I HAD TO hand it to Helena Burnside.
She didn't smirk once when I was Alice-in-Wonder-landed to Andrews Air Force Base southeast of D.C. and driven up to a waiting small private jet. Shortly after we were up, up, and away as the sun sank slowly in the west. It was almost 8:00 P.M. and the three-hour time difference meant we'd chase the sunset all the way, arriving at about the same hour we'd left.
I'd gone wide-eyed when I spotted the turn-off for Andrews and don't think I blinked until we were airborne and sitting in cushy leather chairs that had more positions than a yoga class.
"You can catch up on your sleep," Helena suggested, "or we can have a drink and talk. Your call."
"We need to talk and I need a drink."
"Fine. Any druthers?"
I'd followed her to a built-in cabinet whose exotic wood doors concealed an awesome wall of branded bottles. Guess this wasn't Alice 's Restaurant, as in the old song by Arlo Guthrie, but Alice's Bar.
"I'll concoct something," I said. "Hmmm, no white chocolate liqueur aboard for an Albino Vampire."
"This is usually a guy's plane, Delilah. No sweet girly liquors allowed. An Albino Vampire? That does sound intriguing."
Wait until she met Snow, which she would. He may deny being a literal vampire but he was a money-sucking albino casino owner, so I'd named the drink to irk him.
"Vodka's a manly drink," I said, spotting a crown-shaped vodka bottle of cut and frosted glass touched with gilt. Hmm, this Regalia Gold was something decadently pricey the Inferno bar might feature. "I'll whip up something apropos. I seem to have a way with spirits."
Into a highball glass I poured a jigger or so of the high-end vodka-though I'd have preferred pepper vodka-and a half jigger of cinnamon schnapps, then five ounces of orange juice from an under-counter mini-refrigerator. Feeling frisky, I added two jiggers of orange-flavored cognac from a fancy little bottle. Finally, in went a scant half-jigger of rich thick red grenadine to sink to the bottom. Sweet! I did it all over again and brought the second drink to Ric's mother.
"It matches the sunset," she commented, lifting her glass. We settled into our chairs to watch the sun painting the horizon dark watercolor hues through the windows. "We should be shadowing the sunset like Sam Spade on a case all the way west."
She eyed her vivid glass. "Umm. Subtle yet spicy... for modern women like us. What will you name this concoction, Delilah? It looks like a Tequila Sunrise."
"No tequila in it. How about a... Vampire Sunrise?"
"Don't vampires retire to their coffins to sleep all day about then?"
"So says the legend. Let's drink to that."
We clicked rims even as I was thinking that, whenever they grabbed some shut-eye, the Karnak vampires threatened to become the major force in Vegas. They made Cicereau's Gehenna werewolves look tame.
I kicked off my shoes.
"Panty hose? Why don't you peel out of those unbearably unbreathable things in the executive washroom?"
I grinned. "How did you know I don't usually wear them?"
"No sane woman does these days."
No sane woman. I thought that over while I wriggled the hose down past the shy silver hip chain in a bathroom three times the size of a commercial jet's biffy. I'd worn nylon bikini briefs underneath the panty hose to make them slide on better, so I was still decent enough for an Our Lady of the Lake Convent School girl.
Pretty sharp lady, Irma said as I rolled the hose into a ball and washed my hands. Watch yourself around her. We don't know where she's coming from. And she is a shrink. She'd frown on me for sure. Want you to dump me. You've already had me on "mute" too long.
I won't dump you, I told her. It's just been so stressful lately.
Because you've been doing things you didn't want witnesses for.
That's enough! I slammed a door shut in my mind. I'd never done that to Irma before.
Yet she was right. Helena Troy Burnside had transformd Ric from a feral child before the Millennium Revelation into a secure and dedicated man in a world where nothing was certain anymore but change. She wouldn't be easy to fool.
I returned to the main cabin to find her pensively watching the sunset blaze of purple and orange turn lavender and yellow, like a fading bruise.
What should I tell her about Ric?
With his paranormally healing tongue, my wonder dog, Quicksilver, had licked Ric's skin clear of the sores from the vampire tsetse-fly bites. I couldn't conceal that ragged hole in his neck from when he served as the "catch of the day" for the Twin Pharaohs' bloodthirsty undead minions at the Karnak Hotel three nights ago.
