"You should be! Achilles was worth six of you. He got blood poisoning from biting a vampire ten times his size. You tackle anything like that lately? No, you pick on passing strangers. Achilles didn't need to harass hapless women with bewitched hairs."

"Yet the echo of his hair bewitched you. Just that. Nothing to do with me."

"Nothing to do with you. Look. I'm the last woman in the world who'd ever be in your fan club. I think you're despicable, the way you encourage your worshipping fans, poor, deluded creatures. It's immoral to kiss them into insensibility so they become mindless zombies. It'd be normal if you'd screw them, but, no, you keep them lost in permanent unfulfilled infatuation. I've seen them wandering around the Inferno, drinking, gambling mindlessly. Maybe doing drugs. That's a shitty way of drumming up loyal customers, Snow. I've even been suspected of killing one of them because she fixated on me after you mauled me in the Inferno Bar."

He leaned back in his white leather executive chair, balancing a black Mont Blanc pen on his pallid fingertips. "You weren't exactly stopping me."

"I took you for an amusing freak," I said, very deliberately.

I couldn't see any expression behind the dark glasses but his fingertips pressed so hard on the pen that I actually saw them grow whiter, or maybe they looked that way because a blush of pale pink blood showed through his skin above the pressure points.

Interesting. He had a circulatory system. That was a big argument in academic circles: did vampires have circulatory systems? Sure they drank blood, but since they were dead, they didn't have a heartbeat or a pulse. Given their rep as hot-blooded lovers as well as big drinkers, how the hell did they get it up without a pulse or heart beat? Assumption was only available to a few select saints, and they all skedaddled for heaven, not vampire games. Vamp tramps, totally hooked on the blood-sucker-as-Don-Juan mythology, would never tell. They were mesmerized by the vamp powers, and any tales they lived to tell were big on ecstasy and vague on details.

"I took you," he said finally, "for an amusing fool."

I'd been called worse. "I want this off!”

"Can't do it. It has a mind of its own, in case you hadn't noticed."

"It's your familiar."

"Now I'm a witch as well as a freak?"

"Or a warlock."

"You don't know what I am."

He had me there.

"But you'd love to find out." He leaned forward as I leaned away. "You can't resist finding out, can you, Delilah? Your whole life has been about finding out…about other people, not yourself. You don't have a life."

I understood that calling him a freak had brought this challenge and I was momentarily ashamed. A reporter gets used to feeling like an advocate of the downtrodden. Snow? Downtrodden? What about my manacled wrist?

Even as I thought that, Snow said, sympathetically, "It could be worse."

In demonstration, my solo handcuff linked to one that appeared on my left wrist.

Snow grinned and picked up the pen again with unbound hands. "Is your cuff half-empty, or half full?"

This kind of confinement ramped up my horizontal binding phobia, which Haskell had done nothing to help. I was stuffing panic down as fast as it raced up my esophagus to my throat, keeping cool.

One cuff immediately snapped open and my left wrist dropped free.

Snow spoke seriously. "The police didn't need to cuff you merely to bring you in for questioning."

I hated that he guessed, or knew, about my humiliating arrest. "This police detective named Haskell did," I said. "He's a bully and bigot."

"What's to be bigoted about you? Unless someone discriminates against annoying snoops."

"It was about the company I keep."

He digested that for a few seconds. "I still haven't made my point." He nodded at the half-handcuff. "It could be worse."

The cuff thinned and wrapped itself around my wrist like a serpent, spilling chains over the top of my hands and ringing one finger.

I'd seen some heavy metal bands. I knew this arrangement of chain-linked wrist bangle and ring was called a "slave bracelet."

"I'm a mammal person," I said, "I don't agree."

"Or even worse," Snow said.

I felt the icy swift shiver of the silver snake move up my arm and down my torso under my clothes, settling in a broad cold swath around my pelvis and streaking between my legs to harden into shape with a metal snick like a lock turning.

It felt like a chain-mail bikini bottom, not that I'd ever had a personal acquaintance with one. Haskell and his rough handcuffing were forgotten in the face of a medieval device turned bondage accessory: a freaking chastity belt. It recalled my recent nightmare. Fear became fury, then fear again.

"Obviously, it's not my familiar," Snow said, yawning.

Liar! He loved hiding behind his sunglasses and manipulating me into cheesy bondage gear that made me feel naked in front of him, physically and mentally. Stooping to calling him a freak hadn't helped.

"Still," he added, "it's a good thing that coveting is a commandment and not a Deadly Sin."

Before I could react or speak, the silver snake slid away again, ice water on the move, back to my wrist. Oh. It had morphed into a bracelet dripping charms: a circle of adorable Achilles faces, long-haired, hidden-eyed, sagacious.

"An admirable breed." Snow dropped the pen to the desktop like a small bomb. "I've always been partial to Lhasas myself."

I was still fighting not to blush at the unexpectedly warm sensations the adventurous example of "could be worse" had caused. Snow was interested in me, in teasing me? Sexually? Didn't he have enough groupies? I eyed the lovely Achilles bracelet and melted a little. Why did I suddenly feel in the wrong for descending to name-calling? That didn't stop a retort.

"I've got more to worry about than your migrating familiar or my hijacked drink recipe. My freedom is on the line."

He nodded. "Mine as well. Do your job, Delilah. That's the fastest route to the freedom you crave. And maybe mine."

I didn't know what he meant, didn't want to know. I did know it was a good exit line, so I took it.

Nowadays a whole encyclopedia could occupy a disk the size of my little fingernail, and here I sat again in the Clark County Library looking at late twentieth-century microfilm of mid-twentieth century personalities and events.

But that's when Las Vegas was founded, in the post-World War II world of exploding prosperity and post-Prohibition mob expansion. I found it sad that banning liquor had spurred a drunken binge of organized crime in all areas of vice: gambling, prostitution, and racketeering. And the baby-booming Las Vegas founded by visionary psychopath Bugsy Siegel was at the heart of it all, where mobster and middle class met, each legitimizing the other.

Of course, like all visionaries, Bugsy had been punished for it: he had been found dead in 1947 of several bullets to the head at the age of forty-one. The thirties and forties and fifties were the era of drive-by shootings on an epic scale, like the St. Valentine's Day massacre. So they'd shot up Bugsy's pretty-boy face through his living room window.

I unreeled the early history of Las Vegas. First came the El Rancho Grande and the Last Frontier. The 1948 founding of Bugsy's beloved Flamingo Hotel was the turning point. The first hotel-casinos were small, upgraded motels three hundred miles from Los Angeles and an endless drive from the rest of the country, but they were an adventure destination for those lost souls in search of glamour. Only a few years later a successful animator named Walt Disney would create an adventure destination for the whole family called Disneyland.