"Thanks for the drink." He snagged my almost full Albino Vampire glass as I rose to leave.
Something… my Lip Venom or my blood, had left a crimson swipe on the wide martini-glass rim. I had a feeling that Sansouci was going to be nursing my signature cocktail for quite a while after I left, girly-looking or not.
Oooh! Irma cooed. Shivers of fear and a strange anticipation.
I realized then that danger was indeed an aphrodisiac.
Sansouci wasn't a half-vamp, a juvenile delinquent, or a ham actor who'd hit it big and come back as a CinSim. He was the real deal, a Las Vegas 24/7 vampire, hungry for primal things like blood and sex. Including mine.
Irma had a point.
Chapter Twenty-two
By the time I left the Dead Zone I was a little zonked. Whether that was on pain, Albino Vampires or the stress of interviewing a vampire with no warning, I didn't know.
I also had a lot of hot new info to process.
Sansouci was a vampire, not a werewolf, and a hostage as well?
A hostage free to move about the city.
They'd done something like that in the Middle Ages, when knighthood was in flower and honor was a word that came with a capital H. Rulers would guarantee their word and their willingness to compromise by sending their sons to an enemy's court.
That's why Sansouci hadn't run with Cicereau's rabid werewolves to track me down and tear me apart at the Starlight Lodge in the mountains that night.
He couldn't.
I'd like to think he wouldn't, but he was still a supernatural, and they tended to prey on humans. The xenophobic militants who wanted the supers exterminated en masse might be, ah, right about that.
"Sansouci" meant "without care" in French. Insouciant was the English word for it. Happy go lucky. I imagine Cicereau had christened his hostage that in a taunting moment. Sansouci must have had a lot of cares over the decades, especially when his special charge, Cicereau's young daughter, had been marked for death.
I'd have to ask Loretta about that the next time I was able to play Alice in Mirrorland. I was thinking hard about a lot of things. If I could find out the identity of Sansouci's opposite number-the werewolf prince who was sent over to the vampires-I'd know more about the vampire/werewolf war and also satisfy the demands of Howard Hughes, the CinSims, and Snow, get myself out from under having to deal with that mostly unsavory crew, and maybe have some fresh clout as well as dollars to spend in the New Las Vegas.
Self-congratulation is always a dangerous game. For one thing, it lulls your instincts.
I knew that even as the snarling, fanged beasts darted from the shadows and went for my throat.
Shadows. Shadow.
"Quicksilver, attack!" I shouted, drawing the two new pepper spray containers from my patrol officer's belt like twin six guns.
The attacking canines were large and hunch-backed, maybe eighty pounds each, with huge boar-like, small-eyed heads armed with carnivore teeth.
They danced in and away, nimble circus dogs, attacking and retreating cannily, their jaws ajar and snapping…animated bear traps.
Tall, pointed ears.
All the better to hear your location, my dear.
Broad, fanged snouts came snapping inward again despite the fog of tearing peppers.
All the better to smell your location, my dear.
Long, clawed forelegs scratched gouges in my leather pants.
All the better to claw your legs out from under you, my despised two-foot.
I'd drawn the cop baton and started flailing it.
I batted one creature away, cringing at the crunch of jawbone shattering.
I liked canines. It'd be easier to club werewolves, because I knew from personal experience that the attacking kind were mad, bad people underneath. But this might just be a pack of homeless dogs… ouch! One had grazed my wrist with a two-inch-long fang.
A leaping gray shadow smashed that critter to the pavement, rolled it over, and disemboweled it with the savage slash of a forepaw.
Maybe Quicksilver was more defense than I could stomach.
When green-black blood leached out of the claw trails, I admitted to myself that some very icky supers were trying to make meatloaf out of me. This was not Lassie and friends.
I had to stop being squeamish fast. The creatures seemed to come springing out of the asphalt at me. Maybe they'd smelled my menstrual blood, as Sansouci had. Ick. That was a lot less interesting. It had grossed me out that Sansouci knew, not even so much from a prey/predator perspective, as from a woman/man one.
But the attacking creatures weren't going to let me wallow in squeamish sexual oddities. They leaped to push me down.
I booted a couple away for Quicksilver to deal with, spun to guard my back and found my silver familiar had climbed the cop club and was now a high-gauge chain lashing left and right like a metal whip.
Canine voices howled louder than frustrated demons as I beat the ugly creatures away. One clawed over the ebbing bodies of its pack to lunge for my throat.
I heard a battle growl too long and deep for even Quicksilver as big human hands seized the beast's neck and nearing fangs from behind, wrenched once, and tore the head half off.
My stomach got queasy again, whether from the cramps, the close call, or the savage attack that saved me, I couldn't tell. I knew I'd just seen an embattled vampire in action, seeking not the blood needed for its own life, but the blood of another's death and destruction for the pure sake of it.
"Back to back," Sansouci ordered.
I was more than happy to turn away from his unrecognizable, fury-snarled face and fangs. So many of the black-backed, sand-colored dogs were launching themselves mindlessly into the air that I didn't have time to process Sansouci's terrifying new visage.
I slashed my chain right and left like a sword. Although it was a limp one, the lethal strangling curl of linked metal jerked three of the beasts off their feet. Quick joined us, dancing around in a circle, lashing out and slashing the fallen milling legs and leaping torsos with his fangs while we attacked heads and backs.
My arms were aching from the recoil of my awkward weapon and my boots were slipping on bloody pools on the pavement.
Then, all at once, the lunging animals were gone.
Even the fallen bodies vanished in a puff of powder.
I was too exhausted to do more than let my silver chain swing to a stop and lean against Sansouci's back, steeling myself to turn around and confront his vampire face.
Quicksilver sniffed in a wide circle around us, whimpering with frustration at his vanished foes. Not even a fallen body to howl over. Were these ghostly shapeshifters? Humans who could assume animal shapes and then shed them?