I was thinking one of those resident tequila-bottle worms, being obviously uninhibited, might have a smashing creative career as an artist with the right manager.

Actually, the brains behind the maggot art project was an entomology expert who aided law enforcement on handling insects as crime scene evidence. Even my own “Maggie” was immortalized by the Nightwine media empire.

A click elsewhere on the CSI site produced the tape of Maggie and me doing our garbled version of a graveside soliloquy. TV reporting had made me an effective line reader. A tear was wandering, maggot-wise, down my nose when the segment ended.

Get it together, I ordered myself, to cut Irma off at the pass. I hit my bookmarks on the ancient-Egypt sites. Sure enough, Shezmou was there exactly as I’d seen him, under several less pronounceable spellings of his name, Shesmu, et cetera. His being a blood demon and Lord of the Slaughter was a constant, though.

And Bez… his name was spelled only one way: Bes. You’d never want to call him “Bess,” though. Bez was the phonetic version and much better. The sight of his curly mane of hair and beard and genial Bert Lahr Cowardly Lion face made me feel another almost labor-pain wrench of loss for Quicksilver.

I wondered where the two forgotten gods were, now that the underground food pens were history. Had they retreated back to their pillars if Anubis had left any standing?

Deliberately leaving tragic memories of the Karnak, I switched to my email, two screens full of unopened email, mostly Nigerian in origin.

I started deleting with a vengeance, then blinked and checked my Delete file. There it was: brimfulbabe@snowkissedsluts.sup.

Dot-sup was a new URL address, pronounced “soup,” to handle the explosion of supernatural websites after the Millennium Revelation. Those not in the know pronounced it “sup” as in “dine.” That was also appropriate for our new supernatural population of vampires and werewolves and such.

Brimfulbabe@snowkissedsluts.sup sure sounded like a Snow groupie user name. I skimmed my new mail list. Among the “AWARD” and “FOR YOU, DEAREST ONE” subject lines were several slugged “Graduation.”

It had been ages since I’d graduated from anything, so I checked the email addresses. Yes!

Amazed, I recognized such user names as infernobait, stonedonsnow, snowgasm224, cocainiac, snowkissedslut, all at a new web address, kissedoffsnow.sup.

The Snow groupies were having a weaned-off-the-Brimstone-Kiss graduation ceremony tomorrow night and they wanted me to be valedictorian. Self-esteem had won out over the one-time multiple orgasm kiss and doomed hope of ever getting another from Cocaine the rock star.

I felt the first rush of positive emotion since Quicksilver had vanished into the beetle pit. Maybe I should attend, I thought, teary eyes blurring the screen. Maybe I’d really helped these women. Maybe they really liked me.

I opened a few messages to make myself feel better. And got another bolt from the ethernet. Lilith! They’d found mention of the Seven Deadly Sins rock band and lead singer Cocaine on lilithluvsluci@brimstone.sup. They’d emailed her to attend their “Solicitous” get-together.

I couldn’t ask for anything more in my quests to find my double as well as figure out who’d killed the Snow groupie behind the Inferno Hotel.

Well, one thing more. I could wish that I was still as pure as the driven “Snow” when it came to the Brimstone Kiss. I was not the innocent anti-Kiss crusader who’d organized this groupie self-help bunch a couple weeks ago.

Since then, I’d taken the Brimstone Kiss myself, under duress. I hadn’t had an orgasm, much less several, and I’d never become addicted to anything afterward but shame.

Still, I was a fine one to talk now, and that’s just what they wanted me to do.

I’VE BEEN CALLED nervy a few times since I’d come to Las Vegas only weeks ago. Actually, I’m liking it. Kansas Delilah could have been called determined but never nervy.

Tonight I felt nervy in a bad way.

Despite having faced off a few fistfuls of major mobsters and monsters lately, I approached the deserted Strip shopping center with icy fingers and damp palms.

Only one storefront was lit from within. Funny that this fluorescent sign of life unnerved me more than a fey power touchpoint or a fully packed zombie mummy tomb underneath the Karnak Hotel. I was only going to confront a roomful of mostly middle-aged women.

Imagine, a bunch of ordinary mortals had my knees knocking! The silver familiar seconded my cowardice by shrinking to thread-fine chains and taking cover under my “CSI V as in Vegas” black tee.

A good thing I’d paused at the Enchanted Cottage mantel to push Caressa Teagarden’s funky green-stoned ring onto my middle finger. It might either draw my “twin” or simply underline any “up yours” gestures I had to make in traffic. Just kidding. I’d never do that to Dolly. Some road-rager might mar her perfect hand-waxed-by-me black finish.

I left my adopted cop duty belt locked in Dolly’s vast empty trunk with an unwanted memory picture of Quicksilver’s concealed ride-along there. To ensure a low profile, I’d even parked the huge ’56 Caddy before a closed dry cleaning establishment. That was six doors down from the array of small, high-mileage late-model cars lined up in front of the unlabeled storefront like a gang of motorized roller skates.

I’d worked hard to become nervy and shameless all my life, but now I had a major case of Cringe.

The emails flooding in since yesterday had begged me to show up tonight.

“We need you there, Delilah,” they typed in twenty-some messages. “Graduation Day wouldn’t be the same without you, without the one who started us on a New Path.”

Oh, Lord. I sounded like some cheesy online soul-saver.

They’d even kept up the rent on the former Weight Watchers space, meeting here daily under their own will-power, they told me.

Why? They’d actually bought into my hokey gambit of substituting dark chocolate kisses for white chocolate kisses to symbolize their resolve to grow beyond the addictive memory of Cocaine’s unforgettably sensual Brimstone Kiss.

They had determination, chutzpah, heart.

There was only one bluebottle in the ointment. Me. While they’d been meeting and weaning themselves off the addictive smooch, I, Delilah Street, anti-Brimstone Kiss crusader and the liplock liberator, had become a Brimstone Kiss veteran myself.

Whining that I’d been forced to accept the fatal kiss to save a life… swearing that I didn’t get one fattening, illegal, or immoral thrill out of it, honest, especially not a-gasp!-multiple orgasm, not even one teeny tiny singular orgasm… nothing except… some insignificant, way less than minor, mild body-to-body stimulation even an automated statue of a Greek god at Caesars Palace’s fountain attraction might have been guilty of…

I paused before the kind of glass-paned steel door that had led to a lifetime of various small businesses, swallowing hard. Swallowed pride really does leave a supersize, almost lethal lump in the throat. Ironic that Snow, as lead singer, Cocaine, for the Seven Deadly Sins, had adopted the role of Pride.

I’d rather have faced six half-were gangs like the Lunatics, three pyramids full of zombie mummies, even a seven-course meal of Hector Nightwine’s creepiest favorite things than know that I was something worse than the worst unhuman, a hypocrite.

Still, I couldn’t knock the feet of clay out from under my fervent converts just to salve my corroded conscience.

I pushed inside.

And was greeted by Partee Central and a blaring boom box.

The usual metal folding chairs filled half the room, but had been pushed askew to make room for conga lines of women hip-swinging to a familiar music list: all the upbeat numbers from the Seven Deadly Sins albums. (The SDS was one of the few rock groups still popular enough to have best-selling albums.)