“I seldom have luck locking you out totally, but keep your comments to yourself right now.”

I drifted off into dreamland and a sleep level they call “fitful.”

A couple hours later I woke up, knowing exactly the right person to call for a spontaneous meeting and an emergency consult. I just needed to wait until it got dark so no one would know about it.

And Irma was back then too.

You’re gettin’ out your black leather motorcycle jacket, mama? I do wanna go where you’re going. What kinda shrink digs in-your-face?

“It’s not a shrink in the traditional sense,” I told Irma. “And you’re gonna love the leggings, if you could see them,” I said, firmly slamming the door of my mind shut on her.

I tossed the jacket down on the bed after a try-on. Vegas nights did cool down at times, not in summer so much, but I was after effect, not comfort. I wasn’t content to leave my appearance to the wardrobe witch tonight and waved away the Goth T-shirt she’d produced on the hanger rack next to my closet door.

My black leggings had tiny skull studs down the sides that coordinated with the buckles on the ankle-high genuine motorcycle boots. That was Goth enough. I shrugged into a white ruffled shirt that would suit a pirate or Mrs. Peel. Then I buckled one last buckle, or swashbuckle, a black leather collar around my neck.

A savvy reporter knows how to dress up or down for the assignment.

My role on this occasion? I was a would-be bad girl going to a bad part of town to meet up with a big bad player. I was glad even Quicksilver wasn’t around to give tails up or down on my look.

No sooner had I buckled the bad-girl collar than the familiar curled around it as a gleaming circlet alternating studs with spikes. At least it felt at home. Too bad Quicksilver wasn’t purse pooch material; now our collars matched. I was glad that thought reminded me to take a wrist wallet for essentials. The top of my right hand already bore my homemade tattoo.

I firmly refused to even think of Jane Wyatt, Helena Troy Burnside, or Irma and her reaction, grabbing the jacket and heading out to my date with Mr. Wrong.

HE’D PICKED THE place since this meeting needed to be secret even more on his account than mine.

Now that I stood in front of the off-downtown location too close for comfort to the nomadic Sinkhole, I regretted my agreement. The giant bunker that passed itself off as a nightclub squatted on a parking lot that stank of spilled four-dollar-a gallon contraband gas, beer and stomach contents. The place boasted a big charcoal-gray metal door guarded by three hulking CinSims, all duplicates of six-foot-seven James Arness as the Thing.

They weren’t terribly articulate beyond Argggh, but one held up an infrared device to scan the membership ink on my hand.

I’d downloaded the spider-on-a-skull logo from the club Facebook page—so much for social networking trumping security measures. Then I duplicated it in the invisible ink formula I’d heard about from my pal at the city morgue, coroner Grisly Bahr himself. Murder victims turned up regularly with the club’s reentry imprint on their decomposing skin, visible only under black light. Classy place.

I breezed by the Three Arghmigos. Inside, screaming guitars and pounding drums easily drowned out any editorial comments from Irma. The scene was Rave Machine meets Vegas motorcycle club. My vision adjusted to the combo of stuttering off-and-on strobe lights and that stripper-bar staple, black light that made white skin and shirts, like mine, gleam the same electric blue as my eyes. I spotted other women present with lots of glitter on eyebrow-raising places, but they were all way less dressed than I was, if you didn’t count ankle-to-eyebrow body ink.

I’d wanted to be instantly visible to my interviewee in this crowd, but my signature look was immediately mobbed by dudes in biker chains. These growling urban werewolves were hoping for an impending full-moon night out to howl while they could still have human intercourse, in both senses of the word. Before I had to impress a few more dents in their gypsy leathers, they peeled away right and left as if Moses was coming along putting a long straight part in the Red Sea. My source was here and announcing himself.

“Bitchin outfit,” Sansouci said when he alone stood before me, the other guys skedaddling history.

I recognized vampire fight mode. He seemed taller, wider, stronger, wilder. His eye whites caught the black light too, gleaming blue as he elbowed away the competition.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Sansouci asked, shifting down into the usual merely intimidating Vegas muscle mode again. He steered me through the crowds in his custody and bent down so he could admonish and question me through the high-decibel rock band wailing from every wall.

