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Chapter Forty-Six

I went back to Vilhes, or as left of hi back a Bacardi Breezer in the dressing room

"Hey, kid! You made it out in one pretty unslavered-over piece How is old Howie? He was really hot for onna lad of it What can I say?"

Vil "He used to be quite the dude Slicked-back black hair Pencil-thin e Hey, so was I"

"Weren’t we all?"

"She was a olf princess, you said"

I nodded at Vilirl in the , innocent, tender, and supernaturally gifted Her daddy’s pride and joy And his biggest disappoint Juliet to some unknown teen vampire’s Romeo

Neither of their houses would have permitted such a union, or could have per such a union Add a little Othello and Desdemona to the mix Murderous possessiveness By fathers of their children, by clans of their very different lifeblood

"Who was the head of the vaas was busy being born and ht they’d rule the roost?" I asked Vil to build the as before the va to call it-"

"The Inferno" I knew the answer as I said it The Inferno had fallen only to rise like a phoenix eighty years later How much time was that to a vampire? The blink of an undead eye

Vil hairline in recognition ofto na hellish The va House of Wrathescu The va was Wilhel a vampire nap, as we humans would reckon it"

"He was Juliet’s dreahtmare You’ve seen what form of eternal life Hoon No, this Wilhelirls’ romantic dreaht and blazing co valy Christian A prince an, from the land where olves were put to torture and the test as nowhere else Kind of funny that a vampire-olf roas I don’t know the details Hoould "

My fingernails were biting into ether to my brain

"And the name of this vampire prince?"

"Christopher," Vilma said "I heard talk about that Some humans considered the name part blasphemy, part undead hubris Christopher is the saint said to have carried the Christ child safely across a river The vampire nairl or woet the poor little rich olf girl and her bitter end Yet you say a vampire died beside her? Can’t believe that would be our pretty boy"

Dead bodies were dead bodies Even supers, when killed by the proper means, dissolved into mere bones and dust like mortals Who knew for sure just what these two dead lovers had been? Who kneho or what they would have become had they not been killed?

Maybe whoever had killed theuessed

Chapter Forty-Seven

I left Vil them ho and as Christophe?

The name was suspiciously akin to Christopher, but Christophe felt a lot older to arden And maybe the serpent had been a better catch for a woman like Eve than one lousy apple

Maybe Christophe-Cocaine-Snoas the key to the mystery of Sunset Park Maybe he was the key to the history of vaas

Maybe he was the key toreporters want to know

I re She’d roups where my accessory-buddy was known as the Ice Prick, possessed of a potent Bri

I headed hoe, where my laptop worked without a hard-wire connection, thanks to whatever resident unseen elves or brownies of the Internet hung around the place

Quicksilver arrived hoh his ajarlike a huge, furry beach ball He was glad to see me Why did I think I’d been under his distant scrutiny onthe belle of unseen surveillance here in Las Vegas

First, there were Nightwine’s local security cameras and Cicereau’s stolen videos of me at the Inferno, not to mention Snow’s access to all of the Inferno pics Then there was Quicksilver’s literal tailing of my movements, which I welco via the silver shape-shifting familiar attached to my epidermis

And then there was Ric, who so far see to ask where I was and where I was going to be when Yay, Ric! He was a bit over-zealous, but at least just simply human So far The line between protective and possessive with all these er, entities, was razor-edge thin

I got online and Groggled the Seven Deadly Sins and Cocaine Six hundred thousand entries cale billed itself as "the drinking person’s search engine" and seized fewer copyrights than its more famous predecessor)

Okay

There were a ton of Web sites with names like cocainefreakscom, sevendivinesinscoroup looked pro up, but was still able to peek in on a few discussion chains, asod!" began one gushing entry "I got it The Kiss After the January 16th show First, the Scarf Like hot freezing acid around ! I am so totaled! It is better than a jackrabbit vibrator and it lasts, oh, soooo loooong I live for the next one, if I can be the first and only feot to slip up sometime, and I pray that it’s with me"

What the heck was a jackrabbit vibrator? I personally did not expect ht, now that I’d been in Las Vegas, expect soer Or a lion or an alpha wolf or the right unrotted vauy But not froht as well get it on with a rat! But then a lot of women later concluded that they had

But these Cocaine-aholics were unabashed addicts

I read a fewprose "Exquisite Indescribable White Lightning Albino e-XXX-tasy I’d never had any patience with teases of either gender and Cocaine sure had these poor twits on the ropes

"The Holy Day," one demented kissee wrote, "was ht in thefeather fro and then ca volcanic fury like the Devil’s own fiery breath It seeo on forever and I never wanted it to end"

Well, it had, honey Get over it, Irin naar, Kissycat

I glanced at the signature for the wo enslaved by a Brimstone Kiss was her Independence Day

Lilith

Hey, soht already have used Delilah even Both were classical Old Testament names, classical lady vamp names Didn’t mean that I was that Delilah Or that this Lilith wasin Vegas She’d had the opportunity to see the Seven Deadly Sins, even to get caught up in inein a mosh pit for a melodramatic smooch from a self-important freak

I hated to think so anyway, but I couldn’t know for sure Then so prodded my memory that made my blood chill and set like strawberry Jell-O in allfor you," had been Snow’s opening line when he came up behind me at the Inferno Bar the first time I’d encountered him

I’d taken it for a corny pickup line Now I knew that Snoas a lot of things, most of them scary or despicable, but he wasn’t corny

He’d mistaken me for Lilith