maria, crashing the Sons’ party, a raft of Dickensian orphans clustered around her. She was all sweetness and pleading light, the dialogue box reading, “These are your brothers.” Poor hero-guy was instantly smitten and set out to find her like Prince Charming with a hard-on for a glass slipper.

Some of it was corny, some of it was prophetic, and all of the sets were stunning.

We stared unblinking at Maria in her high-tech glass coffin as she transformed into the gleaming cyborg the mad scientist Rotwang had made . . . at Rotwang’s neon and test tube laboratory transforming the sleeping Maria. Once Maria’s essence is poured into the metal robot, it in turn becomes a human-looking false Maria who Rotwang sends out to incite the workers to self-destructive rebellion against the city’s masters.

For the usual flimsy reasons, false Maria does a nearly nude stint as the whore of Babylon dancing for the leering moneyed class. All very symbolic but also the obligatory strip club setting we see on TV all the time today. Even Ric was mesmerized by Bad Maria’s frenzied erotic dance. Some things never get old.

At last the workers finally realized they’d been had. Their rampage ended with burning the false and defiant Maria at the stake, where she turned back into the silver metal cyborg before the false personality finally “died.” The good Maria was freed to unite with her suitor and rebuild the leveled Metropolis as a really nice place to live and work. Finis.

When the film ended, Ric was leaning forward on the edge of his posh chair, arms braced on his thighs, hands laced together.

“That’s all Brigitte Helm,” I said, “from saint to seductress to saint again. Her false self sure whipped up that crowd of wimpy workers like Hitler on a tear.”

“That’s just it,” Ric said. “This film eerily predicts what would happen in Germany ten years later when Hitler was in power. Speaking of power, I can see why Snow wants to reinvent that amazing towering Metropolis cityscape as a Vegas attraction. The dancing girls and even the Seven Deadly Sins are built in. Did he name his rock band after those creepy critters?”

“Don’t know. Too bad the Sins’ scene is mostly lost. We see them as gray, stone figures in a churchlike setting that come to life and walk toward the viewer, with Death as their sheepherder coming last, carrying a scythe.”

“Snow’s onstage backup group is a lot more sinful than those walk-off parts, especially Lust and Envy.” Ric ginned as he named the two female members of the rock group.

“So you’d noticed those hip-swiveling hussies? I thought you weren’t a fan.”

“I don’t follow Vegas stage shows, but when you admitted after I recovered from the Karnak ordeal that you’d had to submit to a Brimstone Kiss to get Snow to help rescue me, I caught a show to see what was involved. He bent down to do the Elvis scarf trick with the mosh pit groupies, but no kisses.”

I allowed myself a mental sigh of relief. And since when had Ric started calling Christophe “Snow”? He’d been reluctant to sound friendly with the mogul-rock star in any way whatsoever.

“You must have been his last customer,” Ric added with that deceptively casual side glance of a veteran interrogator. “Must have cured him of the habit.”

“Maybe.”

“I had to buy a used video of the show to get Brimstone Kiss footage. Just the standard long wet lip smack, but those women sure swooned like the hero of Metropolis kept doing. You figure out why, Delilah?”

Did I ever! And it wasn’t fit for family consumption, much less one’s boyfriend.

So I dismissed the strength of the effect. “The fans get overwrought when they have actual contact with an onstage idol. Every moment is magnified. It’s a kind of psychic orgasm.”

That was perfectly true, although in the case of the Snow groupies, the orgasms were real and serial.

“Not with you, though,” Ric wanted to confirm.

“You know Snow’s a power freak. A man, or whatever, who can call a dragon into being from a palmful of ashes would have to be. Me submitting to the Brimstone Kiss was his price for mounting your rescue expedition. He knew it was the most hateful and humiliating thing he could require.”

“Does the kiss pack a kick?”

“Like with a groupie? No. Not with me. And I don’t want to talk about it, any more than you’d want to reminisce about your enslavement to El Demonio Torbellino.”

Ric nodded. “I’ve just noticed some tension between you two.”

“True. Terminal lack of trust. Who’d put the stupid fairy-tale price of a kiss on rescuing a human from the vampire mob? Enough about that egomaniac. What did you learn from the film?”

