The pair had sweet unearthly faces and skinny Barbie-doll-like limbs. No larger than eight-year-old human children, they were apparent adults of their kind. Phasia’s pearly skin had a snakish pattern, as Grizelle’s black human skin showed a tiger-striped one.

I’d never seen either fey sister shape-shift into snake or spider, but they harbored characteristics of both.

I wasn’t surprised to look farther into the room’s bordering shadows to see Madrigal, the Gehenna strongman magician, also on guard with his performing familiars. Things were bad if Cicereau was trusting to magical guardians rather than to his extensive wolf pack.

“I have no idea why my name has shown up on your personal and public hotel electronics,” I told the boss. “I’m just a paranormal investigator. Maybe you need an exorcist.”

“You hit it on the spot, sister. That’s exactly what I need.” He eyed me hungrily. “Get out,” he ordered the werewolf guards. “You too.”

I felt Sansouci’s custodial hand drop away. The thick carpeting was too cushy for footsteps to be heard, yet I sensed the vampire retreating as silently as the werewolves.

Only Madrigal remained. Our glances crossed but we remained equally expressionless. It wouldn’t do to remind the erratic Cicereau that we had known each other, however briefly. The mob boss would no doubt be reassured to know that the fey sisters, at least, hated me the way tween groupies hate a rival for a boy-band member. Madrigal was theirs.

Cicereau began jabbing at a gigantic remote control device with dozens of buttons.

“This is what I’ve been seeing for two damn days anytime I look at any screen in the whole damn hotel.”

I turned to watch the semicircular screen behind my back. The upper two-thirds of a human figure appeared, a young girl wearing shades of blue. She talked too, in an accusing baby-doll voice.

“Delilah knows what you did, Daddy. I’ve been telling her everything so that soon everyone will know. You had me killed, your own daughter. You slaughtered me and my first beau. Poor Prince Krzysztof. You hated that my boyfriend was vampire but I’m only half werewolf. I had a human mother. What was so wrong about our love? Only your hatred. Delilah knows everything, Daddy. I told her it all.”

I watched in frozen disbelief. Thanks, kid. I help find your forgotten murdered bones in Sunset Park. I listen to your vintage sob story in my home-turf mirror, and you snitch on me to your mob boss father in living LED.

Take it easy, whispered Irma. Cicereau wanted you here because he can use you. Otherwise he’d have offed you without asking questions. Find out what he needs.

“Yeah,” the mobster crooned as if he’d overheard Irma. “That’s what my darling daughter would be broadcasting on every TV screen in the hotel if we’d let her. We’ve had to shut down the Sports Book section,” he added indignantly.

Uh-oh. That’s where all the lucrative sports bets were made, an area of cushy seats like the world’s biggest home theater. Multiple screens ran every football, baseball, basketball, soccer game, and horse or car race in the world. The bets were major.

Cicereau muttered on. “Vengeful little brat has been haunting all my most profitable venues. Even the slot machines are going nutso. You know those video poker machines with the gloved magician hands and dancing wand the tourists love to watch?”

I did. I loved to watch ’em too, truth be told. It was so Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo! Disney Cinderella fairy godmother. I loved the way the animated white gloves and wand turned tricks on the slot machine screen like a chicken-ranch brothel baby on speed.

“I know the machines you mean,” I conceded. “Cool.”

“Not so ‘cool’ if the magical gloved hands are grabbing cash out of the tourists’ hot little paddies, or even going for their necks and trying to throttle the life out of them.”

No more than Las Vegas casinos and other gaming hot spots did every day, I mused as he ranted on.

“If you know so much, Miss Delilah Street, aka Maggie, maybe you know how to get my dead daughter the hell out of my hotel and my life. The sixty-years-buried dead have a lot of nerve showing up where they’re not wanted and where they ought to damn well know that by fucking now.”

Yes, he was a callous monster of a mobster and I personally would love to see him hounded to the gates of the nearest madhouse by Daughter Dearest.

However, I was in a much more vulnerable form than she: physical and mortal. My first problem was figuring out why she’d dragged me into her family revenge fantasy. Second issue: Why was she showing up here and now?

“It’s bad enough,” Cicereau groused, “I got a freakish serial killer loose in my operation. I don’t need some long-gone daughter giving me public lip.”

He was right. He was caught in a pincer attack between the living undead and the dead. Any bad publicity on either front could cripple his operation. Who wanted to check into a hotel where an unstoppable invader could skewer your carotid artery or the boss’s dead daughter could show up in Debbie Does Dallas on your hotel room flat-screen and take all the fun out of X-rated?

Cicereau pointed a smaller remote control at me.

“I was willing to bring you into my hotel family to make hay on the Maggie craze. Now my crazy daughter is taking over all my venues and taunting me with your name, Delilah Street. You will either rid me of this ghost or you will be one. In about five seconds.”

He pulled yet another remote control device out from under the covers. A pearl-gripped Uzi. What you might call in Paris a d’Uzi. It was way over-the-top showy but no less effective.

“I need absolute privacy,” I told him, “and a single screen where Loretta and I can speak girl-to-girl.”

“My office computer? She screwed that up too.”

“No, that’s too ‘you.’ What’s the most secure screen setup in the hotel?”

Cicereau frowned, then bellowed, “Sansouci!”

He appeared in the bedroom door.

“You heard that?” Cicereau said.

Sansouci nodded. Vampires had supersensitive hearing? Maybe.

“And?” Cicereau aimed the Uzi at his high-end hostage, but what use was an Uzi against an immortal vampire? Guess Cicereau didn’t know that I knew Sansouci’s real breed.

“Eye in the sky,” the daylight vamp said. “I’ll take her there.”

“Not a bad idea but, shit,” said Cicereau, “you do realize that bitch daughter of mine could use the security surveillance system to broadcast her wild charges over the whole hotel?”

“Then we need to get there fast.” Sansouci took my arm again, which I was beginning to like when it involved a quick exit. We swung out the door and out of direct Uzi range into the hall.

“Can you exorcise that ghost in the machine?” he asked.

“I can try.”

Trouble was, did I want to spare Cesar Cicereau the juvenile justice he so richly deserved from his murdered daughter?