“Each full moon we shift into our pack form and celebrate our unity. Vampires hunt alone, like the inferior cat. That’s why we defeated them eighty years ago for control of Vegas. That’s why we will defeat the Karnak nest. Christophe should have burned out the entire lot with his dragon’s fiery breath when he raided them.

“Now this vampire empire knows that we know they exist. I hear that’s all your fault, Delilah Street, and you and your FBI boyfriend are another damnably dangerous couple loose in Vegas. So you’d better leave while I’m feeling grateful. Sansouci, get her out of here. And, Madrigal, time to let your pets clean up the mess.”

I was too tired to argue, almost too tired to stand. I did manage to walk out of there, unaided, on my own two blood-spattered feet.

THE GEHENNA WASN’T done with me yet.

Sansouci steered me into a guest bathroom near the door to Cicereau’s suite and told me to clean up.

In the mirror I saw his point. No chance I was regarding Lilith’s image this time. Blood dotted my face, hair, and the jabot of my white blouse. A few swipes with an evaporating soap product cleansed the face and hair. The blouse would just have to pass as polka-dotted. I wiped the blood drops off the gray toes of my shoes and the bell-bottoms of my black pants. The black jacket absorbed dark red and looked fine to the casual glance.

The silver familiar wasn’t about to waste its glory on my bloody cravat. It snugged around my hips again, under the pants. I leaned against the green marble sink and called Ric to tell him I was all right and heading home from the Gehenna.

“You sound breathless,” he answered.

“I have my reasons, which you’ll know when we meet up.”

When I stepped out again, an equally gore-free vampire henchman was awaiting me in the entry. Must be a matching boys’ room through the opposite door. It occurred to me why a werewolf mobster would provide lavatory facilities at the door to his elegant private penthouse. Must have a lot of messy underlings visiting to report on the latest hits and misses.

“Slick thinking,” Sansouci said.

“Yeah. It’s pretty obvious why Cicereau’s visiting goons would need to tidy up right here at the front door.”

He frowned, then eyed the unmarked doors.

“Not these rest rooms. I meant your slick trick, conjuring a hallucinatory exit for the Karnak’s revived killing machine. Forty-some floors ought to stop reanimated bones pretty cold. What happened to Loretta?”

“That was just a mirror image I summoned like the one I left behind here for a while. Loretta is still bound in Madrigal’s backstage mirror.”

He nodded. “I better hustle you outa here before Cicereau forgets he’s grateful, and then make sure that mirror trick is holding.”

No rest for the wicked, as they say.

We zipped down in the next elevator, picking up hotel guests as we stopped at lower floors. No one recoiled or flared their nostrils, so we must have looked-and smelled-fairly normal, as normal as a silver medium and a daylight vampire could be.

Once on the hotel’s thickly tourist-populated main floor, Sansouci steered me through the casino to a gilded cage. I pulled against his one-armed custody at the very sight of bars.

“It’s a cashier’s cage. Relax.”

Sansouci flashed a Gehenna/Magus/Megalith consortium gambling card, a credit card for gamblers. I’d barely glimpsed the holographic image that flipped from an Annie Liebovitz portrait of Cesar Cicereau to a wolf’s-head before Sansouci slapped it down on the brown marble counter and slid it through the cage.

The woman on the other side wore a one-shouldered rabbit fur corset and purple-dyed rabbit ears. I guess “Prey” was her middle name. She batted metallic green false lashes as she pushed a wad of bills under the cage bars.

“Somebody must have hit the jackpot,” she simpered at Sansouci. “I get off in forty-five minutes, big boy.”

“My women do it much faster than that,” he noted, swooping up the stash and handing it to me.

“Ah, do you have a money bag or something?” I asked the now thoroughly miffed cashier.

“Stick it in your-” she began as Sansouci turned me away from the cage into the clatter and chatter of the casino.

He stopped a passing cocktail waitress tricked out as a calico cat. “Got a nickel slot bonanza bag?”

She produced a pink burlap bag into which Sansouci dropped my loot.

In ten minutes of twisting through the milling throngs we finally exited the cold and glamorously dark interior at the hotel’s entry canopy.

“While you were irritating Cicereau,” he said, “I dialed Nightwine’s majordomo.”

“Godfrey? You know Godfrey?”

“I know how things work in this town. I figured you’d need a ride.” He waved a hand.

That’s right; I’d been driven here by limo. My God, there idled Dolly, my ’56 Cadillac convertible, shining like a decapitated Black Maria police wagon from the thirties.

I turned, grateful. “Sansouci, you’re amazing.”

He gave me a rough little shove. “Get outa here before Cicereau accuses you of ripping him off and has you arrested. His gratitude lasts about as long as a five-dollar whore’s blow job.”

I was feeling the stress of the last couple hours so I stumbled forward at Sansouci’s ungentlemanly push. Why was he irked with me? I’d saved his bacon and his boss’s too.

As I neared, I saw the black Caddy didn’t have a red leather interior like my Dolly. And ace attorney Perry Mason was at the wheel.

“Godfrey has told me you’ve been absent without leave for far too long, Miss Delilah,” the CinSim Perry said sternly as he leaned over the wide front bench seat to open the passenger door. “I’m taking you straight home, no argument. Now get in.”

“No argument,” I promised, relieved.

Perry was a CinSim but he seemed to be totally mobile, unlike most, and nobody would mess with him in this town anyway. He was a man of size, with a sterling legal reputation to match. He was also Big Daddy for a lifelong orphan like me. A girl couldn’t have a better escort.

As we pulled out of the overlit neon canopy into the blitzkrieged Las Vegas Strip night, I couldn’t help studying the Gehenna’s exterior perimeter for signs of a resurrected vampire who’d fallen to earth-hard. Thanks to me. I saw nothing but milling tourists, yet in the distance I heard a wolflike wail.

In what seemed like no time, Perry’s Cadillac throbbed next to the real Dolly in my Enchanted Cottage’s driveway.

“Get some rest,” he ordered in his brusque yet kindly way. “Godfrey said you’ve had a long day.”

“Yes, Perry. Thanks so much for the ride.”

He leaned across the long leather bench seat to advise me further. “And watch that fellow who walked you out of the Gehenna. He looks like a gigolo.”

I laughed to imagine Sansouci’s reaction to that. “You don’t have to worry, Mr. Mason. I’m a very cautious girl.”

He nodded satisfaction as I got out and watched him glide away in engine-growling, shiny-black barracuda glory.

I sighed and turned toward my home, sweet home, aka the Enchanted Cottage, wanting to hit the shower, put on some blood-free clothes, and relax.

Then my cell phone vibrated. The famous Strip dead zones were sure working now.

Why did I have a queasy feeling? Could the wolfish wail have been a distant chorus of screaming police sirens I’d heard as Perry Mason had chauffeured me away from the Gehenna?

“Delilah!” Ric’s voice was easy on my ears but not the urgent note in it. What was the expression that so fit Sansouci tonight? No rest for the wicked. I’d been wicked enough tonight to impress a werewolf mob kingpin and a vampire… and make a permanent enemy of my first mirror BFF, Loretta, now my new Best Fiend Forever

“Where are you?” Ric and I asked in tandem, then laughed.