Ric leaned back. I was thankful he’d moved past the dicey topic of Snow. “That Brigitte Helm was a hell of a performer. She was really just nineteen then?”

I nodded. “Ambitious kids today start on YouTube much earlier. She almost got the part in The Blue Angel that made Marlene Dietrich. She had first crack at the title role in Bride of Frankenstein.”

“From Blue Angel to Mrs. Frankenstein. She had quite a range.”

“Brigitte did what the old soap operas promised. As Maria, and as old film trailers boasted, she ran the gamut of human emotion. Metropolis let her turn it all loose. She’s a saint, a protectress of the downtrodden, a Joan of Arc in a suit of sexy cyber-armor, a seductress from the Apocalypse upheld by the Seven Deadly Sins, a helpless prisoner, a manipulated tool of worldly powers, a deranged orator with qualities of the antichrist, not to mention a virgin and martyr. And she played that emotionless metal cyborg too,” I added.

“I don’t get why they needed to create a robot to recreate it as an evil but human Maria under their control.”

“The robot was created to host the mad scientist’s lost love, Hel, who’d married the heartless CEO, then died bringing his son into the world. Rotwang abandoned his idea of re-creating his soul mate and used the robot to embody a programmable Maria he could use to bring down the bigwig, at the cost of destroying the workers too. The robot plot was probably a warning that factory work was making robots of us all. The theme is announced on the first screen. ‘The heart is the arbiter between the head and the hand.’”

“Not much heart in any world I’ve seen.” Ric sat silent as he reran the script of his life and I reran mine.

“The dreamer and the maker, the brain and the hands, need to meet inside us,” I said. “The dreaming-it-up and the making-it-happen parts. The head Wicked Witch of Wichita, Lily West, mocked her sister Lilah for believing that.”

“I don’t think she’s mocking much anymore, now that we’ve defeated the weather witches.” Ric took my hand. “You saved me when everyone else thought I was lost. I’ll never forget that.”

I couldn’t help thinking, saved him for what? An even worse threat?

“So,” he went on, gazing at the dark screen. “My altered silver vision”—he tapped his left eye socket where a brown contact lens obscured the new, mirror-bright iris—“brought the potent deposit of silver nitrate on the scenes featuring the Maria cyborg to independent existence here and now. How did El Demonio hope to use her?” Ric mused on. “How can we do that, and aren’t we as bad as him, or Snow, for being willing to?”

“We don’t have a choice. You called her off the screen. Now you need to bring out her better nature.”

Chapter Seventeen

IT HAD BEEN a long day for both of us. Only security lights and stars were shining down on the darkened Nightwine estate, so Ric and I parted with a chaste kiss on the stoop outside the Enchanted Cottage.

“How’re you going to get home?” I asked, suddenly aware of the logistics. “Your car must be in the Inferno Hotel parking lot.”

A screech of wheels burning rubber into my driveway turned my head. Ric’s bronze vintage Corvette was tooling up to my door.

“How?” I asked.

“Godfrey got his ‘cousin’ at the Inferno to contact your favorite parking valet.” Ric smiled and went to open the driver’s-side door.

“Manny!” I cried as the orange-scaled demon leaped out of the driver’s seat. “Ric must owe you a huge tip.”

Ric was already in the car and waved a single bill at Manny through the open window. I’d have chewed out the valet if he’d treated Dolly that way, but Ric didn’t seemed bothered by the roar of his car’s entrance. He liked to push the ’Vette around the same way. Vroom. Guys.

Logistics remained on my mind. How was Manny getting back to his post at the Inferno?

I glanced at the slim vintage watch on my left wrist. Wristwatches were a trademark of mine, despite cell phones replacing them among the Android generation. I had a large collection from all eras and they were also a perfect undercover form for the silver familiar. As now.

If I pushed Dolly a little, and she pushed lesser vehicles out of her majestic way, I could make the time limit.

“I’ll drive you back to the Inferno,” I told Manny.

His eyelashes fluttered over his golden cat’s eyes. He had extraordinary long and lush eyelashes for a male demon. “A ride in the Queen. I could swoon.”