Chapter Four

I woke up at midnight, sitting upright in bed, wondering what my subconscious mind had heard.

The vampire's pale face hung over me like a diseased moon, so close that I was forced to fall back. He wasn't anything pretty from an old vampire movie, not a wistful Brad Pitt or even a ferociously life-hungry Tom Cruise. His dead white skin hosted a raging case of psoriasis and his oily dishwater-brown hair was long enough for its rat-tailed ends to twitch at my face and throat like barbs.

Suddenly I was up against a wall, pinned there by him. Vamps can do that, move faster than human perception. And he wasn't alone. He played lead bloodsucker with a backup trio, all as nauseating as their leader.

They were teen vamps who'd been bitten young. Someone had left them buried and forgotten a bit too long. That had made them ugly and mean.

Lead boy ran his fingernail down my cheek. It was ragged, with black oil and dirt obscuring any moon at the jagged tip. It was like being caressed by a jigsaw blade.

"Cool and white," he said. Then he said my name. "Delilah."

"Looks good in red, I bet," a backup boy cackled.

Suddenly I knew where I was, and it wasn't my bedroom on Moody Avenue.

I was back in the social services group home, and the boys were daylight vampires who were older, bigger, and way stronger than I. They knew just when to waylay me, when no one was around to stop them-except me, and I weighed all of ninety pounds at age twelve.

It was so clear. So real. It would be gang rape and then a group blood tasting. I'd be tainted two unrecoverable ways, even worse than I was now as an unwanted orphan.

I reached into my jeans pocket. Jeans? I'd been accosted in bed. Since when was I wearing jeans?

I was wearing jeans, and the pocket held a cheap plastic handle with a pointed steel blade dusted with diamonds. I'd been ready for this moment all my life and knew what to do.

I lifted my left hand, and then wound it tight in those repellent greasy strands of the lead vamp's hair.

The trio wolf-whistled. "Oh, she likes you, Hacker. Come on, Snow White; time to donate a little blood and a lot of booty."

My right hand snaked up to press the long-missing nail file I'd stolen from Miss Whitcomb, the supervisor, hard into the outer socket of Hacker's left eye.

Bleeding doesn't bother vamps. It can even be a turn-on. But the threat of having their eyes popped out "like a pair of pearls from an oyster shell," as I put it in my best Captain Jack Sparrow voice, did turn their dead-white complexions greener than creme de menthe.

They wouldn't have known what creme de menthe was, since they all had the reading level of a gerbil.

The quartet melted away as I sat up. In bed. I was sweating from my hair to my feet, and my right hand was coiled into such a tight fist that I turned on the bedside lamp to inspect the damage: half-moon fingernail indentations weeping blood.

I took a deep breath. In my own bed.

Alone.

Someone whimpered.

Achilles, looking worried, paced the floor beside my bed. Shorted-legged Lhasas aren't great jumpers. When I lifted him up beside me, he set about licking my face with a hot, loving tongue. He brought the warmth back into me and banished the dream. The nightmare. The trouble was, it was true to life.

My life. I'd been there, done that.

So much for the everyday adventures of an underage ward of the guardian state of Kansas after the Millennium Revelation.

I'd always considered myself the orphan's orphan.

After all, no one had ever adopted me, or tried to. No one had fostered me. I just stayed at the Sedgwick County Home as kids younger and older came and went.

Maybe it was my funky name. Delilah Street. I'd supposedly been found there as an abandoned three-day-old infant, wrapped in one of those storm shelter Army-green blankets.

No dainty pastels for baby me.

But, see, there wasn't a Delilah Street in Wichita. Or Kansas. Or surrounding states. I'd looked. At least I hadn't been found on Lavender Lane. I'd have really developed a chip on my shoulder with that sappy name.

When Y2K and the Millennium Revelation came along, it was exciting that all the bogeymen were coming out of the closet and out from under the bed of night-time stories. Vampires and weres and ghouls, storybook stuff. I still wanted to read about The Little Princess, and Cinderella with those cool glass slippers, and Little Orphan Annie, who'd had a good dog and a sugar daddy, born before the age that recognized child molestation. Then, suddenly, the vamp boys came out of the woodwork and circled, flooding the social service agencies, as unclaimed as rabid dogs. Half-breeds, some of them. All predators. That's when they zeroed in on me.

Luckily, a couple years after the Millennium Revelation, some anonymous benefactor, likely a faceless charity, had sponsored my going to a girls' high school, and, later, to college. When I say sponsored, I mean paid the tuition. Period. Oh, sure, room and board at Our Lady of the Lake Convent School was covered, but nothing beyond that. College was coed and public. I earned some extra scholarship money and worked my way through it in the usual "fries with that?" student mode. No time for foolishness, including much dating.

