Vampire Sunrise

by Carole Nelson Douglas

Chapter Nineteen

   

  BY THE TIME Sansouci and I returned to Cicereau's sky-high suite the daylight vampire had become resigned to bearding the werewolf mobster in his rock-star bed.

  Cicereau's private rooms were pretty secure but I'd been able to mirror-walk in and out of his office like a ghost. As an actual ghost, Loretta might share my talents in that regard. I was betting that she didn't have all of them.

  Sansouci braced one knee on the crushed velvet upholstered bed frame and conveyed my message from his lips to Cicereau's ear. Really, gold crushed velvet was so seventies! Some old things were just tacky. I'd give Cicereau my interior design advice later.

  The mobster howled indignation and actually snapped his currently human teeth. Sansouci retreated fast.

  I looked at Madrigal. He was attired, or perhaps I should say not attired, in his macho stage gear-Roman kilt, bare chest, metal wrist and upper-arm bands, gladiator sandals buckled up to the knee. He still played an impassive palace guard beside the bed curtains.

  The mobster growled at me, eyes glaring under thick gray brows, then nodded at Madrigal, who quickly came to my side. The magician's sharp hand gesture signaled the fey sisters to remain topside in the woodsy ceiling bower. They writhed and hissed their objections but stayed put.

  So, with a two-hunk escort of vamp and magic man, I left the suite for the elevators. We jetted down a few dozen floors in silence. Sansouci had pressed no buttons so I wasn't surprised when the car charged past the lobby level and lower yet. I gathered Cesar had an elevator control button on his awesome whole-hotel bedside remote control the size of an organ keyboard.

  Once again I was plunging into the lower depths of a major Vegas hotel with an iffy escort. The silver familiar had been an invisible hip chain through my latest negotiations. Now it was shifting to upper-arm bands like Madrigal's, ready to be deployed as weapons if necessary.

  Madrigal's muscles and weird sister familiars didn't scare me, but Sansouci had been made, not born, a daylight, lady-sipping vampire. Who knew if under extreme pressure he could revert to a traditional blood-sucking killer in a heartbeat-mine-or not.

  Umm, Irma purred in my ear, we're double-dating at last. I'll be happy to take on the vamp.

  Despite her usual randy suggestions, I was happy to have her along for backup. I was beginning to realize that Las Vegas's new supernatural Underworld was also literal. Despite the spectacular high-rise real estate above the Strip, a pit of hidden vice and danger lurked as deep below, an eternal dark reflection.

  What little I'd glimpsed of the Inferno's underbelly was a literal re-creation of Dante's nine circles of Hell. What would a werewolf crimelord's basement contain?

  The verdigris and copper elevator doors parted to reveal. . . nothing. A dim musty featureless cellar. We might as well have been poking around in Castle Dracula's semi-abandoned cape-and-coffin storage dungeon.

  I saw a lot of crates piled here and there but none in a sinister coffin shape. Vampires, except for the hostage Sansouci, were persona non grata in Werewolf Land.

  Our shoe soles ground on a patina of sand drifting over the hard-packed floor. Light came from a leprosy of mosses and lichens on the walls, which glowed like deep-sea life-forms. Some moved. Fungi and slugs and maggots and worms and other writhing things made living mosaics. Like Spanish moss or cobwebs, the growths dangled from the low ceiling to brush our heads and bodies.

  Madrigal, bare-shouldered and annoyed, twitched his mighty muscles to dislodge the tendrils. A gaudy collar and cape materialized to clothe him.

  "So you are a real magician," I commented, my voice echoing.

  He shrugged again. "A minor talent. Why does Cicereau maintain an unfinished subbasement?"

  "Maybe it's a getaway from urban Las Vegas and its surrounding desert," I suggested. Everything damp, dark, and likely to be found under the detritus of a forest floor thrived down here.

  Sansouci walked up to a wall and eyed its glowing upholstery of vermin. He pulled a credit card from his back jeans pocket and used it to scrape off some lichens.

