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And it was utter silence. I ached to hear the shrill pulse of the half dozen rock bands writhing to the beat outside the skull, for the screen to brighten with the waitress’s supernaturally perfect face offering a refill.
I was sure my heartbeat was audible too, especially to him, and shut my eyes.
“Who the hell do you think you are, Delilah Street?” the harsh whisper came again.
“Desperate?” I tried. “And overconfident. ”
I heard the movement of fabric on velvet. My throat tightened against my damn flippant Goth collar, anticipating the fanged assault.
A bit of light flickered over my closed eyelids. I eased them open a slit.
Sansouci had finished draining his glass and called up the virtual waitress.
“Two doubles,” he snarled at the screen as it illuminated his face, emphasizing broad cheekbones, a bone-snapping strong jaw, and the widow’s peak of his black hair against pale skin.
No wonder I’d taken him for a werewolf, as everyone else did.
His face turned my way. The redness rimming his eyes had shrunken and darkened, like dried blood, but his eye whites still glared blue from the black light that penetrated even the skull booths. “Meanwhile, why am I here, now, at your service?”
“I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. ”
“Or maybe you will make up my mind. Decades are weeks to the immortal. ”
His laugh held overtones of a melancholy lilt. I guessed that some inborn ruefulness of his particular vampire history and nature kept me alive and untouched right now.
“Well, hold onto your virtual virginhood,” Sansouci advised, “because you’re going to get more ‘story’ than even you wanted now. ”
I glanced up. He looked just as intense and grim as before, but a tiny emerald gleam sparked deep in his eyes. “Guess your method works, Delilah Street. ”
I cautiously changed position to ease my frozen muscles, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring into the skull’s black portholes to nothing.
“I’m not Dear Abby, Delilah. I’m not your big brother, but you seem to think I can tell you what you’re so eager to know. Time for the hard stuff, so drink up. And then I’ll tell you a night’s tale you won’t soon forget. ”
Chapter Twenty-two
MY FINGERTIPS INCHED the cocktail glass Sansouci had put dead center on the little table toward my side of it. The flavored and colored vodka, added to the innocuous cherry cola, had produced a bright bloodred brew suitable for virginal wedding nights and vampire orgies.
I didn’t dare look at Sansouci, and that wasn’t totally about him being a vampire and also a vampire angry with me.
It was about me being angry with me.
“I’m sorry. I do that,” I said, not looking anywhere but into the cherry-amber depths of my drink. “That’s what I was trained to do as a reporter. Approach story subjects in a mode they feel comfortable with and then get their stories. ”
“And why do you need stories?”
“It . . . they explain things. About the way the world truly works, about what this person has gone through and knows that other people may need to know and . . . benefit from. ”
“You’re an idealistic tattletale?”
“Not anymore. ” I dared one sip of the strong drink, lowering my head to the glass, going for being as low-profile as dirt. “Now I do it to save my sanity and maybe a few people’s, um, lives. ”
“You mean their mortality, thei