DEAD TIRED, I headed “home” in the early evening Las Vegas Strip traffic. Instead of sugarplums-or even three cherries in a slot machine window-other, far less delightful, images danced in my head.

I was only two days of sleep deprivation past an endless night fighting Vegas’s hidden ancient Egyptian underworld of bloodthirsty supernaturals. My cup of nightmares was sure to runneth over for weeks with visions of zombie mummies, hyena carcasses, and vampires in eyeliner.

Even worse would be visual reruns of Ric chained to a dungeon wall under the Karnak Hotel, victim of a vicious suck-fest. That was the ancient Egyptian vampire empire’s version of waterboarding as they sought the secret of his ability to raise the dead.

Now my investigative partner was out of the Karnak ’s supernaturally infested bowels and alive, barely, in a high-rise suite at the rival Inferno Hotel. In an hour, Ricardo Montoya had gone from the pit of Hell to the heavens, or the Vegas version of both.

Following Ric’s and my separate life-threatening investigations at the Karnak, I was alive but iffy on the matter of my soul and sanity. Ric was in a coma-possibly more dead than alive-and possibly possessed of a more compromised soul than I was.

I’d been too frantic to do anything but hover over Ric for hours and was finally heading home under doctor’s orders to “freshen up” before returning to his comatose side.

Good advice.

Getting myself together enough to drive my big black ’56 Caddy, Dolly, through brassy Vegas Strip traffic forced me to focus. My heart felt a faint ping of security when the Nightwine estate’s iron side gates opened automatically to admit us.

After parking Dolly near the carriage house, I could hardly wait to enter my soothing rental digs and start to feel human again. In a city built on flash and flesh, unhuman seemed the dominant life, or death, form.

I headed for the Enchanted Cottage, then stopped. Its Hobbity front door formed a gray wooden frame for something black-and-white and silver all over that stood before it, blocking my way. Yes, this “something” was also “someone” I welcomed seeing. My favorite CinSim.

“Godfrey!” My voice quivered with mingled grief and joy.

“My dear Miss Street,” he began in the brisk tones of that fine actor, William Powell, playing the ultra-competent My Man Godfrey in the 1936 romantic comedy film classic. “How splendid to see you alive and well and back on the premises.”

Godfrey was my landlord’s butler and looked more than double my age. He was actually three or four times it, depending whether you counted birth dates or film dates. Godfrey was as formal as an English tea caddy, but he’d been my first real friend in Las Vegas. That he was a Silver Screen movie image imposed on a zombie body “canvas” made him no less dear to me.

“Where is our Master Quicksilver?” he asked, worried and glancing behind me.

That’s what an old-school butler like Godfrey called my adopted hundred-and-fifty-pound dog: “Master Quicksilver.” Godfrey honored my canine companion by addressing him as he would a young male human. Quicksilver indeed had awesome qualities above and beyond the ordinary dog.

Godfrey’s always amusing formality helped me focus even more. Stiff upper lip and all. Right.

“Quick’s fine, Godfrey. I left him guarding Ric at the Inferno.”

“Ah.” Godfrey’s pencil-thin black mustache twitched ever so slightly with sympathy. “I understand Mr. Montoya is secure and doing well in Christophe’s magnificent establishment.”

I noticed Godfrey hadn’t described Ric as he had me, “alive and well.”

“How do you know what’s… happened?” I asked.

“Word gets out,” he murmured, as discreet as ever.

“‘Word.’” My stress-dulled mind grabbed that one piece of mental flotsam and clung to it.

APPARENTLY, “WORD” HAD been thorough enough to make everyone I knew uncomfortable with the “alive” designation for Ric’s current state.

That kicked me back into reliving the nightmare of Ric’s rescue. I saw our war party retreating quickly through a trail of downed Egyptian warriors, attack mummies, and hyenas as the underground River Nile became one of the rivers of Hell flowing beneath Snow’s Inferno Hotel.

Snow’s security head, Grizelle, a six-feet-something black supermodel type who can turn that catwalk strut into the stalking stride of a six-hundred-pound white tiger, had borne Ric’s unconscious body along so fast she was out of sight.

Snow, acting fast like the big shot he was, had already arranged a state-of-the-art hospital suite in the hotel. No outsiders would know what had happened to Ric. The Vegas bigwigs involved wanted news of a rival supernatural vampire empire at the Karnak kept secret.

I was just as eager to keep Ric’s one paranormal power private.

When I caught up with Grizelle at the hotel’s forty-second-floor high-roller penthouses, I’d found Snow’s designated hospital site was the bridal suite. Ouch.

Snow always played Mr. Discreet, but, like the scorpion, his every move could bear a sting in its tail. My “bridegroom” might never awaken.

I couldn’t carp about the setup.

Ric was soon ensconced in a hospital bed so accessorized it resembled a Bowflex home gym. He had twenty-four-hour guards and nursing care. As he slept, blood dripped around-the-clock into his circulatory system, an oddly vampiric process.

That last memory of him made me shudder now.

“ MISS STREET.” GODFREY gently broke into my dark trip down bad-memory lane. “You’re not here to brood, but to rest, recover, and change clothes. Please go inside and do that.”

“Oh. Yes. Yes, Godfrey.” I looked down at the shopping bags dangling in my hands. “Thanks for packing me some things to use at the Inferno. I’m going right back, of course. Directly back.”

“Of course.” He used that agreeable tone that didn’t quite gibe with what he just said. “I’ll wait here until you’re safely inside.”

“Getting pushy, are we, Godfrey?” I smiled. “I’m supersafe on Nightwine’s ultrasecure estate. I’m just not safe alone inside myself right now.”

I let Godfrey feel useful. He took and slid my key card into the door slot, nodding good-bye as I shuffled my boot-clad feet over the threshold. Everything inside looked the same, but seemed oddly alien.

I felt like I’d been on a two-day bender-like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend-although alcohol hadn’t been my downfall. Since I work freelance, weekends don’t have the significance for a 24/7 on-call snoop like me that they hold for the forty-hour-a-week wage slave I used to be.

Life in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas is one long-one might even say eternal-Lost Weekend anyway. Before the millennium turned, party-hearty Vegas was full up with social vices… drinking, dicing, doing anyone and any illegal substances in sight.

Me, here and now, I’d just OD’ed on fighting supernatural crime. I ached from ankle to angst, but mostly I was mentally sucked dry.

I’d left the Enchanted Cottage thirty-six hours earlier a relatively well-adjusted woman with a mildly important mission… handling a rogue CinSim at the Inferno Hotel. That was more a public relations assignment than a serious case for a fledgling paranormal investigator.

Here I was coming home a virtual zombie, a husk who’d danced cheek-to-cheek with sex and death and destruction and-even more blasphemously-perhaps given life.

When I left my fairy-tale digs I hadn’t anticipated meeting a particularly iconic CinSim: Humphrey Bogart as “gin joint” owner Rick Blaine in the 1942 film classic Casablanca. Who wouldn’t want to share a bar with Mr. Noir Guy, even if he was just a CinSim?

Once placed, CinSims are chipped to stay where put, within a room or a set range of so many feet. They are property on loan. One of them strolling off assigned premises, even in their home hotel, was big news.