  I jumped back, Madrigal with me. His gladiator-style sandals offered an impressive display of muscled calves but his feet and lower limbs were exposed to the writhing grubs seeking a new place to attach themselves.

  Sansouci was sensibly shod in ankle boots and, despite my steel-toed seventies slingbacks, I dearly missed my secondhand motorcycle boots.

  The vampire's credit card (is that a non sequitur or not?) slid into an uncovered, neat, man-made slot in the wall.

  Sansouci grinned.

  With a sleek mechanical hum wildly out of character for this creepy-crawly place, a clean brushed-aluminum door panel knifed into the opening as the lichen-covered walls slid back.

  The panel unfolded accordion-style to reveal a clean shining expanse. We three walked into a gleaming room, floor, walls, and ceiling all burnished in my metal of power, silver. Entering this surgically sterile box felt rather like visiting a gaudy high-tech crypt. Was this an empty safe or a bomb shelter?

  "You should be at home in confined places," I told Sansouci, astounded to hear my voice deadened as if the metal walls were swathed in unseen cotton batting.

  Meanwhile, the garage-door-sized mobile wall sealed us in.

  "I haven't been confined like this for a long time," he said, turning to examine the featureless space. "Cicereau slipped me the key card when I whispered in his ear, which is keen enough that he'd already heard what we required. This seems ultra-private. What did you want to discuss?"

  I turned to Madrigal. He was also pacing the perimeter of our silver box-which was illuminated by its own burnished surface-like a lion caught in a trap.

  I'd misjudged his motives. He was intrigued, not intimidated, and passed his big hands over portions of the walls. They opened out into other boxy chambers as he strode along. We were inside some giant's metal origami napkin unfolding in all directions.

  "Magic," Sansouci muttered.

  "Not my magic," Madrigal answered. "I just have a way with magical stage illusions. Sensitive pressure points lurk beneath all these surfaces. Quite a sophisticated construction. Certainly not made by or for Cicereau. "

  His words had Sansouci and me feeling along the slick walls, pushing at points where the shining aluminum seemed to dimple.

  I gasped as my particular wall unfolded into a train of compartments.

  "It could be a trap," Sansouci warned. "Explore the unfolding distances too far, and you many never find your way back, or out. "

  "Exactly," Madrigal told him. "Or you may find your way out of Cicereau's service and Vegas altogether, which you look as eager to accomplish as I am, my friend. Too bad you and I haven't talked before, vampire. I took you for just another of my jailers. "

  "Don't get optimistic," Sansouci growled in good imitation of a werewolf mobster. "I swore in the name of my kin and kind to serve Cicereau. "

  I wasn't interested in their dueling macho supernatural conflicts of interest.

  "What is this place?" I asked Madrigal. "How can Cicereau claim and use it?"

  "As best as I can guess, it's fey like the Sinkhole, a remnant from the ancient days of earth beyond numbering. The fey have left their mark in every time and place. "

  "They're still present and powerful then?"

  "Present but remote. Powerful but feral," he warned. "The Dread Queen rules in a court consumed with light. She has no heart, or so my feral fey companions say. They've stayed with me because desert places like Las Vegas repel the fey. I've tamed my assistants enough that they prefer my presence. This place may be a tent the fey moored on ancient earth when it was ripe with dark life. "

  "Older than ancient Egypt?"

  "As old as the stars," he answered.

  Sansouci snorted, bringing a welcome clap of reality to the scene. "What
would a greedy thug like Cesar Cicereau have to do with such airy fairy beings?"

  "He inadvertently may have built his gambling hell on a focus point for the fey," I suggested.

  The vibrant wall I touched felt warm. "We truly could be in another dimension for these moments. Cicereau's daughter couldn't penetrate this unearthly place. "

  "The fey are secretive and unrevealing," Madrigal warned. "Yes, they'd find the spirits of our own world crude and intrusive. "

  Convinced it was safe to talk here, I said, "All right. Let's not linger. Could I call Loretta into your backstage front-surface mirror and trap her there somehow?"

