Not every modern career girl can have her rented house blown away by a jealous weather witch in Kansas one week and end up in the post-Millennium Las Vegas sleeping in an Enchanted Cottage the next. But, as Disney says: fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, and it had happened to me, Delilah Street, forever orphan and ex-WTCH-TV reporter. The Enchanted Cottage is a charming little place from the 1945 film of that name. Robert Young played a pilot disfigured in World War II and Dorothy McGuire portrayed a plain shy spinster. They find sanctuary and happily-ever-after love in a cottage just like mine.But this is not the 1940s and films are no longer made in black and white--unless the director is trying to be retro or pretentious or both. And nobody knows who Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire were except film buffs like me and my new boss, Hector Nightwine, producer of the internationally franchised CSI V forensic TV shows. For a number of reasons, my life in the Las Vegas of 2013 isn't worth a five-dollar chip from Cesar Cicereau's Gehenna Hotel and Casino. Fortunately, though, I'm worth a lot to Hector. So, here I am in a pseudo-quaint cottage on the grounds of Nightwine's Fort-Knox-secure Sunset Road estate, surrounded by Hobbity English charm mixed with high-tech convenience. I am tucked under an eiderdown comforter in a high four-poster bed with gargoyles carved onto the posts while a Jacuzzi tub in the adjoining bathroom softly gurgles me to sleep. Surely none of my half-vampire bullyboy nightmares will come home to roost in this place. It's as safe as fairy tales and Nightwine's state-of-the-art security technology can make it.

Even so, I was not quite sleeping, just snuggling into the thousand-thread-count sheets, when I heard a scratching at my second-story casement windows.

Fruit trees and blossom-bearing vines grow around my Enchanted Cottage as thick as Sleeping Beauty's thorny forest. A stray vine was probably blowing against the window glass. I opened my eyes to stare up at the peaked white-plaster ceiling. A small shifting shadow danced there in rhythm with the exterior scratching.

Had a cat climbed the vines and was now trying to get in?

I was warmer than a toasted English muffin from my formerly cold feet to the top of my brunet head. This may be Las Vegas, but I'm cold-natured. My feet and hands never seem to get warm enough at night. Now, though, they finally were.

So I didn't want to get up.

From the stairs came the faint whiff of dinner's garlic chicken. I seldom saw the kitchen witch who came with the property, along with the yard troll and the garden pixies and who knew what else, but she could bake fragrant loaves of crusty bread in the wood stove as readily as she could nuke a frozen Weight Watchers entrée in the microwave.

I wasn't crazy about the garlic odor from that night's homemade dish, but I was comforted to hear my awesomely large wolfhound-wolf-cross dog wheezing in sleep from one of the downstairs rooms. This was not one of Quicksilver's frequent solo nights out on the town that never shuts down. I figure adopting him doesn't give me a lock on his nocturnal need to patrol and rock and roll with his kind.

I wriggled deeper into the warm covers, but the insinuating snare-drum rhythm of that exterior scratching kept me from sliding into sleep. It could be a kitten caught up a tree, clinging there, helpless...

Forcing myself to sit up, I shivered at an inrush of air-conditioned air and put my bare feet to the icy wooden floor.

My sleep-T hem snarled in the covers as I got out of bed, almost tripping me. I moved toward the pair of windows.

A Rorschach blot of black was indeed pressed to the window glass. It was as big as my spread hand, with four clinging limbs and a bigger head. It looked like a starfish shadow.

I stumbled nearer and squinted to make it out in the dark. Surely, a young kitten--but why wasn't it mewing up a storm as cats do when trapped up so high? Only when a squeal revealed rows of tiny fangs did I realize that my visitor was a bat.

Naturally, I squealed a bit too.

Mind you, I'm a former TV news reporter, an intrepid investigator of rural phenomena like cattle mutilations. One midsummer night's window-clinging bat shouldn't set me screeching.

I reminded myself that bats were enormously useful consumers of insects and other pests and returned to bed, shuddering as my floor-cooled feet found the sheets already chilly. Even the slim silver chain on my wrist felt icy. I snuggled stomach-down, curled up, and waited for sleep to find me.

Then I heard the rustling. And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before...

