Vampire Sunrise

by Carole Nelson Douglas

Chapter Twenty

   

  THE GEHENNA WASN'T done with me yet.

  Sansouci steered me into a guest bathroom near the door to Cicereau's suite and told me to clean up.

  In the mirror I saw his point. No chance I was regarding Lilith's image this time. Blood dotted my face, hair, and the jabot of my white blouse. A few swipes with an evaporating soap product cleansed the face and hair. The blouse would just have to pass as polka-dotted. I wiped the blood drops off the gray toes of my shoes and the bell-bottoms of my black pants. The black jacket absorbed dark red and looked fine to the casual glance.

  The silver familiar wasn't about to waste its glory on my bloody cravat. It snugged around my hips again, under the pants. I leaned against the green marble sink and called Ric to tell him I was all right and heading home from the Gehenna.

  "You sound breathless," he answered.

  "I have my reasons, which you'll know when we meet up. "

  When I stepped out again, an equally gore-free vampire henchman was awaiting me in the entry. Must be a matching boys' room through the opposite door. It occurred to me why a werewolf mobster would provide lavatory facilities at the door to his elegant private penthouse. Must have a lot of messy underlings visiting to report on the latest hits and misses.

  "Slick thinking," Sansouci said.

  "Yeah. It's pretty obvious why Cicereau's visiting goons would need to tidy up right here at the front door. "

  He frowned, then eyed the unmarked doors.

  "Not these rest rooms. I meant your slick trick, conjuring a hallucinatory exit for the Karnak's revived killing machine. Forty-some floors ought to stop reanimated bones pretty cold. What happened to Loretta?"

  "That was just a mirror image I summoned like the one I left behind here for a while. Loretta is still bound in Madrigal's backstage mirror. "

  He nodded. "I better hustle you outa here before Cicereau forgets he's grateful, and then make sure that mirror trick is holding. "

  No rest for the wicked, as they say.

  We zipped down in the next elevator, picking up hotel guests as we stopped at lower floors. No one recoiled or flared their nostrils, so we must have looked-and smelled-fairly normal, as normal as a silver medium and a daylight vampire could be.

  Once on the hotel's thickly tourist-populated main floor, Sansouci steered me through the casino to a gilded cage. I pulled against his one-armed custody at the very sight of bars.

  "It's a cashier's cage. Relax. "

  Sansouci flashed a Gehenna/Magus/Megalith consortium gambling card, a credit card for gamblers. I'd barely glimpsed the holographic image that flipped from an Annie Liebovitz portrait of Cesar Cicereau to a wolf's-head before Sansouci slapped it down on the brown marble counter and slid it through the cage.

  The woman on the other side wore a one-shouldered rabbit fur corset and purple-dyed rabbit ears. I guess "Prey" was her middle name. She batted metallic green false lashes as she pushed a wad of bills under the cage bars.

  "Somebody must have hit the jackpot," she simpered at Sansouci. "I get off in forty-five minutes, big boy. "

  "My women do it much faster than that," he noted, swooping up the stash and handing it to me.

  "Ah, do you have a money bag or something?" I asked the now thoroughly miffed cashier.

  "Stick it in your-" she began as Sansouci turned me away from the cage into the clatter and chatter of the casino.

  He stopped a passing cocktail waitress tricked out as a calico cat. "Got a nickel slot bonanza bag?"

  She produced a pink burlap bag into which Sansouci dropped my loot.

  In ten minutes of twisting through the milling throngs we finally exited the cold and glamorously dark interior at the hotel's entry canopy.

  "While you were irritating Cicereau," he said, "I dialed Nightwine's majordomo. "

  "Godfrey? You know Godfrey?"

  "I know how things work in this town. I figured you'd need a ride. " He waved a hand.

  That's right; I'd been driven here by limo. My God, there idled Dolly, my '56 Cadillac convertible, shining like a decapitated Black Maria police wagon from the thirties.

