Vampire Sunrise by Carole Nelson Douglas

Author:Carole Nelson Douglas
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-12-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

THE GEHENNA WASN’T done with me yet.

Sansouci steered me into a guest bathroom near the door to Cicereau’s suite and told me to clean up.

In the mirror I saw his point. No chance I was regarding Lilith’s image this time. Blood dotted my face, hair, and the jabot of my white blouse. A few swipes with an evaporating soap product cleansed the face and hair. The blouse would just have to pass as polka-dotted. I wiped the blood drops off the gray toes of my shoes and the bell-bottoms of my black pants. The black jacket absorbed dark red and looked fine to the casual glance.

The silver familiar wasn’t about to waste its glory on my bloody cravat. It snugged around my hips again, under the pants. I leaned against the green marble sink and called Ric to tell him I was all right and heading home from the Gehenna.

“You sound breathless,” he answered.

“I have my reasons, which you’ll know when we meet up.”

When I stepped out again, an equally gore-free vampire henchman was awaiting me in the entry. Must be a matching boys’ room through the opposite door. It occurred to me why a werewolf mobster would provide lavatory facilities at the door to his elegant private penthouse. Must have a lot of messy underlings visiting to report on the latest hits and misses.

“Slick thinking,” Sansouci said.

“Yeah. It’s pretty obvious why Cicereau’s visiting goons would need to tidy up right here at the front door.”

He frowned, then eyed the unmarked doors.

“Not these rest rooms. I meant your slick trick, conjuring a hallucinatory exit for the Karnak’s revived killing machine. Forty-some floors ought to stop reanimated bones pretty cold. What happened to Loretta?”

“That was just a mirror image I summoned like the one I left behind here for a while. Loretta is still bound in Madrigal’s backstage mirror.”

He nodded. “I better hustle you outa here before Cicereau forgets he’s grateful, and then make sure that mirror trick is holding.”

No rest for the wicked, as they say.

We zipped down in the next elevator, picking up hotel guests as we stopped at lower floors. No one recoiled or flared their nostrils, so we must have looked—and smelled—fairly normal, as normal as a silver medium and a daylight vampire could be.

Once on the hotel’s thickly tourist-populated main floor, Sansouci steered me through the casino to a gilded cage. I pulled against his one-armed custody at the very sight of bars.

“It’s a cashier’s cage. Relax.”

Sansouci flashed a Gehenna/Magus/Megalith consortium gambling card, a credit card for gamblers. I’d barely glimpsed the holographic image that flipped from an Annie Liebovitz portrait of Cesar Cicereau to a wolf’s-head before Sansouci slapped it down on the brown marble counter and slid it through the cage.

The woman on the other side wore a one-shouldered rabbit fur corset and purple-dyed rabbit ears. I guess “Prey” was her middle name. She batted metallic green false lashes as she pushed a wad of bills under the cage bars.

“Somebody must have hit the jackpot,” she simpered at Sansouci.

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