Damn! Why was my subconscious quoting Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven?"

Maybe because the rustling sounded like curtains and there weren't any curtains on my dormer windows. Or maybe because the rustling sounded like a big bird's wings...

'Tis the wind and nothing more!

If that mantra had worked for Poe's uneasy scholar it would work for me. I pulled the covers farther over my head.

The raven-size wing rustling increased to a California condor-size woosh, with a wingspread of, say, ten freaking feet. Only an idiot would ignore that kind of indoor tempest. This was no little lost bat or even a misplaced sparrow.

I sat up, turning the covers half down, and faced the windows. "All right!" I challenged the night.

Not all right, baby girl, whispered my internal invisible friend since childhood, Irma. We are getting called on by more than Big Bird. We're not on Sesame Street anymore, Delilah.

No. The room's temperature had dropped to meat-freezer cold and I was instantly afraid I was the meat. Post-Millennium Las Vegas teemed with things that went bump, stump, hump and slurp in the night.

I was appalled to see that the small shadow from the windowpane had moved inside to become a pillar of darkness draped in black, severe and funereal. I was almost getting used to seeing apparitions in the tall hall mirror, but not in thin air. Slowly, the head of the entity moved, lifted and the cloaked sides spread their wings.

Awe mated with my fear, and both held me frozen. A pale white face came into partial focus. Only cruel, slanting dark eyebrows and a gray grinning mouth were fully visible.

The black fell back, revealing an ash-gray satin lining framing a man's black evening suit of elegant antique cut. The vintage clothing collector in me couldn't help but admire the tailoring even as goose bumps ran races up and down my arms. The figure had no color at all, not even red around the eye whites.

Then I recognized my visitor from his many collectible photographs and posters.

I was beholding the most commercially potent incarnation of Dracula of all time: 1932's Bela Lugosi, slithering onscreen with Eastern Euro-trash swagger and Art Deco decadence. I recalled a few pre-adolescent longings to someday meet a classic vampire: suave, smooth and deliciously sinister. I hankered for any one of a dozen pop culture reinventions of the father of all vampires as a sex symbol. Bela Lugosi had a certain predatory hunger, but he wasn't the hunky anti-hero women would willingly welcome, swooning for his seductive suction action.

Lugosi was nasty. Not as nasty as the ancient devouring vamp in Bram Stoker's novel, but far from the lounge lizard, oral-sex fiend Frank Langella's portrayal had made women go crazy over a few decades back. Why do women always go for the bad boys? I sure hadn't liked the variety I fought off in the group homes.

I could think clearly, but sat paralyzed--just like all those passive silver-screen victims--my fingers curled into the sheets. At least this wasn't a debased half-vamp from the group homes. He was the reel thing, although not a Gollum-gaunt creature of the night like Nosferatu from the days of silent films. That scrawny, long-clawed leech and lech was all too reminiscent of the real-life crackpot Howard Hughes in his current undead state to conjure.

No, Bela Lugosi's slo-mo sinister diction may seem hokey today, but in person, gliding to your bedside, he was mesmerizing. He leaned in and down, showed only the tips of his pointed canine teeth, and lowered his gaze to drink in the sight of my bare neck.

By now my silver chain bracelet had subtly shimmied up my arm. Even as he ogled my throat, it looped itself into a solid wide dog collar around my neck, blocking all ports of entry.

"Bah," Dracula said, recoiling. "Cheesy silver trinket! I only wanted to take a tiny symbolic taste."

"Bad taste is never symbolic," I said, my fingers tracing the smooth, defensive form my silver familiar had taken. It never failed to surprise--and defend--me.

"My master wants you."

"Isn't that Renfield's line?" I didn't mean to be a smart-mouth; I was just surprised that Dracula would admit to a master. He was "the Master."

"Renfield's words may, regrettably, live on, but the bug-eater ended with that blasted film. The message I bear remains: You must come with me."

"Now?" I couldn't believe I was asking that question, like I might consider it some other day.

"No. Never," I corrected myself. "We know all about you these days. You can't reverse your surname and pretend to be some Transylvanian nobleman, 'Count Alucard'! This is not sleepy old England between the World Wars of the last century. This is post-Millennium Revelation America. We're all on to you."

