EVER HEAR THE saying, "Pride goeth before a fall?"
That really seemed tailor-made for Snow with his internationally successful rock band, his swooning fans and groupies, his Lucifer-ambitious Vegas hotel and subterranean kingdom of CinSims and dragon ashes.
Well, this time my pride was about to "goeth," and fast.
I heard the padding bare footsteps of the returning handmaiden nurses. I lifted a languid hand for my goblet of wine.
And got a Lalique angel glass in my hot little palm, glowing cherry-dark with red, red wine.
I reared back to regard my server because across from me Theda's Silver Screen pale gray complexion had become parchment white from diademed forehead to sandaled toes. Not to mention the midsection cellulite.
He was an Egyptian hunk in the burnished terra-cotta flesh, with that Michael Phelps Olympic hero of the Nile build, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, hairless and muscled from collarbone to bare sandaled foot, except for his gorgeously bewigged head.
I accepted the wineglass from the proffered tray, of course, and watched Theda do likewise. If anything, she looked more surprised than I did.
I took it Shezmou was not the usual wine steward in these parts. I was happy to see him slipping into his other, less drastic role.
He greeted me with the same steady, flattering courtesy I could expect from Godfrey.
"These garments you wear are modern and overgaudy but they become you, Deliverer of Shezmou, though they would not much serve you when facing the abased immortal servants of the fallen pharaohs."
"You know each other?" Theda sat up to take notice. I was getting the house sommelier service while Shez ignored Her Royal Aspness.
"Were you responsible for the sublime scents and silky oils of my bath?" I asked him.
Shez bowed his godly head. "While I am indispensable to the rites of embalming and the judgment of the dead, I most enjoy serving the living with the soothing administrations of my sweet wines and rare oils. How do you find the wine?"
It would have been rude not to sip it, even if it was a vital bodily fluid. I was surprised by a taste similar to a light Merlot.
"Marvelous."
Theda stamped her sandaled foot and ankle wrapped in a cobra bracelet that was bound to remain just that, a gaudy gewgaw. Poor thing.
"My wine!" she ordered. "I am Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt."
Shez's Ric-gorgeous brown eyes gave her the once-over I'd get from a put-out Hollywood hairdresser.
"You are a resident CinSim, Orderer of Shezmou. You wear one of my hieroglyphs. My first obligation is to guests."
Of course! The most notoriously revealing gown in the history of film bore three five-armed stars signifying Shezmou over the naughty bits. The god guy was a born style maven.
"You'd do really well with your own exclusive shop on the Strip," I told him. "Do you have all the ancient recipes?"
His face stayed beautifully blank. He'd been made a male model ahead of his time.
"Formulas," I prodded, "for your oils and perfumes."
"I would need sesame, moringa, pine kernel, almond and castor oils."
Hmm. I could see the look of the line now: Cleopatra's beauty secrets for the ages. Shez pictured on the label in his boat with two stars over his cobra-topped but noble head. I wasn't sure about getting that moringa stuff... I'd groggle it when I got home.
After all, I'd redeemed Shezmou's immortal life and freed him from labeling a pillar in the Karnak underbelly for eternity. Why couldn't he pitch his own private label aboveground in the bustling commercial metropolis along the Strip? I owed Shez a decent future since his past had been so... static.
A high-end beauty and wine combo enterprise was fresh marketing. Wait! A wine bar with cosmetics to go. Chez Shez: "Drink in the secrets of everlasting health, beauty, and longevity..."
Yes, daydreaming my pet Egyptian god into a beauty brand was making me cocky now that I'd discovered friends in high places at the Karnak's priciest residence tower. Time for serious updating.
"Where is Bez?" I asked soberly.
Shez placed the white wineglass on the zebra-pattern coffee table in front of Theda and turned to me.
"Alas, Deliverer, he was taken to the throne room to be the royal jester. His guardian post farther below was eradicated by us and our allies, as you will recall."
