SHEZMOU STRODE BAREFOOT back and forth along the deep, wide trench that kept the captive vampire meat isolated and helpless.

In the pit, the deep-set mysterious guardians vibrated and sizzled like living maracas. Who or what they were I didn't dare imagine. Ric and Bez and I watched Shezmou with varying emotions.

Bez was still bursting with pride and triumph. He figured the Big Guy was back. I still didn't see exactly how that would save anybody. Curse and kill rogue Egyptian vampires, sure.

I didn't need cheerleading to feel as trapped as the folks opposite us. On second thought, Ric and I agreed that Shezmou was the merely mortal persona of a god who'd sacrificed size and strength to come to life. Such gods could be slain and sacrificed, maybe to rise again in an afterlife, but rarely can they do their worshippers and believers any good in this one.

"It's like a zoo exhibit," I murmured bitterly as I stared across the sinister abyss toward the people scenting freedom and milling about without hope, except for the tourists pushing forward to stare at our bizarre party. " Monkey Island. The Great Ape 'enclosure.' The breeding program for the Egyptian Vampire Dynasty."

"This explains the missing Karnak tourists," Ric said, his expression grim.

"Those poor tourists!" Of course, they expected us to help them. "I can see the terrified whites of their eyes from here. It must be like being abducted on Lost, or imprisoned on Dr. Moreau's island of cross-breeding human-beast experiments. Judging by their small size, the other prisoners are at least descended from the ancient Egyptians. They buy into this mythology, this pantheon of animal-headed supergods."

"You sprang loose one of the most dreaded, apparently," Ric said, eyeing Shezmou, "even if he has some old-fashioned ideas."

He shook his head and sighed.

"I never saw these prisoners clearly when I was here before, Del. I must have been sandbagged fast after getting this far. It's nuts to think you can 'free' members of an ancient race.

"I know keeping them prisoner for generations is wrong, but who am I kidding? A former FBI agent isn't Moses, and these are real living Egyptians. They don't want to go anywhere. They want to stay here. Maybe even as victims. The world is a food chain and has been for thousands of years. Who am I to say it has to stop, anywhere, anytime?"

"Hey." I shook his arm until his greasepaint camouflaged face turned my way.

No wonder Shez took us for serpents in our high-tech "skins" and black war paint. Not all bad. Serpents were wise. And stealthy. And had an unfair but useful bad rep.

"Listen, Ric. I didn't rub albino nose with Christophe to preserve your life and freedom just to have you renounce your desert Savior complex. Obsessive do-gooders like you and me are hard to come by."

"It's called simple survival, Delilah."

"Survival is never simple, Ricardo."

He leaned his forehead against mine. "You noticed."

"So now we're here in no-man's-land again. Now what?"

"We've got Quicksilver," Ric said. "I no longer underestimate that dog's mojo. We've got Bez, who must be a world-class ankle-biter if I've ever seen one, and this Shazam character. We five could take on a lot. I just don't know how we're going to transport a couple hundred vampire-abused semihumans out of here to any shelter or safety."

"Maybe we could work up a new Cirque du Soleil show around them."

He smiled palely at my joke. "Freedom means nothing if you don't have any real role to play or work to do. I can shuffle risen zombies off to 'jobs' on desert ranches from sunrise to sunset. They're really only automatons until I free them totally. And don't think the ones I raised to save us at Starlight Lodge a month back aren't weighing on my delicate conscience. I hate to see people used and abused, but it's also pretty bad to be underused."

"Boy, you've never worked very long for a major private corporation, have you? I suppose that's why you left the FBI. Come on, Ric! We can't get anybody out of here, including the Lord of the Type AB Wine Cellar, unless we figure out how to do it ourselves."

My pep talk was all too timely.

A new maraca rumba was heating up in the distance, not just in the pit below our feet. As I'd feared, rousing Sleeping Beauty, aka Blood Boy, would not go unnoticed for long in the Egyptian underworld.

THE CONSTANT SCRABBLE of creatures in the pit had played background to our presence here.

I'd pictured millions of beetles piled atop one another clawing to climb sixty feet to reach the cavern floor.

I'd been thinking of the dung beetles represented in probably millions of scarabs in these five thousand years. Dung beetles were as sacred as cats to the ancient Egyptians. Their skill in rolling balls of dung to feed their massive underground broods provided symbols of renewal and resurrection.

Scarab amulets were placed over mummy heart sites. They'd become a modern jewelry object. I could deal with them.

"Aieee!" Bez cried in horror. He shrank as close as a child to me while we viewed the massed, writhing beetles in the stinking pit below.