  "As your own image was once mired!" Madrigal got the idea right away. Then he shook his dreadlocked head. "Intriguing but risky. Your mirror double was vague and dispirited, a shadow suitable for a quick illusion onstage, but no more. "

  "Whoa," Sansouci said. "You kept a captive image of Delilah backstage? And I didn't know about it?"

  "Not your business," Madrigal answered. "Cicereau thought I'd magically conjured the CSI corpse, Maggie. He wanted her kept top secret. Then, thanks to Delilah calling her image back from afar, the mirror version, her simulacrum. . . vanished before Cesar could decide what to do with her. "

  I explained myself to Sansouci, since no one could overhear us except perhaps the Dread Queen and she seemed seriously camera-shy.

  "Realizing I'd left another skin behind in Madrigal's mirror gave me a high ick factor," I told him. "I used my own mirror to recall or dissolve it. "

  Sansouci was eyeing me with disbelief. "You can project and retract yourself in mirrors? No wonder I couldn't trap you in Cicereau's office! Yet that fool police detective Haskell suckered you. "

  Did I mention I blush easily?

  Sansouci watched my face, then chuckled. "Sometimes you're such an amateur, Street, yet you keep us hopping. " He eyed Madrigal and grinned.

  The magician shook his head sourly. "You latter-day vampires are being led around by the wrong bodily fluid. Don't let your libido make a fool of you. Amateurs can get us in trouble with Cicereau, and he's no one to cross. "

  I caught my breath as Sansouci's angered inner vamp hardened every muscle. His frame seemed to gain a hundred pounds and six inches. Blood rushed to his eye-whites and lips as they peeled back from shining white canine fangs. This was the big, bad vampire who'd fought off the spectral hyenas from the Karnak Hotel.

  "You play a dangerous game with your fey handmaidens, magician," Sansouci warned. "Don't mistake the face I show Cicereau with reality. When it suits me, I can still take my humans raw, magic or no magic, fey or no fey. "

  Gulp, Irma gurgled softly in my mind. Guess our girly power is a might undercooked to trifle with these dudes.

  Yeah. So I might as well appeal to supernatural testosterone with, uh, reason. Madrigal, no lightweight in the human muscle department, was frowning hard by then and I sensed a minor spell coming on.

  "You guys should be allies," I pointed out. "You're resident prisoners. I'm only visiting at Cicereau's invitation, remember? Okay, his command. I'm here to do a job for the head honcho. You want to help and get me outa here, or play Incredible Hulks? You gonna let a couple of pretty women, one of them just a slip of a ghost, get you off your game?"

  I would never have put myself in league with the dainty Loretta, but after my session with Helena Troy Burnside, I had a fresh appreciation of the power of feminine wiles. Any weapon in an impending paranormal storm.

  Astonishingly, they bought my argument. You could visibly see their fury subside. Delilah Street, supernatural peacemaker.

  "You want to get rid of me," I reminded them softly, "you have to help me. How," I asked Madrigal, "can I use this fey archeological construct to trap Cicereau's vengeful daughter?"

  He nodded, ready to deal. "What's left of fey territory in our post-Millennium Revelation era," Madrigal said, still keeping a wary eye on the subsiding Sansouci, "is like a cloth anchored here and there to our world, each touchpoint held down by a single stitch. I found Sylphia and Phasia in such an accidental juncture. Once they've been discovered by humans, they're no longer welcome in fey realms. "

  "Like birds that fall out of the nest and humans touch?"

  "Exactly. Yet, without a linkage to this human world, they would fade and die. "

  "You are the linkage," I said.

  He nodded. "I freed them but they bound me. "

  "I may indulge libido," Sansouci said, "but you embraced the bonds of lethal matrimony. "

  Madrigal's face darkened with bad blood, then his expression softened.

  "Many risky supernatural bargains were made on either side of the Millennium Revelation, vampire," he said. "Some better, or more bitter, than others. "

  Sansouci nodded. I sensed a certain truce born of truth between these two men who were not quite simply men. They turned their gaze on me with an unspoken unity that made Irma moan unhappily in my mind.

