“Who’s the freaking school nurse now?” I asked, feeling my cheeks warm at the mention of my period. I didn’t want to even think why a vampire would be able to sense that.

His laugh was low as he leaned near again. “Piqued, Delilah? I’m being too analytical? I admit I enjoyed a unique effervescent quality some might become addicted to. I might too, but I don’t want your blood. How was the taste test for you?”

“Quick and dirty, as I expected. Grow up, Sanscouci.” I knew my request was ridiculous to a seven- or eight-hundred-year-old vampire, but guys will be guys.

“You’re not retching with revulsion.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re an expert at this, right? Like a dentist.”

I was pleased, though. As the lyrics in the classic Casablanca movie song went, “a kiss is just a kiss” and that’s what I’d wanted to know. Sansouci had enjoyed that moment on the level of a stolen sexual buzz, but didn’t find it an orgasmic occasion. I was no longer passing on any remainder of the Brimstone Kiss effect to the man in the street. Or vampire.

At least not on the lips.

“So this is what you do. Kiss and run. Tell me about the harem.”

“They’re ordinary women with no men in their lives, for some reason. Young. Old. In between. Maybe they were abused when children and need the edge of mock violence to feel alive. Maybe they’ve lost someone who can never, ever come back. Maybe they’re just too busy to meet and date and mate. Maybe, Delilah, they just like me and what I do for them.”

“What do they get out of it?”

I was asking an existential question. He wanted to take me down to brass tacks. What does that mean, anyway? I was about to learn what it meant to Sansouci when he was ready to play me.

“I’ll show you.” He reached into the side pockets of his light cotton jacket and started laying items on the black glass where their reflection made twins of everything. “This is my tool kit now, not lances and swords and daggers.”

I recognized the first item, a flash drive lozenge.

“Dirty movies for the cell phone?” I asked.

“No. A vibrator, and not just any vibrator.” As he picked it up the surface shimmered through an electric rainbow of colors changing form in his hand. “This is the Swiss army knife of vibrators, small and portable but with eighty-six different shapes and functions.”

I tried not to stare at it bug-eyed. Huh? Call me an amateur. I’d just achieved supine. He pushed forward some small round rubber bands. I was thinking condoms, but was glad I hadn’t tried to be the A-student and sung out my guess.

“Silken bonds, expandable to any length or situation. Second-most popular. Of course you’ve never . . .”

I was taking the fifth.

“A pair of chorus-girl earrings?” I gawked when the sparkling pair of three-inch red-carpet shoulder-dusters hit the tabletop next.

“We’re back to that naughty word again, Delilah. Nipple clamps. Vibrating. Unisex too. They also work as actual earrings. They’d look hotter than hell with your current outfit. I don’t suppose you’d . . . ?” He held them up so they caught the light like Whore of Babylon pasties.

By now my cool white skin had overheated with a blush. Heartland-naive sucked.

“Yes,” he said, a wicked spring-green sparkle in his eyes, “that’s the effect I’m going for, but it’s called a flush. Just how far down do your flushes go?”

“You’re teasing me in payback for prying your history out of you,” I accused.

And, I realized, it was also because little boys like to torment little girls they like with scary objects like frogs and snakes, that Sansouci’s display was an adult version of the same scenario.

The next item was a nest of tangled chains of various lengths. “Some of my clients have numerous piercings and rings. These offer myriad decorative and functional combinations with onboard equipment. Your silver familiar ever assume any titillating forms?”

“Never,” I said, vehement, only then remembering a time or two . . . I felt my blush go scarlet. “I hate that,” I ground out. “I hate that my skin type does that.”

“I don’t. I find it charming, and very telltale.” Sansouci laughed as he swept his display off the table and back into his pockets. “These are only the easily portable . . . accessories of my trade. Care to know more?”

“No,” I swore. “I think I’d better leave.”

“Not before you tell me your real story,’” Sansouci said softly. “Your real reason for why we’re here, your interrogating me.”