  I turned, grateful. "Sansouci, you're amazing. "

  He gave me a rough little shove. "Get outa here before Cicereau accuses you of ripping him off and has you arrested. His gratitude lasts about as long as a five-dollar whore's blow job. "

  I was feeling the stress of the last couple hours so I stumbled forward at Sansouci's ungentlemanly push. Why was he irked with me? I'd saved his bacon and his boss's too.

  As I neared, I saw the black Caddy didn't have a red leather interior like my Dolly. And ace attorney Perry Mason was at the wheel.

  "Godfrey has told me you've been absent without leave for far too long, Miss Delilah," the CinSim Perry said sternly as he leaned over the wide front bench seat to open the passenger door. "I'm taking you straight home, no argument. Now get in. "

  "No argument," I promised, relieved.

  Perry was a CinSim but he seemed to be totally mobile, unlike most, and nobody would mess with him in this town anyway. He was a man of size, with a sterling legal reputation to match. He was also Big Daddy for a lifelong orphan like me. A girl couldn't have a better escort.

  As we pulled out of the overlit neon canopy into the blitzkrieged Las Vegas Strip night, I couldn't help studying the Gehenna's exterior perimeter for signs of a resurrected vampire who'd fallen to earth-hard. Thanks to me. I saw nothing but milling tourists, yet in the distance I heard a wolflike wail.

  In what seemed like no time, Perry's Cadillac throbbed next to the real Dolly in my Enchanted Cottage's driveway.

  "Get some rest," he ordered in his brusque yet kindly way. "Godfrey said you've had a long day. "

  "Yes, Perry. Thanks so much for the ride. "

  He leaned across the long leather bench seat to advise me further. "And watch that fellow who walked you out of the Gehenna. He looks like a gigolo. "

  I laughed to imagine Sansouci's reaction to that. "You don't have to worry, Mr. Mason. I'm a very cautious girl. "

  He nodded satisfaction as I got out and watched him glide away in engine-growling, shiny-black barracuda glory.

  I sighed and turned toward my home, sweet home, aka the Enchanted Cottage, wanting to hit the shower, put on some blood-free clothes, and relax.

  Then my cell phone vibrated. The famous Strip dead zones were sure working now.

  Why did I have a queasy feeling? Could the wolfish wail have been a distant chorus of screaming police sirens I'd heard as Perry Mason had chauffeured me away from the Gehenna?

  "Delilah!" Ric's voice was easy on my ears but not the urgent note in it. What was the expression that so fit Sansouci tonight? No rest for the wicked. I'd been wicked enough tonight to impress a werewolf mob kingpin and a vampire. . . and make a permanent enemy of my first mirror BFF, Loretta, now my new Best Fiend Forever

  "Where are you?" Ric and I asked in tandem, then laughed.

  "I just now got home," I said.

  "I bet you had a lot to catch up on after. . . " He paused, probably aware of others close enough to overhear. "After our latest assignment," he finished in lower tones. "Listen, I know it's late but I need you at the coroner's. Grisly Bahr called me over for a private talk about some missing corpses. Now he's got a supernatural pile of mystery meat coming in fresh from the Gehenna. And where've you just been?"

  "Uh, the Gehenna. "

  "I figured the dead meat is no mystery to you. "

  I decided not to mention I was actually the chef on that one. Not yet, at least, until I knew what officialdom was doing.

  "No. "

  "Better keep that between me and thee," Ric said. "Kennedy Malloy is en route to Grisly's place too. "

  "Sure I should show up at all?"
/>
  "Why not?"

  "Captain Malloy liked you first. "

  He laughed. "She's a professional associate, that's all. "

  "To her, so am I. "

  I may be new to the dating game but I knew enough to realize that even smart guys like Ric could underestimate the depth of a woman colleague's interest. Few decent guys were out there. Lots of competition for them.

