“Give me a little time,” I told Loretta. “I need to arrange some things.”

She smiled wickedly. “I can’t wait to see you set my father up for a fall.”

Maybe, maybe not.

The major problem: she was “in” every surveillance camera in the hotel.

I collected Sansouci outside.

“Any place we can talk in absolute guaranteed privacy?” I whispered. Yeah, it looked like we were nuzzling.

“Cicereau has every place in this hotel wired. The surveillance centers are pretty good, but Loretta’s got those now.”

“Trusting sorts run in the family, eh?”

“Trust is neither a werewolf nor a mobster virtue,” Sansouci said, “so we serve double doses of paranoia here at the Hotel Gehenna. However, Cesar is no dummy, either. His extreme paranoia led him to establish an electromagnetic dead zone, eavesdropping- and I’d think also ghost-proof. Only Cesar and his top full-blood assistants use it.”

Sansouci was enjoying breathing hotly in my ear, telling me arcane little nothings, so I called him on it.

“Tell Cicereau in just this very secretive way that I need to use it.”

“He’d bite my freaking lips right off.”

“What a grave loss for the Sansouci Ladies Daily Dinner Society. Tell him.”

Although I was worried about Loretta’s eavesdropping on my plans I also saw she was overconfident. Getting Krzys back from the dead had her high on hormones and revenge.

I knew that feeling now, and how physically blinding extreme emotion was. In the group homes I’d learned to deaden my feelings to conceal my reactions. Now that I’d found and almost lost Ric I understood the power of honest feelings, and I also had some hot ideas on how to manipulate them.

Bad Delilah!

BY THE TIME Sansouci and I returned to Cicereau’s sky-high suite the daylight vampire had become resigned to bearding the werewolf mobster in his rock-star bed.

Cicereau’s private rooms were pretty secure but I’d been able to mirror-walk in and out of his office like a ghost. As an actual ghost, Loretta might share my talents in that regard. I was betting that she didn’t have all of them.

Sansouci braced one knee on the crushed velvet upholstered bed frame and conveyed my message from his lips to Cicereau’s ear. Really, gold crushed velvet was so seventies! Some old things were just tacky. I’d give Cicereau my interior design advice later.

The mobster howled indignation and actually snapped his currently human teeth. Sansouci retreated fast.

I looked at Madrigal. He was attired, or perhaps I should say not attired, in his macho stage gear-Roman kilt, bare chest, metal wrist and upper-arm bands, gladiator sandals buckled up to the knee. He still played an impassive palace guard beside the bed curtains.

The mobster growled at me, eyes glaring under thick gray brows, then nodded at Madrigal, who quickly came to my side. The magician’s sharp hand gesture signaled the fey sisters to remain topside in the woodsy ceiling bower. They writhed and hissed their objections but stayed put.

So, with a two-hunk escort of vamp and magic man, I left the suite for the elevators. We jetted down a few dozen floors in silence. Sansouci had pressed no buttons so I wasn’t surprised when the car charged past the lobby level and lower yet. I gathered Cesar had an elevator control button on his awesome whole-hotel bedside remote control the size of an organ keyboard.

Once again I was plunging into the lower depths of a major Vegas hotel with an iffy escort. The silver familiar had been an invisible hip chain through my latest negotiations. Now it was shifting to upper-arm bands like Madrigal’s, ready to be deployed as weapons if necessary.

Madrigal’s muscles and weird sister familiars didn’t scare me, but Sansouci had been made, not born, a daylight, lady-sipping vampire. Who knew if under extreme pressure he could revert to a traditional blood-sucking killer in a heartbeat-mine-or not.

Umm, Irma purred in my ear, we’re double-dating at last. I’ll be happy to take on the vamp.

Despite her usual randy suggestions, I was happy to have her along for backup. I was beginning to realize that Las Vegas’s new supernatural Underworld was also literal. Despite the spectacular high-rise real estate above the Strip, a pit of hidden vice and danger lurked as deep below, an eternal dark reflection.

What little I’d glimpsed of the Inferno’s underbelly was a literal re-creation of Dante’s nine circles of Hell. What would a werewolf crimelord’s basement contain?

The verdigris and copper elevator doors parted to reveal… nothing. A dim musty featureless cellar. We might as well have been poking around in Castle Dracula’s semi-abandoned cape-and-coffin storage dungeon.

I saw a lot of crates piled here and there but none in a sinister coffin shape. Vampires, except for the hostage Sansouci, were persona non grata in Werewolf Land.

Our shoe soles ground on a patina of sand drifting over the hard-packed floor. Light came from a leprosy of mosses and lichens on the walls, which glowed like deep-sea life-forms. Some moved. Fungi and slugs and maggots and worms and other writhing things made living mosaics. Like Spanish moss or cobwebs, the growths dangled from the low ceiling to brush our heads and bodies.

Madrigal, bare-shouldered and annoyed, twitched his mighty muscles to dislodge the tendrils. A gaudy collar and cape materialized to clothe him.

“So you are a real magician,” I commented, my voice echoing.

He shrugged again. “A minor talent. Why does Cicereau maintain an unfinished subbasement?”

“Maybe it’s a getaway from urban Las Vegas and its surrounding desert,” I suggested. Everything damp, dark, and likely to be found under the detritus of a forest floor thrived down here.

Sansouci walked up to a wall and eyed its glowing upholstery of vermin. He pulled a credit card from his back jeans pocket and used it to scrape off some lichens.

I jumped back, Madrigal with me. His gladiator-style sandals offered an impressive display of muscled calves but his feet and lower limbs were exposed to the writhing grubs seeking a new place to attach themselves.

Sansouci was sensibly shod in ankle boots and, despite my steel-toed seventies slingbacks, I dearly missed my secondhand motorcycle boots.

The vampire’s credit card (is that a non sequitur or not?) slid into an uncovered, neat, man-made slot in the wall.

Sansouci grinned.

With a sleek mechanical hum wildly out of character for this creepy-crawly place, a clean brushed-aluminum door panel knifed into the opening as the lichen-covered walls slid back.

The panel unfolded accordion-style to reveal a clean shining expanse. We three walked into a gleaming room, floor, walls, and ceiling all burnished in my metal of power, silver. Entering this surgically sterile box felt rather like visiting a gaudy high-tech crypt. Was this an empty safe or a bomb shelter?

“You should be at home in confined places,” I told Sansouci, astounded to hear my voice deadened as if the metal walls were swathed in unseen cotton batting.

Meanwhile, the garage-door-sized mobile wall sealed us in.

“I haven’t been confined like this for a long time,” he said, turning to examine the featureless space. “Cicereau slipped me the key card when I whispered in his ear, which is keen enough that he’d already heard what we required. This seems ultra-private. What did you want to discuss?”

I turned to Madrigal. He was also pacing the perimeter of our silver box-which was illuminated by its own burnished surface-like a lion caught in a trap.

I’d misjudged his motives. He was intrigued, not intimidated, and passed his big hands over portions of the walls. They opened out into other boxy chambers as he strode along. We were inside some giant’s metal origami napkin unfolding in all directions.