What was it with men in Las Vegas? First Ric, then Nightwine, now this. Snow's fingers made a sensual glissando return trip up my spine to my nape, then began pulling out the industrial-strength bobby pins that held my chignon in place. My hair, like the walls of Jericho, came tumbling down.

"You're ruining the CinSymbiant illusion," I pointed out.

"Illusions are for small-time players. Reality rocks. What's your name?"

He gently tugged down my hair. What a cinematic game this was! I knew he'd really get off on it, so I spoke slowly through a Mona Lisa smile, like Lauren Bacall taunting Bogie with her "put your lips together and blow" how-to-whistle line in To Have and Have Not, a bit of dialogue supposedly written by either Hemingway or Faulkner. Who knew what those old lit guys could get up to?

"De-lie-lah."

"Ah, De-lie-lah." My dopey name sounded delicious in his hybrid accent. He was pulling my hair and head even farther back, almost like a vampire-a rather bloodless one-baring a throat. But a throat wasn’t his thing at the moment.

"Instead of lusting to cut my hair," he said, "I suggest that you grow yours."

He released it and finger-walked down my spine again until his hand slipped under the draped velvet curtain of the gown. "When we make love under a curtain of black and white locks it will look very sexy in the Venetian glass mirror over the bed."

Okay, he was hinting he wasn’t a vampire with that mirror reference, but he sure was a sensualist in my book. I stared into the disconcerting rimless black sunglasses. What's a pseudo-film goddess to do with a line like that?

"You might want to rethink that mirror, Snow. With me, I mean. I have a way with mirrors." I was bluffing, but my close recent encounter with the witch in the cottage mirror had made me cocky.

Maybe I wasn’t just a medium, but a silver medium. I seemed to be sensitive to anything made of silver…a silver-screen movie strip, mirror backing, sterling jewelry…now, mirror-shade sunglasses.

Snow lifted one almost-invisible white eyebrow above the right dark sunglass lens as his hand polished my shoulder blades with my own loosened curls.

"A way with mirrors? Should be interesting. Gotta run, Delilah. I'll see you in your dreams if not in my mirror."

He left as swiftly as he had appeared. The air around us had been electric, charged, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, and always just right, like Baby Bear's bed was for Goldilocks. Except I was closer to Snow White and bears could eat up a girl abandoned in the woods as easily as they could gobble porridge.

After Snow left, it was as if an invisible bubble around us had burst. The crowd tightened around me, buzzing as lights bathed the stage. All the nearby women eyed me, their expressions drenched in envy.

Looks can't kill…yet. So I held back and stood apart as the women surged forward to watch the Seven Deadly Sins strut onstage to screams, whistles, and applause.

The woman in shreds of glittering crimson costume that bared almost everything could only be Lust. Another woman in equally skimpy lurid poison-green was obviously Envy. The rest were guys in stock rock uniforms: tight black leather pants and tarted up jackets, vests, and shirts. Gluttony must be Mr. Patchwork Velvet Vest in vegetable shades of greens, orange, and yellow. Sloth sported drapey silver-gray jersey slathered with white rhinestones. Anger's black leather biker jacket was inset with blood-red lightning bolts. Greed's outfit was the color of money, a forest-like mélange of green, amber, and rust with an overall glitter of gold and silver.

The Sins began playing. Gluttony's insistent initial percussive beat gave way to Anger's rumbling bass guitar. Sloth's rhythm guitar amplified the low vibration until a raw, repeating riff from Greed on lead guitar seized the stage. Then Lust and Envy joined in with a harmonic chorus of mock-orgasmic "oo-oos."

The audience's screams greeted a gorgeous life-size dragon (assuming dragons were the size of a killer whale) as it descended from the high above-stage flies, snorting clouds of smoke and fire from its two heads. I recalled from my Our Lady of the Lake religion classes that Revelations portrayed the Devil as a dragon.

The pale glittering figure on this dragon's back slid down one formidable scowling, bestial head to bound to the stage. The crowd went wilder.

Snow was Pride, of course, the only missing Deadly Sin.

His costume, bejeweled white from shoulder to white patent-leather boot-top, evoked Elvis. The whipping mane of white hair recalled blues-man Edgar Winter, but the total effect was pure blazing fallen archangel, Lucifer in the Sky with Diamonds.

Whew. I found it all so obvious…yet completely fabulous erotic-rock theater. The memory of Snow's far more understated dalliance with me only intrigued me more. Why hadn't the rabid fans swarmed us? Was he somehow invisible to them? I bent to reclaim my fallen hairpins before they were trampled flat. A woman nearby bent to help. We rose together.

"Can I keep one?" the woman pled.

I summed up her pleasantly plump face and the embroidered velvet shawl that camouflaged middle-aged spread. She'd obviously stayed behind to assist me.

"Why?"

She leaned up to whisper hotly in my ear. "He touched it." Her warm, worshiping gaze flicked to the curls I was twisting back into a chignon and pinning into place. He'd touched them too.

"Listen," I told her. "My name's Delilah. I cut people's hair, not the other way around. So forget it. No locks for the lovelorn here."

"I'd pay…five hundred."

"He's just a stage performer. It's all glitter and illusion. Who is he anyway?"

"Cocaine's been the Seven Deadly Sins' lead singer for ten years, but he's so much more. He owns this hotel-casino and hot properties like it all over the world. They're the only places SDS performs anymore."

She had leaned so close that her breath and words blended in my ear.

"The online chat groups say his mouth is hotter than brimstone and they call him Ice Prick, though no one knows from personal experience. The tabloids claim he's an albino vamp. He denies it violently, but I saw him looking at your throat. Let him have it, honey. It'd be heaven."

This was way more than I wanted to know. If I'd read this description in a personals ad, I'd react with a shudder rather than a frisson, given my personal history. What creeped me out most was the frigid prick part, not the vamp suspicions. Accused witches in medieval times had claimed the Devil had an icy penis. Now I knew the reason for the nickname, Snow. It was all sex, drugs, and rock and roll. With the supernatural follies mixed in until undone.

A vampire bite isn't fatal, everybody knew that now, unless the parties wanted it to be. Some vamp tramps ached to become vamps themselves, despite the inconveniences, and that took an exchange of all bodily fluids. Some longed to be drained to death. Maybe it personalized the slitting-one's-wrists in the bathtub form of suicide.

For me, I'd not yet found a way into workable ordinary human sex. Now that I'd connected with Ric, I didn't need to take the obscenic route. But I'd sure enjoyed our little tango duel. Hell, I was only human, even if Snow wasn’t. I knew enough to know what I really wanted and needed: a little love and support. Hard to come by, but I'd glimpsed it now, in two forms, man and dog. I was one lucky girl since arriving in Las Vegas. All I had to do was stay alive to enjoy it.

I peeled the groupie's avid hand off my wrist before the woman tried to skin my back for a trophy-Hector had been right that ghoulie groupies would tear apart the objects of their obsessions-and gave the mock-blind man in the bright lights a last glance. The music was raw, rhythmic, but I didn't need to listen.