I brooded about all this the rest of that long nonworking weekend. I'd trashed the roses and gardenias, but their sickly sweet odor lingered like the subtle breath of a funeral home.

Sometimes I had nightmares I didn't remember much of, almost alien abduction dreams. Compared to the remembered shards of my nightmares, a needle in the navel would have been child's play. I glimpsed something like a silver turkey baster and it was pushing between my legs. Made it hard to think of a penis as anything other than a blunt instrument after that. So maybe Undead Ted was right. I was frigid. Cold. In one sense, silver scared the hell out of me, yet called to me in all its more elegant forms.

Sometimes I thought I was a ghoul, gathering dead people's clothes and fragments of their lives from resale shops and estate sales. Compelled to buy weird Victorian sterling serving pieces at fire-sale prices; they were so tiny, so mysterious, so precious. A set of fairy-size forks for some forgotten kind of seafood appetizer. An opium pipe set into a lady's finger ring. Taxco Mexican jewelry with welts of bright blue glass dewing it.

I was born to be odd. Whenever I tried not to be, it went wrong. Like with Ted.

I moped through the weekend, sharing a sip of Bailey's Irish Cream with Achilles. He seemed downcast himself that idle Saturday. We sat together all afternoon watching old movies on cable TV, I stroking his long, soft hair. Saturday night, he collapsed in front of his water dish, panting. I gathered him up, looking into licorice-black eyes that had dulled to the point of not recognizing me. After frantically riffling the Yellow Pages, I raced in my vintage Caddie for the nearest twenty-four-hour vet's offices. On the passenger side, Achilles lay inert. I stroked him the whole way, only one hand on the wheel, but he wasn't even responding to his name now.

The vet took him in with vague guesses and promises of intravenous fluids and constant care and a phone call if anything changed.

Sunday night I stood in a fluorescent light-glared room and they told me he was terminal.

"Never seen anything like it," the weary-faced vet said. "So fast. Blood poisoning."

I pictured small defensive teeth sunk into a bony undead ankle, and sobbed. Achilles lay dead to the world on a steel table, a beautiful dust mop of pale hair just barely breathing. My own breath came raggedly. Getting Achilles had been the first thing I'd done after leaving college and getting a job. He was the first and only creature to ever give me joy and affection. We'd been together for three years. I felt like I was strangling on poisoned cotton candy.

What did I want to do? they asked. Leave the body with them, like a CSI corpse? Or send it to Smokerise Farm for incineration? Rotting in a common grave, or reduced to ashes on my mantel?

What I wanted to do was leave with my dog.

Not... possible. I asked for a lock of his albino-white hair and opted for Smokerise Farm, where, I was assured, the ashes I received were guaranteed to be really his. I could select a suitable... vessel from a book of photographs. I chose one of an Asian shape, with a five-toed Imperial dragon on it. Achilles had been royalty.

Imagine, some people might pass off any old ashes on a bereaved companion.

Achilles was of a breed that had guarded Tibetan holy men for centuries. What if some of their masters' reincarnation mysticism had rubbed off on the dogs? Maybe I was just trying to dull the ache, but I somehow felt that Achilles and I would meet again some day. We might be in different forms, but we'd know each other.

Meanwhile, tomorrow was Monday, not Maybe. I had to go to work again. I felt like the walking dead. In fact, it would be a miracle if I didn't stake Undead Ted on the six o'clock news.

Chapter Five

I hadn't expected life at work to be pleasant after kicking out anchorman Ted, but it seemed he'd been busy over the weekend while I'd been losing my dog.

For one thing, when I entered the studio Undead Ted the Splitting Toad was canoodling with Sheena Coleman by the blue screen. For another, the news director, Fred Fogelmann, called me into his tiny windowless office for a little two-person conference.

"Sit down, Delilah. What's the matter?" He must have just noticed my maroon eye-circles (a problem with tissue-thin pale skin), so this conference was about something else. "You look like hell."

I tried to dredge up a patina of perky. Looking bad was a mortal sin in the TV biz.

He rolled right on before I could defend myself and my raccoon eyes. "Never mind, it doesn't matter."

That was even worse news, but I still couldn't gather any words or gestures to fight my way into a good mood.

"Er, there're some changes in the hopper." Fred was formerly a newspaper City Editor and he still talked like someone with a dwindling pint of rotgut whiskey in his bottom desk drawer.

