“SHOCK THERAPY MAY be okay to use on an illiterate boy once enslaved in the Hell Zone between the U.S. and Mexico,” Ric told his foster mother.

Angrily.

He slapped his palm on the table of her boutique hotel suite, making Helena’s eyelashes flinch. “Not on Delilah. Not with me there.”

Me, I was beyond flinching. I’d batted my last eyelash. My mind and emotions were churning, trying to make sense of the last half of my life. The post–Millennium Revelation part, when I’d been physically altered against my knowledge and will.

Ric was not done ranting.

“It’s not something to spring on a woman who blotted out a childhood medical assault because it was too damn traumatic to remember at all.” He stopped behind me, bending down, voice lowered.

“You didn’t damage your hands or feet, did you, paloma? Butt-kicking inanimate objects can hurt you more than it will ever damage them.”

I let him kneel beside me to examine and clasp my fingers. His hands were as warm as his riled temper, and my ice-cube core of dazed fear and fury was melting. I was mad enough at Helena to let him rage, which was rather mean, because I could see Ric’s every accusing word flayed the foster-mother inside the scientist.

“She had to confront it, Ric.” Helena’s soft, controlled voice was pleading. “She had to see what had happened to her in a legal as well as a personal sense, and grasp it all at once. She needed her ‘day in court,’ because she won’t get justice in any real sense.”

“She could still bring a civil suit,” he argued.

“And put her character on trial?”

“She is fucking flawless,” Ric shouted.

Damned if my lips didn’t try to break their grim parade formation to smile a little shakily. That kind of described our amorous adventures so far.

“Language,” Helena murmured, as she must have reprimanded the teenage boy.

“You’ve heard—and said—it all, Helena,” he returned. “You can’t do your demure act on me like you do on the D.C. military brass when you want something, including Philip. I was a feral boy. You and I fought like chupacabras over a goat corpse in ‘therapy.’”

“Always so colorful,” she murmured, daring to glance at me. “It wasn’t anything Annie Sullivan didn’t have to put up with when she was domesticating the deaf and mute child Helen Keller.”

“That rough?” I said, my voice cracking from not having spoken since shouting myself raw in that … butcher’s office.

Ric flung himself into the chair next to me. “Drink some wine, Del. It’ll soothe and calm you.” His lips brushed my temple, doing more than any wine could.

“I need to ask Helena some questions,” I said.

“So do I,” he said, glaring across the table.

Helena answered mildly. “She means alone, hijo. Girl talk.”

“About today, or about then?” he asked.

Helena shook her head gently from side to side, meaning “Yes, and this and that.”

“About … us?” he asked, his voice hardening with a touch of … dread.

She nodded. “I’m a head shrink, not a medical doctor, Ric. I need to determine the degree of damage and how Delilah’s doing with her current life issues.”

“He told you,” I said. “I’m fucking flawless.”

“Ouch. Your chica’s claws are in fine condition,” she told Ric with a gleam of humor. “Don’t worry. I’ll be gentle. I know you were.”

I watched his dusky face flare dull red.

Wow. I’d never seen anyone or anything make ex-FBI man Ricardo Montoya, the Cadaver Kid, blush.

“Where am I supposed to go, what am I supposed to do,” Ric asked. “When am I supposed to come back?”

“You’ve got a cell phone,” Helena said. “You do know how to use it? Just pick it up when it ring-tones and put it to your ear and talk. Try the bar, Ric. It’s guy country at this hotel.”

He had no idea he was being given the Lauren Bacall brush-off to Humphrey Bogart, in paraphrase, but he left.

“The hotel provided me with this insanely overstocked room bar,” Helena told me, pointing to a pair of louvered doors. “Whip me up a new drink before we settle down to talk. Your Vampire Sunrise is the party circuit hit of Alexandria, Virginia.”

“Really?”

“Ric’s right. You’re a very talented girl.”

“Virginia, huh?” I walked over and swept the double doors open on a mirrored wall of liquor bottles and glasses. “No minibar for Helena Troy. You figure keeping me busy will ease the angst?”