I sat down, my calves rubbing together and giving me a mental flash of how inciting Ric would find my bare legs under this prim, uniform-suggestive suit. I'm your stewardess, Delilah. Fly me, as the old airline ad went.
Here I didn't even know if Ric was coming out of his coma, with or without a soul, if you believed in that sort of thing, and I was thinking about us having sex.
Helena looked away from the window to me as I picked up my Vampire Sunrise for a sip.
"How long have you and Ric been sleeping together, Delilah?"
"Ah-" I got my mind doing mental math. That would short-circuit intimate memories. "A few weeks."
She was smiling at me like the Madonna, all-wise and a bit rueful.
"I'm not exactly Ric's mother," she said, "but the relationship is close enough to that, so I don't really need to know certain things. You might want to shutter some strong memories. I do sense you and Ric share unconventional and trying childhoods. You seem to be a good match. And, no, mild bondage during sex is not abnormal, especially when the woman is terrified of losing control because of a forgotten childhood trauma. It might be just what the doctor would order. In matters of sex, if it's effective, it's right."
This "old-fashioned" girl was flushing like a red light. I could feel the heat suffusing my pale chest and face, scarlet against the white and navy of my outfit. I was vividly patriotic at the moment.
She laughed softly.
"Are you... psychic?" I asked. "You can read minds?"
"I always was intuitive," Helena explained, looking out the window as she sipped my " Sunrise, Sunset"-colored cocktail. The sentimental song about love and life ran through my mind, not vampires. "It was really only close observation, in the way Sherlock Holmes practiced it. His methods, as he called them, were learned from a brilliant diagnostician, a doctor Arthur Conan Doyle studied under."
"Really? The fictional Sherlock Holmes was inspired by a doctor?"
"Maybe there were always those who had millennial gifts." She sighed, perhaps thinking of Ric. "After the Millennium Revelation, I found my 'insights' became much more literal. I can 'see' high-impact or traumatic incidents from my patients' past. It's not like 'reading minds,' though." She eyed me again. "It's like surfing Web pages really fast. Skittering images and emotions. I sense a lot of upheaval in you."
"I can't imagine why," I said ruefully. "I lost my dog and my home and my job in Kansas. I'm supposed to be an orphan but I saw my double being autopsied on CSI V: Las Vegas. I came here to find her and found Ric instead. So far."
"You're not one to give up, I can also sense that. I do see mirror images colliding around you. And, like Ric, you had no one to nurture you as a small child. No one to hold you and keep you safe. No one to tell you that you were a pretty and smart girl, as every girl is, in some way. I suspect those raging, suppressed infantile emotions will manifest themselves in your adult powers."
"I'll have delayed tantrums?"
"Maybe not. You're a very sensible and mature young woman, Delilah, a bit too much so. You're so demanding of yourself and others. Your relationship with Ric has been good for you but now you must concentrate on being good for Ric. I hope not, but what's just happened to him could undo the years of reclamation work I did to overcome his brutal childhood."
And she barely knew the half of it. I drove out my haunting worries about his torture at the Karnak by concentrating on something happier, another lovemaking session she really didn't want to spy on. I could sense her regard blurring and withdrawing.
"Yes, you can block my unconscious 'readings' if you concentrate," she told me, unaware that I was putting up barriers by thinking about sex with her patient-son.
Some things never change, Millennium Revelation or not. When it comes to parents and children of any age neither generation can quite bear to think of the other "doing it."
"Thanks for the warning," I said. "But, just to follow up, you say Ric is trying to overcome my, ah, position phobia about lying on my back in dentists' and doctors' offices in, um, bed?"
"He was a very bright boy who survived a nightmare childhood and underwent years of therapy. Yes, he can help you, Delilah. More important, I sense that he badly wants to."
Shoot! I blushed again. Time to get away from my intimacy issues and back to finding out what Ric is really about. Wanting to help must be our mutual weakness.
"So what is your relationship to Ric?" I asked.
She considered. "He's not quite a son to us. More like a beloved foreign student who came to live with us for a long time."
"Does your husband know about your expanded intuition?"
