"Oh, you poor thing!!!" A woman was weeping and embracing me. "You almost made it. It's so tragic. So close."

Right. I almost made it. An excellent position for me in the Cocaine groupie world. Almost favored. And in. In like…Lilith?

Chapter Forty-Nine

The winners clung together, weeping, unable to leave the foot of the deserted stage.

The losers ebbed away to the Inferno Bar, or to the gaming tables and the rest rooms, where they probably surveyed their tragic, bereft faces in the mirror and gave them soul kisses.

Horse hockey! I caught up with the crew that had made for the Inferno Bar.

"…hung like a horse," one of the losers was saying.

Ludicrous. I was an objective reporter. You can't, uh, snow me. Hung like a hunky mortal man, if I had to make a guesstimate. That I could was a bit annoying.

"My God, that scarf! I'd give anything to have it around my neck. I bet it feels just like his hair."

One of the true believers focused on me, stroking my wig in a creepy way. "You felt it. The scarf. What was it like?"

I wanted to say "China-silk import chiffon, really cheap."

I said, "Like air, clouds, steam heat."

Man, this was easy; I had them swooning on their bar stools. I ordered an Albino Vampire to up the ante. They hadn't realized that option existed, so I was swarmed.

"It's a house drink," I said, "really smooth and creamy."

It hurt not to claim credit as I watched the cash register ca-ching at a rapid rate as Albino Vampires were served all around.

A hard-faced brunette wiggled onto the bar stool beside me after pushing off a blitzed blonde to make room for herself. "You're new in town."

"Right."

"Do you know about the Club?"

Yeah. You put it on your steering wheel to keep creeps from stealing your car. "Club?"

She leaned way nearer than I needed. There were vampires, and there were vamps. "Club AV/DC."

Okay. I wasn’t born yesterday even if I was from Kansas. AC/DC meant alternating current or alternative lifestyle. The latter meaning was a code word for folks who swung both ways. Bisexuals. Also nowadays, bi-humans or unhumans. Different strokes for different folks, and very different folks, but this gender preference stuff had all gotten a lot more complicated after the Millennium Revelation.

AV/DC, on the other hand, might mean Albino Vampire/ Doting Cows.

The brunette pressed a card into my sweaty palm. "We meet every night. Have a few drinks. Dance. Watch Cocaine impersonators. You might like the scene."

No, I needed to research the scene. "Thanks! Impersonators?"

Her breath riffled the phony hair around my neck. "You won't need to lose out on any Brimstone Kisses there."

My blood, predictably, ran cold. Was she was hinting that an illegal vampire club had attached itself to a star? Snow.

Is that what had made Lilith a shadow in my mirror?

Naturally I showed up at a gathering the next night in a one-story shop near downtown that had obviously gone belly up. Times were tough even in Las Vegas. This felt a lot like going to an AA meeting, not that Alcoholics Anonymous had ever been my thing. I'd covered the organization as a reporter. I found the religious bent hokey but it had worked for a lot of people, including the TV station owner. The news biz still ran on eighty-proof for blood.

The Cocaine Club occupied an end spot in the usual one-story strip shopping centers that dominate Las Vegas off the Strip with a Capital S.

I brought a covered casserole, as requested, even though I had to buy it at Albertson's deli and heat it in the cottage microwave, then transport it in a padded aluminum wrapping. Anything to look properly domestic while getting my…rocks didn't quite apply to girls…hormones off. I set the casserole, Velveeta and macaroni, down beside the huge aluminum coffee urn. Like that was the only drug here. Yeah. You could smell Albino leather here like perfumed pheromones.

The women-and the attendees all were women; apparently the Brimstone Kiss didn't do cross-gender- had that frantically worn look of desperate housewives. They were the same personally enterprising women who had made romance cover model Fabio a household name for a brief shining moment thirty years ago. Given the usual male incapacity for dealing with women beyond sex, generation, and child support, I could get these babes' fantasies.

On the other hand, despite my early childhood experiences, I was beginning to think I really liked most men: Ric…my male guard dog, Quicksilver…maybe even, on a particularly generous day, my un-American Idol Snow…and could cut them some serious slack under the right circumstances.

"You have a Web site?" I asked the aggressive chick whose shoulders would rival a defensive lineman's. It had been listed on the card: brimstonesluts.com.

"Definitely. It's an online world. I hear you almost got the Kiss last night."

"Yeah. So close." My fingernails tapped the table as I poured steaming amber liquid into my Styrofoam cup. The cup was white, but beyond that it was nothing the real Snow would touch on a bet.

"That's okay, honey. There are more of us than them." Her consoling hand-clutch almost stapled my knuckles together, thanks to her painted claws.

"What exactly does a Brimstone Kiss do?"

"Take you to paradise."

"What kind of paradise?" I was not the type to take even a free pass to heaven. One never knew what one was getting.

"I don't know! The recipients are all too incoherent to say. Pleasure Central, I guess. And nobody comes back down to write memoirs."

Hearsay. I was all for nirvana, but I had to have a free sample first.

I left the group meeting with a lot of questions.

Most of them were for Snow, if he would answer. Or if I could make him.

Chapter Fifty

I was beginning to pick up a pattern. Then. Now.

Christopher. Christophe. Krzysztof, maybe. Who knows what other variations?

My charm bracelet had changed into a silver circle of lips. Cold silver lips.

I suppose Snow knew where I was going around Las Vegas, knew what I was doing.

Whoever he was, Christopher or Christophe, he was a complex being, probably supernatural, and he wanted something from me I wouldn’t freely give. So he was just Cicereau in mime make-up as far as I was concerned.

I made sure to hit the Inferno the next night long after the show, when the sweat of performance and the sweet brain-freezing liquidity of the Brimstone Kisses were history. I wondered if he was affected at all, felt anything profound himself. Nah. Most womanizers weren't that sensitive.

I donned a royal blue poplin suit I'd used for attending political lunches for WTCH-TV and hot pink fifties pumps. The silver familiar apparently approved of the footwear, because it immediately slithered up my arm and down my side and leg to become a slender ankle bracelet. Call my look Business Brazen.

Nick Charles offered me an Albino Vampire at the bar, but I declined. Didn't need any high-octane oral stimulants tonight.

Snow showed up in black this time: slacks, jacket, silk shirt, and sunglasses. Maybe he homed in on my silver accessory, which still sported buttoned lip charms. Like his lips were sealed. Right.

Snow gathered me into a half-time rumba. He'd been expecting me. So I got right to the point.

"Why do you do it?" I asked.

"Dance?"

"Snow all those women."

"Because I can?"

"So. You're a human drug."

"Who says I'm human?"

"I wish you were."

"Why?"

"I might like you. A little."

He stepped back and stood apart from me, holding my hands in the extravagant open posture of a dance that had frozen in time. "I like you. A little."