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

“That hurts … burns … stings.”

Only then did I realize what the monsters engraved on my silver cuffs were … jellyfish.

Most jellyfish stingers were not homicidal, but protective. So far, no major harm had been done. Grizelle, that intractable … huntress … had used her formidable baby teeth to snag jeans legs and T-shirt sleeves, dragging the groupies away over and over, until they clustered in a supine moaning clot.

Now I had to face—how it pained me to attach this word to Snow, but it was true—the victim. Not only did I dread the sight of the bloody rock idol … this was my deepest personal trauma, a Ric rerun, only with Snow instead, my worst nightmare starring my best enemy.

I approached, taking in the man manacled against a towering black basalt wall. Way too much Samson for this Delilah.

Bloodsucking lip prints covered Snow’s pristine white skin and bleached leather like a graphic design and his bare face … I’d never before seen those semicircles of white eyelashes innocently curved along his eyelids. They reminded me of severed snowflakes.

Something winked from the floor at his feet: his shiny black sunglasses, torn off and tossed down. He was an albino, no matter what else he was. Even Snow didn’t deserve to be crucified by his idolaters, his weak vision identified and their protection cast away. His pale blue-veined eyelids still danced to the REM mode, barely visible yet jerking in that unmistakable tic of nerves on edge. Genetically defenseless.

I bent to retrieve the fragile sunglasses.

“Hey, leave that! It’s ours,” a groupie shouted.

A couple rose to charge again, trying to topple me from performing my one good deed, but Grizelle protected me during my ass-out moment.

I elbowed away any still-upright groupies with my flailing glitter whips, climbed Snow like a Sherpa, and placed the sunglasses over the rock god’s spotlight-blinded eyes.

I let myself slide down the marble sculpture of his form, back to the obsidian floor of this place, satisfied his eyes were open again and hidden behind the same tiny, gleaming reflection of me I faced every time we met.

With his full persona in place, he struck me as way too cool and invulnerable again. I’d never seen his back flinch after he’d inherited Ric’s boyhood beatings, and at the moment he even seemed a bit amused by my race to his rescue.

“So,” I said to Snow. “Are we good now?”

His head bowed toward my presence. “You’re good,” he said. “But you could be better.”

If he wasn’t hurting, I wasn’t feeling merciful … more like had, and mad.

“Let’s consider,” I said, “the thousand cheesy films of women chained and mauled. Maybe you ‘asked for it,’ rock star. Not that I’d ever tell that to the Pussycat Dolls.” Who maybe had, too. Sex objects could be so obvious.

Why couldn’t we all just keep our kinks in the bedroom closet?

Because they made money.

“It’s my job, Miss Street.” He made it sound more like a vocation.

I’d noticed that two of the snaps beneath his costume’s gem-studded fly had popped open during the struggle among his frenzied fans to claim a piece of him. I mean, who could miss that bling? I was able to get my fingers, uh, down under to press the snaps decorously shut.

“And doing that isn’t yours,” he finished.

Interesting, though. Snow was obviously not getting off on this mass grope scene any more than I was … or … wait … not until I appeared in the neighborhood.

What to do? If I stepped away, I’d leave him even more exposed to the fanimals, so I stayed put as a barrier and nervously rubbed a bloodred stain on his torso, managing only to smear it.

His hair brushed my embarrassed pink face as his head bent to watch me, knowing what I didn’t until my fingers touched the sticky dab of red, retreated, and I inhaled the scent of perfume, not coppery blood.

No wonder Snow had suffered this apparent feeding frenzy so stoically.

Instead of bloody sucking marks, these “vampire” groupies had left … lipstick kisses on almost every inch of exposed flesh, which Snow had a lot of. He was a bloody Andy Warhol canvas. Oh, blessed Bela Lugosi! I hadn’t prevented a physical ravening; I’d interrupted a rave, a rainbow party gone bad.

“It’s only lipstick, Delilah.” Snow so loved stating the obvious when I’d missed the boat. My moral outrage only got me a ticket on Roll-Your-Eyes line. My time here had been wasted, and I looked like an idiot.

“I see that. Now,” I admitted.

“Even you wear lipstick sometimes.”