“This is,” Ric asked, “where Christophe and his rock-star persona’s Brimstone Kiss come in?”

Ouch. “Right.”

“I’ve heard of the Brimstone Kiss,” he said dismissively, the way even the best guys sometimes don’t get girls with long-distance but potent crushes. “Heartthrob singers always sucker the fangirls with some sexy stage shtick.”

Nobody does it like Snow does, Irma singsonged softly in my ear.

I gritted my teeth and gave Ric a palatable song-and-dance.

“Exactly right. Only, Snow has some ulterior motive for kissing strangers. He takes it semi-seriously and insisted I accept the infamous kiss if I wanted his help invading the Karnak and springing you.”

I hoped I’d sounded casual enough.

“Some freaking stage kiss?” Ric asked. “You’d think a rock star could get whole harems of a lot more than kisses in the dressing room every night.”

“It’s like a job application. The dude thinks he’s going to find Cinderella or something. I didn’t pass the glass lip-lock test.”

“He kissed you? You let him?”

I didn’t think Ric was ready for the potential multiple orgasm part yet. Maybe never.

“You know I’ve never been the groupie type. I admit I found it pretty humiliating and sure hated the idea of kissing another man when I was rounding up a rescue party for you, mi amor. But it proved worth the hassle. Ric, he raised a dragon from its ashes to help take down the mummy legions!”

“No big deal. I can raise zombies. So back to this kiss thing-”

“That was a big deal. I really, really didn’t want to be unfaithful to you but I guessed he was the only Vegas mogul who could or would save you.”

“I can see you were between a rock and a soft place. A kiss is just a kiss,” Ric consoled me, ironically quoting the song from Casablanca.

“Not Snow’s,” I admitted. “The mosh-pit women who get it are forever addicted to trying to get another, but they never do.”

“Women go nuts over those rock idols.”

“Once was enough for me, since it got you back.”

I didn’t mention how very specifically it got him “back.” From the dead.

“I can dig the bastard would want to kiss you but it’s awful petty to make a guy’s girlfriend give out just to revive a dead dragon and take on a pack of vampire mummies.”

I laughed, as he meant me to do, glad this iffy confession was over.

After all, a kiss is just a kiss unless it’s a key to immortality.

“BASTARDS!”

The deep-toned bellow beside me sounded like a cry of the damned from Hell.

It was Ric, visiting the Land of Dream and finding out-takes from his recent all-too-real nightmare of capture, torture, death, and revival.

He’d sat up, sweeping off the black satin sheets and reaching out to throttle unseen attackers. “Hell-born bastards!”

“Yes, but you escaped them. You’re free now.” I tried to soothe but sounded ineffective even to me.

“They’re not free,” he shouted, pushing out of bed and scrabbling for his clothes in the dark.

This was a walking, talking nightmare. I felt for my own shed clothes alongside the bed.

Ric was heading for the bedroom door, mumbling about car keys.

I stumbled after, barefoot, pulling on my jeans as I went and sticking an arm through my knit-top sleeve. Wherever he was going I was going with him, but not bare-chested too.

The door to the garage was already slamming shut. I rushed through to hear the garage door grumbling as it lurched upward and the driveway security lights came on automatically. Ric’s house had the latest “smart” gadgets.

Whew! Hermie had literally “delivered” already, keys and all. The Vette engine roared into hot-throated life. I yanked open the passenger door and jumped in just as Ric shifted gears, backed out, and turned into the street with a banshee engine howl.

The garage door and lights were closing down, computer-controlled.

The low classic sports car was controlled by a driver who was a nightmare walking, with a crazy woman riding shotgun on what promised to be a wild ride.

Funny how when you save someone’s life you don’t want him to throw it away.

“Ric,” I yelled over the whine of the four-hundred-horsepower engine. All those powerful hooves were almost striking sparks off the pavement. “Where are you going?”

“The bastards,” he growled, increasing our speed to over one hundred, I’d bet. The side windows were open, so I practically had to hold my hair on… until a silver net of a scarf materialized to do the job for me.

I figured if my silver familiar was not panicking but being practical, I should be too.

I stopped trying to rubberneck and read the speedometer needle. I eyed Ric’s fierce profile instead as we took a freeway on-ramp at high speed. His eyes squinted against the wind but they were open, and the car varoomed up Highway 95 dead center of the lane, as if it ran on a track instead of costly vintage gasoline.

“Where are we going?” I shouted.

“To Hell,” he shouted back.

Oh, well. As long as this wasn’t just an aimless race to nowhere…

At this hour of the night we met only a few lonely big rigs heading south. The low-slung Vette was surprisingly solid but did a little stomach-churning boogie as the semis tried to suck us into their slipstream.

Actually, if I hadn’t been worried about Ric’s state of mind, I’ve have enjoyed the heck out of this furious fun-house escape trip.

By now we were so far from anywhere anyone wanted to be from or go to that the desert was a blank black canvas. We saw only what the headlights revealed.

It was like cutting the dark with a butter knife, or a bronze bullet.

Without warning, Ric braked hard and spun the small steering wheel. The Vette did a TV chase-scene 180 and stopped.

We were facing back into the night we’d dissected with speed, a ton and a half of low-slung Detroit steel, and Ric’s justifiable nightmare fit of rage.

We both sat there panting, feeling the cool desert wind curry our hair with its sagebrush-scented fingers.

In the distance, something howled.

“Coyote,” Ric said, finally looking at me. “Not wolf. Even the werewolves don’t come way out here to hunt.”

His hands were still strangling the small steering wheel. I understood what the car represented to him, the same thing that Dolly meant to me. Choice, refuge, and escape.

I looked nervously behind us. No headlights coming. Ric seemed calmer here. He was desert-born, after all.

“‘Bastards,’” I repeated. “Were you thinking of capturing El Demonio and his cartel crew?”

His head snapped to face me. “ Helena told you all the current specifics of that? What else did she spill?”

We would either go soap opera here, or not. “Lighten up, Montoya. You are such a trial for us mothering types. Of course we talked all about you. She even gave me sex tips.”

“ Jesus, Del!”

He looked so shocked I almost laughed. “For me, not you. Seems she could tell I was an uptight virgin who didn’t have a clue.”

“Not so much lately,” he said absently.

“So, who are the ‘bastards’ that drove you out of a nice warm bed with me into the desert dark?”

“Not ‘who,’ what. I just remembered that part.”

“The tsetse flies and leeches? The biting and draining?”

He was shaking his head even as I suggested that, as if his torture and temporary “death” were trivial matters already far behind him. I hadn’t yet told him he might have been clinically dead, though.

“No, nothing to do with me,” he said. “I risked that sort of thing every time I went to Mexico the past year.”

His casual confession made me shudder in the chill night desert air. No wonder Helena was concerned. Ric had been flirting with a rematch with El Demonio and his henchmen for years. A wimp he was not, at least not on his own behalf.