“Generally, it does. And I figure we need something stronger than this sissy wine Ric ordered. Men think we women are made of glass.”

“Just bar glass,” I said, pulling down a few bottles and setting up two martini glasses. “I wish there’d been more glass in that consulting room to smash.”

“Do you have any questions?” she asked.

“Let me try something mind-bending here first.”

I mixed some flavors in a set of three shot glasses, sipped and remixed, sipped more. My mind and mouth were working in concert again, as she’d intended. I wondered what poor Ric was downing in that main floor bar in the noisy, echoing atrium.

“There you are, Counselor,” I said, placing something dark, tall, and bloodred before her.

“Why are you calling me that?”

“You got your client off the hot seat and into the driver’s seat.”

Her eyes closed a moment in relief.

“What are you calling this?” she then asked, sipping the drink and closing her eyes again, this time in relaxation. “Delish, Delilah.”

“It’s named in honor of my biggest Darkside Bar fan from the party state of Virginia.”

“Yes?”

I sipped from my own glass. “It’s a Virtual Virgin.”

“I take it you’re ready to talk,” Helena said.

“Way too overdue. Do you like my cocktail?”

“Love it. A Virtual Virgin, wouldn’t that be fun to dabble in again?”

Of course my dead-white skin flushed like Mrs. Haliburton’s chagrined face. Helena didn’t truly understand how recently that condition had been mine.

“What’s in it?” she asked.

“Chilled Coca-Cola, or you could use Dr Pepper, for starters. Some black cherry vodka and then citrus mixes to cut the edge.”

“Black cherry vodka,” Helena mused over our tall, footed glasses.

Besides exotic ingredients, I prefer stemmed barware for my cocktails, when possible.

“How,” Helena persisted, “did you come up with black cherry vodka for your Virtual Virgin, my new favorite drink, Delilah?”

“The cherry was obvious and my mood is a bit dark right now.” I was not about to explain Ric’s addiction to my Midnight Cherry Shimmer lip gloss. “You could leave out the vodka for minors and those who dislike strong spirits.”

“Not us, Delilah.”

“No, not us.”

“What do you want to know?”

I sighed and leaned back in my chair. The numbness was wearing off. My reptile brain was curling back up to sleep after giving almost everyone around me a good tail-lashing.

I’d never had anyone to tell me these things. “This IUD?”

“A method of birth control for decades, of varying usefulness. Not really meant for nulliparous women.”

“I’m this nulleperous woman?”

“Nulliparous. The word means non-child-bearing. We’re both nulliparous women.”

“Cheers,” I said, lifting my martini glass rim to hers. “Why is the installation process so gross? Computers do it better.”

“Ancient Arabs put stones into the uterus of a camel to prevent pregnancy.”

“Sure don’t want inconvenient pregnancies in beasts of burden,” I noted. “Weird, the Rolling ‘Stones’ recorded a song titled ‘Beast of Burden.’”

“In the last century’s twenties, a German named Ernst Gräfenberg placed rings of silk—and later, silver—within the uterus of his female patients to prevent pregnancy. Too much bleeding.”

“I can testify.” That mention of silver unnerved me, so I sipped my Virtual Virgin and let Helena enlighten me further.

“Starting in the sixties IUDs became much more workable and popular. The trouble is the body tends to reject foreign objects unless the uterus has hosted a fetus.”

“This all sounds like a biology class at Our Lady of the Lake, where they told you all the scientific stuff, just not exactly how the egg and sperm get together.”

“I think we can gloss over that part too, Delilah. What’s crucial is that you were not even in puberty, yet you were fitted with a birth control device without your knowledge. Your ignorance of the medical procedures made the act an assault. It was a crime, and it’s a sin that it’s not prosecutable in a court of law.”

“If I were one of these leprous women,” I started.

“‘Liparous,” she corrected. “You’d be used to routine pelvic exams since puberty.”

“And that turkey baster?”

