He snapped his fingers but lacked the strength to make sound as well as gesture. A nurse hastened to his side to produce an auditory snap.

“Mainline level, please,” Hughes croaked. “I’m suffering a terribly distressful thought.”

I waited while Howard gathered strength and spittle. “You can’t seriously suspect that unprepossessing frog might be your father?” he demanded finally.

“That’s a very biased way to refer to Frenchmen, Mr. Hughes. But you’re right. I don’t want to think that.”

Howard’s features squeezed into an expression of pleased calculation. “You came here hoping I had that honor. That you would inherit?”

“Please. You ‘died’ childless without a will more than thirty years ago. Your ‘heirs’ unto the third generation and their lawyers number about a thousand and your last asset is a plot of Vegas land that lost most of its value in the Great Recession and is owned by a bankrupt corporation.”

“You cared enough to look that up,” he said, smiling sideways at me like a shy suitor.

Ugh.

“I’m an investigator. I investigate.” I eyed his white-uniformed attendants. Real nurses wore colorful scrubs nowadays. “We need to speak privately,” I told them. “Could you run off and sterilize blood or something?”

Howard cooperated by nodding vigorously. “I haven’t been alone with a living single woman in years,” he told me. “You are so obviously after my money, Delilah.”

“Me expect to inherit from a vampire, especially one so careful about the purity of the blood he takes in? Never happen. Besides, I don’t want your blood money.”

“Then, what do you want?”

“Your guess on my parentage. Vida is more than vague about when her fertile and vampire years intersected. But I do know that someone had to turn you. I heard you had a beautiful woman made into a vampire to make the process more inviting. That was despicable, Howard, even in a life that used women like the tissues you relied on during your last live years to keep your fingers germ-free. There is still innocent blood on your hands.”

“Don’t say that!” Howard began wringing his cadaverous hands like the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth washing them in Shakespeare’s play. “I have even more money now. It could all be yours. All you have to do is think well of me, flatter me. You do resemble my fondest loves, but, of course, I can’t consider any carnal activities nowadays. Germs. You could be my virgin mistress.”

“Some things you can’t buy, even after death.”

Like really old people his moods shifted fast. “I can destroy you,” he threatened.

I wouldn’t have come here if I’d taken his moods seriously, although he was probably right.

A deep growl to my right drew my gaze, and Howard’s.

Quicksilver was stationed by the IV stand, black lips drawn back from white fangs, his major canines poised to cut the tubing.

His eye whites showed as he turned a questioning look my way. To bite or not to bite.

“Get that monster dog away from my blood line!”

“Now I can destroy you,” I noted. “Your so-called bloodline is what I’m asking about. Am I in it?”

Howard’s teeth were chattering, his eyes pinned on Quicksilver’s teeth. For a huge dog Quick had a grip as delicate as a Chihuahua’s.

“All those women, Howard, those flattered, suckered devoted starlets and actresses. Never a pregnancy, never a hidden birth, an abortion? Birth control was more primitive then. You favored actresses who looked like me.”

A smile trembled around his chattering teeth. “It had not escaped me, but parentage is not possible, Delilah. There were two or three attempts to claim my paternity before you were even born. I was, ironically, sterile long before I became . . . senile.”

I nodded Quicksilver to back off now that Howard was sharing his most intimate secrets. Maybe. When I maintained silence he went on.

“Syphilis.”

For a wild moment I thought of Madrigal’s fey assistant, Sylphia.

Howard confused my continuing silence for ignorance. “Syphilis was the AIDS of the centuries preceding the nineteen eighties.”

I knew what it was. I had just gone stone cold at any possibility that my “inheritance” from Hughes might be that devastating venereal disease. It would certainly explain most of his mental and physical degeneration over the decades.

“Yes,” he went on, “any genuine heir of mine would bear that inescapable curse. My nurses can take a sample of your blood right now. A DNA test comparing yours with mine would settle the issue. It’s unlikely, but I’m willing if you are.”