"Perhaps, Miss Street, but you have tried to trick my master. He's had time to discover your name and profession. He could choose to crush you like one of that pathetic Renfield's bugs. Instead, he is magnanimous. He wishes to employ you. You call yourself a paranormal investigator, do you not?"

"Barely. I just phoned the Yellow Pages today to order the ad. It'll take ages to show up. How would your master, whoever he is, know that?"

"We ... he knows many things through many means."

"And how'd you know where to find me?"

"All my kind know Hector Nightwine and his Sunset Road estate. You are becoming known as his creature," Dracula announced with loathing.

"His part-time private investigator! I'm nobody's creature. What have you got against Hector?" I was puzzled, because Nightwine was a known admirer of CinSims.

"He has leased all three of my brides." Dracula positively hissed the last word through his fangs. "I am denied all ... access."

"Oh."

I had to admit that the trio of willowy train-dragging thirties femmes fatales made a pretty good girl back-up group for Drac. They were the only vampire chick role models I aspired to. I made the height requirement, being five-eight flat-footed, but not the weight one. Lean and hungry (i.e., anorexic) is definitely not my look. I'm a substantial girl, more hourglass than swizzle stick. Still, it'd be fun to slink around in fangs and furbelows.

"Enough chitchat. Come with me." He extended a graceful gray hand.

Well, adolescent me had wanted to meet a gentleman vampire of the old school and now here I had one.

Don't go, Irma urged. You don't know where that walking corpse has been.

"Do not be afraid," Dracula said in slow formal tones, noting my hesitancy. "These days I only drink from those who pay for the privilege. I am the resident attraction at the Love in Vein Social Club."

"Then what are you doing here tonight?"

"My master occasionally needs me mobile. The night has always been mine. Sometimes what he wants from me is what I also want for myself ... a beautiful but shaken young woman, a midnight mission, an opportunity to stretch my wings and my reach, as of old. To be powerful. To be irresistible. You will come with me, Miss Delilah Street, because you must."

He leaned nearer. I inhaled the stale scent of cigar smoke and raw meat and old blood. Then he withdrew. I wondered if the chicken garlic on my breath was slapping him in the undead kisser. Good! But I had a feeling this was an offer I shouldn't refuse.

"Not so fast," I told him. "Not in this outfit do I go anywhere. Turn your back while I change clothes if you want me to go with you."

No! Irma was kicking up an internal storm. You don't know where and you don't know who. You can't go.

Irma was my alter ego, the psychological crutch of a lonely kid, I figured, but she could get bossy. I didn't feel the need to heed her at the moment. The King Vampire in this town had called on me for help, no matter how rudely he had put it or how seedy his operation. I had to live up to my new business card: Delilah Street, P.I.

What kind of paranormal investigator would flinch from a CinSim vampire? Underneath all the props and persona, even Dracula was just an animated zombie these days. A lot of classic horror film creatures had been resurrected by the Immortality Mob to entertain the tourists. At least Mothra hadn't been sent to pick me up.

I thought about Quicksilver asleep below as I pulled a black knit turtleneck down over my black yoga pants. Old Drac must have some spell to put animals asleep, even big supernaturally strong wolfhound-wolf crossbreeds. Otherwise, he'd be at the vampire's throat.

I thrust my feet into a pair of black cowboy boot mules and grabbed the slim Baggalini uptown messenger bag I'd found so handy during my incarnation as a TV reporter. I slung it across my body and stuffed my cell phone, ID and some cash inside so my hands would be free in an emergency. Unfortunately, it had no space for wooden stakes or garlic garlands. But if someone found my body, I'd at least have a chance to be properly identified.

Of course, if I wound up dead, I hoped somebody would make sure I wasn't resurrected--even if my future as a Lilith stand-in was worth a fortune.

Couldn't count on Hector Nightwine for the job; he had an addictive profit motive. I'd need my new beau, Ric

Montoya, to make sure I was dead and buried and kept that way. Ric had his unusual ways with the dead, but our relationship is anything but lifeless.

Bela was waiting, polite, his caped back to me, bare gray hand still extended. The other wore a white glove.

