“OK, boys?”

They couldn’t wait to jump out and stretch. Nice muscles, furred or not. Ric smeared my face with black greasepaint. In our skintight black outfits with the war paint I bet we looked like rogue Cirque du Soleil cast members.

“Come on,” Hermie prodded. “This is a top-secret route.”

He led us to an elevator door cleverly disguised as a fire hose installation panel.

The lower you went in Las Vegas these days, the closer you got to hellishly intemperate zones. Sweat started trickling down my back. My steel-studded pseudo “wet suit” was living up to its name. At least the catsuit was a strong second skin with first-rate protection against fangs, venom, and weapons.

The elevator was the size of a large upright coffin or a royal mummy case. Ric and I squeezed in, black on black, Quicksilver between us, panting up a storm.

Ric and I grinned at each other. Our shared inhaled doggie breath carried a faint overtone of fresh blood.

We shrugged. Carnivores Are Us.

The letter on the single button on the gilt panel was a weird hieroglyph, a star shape with five lines rayed out. It could represent a human with a wide stance and wide, welcoming arms.

Oddly, it recalled the famous Leonardo da Vinci figure of a man with radiating arms and legs symmetrically splayed to contact the edges of a circle. The Circle of Life. And Death.

Quicksilver frowned, salivating without compunction. Healing was the last thing on the lupine half of his mind.

I glanced at Ric. His features were as focused and intent as a hunting falcon’s. If a human being could salivate, this was it.

“Where are we going?” I asked Ric. He must have rambled in the belly of the beast deeper than I had.

“I don’t know. I just bet I’m going to enjoy it.”

“You figure your instincts will lead you back to those lost souls?”

“Yup. That vision of Hell haunts my dreams, and I dowse for the dead on instinct. Maybe I can detect the dying too.”

So here we were: one woman, one resurrected man, and one rescue dog with “gifts.” We might be up against the entire immortal Egyptian empire, but we were ready to rock and roll.

The only thing we weren’t willing to do was roll over and play dead. We all had a lot at stake. Oops. Bad expression.

Quicksilver thirsted to confront his ancient hyena enemies.

Ric ached to destroy anyone or anything that preyed on innocent victims.

I needed to redeem the unhappy pasts of both my partners, man and dog.

THE ELEVATOR DOORS opened on deserted halls depicting the eternal Egyptian decorative combo of earthly and afterlife paradise and a passage through the murky underworld separating these two desirable states.

We all paused, awed. Ancient oil lamps cast an ambient glow like the high-tech, ultraviolet-filtering low lights museums use to shield irreplaceable artworks. They illuminated everything.

The hundreds of thousands of ordinary humans who produced the Egyptian culture’s prodigies of architecture, art, writing, and religious complexity for their time and place were almost supernaturally gifted.

Add to them a vampire’s eternal life and strength and they were terrifying.

They always say, “Don’t look back.”

That’s what someone somewhere sometime must have told Dorothy Gale after she got back from Oz, I bet. Dorothy, don’t look back! Don’t see the curled toes and striped socks of the Wicked Witch of the East lying dead under your tempest-tossed house. You didn’t kill her. Fate did. You can’t afford to feel guilty in a land where Wicked Witches will eat you alive.

Irma was playing Greek chorus to me at this moment.

Girl, don’t follow that yellow brick road. They play for keeps here. Death is the game, my pretty, and those ruby red slippers of yours? Take another gander. They’re black butt-kicking boots. No pretties here but us.

I looked around at the large jars and linens, deciding we’d arrived in a mortuary temple storeroom. I’d been boning up on ancient ways along the Nile since my first foray “way down in Egypt land,” as the old spiritual put it, where Moses told Pharaoh, “Let my people go.”

I glanced at Ric, trying to picture him as the Charlton Heston film version of Moses. I saw a bit of the liberator but not the asexual religiosity, thank goodness.

Quicksilver growled as Ric did a rapid visual survey.

“Great stuff for the tourists,” Ric said, “but my dream featured the deep, dark, down and dirty parts. That’s where we need to go if we’re going to free anybody from being kept as enslaved food for an aristocracy of immortal vampires.”

Ric’s glimpse of enslaved vampire food kept like cattle in cavern camps overrode the memories of his own torture for now. I was thankful for anything that banished such pain. Still, how could we three rescue “herds” of people who’d survived thousands of years beyond their time?

He must have explored far beneath the royal pomp and circumstance areas of the Karnak’s inner necropolis to have discovered the vampires’ human food supply before he’d been captured and became it.

I shivered inside my warm catsuit. Helena’s therapeutic intervention still dampened Ric’s bad memories. What would happen when they fully exploded back into his consciousness?

If he remembered his torment, would he also remember I’d kissed him back from apparent death, or the brink of it? Would he love me for doing it? Or not. Love me or loathe me? I was becoming a person with either friends and lovers or enemies, nothing in between.

Did I really want to awaken every morning in a city like Las Vegas with its hidden underworld of blood, lust, greed, and death? Did I want to call a glittering playground built upon the exploitation of so many victims home? Maybe we all do that, unknowingly. That was the trouble with the Millennium Revelation. Nobody with eyes and a brain could pretend to be ignorant and innocent anymore.

Rats. That made life hard but… maybe more worth living? Or not losing, at least.

I nodded at Ric. “Lead on, amigo, and we’ll follow.”

We were a team, yes, but sometimes one had to take the initiative. He moved forward with the bold caution of a point man in a SWAT operation.

So far we’d only intruded on the lavishly decorated corridors of an ancient Egyptian tomb. Although the chambers and halls we passed were empty, we never had a sense of being alone. The eerily lifelike painted bas-relief human figures on the walls ensured that. In shades of red, yellow, blue, and green, the people alongside us were forever frozen in their daily occupations of work and pleasure, their black-outlined eyes always facing the viewer and on us.

The hieroglyph of their god Horus, an ever-vigilant open eye, supposedly had inspired the watchful “private eye” logo of the first and most famous private detective agency in the world.

The nineteenth-century U.S. Pinkertons’ “We never Sleep” motto and open eye symbol had set the PI standard ever after.

So in the shadow of sloe-eyed, life-size Egyptian hunters and courtiers and pharaohs and boatmen and handmaidens and beast-headed gods, Ric checked every corridor each way.

A pulsing muscle in his cheek caught the light of the ancient lamps that allowed us to proceed without using our small, high-intensity flashlights.

Some seductive perfume in the smoke-wafting oil blended with the dusty, dry air and snaked almost physically through these chambers and narrow passages that angled up and down without stairs.

Ric always took the downward path.

Claustrophobia? Oh, yes. I had it.

Yet this grandiose tombscape also felt seductively peaceful, even intimate. All those white-garbed silent figures we passed seemed to acknowledge us in our somber cat-burglar black as we stalked images of their daily lives.