"There isn't a food market there still?" I asked carefully, as Theda stared incomprehensibly.
In her silent-film day, actors did a lot of incomprehensible staring because the action froze as dialogue placards popped on the screen mid-scene.
"No." Shez was emphatic.
What would the Karnak vampires use for food then? I was afraid to speculate at the moment.
"And-" Maybe it was a couple sips of wine, but none of the exotica around me was distracting anymore. "-the great gray warrior... hound, was he seen...?"
Now I knew why lushes cried in their beer. Or wine.
"No, Deliverer." Shez remained expressionless. He'd had millennia to master that Godfrey demeanor. "Not along the great River Nile in sky, on earth, or in the Underworld."
I took a deep breath, controlled myself. "But you are safe here?"
"Oh, yes. I have an entire floor for my wine and oil presses, my supplies. And, of course, I am free to leave anytime when darker duties with my lord Osiris call me."
"Great," I said.
I felt even safer here now that I'd seen Shezmou. Human "Deliverers" don't get their heads twisted off and he was in no way a vampire.
Still, I thought frantically while nodding and sipping socially. Just who could or would foot the bill for an ancient Egyptian demon god to take up his kinder, gentler hobbies?
"I hope to see you here again, Deliverer," Shez went on. "Your business proposition is most interesting. I do have time on my hands in these latter days."
Shez bowed to me (wow!) and eased out of the room. Whoever had provided Shez shelter couldn't be an out-and-out villain.
Or maybe not.
I heard a discreet clattering noise behind me and turned.
A human in living color was moving toward our conversation group. He had long gray hair and beard and was wearing a striped robe and using a walking staff. With the window-wall light at his back, he reminded me of nothing so much as Charlton Heston as the aged Moses from the 1958 The Ten Commandments.
The film had been a Cinemascope Technicolor epic. So this guy was not a CinSim. Nor was he even human, I realized, as he came close enough for me to recognize him.
It was Howard Hughes, dressed as urbanely as Hugh Hefner in a silk-lapeled robe, dragging his IV pole of thinned blood with him like an imitation of Marley's Ghost in chains.
Holy Horror! Imagine. Those two HH-initialed old guys, twins suffering from mogulism and lechery, still going, after all these decades.
A handmaiden nurse scurried to catch up to Hughes and scoot the wheeled IV stand into place next to him when he grasped a sofa back and swooned more than sat on the goose-down cushion. I assumed it was goose-down because (A) he could afford it and (B) the way it swelled up around him bespoke really ritzy upholstery.
Besides, that almost skeletal bony frame needed all the padding it could command.
"Miss Street," he greeted me, or rather, my boobs. "I must say it is an aesthetic pleasure to see that bit of costuming worn by one born to fill it properly."
Theda writhed on her divan and squealed her displeasure.
Hughes ignored her at first, then frowned. "Go tint your nipples or something else vampy."
Theda rose and scurried away, giving me a poisonous look. Another enemy; join the club.
"There goes another secret piece of film history for you, my vintage-film lover." Hughes leaned close enough to whisper. "Seeing the surviving photos of Miss Bara's Cleopatra costuming inspired me to invent the first steel-underwire push-up bra for Jane Russell in The Outlaw. Miss Russell also possessed your assets in abundance. Or perhaps I should put it vice versa. So you owe me for your support."
"Laundromats everywhere must curse your name," I told him, unimpressed. "When I was in college, bra underwires were always escaping during the spin cycles and breaking the equipment."
His bony shoulders shrugged. "Progress has its price. My point is that engineering can be applied to the trivial, a woman's undergarments, and to the sublime, a marvel of the centuries, say, an Egyptian pyramid."
I wanted to shrug back but realized that would only incite the undead old lech. I'd thought being escorted here by a harem of nurses and greeted by Theda made this a "just we girls" night or I'd never have allowed the sex-slave pampering bit.
