I wasn’t crazy about all those lethal figures of speech, but Ric was inviting me into an element of his culture, if not his world (I hoped). His equally inviting voice and eyes made it hard to say no. Someday soon maybe I wouldn’t be able to say no to him about something way more serious.

The next day I hied to the Fashion Show Mall on the Strip and hinted to saleswomen older and bonier than I was where exactly I was bound. They winked and sold me a three-tiered indigo silk skirt with flounces at the bottom and a mesh camisole to match, plus a black lace mantilla for a shawl.

At home, I pulled my Wicked Witch of the West fifties plastic-and-rhinestone heels out of their box. Weird how everything vintage had survived the weather witch's insty tornado. Maybe old, pre-Millennium Revelation things didn't do post-Revelation hexes. The clear plastic heels twinkled with aqua rhinestones and the vamp (excuse the expression, it's a shoe thing) outlined my toes and instep with flamboyant rhinestone coronets.

Overdressed? Maybe. But then, could I really compete with Ric, who was a dandy sartorial blend of a young Tom Wolfe (ouch, wrong family name) and early Prince?

Before I left, I checked myself out in the full-length mirror at the end of the hall. The lighting here was dim, but the rhinestones on my shoes sparkled. I squinted. Wait! The rhinestones looked red, not blue. In fact, my whole figure looked angular and black and I had a green face and damned if I wasn’t seeing the real Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz wearing Dorothy's ruby slippers. Nightwine's "enchanted cottage" was getting to my imagination.

I stamped my foot in spunky Dorothy fashion. "Get out of my mirror, you mean old witch!"

The figure wavered as if under water and I saw it had been myself, the way you can look at something very familiar and see it completely differently. A red nightlight from down the hall must have reflected in the rhinestones on my shoes. The light was so low that my clothes had lost their color, that's why the nightlight. I shook off my sense of seeing someone else look back at me. I didn't want to start the evening spooked.

Plenty of time for that later, my pretty, Irma warned me with a sinister giggle borrowed pitch-perfect from the Wicked Witch of the West.

Quicksilver, in the background, was bewailing my abandonment at the quaint cottage that was Hector's guesthouse and my new digs. I stood on Sunset Road, waiting for Ric. I didn't want to introduce Ric and Quicksilver at the front door, which the dog guarded like the drawbridge to the Tower of London crown jewel collection. Not that I minded that after glimpsing Las Vegas after dark. The older Corvette that cozied up to the curb was low, sleek, and colored bronze. As in "bronze god," no doubt. Ric leaned over to open the passenger door.

I lowered myself into the leather seat and pulled the safety belt over my shoulder to snap it into the latch. We zoomed into the dark, up Highway 15 that paced the neon-lit Strip for a few miles. Then the car charged onto a rough-and-ready ribbon of unpaved road into the empty desert dark where the stars gathered into a mascara-thick layer of glitter. We were on an endless zigzag toward the Spring and Sheep Mountains. In the blue-tinted glass roof above me stars whizzed past like comets.

"Werewolves are ultra discreet," Ric told me, the dashboard lights playing laser tag with his clear-cut features. "They can afford to be, since, unlike vampires, they can pass as perfectly human most days of the month…if they're not raising obvious hell like your biker gang. Everyone overlooks it. Cops. Media. Tourists."

He went on, as if lecturing at some alternate world Quantico. "Some werewolves are almost like us, except for a little moon-madness once a month. Not too different from the female of our species."

He glanced at me sitting a little stiffly in a seat that was semi-reclined by design. "Nice shoes, by the way."

"Thanks. What am I going to see at Los Lobos?"

"Mostly traditional Hispanic werewolves. Not many gray timber wolves or white Arctic ones. Yellows and reds, in daily life everything from gang-bangers and taquiera owners to music idols. A mix. Werewolves come in all styles and flavors. Some are enforcers for the casino owners. Some are the owners. Some are wait staff. Some are your friendly neighborhood janitors and maids."

"And you?"

"I'm your friendly Latino ex-FBI guide. I don't belong anywhere, but I go everywhere. Okay?"

"Yeah. Lone wolf. I get it."

I'd bought a doll-size purse on a long chain that I could wear while dancing, so the mall sales clerks had advised. It fit fine on the teeny table made for cocktails and appetizers.

The room, with a mirrored ball high above flashing laser lights, was dark and cavernous, divided down the middle at ceiling level by a Plexiglas sheet that reflected the mirrored ball, Below it, Us and Them mingled. Most looked like thee and me. But some of Them were scary, at least to someone who'd done the Asphalt Stomp with a full gang only a couple nights before.

Some were half-changelings on two feet with snouts and body hair disturbingly like fur but without the rabid expressions of the gang that had attacked me. Some were dressed. Some were undressed except for the rust and cream fur that reminded me that Quicksilver was silver and black and cream, and bigger, a seriously large-boned dog who could take out a gang of lean, agile werewolves. I was glad none of that bunch had managed to penetrate his thick fur, after what Ric had said about the half-weres’ lethal bites.

Ric allowed me to savor one huge Midnight Margarita, moon-blue from Curasao, before he coaxed and prodded me onto the dance floor. All around us human couples were swirling and twirling in the sexy Latin couples dance called salsa. Others not so human were bumping and grinding, doing the werewolf two-step.

"I can't dance," I told Ric again. Don't ask me.

But Ric was in his element, actually in his shirtsleeves, which played up his warm mahogany coloring. I was overdressed for a roomful of petite yet full-bodied Latina women slithering like snakes in their low-rise jeans and plunging, shrunken, midriff-baring tops. Ric was The Man in his white business shirt, high-end slacks, and brassy gold belt.

"It's just a three-step," he said. "Cha-cha-cha."

I mimicked his steps, looking down, trying to master the simple pattern as it shifted from forward to back and side to side.

I watched his feet, his legs, his hips. He had rhythm, that inborn Hispanic sway. All the men in the room, hairy or not, had it. Their moves were as macho as a matador's, sexy and sleek.

I was watching Ric's hips more than his feet.

One, two, three. Oooh! That ultra-slim gold belt was almost over the top, but it gleamed like the scales on a serpent in Eden.

He caught me moving to the motion of his hips, not his feet. He smiled with almost palpable pleasure, slid the belt out of his tailored pant loops even as we kept up with the steps and the music, and refastened its gold links around my hips.

Then he whispered: "As Jimmy Buffet says, 'I wanta see some movement below the waist out there.'"

"I don't have a waist." I sounded like a prig even to myself.

"Oh, yeah? Just watch." Rick grinned, hooked his thumbs in my skirt's elastic waistband and pulled down about three or four inches. I gasped as the cold metal of his belt hit my warm flesh. The skirt was barely riding on my hips, my navel was sucking air, and whistles echoed all around us. Wolf whistles, of course.

I could have died from embarrassment.

Other dancers were watching us out of the corner of their eyes. Some brown, Some black. Some lupine yellow. An awful lot of the chicks here sported pronounced widow's peaks.