"That tight knit top really juices up your breasts," he said. "Take it off."

Here? Outdoors in the empty night? It might not be empty any minute. The notion was exciting. Besides, the big bad strange lawman made me do it. Sí, senor, Irma growled in my mind. Give and you shall receive, chica.

I torqued my torso to eel out of the spandex knit, down to my black sports bra. My thin silver chain shimmied on my hips, where I usually wore a chain with him in mind.

He parked a thumb in my navel to stroke the chain. Even that tiny bit of mock penetration had me ready to writhe with excitement, except that Ric caressing Snow's lock of hair once-removed made me feel oddly incestuous.

"Nice low-rise jeans." Ric was still exploring. His finger stroked along the top edge just above my pubic bone, hidden until now by the top. A sudden vertical jab down inside almost made me jump out of my skin… and my skin-tight leather.

"This short little front zipper is going to drive me wild until we get home." Ric tugged on the metal pull. I felt an answering tug from deep within, my muscles straining to pull something inside, that teasing finger, that eager erection I'd felt in Wrathbone's.

Ric curved me back against the convertible top. The night was warm, but I shivered. His other hand brushed over my breasts, along my ribs, down my hips, and past my navel to the ebbing edge of the jeans' band.

His mouth started at my throat and slipped down my center, his teeth finally biting the zipper pull and tugging until I spasmed, arching toward his face and mouth.

"Mi amor," he whispered into my pelvis, as shaken as I was by our mutual sensual connection. He pulled away, brought his face up to mine.

I was quivering. "You get off on bare torsos, senor. Any reason?"

"You always want to know 'why' about everything, mi periodista."

I recognized the Spanish word for "journalist."

"Yes, I am one. I have a muy grande need to know."

"Now you need to know why I like to caress you, where and how."

"It's because all this is new to me."

"In my case, it's because of those filthy coyotes who held me captive in the desert. I kept the herd animals between myself and those evil men. I knew, even as a muchacho, that nothing was safe from them. But they had magazines. Porn. The only thing I had to read. The crude photos repelled me, but one magazine had a photo of a belly dancer glittering with gold coins in a fringe beneath her breasts and in a circle of gold at her hips-all swathed in sheer silk. That bare midriff with mysteries above and below, that an ignorant boy could safely covet."

I smiled at him, letting my glance fall to his dingy neck, expert applied camo makeup rather than dirt. A wrinkled bandana circled it, covered something. "There are things an ignorant girl can covet too."

We froze, my heart pounding at the thought of soon teasing the love mark I'd made on his throat and kept bruised and tender, the site of a boyhood vampire bat bite. That had been his first innocent, unconscious turn-on and I'd learned to use it.

Quicksilver had endured enough of our sensual games that aimed straight at the heart of love. He thrust his furry head and neck up at the sky and celebrated, or protested, human lust with an ancient, long and mournful canine yowl.

Chapter Sixteen

Since Dolly was protected from vandals by pixie halitosis, we took Ric's vintage bronze Stingray Corvette, which was always thief bait despite its expensive security devices.

Quicksilver stood dancing from forefoot to forefoot twenty feet away, wired to race the Corvette home. Even my skimpy top and leather vest barely fit in the so-called storage area, but I liked the ambiguous privacy of the small, low, throbbing car that had the road feel of a very large and intimate vibrator.

Sometimes the intensity of our physical reactions scared me.

Both of us were orphans. I was never adopted. Growing up in group homes made me defensive and emotionally cautious. Ric was from a poor Mexican family of water dowsers and ended up used by a gang of coyotes, the heartless desert rats who take money to guide illegal immigrants through the Sonora and Chihuahua Desert wilds into the U.S. There the coyotes often abandon them to death by dehydration. They gave real coyotes a bad name.

After the Millennium Revelation, illegally imported zombies from Mexico began fueling the entertainment industry as technology and magic combined to create whole new industries. Young Ricardo Montoya was forced to find and raise zombies so they could be sold into servitude. Somehow he got away and grew up to be the man I'd recently met: an educated, attractive, sexually sophisticated drop-out from a good government job who dressed like a Gentleman's Quarterly white-collar stud.

I wasn't a former TV reporter for nothing. There had to be a whale of a backstory between the man in the present and the illiterate boy on the brink of puberty living among men worse than animals could ever dream of being. That boy had relied on visions of Our Lady of Guadalupe as an ersatz mother figure until a dancing girl in a porn magazine collaborated with a vampire bat to bring him over into manhood one moonless desert night.

Me, I'd come out of puberty with holes in my memory and a phobia against lying on my back.

Somehow, though, Ric and I had a healing effect on each other.

Our cars said a lot about us. Dolly was a 1956 Caddy Biarritz, a classic car. During my self-supporting student days I'd survived by living on other people's castoffs and learned to love the plunder to be found from families who didn't honor their own history-history I would have given my blood for, if vampire bites could deliver such a thing.

Dolly was a battleship: flashy, big, slow, ponderous, but with enough hidden power under the hood to tow Superman. She was my fortress. Ric's small sixties-era Corvette was fast, sleek, powerful, the perfect escape car.

And now here I was a passive passenger in Ric's car, and liking it. Group home Delilah was easing up. How could I not like it? Ric drove the sports car like he did me, an easy hand on all the gears, shifting them silkily…when he wasn't shifting he was caressing my bared midriff.

His fingers were teasing my thin silver hip chain, which put me in a ticklish position again in a couple ways. Caresses were one butterfly wing away from tickling, and this chain wasn't the department store one I'd bought, but yet another shape-shifting incarnation of a lock of albino hair from Christophe/Cocaine/Snow.

So Ric toying with Snow's sending gave me the edgy feeling of being in a threesome nobody knew about but me. Me and my silver shadow.

Ric quit toying and pushed three fingers tight inside my leather pants, under that ridiculously short zipper.

Man, that hombre does know how to rattle our cages, Irma kibitzed.

Yeah. As much as I reacted physically, I knew a significant part of my new sexual thralldom was emotional empathy. I longed with every bone and drop of blood in my body to find the last, hidden key to Ric's past and heal any wounds still borne by that brutalized boy in the desert. And maybe I would. Someday.

The courtyard to Ric's house, hidden behind six-foot-high pale stucco walls, resembled a square in Old Mexico with its huge central fountain plinking away like a watery harpsichord.

A girl could feel like Zorro bait pressed against a stucco wall in the warm, velvet dark, surrounded by the heady scent of a flowering vine while six feet of hungry male sucked the sugar from her lips. Much better than being vampire bait. Much better than being horizontal, although Ricardo Montoya was luring me more and more to that inclination.