GHOSTS WERE FOR sissies, I'd decided.

Vegas had a lot more potent supernaturals to worry about.

Dolly awaited me under the porte cochere beside my cottage. I slid into the red leather driver's seat and revved her powerful engine. Getting behind that giant pizza-size vintage steering wheel gave me the sense of power and direction I needed right now.

I tooled through the tepid evening dark to the Strip and up the fabled thoroughfare to the Inferno Hotel, a literal "hot spot" on the horizon. The sound of snapping, whipping flames under its main canopy was almost as rhythmic and soothing as the myriad fountains at the Bellagio.

My self-appointed parking valet, Manny, was demon-on-the-spot to take Dolly in hand. His orange scaly skin and gray-green teeth put off some tourists, but he adored classic cars. I was pleased to see that his Inferno uniform had arrived and he no longer wore the ancient Egyptian kilt and accessories of his former employer.

Had he still worn that Karnak costume, I might have lost it and strangled his scrawny orange throat for reminding me what had happened to Ric there.

"You all right, Miss Street?" Manny looked up from admiring the chrome-heavy dashboard.

"Sure. Fine." Easy lies were all I was capable of in public yet.

"That awesome Grizelle has been checking the entry-way every twenty minutes. The Boss must want to see you bad."

He winked as I blanched. I reminded myself that I did not want to see the "Boss" in any of his incarnations, especially hotel-casino mogul Christophe, my blackmailer and Ric's rescuer. Talk about having mixed emotions.

"Be gentle with her," I told Manny as he put Dolly in gear.

" Miss Street," he rebuked, "Dolly and me are soul siblings."

This was not encouraging. The last thing I needed was a demon car.

I bumped into Grizelle as soon as I hit the lobby.

She was indeed haunting the entrance in human form, attired in the deep purple leather suit of a fashion victim.

"Any change?" I asked.

"Not with Montoya."

I'd slowed to brush past her but never stopped. Now I clickety-clicked on the black marble path through the casino carpeting, heading for the luxury tower's elevators. Her own noisy spike heels followed.

"The Boss wanted to know the moment you came back."

"So tell him."

"He's due onstage for his first show any minute. You could see him backstage."

"Sorry. Ric's bedside is my priority. Snow can see me there."

She stopped. "The show will be late-"

"Showbiz motto: 'Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make ' em wait.' Don 't thank me."

I didn't want to see Snow anywhere, so leaped into the first open elevator without looking back. Treating Grizelle like a flunky was probably stupid but it made me feel better.

The bridal suite was on the forty-second floor. I stormed through the unlocked double doors to find Quicksilver panting on the other side, already sensing my approach.

Not just bright, Quick was a great big beautiful dog with all the glorious lupine features-big furry ears, big sharp white teeth, and soulfully intelligent eyes of winter-sky blue, a paler version of mine.

His huge jaws accommodated a grin but his furry brow was furrowed with questions.

"It's okay. I'm sitting with Ric tonight. You can stand down."

He trotted after me through the set of double doors into the huge bedroom anyway.

I stopped just inside, aware suddenly that Ric resembled Vegas's undercover senior citizen vampire, Howard Hughes.

Hughes lay abed atop the deserted 1001 Knights Hotel at the fag-end of the Strip surrounded by lush vampire nurses he never touched and a constant IV drip of sterile blood.

Ric reclined here, supervised by human nurses administering constant fluids and blood IVs to replace what the Karnak 's ancient Egyptian bloodsuckers had drained from him for nearly a day.

The doctor said his circulatory system had slowed almost to a stop, as if he was being embalmed alive. It would take many transfusions and much time to bring him fully conscious.

Thing was, I wasn't sure that the undead vamps at the Karnak hadn't sucked the soul right out of him while they were torturing him.

Had he been clinically dead when I finally found him and used CPR on what seemed to be a corpse? Nobody wanted me to revive him. If he had been made vampire, at least in 2013 there were ways to "live" that way

For the time being, he remained comatose. The one moment he'd opened his eyes when we were alone, I was shocked to see that one iris was now pale silver, not the hot coffee-dark Hispanic brown I loved. What was that about? Had Ric's near-death experience and my heart-felt second-hand Brimstone Kiss transferred a touch of my iffy silver powers?

That was another reason for my speedy return. I'd stopped en route at one of Vegas's many costume shops to buy a cosmetic pair of brown lenses with no correction.

The lenses would have been cheaper at D��j��-Vous, the vintage shop that catered to CinSymbionts, fans who dressed up as the black-and-white CinSim celebrities. I needed these contacts kept secret, and Snow owned that place.

Snow owned a lot of things in Vegas. I desperately hoped one of them wasn't me.

Ducking around the metal stands and medical equipment boxes to lean over Ric's cumbersome hospital bed, I dropped some water from the bedside table carafe onto the transparent brown lens and lifted Rick's left eyelid with my other hand.

I paused to admire the glittering silver clarity of his iris around the pupil's pinpoint black center. Silver was my medium and a hallmark of my paranormal powers. Perhaps in Ric this was a good sign. Or not.

Whichever it was, Ric needed to avoid unanswerable questions when he awoke. The water on the lens drew it to the moisture of his eye like a magnet. Ric's other eyelid opened for an instant.

"Nurse," he murmured, seeing my white dress and probably nothing else.

He drifted back to sleep. I preferred to think of it that way, not as unconsciousness. Not as a coma.

"The doctors," a resonant voice said behind me, "still describe his condition as 'alive.'"

I jerked upright, afraid Snow had seen me slipping in the contact lens. How easy it was to lash out in order to distract him from what I'd just been doing.

"You never believed he was still alive," I spat out as if I lived on Lip Venom. "You'd have let him be carted from that subterranean slaughterhouse as dead meat."

"If he was indeed dead, it might have been easier to let him come back as a vampire than what he may be now."

"Ric never settled for 'easy,' and I don't either."

"And don't I know it." Snow almost chuckled.

Every word he spoke, every gesture he made, was like screeching chalk on the blackboard of my senses. It didn't help that he was attired in his white leather catsuit for the evening's performance, with the jeweled fly reminding me how close and sexual we'd been recently.

Thanks to the Brimstone Kiss, Snow was the only man besides Ric to have seen and touched my naked breasts. That fact made my skin crawl. I suppose a lot of women would have loved getting it on with the sexy rock star, even without being under the influence of the Brimstone Kiss.

They didn't have my sexual history, or rather, lack of it.

"I'm still pissed at you," I said.

He folded his arms over his bared white chest with its lightning-strike scars that I'd been skin-to-skin with for longer than I cared to remember.

"If I didn't have a show to do I'd stay here and spar with you. Montoya is a valuable asset. It's good he's 'alive' in any sense. I'm sure your nurselike attire will comfort him, consciously or subconsciously. I'd be careful about kissing him too deeply until he's fully awake. Who knows what hidden influence you might unleash?"

He left before I could sputter at him for sounding like a spymaster weighing the life and death of an operative. Yet his hint that the Karnak vampires might have infused Ric with foreign elements chilled my anger.

I sank onto the bedside chair, taking Ric's cool fingers in mine and lowering my cheek onto our clasped hands. I didn't like Ric's prolonged coma, and I did fear what he might be when he awakened.

If he awakened.

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