"Ted's eager to get out on the streets." I bet. "To use his reporter skills again." Again? Really? As if he'd ever had them. "You've done a great job with the ritual crimes beat, but he'll be taking that over. And Sheena wants some street cred too. She'll be doing that 'pornanormal' spot you thought up. Fresh face, you know."

"You mean 'blond and anorexic'," I said, finally peeved enough to growl a little.

"Ann or Rex who?" He shrugged. What a with-it guy on women's issues!

I saw the strategy. Ted had grabbed the juicy beats I'd made mine. What's better to cover than sex and violence? Especially exotic sex and violence. Who did Ted think he was, his journalistic idol, sob-soul brother Geraldo Rivera? Really! Vampires and Geraldo are so over! And what did I get in exchange?

"I have something new for you," Fred said.

It was a good thing I was still feeling too down to pretend to be up, because his next words would have crashed me even if I'd won the lottery the night before.

"We've got a vital demographic that isn't being served and you're just the one to put them in the spotlight. I'm calling the feature 'Good Living After Death.' A lot of influential Baby Boomers underwrite those Sunset City retirement communities all over the country and they have a heck of a lot of interesting stories."

When you have to use "heck of a lot" as a news peg, you're in trouble.

"This old doll, for instance." He handed a black-and-white glamour photo from the Ice Age of film history across the desk. "Right here in Wichita at Sunset City. Quite a looker once. I bet she has tales to tell."

The name under the classic thirties' face with its arched penciled eyebrows made my pulse blip once: Caressa Teagarden, a major star who'd vanished from screen and media as thoroughly as Garbo, at about the same time. My love of vintage made me familiar with films and their stars from the silents to the sixties when the star system crumbled.

This would be a fun one-time change of pace, maybe, but a whole beat based on dredging up the almost dead? I knew what the problem was. The "whole group of senior citizens out there now" just won't die. Rumor had it that the North Koreans, banned from nuclear experiments, had gone to the cellular level, even getting into cloning. Through their various experiments, they'd invented a method of replacing death with a "twilight awake" state. A thing like that would rake in billions. Think Donald Trump paying to be preserved in amber and comb-over. Forever.

"It's set up for tomorrow," Fred said, totally co-opting me. "Slo-mo Eddie is the videographer. Cheer up, Del. A spin out to Sunset City should be real scenic. Some fresh air would put roses in your cheeks. You've been too deep into all that sicko murder stuff. You look like a zombie yourself. Do something to make the old dear happy. A little attention should do wonders for her latest face lift."

I sleepwalked out of there, living up to my new rep, Zombie Reporter. So that was my new beat, Death Warmed Over? Kinda like my career at the moment.

Slo-mo Eddie was one of those lanky, laid-back guys, instead of hyper nutso like most videographers. Deadlines, dead bodies in rapid rotation, it can make you crazy. He chewed Butternut gum while I explained about tomorrow's assignment at Sunset City.

"What's the deal with this Sunset City dame?" Eddie asked. Videographers never paid any attention to the news, the culture, and the wider world. It was all inside the box with them. The camera box.

I explained. "If you have the money, you can retire in clover. Every resident gets the quarters from his or her favorite time of life. There are rumors that they live on only there, like a Virtual Reality personality."

Eddie shrugged. "Weird world."

"Yeah, the Retread Retreat. She probably won't look a day over this," I said, waving the photo.

"Sexy."

"That was then. We can't expect a woman living, er, residing, in a lakeside cottage at Sunset City to resemble any available photos of her salad days. She was a real star once, though, back in the days of the Silver Screen."

"So were we all, kiddo." Eddie snapped his gum and rolled his eyes back toward the TV studio. "Didya hear the latest on Undead Ted? He's had his incisors artificially lengthened. You know what they say about vamps: not enough fang, no wang."

Suddenly, I felt better.

Eddie loved gossip. Or maybe he just hated Ted. "I see Ready Teddy is getting into Witch Twitch. What a bimbo! So what's got you down?"

"It's personal."

"What? You got a life away from WTCH?"

At home that night, I thought about Fast Eddie's mocking comment on having a life beyond WTCH. I stared into my faint reflection on the glass-topped coffee table. Achilles used to stretch out underneath it, dog under glass: safe, sleeping, and elegant in his wavy-haired, short-legged, sharp-toothed way.

The sight of myself on Dead TV still haunted me. I picked up my cell phone to dial one of my few female friends, a street-producer for CSI Bismarck.

"Hey! It's Del. Listen, Annie, I need a copy of the latest Vegas CSI V episode. Yeah, it was a live feed here in Wichita." Or a dead feed, to be precise. "No tapes available. I need the addresses of the producers and writers. Oh, just for a piece I'm working on. You know, always chasing the latest 'in' thing.