I put my own pale hand into that dead, ashen flesh.

Icy. Icky.

Dracula turned slowly to face me, his arms lifting his cloak into black wings again. With those "wings," he clasped me to the formal front of his evening dress, the starched white shirt. His cloak curled around me, enclosing me in the scent of mothballs, must and cold decay.

With a swoop and a whoosh, I felt us break the

"ground barrier" and fly through the window to soar into the warm night air. His arms remained around me, but the cloak folds unfurled, fanning out like giant wings as we sped through the night sky. I eyed the gorgeous glitter of

Las Vegas a hundred and fifty stories below.

Being in Dracula's arms felt like waltzing with a marble pillar; his skin and bones formed one hardened, heartless surface. It was odd to fly vertically, as if we stood on an invisible floor, but it certainly eased my horizontal phobia, if not the acrophobia any human being with a brain would feel in this situation.

The wind chilled my ears. I curled my toes to keep my mules from falling off and braining some unlucky tourist below.

I distracted myself during the terrifying flight by wondering who could send Dracula as an errand boy. Certainly not mobster Cesar Cicereau of the Gehenna Hotel-Casino and werewolf syndicate. I wasn't sure from our last encounter whether he now preferred to forget me instead of tearing my throat out, but I was pretty sure he'd never want to hire me.

The Strip lights below had dimmed. We were dropping toward a square black blot in the lightscape. I squinched my eyes shut, sure we would smack hard into that rectilinear bull's-eye.

Instead my soles touched roof, the dangling heels first, then the toes. Note to self: Never wear mules for night flights with the dead. Nun-like lace-up oxfords would have been better. At least Drac and I were once more on solid ground.

But whose solid ground?

Dracula slowly loosened his custody, but kept his hands on me, now both gloved--how did he do that?--in a waltz position. Did every supernatural in Vegas want to cha-cha-cha with me?

Listen, pal, Irma tried to tell him, these Irish gams only do jigs, not waltzes with weirdoes. She was wrong about that; I'd waltzed with Snow, weird only in the ancient demonic definition of word. He was the sexy long--haired rock-star owner of the Inferno Hotel and purveyor of the "Brimstone Kiss," an after-show perk he bestowed on groupies who became enslaved at one touch of his ice-white lips. Rumor had it he was an albino vampire, the obverse of my current partner. Both of them were deeply unwanted on my dance card, even though Snow's lock of white hair-turned-silver-familiar was still guarding my throat.

Dracula swept me into a stately gliding circle. "A little movement warms the blood after a chilling night flight."nly to serve. For now."

Master, whoever he was, had better watch his front, especially the carotid arteries.

Despite the probable danger, this outing was fascinating to an investigator. I considered CinSims as animated movie posters, in a way, able to walk and talk, but that was it. If I'd thought about it, they could do a lot more or they'd never be in demand at brothels. Although I'd heard that some human sex partners could be pretty lifeless....

Luckily, I'd lost my virginity right here in Sin City, with a guy who could tease an orgasm out of a corpse. I was only slightly harder to win over. During those literally magical minutes, Ric and I had accidentally tapped the borrowed emotions of the Sunset Park lovers killed during their most ecstatic moments. A little paranormal passion by proxy had not hurt one bit.

But I didn't know that CinSims could freaking fly! And with me along. Apparently, if the CinSim was gifted with paranormal skills in the originating film, those abilities carried over to the zombie reincarnation. That made the rumors of a brewing CinSim insurrection pretty scary. I mean, think: Godzilla loose on the Strip.

"I must leave you," Dracula announced dramatically, bowing to kiss my hand. "My task is done."

With that he walked to the end of the flat roof and jumped off.

"Wait!" I ran to the edge, seeing mostly dead black below, with a smattering of streetlights and signs.

Then I spotted the large humped figure rushing straight down like a beetle, just as Jonathan Harker described his host's creepy manner of egress from his Transylvanian castle in Bram Stoker's classic novel. I watched Dracula's form become one with the dark street below. And where, pray, was I to go?

The usual answer to that in an uncaring world was, "To Hell!"

And in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, it was all too often the literal truth.

Chapter Two

I explored the roof on foot, vertical and a slave of gravity again, thank God.

