Carole Douglas - Brimstone Kiss

The second book in the Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator series, 2008

Everyone has family issues but I have only one: that I don't have any family. My fresh new business card reads Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, but my old personal card could read Delilah Street, Unadoptable Orphan.

I was supposedly named after the street where I was found abandoned as an infant in Wichita, Kansas. (I guess I should just thank God and DC Comics it wasn't Lois Lane.) Of course, I've Googled and Groggled (the drinking person's search engine) the World Wide Web for Delilah Streets and not a single bloody one of them is to be found in Kansas.

Whoever my forebears, they gave me the Black Irish, Snow White coloring that is catnip to vampires: corpse-pale skin and dead-of-night-black hair. By the time I turned twelve I was fighting off aspiring juvie rapists with retractable fangs and body odor that mixed blood, sweat and semen. Really made me enjoy being a girl.

My growing-up years of group homes in Wichita are history now that I'm twenty-four and on my own. I had a good job as a reporter covering the paranormal beat for WTCH-TV in Kansas -until a jealous weather witch forecaster forced me out. Now I freelance as an investigator in wicked, mysterious post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas. Vegas was wicked, of course, long before the turn of the twenty-first century brought all the bogeymen and women of myth and legends out of the closet and into human lives and society. Now it is 2013 and Vegas is crawling with half-vamps and half-weres and all-werewolf mobs and celebrity zombies and who-knows-what-else unhuman.

My ambitions are simple:

One: Staying alive. (Being turned into an immortal vampire doesn't count.)

Two: Being able to make love in the missionary position without having panic attacks. (Whoever thought someone would aim for the missionary position?) Position hadn't been an issue until recently and neither had sex, but now I've finally found a man I want to make love with. Ex-FBI guy Ricardo Montoya-a.k.a. the Cadaver Kid-is tall, dark, handsome, Hispanic and my brand-new horizontal ambition. He has my back-and my front-at every opportunity.

And, three: Tracking down "Lilith Quince"-my spitting image-to find out if she is a twin, double, clone or whatever. Or even if she is alive. Seeing her/me being autopsied on Crime Scene Instincts V: Las Vegas one rerun TV night in Wichita brought me to Sin City in the first place.

Lucky me, Lilith turned out to be the most desirable corpse ever featured on the internationally franchised show. She had an early-exit contract to kill herself, so her star turn as a CSI corpse was supposedly a "Reality TV" dissection. (I knew Millennium Revelation pop culture and taste tended towards the dark-now I know how dark.) When the CSI cameras showed a discreet maggot camping out in a nostril that held a tiny blue topaz stud like my very own, Lilith's corpse was dubbed "Maggie" and a fantasy franchise was born. Maggie is the It Girl of 2013: Maggie dolls and merchandise are hot and so are bootleg Maggie films, out-takes and my hide, if anyone could snag it-dead or alive. One werewolf mobster almost did already.

Then comes ambition number four: Identifying the embracing skeletons Ric and I discovered in Vegas's Sunset Park just after I hit town and just before town hit me back, hard.

I have allies other than Ric helping me achieve my ambitions. One has heavenly blue eyes and is seriously gray and hairy. That's my dog, Quicksilver. He's a wolf hound-wolf cross I saved from death at the pound. He returns the favor with fang, claw and warm, paranormally talented tongue.

(I have a soft spot for dogs-especially since Achilles, my valiant little white Lhasa apso in Wichita, died from blood poisoning after biting a vampire. Achilles' ashes rest in a dragon-decorated urn on my mantel, but I haven't given up the ghost on him.)

That mantel is located in an Enchanted Cottage on the Hector Nightwine estate. Hector rents it to me cheap because, as producer of the many worldwide CSI franchises, he's presumably guilty of offing my possible twin on national TV.

When Hector's CSI show made Lilith Quince into a macabre international sex symbol, he inadvertently made me, Delilah Street-her twin, double, clone, simulacrum, whatever-a wanted woman. Not for myself alone, mind you, but for the naked and dead image of another woman, who may be dead, or not.

Hector has a profit motive rather than a conscience. He's banking on my finding Lilith or becoming her for his enduring financial benefit.

The only thing Hector and I have in common is loving vintage black-and-white films. The Enchanted Cottage is based on a setting from a 1945 movie. A shy-to-the-point-of-invisible staff of who-knows-what supernaturals run the place and I suspect it's supplied with the mirror from Snow White. Maybe it talks like the wicked step-mom's gabby glass but, so far, it's been mum with me. I just see dead people in it.

The most complicated beings in my brave new world are the CinSims. Cinema Simulacrums are created when fresh zombie bodies illegally imported from Mexico are blended with black-and-white film characters. The resulting "live" personas are wholly owned entertainment entities leased to various Vegas hotels.

Hector and Ric are sure the Immortality Mob is behind the brisk business in zombie CinSims, but can't prove it. Hector wants to wrest the CinSims from the mob's control into his. Ric aches to stop the traffic in illegally imported zombies. It's personal-he was forced to work in the trade as a child.

I'd like to help them both out-and not just because I'm a former investigative reporter crusading against human and inhuman exploitation. My own freedom is on the line from several merciless and downright repellent factions trying to make life after the Millennium Revelation literal Hell.

Luckily, I seem to have some off-the-chart abilities simmering myself, most of them having to do with the silver from the silver nitrate in mirror backings, black-and-white films and reflective surfaces.

Which reminds me-I have one more sorta sidekick: a freaky little shape-changing lock of hair from the albino rock star who owns the Inferno Hotel. The guy goes by at least three names: Christophe, for business; Cocaine, when fronting his Seven Deadly Sins rock band; and Snow to his intimates. I seem to be considered an intimate, but don't want to be.

The long white lock of hair became a sterling silver familiar that transforms itself into various pieces of often-protective (and always attractive) jewelry. It's handy at times, but I also consider it a variety of talisman-cum-leech.

I've been called a "silver medium," but I don't aim to be medium at anything. I won't do things halfway. I intend to succeed at finding out who I really am, and who's been bad and who's been good in my new Millennium Revelation neighborhood.

Not every modern career girl can have her rented house blown away by a jealous weather witch in Kansas one week and end up in the post-Millennium Las Vegas sleeping in an Enchanted Cottage the next.

But, as Disney says: fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, and it had happened to me, Delilah Street, forever orphan and ex-WTCH-TV reporter.