  "I've been getting some flashbacks," Ric said in a lowered tone, after a pause, "and some flash-forwards maybe too. You really okay, chica? I had a bad feeling an hour or so ago. "

  Yeah, well. . . I'd been getting multiple bad feelings about then too.

  "We'll have a one-on-one later," he added. "After our date at the coroner's. "

  Actually, I couldn't wait to see what Grisly made of what was left of Loretta's risen Prince Charming turned avenger. It was even possible the fall hadn't, ah, killed him.

  BEFORE SEEING RIC, I needed a quick shower and change. Dried blood was not the latest shade in streetwear, even in Vegas.

  I turned to the steps leading to my charming arched front door and only then noticed Quicksilver's gray fur blending into the aged wood. He sat there on prick-eared alert, his neck ruff fluffed and his blue eyes half closed in that mute, rebuking look smart dogs get.

  His black nostrils flared to inhale the invisible traces of blood and gore from my clothes and skin.

  How dare you have fun without me? his guard dog look and posture screamed, in the best canine form, of course.

  "I suppose you want to shower with me too?" I asked.

  He stood and shook out his thick, silvery coat, then grinned.

  "No, you don't. Stay down here and guard Dolly. I need to make tire tracks to the coroner's office as soon as I'm decent and dry. "

  The grin allowed a long pink tongue dangling room, reminding me that we were now twins in the healing department.

  "And don't drool any stray saliva on Dolly's leather upholstery!"

  Inside, I first had to stash my cash from Cicereau in the. . . uh, okay. . . the open floor safe I spotted in the parlor.

  "Thanks," I muttered to my resident guardians.

  Then I rushed up the steep stairs, shedding clothes as I went. I hopped in the hall to kick off my gray sling-backs and wriggle out of the bell-bottoms.

  I'd resolved to avoid looking in mirrors for at least a day but still glimpsed my frenzied hopping in the tall mirror at the hall's end.

  No bound and gagged Loretta, thank the mirror goddess, but another figure hopping there in eerie time with mine. A naked Lilith, putting on what I tore off.

  Just too bizarre! I fled into the bedroom and the bathroom beyond it, toward the sound of pelting shower water, thank the secret pixie or who- or whatever had turned it on!

  In moments, pink water swirled around my bare feet in the shiny hole-pierced drain, reminding me of Snow's pink ruby collar gemstones and matching eyes behind the dark sunglasses.

  Argh! I didn't want to remember any part of Snow, particularly his presumably bleeding back. Still, if anyone deserved to suffer on Ric's behalf, it was Snow, who'd charged me a personal price for saving Ric's life.

  Wait. He hadn't saved a thing. I'd done that. He'd taken his blood money-i. e. , my kiss-for the mere attempt at a rescue mission.

  Which had worked. As his supposedly enslaving Brimstone Kiss had not.

  So why was I furious?

  Stress, Delilah. Irma's voice soothed me like a slippery bar of soap stroking my shoulders. You're just stressed.

  And seeing Lilith in my hall mirror donning my discarded clothes doesn't help, I railed at Irma. Who does she think she is? Besides me?

  She doesn't have me, Irma soothed.

  But she has my clothes and she's done it before! That's what got me accused of being the Snow groupie killer on that hotel security tape. It was Lilith, not me, on the scene, and I'd be judged crazy if I tried to say that.

  I wrapped myself in one of the huge coat-tree-hung towels that dried me from ankle to armpit in three steps, then stood thinking on the plush bathroom carpet as the wet soles of my feet sank in. Something else sank in.

  In that inadvertent Inferno crime-scene security-camera shot Snow had held back from the police, Lilith had been wearing the same striking vintage evening ensemble I'd rented only a few hours earlier at D??j??-Vous, the costume shop Snow owned.

  That I'd tried on in the D??j??-Vous dressing room mirror.

  Lilith could "'nap" the clothes from my own image in a mirror! I stomped out into the hall. She/I were a set of overlapping images, one towel-draped, one wearing the blood-worn clothes I'd just dropped to this very floor.

