No way would our pal Shez twist off his head like a cork out of a bottle of blood wine. He was just a dog, for Pete’s sake. Well, not “just” a dog.

Ric called the next day with frequent progress reports on his efforts.

A police search warrant led to a blank wall. The Karnak onyx horses and golden chariot couldn’t be budged to reveal a lower level.

“I’m hunting the Sinkhole tonight,” Ric said during his last call of that long day. “It’s been playing hard to get lately, though.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, Delilah. Keep to your usual haunts, in case he finds his way back.”

I saw the logic, but hated returning to the Enchanted Cottage and the word “haunt.” Once there, I discovered a fish and macaroni TV dinner in the microwave from the witch. A warm bottle of beer sweated slightly on the kitchen table.

The place’s aura had turned tepid and stale to reflect my numb state of mourning. If Delilah was anxious and unhappy, the happy, dancing supernatural staff would let her stew in her own self-pitying juices.

I ate some, sipped some, and went up to bed again, pausing to stare in the front-surface mirror at the hall’s end. Wary, I wondered if fey-bound Loretta Cicereau would appear to berate me for what she’d regard as my betrayal.

Blank. Nothing. Not even my enemies could be bothered with me in this state! The silver familiar had shrunk to a thin, weak wrist chain, and pinched.

I dragged myself into my bedroom and crawled under the light, thick comforter that always modified its temperature to what I required.

That, at least, was working. I didn’t sweat or shiver. I just fell into a deep dark sleep. Almost twenty-four hours gone, I thought before I zoned out. Quicksilver, come back! my mind screamed. Irma didn’t even show up to echo my despair. It was like I was becoming a ghost, fading to everyone and everything I knew.

Even Ric, God help me…

I AWOKE, EYES wide, staring up at the white canopy on my four-poster bed. Oh, my God! I’d somehow done what I’ve never done since a child.

I had turned over on my back during sleep.

Panic made me gasp, drawing heaving breaths. This must be a dream. I checked both sides of the bed. No goggle-eyed alien spectators gowned in white fenced me in.

I rolled onto my side so fast I almost got sweatsuit burns. In the dimly lit room, my eyes adjusted to scan the high, peaked ceiling and the dormer window where Dracula had come calling a couple weeks ago.

No sinister CinSim waited there for admittance, although the window frame cast shadows on my bare wood floor. Nothing loomed above me, or outside the bedroom to threaten me.

I drew deep, calming breaths and read the luminous dial on my nightstand. Five A.M. More than thirty hours. I whimpered my pain.

A shadow from the window vines twitched on my floor like a dark star twinkling. I looked down, around.

Oh, God! Oh, Shazzam… Shamu… Shezmou! Oh, oh, oh, Osiris!

I scrambled half up in the sheets.

I saw-blink-the gray form of a dog sitting guard beside my bed. He was stretched out on his belly, gazelle-graceful paws straight forward, haunches gathered in back, head up… and what a head.

It was a sphinx in the Egyptian wiglike headdress and uraeus, wearing no ears and muzzle, but the face of… Lilith!

How did I know it was Lilith and not me? Because the right, camera-side nostril bore the icy star sparkle of a blue topaz stud. I’d dumped that bit of bling when I’d discovered it made me a marked woman.

Quicksilver and Lilith had merged into a bizarre new form?

This must be a dream!

I turned over on my stomach, curled my fingers into the bottom sheet, and muttered, “This is a dream,” afraid to crawl out of the covers and find I was in my alien abduction nightmare all over again.

SO YOU OPEN your eyes. The room is flooded with daylight and your sweatsuit has huge damp spots under the arms and across the back and the floor is sunny and cheerful and empty of both night-visiting ogres and angels.

And it’s just real life again, swallowed by a loss you won’t admit.

It was also late afternoon, I discovered. Why had I been out so long? I wouldn’t call my previous state “sleep.”

My bedside cell phone had three messages. I rang Ric back without listening.

“Del?” He sounded like he was talking on ice, so careful.

“Yeah. I was… sleeping.”

“Good!” Much too hearty. “Just rest, Del. Since Malloy’s warrant didn’t get anywhere at the Karnak, I, uh, visited your last satisfied client.”

“Nightwine?”

“Cesar Cicereau. He lost his first team of werewolf guards the other night, as you well know, but he can volunteer a second crew.”

“Cicereau is gathering a hunt party for Quicksilver?”

“Yeah. He says his werewolf pack can track the true wolf blood in your mongrel wolfhound now that the moon is full. Sansouci and I are taking them underground.”

“The moon is full?” I’d been underground myself too long to notice. “You and Sansouci? Don’t tell me… Snow is in on this too?”

“Christophe? He’s doing his nightly rock idol riff as ‘Cocaine’ per usual. This has nothing to do with the Inferno. No, Sansouci, Cicereau’s go-to guy, says that freako cop who hassled you, Haskell, hangs out at a biker bar. We can ‘persuade’ him to take us to the latest location of the Sinkhole. Stink finds stink.

“Del, are you there? Awake?”

Not really. I hadn’t realized how many unlikely suspects would be willing to help me find Quicksilver. Now I was thinking some of the methods might be subconscious. My previous night’s “dream” may have been a message: to find Quicksilver I had to find Lilith, for real and for once and for all.

“Good hunting, Ric,” I wished him, signing off.

I didn’t know where I was going, but it would be somewhere.

I ripped off the ripe sweatsuit and took a shower. I opened my closet door myself for once, grabbing jeans and knit top and my customized cop duty belt. Cowboy boot-style mules for my feet.

Dressed, I went to stand before my hallway mirror. Just me looked back. I wasn’t fooled.

“Lilith, you bitch,” I said, “you taunt me with glimpses of your image on film and in my mirror and then you have the nerve to show up in my dreams at the worst moment in my life, in my own bedroom, glued to my dog, the best dog in the whole damn world. Any of them.

“He’s missing now too but he’d never desert me. Maybe you can lead me to him somehow, so I’m going to find you before another day goes by. Just saying.”

VOWS ARE DRAMATIC motivators. I still needed a concrete trail to follow.

I went downstairs to use the laptop in the study/office (unlike Hector, I don’t have room for single-purpose areas).

Why hadn’t I ever explored the CSI V: Las Vegas website before? Maybe it had felt like a creepy combination of vanity and voyeurism.

Of course, Lilith’s autopsy segment was available for download. My shaky hands hit the arrow and I sat back to see my “dead” body-what was the famous T. S. Eliot line about the night? “Etherized like a patient on a table.”

That was how I really pictured Lilith, etherized on a table, helpless, dead. “Maggie,” the lone maggot, wriggled onstage briefly and then the star-making performance was done and gone.

I forced myself to play the entire two minutes, then reran them. Behind Lilith’s bare body, I spotted the blurry, out-of-focus scrubs of minor players like myself.

How little it took to make a star these days: a freaky YouTube video. I could move from “maggot CSI” topics to a “maggot art” page. There, the pallid fly larvae were dipped in harmless colored paints to writhe random strokes on a page, later sold as “art.” Was self-expression now the domain of brain-worms as well as human brains?