I eyed the nurses lingering in the archway to the next room. Two were edging nearer, heavy lipstick clinging to their bared fangs and scary-large syringes drawn from their side uniform pockets like ever-ready revolvers from a cowboy star’s hip-slung holsters. I imagine they were on a diet of Shez’s bloodwine and welcomed any crack at the real thing, even through the intervention of a needle.

Quicksilver produced his bigger fangs and they stopped, eyeing Howard.

“Not necessary,” I told him. I definitely did not intend to submit my blood sample to one more vampire in this town. “I’ll take your word that you paid for the sins of your youth early, with interest.”

His skeletal hand waved off the attendants again.

“So you had to turn vampire,” I noted when we were alone. “It stopped your deterioration. Your life was really screwed up from the beginning, wasn’t it?”

“Not my fault, say the shrinks. It’s a kick to talk to a thorough researcher like you who sees the whole picture.”

“You’re like Elvis, Howard. So many exaggerations have been written about your life . . . and death . . . that the truth is still out there.”

“Elvis did not have the foresight to fake his death and live on as a vampire.”

“Elvis was surrounded by vampires at the end, as were you.”

“Ah, human vampires. A minor variety compared to the actual thing. I did do some good in my life.”

“What about the nest of unreformed vamps you’re sitting atop?”

“They’d be up here to stake me and my attendants in a second and take over the overworld as well as the underworld, except for you and your handsome lover, Ricardo Montoya. And your big dog too.”

Rumors abounded that Hughes had been bisexual, but his tone when he mentioned Ric had been more envious than lustful. Once he’d been the handsome young adventurer and he’d owned the skies, the most money, and the most beautiful women in Hollywood.

“Why thanks to me?” I asked.

He leaned toward me, looking alarmingly like a reviving mummy whose case had just been cracked.

“Shezmou!” he cackled. “You freed the demon god who can cast them all into hell. Shezmou is the only thing left on this earth they fear. It’s why I installed a workshop for him adjoining my suite in addition to that silly little enterprise you talked him into opening on the Strip. His presence is my guard dog. Nice puppy,” he crooned at Quick, earning an operatically sustained growl that made him grin, showing not great teeth.

I was struck to realize that Vegas moguls were busy inviting live-in neighbors, like Shez here and, at the Inferno, Ric, to protect their empires and . . . perhaps themselves.

Hughes was sitting atop a powder keg. The imperious ancient vampire empire under the Karnak had to scrounge for prey in the surrounding desert now that Ric and I had freed their food supply, an entire class of nonvampire Egyptians bred and kept like stock for that sole purpose.

Only the fear of Shezmou reaping their immortal heads and sending their souls on to Orsiris and a judgment that would cast them into eternal darkness kept them going along with Howard and his artificial bloodwine campaign.

So . . . why did the great and powerful Christophe need Ric? Sure, mi amor had soaked up some of my silver medium powers, but I still had my modest original silver mojo, plus the familiar transformed from a lock of Snow’s hair.

“I’m tired now,” Hughes muttered. “You may leave.”

Apparently girls weren’t considered ace supernatural guardians.

I should be so hurt that Cesar Cicereau hadn’t invited me to be his in-house guard when I’d saved his hairy ass twice.

Speaking of hairy asses, as I’d recently had the unhappy occasion to glimpse, Bez was waiting outside the suite door to see me and Quicksilver out when we took our leave.

Chapter Twenty-eight

GEE, IRMA ANNOUNCED, when we weren’t looking, someone turned the lights out.

I took a deep breath.

After a fun ride down on the Hughes-built automated chair, Bez left Quick and me to navigate through the Karnak crowds and the oppressive exterior pillars outside. As the casino chill faded in the warm dry air, we gazed on the overlit dark of the Strip, now the world’s biggest and most expensive velvet painting.

I actually liked the effect of night scenes etched with luminous chalk on a black velvet background. It wasn’t the Hope Diamond on red-carpet jewelers’ velvet, but it was . . . Vegas.

