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I started forward at a gallop, baby Grizelle leaping alongside me like a … well, like a gazelle. I had to wonder how a major beast felt being so totally downsized, and could understand the shapeshifter’s fury. The distant mob scene disturbed me, too.
As we closed on the action, I realized we were viewing the dark backs of about fifteen young women shoving, pushing, even climbing each other to make contact with a … white marble statue set against a black stone wall.
The obscured figure we neared was not all white now. Telltale blots of red dappled the object of the assault. My emotions sickened to see a rerun in progress of what I’d only witnessed at the bitter end … my partner Ric Montoya’s multiple fang-marked body after a whole freaking vampire empire, including vampire tsetse flies, had feasted on him. I had to stop this.
Closer still, a frantic Grizelle and I bounded, our charging footsteps muffled by the tiger’s pads, my ridged-rubber boot soles, and the attackers’ deafening shrieks.
Now I was close enough to read the backs of the attackers. Backs? Read? What were they? Living billboards? What was I missing? Oh, the women were wearing T-shirts with messages that echoed their shouted words. And those words were becoming clear and scarily familiar.
“You can’t whip us up, then just stop,” peeved female voices taunted.
“How does it feel to be ‘snowbound’?”
“Yeah. Like we were, Cocaine.”
“We want what’s coming to us … the Brimstone Kiss.”
I skidded to a stop. Oh, no. The figure pinned by the ravenous horde was no hunk of unfeeling marble. It had to be Grizelle’s boss and my so-unfavorite Vegas mogul.
The seething, clawing harpies using the real Snow for a climbing wall shouted “Come on, Cocaine, give,” and “Snow up a storm for us,” as well earthier online endearments I also recognized, like “Ice Prick.” Or so the rumor went.
Only my hard grip on the leash kept fifty pounds of snarling tiger cub from scaling the T-shirted human torsos ahead of us. Now I knew what these attackers were, not the relentless ancient tormenters who’d savaged Ric but modern fangirls gone bad. Even fifteen women, crazed enough, can make a mob.
Groupies were indeed Nick Charles’s schooling “fish” … if you thought “piranha.”
“Grizelle,” I ordered, “velvet paws and fangs only. They’re paying customers and fans. The boss would not want them hurt, no matter what. Got it?”
The tiger cub’s white muzzle lifted in grudging acknowledgment. I hoped she didn’t take it out of my skin later, when we were all back to normal, which I swore we would be. All of us, even Snow and the groupies.
Was I still missing something? Maybe I was being naïve, and Snow liked this scene. I had no time to overthink anything. Even my silver familiar jumped ship, abandoning its cool double-handcuff bracelet form. It split to rocket up one arm, across my shoulders, and down to the other wrist so fast I hoped I’d just sensed hot metal burns.
When I looked, my
wrists were circled by cuff bracelets. The pair was etched with serious monster designs, snake-pit-tangled shapes I couldn’t name. Sea monster, kraken, giant squid? Both cuffs trailed silver-chain tentacles—more than the average octopus—say nine per wrist.
I was literally “armed” with my own matched set of heavy metal cat-o’-nine-tails. Could I whip community ass now …
The familiar had become such an intuitive part of me, I’d almost forgotten it had been spawned by my unintentionally touching a lock of Snow’s albino hair, and he might be murderously goaded to revenge at the moment.
Would the familiar, no matter how lethal the form, still obey my “prime directive,” think first and do no harm unless about to be harmed? Yeah, I’m a pacifist kick-ass chick. So sue me, but expect to pay court costs.
My only option was wading into the frenzied fans’ midst, jerking anonymous arms and shoulders away from the prey while Grizelle nipped the heels of their churning feet.
Only Grizelle and I knew the worst part of this assault scene, a damning secret that made me squirm with sympathetic pain for a man, or whatever, I despised.
Only we knew the mauling groupies were pressing Snow’s eternally wounded back—damaged because of me—to the hard stone. He was bound between pain and humiliation like a mythical demigod in Tartarus, the Greek abyss below even Hades, and the mother of all hells.
Whatever breed of immortal Snow was, I knew he was vulnerable—or even human enough—to bleed. I’d never seen but often envisioned the raw, meaty mess my driving compassion for my lover, Ric, had made of his back. I hadn’t known it, but every lash scar my lips fresh from an extorted Brimstone Kiss had erased on Ric’s skin had appeared as a fresh welt on Snow’s several hotel stories away.
Vegas after the Millennium Revelation was the kind of naughty world where one good deed would exact at least another bad one in exchange. Ugly speculations were occurring to me in fractured seconds.
My God. What if these spellbound women were no longer just berserk groupies, what if this sinister hotel-wide change also had made them into vampires?
Above the feeding frenzy loomed Snow’s profile, ghost white face and long hair turned sideways, neck cords strained, albino eyes shut, denuded of the ever-present sunglasses.
By then I’d jerked a pathway through the clawing groupies so eager to close ranks and fight off rescuers. My arms lashed out, the tentacles of silver chains cutting slashes in their black Seven Deadly Sins and snowsluts.com T-shirts, other tentacles wrapping their necks and bare forearms.
The swinging metal stingers left silver comet trails in the air … and streaks of glitter on the black knit and the flesh beneath the raw-edged rips, on the women’s arms, lifting to defend now, not assault. Their fevered demands became moans as I slashed them into stumbling away, cradling their arms and mumbling.
