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"No one will mess with me," he assured me

Count me out on that

Ir?" Sansouci leaned nearer to hearIr ht I could handle Sansouci Maybe if I so me to the door surely was

We were there, at the usual blank steel-door nightclubs this town favored

I heard

Sansouci blocked all that noise and ugliness with his body, his big warrior’s body pinning me to the steel door, protective as a wall, intio there

His eyes searchedmy panic with a looka look somehow both satisfied andtender

I felt all the superhuth I’d told him I’d want onme suspended in a bell-jar moment I’d never anticipated

I had the most awful suspicioninstinctthat Sanscouci wanted tokissprom date

He didn’t want to taste my blood, which should have been a relief He wanted to taste my emotions, which were even hthat vow of mine for the first ti now" His husky undertone seemed to vibrate in my bones

"Gee, thanks What part of ‘taken already’ don’t you get?"

"Undead life is long"

I averted net

"Delilah," he said, willing

I wasn’t breathing, I was panting, a wild animal, cornered

His expressionht and found only a steel door against my fevered cheeks, his eyes locked oninto like a hunted aniins

If I kissed himif I let hi me pinned here but me I forced my eyes to focus far to the side and addressed the e

"I’ve been here before," I said, my voice hard and cold "Before I ever bled for the first ti ry Horrible They smelled of death and murder, old blood and new lusts Their skins wereand I only had a diaht theo"

I felt his presence retreating before it was physical fact It was if I’d knocked a ravity

One furtive glance at his face caught a fading gleaaze

He hadn’t lasted all those postvaet of hu inunhumans

"Get out" His voice was harder and colder thanto"

"Get Out"

I saw the blood tide,in his eye whites and yanked the door handle open behindso loud I knew he’d hear it for yards, as he’d scent my blood for alot, her neon chartreuse halo of pixie dust security announcing she was no Eldorado to mess with She had never looked more like a fortress

Chapter Twenty-three

AFTER HE’D LEFT the Spider Skull, Sansouci had made an immediate blood and booty phone call to Cary cougar of a woman in her late forties

Carmella was the only one of his blood "wives" he didn’t like

She was also the only one who craved being drained to the very edge of mortality So, senseless survival Especially after seeing, flirting with, wanting Delilah She got under his skin the way he was supposed to want to get under hers Like an addiction

He did all the things with Car he did Twice

He left his client when she was sated in every way possible and he was sick of himself His ancient, wholly hulitz of the Las Vegas Strip

Sansouci decided to finish his unhappy evening out by stopping for a nightcap at Chez Shez He could atone there for what he’d refrained fro--and what he’d just done tothe artificial blood on tap Penance, they’d labeled it when he’d been a monk Nowadays even that as out of date

Gentle Fawn, the day-shift employee Shez called Faartz, had been replaced for the evening hours by a tall black woreen eyes who suspiciously resembled Grizelle, the Inferno Hotel’s security head Had the ancient Egyptian godling developed a crush on a twenty-first-century shape-shifter?

Good luck with that, Sansouci thought

He hunkered over the stone cup inset with semiprecious stones and filled with the chilled bloodwine "Hastur" had given hi into the shop’s rear The sh the artificial bloodwine inside tasted like lukewarm cinnamon mouthwash

Could he live on this swill forever? Or for as long as Delilah lived her mayfly’s seconds of existence until2168, say? Delilah would be old and frail and he’d besorry he hadn’t turned her and facing more centuries of oblet in fists of frustration What he treasured about Delilah was her s her his endless blood-craving life would destroy that

"The bloodwine does not appeal?"