Before I risked my free will and traded Snow the addictive Brimstone Kiss for Snow’s help in rescuing Ric.

Before my attempts at the Kiss of Life, aka CPR, failed and I resorted to a last, passionate farewell kiss… tainted by the brimstone of compromise yet containing the new gift of the Resurrection Kiss.

That scenario was a lot for one Latin lover to absorb so I concentrated on our reunion and union, until we collapsed on each other in waves of fulfillment.

“This is wild,” Ric said. “I have this whole new erotic zone.” He wriggled his back into the satin sheets as I laughed.

“But,” he added, “I don’t remember anything from early that afternoon a week ago when I went to check out the Karnak until you were tongue-lashing my back with your velvet lips last night. How’d you find Helena anyway? Why didn’t she stay?”

“She said what you needed was me, hombre, and she was right. You’d mentioned your father’s full name once. Philip Burnside. I’m a reporter. Once is enough.” I considered. “Not with everything.”

“Nope. Forget it. No more sex until I know what’s going on from A to Z,” he threatened, getting up to leave the bed and the bedroom. He showed me his naked back without a qualm. I wished I could be as forthright about what he wanted to know.

He returned with a bottle of roja wine, no brand I recognized but a vintage as red and smooth and warm as blood. We drank it out of big bubble glasses as we leaned against piled satin pillows the color of my eyes.

“Do you remember anything about your kidnapping?” I asked.

“Was that what it was? I, um, remember heading to the Karnak Hotel and Casino. Grisly Bahr had alerted me by phone that someone from there had just contacted the coroner’s office with suspicious questions about the male corpse from the Sunset Park grave.”

“And you didn’t pause to tell me where you were going?”

“Bother you with a slender lead at an established hotel?”

“You’d just lectured me about keeping current on who was doing what, where. In fact, I was trying to call you that day to say I’d checked out the Karnak the day before and it was crawling with vamps.”

“I found out soon enough, but I don’t remember much yet. So what are they like?”

“As old as the ancient tomb paintings and as eternally young-looking. I’d only gotten out, and that barely, thanks to my mirror magic skills. I didn’t realize until the next day that the folks in charge were obsessively interested in the zombies you pulled out of the ground at Cesar Cicereau’s Starlight Lodge.”

“You’re saying that my raising the zombies to protect you in the mountains last month tipped these Karnak vampires off to my, um, talent?”

“Yes. You saved my skin from being mounted in the werewolf mobster trophy teepee.”

“Why should these Karnak vamps care? So I stopped another Vegas hotel mogul’s hit squad. You’d think they’d thank me.”

“I’m sure they would have, had you cooperated. They want someone who can raise really old vampires, the ugly, ruthless bloodsuckers, not the modern half-and-half kind. We both know how you feel about raising the dead for other people’s gain.”

“I will never sell bodies and souls into slavery again.”

“Admirable. I will never starve again, or eat turnips again.” His grin showed I’d lightened his dark mood by evoking Scarlett O’Hara’s famed turning-point vow. “Holy Hathor, Montoya! You must have made that all too clear to the Karnak vamps.

“They decided to induct you into their club so you’d want to do what they wanted. When the expedition from the other Vegas hotels found you, the Karnak vamps had sucked you dry, Ric. They’d used every bloodsucker they had access to, even leeches and vampire tsetse flies. You were-”

He shook his head. “I don’t remember anything after arriving at the Karnak lobby. I recall a huge hyena-headed statue of a god I’d never seen or heard of before in the main check-in area.”

“They’d already ID’ed you, as they had me, and were waiting to pounce. Luckily. I doubt we’ll ever know what kind of tête-à-tête you had with the terrifyingly self-absorbed Twin Pharaohs who rule the Karnak.”

“Twins?”

“Kephron and Kepherati, two of the most incestuous brother-sister royal twins the River Nile ever birthed. It’s a long story, but I found archaeological evidence on the web that the ancient Egyptians had vampires among them.”

“Naw. Their culture keyed on death and resurrection, life and the afterlife, true, but I’ve never heard of Egyptian vampires. Anne Rice had an ‘immortal’ mummy running around World War I England in one novel, but I don’t think he sucked blood. The Egyptians are almost the only ancient world culture without vampire lore.”

“No more.”

“Quoth the raven?” he asked, leaning forward to kiss me long and deep and totally without fangs.

“Poe’s raven was carping about ‘nevermore.’”

“No more, nevermore, what’s the diff? I’m okay, you’re okay. We’re so more than okay together.”

I wished I believed that as easily as he did. It was indeed all too easy to soften into his arms and strum my fingers over the silvery scar strings on his now sensually tuned back and celebrate life and love and libido.

“Then how did you know where I was and what was going on?” he asked when our embrace took a time-out.

Eternal ex-FBI man, asking questions. The habit of intellectualizing would probably save his sanity. I smiled and resumed my narrative.

“The clue I’d found was that some Egyptian tombs, from the most ancient and lost to the most celebrated finds of modern times, including King Tut, contained a weird potted artifact of a gilded headless animal hide hanging from a lotus plant.”

“Headless? Like the ‘bone boy’ in the Sunset Park grave?”

“Mentally acute and decidedly not dead,” I said, smiling. “That’s my boy.”

“This ‘artifact’ was the symbol of beheaded vampires in the Egyptian tombs, the proof that even pharaohs like Tutankhamen could be vampires?”

“I thought so. Meanwhile, the Peter Lorre CinSim at the Karnak has many shared movie ties to the Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains CinSims at the Inferno. He’d seen me captured, and then escape. He must have realized your capture was act two of the royal twins’ ambitious scenario. When he saw you being held and forced to suck winding cloths, the ‘better angels of his being’ emerged from behind the creepy criminal roles and came to the rescue.”

“CinSims have ‘better angels’?”

“A theory of mine. I think the actors are taking over the roles. It was an incredible string of events. The Karnak’s Peter Lorre ‘Ugarte’ Casablanca CinSim somehow managed to break his venue moorings and get a physical token I’d lost at the Karnak to me at the Inferno Bar as a veiled warning.

“He did it using the Inferno’s Humphrey Bogart ‘Rick Blaine’ CinSim, who broke free of the lower-level Casablanca key club and got to the William Powell ‘Nick Charles’ CinSim at the Inferno Bar. Nicky somehow tipped off his ‘cousin’ William Powell CinSim, Godfrey, at Hector’s estate. Who told me to get to the Inferno Bar to pump Rick Blaine of all the things he didn’t think he knew.”

“Gosh, Delilah! I need one of those star maps of Hollywood, Las Vegas-style, to follow this scenario.”

“Consider it as a CinSim chain reaction, and damn efficient in its dysfunctional way. Trust me. We’ve got a long ways to go before we understand the hows and whys of CinSims.

“Anyway, I was called to the Inferno Bar in my best thirties velvet gown to evoke Rick Blaine’s film ladylove, Ilsa/Ingrid Bergman. I picked his brain like a noir femme fatale.

“When the Inferno’s Rick Blaine physically produced the case of Lip Venom I’d unknowingly dropped during my escape from the Karnak, I realized someone at the Karnak wanted me to go back there, bad.

“I also realized that you weren’t answering my calls because of the usual Vegas Strip cell-phone dead zone, but were actually missing. That’s when I finally grasped that the Royal Pains had been much more interested in your zombie-raising act than my minor mirror magic.”