"Nurse Wretched," a voice declared from an overhead PA system. I'd given my name as "Ratched."

"This is your patient."

The dim lights came up.

I was not alone. Really not alone. A half dozen clones of me-busty young women in tight white uniforms- flocked around a hospital bed accessorized with trees of IVs and other high-intensity medical paraphernalia.

The object of their attention lay sprawled on the sheets before me, Las Vegas's oldest living vampire, a scrawny, filth-brown man with nails the length of an abused pony's hooves and hair long and unkempt enough to make a supermodel's career.

My heart, and gut, sank.

I'd fought my way into this?

The rasp of heavy breathing magnified by machines surrounded me. My sister nurses grinned to show their sharp canine teeth. The breath sounds? Mine. I was the only breathing being in this place and I was being monitored as if I were the sick person.

"You're here to h-h-help me?" the skeletal figure on the bed wheezed.

I grabbed the stethoscope, finally understanding what a forgotten nest of undead this place was, my knees shaking.

"Breathe," I said, placing the silver circle on that hollow, filthy chest.

"You must be kidding."

"No. I can…read your state of health through this instrument."

The wild-animal glittering eyes focused on me. "And…my state is -?"

"Vigorous." I snapped the bag shut, determined to bluff my way through this. I actually believed it and he so needed to hear it.

The balloon-bosomed nurses arrayed themselves around him like chorus girls. He was used to flunkies, but was essentially a never-satisfied man.

I played doctor, rather than nurse, because only an authority figure could get anything out of this lecherous geezer. "I believe that unresolved issues from your past are hurting your recovery now. Why did the vampires lose the war?"

Even I sensed the instant suspension of all sensory devices: the security, the girls' phony solicitousness.

"Not lost," he huffed, clutching his bony chest.

I immediately applied the silver stethoscope head to it again. My medium. Silver. Even when it was chrome.

"Cold," he complained, writhing with the satisfaction of feeling something, anything. The surrounding nurses showed their fangs and backed off. Those shrunken gums grinned up at me, the teeth brown and sharp, like rusty razors.

"I can make you a star," he promised.

If there's one thing some men like better than gratuitous sex, it's telling war stories.

I lounged alone on the hospital bed with my host while his rakelike fingernails unthinkingly caressed the tape recorder lump on my thigh, taking it for some sort of vibrator, no doubt.

The creepy girl vamps hugged the room's walls, waiting for the old guy to fall asleep. Then they'd storm me for a group bite. I wasn’t as worried about them as the lean and hungry vamps on the street level. Besides, I bet it was hard to catch the old guy asleep. As long as I kept him talking about his glory days of yesteryear, I was okay.

"So you're the sole survivor," I encouraged him, forcing my nurse-white false fingernails (thank God I could ditch them afterwards) through his kinky, gray, snarled locks. Snow's hair was sable-soft but right now his metal familiar had shrunk to a cheesy ankle bracelet with a dangling (two guesses what parts were dangling) Playboy Bunny charm. I was not here to think about Snow, but the old guy might give away something about him before I left.

"Sole survivor." He relished the words the way Nightwine savored mobile olive slices. "The sole survivor to stay on, despite all the mob action, even if I had to play dead to do it. See, my empire was going south. My lieutenants were using the fact that I like my privacy to take over. The Big Boys from the East Coast and Chicago outfits had brought me in to clean up the Alakhazam Hotel operation, but my own staff was conspiring to take over my Las Vegas interests. The only option was to let someone they couldn't buy or bully take over for me."

I got it. "You made an alliance with the vampires."

"Yeah. Good businessmen. Went for the jugular, like I did. Immortality would allow me to pursue my first loves, flight and females. I loved engineering things that people believed couldn't be done. Nice undergarment you're wearing, by the way. I invented that fashion-forward look."

I stared at him the way he was staring at my conical brassiere.

"What?" he demanded defensively. "I read Victoria 's Secret catalogues. Better class of model in them than in Playboy these days. That Hugh Hefner was just a wannabe me."

Actually. Howard Hughes, or what was left of him, had a point.

And then he stuck that point, a curling, yellowed fingernail, down my open blouse front while I pretended to wriggle away in delight rather than disgust.

"You're quite the aerodynamic genius, in the air and in the sack," I cooed. "So who did the deed? Who bit you over to the Dark Side?"

"I'd only let a woman. No guy was sucking on anything of mine. She was a beauty. Dark-haired like you. Built. Lips red as roses. I was going to make her a star."

Wow, was that a tired line! I glanced at the hovering nurses, who were clearly slavering over my virgin neck, wrists, and femoral arteries. All brunet. Crimson-lipped, white-toothed. All right out of a Hammer film from the sixties. Vampire High. Rocky Transylvanian Horror Show Mountain High. I'd fit right in if I didn't figure out an escape ploy.

I'd read up on Howard Hughes during my research. He wasn’t in on the founding of Las Vegas, but came along shortly after. And he had indeed been asked by the mob to clean up the situation at the hotel. His playboy days were fading then, and he probably was tending toward the obsessive-compulsive disorders and paranoia that ended with him holing up in a string of hotels he owned, possessed of a germ mania but in a skeletal, filthy, unkempt state himself, with long tangled locks and mandarin fingernails like claws.

His reported death and burial in the seventies and the location and state of his huge assets and will remained lucrative tabloid paper mysteries for years. He could darn well be exactly what he seemed to be: a madman who had made a deal with the undead. The ramifications were mind-boggling.

Meanwhile, I needed to know more.

"Oh, Vampy Boy." I let a false fingernail coil in his iron-gray chest hair. Singular, as in one hair. "Tell me who bit you into eternity? I need a role model."

The cunning eyes in their corroded setting squinted at me. "Looked a lot like you. A Black Dahlia. Dark devilish hair, heavenly blue eyes, wanton red lips. Vida was her name."

Vida. Spanish for "life." She couldn't possibly be-? No. But she could still be…alive, so to speak.

He went on reminiscing. "She worked for the werewolves, but her heart had turned vampire. Liked the kick of giving blood along with her body. I suggested they turn her all the way just for me, so I could pick who'd suck me into immortality."

The selfish bastard!

"Where is she now?" Poor undead woman!

He shrugged. "She had issues. Left for California with some master vamp. Some Podunk town in Orange County, when I could have made her a star here. So. Now I am vampire. Now you will stop asking questions and become my bride. I need another one."

"I don't date older men." But I was wearing all white…even my undies.

A scrawny but powerful arm captured the back of my neck and drew me toward those neglected-knife-drawer teeth.

Around me I felt the busty nurse vampires closing in. Once he got the first bite, they would get seconds. Pickings were lean around here. Sharp nails dug into my nape, Nosferatu on the march.

The nurses were swarming my limbs, pinning down my arms and legs for their master.