And she barely knew the half of it. I drove out my haunting worries about his torture at the Karnak by concentrating on something happier, another lovemaking session she really didn’t want to spy on. I could sense her regard blurring and withdrawing.

“Yes, you can block my unconscious ‘readings’ if you concentrate,” she told me, unaware that I was putting up barriers by thinking about sex with her patient-son.

Some things never change, Millennium Revelation or not. When it comes to parents and children of any age neither generation can quite bear to think of the other “doing it.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “But, just to follow up, you say Ric is trying to overcome my, ah, position phobia about lying on my back in dentists’ and doctors’ offices in, um, bed?”

“He was a very bright boy who survived a nightmare childhood and underwent years of therapy. Yes, he can help you, Delilah. More important, I sense that he badly wants to.”

Shoot! I blushed again. Time to get away from my intimacy issues and back to finding out what Ric is really about. Wanting to help must be our mutual weakness.

“So what is your relationship to Ric?” I asked.

She considered. “He’s not quite a son to us. More like a beloved foreign student who came to live with us for a long time.”

“Does your husband know about your expanded intuition?”

“No. Philip is a military man by profession. He must remain skeptical to maintain equilibrium. He can’t even face Ric injured and in pain, not because he doesn’t care but because he’d choke on helpless rage. He’d want to raid Mexico and make someone pay.”

I thought hard about those awful piano lessons I suddenly remembered having at Our Lady of the Lake school to block her enhanced intuitions. Did I want to correct their assumption, that Ric had been captured and tortured while out of the country, not in Vegas? No.

“Why does Ric keep returning to Mexico?” I asked instead. “His memories must be horrendous.”

“The men who held him captive then are crime kingpins now, drug lords and human and unhuman slavers. They’re exploiting and torturing his people. He needs to stop them.”

“I saw-” I began.

“Saw what? Oh.” She drew back as if I’d slapped her.

I’d been unable to keep the image of Ric’s whip-scarred back from my mind’s eye.

We both sipped Vampire Sunrises, girding ourselves.

“What did he tell you about the scars?” she asked finally.

“Nothing. I saw them while he was sleeping. He keeps me-I imagine all women-from touching his back, even clothed.”

She fidgeted in the cushy chair. “That’s not good but understandable.”

“He was just a child!”

“Nine when he was freed.”

“Who? Why?”

“El Demonio. A fittingly obvious name,” she said bitterly. “This ‘demon’ surnamed Torbellino now heads a dozen criminal operations all over Mexico and along the U.S. border. When Ric was captured, El Demonio was only a border-running coyote. Ric ran away, and when he was inevitably caught and returned, he was whipped. El Demonio had a thirty-foot bullwhip he liked to unfurl, at long distance or short.”

My stomach told me I was getting nauseous. Our shared dream had made me feel the unimaginable brutality of using such force against a valuable child laborer. I just suffered from a lack of love. Ric had been hated.

“One whipping like that would have killed him,” I said, amazed he was still here to talk about.

“Ric ran away and was caught, and then ran away again. And again.”

“Even though he knew-? That’s crazy.”

“It was how he kept his spirit from being broken. If he let those men intimidate him into giving up on freedom, it would mean nothing if and when he finally got it. They call it ‘fire in the belly.’ Ric is probably the only person who challenged El Demonio and lived.

“So,” she went on, “from what you’ve said, he either didn’t fall into El Demonio’s hands this time, or the man’s henchmen didn’t know whom they’d captured. If he was tortured lying on his back, as the frontal injuries you describe indicate, his identity would remain secret.”

I clasped my arms against the chill I felt at her medical, logical approach to this atrocity. Perhaps to keep her motherly feelings at bay?

Even worse, I now knew that two demonic forces would love to recapture and try to break Ricardo Montoya yet again, this El Demonio and his associates as well as the Egyptian vampires.

She saw my goose bumps, picked up her doffed cardigan, and laid it over my shoulders. That motherly gesture nearly undid me. Nobody had touched me or my clothes that I could remember, nobody had ever dressed me until Ric started undressing me, which was another thing entirely.

Still, her words haunted me. I was supposed to be glad the Pharaoh freaks had wanted Ric’s throat accessible while they tormented him with leeches and vampire tsetse flies and held a group suck party at his neck?

“Delilah, I can’t glimpse your thoughts right now, but I can tell you’re overdramatizing,” she said softly.

Darn right.

“Your husband hasn’t even the slightest notion that you’re able to see into other people’s heads since the millennium turned?” I asked, wondering what that would do to the trust in a marriage. Who was I kidding? In my relationship with Ric too.

“No. Washington bureaucrats only subscribe to facts. They are the most inadaptable creatures on the planet.”

I wondered if either of the Burnsides knew Ric could dowse for the dead and guessed they didn’t. Ric had been only nine when he was rescued and the wife began to work with him. He was only fifteen at the Millennium Revelation. He didn’t start dowsing for the dead again until he was out of college and training at the FBI’s Body Farm. Helena admitted her enhanced “intuitions” could be blocked. An adult Ric would surely hide his resurrected powers to avoid worrying his only parental figures, as he had concealed his disfigured back from me. The Burnsides probably thought El Demonio had kept him prisoner as a goatherd.

“Will he look the same?” she asked, visibly nervous for the first time.

I nodded. Yes, he would.

Especially now that I had sneaked that long-wear brown contact lens into the Inferno bridal suite.

He would look perfectly the same.

Only time and a return to consciousness would tell if he was the Ric I knew and loved.

I SEE THE Vegas entertainment scene has gotten dark and dangerous,” Helena Burnside commented as the cab dropped us off at the Inferno entrance at 9:00 P.M.

Manny was there to sweep open the SUV’s sliding door for us.

“Welcome back, Miss Street. I’m sorry to see Dolly has not accompanied you.”

“Dolly?” Helena asked after I’d tipped Manny and we were walking inside. “And just what is that parking valet’s, ah… derivation?”

“A low-order demon, usually harmless. Not that he wouldn’t snap up a careless soul if he could.”

“And… Dolly is a friend of yours?”

“My car. Demons love classic cars and Dolly is choice.”

She eyed me hard. “You named your car Dolly?”

“She’s an estate-sale cream puff, a ’56 Caddy Biarritz with pointed chrome bumper bullets up front that could take out a tank nest.”

“Oh? Oh. My, this town is colorful, and so are you.”

“As you noted, my stuffy outfit was for the benefit of the resident D.C. bureaucrat.”

“I bet you show my boy a whole different side.”

“He’s shown me a whole different side of myself.”

“It’s that way. I see. What should I expect with him, Delilah?”

By then we were in the elevator wafting upward.

“That’s why I went to you. He’s been healing well but is still comatose. I think his mental state needs expert addressing.”

“You aren’t the person he’d most respond to?”