ALL LAS VEGAS hotels have wall-to-wall security cameras. Nowadays many are mobile, even nomadic. Before one overblown holographic glass block is laid, the building’s skeleton is festooned with hidden camera links. Many newer ones are wireless.

Central control areas are scattered throughout the structure. Sansouci led me to one hidden center and ordered out all the resident spies.

It was just me and him and walls of color and black-and-white screens showing monitored areas, the casinos and shops, elevators, pool areas, even hotel rooms. I felt like a Homeland Security operative.

“You need to expel Loretta,” he told me. “If she uses you to get herself broadcast over the entire hotel snoop system we’re both dead. You for real, me for a few more centuries of indenture.”

“Why’d you get dragged in on this?”

Sansouci’s smile was both rueful and sinister. “It’s a game Cesar has played with me for decades. He likes me in the target zone. He knows he can’t kill me but he can add to my indenture.”

“He does that with Madrigal too.”

“Yeah? He also wants to sucker you somehow. His daughter’s ghost he’d just like to exorcise.”

“I’m starting to wonder if she is a ghost.”

“What else would she be?”

“I get that she and her lover were not of the ‘same’ supernatural derivation. I understand they alienated both sides of the vampire-werewolf war to control Vegas as it became a hotel and gaming hot spot in the nineteen forties. What about the thirty silver dollars thrown on the still-embracing dead figures?”

“Exactly what you suspect,” he said, “to show the lovers were Judases to both sides. The werewolves included an early design of an Inferno Hotel chip as a message to the vamps that they planned to own this town.”

“Loretta and her six-hundred-year-old vampire prince were killed by her father, but why were the methods so brutal? Bullets and castration, rape and stabbing. Loretta’s a vengeful spirit, sure. But… with, I’m beginning to think, ambitions and unsuspected abilities. You never really did her wrong, Sansouci. You just watched. You might still be able to negotiate with Loretta.”

Sansouci’s hand indicated the static scenes on the dozens of spy cameras. “Nobody can undo yesterday. That’s not negotiable. Call her, but don’t let her broadcast.”

For some reason, my high-profile necklace thinned and slid down behind the neck of my blouse to go undercover as a hip chain.

Call and control Loretta. Easy to say, less easy to do. I was working with emotional plastic explosive, ectoplasmic explosive with a lot of bones to pick. Her own.

“Loretta,” I said softly, envisioning the girlish apparition from the Enchanted Cottage hall mirror, wearing a blue taffeta forties gown. Puffed sleeves, flattened bodice, slender waist. She was a prepubescent Disney Snow White with the light brown hair instead of my potent midnight-black locks.

And so she appeared in a flash, a tender pastel vision of color superimposed on the serviceable black-and-white scenes of the surveillance cameras. I wondered why they still used some of them, instead of all color.

Loretta took the opening line. “Delilah! You came when I called.”

“Of course I’d do that. Did you ever doubt?”

“No, I didn’t.” She frowned, seeing past me. “Why is he here?”

“He?”

“Daddy’s prisoner.”

“Your daddy doesn’t trust me to talk to you alone.”

“And just what have we been doing all these times in your hall mirror?” she asked, giggling. “I’m very pleased with you, Delilah.”

“Yes?”

“Well, you got him back, didn’t you?”

How did she know about the showdown under the Karnak, about Ric?

She gushed on girlishly. “It’s wonderful he’s alive again.”

“Yes,” I agreed. How did she know? If a ghost thought Ric had been really dead…

“And he’s so powerful now that he’s come back.” What did she care about Ric? “Don’t you think he will become incredibly powerful?”

“I… don’t know. I’d settle for back the way he was.”

“Well, yes, that too, but I want more than the way he was, I want him back the way he could have been if Daddy hadn’t… let… his… pack… mutilate him… and violate me… and kill us.”

Oh. We weren’t talking about the same “he” at all.

“How they killed you both was terrible,” I agreed, switching gears fast. “An atrocity.”

“Having his head severed truly killed him. He didn’t just die. His flesh rotted to nothing. The coroner nicknamed him ‘the Bone Boy,’” she added bitterly.

“Coroners need to insulate themselves from the violence of death.”

“He’s not a ‘Bone Boy’ anymore.”

“No? That’s good.”

Sansouci’s frown was deepening.

“I want to thank you for that,” she said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“It was nothing,” I said. “Once I heard your story-”

She giggled. I was beginning to find the giggle sinister.

“That was a great story, wasn’t it, Delilah?”

“Of course I realized that you needed to… embellish it to win my sympathy.”

“You did? You’re smarter than I thought. And I knew you had reason to hate my father.”

“Who wouldn’t? He kidnapped me like I was a paper doll to cut out and use. And what he did to you and your prince…” I eyed Sansouci. He had made me think… damn his vampire eyes!

“You’ve done very well, as I said,” she added imperiously, “but you’re not done. My darling is back in full physical form-”

The rampaging monster on the security tapes!

“-now I want to come back physically too.”

I finally got the whole scenario, a sort of Sunset Boulevard/Sunset Park movie melodrama of lust and death and resurrection for the unhuman set. How had the Bone Boy been fleshed out and animated? By something the Karnak vampires had figured out while torturing Ric? Loretta was supposed to get her long-dead and even-longer-undead lover boy back over my lover’s dead body? No way!

“Yes,” I conceded to gain time to think, “the ancient Karnak pharaohs may have developed a way to reconstitute bone into muscle and blood-seeking flesh, but Loretta, you’re not a vampire. You were never undead, like Prince Krzysztof. You were a half-human werewolf. I doubt ancient Egyptian vampire rituals can raise the dead, only the Undead.”

“NO!” She stamped her foot, unseen on camera, but I bet it was shod in a soft satin slipper. “They have the means now. And you aren’t done! Now you must give me a body, make me whole and mortal, or I’ll tell Daddy you brought my Bone Boy back and he’ll grind your bones to powder with his werewolf teeth.”

“Sweet,” Sansouci muttered under his breath. “Her father’s daughter.”

We were witnessing a spoiled rotten, mean-girl supernatural tantrum? That didn’t make Loretta Cicereau less dangerous.

I started fiddling with the screen controls, focusing past her to the background where tourists milled unaware of the ghost in the foreground.

Also mixing into the tourist scene were some Gehenna CinSims. Black-and-white cameras were their medium. That’s why the surveillance cameras weren’t all in color! Jeez. These casino owners are so paranoid. Can’t even trust their “unreel” help. I fixed the focus on one CinSim after another.

Meanwhile, Loretta was concentrating on bending me to her wants and needs.

“First, Delilah, get that turncoat half-vamp out of here.”

I turned to eye Sansouci with a signature Mr. Spock raised eyebrow. The tables had turned. Now Cicereau’s dead daughter was bossing him around.

Sansouci made a sour face but shrugged and slipped out via the gray-flannel upholstered door. He was used to high-handed Cicereau ways. The control room was designed to be soundproof, so now Loretta could speak in total secrecy.

Until, that is, she might decide to turn on the audio-visual systems and we’d take over every mike and screen in the hotel-casino.