Madrigal wrenched his head around to eye his startled assistants twining the empty door frame. Violence in fey territory must be the poison and wire garrote sort.

“Save yourselves,” he cried.

“No!” I answered. “First make them release Loretta. Can they retract their silken fey bonds at long distance?”

He nodded. “But-”

“Can you darken these lights?” I asked next, eyeing the window-wall opposite all this, the dark expanse reflecting portions of the carnage as if lit by heat lightning, by all the neon wattage of Las Vegas.

“No,” he muttered, “I can’t darken the Strip. What do you think I am?”

“Useless?” a voice snarled from the wall, sounding strangled in the Bone Boy’s huge hands that were all bone and sinew and muscle and no skin and around the daylight vampire’s muscle-bulging throat.

Sansouci had come to the Inferno at Snow’s call to help save Ric. I needed to return the favor.

“Give me a mirror!” I screamed at Madrigal. “I need darkness behind a rectangle of the night. Damn Vegas and its overlit arrogance! I need just one door-size patch of darkness for a mirror-”

Madrigal looked toward his fey girls, whose entwined fingers and locks of long hair made them twin Medusas lost in their own reflections.

“Their own binding ritual will release Loretta’s image. That’s all they can do.”

And it wasn’t enough. The mob boss’s glorious bedroom panorama of the Strip’s nightly fireworks would destroy us all. I needed solid darkness to draw Loretta close, to make her visible. Or… the windows needed a solid silver mirror backing.

The fey sisters’ posture reminded me of something.

Meanwhile, Sansouci had roared and slipped away from the wall and the creature’s stranglehold to attack Krzysztof from the rear, driving the jagged rung of the chair-back into his leathery shoulder. A wooden stake wouldn’t kill, but if any vampire was left in this risen abomination, it could immobilize him. I didn’t dare watch their battle.

My distracted mind fought to concentrate, to sense the whispery feel of the silver familiar on my skin in its precious metal form. Now it was made of Snow’s and Achilles’ conjoined locks of hair, one a strand that I regarded as an enemy to me and mine and my very mind and soul, the other cherished as a memento of a faithful canine defender. Now dark and light influences had braided into one strand I could consciously command. Maybe.

I called them up and cast them out, away from me, surrendered them. It was as if all my energy and will had turned steely cold and seeped from every artery and vein of my body in an ugly, draining rush.

I could hardly stand, then felt Madrigal’s strongman body behind me, bracing mine like an easel a canvas. I felt blank, empty. He was crooning some strange syllables that brought Phasia and Sylphia creeping into the room.

The scent of blood intensified into the metallic tang I’d sensed on my tongue at my first, agonizing menstruation. I felt a sudden, gut-wrenching, and purely phantom cramp in my belly and mind.

In front of my eyes, the familiar stretched into tendrils from my left and my right arms and pooled on the window glass into a spreading surface of bright liquid silver. It resolved into a person-high oval of light against the night’s darkness, blotting out all the neon of Vegas.

I saw myself reflected. Standing alone, dressed exactly as I was but upheld by no one, wearing no pair of thin silver leashes on my wrists.

Lilith.

Now. When it least mattered, I saw her, clear and separate. Now, when extinction was a leap and snarl and slash away from all of us in this room that held stalking Death within it.

She wore the exact double of my Mrs. Peel ensemble, except that when she tossed her head her hair pulled free into an untamed mane. Then she was… gone.

I lost my breath, my senses, my mind.

Summoned, Loretta levitated into the mirror that I had made, like a saint ascending into heaven. Sweet, pretty murdered and now murderous Loretta.

Her image also was as clear as crystal.

I stepped in front of it.

“Krzysztof,” I cried from the heart. “I’m here.”

Then I stepped away again.

The monster turned. His wayward gaze fixed on the vision floating almost fifty stories above the Las Vegas Strip, the mirror-bound image of his lost love.

He made a sound of such bestial longing that every human ear within reach-that is, only mine-must have sensed a pounding heartbeat freeze. Then he lurched in his mad destructive inhuman way toward his beloved.

Three giant steps and the double-strength safety glass fractured like a bad dream. Daggers of mirrored glass splintered, scattered, admitted the lavishly lit night as Krzysztof stepped forty-some stories into the empty, as-yet-unbuilt Las Vegas Strip of his nineteen-forties past and vanished.

I felt the silver familiar rebound on my body like a snapped rubber band, or a yo-yo abruptly recalled, an echo coming back five times louder. I would have fallen from the impact without the literal backup of Madrigal.

His fey assistants came twining his form, each one peering over his mighty shoulders, evoking the huge Strip billboard advertising his Gehenna act.

They gazed at me and purred in concert. They were Madrigal’s familiars, I realized, as eerily attached as mine.

I turned to find what was left of Sansouci.

He leaned panting against a wall, bloodied. As I watched he wiped off secondhand gore sprayed from the dying werewolves whose corpses littered the floor. His green eyes had faded to hazel. Did vampires feel something as human as fatigue? He managed to raise a bloody hand as if shielding himself against me or the lights or the hole in the window-wall.

“You are too sucking fierce for Vegas,” he said, then coughed up secondhand blood and laughed.

Last I looked for Cicereau. He remained on the bed clutching his emptied, Liberace-glammed-up Uzi, surveying his fallen werewolf guard and those of us left standing: magician and familiars, daylight vampire and paranormal investigator.

“I should reduce your times of indenture,” he told Madrigal and Sansouci. Then he laughed too. “But I can’t afford to let you go, especially after this.”

He addressed me last.

“Good thing my pack failed to kill you at Starlight Lodge, after all. I’ll pay what you’re worth for this night’s work, then the slate is clean and we can all resume being the usual enemies in peace.”

“This is entirely your fault,” I told him. “If you hadn’t killed your own daughter and her vampire lover so brutally it never would have happened. You deserve to see ravaged victims raised and walking back to you. How could you do that to your own daughter? Or your own werewolf mobster ambitions? Now the Karnak vampire empire is poised to resurrect any destroyed master vampire they can find the world over and try a takedown of Vegas and anywhere.”

Cicereau stirred on his blood-spattered brocade coverlet.

“I had to make an example of them. I didn’t care who Loretta picked for a boyfriend but Loretta was half-human. We werewolves and vampires feared that the unprecedented cross-supernatural lovebirds might be able to reproduce like humans. The unnatural result of such a union would destroy the ages-old turf of our two kinds and no one wanted that. That’s why we made a blood pact over their dead bodies.”

“You’re telling me that supernaturals find half-breeds unnatural? Werewolves and vampires aren’t exactly the Smiths and Joneses or the Hatfields and McCoys for that matter.”

“Kind must stick with kind. Family is family in the lupine line.” Cicereau’s sweat-mustached upper lip lifted in a snarl of disdain. “Vampires are already a mongrel sort, connected only by their unnatural appetites. What makes the werewolf mob invincible is that we are all blood family, not just joined by shedding it.