ONCE THE GOLDEN glow of the Las Vegas Strip was unfolding like a fan on the horizon, I checked in with my landlord on my hands-free cell phone.

Actually, I checked in with his butler. He was the one who’d fret about my whereabouts.

I didn’t even need to worry about waking him up, because he was one of the celebrity zombies known as a CinSims. You really can’t wake up William Powell from The Thin Man and My Man Godfrey films, among other classics, since the actor has been dead for decades and his various acting personas have been grafted onto contemporary zombie bodies at select Las Vegas entertainment locations.

What does it say when the only person who worries about your well-being like a father you can always count on isn’t actually a real person?

Quicksilver and Ric listened hard to my end of the conversation.

“Godfrey? Yes, we’ve stayed out really late, but we’re safe and sound.” …

“Master Quicksilver will be fine. Ric has a smart house but Quick is smarter, so we can always use the extra security.” …

“Yes, we’re heading to Ric’s place. Master Quicksilver and I are doing an overnight. Tell your boss I’ll check in with him in the morning.” …

“After breakfast, Godfrey, yes.” …

“Indeed. We are being ‘deliciously scandalous’ and will ‘enjoy ourselves.’ Yes, maybe even champagne, but certainly Brimstone Kisses.”

I winked at Ric as the phone’s ultraviolet glow faded with my conversation.

“Brimstone Kiss.” Ric mused. “That’s the Inferno Bar cocktail you whipped up for the Humphrey Bogart Casablanca CinSim when you were trying to ply him with booze to save my hide. Is my liquor cabinet likely to stock the right ingredients?”

“If you have OJ in the fridge and orange brandy on hand, I can mix up a Brimstone Kiss.”

“Brandy? Nope. You’ll just have to rely on my homemade brews and kisses.”

By then we’d arrived and Ric’s garage door was opening at Dolly’s approach as its interior light went on. Luckily, Ric’s Vette was a space saver. Dolly could glide her three thousand-plus pounds right in. She’s a big girl and proud of it.

Ric and I were entering the connecting courtyard before the system could close the garage door after us, so Quicksilver lingered behind to ensure nothing even as low and slender as a rattlesnake had slipped in unnoticed.

I loved the moonlit courtyard and the soothing splash of its copper fountain recycling water to the lush foliage. It felt so Old Mexico. Ric loved the stucco wall niches between climbing vines dripping blossoms and rich scent, where he could back me into the dark for butterfly and brimstone kisses.

Quicksilver whined impatiently and then lapped noisily at the fountain pool. He was big enough to sound like a herd of thirty water buffalo.

“I bet he’s jealous,” Ric said, turning to stare at the wolfish lapper.

Quick stared back and stopped drinking, wearing his innocent-dog look.

“Why don’t we leave him on guard duty out here?” Ric suggested.

I walked over to Quick, who promptly sat and gazed at me with his limpid baby blues. My hand brushed his head and neck, fingering the silver medallions on his collar, now all sliced in half, like the moon.

“Okay?” I asked.

Could a dog roll his eyes? Mine did. I took that as a yes.

Ric and I walked through the heavy hacienda-style wooden front door as it opened for us. Ric’s house might not contain the Enchanted Cottage’s invisible helpers, but he had high tech.

“I don’t see any ritzy liquor cabinets,” I mentioned as Ric took my hand and hustled me through the dim living room.

“We don’t need liquor. We’re running on liquid silver.”

“You actually like sharing a bit of my silver magic. Concealing your one silver iris most of the time isn’t a drag?”

In the dark living room Ric stopped to grasp my upper arms, even then his palms unable to stop caressing my velvety, metal-studded suit.

“I like us sharing everything. What’s not to like about you saving my life if the only side effect is a cool silver eye I can cover with a contact lens?”

“Maybe your eye doesn’t reflect an aspect of my silver talents. Maybe the color was leached from your eye, rather than added. I didn’t even know I had any silver mojo until I came to Vegas.”

“Delilah, querida. I really don’t care about the why and wherefore of my quirky eye right now. What I don’t know is how Christophe’s rescue party kept their hands off you in this thing. Mmm, that warm velvety black stretchy stuff embedded with all those silver metal mega-goose bumps except here. … What’s the matter? You’re holding back.”

I felt like such a fraud for not telling Ric I might have brought him back from the dead with the leftovers of Snow’s Brimstone Kiss, not my own determined CPR.

“I’m … not used to such blatant booty calls.”

Ric laughed, a rich and wonderful sound I thought I’d never hear again only a few days ago. “Shy Delilah,” he crooned. “Don’t you know that’s even more seductive? Yeah, this is a booty call. We’re going into the lighted bathroom and you’re going to strip me naked, shy girl, but then we’ll go into the dark bedroom and I’m going to make love to you in that suit like you’ve never had it before.”

“But Ric, I’ve only ever … had … you before.”

“Maybe not like this. We’ve both got the silver mojo now, and I’ve figured out how to use it some. There’s no telling what we can do together.”

“Who knows what the silver eye will do for, or against, you. I don’t think sex is going to prove anything.”