  Divide and conquer was no longer an option. In fact, I was actually glad that I'd helped point out their common cause.

  "Madrigal," I asked the magician, "can you reach your stage mirror from here?"

  He turned, regarding the dazzling silver fractured images everywhere. Then he nodded.

  "These all must lead to touchpoints. Sylphia and Phasia have marked my stage area. Here. "

  He grabbed my shoulders and turned me to face one burnished silver tunnel. I gazed down it and finally saw a simple rectangular frame at the end. Madrigal ran a hand from my shoulder down my arm to my elbow.

  "What you see you can find," he said. "Come with me. "

  I felt him step forward and matched the gesture. The mirror so far away was now rushing right at us. I blinked and turned away, expecting impact, shattering, cuts.

  "Damn both you mirror-walking freaks to the Inferno underworld!" Sansouci thundered somewhere back down a tunnel of time and space. "How the hell do I escape this Disney action ride?"

  I blinked again. Madrigal and I were standing on the darkened Gehenna stage. Only the perpetually glowing bare backstage lightbulb-known for decades as the "ghost light"-was lit.

  It illuminated mere slivers of the dark-floored stage, the hanging black velvet curtain folds, the plain silver frame holding a mirror that shone softly blue, like a hologram. The mirror reflected nothing, neither the magician nor myself. It was half in feyland and half here. It was waiting.

  Madrigal looked up, so I did too.

  Oooh, Irma murmured. Those creepy feylings abandoned Cicereau and are hanging like Spanish moss from the ropes in the backstage flies.

  "Call her," Madrigal urged.

  I didn't have to ask who. "Loretta. "

  Her slight figure appeared, perhaps three inches high. It sped toward the mirror frame and me, growing to lifesize.

  "You're here at last, Delilah," she said. "You're ready to free me, let me loose in my home environment in my revived form. Oh! Daddy Dearest will be so frightened! Me back. And free. Krzys back! Free and in solid form. This is my inheritance, finally mine. Delilah, kiss me. Let me through! Let me into you. "

  Ooh, Dee girl, the big L smooch is no big deal, Irma muttered, but I do sooo not want to be possessed. Do something, Delilah!

  I was getting terminally weary of supernaturals in Vegas who wanted my body. I glanced at Madrigal. He was ignoring the wonder of Loretta's appearance and looking up. I saw why. Sylphia was dropping her webs upon the mirror frame while Phasia twined her serpentine body down them to add a sinuous decoration to the plain frame.

  The fey webs were propagating, twining the frame and pushing inside, sending tendrils like curls down Loretta's soft cheeks and neck, circling her arms and wrists, glittering, glowing, enhancing, confining.

  At first she lifted an arm, enchanted by the iridescent threads falling from abov
e like soft, warm, living sleet. Then they crisscrossed to construct a diamond-patterned veil for her features. She tried to speak but they spun a sugary gag over her mouth. She blinked but they painted sticky iridescent mascara on her eyelashes. She couldn't close her eyes. Her entire slender body was twined, twined, twined in tender, tensile steel, fey gift wrap and ribbons, until she was a glittering mummified statue, a mannequin from some Macy's Christmas fantasia display window.

  The feys' thoroughness and speed took my breath away, as it had hers. Wait. Ghosts didn't have breath, but they could talk. Same way vampires didn't have circulatory systems but males could get it up for sex.

  One of those sweet and sour mysteries of life. . . and life after death.

  MY CELL PHONE vibrated, and I jumped. A cell phone seemed too modern for a place where I'd watched a ghost bound in a mirror.

  Ric! I pulled the thin shell out of my riding jacket pocket and clapped it to my ear.

  Instead, Sansouci's voice shouted into my ear.

  "I hope you've got that girly ghost banished because-" He grunted as I heard Uzi bullets spray in the background. "Get Madrigal up here too. I was jerked back to the elevator the instant you two deserted me in the aluminum tent. By then that killing machine had made it all the way to Cicereau's-"

  A pause, and then I heard the words "freaking bedroom" fading into the distance. I shut and stashed the phone. No time to take a break to call Ric.

