That’s disgusting! Shut your mouth! I told her.

Irma had been getting on my nerves lately and I didn’t need any help in that department.

I dug deeper for the keys, their spiky prongs my only weapon besides my wits, which had been AWOL lately. A shiver along my spine told me the still-hidden silver familiar was expanding its reach to act as either defensive or offensive weapon. I couldn’t tell whether it was ashamed of me too, or just being sneaky.

I scuffed forward. Retreat in this city is certain death.

“Can I help you with anything?” I asked.

The likeliest suspect here was a wino hunting dregs in the tossed liquor bottles.

“You can help me with everything,” a husky voice answered.

Wrong answer. It was too knowing, too challenging to be a stranger’s voice.

“Did you send the message that you’d located someone I’m interesting in finding?” I asked. Was some anonymous groupie going Deep Throat on Lilith?

“Maybe. Depends on the message you got.”

Why did I think a simple evening run to a Strip shopping center to meet rock-star groupies didn’t require the presence of Ric, or the marines?

I cleared my throat. “I was after information on a murder of a Cocaine groupie at the Inferno. I don’t suppose you’d know anything?”

“I know everything,” the hoarse voice answered.

I bet. It sounded honed on sandpaper, neither male nor female, human nor unhuman.

The figure was slumped so close to the Dumpster side I couldn’t tell if it stood on two legs or three, in shoes or boots, on cloven hooves or big, shaggy paws. The head was a spiky mystery that could be too much drugstore gel or demon spines. Today’s street punks often resembled arcane night terrors of hundreds of years ago.

And why was my armed duty belt locked in Dolly’s truck? Was it because I didn’t want to scare the Snow groupies? Or did I just not want to look “hippy” in a former Weight Watchers venue? Or was I just sexist enough to think that a bunch of women weren’t dangerous?

Could I actually be hoping that Snow was still hanging around to taunt me further?

You gotta resolve that bipolar thing you got going, Irma suggested throatily.

“I know,” I snapped aloud at Irma.

“You know who I am and why I’m here?” the figure growled back. “I don’t think so, Delilah the Dog Slayer.”

How did-? Never mind, it was exactly the right thing to make me wince and lower my guard. “Who are you?”

“You’d never guess in a thousand years, and certainly haven’t in twenty-four.”

“So you know how old I am. So what? It’s public record.”

“I’m not.”

A scrape of leather sole on back-alley grit warned that the figure had stepped away from the Dumpster and toward me.

The stiletto of light that edged the hulking metal caught the stranger in its glare, cutting a foot-wide swath across a death-pale cheek down to the black-leather-booted calf opposite me. I recognized the footwear.

Mine.

Studying the opposite figure, I recognized pieces of my height, hair, build.

“The late, great Lilith, I presume,” I managed to spit out past the rapid hip-hop rhythm of my heart. “I’d heard you might be here tonight. Why show in person only now?”

“You were getting too close.”

“And the Dumpster? How could you be sure I’d exit through the rear?”

Even as I asked the question, I wished I’d been wearing Lilith’s version of my ass-kicking motorcycle boots to use them on my own rear. Snow. He’d been stationed at the front to drive me out the back.

Was I really that predictable? More important, did Snow work for Lilith or vice versa? I waited for Irma to chime in with theories and further critiques, but she kept mum.

“The Dumpster,” Lilith answered slowly, like a Big Sister spelling it all out to the middle-grader, “is ‘our place.’ It’s where everyone else thinks I am you and you know I’m not.”

“Did Snow grab that security tape showing you in my clothes clobbering his groupie to protect you?”

“You think he’d protect you?”

“If it suited his purposes.”

“Which are?”

“Dubious. He did give me a copy of the security recording of the scene. Much as you might like to have me taken for a murderer, you only knocked out the groupie. She was strangled later.”

“That still leaves you a suspect.”

“Unless I can prove you’re still alive and at large.”

“Is that why you’ve been snooping around the CSI V autopsy set?”

“Or are you not dead, but Undead and still looking for victims? Why did you wear the same Déjà-Vous outfit I did that night?

“I might have, like, gone to Déjà.”

“In a pig’s eye! You went there in its dressing room mirror. You copped my clothes, my look, even as I was putting them all together. Just to put the blame on me? Was that why? Still, how could you know that the groupie would accost me inside the Inferno Hotel? Did you follow her to the Dumpster after that? She must have thought you were me and tried to steal another ‘souvenir’ of the hair Snow had touched.”

“So many questions, Delilah. You really were a TV reporter in the boonies like you claim.”

“Kansas isn’t ‘the boonies,’ it’s the heartland, and I was a pretty darn good reporter there.”

There was light enough to see Lilith roll her eyes, flashing as vivid blue as my own.

“Oh, come on!” she said. “You’ve got to admit Vegas has a much better and badder class of supers. This is the Big Time, kid.”

“I’m not used to being talked down to by my mirror.”

“Liar!” It was an ugly accusation but she seemed to be laughing at me. “You get lots of back-talk through mirrors, including from the bad little werewolf girl. And speaking of mirrors, yes, that’s where I get most of my Delilah-brand rags, not from any fancy costume shop, not even Déjà-Vous.”

She’d confirmed my guess at least.

“So,” I said, “if you see me in my hall mirror, you cop my look? Why didn’t you let me see you do it sooner?”

“I don’t do it very often. Your ‘look’ is too hicksville. All that vintage stuff. At least your hot Hispanic guy upped the temperature of your wardrobe.” I saw her slap the flat of her hand on her jeaned butt, jutted out to catch the light.

I shrugged. I wanted to know the how and why of Lilith’s very existence, not her fashion opinions.

“I don’t think you killed that groupie,” I charged, sounding like not killing someone was a bigger crime than doing it. Lilith really turned my head around and my sanity inside out.

“You don’t picture yourself-myself-doing it?” she asked.

“No. I know you didn’t leave her dead. You might have a notion who did, though. You saw her last.”

“Always the unimpassioned investigator, Delilah. You’d think my personal appearance here would rustle up a little sisterly emotion.”

“Don’t dodge the question, Lilith. Makes me think you do know an answer.”

“Maybe it was that creepy guy who was after you.”

“That covers a lot of guys in town, unfortunately, from the Lunatics gang to Cesar Cicereau. Given your earlier description of Ric, I assume you’re leaving him out of that sweepstakes.”

“Definitely. How soon you forget your enemies. I mean that crooked cop who’s been slowly rotting off his humanity one private part at a time.”

“Haskell! He was there? Why?”

“He knows when you’ve been sleeping. He knows when you’re awake-”

I shuddered at her sardonic words. Lilith was right: like the song also said, you better watch out. In today’s Las Vegas, even Santa Claus could be a monster and Haskell certainly was capable of stalking me.

Or her, even before I’d come to town.

Just the mention of Haskell’s name sent a flutter of likely scenarios through my mind on fast-forward: he’d seen the groupie groping me inside the Inferno that night and… figured she was hot and fair game for him? Or… Haskell had killed the woman after Lilith repulsed her, mistaking Lil for me and hoping I’d get blamed.