"Very good, Miss. Master Quicksilver. I'll leave you two to get acquainted with your new residence."

After he'd gone, Quick and I eased on down the fieldstone walk to the door. The card slipped easily into the old-fashioned Alice-in-Wonderland keyhole. The round-topped door squeaked open on reassuringly old hinges.

We moved into a slate-floored entry hall. Cozy rooms opened off it to either side: a kitchen and dining room, a little laundry room with a big dog bed, a back stoop and a clothesline in the garden!

Also…I found an office off the kitchen and a media room off the parlor. A circular staircase led to a loftlike bedroom with a huge four-poster bed topped by a mountainous embroidered feather quilt and…a master bath with a triple mirror, double sinks, a huge walk-in closet, and a Jacuzzi.

Quick leaped atop the four-poster, deflating the quilt about three feet. Methought the dog bed in the laundry room would make a good footrest in the parlor. After a half-hour of exploring, Quick and I retreated to the front parlor, where I'd installed the dragon urn of Achilles' ashes on the mantel. The place was thronged with window seats, so Quick stretched out full-length on one. I'd poured a glass of sherry from the quaint, mid-nineteenth century bottle on the silver salver. Say that three times fast: quaffing sherry from the silver salver.

I had one thing in common with Hector Nightwine, odious as it was to contemplate. I too liked to combine high and low tech. From this Stratfordian retreat of an Old World cottage I would penetrate New World perfidies of expendable media personalities, crime new and old under the sun, the fate of lost body doubles, and the world wide web of crime and extortion and immortality that made modern Las Vegas all things extravagant and evil.

Quick barked, short and sharp.

I just nodded in reply.

I reached Ric on his cell phone, his face tattooed into my memory from Nightwine's videos like my own personal R-rated image.

"Delilah," he said when he recognized my voice, as if he just liked saying my name.

I like hearing it, from him. Damn it, but Nightwine and his prying cameras had been right on: Ric and I had that certain something going.

"I need to see you," I said. Literal truth.

" Sunset Park? Hot dog stand."

"No. Someplace else." I didn't want us on camera anymore.

" New York, New York food court? Lunch?"

"Yeah. How will I recognize you?" My voice had taken on an alien, flirtatious tone. Ever since I'd tapped into the dead woman's pheromones I hadn't been myself. I liked some things about that, and hated some things. Rick was among the things I liked.

"I'll be the guy who wants to try dowsing indoors," he said.

We shared a cozy corner at a plastic table in the urban New York City-themed food court with plastic chairs and food and knives and forks. Surrounded by faux brick walls with acres of iron fire-escape ladders, I told Ric about my strip mall attack the night before. I needed answers.

"So who were those matted men who tried to make hamburger patties of me?" I asked him. Maybe not so surprisingly, he knew.

"Nasty customers, a rogue gang of rabid half-werewolves. They'd been vampire-bitten in their human forms. It makes their own bites poisonous, even lethal, if you get enough, and they remain half-changed all the time. Not all the half-weres go rogue, but when they do you don't want to mess with them."

"Why aren't there billboards warning against them, like they used to do with AIDS?"

A few years after the Millennium Revelation, an inoculation had made AIDS and all sexual diseases history, at least in the Western world. It drove religious fundamentalists crazy to lose such a sure-fire deterrent to sex, and it made AIDS as legendary as the Black Plague.

"They're an animal form of AIDS, all right," Rick said, "but this is all top secret. It would kill the tourist business if it got out. The big hotels have security teams to take them out if they come too close, but the half-weres are cagey. They make lightning raids, usually at lower-end businesses, sometimes to steal. Sometimes to enlarge the pack."

"What do you mean 'enlarge the pack'?"

He leaned over the plastic table to brush my hair off my shoulders, just for the heck of it.

"Brides," he intoned like Bela Lugosi, following up by leaning way too close and kissing my neck. I laughed, but I didn't mind "necking" with a man who didn't need to tap my jugular like a keg at a frat party.

"Listen, Del. " Ric's voice did a hot blowjob on my neck. "Werewolves run this town."

"You're kidding! These are the only ones I've ever seen,"

"Because they're stuck in mid-change. Frustrates the hell out of them. Most of our regular werewolves are no worse than the mob bosses who founded Las Vegas in the forties."

I stared at him.

"Sure, those old mob guys were pretty bad, but they mostly killed each other. With bullets. Now that whole mob thing has gone corporate. With the Millennium Revelation it became obvious to some of us in law enforcement that werewolves had worked their way up the management ladder in Vegas. Figures. Unlike most supers, they only go feral three nights of the full moon a month, give or take a little waxing or waning. They pass as human and deal as humans most of the time, no more ruthless or crooked than the real thing."

"Amazing. In Kansas we only had the occasional were-cow."

This time he laughed. "I think that I shall never see, a were as weird as…Elsie?”

"So I'm from a farm state. I guess I'm just a hick."

He brushed his lips over my neck again, paused to suck a little. A little bit more. A lot.

"No hickeys," I told him. "I've had it with a lifetime of passes at my jugular vein. You swear you're not a vamp in disguise?"

"I'm not a vamp, in disguise or out. Look. You're an investigative reporter. You have a professional need to know these things. The moon will be full tomorrow night. You should see a cross-section of our werewolf population, not just the Wild Bunch."

"Yeah?"

"I'll take you there."

"I'm not sure I want to tangle with those things again."

"No, it's perfectly safe. Los Lobos. A salsa club. We'll go dancing. Werewolves love to dance."

"Dancing?"

"Yeah. Clubbing."

"Sorry, I'm Black Irish."

"Whatever that is, I'm more than okay with it."

"We Irish don't dance."

"You ever see any of the eighty-one touring companies of River Dance?”

"Yes."

"That's not dancing?" he asked.

"Only with our feet." I pushed my arms stiff against my sides, made a poker face, did one tiny jig step at the ankles under the table. God forbid anyone should see me cutting loose. "It's inbred. Sorry."

He didn't discourage easily but leaned closer, nibbling on my earlobe. All lips, no teeth. What a relief.

"That strait-laced Irish jig of yours is a cousin to the flamenco, one of the sexiest dances on earth. We Spanish can speak with our feet, as well."

"Salsa's like flamenco?"

"Nope. It's a lot easier…and looser."

"I can't see werewolves without going to a dance club?"

"It's the only place you can eyeball the full range of werewolves, the wonder of the change. Come on, it's a hot underground club and even a few gutsy tourists get there. Aren't you up to confronting what the Polyester Set is?"

That last dig did it.

He was still in sell mode. "The moon is just about to pop into full. I'll pick you up tomorrow night at nine."

"So late?"

"We want to be there at midnight, when the wolves run."

"Three hours to kill?"

"Los Lobos has knock-out margaritas, a mariachi band to die for, and killer appetizers."