  Sylphia and Phasia remained coiled around the mirror frame like Art Nouveau nymphs. Madrigal looked puzzled.

  "Cicereau and Sansouci need us all upstairs," I told him. "Fastest. "

  He nodded at the creepy pair, then ran into the wings where all the stage equipment was kept.

  The fey sisters shot up on Sylphia's Spider-Girl web into the dark flies, diminishing contrails of iridescence. I cast a final look at Loretta webbed in eerie glitter-bound glamour, a captive ghost. Her mouth had opened to speak and frozen in that impotent, mute position.

  Then I followed Madrigal into the unlit backstage area. . . just in time to be lassoed around the waist by a sticky rope of Sylphia's spider silk and jerked upward into endless dark until, beside me, Phasia hissed happily.

  Now I was as much in their power as Loretta. They were jealous goddesses when it came to Madrigal's attention and association, and could easily drop me to the floor, which was rapidly vanishing stories below. The theatrical flies seemed to stretch up and up like an enormous elevator shaft. I was rising only by these fey cables, with no solid car to support and protect me.

  Before I could fixate on my fears, I was swung into bright light and onto solid carpeted floor where Madrigal waited. There was no elevator car in the shaft, just concrete wall and steel supports. Then I watched a stalled car shuttle past and heard closing doors above. The strongman magician had simply suspended an elevator car at the top of the shaft and climbed the thick cables.

  That didn't explain how the theatrical flies had morphed into one of the elevator shafts, though. I remembered what Helena Troy Burnside had said: many people found their native skills supernaturally sharpened after the Millennium Revelation.

  So a stage magician who'd found a pair of fey nestlings could become an enhanced actual magician, thanks to these reverse changelings, his assistants.

  Madrigal's big hand kept me upright while his agile assistants slithered up the hall walls to the ceiling and skittered down the passage to Cicereau's penthouse door.

  I didn't have an inclination to question anybody's transportation methods. The trail of bloody footprints on the lush forest-green hall carpeting made talk unnecessary and time precious.

  Hard to believe, but I joined Madrigal in pounding down the blood trail to Cicereau's door to save the werewolf mobster's skin. Wolfish howls were cutting off in mid-shriek.

  Madrigal's brute force bounded through the shattered wooden door. A charnel house stench of blood and feces kept the two dainty feylings hanging from the door frame in the hall. Human offal overpowered even their predatory snake and spider sides.

  Madrigal and I barged inside. In a split second the scene resolved into a mind-boggling series of gruesome vignettes.

  Cicereau and the Uzi were both bloodied, the mobster kneeling on his gaudy bed as if huddled in a foxhole. His six wolfish guards lay gutted on the carpeting, a couple changed into full wolf form, clawed feet twitching.

  I swallowed hard, thankful I'd left Quick safe at home. He was always too willing to leap into an unfair fight.

  Sansouci, against the wall, had taken his fearsome vampire form. Mouth and eyes foaming with blood, he was straining to contain a huge forceful figure part Beowulf, part. . . mummy, and all monster.

  "Krzys!" I cried experimentally. The hulking shoulders and neck shifted in my direction.

  Yes, Loretta's Prince Charming had come back to un-life from his Sunset Park bones. The Karnak vampires' mystical methods must have managed to clothe bones with muscle and flesh.

  His turning at my call not only gave Sansouci a chance to break a chair back for a raw stake, it revealed a face that was a burning-car-accident patchwork of Beauty and Beast. Those pale, Polish-blue eyes he shared with Loretta and Quicksilver shone like aquamarines in a leathery skin cobbled together from beaten gold and stiffened gauze. A few gilt strands of hair glistened on his mottled bone skull. His hips, swathed in a transparent linen Egyptian kilt, showed splitting patches of skin over a raw substructure of naked muscles and tendons.