"Such relentless devourers," he moaned, "of skin, hair, horn, furs, feathers, and mummy wrappings. They can enter the snuggest tomb to disfigure the dead and make them unfit for eternity."

At his words I ID'ed the little buggers. So these weren't the sacred scarabs, aka dung beetles, of lore and jewelry design. These were a nastier sort. Who hadn't watched a CSI episode where a swarm of flesh-eating dermestid beetles picked skeletal remains clean in the forensics lab?

"Away, foul Apshai," Bez shouted, his voice echoing. "Even the Book of the Dead abhors your very name."

What a gruesome alliance nature and the Karnak vampires had devised! If the beetles were inadvertent guards who held the people of the caverns captive, they themselves were also prisoners of the pit, living by picking flesh from the animal and human bones that eventually fell into their innumerable midst. Maintaining a "herd" of slowly sucked-to-death vampire victims was not a neat or humane process.

Now I heard the distant click of more than the imagined billions of beetle legs and pincers behind us. Worse, although the noise echoed off the walls of the pit below, it came from the forest of pillars, from far at its rear.

And it was gathering momentum, like oncoming rolling legions of millions of glass marbles streaming through the thick-set pillars, striking stone and caroming off, spinning along the gritty floor on an incline, gathering incredible mass and speed.

Ric and I turned and froze, heroes in a B-movie horror thriller.

Bez jumped up and down, one fist filling his wide mouth as moans of warning and despair tumbled past his knuckles. We were too stunned to check out Shezmou, but spotted a silver-gray streak zooming toward us like a ground-bound meteor.

It was Quicksilver as I'd never seen him before, running with ears pinned flat back, tail straight out to avoid drag, all four paws seemingly off the ground at once, heading our way.

Behind him came the rolling thunder of an army of oncoming foes of no description we could imagine. We spotted a low muddy-brown tide scraping through the pillars as if carrying thousands of twigs in its path, coming flash-flood fast.

It burst through the last rank of pillars into the clear area before the pit, revealing a ground-hugging army of brittle brown forms, fanged and clawed, of all lengths from one foot to fourteen or fifteen. A carpet of moving, mummified crocodiles.

My silver familiar had gone reptile in reply, snaking a braided rope out of each of my catsuit sleeves and then filling my palms with a cold metal whip butt.

I was no Lash La Rue or Indiana Jones, but my instinctively lifting my arms to repel the odious menace sent out coiling ripples of thick silver "snake" chain that tangled in stubby crocodile legs and caught in their brittle ridged scales.

I was lassoing lethal luggage. Each spasmodic jerk of my arms spun a zombie croc over the pit edge behind us.

The hissing and scrabbling below met falling crocodiles. Up bellowed a powdered red fog of beetle shells and mummified crocodile scales like a steam engine pouring out smoke.

Near the pillars, Quicksilver jumped atop a twelve-foot-long running croc. His snapping jaws seized the dried skin behind its long-snouted head.

Quick's four clawed feet dug in as his weight pushed off the thing's back. The creature skidded straight for the pit, massive tail lashing as I captured it with a silver whip coil so Quick could leap free of the powerful club.

Bez crouched to grab the baby crocs under two feet long by the tail and fling them into the instant garbage disposal behind us, now seething with the death and disintegrating agonies of small, live beetles and huge mummified predatory Nile crocodiles, two species once sacred to the Egyptians.

Crocodile rodeo one wild ride at a time wasn't going to stem the lethal tide or keep us from plummeting into the rift with our scaly attackers.

I thought about Ric, then I felt powerful hands curl around my shoulders from behind, bracing me.

I glanced back in gratitude, or farewell, to discover Shezmou behind me. I started to wrest away but he lifted me by the shoulders and set me aside.

He set me aside.

Hell, no!

Just then I felt someone else behind me and hands slide down my arms to my hands, covering them.

Ric.

I glanced over my shoulder again and gasped. The battle had dislodged the contact lens I'd installed to hide his postresurrection silver iris. It was not only fully revealed, but the white of that eye had gone bloodshot.

His hands tightened on mine until I thought the bones would crush. I looked down. His fingertips were oozing blood onto mine and down along the silver whips, which were expanding and twining into a net-I remembered my silver familiar morphing into a net scarf during that wild Corvette ride-suspended above the solid carpet of writhing crocodile mummies.

That giant net settled on them like a cape. Where it touched, mummified corpses turned to powder, to carnelian dust. As new oncoming crocs rushed over it, they too disintegrated into a cloud of rising dust.