  They should have been lying there, puckered and empty. Corpselike. The floor was dry and clean.

  Back to the bathroom.

  Mrs. Peel's freshly cleaned and pressed "Carnaby Street" sixties suit and ruffled shirt hung from the clothes rack. Lilith wasn't stealing my look, she was duplicating it.

  I shook out my mane of wet hair and felt a jet stream of warm air riffle it like a blow torch. Did a demon hairdresser come with the place, just now announcing its presence in an emergency? Maybe the Enchanted Cottage was only three-fourths Disney and one-quarter imp. Or vice versa. And the mirror could be as much my enemy as my friend, as Loretta had so recently proven.

  I nodded my head slowly, speaking not exactly to Irma or to my invisible dresser or to Mrs. Peel's empty suit.

  "Makes sense. If I'm wearing this outfit and I saw Lilith jumping into it, my mirror image can duplicate any wardrobe item of mine reflected in a mirror to masquerade as me. "

  Not to worry, Irma purred in my inner ear, she copped the unwashed, used clothes. You aren't exactly the same at all. What a stupid skank!

  By then I was redonning the outfit, not pausing to consider its blood-drenched recent past. The Enchanted Cottage was just doing its job: putting the best, freshest face on everything that had been tainted.

  There was only one thing it couldn't counter: the mischief unwanted guests like Loretta and Lilith could get up to in the front-surface glass of my hall mirror.

  Quicksilver was already perched on Dolly's passenger seat before I could get the keys out of my messenger bag and open the driver's-side door.

  "What have I told you about jumping over the door when the window's down?" I demanded. "Okay, be snarky. "

  I fished his sunglasses out of the humungous glove compartment. Dogs love convertible rides but the desert wind is too drying for their naked eyes. And the glare of the Strip at night made sunglasses a good idea. Besides, Quick liked turning heads.

  I donned round Audrey Hepburn sixties shades myself.

  Dolly's engine purred like a kitten en route to the coroner's. Surely my sixties duds revved her fifties Detroit heart. To my mind, clothing stopped being cool in the seventies and drowned in the gaudy, trickle-down Reagan eighties.

  When I got to the low morgue building off Charleston I noticed that Nightwine's nearby soundstage was still grinding away. My heart lurched and clutched to see Ric's bronze Stingray next door parked beside a white Crown Victoria that had to be Captain Kennedy Malloy's ride.

  No wonder poor Dolly lurched and clutched while I put her into park and turned off the engine. If it wasn't Lilith trying to take my place in the mirror, it was Captain Malloy trying to move in on Ric.

  "Watch here," I told Quicksilver, rushing inside. Some people are just dying to get into the morgue and I was one of them right now.

  The receptionist, Yolanda, sniffed as she handed over my ID card. "Mr. Montoya came inside with the police captain a half hour ago," she informed me. "You may be too late. "

  "Nobody's left yet," I pointed out, "unless the corpse we're all here to see took a stroll. "

  Her nose curled. "Ugh. I hear three techs fainted moving the remains
into the autopsy room. Care for some Vicks?"

  "Thanks, but no thanks," I said, smiling in the name of getting along with the clerical staff.

  Patting Vicks VapoRub on the nostrils is a cop trick for masking the stench of death. I have to admit I was nervous. I'd never before attended an autopsy for a revived dead body I'd been responsible for killing again.

  "Murder" had become a very loose term in the post-Millennium Revelation world.

  A wide-eyed tech assistant (just like I'd recently played next door) issued me the regulation latex gloves and Plexiglas visor at the autopsy room door. With an unnerving sense of d??j?? vu, I joined several similarly accoutered people gathered around a stainless steel table.

  It was like walking in on my longtime nightmares, only I was one of the weird beings surrounding my supine self, not the body on the examination table.