  Apparently the new Egyptian art of raising old vampires was still in the R &D stage. Imagine a Frankenstein monster mummy. No, don't!

  Sansouci was French toast. Cicereau was a werewolf shish kebab and Madrigal and I were about to become either escaping cowards or dead fools.

  Madrigal wrenched his head around to eye his startled assistants twining the empty door frame. Violence in fey territory must be the poison and wire garrote sort.

  "Save yourselves," he cried.

  "No!" I answered. "First make them release Loretta. Can they retract their silken fey bonds at long distance?"

  He nodded. "But-"

  "Can you darken these lights?" I asked next, eyeing the window-wall opposite all this, the dark expanse reflecting portions of the carnage as if lit by heat lightning, by all the neon wattage of Las Vegas.

  "No," he muttered, "I can't darken the Strip. What do you think I am?"

  "Useless?" a voice snarled from the wall, sounding strangled in the Bone Boy's huge hands that were all bone and sinew and muscle and no skin and around the daylight vampire's muscle-bulging throat.

  Sansouci had come to the Inferno at Snow's call to help save Ric. I needed to return the favor.

  "Give me a mirror!" I screamed at Madrigal. "I need darkness behind a rectangle of the night. Damn Vegas and its overlit arrogance! I need just one door-size patch of darkness for a mirror-"

  Madrigal looked toward his fey girls, whose entwined fingers and locks of long hair made them twin Medusas lost in their own reflections.

  "Their own binding ritual will release Loretta's image. That's all they can do. "

  And it wasn't enough. The mob boss's glorious bedroom panorama of the Strip's nightly fireworks would destroy us all. I needed solid darkness to draw Loretta close, to make her visible. Or. . . the windows needed a solid silver mirror backing.

  The fey sisters' posture reminded me of something.

  Meanwhile, Sansouci had roared and slipped away from the wall and the creature's stranglehold to attack Krzysztof from the rear, driving the jagged rung of the chair-back into his leathery shoulder. A wooden stake wouldn't kill, but if any vampire was left in this risen abomination, it could immobilize him. I didn't dare watch their battle.

  My distracted mind fought to concentrate, to sense the whispery feel of the silver familiar on my skin in its precious metal form. Now it was made of Snow'
s and Achilles' conjoined locks of hair, one a strand that I regarded as an enemy to me and mine and my very mind and soul, the other cherished as a memento of a faithful canine defender. Now dark and light influences had braided into one strand I could consciously command. Maybe.

  I called them up and cast them out, away from me, surrendered them. It was as if all my energy and will had turned steely cold and seeped from every artery and vein of my body in an ugly, draining rush.

  I could hardly stand, then felt Madrigal's strongman body behind me, bracing mine like an easel a canvas. I felt blank, empty. He was crooning some strange syllables that brought Phasia and Sylphia creeping into the room.

  The scent of blood intensified into the metallic tang I'd sensed on my tongue at my first, agonizing menstruation. I felt a sudden, gut-wrenching, and purely phantom cramp in my belly and mind.

  In front of my eyes, the familiar stretched into tendrils from my left and my right arms and pooled on the window glass into a spreading surface of bright liquid silver. It resolved into a person-high oval of light against the night's darkness, blotting out all the neon of Vegas.

  I saw myself reflected. Standing alone, dressed exactly as I was but upheld by no one, wearing no pair of thin silver leashes on my wrists.

  Lilith.

  Now. When it least mattered, I saw her, clear and separate. Now, when extinction was a leap and snarl and slash away from all of us in this room that held stalking Death within it.

  She wore the exact double of my Mrs. Peel ensemble, except that when she tossed her head her hair pulled free into an untamed mane. Then she was. . . gone.

  I lost my breath, my senses, my mind.

  Summoned, Loretta levitated into the mirror that I had made, like a saint ascending into heaven. Sweet, pretty murdered and now murderous Loretta.

  Her image also was as clear as crystal.

  I stepped in front of it.

  "Krzysztof," I cried from the heart. "I'm here. "

  Then I stepped away again.