"You needn't fear me personally, Miss Street. I am far too careful to take my blood from any living being and am too old and wise for sex. Besides, Shez is prettier than you; pity he's such a remorseless god. Anyway, do you know how many germs fester in the human mouth?" He shuddered delicately. "I admit I still like to look, but, alas, cannot touch and have not for many decades."
I nodded, almost sympathetically. Even when he'd been alive and first came to Vegas, back in the late sixties, he'd sequestered himself on the top floor of the Desert Inn and bought a local TV station so it would play only the movies he wanted to see, all night long.
How freaky to remember that's pretty much what kiddie me did nights in the Kansas group homes forty-some years later: stay up all night getting hooked on old movies.
I wondered what he feared, what had scared Howard Hughes so much he went from playboy engineer, inventor, filmmaker, flier, and mogul to a crazy, lonely, emaciated, old billionaire hermit?
"Your look of pity is misplaced. I have more money and power than I ever did. Any one of my nurse attendants would rip your throat out at the lift of my little finger and drain your blood for my continual, moving 'cocktail' by IV tube."
"It's not pity, Mr. Hughes. It's curiosity."
"Partly that too, yes. You are annoyingly curious, also lucky I've taken a liking to you. Do you know how long it's been since I've done that? Would you consider a seven-year exclusive contract?"
"You don't make films anymore."
"Are you sure?"
"I guess not. I didn't expect to find you were the literal top man at the Karnak either."
His thin lips smiled, reminding me of dashing forties photos of him looking like Clark Gable's double. I guess a lot of men did in that era. Pencil-thin mustache, fedora at a jaunty angle. They could be the hero, or the villain, in a hundred different enjoyably forgettable noir crime dramas.
"You are always so dependably... buoyant," he said, glancing south of my collarbones again. "No one has made me smile in thirty years."
"That's great, HH, but an hour or so ago I was about to become steak tartare for a demented CinSim."
"Frankenstein can be obsessive and he's no engineer, that's for sure, but he demonstrated promise for weird science."
"He's a CinSim escapee from a piece of fiction written almost two hundred years ago as a moral and philosophical fable."
"The point is, he intended to create life. We are now in an era when life can be scientifically helped along at both the beginning and the end of the cycle. And now death can be defeated, by extreme measures sometimes, as in my case, or by something as tried and true as CPR and its Kiss of Life."
His watery eyes fixed on mine. I appreciated the change of focus but wasn't going to say a word about Ric. No one but Grizelle knew I'd accepted Snow's Brimstone Kiss.
"You're saying," I ventured, "that if you'd waited a few more years you wouldn't have had to make yourself into a vampire to stay in business."
"Simplistic, but yes."
"So why let some CinSim loon loose in the Karnak?"
"I own it, for one thing. Yes, I own a lot of things no one suspects I do. Always did. For another, I'm aware that in this post-Millennium Revelation world, the ancient ways might hold secrets of life and death that are every bit as effective and useful as any that modern science can explore."
He sat back. "Drink your wine, Miss Street, not everyone gets a glass hand-delivered by the Lord of Blood himself."
"How do I know it's not sweetened blood," I asked, "not bull's blood, say?"
"Because Shezmou is the god of wine, as Bacchus was for the Greeks. I'm tickled you found and freed him. He is quite the fan, Delilah Street, and proud of his vintages. The one in your hand derived from a formula many millennia old and the instant-aging magic of a reawakened god."
Millennium wine. That would be a commercial hit too. So would my Vampire Sunrise cocktail, now that I'd discovered the impulsive title was a literal description of up-and-coming vampires in Vegas, from the Gehenna's Sansouci to the Karnak legions.
I sipped ancient wine again while Howard leaned his head back against the sofa pillows. "What impression does the Karnak entrance give you?"
"Those massive inscribed black pillars so close together? They create shade from the sun but their immensity makes you aware of how architecturally awesome the Egyptians were."
"They also obscure the fact that the center of the hotel is the top of a massive pyramid built deep into the sand and stone below the Strip level."
