Hex Appeal (P.N. Elrod) (Kitty Norville 4.60)

He turned to greet me, a quizzical eyebrow arched toward his receding hairline of wavy hair. “Miss Delilah Street, as I don’t live and breathe. Aren’t you a treat to see in your upscale long johns?”

He hoisted his constant prop, a martini glass that was perpetually half-empty or half-full, depending on your life philosophy.

“I’m so glad to see you.” I actually gushed I was so relieved to find Nick being his normal self.

“That goes double for me, as my vision often does. I have a mystery to solve that has me hammered.” He uttered a puzzled complaint. “There is swill in my glass.”

“There’s always expensive swill in your glass,” I pointed out.

“This stuff is undrinkable, and from me that’s saying something.”

I leaned forward to sip from the rim that swayed to and fro with his well-oiled sense of balance. We could have been on the QE II. A wavelet washed into my mouth.

“Oh, Nicky. This won’t hurt you. It’s just … water.”

Nick’s dapper shoulders shuddered. “Poison! Nora.” His voice lifted to summon his wife. “I’m being poisoned.”

“Hang on for a minute, Nicky dear,” she trilled from the other side of bar. “I’m coming, but Asta is being a perfect beast!”

Quicksilver was not an Inferno bar regular, but he sensed when things were awry. He gave his yard-troll-at-the-cottage-door growl that was half-inquisitive and half-desirous of a snack.

Nora came jerking around the bar’s other side in all her willowy high-fashion glory, up to an impudently tilted and veiled hat overshadowed by a large gray ostrich feather.

Quicksilver leapt forward with a pounce and growl that indicated prey.

I had no leash but my voice. “Leave kitty,” I ordered. It worked in Sunset Park, and here he’d stopped on a whisker although his discontented growl kept going and growing until the sound of a squalling baby rose to my ears.

How odd for Quicksilver to carry on like a coyote pup.

I looked down. Quicksilver was silent, but his blue-eyed gaze also fixed on something … a critter the size of a wire-haired terrier but with huge-clawed paws that churned the carpeted floor while a sound like an angry monkey grated through its fangs.

My jaw dropped, then stood to attention again in amazed speech. “That’s … not … Asta.”

“Of course it is,” Nora cooed fondly. “He’s just throwing a tantrum. Isn’t he, dear?” she asked Nick.

No, it was a real “kitty,” sort of. And not a he. I recognized the white-and-black-striped coat of Grizelle’s white-tiger form, but now she was just a … baby, a fifty-pound cub with demonic green eyes staring straight at me as if ready to tear my heart out.

For an instant, the fuzzy-wuzzy adorable black-and-white baby-tiger stripes morphed into short frothy white petticoats and blouse under a full-skirted black apron. The long gray claws became dark Mary Jane shoes on white-stockinged feet, and the cub’s face was surrounded by petite black pigtails tied with poison green ribbons. So cute it was scary! I stamped my Ed Hardy tattooed motorcycle boot at her, and Grizelle’s fierce, but truly “girly,” expression returned with a snarl to a tiger-cub likeness with the rest of her.

What was going on here?

Nick’s martinis turned to tap water? Awesome security chief Grizelle reduced to a leashed tiger cub? Nick and Nora not noticing the major family pet switch? What else was wrong at the Inferno Hotel?

“Why didn’t you tell me Miss Street is trespassing again?” asked a resonant baritone that could strike twenty-five thousand people silent … or set them screaming mindlessly.

I turned fast. The Inferno owner, operator, and rock-star mogul stood so close I almost got leather burns from his black jumpsuit. We could have gone on the Inferno stage with his cub and my dog as an animal act.

Curiouser and curiouser, with neon on it.

The suspected albino vampire’s skin and shoulder-blade-brushing hair were both as white as white could be, but he was not the usual milky monovision with a blindfold of dark glasses the only off-color note. Gone was his bleached-leather stage costume. Instead, his jumpsuit was dead black, as black as those signature sunglasses.

“It’s our bar,” Nick’s voice came over my shoulder in a grumpy slur. “We were leashed here first.”

“You tell him, Nicky.” Nora struggled to untwine the tiger cub’s lead from around her gray silk hose. Major snags to match the unsightly existing runs were in their future.

“I believe you mean ‘leased,’” Snow corrected Nicky.

I tried not to ogle Snow’s skintight Elvis-comeback black leather outfit although doing so came with my job as a paranormal investigator. As with his usual white leather jumpsuit, also borrowed from Elvis, this one was open to his navel like a red-carpet starlet’s dress.