“Would be a familiar if not favorite article once a year, when you were given a Pap test for cancer. It’s criminal that you haven’t had any basic female organ care.”

“And the dilator?”

“Would be used briefly to obtain a scrap of uterine tissue to test for abnormal cells. It would be a necessary— possibly uncomfortable, but no more—procedure for your good health.”

“So the procedure, the pain, I experienced as a kid was no worse than a woman who wanted an IUD would go through.”

“Except such women are usually sexually experienced.” Helena stared into her Virtual Virgin. “You weren’t. You weren’t accustomed to penetration, to intimate invasion. Your fear and natural resistance would make it far more painful. For a young girl of your age and history, it would be a nightmare.”

“It was.”

“Your highly creative subconscious converted it into an alien abduction dream. Since others went public with such claims, it gave you something ‘real’ to cling to after what must have been a devastatingly surreal experience. That’s not so different from Ric converting his first adolescent wet dream stimulated by a vampire bat bite into an appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The immature mind needs cultural coat hooks. Yours was alien abduction. I’m sorry, Delilah. You needed to know the truth, no pussyfooting around it.”

I nodded.

“On the other hand, for those responsible, it was an unconscionable dereliction of duty. Which Ric realized, and which infuriated him. Essentially, the social services powers-that-be then punished you for being attractive to predators. Blame the victim.”

Now that she’d put it in bald terms, the injustice of it all hit home. It wasn’t even just the single invasive, controlling act. It was all the consequences, even more to my mind than my body.

“It’s why I’ve always hated my looks,” I said slowly. “I thought it was my coloring, my white skin looking even paler because of my black hair. I thought vampires went for me because I already looked like a corpse.”

“They went for you because they were also teenage boys and you were a very pretty girl. Still a predator-and-prey situation, but one we call ‘normal.’”

I shook that damning head of black hair.

“Now,” Helena said carefully, “here’s why Ric is probably drinking boilermakers down in the bar. I need to ask about your sex life together.”

“You can’t. You’re virtually his mother.”

“Virtually, Delilah? That’s a dividing line these post– Millennium Revelation days, isn’t it?”

“Except for the me-never-on-my-back-thing, it’s none of your business. Now my phobia makes sense, and I feel a lot better that I wasn’t hallucinating aliens. I also feel better knowing that a woman of my age would have experienced pretty much the same thing I did, minus the panic, to get a routine Pap smear.”

“Is it possible you’ll actually make an annual appointment now?” Helena smiled ruefully. “It’s for the good of your health.”

“Yeah, but I’m finding a woman doctor who will understand my issues. The twentieth century must have sucked for women.”

“You should have seen the nineteenth. I read about it in grad school.”

I lifted my Virtual Virgin glass—weren’t we all that at one time?—and we clicked rims.

“Delilah,” Helena said, “you have to realize this is devastating for Ric too. He literally didn’t know what he was doing, with you.”

“He owes me. I like that.”

“I’m not kidding.”

I shook my head. “Mama Doc, don’t worry. Ric was the best thing that ever happened to me. You raised him right. We’re so much better for each other than you could ever imagine.”

“You don’t understand the male mind. Now that your true history is revealed, he’ll feel like he’s been a … an insensitive human battering ram.”

“You don’t get it. He can’t be insensitive and I can’t deny I like what he can deliver. Are we done here? Best haul him back from that den of macho iniquity downstairs. We still have some troubling cases to solve in Kansas.”

“I admire your spirit, but I know more about the damaged psyche than you’re willing to admit. And there’s one more revelation you need to face this millennium.”

“Nothing medical? I’m not going ‘annual’ for a good year, at least. And it’ll be on my terms.”

“Nothing invasive. And very, very soon. I’ll be there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Delilah, I know you’ve experienced a huge shock on all levels, physical and mental, but there may be a bigger one coming.”

Exploring her classical Helen of Troy features, I saw faint worry lines beneath the mineral makeup and even the composure.

“What now?” I demanded.

She took a long, deep breath.

“We still need to find that IUD.”