“Aw, Del, sex proves everything. Our connection was white-hot from the first, with our finding those not-so-dead embracing skeletons in Sunset Park. … What should I call that co-ed dowsing moment? A sensual shudder?”

“Nicely put,” I admitted. He was right. We’d had it all from the first. Sex and death and dark delight.

I swallowed. “This could be dangerous. My silver talents, your quicksilver eye. We could … spontaneously combust.”

“Yeah, baby.”

“You’re killing the mood with that word.”

“Sí, Señorita Paloma.” His kisses avoided my mouth, tracing my temple and cheekbone, along my jawline down to the side of my neck to the drumming pulse there.

The sweet spot for teenage boys and vampires.

I twisted my shoulder away from his lover’s grip. I didn’t want to play vampire games. It wasn’t safe sex.

Allowing myself to tease the site of the vampire bat bite that had introduced Ric to puberty in the Mexican desert had made it an instant highway for the real Millennium Revelation vampires to nearly suck him dry and kill him. I wanted no more neck-nibbling, even if it had been a basic foreplay move since cave days.

“I’m back now, Delilah,” Ric reminded me. “Better than ever.”

“Your ego never went missing, for sure,” I teased. “You really want me to strip you?”

It wasn’t like I’d never been there before, but I’d never been the doer, mostly the do-ee. Convent school and a squeamish fetish for avoiding vampire hickeys will do that to a girl.

I knew once we hit the bathroom spotlights I was going to blush. Pale skin is made for baring every hang-up, but this was what I’d wanted so desperately, Ric alive and vital again. Why did I always find it easier to make war than love? Why was Ric hell-bent on taking me over every hurdle in my once-sheltered life? Why did sex have to be so revealing?

No wonder Quicksilver had wanted to get lost, fast. For the first time, I wondered about his doggy sex life, maybe the reason for all those solo midnight runs of his. TMS. Too much speculation.

Actually, undressing Ric was a good ice-breaker. The racing-style suit Velcroed open at the extremities and then down from the mandarin-collared neck to the, um, crotch. He stood there like Vitruvian Man with his legs braced and arms out while I went to work high, low, and center. Men can be so out there.

I smiled as he turned his muscular, desert-dusky back to me, the bright lights revealing no trace of the ugly whip welts my tear-salted kisses had smoothed into faint silver scars. My forefinger traced the Catherine’s wheel of strokes thinner than barbed wire, each touch evoking his audible purrs of pleasure.

I’d done this.

My silver talents and whatever remnant of Snow’s Brimstone Kiss that had lingered on my lips had made the site of untold old pain into a new erotic zone.

Even as my fingers explored the wonder of what my lips had wrought, I winced.

How could I anticipate that Snow would absorb every slash the child Ric had borne as fresh wounds while I healed the old sites? What weird connection had been going on?

Ric was right again. In a paranormal world, every gift seems mated with a curse.

Now, as I played Ric’s faded scars like a harpist, I couldn’t help thinking of Snow. Could my pleasure-giving here slowly undo the damage done days and miles away at the Inferno Hotel? How much, over how many times? Or would the exchange of damage last forever?

I recalled Snow, fatalistic and as supernaturally cool as ever when we’d last met … the first time after Grizelle had told me what I’d done. My knees had been knocking, but the impervious rock-star persona Snow flaunted for the world had shown no signs of craving vengeance.

Why would he? He now had a greater power over me than any werewolf mob boss or undead Karnak pharaoh or vampire Howard Hughes … or even Ric.

My guilt. I’d deliberately chosen to undo the last seven lashes of Ric’s pain even after I knew each healing touch was scourging Snow. My punishment, so far, was cringing at the memory of Snow every time I made love with Ric. I suspected there was far worse to come.

“You need to stop,” Ric told me.

Startled, I assumed he’d eavesdropped on my distracted thoughts. But … no.

“Your sensual back massage is making me too happy. I trust we have something joint in mind,” he went on.

I stepped back, dropping my hands. Still the amateur, I scolded myself, either avoiding or pushing too far too fast. I didn’t know my own powers on any front … physical, emotional, or paranormal.

Ric picked me up in a bride-over-the-threshold carry and brought me into the dim bedroom. He settled me on the bed to a rhythm of kisses and caresses that made making love with one person in a wet suit seem perfectly logical, and my suit’s silver studs flashed tiny lightning strikes from all the room’s mirrored or metal surfaces.

“Electric,” Ric murmured, as he rolled onto his back beside me. Of course, I had to remain on my side. My phobia against lying on my back kept me with my head braced on my crooked arm, gazing down into his beloved face. Ric turned his head away from me, so I couldn’t see the silver iris. “Delilah, I need your mouth on me.”

I ran my hand down his muscled, slightly furry thigh. “No problemo, amor.”

His hand on my wrist stopped me.

“No. Here.” He turned his head farther, his brunet profile etched against the blue satin pillowcase the color of my eyes. I consumed the sight of his dark, thick hair, slanting forehead, slightly aquiline nose, deeply arched lips … the image as breathtaking as one of Michelangelo’s ultramasculine sculpted angels.

His motion had brought my focus to the strong, exposed column of his neck with the new knot of scar tissue resembling a miniature star gone nova.