"You have a digital recording? Really? Fabulous! Sure. Just Fed Ex it. Overnight? Thanks, you're a doll."

Once I had the names and titles, my reporter self could call and find out what the hell was going on.

Figuring out what was going on in my dreams was another matter.

I didn't wake up the next morning with the usual nasty fragments floating around in my head. Instead, I had a vivid scene right out the Wizard of Oz movie.

I saw Achilles standing, wagging and waiting for me, on the yellow brick road. Only he was white instead of black like Toto, and the whole scene was black and white and gray, like the opening part of the film set in Kansas, not wildly Technicolor like the "merry old land of Oz'" sections.

I looked down to sparkly sequined pumps on my feet. Black and to die for. Maybe I was going somewhere unexpected. Soon. But not into Dorothy's Oz. Someplace darker, a Wonderland all my own.

And Achilles was waiting for me somewhere out there.

Chapter Six

"Can that piece." Fuck-up Freddy was standing by my desk at work, in blowsy mode with The Front Page shirtsleeves from the classic forties newspaper movie, a caricature in the flesh. The only thing missing was the green eyeshade and a garter on his flabby biceps.

"The old dame is dead," he said. "Pulled the plug on herself this morning. Cancelled the contract."

Oddly enough, I was sorry to hear that. "Maybe her death, the reason for it, is a story."

"Nah. The feature's name is 'Good Living After Death,' not 'Death After Death.' I need someone downtown to do a stand-up for a Cub Scout camp-out in the main park."

"That's about as exciting as filming an anthill."

"A good reporter can make a great story out of anything. Jeez, are you losing it, Street, or what?'

I drove home from the station that night with a dopey new assignment sked riding shotgun on the passenger seat of the Caddy, just as Achilles' "documents" had accompanied me away from the vet's office.

It was beginning to feel like "loss" was my middle name. I had no other, anyway.

What more could go wrong?

I had not counted on the Revenge of the Weather Witch.

I had some trouble finding my bungalow on Moody Road. Because it wasn't there anymore.

I got out of the car, slammed the heavy door shut, and stared at the empty, aching socket of dirt where my house had been. All that was left was my refrigerator, lying on its massive metal side, looking like a heavy-metal porcupine.

I approached it over the lumpy ground strewn with toothpicks splintered from the wood and spine of my rental bungalow. It wasn't merely a rental. It was my first real home. It was a lost relative, and it was totally gone, sucked up into some passing tornado funnel.

Other houses of that era stood whole and sturdy on either side of it. My house was the only molar that had been pulled. Freak tornadoes, they were called. Unpredictable.

This one wasn't.

When you piss off a weather witch, she can make her wrath known.

My refrigerator lay there like a beached steel whale. Barnacled to its side was my metal clothes cabinet crammed with vintage duds and every last freaking piece of sterling silver I had ever collected at an estate or garage sale. Victorian fork tines bristled like WWII underwater mine prongs. Mexican jewelry draped the handles. Nineteen-twenties marcasite batted its steel eyelashes in the clear sunlight. The sky was blue, like my eyes; the clouds were white, like my skin. No black thunderclouds, like my wild Irish hair, appeared.

This was a very specific tornado.

At that moment a Fed Ex truck pulled up, white and gleaming in the sunlight. The tiny woman behind the wheel hopped down.

"Street residence?" she asked.

"What's left of it."

"Too bad! Was this house a tear-down?"

"Kinda."

"Sign here."

I did. She handed me a box stamped "Smokerise Farm" and a padded envelop large enough to hold a videotape and a newsy letter about Nightwine Productions from Annie in Bismarck.

I stood there, on the wind-blown prairie, contemplating my losses.

The fact was, my cup was overturned, but I wasn't. We were both half-full, and maybe the half-empty part wasn't worth keeping.

I had Achilles' ashes in a dragon vase and a lock of his hair in a silver Victorian locket. I had Dolly Parton, a running vintage car with 28,000 miles on it, mean-looking fins, and chrome bumper bullets the size of- Well, you know Dolly: talent, guts, and up-front plastic surgery. I had some money in the bank. I had a smattering of borrowed glitz and an empty refrigerator. And I had a shockingly large number of pretty, prickly Victorian sterling flatware sharp enough to function as martial arts throwing stars.

I was taking them all to Las Vegas, where they carved up way-too-familiar corpses on CSI and where a writer-producer named Hector Nightwine had a lot of explaining to do. Never trust a man with hyphenated job title. Or artificially extended fangs. Or both.

And I wasn't leaving Sin City until I knew... who I am. Or who I am not.