I also remembered it took drops of Ric's blood to raise a zombie, and now, apparently, to kill them.

A CHORUS OF coughs behind us proved that this literally poisonous cloud had also enveloped the weakened captives. I was most concerned by powdery contaminants puffing up from the pit as disintegrating crocodile mummies met and smashed beetle shells.

Some beetle varieties did carry toxins. Although flesh-eating beetles were guiltless that way, we were likely inhaling their dried excrement too. Aw, nice.

I checked Ric's face, imagining what millennia-old dust formed of crushed insect carapaces and reptile scales would feel like lodged behind a contact lens. Burning hell. Luckily, the action must have jolted out Ric's sole contact lens without his ever being aware I'd made sure he wore one. I'd have to update him on that at the first opportunity.

Shez and Bez, being gods in demigod form, were apparently immune to mortal reflexes like coughing and tearing up. Quicksilver, now a Redcoat from head to tail-tip, barked out hoarse canine coughs.

Meanwhile, the wondrous carpet of chain my silver familiar had spun, augmented by Ric's strange new silver vision, lay powdered red too. The pattern reminded me, with a chill, of Sylphia's enwebbing prison spun to contain Loretta Cicereau in Madrigal's magical mirror. Right now one pissed-off werewolf mobster's daughter wasn't my immediate worry.

As the last dust settled, the silver links disappeared along with any trace of the mummified crocs.

Ric's hands were clutching what had changed from silver whip butts in my hands to Wonder Woman wrist cuffs above them. The blood around his nails and knuckles had dried and was flaking off. It was as if everything here must ultimately desiccate and die.

He cupped a hand over his silver left eye.

"God, Delilah! A dagger of ice-cold glass stabbed my eye, then some barrier flew away, small and dark, like a crow's wing in the corner of my vision."

An ice-dagger in his Brimstone Kiss-altered eye? My anxious girly heart fixated on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale where the Ice Queen thrusts a sharp cold hook into a boy's heart and that icy control grows in him until he rejects his childhood friend and true-love-in-waiting...

God, girl, Irma kicked in, I'm all for true love and mineral powder bronzer, but get us out of this sandstorm of dried ick pronto!

"Ric, you just lost a contact lens I installed when you were unconscious at the Inferno. Um... it's cosmetically necessary. I'll explain later."

Twenty feet away, Quicksilver braced his feet and shook himself from ears to tail. More red dust rained onto the stone floor to dissipate into motes. Quick had recovered his cool, northern colors of gray fur and blue eyes.

Bez dusted off chubby hands, making us cough again. "Good work. That was like the elder days, Shez, when we gods weren't all living by rules cast in stone and hieroglyphs."

"Indeed," Shez agreed. "I cannot wait to resume my old role, though, toward these new-style and decadent ruling Egyptians. They relish my bloodwine and scented balms and perfumes but have neglected to worship my other role as a winepress of sinful souls, where I stood as Lord of the Blood beside Osiris, as his chosen headsman."

Ric and I checked each other's understanding and pulse rate, wary of our associate's new blood-lusty attitude. Almost everyone with a smattering of Egyptian knowledge knew Osiris was the God of the Dead. His "headsman" must be a pretty bad fellow. What had I let loose on the Karnak and Las Vegas?

"A 'winepress of sinful souls'?" Ric asked Shez, getting to the nitty-gritty.

"So it is written in the ancient texts now known as the Book of the Dead," Bez explained with reverence. "He"-pointing to Shez-"is to be worshipped and dreaded. He is the Lord of the Blood. When evil souls try to slip into the Afterlife he slaughters them, wrenches off their heads, and throws them like grapes into the press to make bloodwine for the pharaohs."

Ric had gone silent. For once I didn't want to break the tension with a quip.

"It is written," Bez went on like any true believer quoting from a holy book, "that he rules in the night of the burning damned, and of the overthrow of the wicked at the Block, and of the slaughter of souls. It is he, Shezmou, the headsman of Osiris, who cuts them up, Shezmou who has boiled their pieces in his blazing cauldrons so that Unas can eat their words of power, can consume their spirits. Unas is mighty, but Shezmou is the Lord of the Slaughter."

I had no idea who this Unas was, and from what little I'd learned of the Egyptian pantheon, they'd had three thousand years to fine-tune an enormous number of gods and functions.

So I didn't doubt that Shez, exacting winemaker and perfume connoisseur, had a dark side I'd never want to meet in person.

Also, though, I figured Ric and I could sure use it now.

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