The surface tar was overlaid with gravel. Occasional air-conditioning units poked up in knee-high hummocks just the right height to trip me in the dark. They were humming away, so the building was in use and occupied.

I circled until I found a larger hummock, the sort of inset entry you find to a storm cellar in Kansas. What it was in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, I hadn't a clue. It could have been the low road to a crypt. Okay. What does the alert investigator do? She walks down into the dark and finds out.

Mules, do your duty! Irma offered a small cry of encouragement to my footwear. I am so glad we are not wearing your Wicked Witch of the West spike heels for this outing.

Listen to the born spike freak, I sassed her back. You'd wear heels to a golf course.

The steps were steep and I hadn't thought to bring along a high-beam flashlight. What woman would expect Dracula to dump her off in the dark like undelivered mail, without even one courtly swipe at her circulatory system?

But once on level flooring, my humble mules were ableto shuffle me into a vaguely lit area. The metal door to theservice stairs was chained shut with a sign reading Building CondeMned: do not use affixed with rusted screws. A search revealed no other access but an air conditioning shaft grille. Spotlighted by a distant neon sign, I could see it was enameled white, but now grimed a dusky gray. I wasable to shake it free after further loosening the screws with my fingernails. What shoddy maintenance work! Probably hadn't been inspected in decades.

I set the grille aside and crawled in headfirst. The shaft ran straight, turned, then dropped what felt like four feet and ran straight again.

There was no use cursing the darkness. The only way to enter or leave this building was via down.

I gulped, cheered by the absence of cobwebs pushing over my features like an unwanted, unseen veil. Then I stopped. And wondered why there were no cobwebs. Oh. Maybe I wasn't the only intruder to use this route.

Investigation work was already losing its glamour.

Then I heard voices.

No, I am not Joan of Arc. I am a simple Kansas girl turned loose in the big bad city. And I am a PI. So, onward toward the voices. Another ten feet and I could hear giggles echoing off the hollow aluminum shafts. Giggles?

Definitely female voices, those cloying, phony tones I hated from the girls at Our Lady of the Lake Convent School. Girls who had power and tried to pretend they didn't. Voices I'd heard, once out of high school, directed almost exclusively at men. At powerful men they aimed to seduce.

Seduction had been against my religion ... until I'd met Ric here in Vegas. And he'd been the seducer. No, we'd both been seduced, by love and death and lust and dust six feet under in the desert.

I paused, wishing I had my dowsing partner with me, only Ric dowsed for the dead. I was afraid he'd find some where I was headed now. Those voices echoed as if in a vault. A burial chamber. Great. I wished Quicksilver was with me. I almost wished Dracula was with me, but he, wisely, had split.

When in doubt, advance.

At last, some light leaked into my square metal tunnel.

I crawled right into another grille, my nose flat against the metal.

I could look down. A little. I saw a lot of white and began to recognize the location.

Oh, no! The 1001 Knights Hotel. Not here! Not him again! What had I done to deserve this?

At that moment a tremor ran through the shaft, like a boiler deep below going postal. Probably the periodic hiccough of the condemned building. The grille gyrated off its loose screws. I was shaken into it, past it and down the rabbit hole into the white light.

Luckily, unlike Alice, I landed on a bed. Unluckily, there was someone repellent in it. Several someones.

Scarlet-painted worm-lipped women in white scattered at my descent.

The desiccated scrawny figure of an old man in cerise satin pajamas stayed put to aim his lecherous death's head grin at me.

"Howard Hughes," I said, scrambling off the high hospital bed and its stiff white linens. "What an unexpected ... meeting."

"Hmm," he said, "I liked you better in white."

His "nurses" regrouped around the hospital bed, licking their lips at me.

I had nowhere to go. Howard's mandarin-long fingernails scratched his sparsely haired chest, drawing blood. The vampire nurses sighed in unison and, with fangs descended, came uncomfortably closer.

He waved a cadaverous hand. "Back! You had your share during the turning. Now if Miss Street cares for a friendly lick from me--"

Ick. The sanitary issues alone were stomach-turning. Historically, he'd been famously vermin phobic. You'd think he'd still have serious inner conflicts about germs in his new state. "I'm here on your business this time," I said.