“When you set this meetup, I wondered,” he said. “You doing crazy-ass things is my greatest entertainment form in the world entertainment capital. Montoya know you’re off your monogamy leash?”

By then, we’d reached one of the luminous giant skulls suspended on chains at various heights around the vast dark space. I’d checked out the setup on the Spider Skull Bar website, so wasn’t surprised when Sansouci steered me to a swaying skull booth a couple feet off the floor.

Entering it was like stepping up into Cinderella’s pumpkin coach from Hell. Sansouci’s hand under my elbow boosted me inside. We were scooped onto a semicircular red velvet “booth” as our weight swung the skull’s jaws snapped shut. The macabre capsule whisked up over the dancers’ heads to rock gently in the dark.

Whee, Irma managed to blurt.

Whee, indeed. My stomach did that involuntary adrenaline swoop you get from Ferris wheels or sexual attraction. At least I recognized both sides of “thrill” now.

Inside, we sat at a small circular table with a black glass top as round and perfect as a gun barrel. As soon as the swinging-on-a-skull effect slowed, Sansouci used the remote control on the table to shut off the piped-in racket.

He leaned back on the tufting to inspect me from head to boot. So I surveyed him with Vida’s eyes. He was still a handsome green-eyed guy with a slash of silver in his brunet forelock. His black turtleneck shirtsleeves were pushed up to the elbows to reveal a landscape new to me, forearms with matching iridescent green tattoos of snaky Celtic design.

He’d recently made no secret of being attracted to me, so I’d resolved not to fidget under his own assessment, half impersonal surveillance and half lust. Wondering if he could be a remote candidate for Daddy dearest really upped the ante on my nerves.

What I wanted—needed—to know from him was extremely personal and even more confidential. Girlish hesitation wouldn’t get me anything from a man or supernatural like him. I had to extract my information in a way that seemed to feed his desires, but also addressed my increasing fears.

Lucky for me his was a new breed of vampire—developed to go public these post–Millennium Revelation days. A gigolo vamp who liked and lived off women, a few drops at a time, was easier to relate to than the usual desperate lunger.

A screen inset on one of the skull’s eye sockets burned into being, showing the impassively perfect face of the joint’s virtual cocktail waitress. “Your order, please?”

Sansouci cocked a dark eyebrow my way. “You’re the star Inferno Bar mixologist.”

My answer lofted that eyebrow to new heights. “I’ll have a Virtual Virgin.” I ticked off the ingredients. “Six ounces of no cal, no sodium, no caffeine cherry cola, an ounce of lime juice, and a slice of lime.”

“Is there any octane at all in that drink?” Sansouci asked.

“Add two ounces of UV cherry vodka,” I suggested.

“That’ll do for mine,” he said, nodding at the screen. “Skip the lime garnish.”

Our virtual waitress vanished.

“Virtual Virgin.” He savored the name. “You sending a message?”

“I wanted to invent a drink for the sober that could go country or pop.”

The eye socket blinked open with a red flash. Two cocktails in tall, footed glasses sat on a black glass tray. Only one had a skewered lime slice on a swizzle stick.

Sansouci handed me that glass and took his own as the skull’s socket went opaque black again, tray gone. He clicked off the skull’s other . . . porthole, as I’d prefer to think of it.

We were swaying in a sensory deprived environment again except for a black-light blue glow that amped up my white blouse and skin and our teeth, of course. We each sipped our light, and loaded, versions of the Virtual Virgin. I was beginning to regret my nervy attempt to sucker the werewolf mob house vampire into any kind of confession for anything.

“A toast,” he said, “to whatever you think you want from me this time.”

I clicked glass rims and talked fast.

“Why did you c-come . . . show up . . . if you weren’t willing to give me information? You know that’s my job.”

I wished Irma were there to sing, Wrong start.

He smiled at my clumsy attempt to dodge any inciting double entendres. Sexy guys made me nervous. Blame it on my convent school education.