"No. Philip is a military man by profession. He must remain skeptical to maintain equilibrium. He can't even face Ric injured and in pain, not because he doesn't care but because he'd choke on helpless rage. He'd want to raid Mexico and make someone pay."
I thought hard about those awful piano lessons I suddenly remembered having at Our Lady of the Lake school to block her enhanced intuitions. Did I want to correct their assumption, that Ric had been captured and tortured while out of the country, not in Vegas? No.
"Why does Ric keep returning to Mexico?" I asked instead. "His memories must be horrendous."
"The men who held him captive then are crime kingpins now, drug lords and human and unhuman slavers. They're exploiting and torturing his people. He needs to stop them."
"I saw-" I began.
"Saw what? Oh." She drew back as if I'd slapped her.
I'd been unable to keep the image of Ric's whip-scarred back from my mind's eye.
We both sipped Vampire Sunrises, girding ourselves.
"What did he tell you about the scars?" she asked finally.
"Nothing. I saw them while he was sleeping. He keeps me-I imagine all women-from touching his back, even clothed."
She fidgeted in the cushy chair. "That's not good but understandable."
"He was just a child!"
"Nine when he was freed."
"Who? Why?"
"El Demonio. A fittingly obvious name," she said bitterly. "This 'demon' surnamed Torbellino now heads a dozen criminal operations all over Mexico and along the U.S. border. When Ric was captured, El Demonio was only a border-running coyote. Ric ran away, and when he was inevitably caught and returned, he was whipped. El Demonio had a thirty-foot bullwhip he liked to unfurl, at long distance or short."
My stomach told me I was getting nauseous. Our shared dream had made me feel the unimaginable brutality of using such force against a valuable child laborer. I just suffered from a lack of love. Ric had been hated.
"One whipping like that would have killed him," I said, amazed he was still here to talk about.
"Ric ran away and was caught, and then ran away again. And again."
"Even though he knew-? That's crazy."
"It was how he kept his spirit from being broken. If he let those men intimidate him into giving up on freedom, it would mean nothing if and when he finally got it. They call it 'fire in the belly.' Ric is probably the only person who challenged El Demonio and lived.
"So," she went on, "from what you've said, he either didn't fall into El Demonio's hands this time, or the man's henchmen didn't know whom they'd captured. If he was tortured lying on his back, as the frontal injuries you describe indicate, his identity would remain secret."
I clasped my arms against the chill I felt at her medical, logical approach to this atrocity. Perhaps to keep her motherly feelings at bay?
Even worse, I now knew that two demonic forces would love to recapture and try to break Ricardo Montoya yet again, this El Demonio and his associates as well as the Egyptian vampires.
She saw my goose bumps, picked up her doffed cardigan, and laid it over my shoulders. That motherly gesture nearly undid me. Nobody had touched me or my clothes that I could remember, nobody had ever dressed me until Ric started undressing me, which was another thing entirely.
Still, her words haunted me. I was supposed to be glad the Pharaoh freaks had wanted Ric's throat accessible while they tormented him with leeches and vampire tsetse flies and held a group suck party at his neck?
"Delilah, I can't glimpse your thoughts right now, but I can tell you're overdramatizing," she said softly.
Darn right.
"Your husband hasn't even the slightest notion that you're able to see into other people's heads since the millennium turned?" I asked, wondering what that would do to the trust in a marriage. Who was I kidding? In my relationship with Ric too.
"No. Washington bureaucrats only subscribe to facts. They are the most inadaptable creatures on the planet."
I wondered if either of the Burnsides knew Ric could dowse for the dead and guessed they didn't. Ric had been only nine when he was rescued and the wife began to work with him. He was only fifteen at the Millennium Revelation. He didn't start dowsing for the dead again until he was out of college and training at the FBI's Body Farm. Helena admitted her enhanced "intuitions" could be blocked. An adult Ric would surely hide his resurrected powers to avoid worrying his only parental figures, as he had concealed his disfigured back from me. The Burnsides probably thought El Demonio had kept him prisoner as a goatherd.
"Will he look the same?" she asked, visibly nervous for the first time.
I nodded. Yes, he would.
Especially now that I had sneaked that long-wear brown contact lens into the Inferno bridal suite.
He would look perfectly the same.
Only time and a return to consciousness would tell if he was the Ric I knew and loved.