“What are you doing down here?” he demanded.

“What your gentlenesses must also be doing down here,” Bez said. “Exploring maybe, patrolling. The Lands of Their Joint Majesties are minor above, but major below.”

“You’re a guard dog of sorts?” Ric asked.

“A guard god. Yes, a humble one, or I would be much closer to the throne room. But, really, sir”-his oversized head leaned inward-“if you yourself do not harbor millennia of blood tastes, you’ll much prefer these empty, natural caverns, home to those who would practice the old ways but also have no way to defend their preferences, alas.”

“The new ways,” Ric said, “require legions of cowed and unwilling blood donors, indentured for centuries, being born and dying for one reason only: to be food.”

“Food. Ah, yes. One of my favorite things. I admit to a lion-size appetite despite my small size. I must say I like being of this elevated stature your gentle grasp permits.”

The bizarre head that combined features of a chubby man and a lion looked from right to left and back again.

“However, since I am charged with the safe passage of life from mother to child, and most of these born here are meant to be drained, ultimately to the death, I suppose I am obligated to help any liberators rash enough to venture below. I saw you captured here, man-stranger. Your valiant fight gave me hope my people might someday face a kinder fate. If you could use a guide to the Underworld, I would volunteer myself.”

Ric lowered Bez to his chunky legs with a swallowed curse.

“All right for now, Shorty. I’d not seen your like down here, during my brief and, as you state, violent earlier visit. You seem harmless enough.”

“And nice to see you again, sir. Harmless? Always my major advantage, sir, among a very formidable pantheon of predatory-headed gods,” Bez said with a bow. “It’s true I’m partial to the ladies but my role is guardian, which leaves me stranded at a lot of portals while others have all the fun.”

Ric was still dubious. “Such as inspecting women’s thighs, no doubt.”

Bez peered mischievously around Ric at my dark-clad legs. “She wears no linen sheath but I sense the female. No tattoos of me? Not a one?”

“Alas, no tattoos at all, especially of you,” I answered.

“I am considered a lucky charm.”

“But you’re not Irish,” I noted. There was something leprechaunish about him, also Puckish. He was also clearly Egyptian, although oddly so.

“Eye-rish?” he echoed me. “Does that have something to do with the Eye of Horus, which never sleeps? Speaking of such, I advise moving on. Like the River Nile, to move is to make new and in moving one is safer than still water.

“So speaks Bez, the guardian.”

RIC CLAPPED AN arm around my shoulder as we and Quicksilver followed our cavorting guide.

Despite Bez’s assurances, we all kept looking left and right, back and ahead, keeping a 360-degree eye on our surroundings. The area did indeed seem deserted, though we figured from Ric’s seeing hundreds of corralled people down here that some nasty people herders must lurk ahead.

Ric leaned near so I could place my whisper for his ears only.

“If such a creature as this Bez can exist here, perhaps it’s a safer zone.”

“Don’t count out Coyote,” he growled back as deep and low as Quicksilver.

“Coyote?” I was lost. Didn’t he mean hyenas? They’re the African-and now new-ancient Egyptian-variety of canine.

“Trickster god,” he hushed back.

Oh, Irma whispered in my inner ear. I’ve heard of that dude. Well known among Native Americans in the Southwest. Remember that trickster gods are two-sided coins, Dee. Sometimes helpful, sometimes definitely not!

I nodded, puzzling Ric, who didn’t know I’d never outgrown my childhood invisible friend. In fact, I had two invisible friends now, counting the Invisible Man CinSim at the Inferno.

I was always happy to know that Irma and her strong survival instincts were aboard. When she came out to chat, it boded well. Bez might be a guardian god but I packed a guardian goddess.

Speaking of goddesses, I felt the silver Wonder Woman coronet melting down my cheekbone and neck, a cool thread snaking down my torso to wrap my left thigh. Oh, no! The silver familiar was faking a Bez “tattoo” on my leg. More subtle mockery? Snow might claim the amulet’s activity was only driven by my own conscious and subconscious, but I knew he’d get a vengeful kick out of my skin being marked, even temporarily.

I had to stop worrying about what Snow might or might not do to me now that I’d really done him wrong. It was messing with my mind at crucial times.

Think, Delilah, don’t let guilt grab the steering wheel from you!

I didn’t need Irma to goad me on this subject. I was far too aware of what Snow had done to me and I had done to him. I was concluding neither of us came out looking good from that juvenile, supernatural one-upmanship contest.

So I reconsidered the familiar’s latest shift on my epidermis. That damn mobile silver hitchhiker might consider it vital to mark me with Bez’s sign of protection. I surely wasn’t a pregnant woman in need of a mystical midwife. I might surely be a mortal woman requiring supernatural Egyptian protection in the coming hours.

MEANWHILE, I HAD two keen hunting dogs for partners.

“I recognize this stone forest.” Ric pushed past Bez to palm-stroke a shoulder-high scratch on one massive pillar. “I used my fingernails to etch my path.”

“Hieroglyphic cookie crumbs. Good thinking, Hansel.”

I rushed ahead to another marked pillar. The faint marks on the exposed fresh stone stood out down here, even in the eternal twilight glow.

“Naughty, naughty!” Bez cried, dancing after us as if his bare feet trod hot sand. “The royals don’t want any graffiti but their own on their walls and pillars.”

Ric and I caught each other’s glances, then laughed. We had reason to scoff at the royals’ rules after enduring separate capture by them. Being considered trespassing graffiti artists tickled our senses of humor and survival. When your life is on the line, there’s no sense going down sniveling.

Quicksilver demonstrated the same spirit by stretching his six-foot length up a pillar and dragging a front fang along it. He turned to grin at us. A crooked line like a faint lightning bolt was his mark.

That sky-set signature was more than appropriate. I noticed the silver circles on his collar had swollen into almost full-moon roundness down here. Did that mean he sensed the lurking presence of his canine cousins, the royal hyena corps? I hoped not.

“How’d you get this deep on your own?” I asked Ric. “I trapped myself in a mummy case-guarded hallway near the hotel levels. I only descended a few levels to reach the royal throne room for a disdainful interrogation session. The Twin Royals had nothing on Captain Kennedy Malloy of the LVMPD in the disdainful department, I must say.”

Ric eyed me sideways, amused. Little did he know he owed his two coffee-dark irises to a contact lens I’d slipped into the one that had turned silver.

“Kennedy isn’t as possessive as you think,” was all he said.

“Maybe not, Mr. Tequila Smoothie Montoya, but I’m a lot more possessive than you think.”

Ric hadn’t been conscious to see me poised to battle Grizelle’s huge tiger form to the death.

He smiled ruefully. “I lucked out to get this deep unchallenged. In the desert you learn to move silently, so the rattlesnakes don’t strike. We don’t want to linger down here. The last time I did that it didn’t turn out so swell. So, no, I didn’t take your handy dandy elevator ride down, I just followed the yellow sandstone road.”

When I lifted my eyebrows, he swept his rubber sole over the yellow sand covering the limestone. “These paths go down stories and stories, like the staircases in the London Tube. Ever been there?”