  The monster turned. His wayward gaze fixed on the vision floating almost fifty stories above the Las Vegas Strip, the mirror-bound image of his lost love.

  He made a sound of such bestial longing that every human ear within reach-that is, only mine-must have sensed a pounding heartbeat freeze. Then he lurched in his mad destructive inhuman way toward his beloved.

  Three giant steps and the double-strength safety glass fractured like a bad dream. Daggers of mirrored glass splintered, scattered, admitted the lavishly lit night as Krzysztof stepped forty-some stories into the empty, as-yet-unbuilt Las Vegas Strip of his nineteen-forties past and vanished.

  I felt the silver familiar rebound on my body like a snapped rubber band, or a yo-yo abruptly recalled, an echo coming back five times louder. I would have fallen from the impact without the literal backup of Madrigal.

  His fey assistants came twining his form, each one peering over his mighty shoulders, evoking the huge Strip billboard advertising his Gehenna act.

  They gazed at me and purred in concert. They were Madrigal's familiars, I realized, as eerily attached as mine.

  I turned to find what was left of Sansouci.

  He leaned panting against a wall, bloodied. As I watched he wiped off secondhand gore sprayed from the dying werewolves whose corpses littered the floor. His green eyes had faded to hazel. Did vampires feel something as human as fatigue? He managed to raise a bloody hand as if shielding himself against me or the lights or the hole in the window-wall.

  "You are too sucking fierce for Vegas," he said, then coughed up secondhand blood and laughed.

  Last I looked for Cicereau. He remained on the bed clutching his emptied, Liberace-glammed-up Uzi, surveying his fallen werewolf guard and those of us left standing: magician and familiars, daylight vampire and paranormal investigator.

  "I should reduce your times of indenture," he told Madrigal and Sansouci. Then he laughed too. "But I can't afford to let you go, especially after this. "

  He addressed me last.

  "Good thing my pack failed to kill you at Starlight Lodge, after all. I'll pay what you're worth for this night's work, then the slate is clean and we can all resume being the usual enemies in peace. "

  "This is entirely your fault," I told him. "If you hadn't killed your own daughter and her vampire lover so brutally it never would have happened. You deserve to see ravaged victims raised and walking back to you. How could you do that to your own daughter? Or your own werewolf mobster ambitions? Now the Karnak vampire empire is poised to resurrect any destroyed master vampire they can find the world over and try a takedown of Vegas and anywhere. "

  Cicereau stirred on his blood-spattered brocade coverlet.

  "I had to make an example of them. I didn't care who Loretta picked for a boyfriend but Loretta was half-human. We werewolves and vampires feared that the unprecedented cross-supernatural lovebirds might be able to reproduce like humans. The unnatural result of such a union would destroy the ages-old turf of our two kinds and no one wanted that. That's why we made a blood pact over their dead bodies. "

  "You're telling me that supernaturals find half-breeds unnatural? Werewolves and vampires aren't exactly the Smiths and Joneses or the Hatfields and McCoys for that matter. "

  "Kind must stick with kind. Family is family in the lupine line. " Cicereau's sweat-mustached upper lip lifted in a snarl of disdain. "Vampires are already a mongrel sort, connected only by their unnatural appetites. What makes the werewolf mob invincible is that we are all blood family, not just joined by shedding it.

  "Each full moon we shift into our pack form and celebrate our unity. Vampires hunt alone, like the inferior cat. That's why we defeated them eighty years ago for control of Vegas. That's why we will defeat the Karnak nest. Christophe should have burned out the entire lot with his dragon's fiery breath when he raided them.

  "Now this vampire empire knows that we know they exist. I hear that's all your fault, Delilah Street, and you and your FBI boyfriend are another damnably dangerous couple loose in Vegas. So you'd better leave while I'm feeling grateful. Sansouci, get her out of here. And, Madrigal, time to let your pets clean up the mess. "

  I was too tired to argue, almost too tired to stand. I did manage to walk out of there, unaided, on my own two blood-spattered feet.