  Perspiration stippled my entire body like a rash. Why had I ever thought I could do this? Stroll up to something I'd tricked to jump out a window? Guilt was such an iffy element nowadays. Had my desperate act blasted all hope from Loretta's previously presumed innocent heart or had I stopped a monster in its tracks? Did I have the right to dote on the sight of Ric standing alive and well near the fallen jigsaw remains of Loretta's Polish prince?

  "Autopsies are off-limits for civilians," Captain Malloy noted from behind her glinting transparent mask.

  I readily turned to go, but Ric stepped up to capture my elbow and stop me.

  The clear plastic face guard blurred his mocha skin and coffee-dark hair and eyes, but I couldn't fail to recognize the rolled-up ivory silk shirtsleeves and tailored buff-colored slacks. He was Mr. Suave even around an autopsy table.

  "Miss Street may have seen the victim alive," he said.

  "She can ID this?" Malloy jeered. "I thought I'd spare a civilian embarrassing herself. " She stared at Ric's fingers making comforting circles on my elbow.

  I took a deep breath.

  Yeah, lady, Irma taunted on my behalf, he's pretty familiar with the lay of her land. Too bad, loser!

  Irma made me smile inside. She was always in my corner.

  I walked closer to the table to regard my victim, pushing aside both childish nightmares and adult guilt.

  Had Captain Malloy been trying to do me a favor! The broken and tangled form was less human than a robot graveyard. I saw only twisted pseudo-flesh over raw muscle, not Loretta's idealized and romantic undead lover. Nothing of him had been revived but the bones and patchwork covering, and the brain had been a mockery.

  This repellent conglomeration of flesh and bone had been raised only to become mindlessly murderous, perhaps reviving its last mortal, defensive impulses. Not its fault, but also not a reason to spare a killing machine.

  "What a puzzling m??lange," Grisly Bahr said, his fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows arching like inchworms. "Although I spot a lot of shiny nostrils in the room, Miss Street, the amateur among us, was right to abstain. The mentholated Vicks was unnecessary, folks. "

  Besides giving me an "A is for Amateur" scarlet letter, making all the police pros present hate me, Dr. Bahr was also stating the oddly obvious. This blob of monstrous mortality smelled more of sunbaked asphalt than decaying flesh.

  "I got a call from the meat wagon," Captain Malloy noted. "What brought out the civilians?" she asked Bahr, eyeing me and Ric.

  Oooh, she must be mucho mad about you being here, Irma whispered in my ear.

  Ric wasn't going to tolerate official snootiness goring his associate.

  "Dr. Bahr had called me on another matter involving the bodies found in Sunset Park a few weeks back," he said formally. "Miss Street had been present for that discovery, so I suggested she meet me here. "

  "Not expecting a crowd, I'm sure. " Malloy sounded sour. "Or a bizarre new body. I wish losing gamblers would leap off the Hoover Dam instead of a Strip hotel for a change. "

  She folded her arms over her dark blazer, reminding me of the faux uniform suit I'd worn to D. C. A trim blonde looked more icily official in navy blue than a buxom brunette, I observed.

  "It's not a despondent gambler," I felt obliged to tell her. "It's the male vic from the park. Any sign of those original dry bones?" I asked Grisly.

  He shook his head. "Just fragments and powder here now. I'll have to analyze every component. What was the height of the fall, three hundred feet? Any identifiable face?"

  "You wouldn't want to see," said a new voice.

  Malloy's constant frown deepened as she turned to spot Sansouci entering, gloves and visor in hand. "Another party crasher. I suppose your presence confirms this individual died at the Gehenna. "

  "Yup. My boss wanted to make sure the body got here. . . safely. "

  "As if. " She didn't need to say more. The body could hardly be more destroyed. "I'd think Cicereau had better errand boys at hand than a gigolo. "

  Ouch! Irma gasped. I found the comment telling.

  "Get out, Sansouci," Captain Malloy ordered with contempt, "along with Montoya and Street. "

  The resulting silence got intense. Sansouci looked ready to break out the fangs again and I was wishing for some.