We'd first met a couple of weeks ago, when I'd finagled myself in disguised as a nurse--the sexy fantasy sort found in Playboy magazine. Howard Hughes and Hugh

Hefner had more in common than initials. Hughes was supposedly the most powerful vampire still left in town, which doesn't say much for Vegas vamps.

"Too bad." Howard's watery dark eyes studied my face. "I could have made you a star."

When he'd been a playboy movie mogul, star-making had been the name of his game. His single success was busty Jane Russell, for whom the engineer-aviator had designed the world's first pushup bra. Come to think, maybe the old coot had earned a crack at immortality. He certainly was a Renaissance man. Pilot, inventor, unreal real estate tycoon, lech....

"A star?" I hooted. "Hector Nightwine's already taking a shot at it. I'll be doing featured cameos on his next TV series."

"Nightwine!" he snorted. "A minor, a very minor player. Still, my condition has certain limitations and I require agents to act on my behalf. I would like you to become one of them, Delilah Street."

"How do you know my name?" The last time I had been here, I had ducked out without any introductions.

His smile revealed teeth so ancient they all looked like fangs. "You are already gaining a reputation in this town. I assume anyone the Cicereau mob wants to assassinate is someone worth knowing. Or at least using."

"Ever the straight-talking billionaire," I said. "How do you know about my near-death experience at Cicereau's mountain lodge?"

"Cesar Cicereau thinks he's a rival, but I'm merely giving him the space to screw up. I have sources inside his organization. You look lovely in that python unitard with a Rome Beauty apple in your mouth. Delicious! Cicereau was a fool to let you escape him."

Holy Hugh Hefner, Catwoman! Irma whispered, this undead lech knows about your secret birthday-suit command performance at the Gehenna. He must have better intelligence and organization than you'd think.

"If you have Cicereau's operation wired then why do you need me on your payroll?"

His scraggly-haired head nodded regally. "This may take more legwork than my in-place operatives can handle. I want to know who shared that Sunset Park unmarked grave with Cicereau's daughter."

"You know who the dead woman was?"

"Yes, my tasty little runaway winesap. In today's Vegas, even the spider webs have ears. The creatures of the night's hearing can outdo the most advanced electronic bugs. Better, they can return to me with information."

Bats and wolves were associated with Old World vampires, but spiders? Wolves. Did Quicksilver have a gene susceptible to vamps? He was at least as much wolf as wolfhound. That might explain why he'd slept while I was being airlifted up, up and away by Dracula.

Then there was that spider-fey familiar of Madrigal, the house magician at Cicereau's Gehenna Hotel and Casino, Sylphia...

Thinking of creepy-crawlies made my pale Irish skin break out in gooseflesh.

"Nice." Howard ran a yellowed nail down my arm. I was undecided: did spooked women most titillate his inner mogul, playboy, or vampire?

Time to stop being terrified and deal.

"Okay, Hughes. You know that Cicereau's own daughter was in that grave, but you don't know who the guy was. We're assuming he was a vampire. Is that why you're so interested?"

"I wasn't a vampire myself at that time. No one believed in vampires then. But I did believe in the future of Las Vegas, although I didn't openly invest until thirty years later--in the seventies. Obviously, a lot was going on here in Vegas in the 1940s and 1950s that no one had a clue about until after the Millennium Revelation. I want to know who that slain vampire was. I want to know who put thirty silver dollars in the grave and why. The answers are worth a nice sum to me, Delilah Street, and I will keep my creatures' fangs off you if you achieve my objectives."

"Off me and mine."

"Not including Nightwine."

I shrugged. Hector was my boss, but something of a voyeur and an epicurean ghoul. He'd done quite well here since the Millennium Revelation and I suspected he could protect himself equally well.

"I don't know what you have against Nightwine, but he's not on my personal five fave call list."

"Nor anyone's. So, who is?" Hughes eyed me slyly. "I suppose that big bad doggie of yours."

I nodded. "How do you know about him?"

"He trashed the Lunatics. They're still whining about it. You think a domestic dog taking out a motorcycle gang of half-weres in a parking lot doesn't get on the weird-news Internet? And I suppose you'd want me to spare that big bad ex-FBI man."