"I didn't see any pointy top anywhere inside the hotel."
"You weren't meant to."
"I see. The Luxor Hotel had already claimed the pyramid as an external image and brand since the nineteen nineties."
"I could have bought and leveled the Luxor and built my own pyramid-shaped building openly here."
"Why hide a pyramid inside a temple facade?"
"You must understand that a pyramid was not just a massive tomb and monument to some old man's ego."
Was that an actual twinkle in Howard Hughes's colorless eye? He snorted with elder glee.
"I do so relish your quaint moralizing stance, Miss Street. Quite takes me back. That has been so long out of fashion. My revolutionary undergarment got The Outlaw and Miss Russell's bust delayed from public release for two years, but when it finally came out it took down the old Hayes office blue-nose censorship."
"You were the real 'outlaw.'"
His rat's-nest-haired head bowed. "How you make me wish I was the man I used to be. You are as gorgeously waspish as Katharine Hepburn."
"You dated her?"
He merely smirked.
"I mean, she dated you?"
"Kate was an innovator too."
I'd actually started to succumb to his tattered charm... until I remembered he'd had the gorgeous Vida attacked and turned by a vampire merely to provide an attractive vehicle for his own conversion to Undead.
Playboys weren't real men and they really were playing for keeps when it came to satisfying their own wants.
"She didn't much like me, either, in the end," he noted. "But men like me don't care about trifling emotions. We see the future, and you and I are sitting atop it."
"A huge ant hill of ancient hubris? The Egyptian royals have about as much substance and depth as the Nile at its lowest level before the flood. Granted, the civilization and its beliefs and rites were elaborate and impressive, but it's dead and gone except for these ghastly bloodsucking relics."
He shook his head.
"I told you not to underestimate the pyramids as showy tombs. They were really ancient experimental laboratories. 'Resurrection machines,' as some scholars put it. They were after that most prized human goal: eternal life. Call it science. Call it religion. It exists in every culture and every time period.
"Dead bodies are buried, mummified, preserved, marked, and noted. That is not morbid; it is the expression of an ardent, unquenchable life wish. And I want it not just for my admittedly selfish self, Miss Delilah Street, but for my medical interests. I invented the hospital bed, too, you know."
His piercing look made me fear he'd known about Ric's Inferno recovery room.
"I want what I have-long and active life-for every human on the planet, for every child dying of leukemia and every dismissed so-called senior falling into dementia."
I gulped some more of the Lord of Blood's elderberry wine to calm my latest shock.
Whatever else Howard Hughes may have been and was... inventor, romancer, aviation pioneer, real estate king, crackpot... I now saw him as a creature whose dreams were as outsize as those tombs of the pharaohs we call the pyramids and that Hughes considered Tinker Toys for immortality.
"Yet," I said, "the aristocracy and upper scribe and artisan classes who'd followed the pharaohs into immortality and vampirism bred herds of generations of true Egyptians to feed on beneath this very hotel you now own and operate. You're responsible for those bloodsuckers."
He gazed at the pale red liquid filling the opaque plastic tube piercing his inner elbow.
"Bloodsucking, like sex or any personal exchange of bodily fluids, is so pre-Millennium Revelation. I plan to convert the Twin Pharaohs to my method of ingesting purchased donated blood. The others will follow their example."
"Methadone for heroine addicts or a 'nicotine patch' for the blood-addicted? That doesn't work very well for smokers."
"I'll find a way to make it fashionable. People of any era fall for that."
I pictured the Twin Pharaohs sitting on their thrones side by side, golden IV poles beside them. Then I recalled the albino cobras that I'd seen flanking the dais in what you might call "real" life, but I wouldn't.
"You could route the IVs through the uraeus," I suggested, "the royal cobra symbol. Make a daily ceremony of it for the royals and the whole court."
His watery eyes gleamed. "What a swell idea, Delilah. Boobs and brains. I always liked that combination, you notice. I may have to hire you full-time. You'll make a moral man and vampire of me yet."
