“To Cesar Cicereau you are. And maybe his salvation.”

Sansouci looked somber but I wanted to laugh.

I wasn’t sure about anybody’s salvation in the world that existed after the Millennium Revelation, least of all mine, but Cesar Cicereau would be on the bottom of my Most Likely To Be Saved list.

“I don’t like Cicereau, man or beast,” Sansouci admitted, “but I like what’s happening to him even less. It doesn’t bode well for our little supernatural playpen here in the Nevada desert.”

“‘Our?’ Leave me out of that category.”

He stared at my chest, which didn’t need the enhancement of ruffles. The pointed ruby rhinestone fingernails were now dripping pendants of mock blood drops.

So sue me. I was a bit on the supernatural side myself these days.

“The ‘Cadaver Kid’ truly lives up to his rep now,” Sansouci went on, “and you ain’t just a wayward orphan CSI corpse anymore. Remember, I watched you raise the beloved dead.”

That cold shiver hit me again. “Wayward orphan?” Sansouci had been researching my background. Nothing supernatural about that. He’d also been speculating about what Ric and I had been and become before and after the recent rescue mission under the Karnak Hotel.

“You combine the worst of human and super, you know that?” I told him. “Snoop and lech. And leech,” I added, because it was a handy play on words.

“Also the best, maybe? Just hang on, let me show you why Cesar wants to see you so badly.”

SANSOUCI BENT TO touch the screen, banishing my name to bring up a mini-movie.

The scene was so dark it looked filmed in black-and-white. Once the action started, scarlet ropes of fresh, spilled blood whiplashed across the somber screen and even spattered the camera lens. These were outtakes too violent even for Hector Nightwine’s gruesome CSI V TV show.

I jolted back as if I were a target. “What the hell? This was filmed at this hotel?”

“Security cameras.” Sansouci touched a corner of the screen so the scene shrank and became more comprehensible.

A dark shambling figure was churning through five or six uniformed people trying to block its path. One by one the guards were seized, slashed in a major artery, and tossed aside, spewing blood like human fountains.

The daylight vampire did the voice-over while we both intently watched the bloodbath, for different reasons.

“Whatever weapon he’s using cuts down along the arteries, not across,” Sansouci pointed out with creepy expertise, “cuts through tissue and muscle and bone. Maximum blood. Wasteful.”

Sansouci sounded clinical but I saw him bite his lip. Then lick it. For a vampire, this must resemble watching the Roman Circus, bloody stimulating and even entertaining.

The last guard standing wheeled to run. In an instant the man’s face did a 180 turn over the shoulder, eyes popping. The huge shadow bent over him as jets of arterial blood flared into a hellish halo over the victim’s head.

A limp lump of fabric and flesh was tossed aside as the marauder moved on, out of camera range.

My pulse was pounding. This was mass slaughter and the site was clearly deep inside the Gehenna.

“Don’t the hotel security cameras move to follow intruders?” I asked.

“Yeah, but it learns. After this, it batted down the other cameras like King Kong grabbing airplanes from the top of the Empire State Building.”

“What, or who, is it?”

“Some hellish new supernatural. It got all the way to the public areas before the alarms went off. It must have retreated, or hidden. This is the second incursion in twenty hours. The first almost caught Cicereau alone in his office, staring at the ‘ Ask Delilah Street ’ message that’s taken over his computer.”

“He can’t think I’m doing this?”

“He doesn’t think; he fears. He does believe you know something about what’s going on.”

“No, I don’t. So I might as well leave now.”

His hand caught my upper arm, way too tight this time. “No. I think you may know something about what’s going on too. You’re staying and talking to the boss.” His expression softened. “Besides, I know you’ll enjoy seeing him again.”

I jerked my arm away, mostly because he finally let me. That’s what I liked about Sansouci. He was a thug but he didn’t overplay the role.

Now he had me curious.

“Delilah,” he added, “you’re a major player in this town now.”

Huh? I didn’t try to translate that. Sure, I’d freaked everybody out by seeming to raise Ric from the dead but maybe they just hadn’t tried CPR on him. And they hadn’t possessed the magic of the Brimstone Kiss once removed.

Why the hell hadn’t Snow tried that supernatural kiss thing on Ric himself? Afraid of being labeled gay? That was such a delightful new way to mentally slander Snow that I hardly paid attention when Sansouci hustled me out of the office back to the elevator.

I MULLED OVER the murders on the security tapes while we were whisked up another few floors. Las Vegas kingpins were addicted to heights far above the madding crowd.

The taped scene was disturbingly brutal. Werewolves relished a chase and vampires liked to linger quietly over a fresh drink. This marauder had a relentlessly machinelike air I’d seen in action before. It reminded me of something, but the link stayed vague.

The elevator opened on the foyer to Cicereau’s penthouse.

I entered another elaborately carved and gilded chamber of stylized tree trunks thick enough to form a prison wall.

Here we also faced six disturbingly lupine guards, hairy enough to resemble hulking Victorian gentlemen with side-whiskers, say the Mr. Hyde side of Dr. Jekyll.

These weren’t the fully human Cicereau pack members who usually faced the public. Nor had they been sent to Christophe as “soldiers” for the war against the Karnak crew. These were Cicereau’s paw-picked bodyguards, the weres who never fully reverted to human for some reason, like the half-were biker gangs on the Vegas streets.

That thought reminded me of my least favorite fledgling half-were, Vegas cop Irving Haskell. He was not among this elite pack yet, thank Larry Talbot.

In fact, I wished I was facing a tormented, self-hating werewolf like the “Larry Talbot” persona actor Lon Chaney Jr. had pioneered. In 1941 The Wolf Man classic horror film portrayed the title character as all angsty dude, with my devoted CinSim and all-around character actor, Claude Rains, playing his father figure.

Back in 2009, the film was remade with Benicio Del Toro in the wolfman role and Sir Anthony Hopkins in the Rains part. Goes to show you the old thriller classics had more universal appeal than critics at the time thought.

Changing into something worse than you thought you were is a major psychic nightmare of the human condition.

Unfortunately, Cesar Cicereau felt no regrets at having to tear out human throats as often as I got my periods. He was in his inner sanctum, a bedroom with three rock-hewn tiers leading up to the huge round bed.

A semicircular plasma TV faced the bed with my name up in lights on it, in red LED moving dots, like the computer screen below, only Times Square bigger.

ASK DELILAH STREET.

Like Howard Hughes in his scraggly late-life incarnation as a vampire, the stocky, fleshy-faced Cicereau would not enhance an orgy movie set. Especially now that I could see the beads of sweat on his unshaven upper lip from twenty feet away.

He growled when he spotted me, clawing the olive-green brocade coverlet with fingernails so ragged they snagged the expensive threads. Otherwise he resembled your stereotypical mob boss: middle-aged, constipated with power, and about as attractive as week-old corned beef and cabbage in a Dumpster.

“Okay,” he barked at me. “Talk.”

A sudden flutter in the treelike lattice of vines above his bed made me look up. I spotted Phasia twining her fluid fey form snakelike through the thick leaves. Even higher above, I spotted her “sister,” Sylphia, whose body glimmered like a glam-rock eye-shadow counter at Sephora.