One couldn’t get more properly kick-ass than Diana Riggs’s Mrs. Peel, so I happily donned it along with a pair of square-toed, gray patent-leather sling-backs. The shoes were also highly kick-ass. Metal cleats underlay those sturdy square toes.

The silver familiar chain looped itself thrice around my neck, dangling a sinister six-inch white rhinestone hand with each finger dipped in a pointed marquis-cut scarlet rhinestone “fingernail.” Butler and Wilson from the days of lovely ’80s excess.

Grrrr. Snap! My, what big claws I have.

I pulled my black hair into a low ponytail at my nape and reluctantly decided against wearing a fedora. Vegas was not fedora country. Though the pantsuit wasn’t pinstriped, it broadcast a nice air of Broadway musical mobster, so when the Devil tries to “drag you under by the sharp lapels of your checkered coat” you can do your own dragging back. Cesar Cicereau, not I, was going to be the dragee at this meet.

I’d learned as a TV reporter that dressing for the assignment unconsciously positions people-and now even unhumans-to act according to your scenario, not theirs.

The outfit, though modest, had another tactical advantage. Sansouci, a highly heterosexual hunk, would fall like a ton of testosterone for this shady lady maybe-dominatrix outfit.

Score two for the Enchanted Cottage’s anonymous personal closet shopper.

I went downstairs to make sure the kitchen witch had refreshed Quicksilver’s water and food bowls. He’d come inside to greet me, and now laid his handsome head on graceful, deerlike forelegs to sigh dramatically.

“You’re a good dog,” I told him, “but these big tough werewolf bad guys get so twitchy around wolfhounds. Me and my Mrs. Peel pantsuit can handle them.”

“GEHENNA” WAS THE Jewish version of Hell, a place where both soul and body could be destroyed in “unquenchable fire,” if I remembered the Gospel of Mark from Our Lady of the Lake Convent School religion classes.

Here in Las Vegas, the Inferno Hotel had copped the “unquenchable fire” theme-park look. The Gehenna had settled for deeply, darkly, dangerously, enticingly menacing.

The sprawling hotel-casino crouched on the flat landscape like a supersized Bruce Wayne batcave or maybe a charcoal-colored, glassy tidal wave frozen in mid-storm-surge. It made wolfish gray into a direr shade of black.

The limo paused at a side entrance. I strode past bracketing musclemen, through a row of glass doors, and into the cool shadowy interior, my eyes momentarily blinded.

Blinking fast put two more hunks of wolfish muscle and Sansouci into focus between them. He was pocketing the tiny earphone that had announced my arrival.

“I’ll escort Miss Street from here,” he said, taking my upper arm in a grip part courtesy and part custody. “You’re not carrying,” he noted, eyeing the sleek pantsuit and not-so-sleek me in it. I’m more tennis player than fashion model and stand almost six feet in heels.

For answer the ruby fingernails of the glittering hand on my ruffled chest morphed into scarlet snake heads and hissed. Sound effects were a new manifestation of the silver familiar, in operation only since our subterranean march on the Karnak ’s undead minions just days ago.

The memory made me shiver a bit.

Sansouci wasn’t scared of big bad red rhinestones. In fact, he eyed them with a glint of vampire lust.

“Vegas does keep our hotel-casinos freezing,” he said, smiling to detect my involuntary shiver.

Sansouci was a couple inches taller than I, broader and more muscular. With his forest-green eyes and his black hair strafed with silvery highlights, what a handsome dog he was! No wonder I’d taken him for a member of the werewolf mob, not a vampire.

“You know that Cicereau hates me and it’s mutual,” I said.

“Then why did you come?”

“Because you said ‘please.’”

“The flunkies said ‘please.’”

I shrugged his hand off my arm as we stepped through verdigris and copper doors into a private elevator. “And I wondered why Cicereau sent forces to aid Christophe. They don’t strike me as brothers-in-arms.”

“They’re mortal enemies,” Sansouci confirmed, “but thanks to you we’ve found a more worrisome breed of immortal enemies right under our noses.”

I smiled tightly. Sansouci would give me credit. He was actually a stand-up guy for a bloodsucker. Cesar Cicereau was a Vegas founding father. He gave no one credit.

This elevator car was a lot more elaborate, and forest-like, than the public ones that led to guest floors and that I’d taken before to Cicereau’s offices up top.

Exotic woods with black, white, golden, and red grains as tight as shades of wolf fur were carved into a thick tree-like bas-relief against a dusky, deep amber-tint mirror that glinted like wolf eyes around me. I felt surrounded by an Art Nouveau woodcut in living color, not stark CinSim black-and-white.

So awesomely beautiful! Someone in the Gehenna werewolf pack had the soul of an artist.

“How’s Montoya doing?” Sansouci asked as the floors whisked by.

“Better than could be expected.”

“I guess his FBI nickname of ‘Cadaver Kid’ proved more appropriate than anybody suspected.”

“You’re fishing, Sansouci. I don’t take bait. Ric is doing fine and so am I.”

“Cesar Cicereau isn’t.”

The elevator halted but I hit the STOP button to keep the doors from opening. “I should care? He wanted to use me. When I escaped that fate he tried to kill and eat me.”

“Those whom the gods cannot use they then destroy.”

“The actual quote is: ‘Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.’”

Sansouci grinned, damnably roguish, Clark Gable-style. I “got” the devoted harem of human ladies who served as his moveable feast with no loss of life beyond what a blood donation site would take.

“You were born mad as a hornet,” he said, “so it was hardly a fair fight, Delilah. You won’t believe what the Old Man has been reduced to since you last saw him.”

“You care? You’re a political prisoner. At least you said so.”

“I care when things happen in this town that are more supernatural than we’re used to dealing with.” His voice lowered to a mock-wolfish growl. “Can we move on, or do you like being penned in a small steel box with me?”

Oooh, shades of being buried alive with a vampire. No thanks! I hit the red STOP button again so it popped out and the doors slid silently open.

“This is the office level,” I noted. “Reached by a different elevator.”

“Right. The boss’s private car, but the same office, scene of our martial arts dance in the dark when you first broke in, I still don’t know how-”

Good. My mirror-walking talents were still a mystery to Sansouci and therefore his boss. I hustled down the hall, eager to find out what had become of Cicereau.

The office was empty. I paused in the doorway, eyeing the mirrored wet bar that had been my entrance and exit point. To an observer I would have looked like someone hankering for a drink.

Sansouci brushed past me to the humongous executive chair behind the desk, where he stood staring at the computer screen.

I’d sat there when I’d secretly returned to download the 1940s photo of Cicereau with his “family.” That had included an infinitesimally younger version of Sansouci… the usual towering Vegas chorus-girl arm candy, Vida… and Cesar’s teenage daughter, Loretta, soon to be his murder victim for the sin of loving a vampire prince, not a werewolf.

“Look,” Sansouci ordered.

I reluctantly rounded the desk to stand beside him. Sansouci was equally effective as seducer and slayer. I kept my distance when I could.

The blank black screen I stared at was like the famed electronic billboard in Times Square. Big bright moving crimson letters paraded endlessly across it: ASK DELILAH STREET.

“So now I’m an oracle?” I asked.