He watched my skeptical reaction. "Don't forget the house toast here at the Karnak, Delilah."
"What would that be, Mr. Hughes? 'To Mummy'?"
He actually cracked another smile, exposing sharp brown teeth that would never sink into a rare porterhouse steak or a neck again. Did I feel another flash of pity for his phobic afterlife?
"Every billionaire needs a court jester these days. No. The house toast on this occasion is to you, Delilah Street, and our continuing business association."
He lifted the clear tubing that conveyed the thin pink fluid that kept him undead. As I raised my glass, he intoned, "You live again, you live again forever, here you are young once more forever."
"I still consider myself pretty young, Mr. Hughes."
"And pretty too. Call me Howard. Those words are not mine. They've been uttered for millennia during the final phase of the mummification ritual. I have made it my own motto."
"You do realize I'm a freelance investigator. I work for whomever I choose."
"You'll find, as you've begun to suspect, that choice is not what it once was in this time and this place. Still, your mobility and contacts with all the parties in our little war of superpowers here in Vegas make you useful."
He shook his head sadly.
"Only, however, for as long as you're able to please all of us equally, if not all at the same time."
I drained the Lord of Blood's wineglass and rose to leave.
"I'll need to change into my street clothes."
"'Street' clothes," Howard Hughes giggled. He was very old and perhaps a trifle senile.
A CinSim Cleopatra appeared in the doorway to escort me back to the bathing chamber. It wasn't Theda, though, but her nineteen thirties version, Claudette Colbert, glittering in a silver-gray winged metal headdress I coveted so much I could feel the familiar arm cuffs bracing for flight to my forehead, and mentally headed them off. No!
Claudette had slinked through that entire 1934 film in gowns of hokey Hollywood glam lam��. She even wore a collar of oversized pearls, not exactly a desert kingdom staple.
Still, I choked back an urge to curtsy and left, wondering how I'd get out of here after I was out of the queen costume and into my own clothes.
As I turned to exit the main room, the double doors leading to the penthouse broke open, both at once.
Now what?
"MORE UNEXPECTED GUESTS?" Hughes gurgled. "For me?"
I turned, braced for a pack of fanged mummies. And me with all my major arteries exposed by my dancing girl outfit.
The silver familiar, restrained no longer, was expanding into growing lengths of chain mail around my naked midriff, and then it stopped, cold. Maybe my hokey gold-metal bra offended its sensibilities.
I grabbed the nearest weapon, Hughes's metal IV pole.
If I ripped out his IV using it as a lance, tough.
A big brown hand stayed my arm.
Not Hughes's brown-spotted, curve-nailed claw.
I turned back to face the impassive Shezmou.
"Wait," he ordered.
Is that any way to treat a Deliverer?
When I spun back to face the door, I was floored by the oncoming leaping furred length and weight of an attacking royal hyena.
I screamed and fell back against Shezmou. Where's your grateful god when you need him? My arms and hands had lifted instinctively to guard my throat.
Too late! Canine claws scratched my shoulders as a hot wave of animal breath scorched my face and closed eyes. Wet saliva swiped me from cheek to forehead, deafening my ears in between.
My eyelashes were almost glued shut, but I was able to stagger back and open them.
I was waltzing with a huge canine form as tall as myself, my arms pushing off the powerful furred chest.
Someone grabbed the creature's collar at my shoulder height and pulled it off me.
Collar?
"Quicksilver?" I screamed, looking from blue eyes to the brown ones behind them. "Ric?" I looked back and forth again. "Ric? Quicksilver?"
"Where did you find him?" I asked as Quick dropped down to four-legged height.
Both looked remarkably well and even smug.
"More unexpected company," came Howard Hughes's long-suffering quaver. "Nurses! I need you. Shezmou will let them out when this abominably unsanitary reunion is over. Send in the crime scene cleaners then."