How the hell did he know about Ric? I wasn't going to satisfy him by asking.

Meanwhile, the nurses had crowded closer, sighing while sucking air through their fangs. "Fox Mulder," they wailed hungrily.

Honestly, women in all forms are just too inclined to be groupies!

"Forget The X-Files," I told them. "That was fiction and is now only reruns and DVDs. Ric is real life." I eyed them all and then Hughes. "And I want him to stay that way."

"That certainly is something to bear in mind," Hughes noted.

"So ... do you have any clues who the dead vamp might be, or who he might have been allied with?"

Hughes folded his age-spotted, blue-veined scrawny claws on the immaculate white bed sheet. It was like viewing leprous orchids in the snow. "I didn't come here to buy up the Strip until the seventies. So I have no clues. Not a one. That's your job, Delish Delilah. And keep in mind, if you fail to find out anything useful, all those no-fang concessions are off. Including on you."

He loomed up from the bed like a striking cobra, the IV stand at his side crashing over to spray both the nurses and sheets with watery pink blood.

I jumped back and off, streaking away through the outer chambers containing germicidal lights and sprays. The startled human-for-now attendants jumped out of my way. I banged through doors until I was in the truly deserted run-down part of the derelict hotel building.

Just what I needed: a notorious, undercover vampire as my first client.

Chapter Three

From my previous fact-finding mission here, I knew I had to get down ten floors and through a ring of decadent vampire druggie-guards to reach the main floor and exit the building.My silver familiar, which had remained dormant around my throat all through my adventure with Hughes Tool and Vampire Company, crept down my right arm to curl around the bases of my fingers. The silver metal thickened into rings and then grew two-inch diamond-dusted spikes on each finger: the glitzy Vegas version of brass knuckles. Well! How had Snow's unwanted gift known to produce the glittering knuckle spikes? They echoed the diamond-dust-embedded nail file points I'd used to hold off group-home, half-vamp bullies years ago. Eerie.

Snow had sent me the lock of his albino hair as a play on my name and his enigmatic powers. I couldn't resist petting it in memory of my lost white Lhasa apso's flowing coat. Like a striking serpent, the soft tendril of hair had morphed into a hard silver bangle on my arm with a permanent lock on me, unable to be sawn or burned off. Whether or not the silver familiar taunted me by migrating to various body parts and becoming simply decorative jewelry, changed into protective adornment or transformed into instant weaponry, I resented being protected at the cost of being invaded.

Once again the mobile parasite had worked its bizarre mind-reading magic. Silver knuckles were even better than brass for punching my way through the house vampires at the 1001 Knights Hotel.

It was just like a heartless businessman of Howard Hughes's ilk to have me dropped into his lair, then force me to fight my way out of it. Cesar Cicereau, the werewolf mob alpha boss, wasn't very likeable, but he had a heart as big as the Tin Man's compared to Howard Hughes.

I decided to take the stairs. I'd have the advantage of height when I ran into the vamp patrol. The cowboy heels on my mules were good and thick--great for kicks and full-body shoves. I knew from my last visit that, to conceal his presence, Hughes employed deliberately lame, tame vampires as derelict as the building. Still, even debased vampires were unhumanly powerful.

Of course there was no way to avoid announcing my descent as my shoes clattered down the dozens of concrete steps. The 1001 Knights Hotel, Howard Hughes's hidden headquarters, was supposedly abandoned and ripe for razing. I wondered if it was just Hughes's economic clout or some eerie supernatural mojo that kept this prime property at the south end of the Strip off the rebuilding market and looking deceptively empty.

A savage cry announced a vamp in a burned leather coat charging up the stairs. I grabbed a railing with my left hand, kicked out my right foot, aiming at his throat, and flashed my spiked silver brass knuckles across his brow bone.

The blood ran down in sheets, blinding him as he tumbled backward...

...into a second vamp, who pushed him aside and down like deadwood.

I hadn't expected the blinding flood of blood, but I suppose well-fed vamps are like ticks, gorged and ready to burst.