“Fair enough,” he said. “I patronize this private club. These suspended skulls are as secure as the grave used to be. I was curious to see what you’d wear to semi-seduce me, but not really mean it. You never disappoint me there, Delilah. No skin but a whole lot of attitude. I can’t resist a virtual virgin.” He shrugged and lifted his glass as an example. “And I’m bored. Should I say, bored out of my skull?”

I quirked a pale smile at his jest. To get info you’ve got to give info. I ignored the inciting things he’d said—everything but the last phrase. I leaned my elbows on the table and bent in confidentially even though he claimed the skull booth was eavesdrop proof.

“You and your skull are not going to be bored in Vegas very long. Christophe’s come back from Wichita with something that will blow the local supernatural mobs off the map.”

“What, some new venue or power? Out of Podunk Wichita?”

“Wichita is my home town.” I was surprised to hear myself defending a place I once couldn’t wait to leave. “We were just there, Ric and I. And Quicksilver. And . . . as it turned out, Snow.”

“Hmm.” Sansouci gazed down my waterfall of front shirt ruffles as if it wasn’t there.

I sat up tall and adjusted them, like it would do any good.

“Sorry, Street. Christophe may have sold you a fairy tale, but I don’t believe any of them, except for the big bad wolf. Mine’s named Cicereau. I notice you’re not wearing red tonight, except in your lip gloss. Or am I supposed to go beneath the surface and think creatively. A scarlet satin thong?”

“You should think with something besides your . . . your gigolo jeans.” I decided to commit truth. “Yes, I know you like me. I’d like to think it was me and not my, okay, girlie attributes. You hate being held hostage to the Gehenna’s Cesar Cicereau and his wolf pack. I’m here to say you could do something about that now.

“Snow has a secret weapon Ric, ah, unearthed, something snatched from the clutches of the drug lord El Demonio that would have every overlord in Las Vegas panting to capture and use it, from the Immortality Mob to Cesar Cicereau.

“Snow is offering Ric sanctuary from all those forces, and he might offer you that too if you went over to his side.”

“What could be that powerful,” Sansouci scoffed.

“Not what, who.” He still looked unconvinced, so I sold harder. If I told Sansouci a secret, he might help me with mine. “This is big. You know what reach and power El Demonio’s cartel commands in the whole Western hemisphere. That demon covets what Ric raised to the dark bottomless depths of what would be a soul in anyone else, even in any other doomed supernatural in Vegas.”

I stopped for breath. And then caught it.

Sansouci’s head was down, hovering over the glass he held in both hands. His thick black hair with its silver streak reminded me of a wolf’s pelt, of Quicksilver’s paler version of it. Oh, no. I’d offended him. Wasn’t a vampire just another doomed soul too?

The silence lasted long enough for me to realize I was breathing heavily.

And so was he.

Just as Mama said, vampires may not live and breathe, but they had to suck air to speak.

When Sansouci looked up, his eyes were rimmed in bloodred.

“Do you believe that I ever wanted this, that I was always this?” he demanded, his voice so low I had to lean closer to hear, much as it scared the hell out of me.

“Do you believe a vampire ever forgets being human, any more than a plague victim forgets a whole skin and being able to breathe, to the very end . . . for six or seven or eight hundred years of the very end, with no cessation in sight but some fanatic striking out centuries of half life with a stake or a beheading sword? To finally wanting, needing immortality, if only as a way to hold off total damnation? By God, you’re lucky I’ve had a hundred years to live off what you call my gigolo jeans.”

God? Damnation? What kind of vampire was this? What shocked me most was his taking the Lord’s name in vain. A vampire? Calling on God in any way? Even I was edgy about doing that anymore. And I was only recently a postgraduate virgin.

Sansouci’s low mutter continued, as rhythmic as a familiar prayer. “Do you dare to think I’m some kind of chained bear whose entire being doesn’t scream out every day for vengeance on its tormenters? Do you presume to think I’ve come to your rescue a time or two just because I like your ass in a city showcasing whole chorus lines of them? Do you think I tolerate your feeble attempts to use me because it’s fun to see an amateur try to fire a forty-five magnum? To judge me, use me, snow me?”

Again the silence spoke only of my shock and terror.