  Ric, Mr. ex-FBI Coolio again, took us both in hand, my alter ego and me. His hand on my elbow propelled me and Irma to the door.

  "Time to visit the snack zone," he said, "while the pros get their teeth into their new corpse. "

  Sansouci followed.

  THE SILENCE AS we three withdrew was mutual. None of us easily swallowed orders to retreat.

  Once we'd hung up our visors and discarded the latex gloves, we passed through some heavy stainless steel doors. Sansouci and I followed Ric, down a hall exhaling the delicate odor of decay to the employee rest area, where soft drink and snack machines lined the walls. It was otherwise empty.

  "You guys know each other?" I asked, surprised. Sansouci had seen Ric during the Karnak rescue but Ric had been dead to the world in a very real sense then.

  Ric nodded slowly, measuring Sansouci's breed and steel.

  "The FBI keeps mug shots and files on all the Vegas principal players. I still have access. "

  "'Principal players'?" Sansouci mocked. "I'm just Cicereau's lieutenant. "

  "That how you know my girl?" Ric's tone wasn't searching for steel now, it was showing it.

  "Yeah. I like her too. "

  "Am I going to have to do something about that?" Ric asked.

  The scent of testosterone in the innocuous break room overcame the potent ozone formula that quieted the reek of decay. Some said it was just Febreze. I knew enough to keep my mouth shut for once. Irma didn't.

  Dueling dudes! Over us! This is a first, girl, relax and enjoy.

  Whoa, Irma! "Relax and enjoy?" That's what sexist men in the bad old days advised women facing a rapist to do, I told her. I don't need to be anybody's prize.

  Aw, guys gotta do this stuff. Don't enjoy, then, but relax.

  Sansouci pulled out a plastic chair and sat down at a flimsy matching table, crossing his arms over his impressive chest. "Nope. Not while you're alive. "

  Somehow that settled things, even though Sansouci and I knew that condition was ambiguous.

  Ric had already moved to the garish wall of steel food dispensers, poised to feed dollars into drink slots. "Anybody want anything?"

  I shook my head but the guys had Red Bulls. Of course. Having been shooed out of the autopsy room by a woman, they had to macho up again.

  "Sounds like you annoyed the homicide captain," Ric told Sansouci after we sat at his table. "What's her issue? Any untimely expirations you might have had something to do with besides the current remains?"

  Sansouci shrugged. "Malloy? Hell hath no fury-"

  ?C like a woman scorned, Irma breathed. This Malloy broad has her eye on both Ric and Sansouci? Her taste is wa
y too like ours.

  "Yours," I said aloud.

  "Our what?" Ric asked.

  "Ah, I meant Malloy's dating druthers is your problem, guys. Come on, Ric, don't so look innocent. You know she likes you. Apparently she liked Sansouci once too. "

  But I couldn't believe it even as I threw out the pretended distraction, though I'd rather have Ric and Sansouci getting territorial about Kennedy Malloy than about me.

  Malloy had wanted to be one of Sansouci's daily dinner dates? I couldn't picture a high-ranking police officer willing to be some vamp's midnight snack or lunchtime lay, even if she had nothing to lose but a few ounces of blood.

  "You doing all right now, Montoya?" Sansouci asked Ric to change the subject.

  "You were in on that Karnak action?" Ric asked in turn, surprised.

  "Yeah. Cicereau volunteered some forces when Christophe rallied a rescue party, thanks to Miss Street here. "

  "I need to hear all the details," Ric said.

  "Delilah didn't tell you?"

  Ric took in his use of my first name. "We had other things to discuss first, but now I'm all ears. Shoot. "

  "It was pretty awesome, man," Sansouci said. "Christophe has unsuspected resources. "

  "Not unexpected by me. "

  "You may have been Mr. Suspicious FBI Agent Man, but you were out, uh, cold at the time. "

  Sansouci eyed me nervously. Ric had been more than "out cold. " Cicereau's man didn't know how much I'd told Ric.