This new guy's fangs were already rusted by an evening meal too. He seized my kicking foot and tried to twist my leg. I grabbed the railing with both hands and pushed out that leg with all my strength. That knocked him back, but I was going to land supine on the concrete steps, the edges slamming my spine in a couple places, both blows likely to hurt like hell, not to mention paralyze.

I pedaled my legs to give my feet some sort of traction on the stairs. A mule went flying off and upward, right into the snarling vampire mouth. I saw teeth fly, maybe even fangs. The vamp howled and covered his bleeding mouth, backing up too far and falling. The stair edges wouldn't wound his immortal body.

But I was upright again and ran down after the tumbling defanged vampire. It would have been a smooth descent, except something hit me hard in the back. I was stumbling down the stairs faster and faster, out of control, my hands ripped from any grasp I got on the railing as soon as I found it.

I heard a disgusting slurping sound behind me and realized the pursuing vamp was licking my blood off the metal railing. I wished this was happening in the middle of a Kansas blizzard and his blood-sucking tongue would stick to the icy metal...

No, this was a warm spring Vegas night. And blood would be hot too....

At the bottom of the stairs, the blood-blinded vamp was waiting for the others to catch me as I tumbled into them.

I got both feet--one bare--on the same step, bent my aching knees and jumped as high and far as I could. I almost cleared the rapacious welcoming committee, feeling their filthy, clawed hands clutching at my legs as I sailed over. Then something incredibly fast and hard slammed me back ... oh, no!

Back into my attackers!

I landed on them hard, sinking into their bones and muscles, their clawed hands closing on my arms and scratching my throat.

But before the lifting hands could capture me, something bit them off at the wrist. Blood, who knows whose, that filled those undead veins spewed over me like warm syrup on a buttered pancake.

White fangs snapped as I heard bones breaking.Not my own.That realization got my body going, arms and legs flailing to gain balance, struggle upright and get running again. A last bolt of energy sprang me forward, away from the building's covered driveway toward the street.

I finally collapsed at the curb, panting like a winded marathon runner, too exhausted to move.

Something was coming up behind me. I could barely manage to move, but I did not want to become a halfvamp--something, according to rumor, a single bite would accomplish. Two more and a reciprocal sip from my killer's immortal veins, and I'd be turned. Or so they said. I figured that three vamps were still ambulatory and fanged enough for the job.

I reared up as best I could, teeth gritted, fist extended. Wait! Where were my silver "brass" knuckles? The damned familiar had run out on me! My wrist sported a wimpy charm bracelet now. Damn Snow to Hell!

My redundant curse forgotten, I gazed into two burning blue eyes and a jaw full of grinning white fangs.

The jagged teeth were clamped on some disgusting amputation, black and burnt and dead as ... as shoe leather.

I pulled farther back, took a deep breath.

Oh.

Quicksilver was sitting there, panting hotly and smiling that wolfish grin, my lost leather mule firmly in his teeth. Cinderella had never had a handier Prince Charming.

Good doggie, Irma said.

Quicksilver dropped the shoe when my right hand reached for it, and began laving my bleeding hand with his huge pink tongue. Dog saliva heals doggie wounds over time. Quicksilver saliva heals human wounds instantly, as Ric and I had found out.

In seconds, we were both on our feet, me fully shod, my hand on Quick's wide leather collar. I realized the bracelet familiar now boasted canine figures and that a matching silver-studded dog collar had been coiled protectively around my neck for some time. This was the first occasion that my silver familiar had revealed a split protective personality.

Dracula's sleep spell on the wolf part of Quicksilver had probably evaporated the moment Drac dropped me on Howard Hughes's roof. We were a paranormal K-9 team. My dog could track me through a swamp or a thunderstorm and probably thin air. He was an awesome animal. I'd seen him lick Ric's barbed-wire-shredded hands whole in a couple minutes. Now my once-scraped palm was flexible and smooth. Nice trick."Good dog! Good boy." That was hardly sufficient praise, but we humans have talked down to animals for so long it's a hard habit to break.

Meanwhile, I jumped with my two shod feet into the roadway, tried to grin as innocently as Quicksilver, wiped the blood off my pants and looked for a cab to hail.

No way was I walking all the way back to Hector's estate.