“No,” I said.

I couldn’t miss how shallow, excited breaths lifted his bare chest up and down even as he kept his face and throat immobile for my view. The provocative contrast was playing crazy with my libido.

“No, amor,” I coaxed. “This isn’t a game anymore. That Sonoran desert bat bite left two tiny marks on your neck. I could play ferocious vampiress and leave you unchanged before. Now, real vampires have used that same spot as a spigot. They sucked your blood out. I can’t ‘pretend’ to do that anymore.”

“It was a vampire bat bite, Delilah, on the neck, a natural site for the tiny beast. I can’t help that undead beasts favor the spot too, or what I feel. Your mouth has made the welts on my back into a road map of pleasure points. Think what your lips could do for the new scar here.”

Help me, Irma! I couldn’t plead that I didn’t do oral sex. I couldn’t deny that we all had idiosyncratic turn-ons and turn-offs. I’d overcome my distaste of early attacks from predatory half-vamps to feed Ric’s harmless thirst for a bat bite rerun. He’d led me to overcome a lot of my hang-ups. How could I deny his one little long-standing kink?

“Por favor,” he whispered. “I can beg …”

I studied his beautiful, beloved features. Like I shouldn’t be begging him to let me touch him, love him.

I launched the most passionate kiss of my being at the damned vampire scar, pouring love and tears on the wound, as I had before when I had healed, sensing the pleasure shivering through his entire body and mind and soul, breathless at the power I had to shake him … and at his power to make me abandon myself and my fears.

IT WAS ONE of those paralyzing nightmares, where you know you need to move, change the scene, wake up … and you can’t.

Yes, I was reliving my old alien abduction scenario. Me pinned on my back to an examining table, or an autopsy table, like Lilith. Me in the glare of a sinister overhead light hovering like a pale manta ray. A trio of vampire nurses fencing me in along each side of the table.

Vampire nurses? Howard Hughes’s various Vegas venues had finally crept into my old Wichita nightmares.

An alien figure still stood at the foot of the table, ready to inject me with … some giant needle device. Yes, the alien was the black-and-white CinSim of Dr. Frankenstein, who wore far too much gel on his thick black hair.

And then he became the gold-glimmering black figure of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the underworld …

Really, I had too many alien entities to worry about to stay frozen in this dream … and so I awoke. I couldn’t move for several seconds, my heart beating as if the captive-on-my-back abduction experience had been real.

And then I remembered that … it had been. I’d actually lived through scenarios like this since hitting Vegas. I’d already experienced this in real life, surreal as Vegas was.

Was I finally outgrowing my childhood phobias by living through them?

Beside me, I noticed Ric thrashing on his black satin sheets. I softly stroked his upper arm. Where I feared to lie on my back, he’d made a habit of doing it to hide the whip scars of his childhood. Now he lay on his stomach, his exposed back and hips twitching with the phantom lashes of his deepest memories and nightmares.

“Ric,” I whispered into his ear whenever his head thrashed my way. I ran my fingertips over the pale scars, each stroke quieting his shudders.

He awoke groggy and purring at last.

“You can’t leave a man alone, Delilah,” he murmured. “Magic Fingers. Put in a quarter.”

I smiled, recognizing a reference to massage beds in cheap motels.

“Are we really going to stay in motels on our road trip?” I asked.

He turned over onto his side. Revealing his back had been a big achievement. Someday we’d make love in the missionary position, my own phobias no more too. Who’d believe a modern woman would want to be on the bottom. Oh, yes.

“God, I had a horrible nightmare, Del,” he said, blinking as the memories flooded back.

“Tell me.”

“Unlike you, I haven’t dreamed like this in years. Mama Burnside pretty much reprogrammed me.”

“I wish I’d had someone like her in the group homes of Wichita.”

“We’ll get back there and look them all up, paloma. And give ’em heck.”

“What did you dream?”

He laid his head on my shoulder. “I saw El Demonio, the chief slave-labor smuggler south of the border. He was using his bullwhip on me again—”

I clutched his head to my breast.

“Del, you’re gonna hook me on bad dreams.”

I unclutched.

“But, Del … in the dream, he turned into … you.”

“No!”

“Yeah, and your crazy silver familiar had taken the form of twin silver whips and then became tendrils of your silky dark hair and they were slashing like black-satin ribbons all over my body and I was really into it …”

“Oh, shut up. You just want a pity fuck.”

He laughed.

“Any time. No, honestly and truly. I dreamed that old dark dream and then you appeared and drove it back down into the deepest corner of Nightmareland. The day you dream your alien abduction scenario and I’m the one menacing you with the phallic implement from the foot of the table, we’ll know we’ve got both our kiddie nightmares deep-sixed.”

“You think that this trip back to Wichita will do that for me? Turn the bogeyman at the alien abduction table into Prince Charming with a hard-on?”

He turned sober.

“I believe that digging to the bottom of our nightmares always pulls up the truth, Delilah. And the truth will set you free.”

“That’s the reporter’s credo, but not an original thought, Ric.”

“That’s why it’s so true, mi amor,” he said, pulling my face down to his in a deep, soothing goodnight kiss.