I heard a fading clatter and cooing, but could not have cared less. The Cleos had vanished too. I sank weak-kneed onto the sofa, running my hand over Quicksilver's furred head and shoulders, not believing he was alive.
He sat, his huge head even with mine, soulful blue eyes fixed on me.
"I thought you were... you were-"
He whimpered in that understanding way dogs have, and licked my upper arms and shoulders. It was only then that I saw his overeager greeting had left huge red claw marks on my Sunset Park-pinkened skin.
Two long, warm licks and my skin was lily-pale again, even the remaining sunburn erased.
I turned to Ric, who'd sat beside me, and ran my fond hands over his face and shoulders too. He was wearing his Sinkhole five o'clock shadow and weathered gang leathers and felt yummy solid.
"You are freaking amazing, Montoya. You found Quicksilver like you said. You raised him from the dead? How? Where? How did you two find me up here?"
Ric eyed my face hungrily, in his own way lapping up my amazement and joy.
"He's still totally mortal," Ric said. "I found you once I found him. You always say he could track you through anything. That included the Karnak complex up to the highest floor."
My restless fingers were petting their forms like a blind person's seeing through feel alone. Ric's smooth warm skin, Quick's warm rough coat. I kissed them both, and the Brimstone Effect seemed utterly gone from my lips and my soul. I wondered if my painful apology to Snow had undone its lingering power.
I preferred plain, mortal joy and the reunion we shared.
My fingers curled around Quick's collar, feeling that the silver circles had thinned to the faintest crescent slivers. My other hand skimmed down Ric's back, feeling only smooth unwelted muscle.
"How did you find him?" I asked Ric.
Ric's grin was white as snow. "Actually, Haskell found him in the Sinkhole."
"Half-balled Haskell? That creepy ex-cop who would have raped me if he could?"
"That's a colorful nickname you gave him, Del," Ric said, "but it no longer applies. Actually, Quicksilver found Haskell. I doubt this dog ever forgets. Haskell threatened to shoot Quicksilver, remember? So you penned up the dog when Haskell tried as much to molest as arrest you at the Enchanted Cottage."
"You caught up with the creep later in the Sinkhole and beat him up."
"Right. Then somebody or something came along and gave him half a castration. Fast-forward to now. Quicksilver surfaced in the Sinkhole after the gods brought the walls of the Karnak feed lot tumbling down, encountered the bad guy, and finished the job.
"The ex-cop is No-balled Haskell now."
My jaw dropped, which was an excuse for Ric to soul-kiss me. Quicksilver whined and put a paw on my bare thigh. Velvet paw.
This was getting awkward.
"I need to get my street clothes," I said for the second time that evening, and on this occasion no jokes were made on my name. "We need to get down to the Strip and away from here."
"Agreed; much to talk about away from here." Ric's fingers traced the snaky metal coils of my cobra bra. "No need for you to change clothes first. Quicksilver and I are experienced bodyguards and what you're wearing is just right for my plans for the rest of tonight."
Quicksilver subsided to his stomach, nose on paws.
"I agree you must leave," came a deep manly voice. "I will escort you out."
"Shez!" Ric greeted the demon lord with a grin. "You're looking a lot less dusty and bloody."
"All of you also."
Shez handed me a gilt-embossed Karnak shopping bag filled with my jeans, shirt, and shoes along with a supply of carved carnelian bottles of bath products, and an Egyptian-collared cape.
"I retrieved your articles from the area below. I am Shezmou, maker of embalming oils and rare scents. I am also Lord of the Slaughter. I go where I please here and will until the sun sets forever on the world."
"Good thinking," I said, gratefully covering my Rio beach condition with the cape. "Thanks, Shez."
I checked to ensure I still had the vial of my blood I'd snatched from the embalming table and had tucked into my pushed together cleavage, feeling very Jane Russell.
From the dilation of Ric's pupils, I looked very Jane Russell too.
We rose, all three, and left with dignity and no fear.
We had a god on our side.