He suddenly pulled me close again with one arm while his other hand lifted the hair off my nape. My face was smothered in his jacket shoulder. In an instant I was held immobile, although the skull rocked after his sudden move.

“I thought so,” he murmured in my ear. “You didn’t ask about this, and here I am an expert at your disposal, fearless reporter. Señor Montoya’s been sampling your tasty neck. Regularly.”

“It’s just a hickey. Hickeys,” I mumbled against his jacket. “I hate that word.”

“Not just a hickey. Hickeys.” His thumb stroked the freshest one and I couldn’t stop a wince. I jerked away, but he held me tight.

He whispered the next words into my hair, but I heard every damning syllable. It was a taunt and an intimacy and a diagnosis. “Can’t deny it. Broke the skin, Luscious.”

I pushed off, fighting his custody, more flushed and angry and anxious than before. “As if you wouldn’t,” I hissed back at him. “He gets . . . overenthusiastic. A bat bite in the Mexican desert spurred his first wet dream, okay? It’s a tiny, harmless kink.”

God, why was I telling him this?

“Like you’d know, virtual virgin.”

“He doesn’t have . . . fangs.”

“Teeth enough to be interesting. You let him?”

“I love him.”

Sansouci let me go. The silver familiar lay coldly around my neck. I put my hand up to feel a bristly crown of thorns. It had allowed him to touch me when I’d wanted to intrigue him into testing my blood, but this was too much for us both.

“Manhandle me like that again,” I told Sansouci, “and you’ll lose a body part.”

“No desire to, now that I know what I suspected is right. This is serious, Delilah, and you know it. That’s why you cozied up to me to pry out some facts of vampire life, so to speak. You’re like any vamp-tramp-in-training—”

I belted him in the mouth before I could even think.

The shock shut him up, and me too.

Not very ladylike. I didn’t approve when women did that to men who said things they didn’t like in forties movies. It made them “dames,” I guess.

Sansouci felt his jaw. “Bit my tongue. You drew blood, Delilah. How does that feel?”

“Annoying, like your behavior. You’re the only vampire I—”

“Trust?”

“Don’t fool yourself. The only one I know I can ask.”

There was always Howard Hughes, but asking lecherous Uncle Howie about plain sex, not to mention vampire sex, was way too icky. Warped, even. Especially if he was my father. At least I was convinced that Sansouci’s attitude toward Vida was far too neutral for him to be a candidate.

“You weren’t going to tell me the one piece of information that really mattered.” He sat back, shaking his head. “I overstepped, but it was for your own good.”

“The bastards always say that. Ric is not a vampire.”

“Let’s say not. But you’re worried sick. Vampires did drain him dead.”

“Maybe. . . . I’m not buying that. Whatever happened, they didn’t . . . turn him.”

“You just don’t want to accept responsibility for raising the dead. Why not? Your lover does? He dowses for them.”

“If it was me who brought him back, maybe I shouldn’t have.”

“I saw it. Snow saw it. The Gehenna werewolves saw it. Everybody in the rescue party did. One of the great love scenes never on the silver screen.” He picked up his drink to toast me. “Here’s looking at you, kid. You willed Ric Montoya back from the dead. Now you have to live with it. Everybody throws that term around. ‘Turn,’ like it’s a damn dance move.”

I shook out my hair to make sure my nape was covered and sipped my Virtual Virgin. Was I starting to be sorry about what I’d named the drink. . . .

“I don’t know about those things,” I said. “I only know the vamp boys in the group homes were always after me and I would die before I’d be bitten.” I sounded weary, a mistake in strategy.

“You’re right. That’s not a real bite on your neck, just a love nip, huh?”

“They say . . . I’ve heard . . . People can be turned if a vampire drains all your blood, or you’ve been bitten and you then bite the vampire. Or from toilet seats. I don’t know!”

“And you hate that condition more than anything,” Sansouci said with a quirk of his lips. “Not knowing.”