  "Look," Sansouci said after a big ice-breaking chug of Red Bull. "I don't know what anybody else thinks but I figure we're all sitting on a fire-ant pile of ancient evil that makes a few Stripside touches of the Apocalypse look like a Punch and Judy puppet show in Sunset Park.

  "To save your sorry ass, Montoya, your lady here helped expose the whole shebang. That got a bunch of powers along the Strip stirred up to go and kill a tombful of ancient Egyptian immortals, which is kind of ironic if you think about it. "

  This was such a hokey recital I expected Sansouci to pull out a cheroot and strike a match on his spurs to create a smoke screen.

  Ric seemed unconvinced but a good interrogator is always tricky to read. "So this body tonight-?"

  "My turn," I said quickly. "That's what the Egyptian cartel at the Karnak wanted with you: raising poor dead Loretta Cicereau's slain boyfriend from the bones. Meanwhile, Loretta's ghost had been working on me in my mirror after the same thing. She wanted her beloved Prince Krzysztof brought back to life. The Karnak's royal vampires wanted it more. "

  "Why?" Sansouci asked.

  "Think about it. He's a six-hundred-year-old vamp. Apparently most European vamps of that 'superstitious' era are permanently staked and beheaded, and moldering immobilized in unknown graves. The Egyptians must have been working on some potion or rite over the centuries that raises vampires from even the bones. "

  "My God," Ric said. "When I got here Grisly showed me the empty gurneys where the Sunset Park bones had lain. You mean," he challenged Sansouci, "that hunk of once-biological. . . material in the autopsy room was. . . grown from those bones by a nest of ancient Egyptian vampires?"

  "Yeah, and they needed you to do it. You have some kind of resurrection mojo? That certainly explains-" Sansouci shut up as I kicked him hard in the shin under the table. "When your girlfriend figured out where you were and why," he resumed, "she needed an armed expedition to pry you loose. Everyone in charge seems to think the excitement is over but the Bone Boy killed some tourists and a half dozen of Cicereau's wolf-boys tonight. Unless someone stops those crazed mummies gone wild we'll all be bloody gauze-bait. "

  "The werewolf mob only looks out for its own," Ric said. "Why'd you care?"

  Another long silence, during which Sansouci smoldered and Ric matched him glare for glare.

  "Ask your lady friend," Sansouci snarled in a wolflike way that confused the real issue. He stood, practically pulsing with conflict and resentment.

  Ric leaped up. "What does Delilah have to do with it?"

  "Because it's all about you. "

  "Not here and now," Ric said. "Why do you know more about it, and her, than I do?"

  Sansouci, the coward, took that for an exit line. "Listen. I have to report back to the boss. Ask your lady. "

  He finished the Red Bull as if swilling the last of a rare blood vintage. Of course only I thought of that image. "I'm sure she can fill you in on all the gory details. "

  With a bloodthirsty grin, he swaggered out.

  "Kennedy Malloy must have lost her mind," Ric muttered. "That guy is Thug Central. She'd risk her career for a few nights' stands with a werewolf? He must be some salsa dancer at Los Lobos. "

  Poor Ric. He had so much to get caught up on.

  "Do you think Malloy can dance?" I asked as we dumped our trash and headed into the empty halls of the truly dead.

  "Not like you can now that I've taken you in hand," he said.

  "Speaking of which, we need to fox-trot back to Quicksilver and Dolly. You can follow us to my place. Poor Quick's been feeling as left out as you lately. "

  "So much has been happening," Ric said, not aware of the half of it.

  I'd have to fill him in fast. His powers of dowsing for the dead were the heart of everything horrible that had happened to and around him. It wasn't right to keep him an ignorant accessory to the biggest and baddest news to hit Vegas since the Millennium Revelation.

  I couldn't afford to spare Ric anything at this point, not even the fact that I was now a stone-cold killer.

  Of the Undead.