I was relieved to spot no blood on them. “So what’s it like being a vampire forever?”

“Like my brother figured when he wanted me more than dead and out of the way. He wanted me to suffer. He knew that the religious vocation I’d chosen would make my undead eternity as a bloodsucker into unliving hell.”

“Ric would be like that.” I shut my eyes.

“I don’t think he’s a vampire.” Sansouci’s hand covered my fist on the table, his thumb stroking mine. It was truly a consoling gesture.

“Not?” I looked up, my eyes full of question and hope.

“But it’s not good. I said your blood had an intoxicating effervescence.”

“I’ve got pink champagne in my veins?”

“That, and circumstances. Part of the vampire/prey dysfunctional relationship is that being bitten can hook you on biting. You mentioned a boyhood vampire bat bite. Then the Karnak vampires made it a group party. It’s possible Montoya’s becoming addicted to your blood, which would make him your personal human ‘lifestyle’ vampire. All addicts want more and more. All addicts have a built-in denial factor for why they do what they can’t resist. For a girl who hated the idea of being vamp-bit, you’re on the royal road to serious risk. It’s not his fault, but it’s a fact.”

My fist lifted to shake his chilly vampire hand off mine.

I hit it down again so hard the black glass cracked from rim to rim like an instant spiderweb.

Sansouci’s head leaned back against the red velvet upholstery. He did look like a knight.

“Love the new cracked glass tabletop, Delilah. Now. Here’s the way it is, the way I see it, and you’re going to have to deal with it.”

I listened with all my heart, and my head.

“Montoya loves you.”

I knew that.

“I want you.”

I knew and used that.

“And Snow . . . Snow needs you for some reason even I can’t guess.”

Need? Snow? That one had me stumped.

“Unless you’re willing to juggle lovers, and I doubt you are . . . yet, you’re going to have to decide who you’re safest with, and who’s safest with you.”

My only answer was silence. It was time to head home and mull what Sanscouci had told me and what he’d told me without knowing it.

He drained his glass. “Even your Virtual Virgin packs a kick, but a tentative one.”

“It’s the cherry vodka you laced it with, not my innocent nonalcoholic recipe.”

“Cherry vodka.” He repeated . . . caressed . . . my words with a searching look.

My inner alarms went on red alert. I was Sansouci’s chief prey these twenty-first century days. For all his apparent sophistication and benign blood-drinking, he’d been a savage warrior many more centuries than he’d been a dedicated monk or a cultish “life coach” for lonely ladies.

“I need to move on,” I said.

“In your life, or at this moment?”

“Both. How do I . . . we . . . exit this Goth carnival ride? And I like my life,” I announced, sitting forward on the banquette, in case he had any doubts.

I needed to pass him to get out.

Put me on hold and put yourself in a cul-de-sac with a vampire, right. Irma was back, gloating.

“Excuse me,” I suggested.

Sansouci tilted his head, as if analyzing a lot more about me than my words.

He has us at his mercy. Umm.

“Sure thing, Luscious.” Sansouci’s smile was as smooth as corn silk. He cracked the skull’s tufted velvet doors and the jaws yawned open, admitting screams of laughter and tortured electric guitars.

His exit left the suspended unit swaying hard. I poised on the booth’s bottom lip trying to gauge the jump to terra firma. I made the leap unassisted, taking the impact with my bent knees.

“Impressive,” he said.

“I’m used to exiting hovering helicopters. A state-fair ride is a snap.”

“Helicopters?”

I’d truly surprised him, since most such exits happen during troop deployments during wars. I was a veteran of the journalism wars.

“The WTCH-TV ’copter. Weather coverage was a big deal in Wichita when I was a reporter there.”

“Weather. TV-station ’copter. Right. Let me get you to the door. Spider Skull gets . . . raucous after dark.”

I sensed the female-unfriendly eyes all around. Or too friendly, I should say. Even today, women on business errands at night were considered fair game.