Meanwhile, Irma waxed guilty for a change.

I sort of feel like I should have stayed to keep the old guy company.

“He’s power-mad Howard Hughes, world’s most unattractive vampire,” I pointed out.

All he needs is a good listener.

“Fine. Do whatever you do to take over an innocent mind. Howard just reminded me what I do best.”

Attract lonely old moguls?

“Research, baby! My next project is to figure out the identity of the woman who helped Hughes die and live again. If it wasn’t Vida, and I doubt that, thank God . . . who was it? That might explain a lot about pre– and post–Millennium Revelation Vegas, maybe even the Immortality Mob.”

But . . . it was late and tomorrow was another day.

AND THEN QUICKSILVER and I returned to the Enchanted Cottage to find Ric leaning, arms folded against his chest, against his ’Vette in the driveway.

Talk about a velvet painting. Add it up. Bronze car gleaming under the soft security lights. Bronze-skinned guy with the day’s tie in his jacket pocket and his cream-colored shirt opened three buttons down. The glints in his hair and his eyes both simmered like hot black coffee.

Quicksilver took one look, bolted over the wall, and headed for Sunset Park. He knew my weaknesses.

Going off leash was illegal and I should chase him down and get him home.

“Got all night?” Ric asked.

On the other hand, if Quicksilver couldn’t take care of himself, who or what could?

IT ONLY TOOK a quarter of the night for Ric to soften me into an utterly agreeable state and whisper the bad news in my ear.

“I’m going to hate to leave town tomorrow, chica.”

I paused in doing passionate things to his navel.

“Tomorrow? Leave?”

“An out-of-town consultation gig. It’s secret government work. I can’t tell you anything.”

“Anything? Now that’s a challenge.” I moved my mouth lower. “Where?”

“I’m not supposed to say . . . Delilah! It’s just Texas.”

“Texas? What’s in Texas?”

Lower.

“El Paso. Zombies. Smuggling.”

I had him down to one-word answers, then paused to give him time to catch his breath so I could learn more. El Paso sounded innocent enough. Until I realized what was opposite El Paso.

“Juarez!”

“Delilah! Ouch.”

I put us on serious Pause button. “You’re going back to the worst killing field on the planet and you weren’t going to tell me!”

“Just for a couple of days.”

“And nights. If you want any more of them with me, you’d better take me along.”

“I can’t. It’s not just me involved.”

“So that’s why Tallgrass showed up. You guys put on the foot-shuffling male-bonding act so I’d only be able to kick up a ruckus about being left behind when it was too late.

“I don’t even have a passport,” I said bitterly.

“Delilah, you’re an ace investigator and have more cojones than most werewolves, but the officials we work for wouldn’t understand what you could do for them. This is an all-human, unofficial covert paramilitary, not paranormal, force and operation.”

“All male,” I grumbled.

“There will be some female troops, but you are not an enlisted woman.”

The finality in his voice was something I’d never heard before. This was FBI Ric speaking, laying down the law in an area where men were mostly men, discipline was strict, and rules were not broken.

I sighed. There was no stopping him, I could tell. Might as well make the most of these last hours before he left.

I wriggled farther down his body, tossing my hair from side to side as it trailed down too.

“That’s a good girl,” Ric murmured after a deep intake of breath. “That’s a very, very good girl.”

He had no idea just how good I could be when I was bad.

Chapter Twenty-nine

WHEN THE LOVE of your life insists he’s going off with his one-time FBI mentor to find his demonic worst enemy in “the murder capital of the world,” a city that boasted almost five thousand murders last year alone, and you will damn well stay home safe in Las Vegas, what’s a modern woman to do?

Argue herself pink, purple, and puce to no avail, and then say, “Yes, dear.”

So he soaks up the supersteamy farewell sex while you soak up his mushy vows of love and a swift, safe return.

Then you check his cell phone and email in the middle of the night when he’s sleeping sounder than an exhausted sultan after you gave him his third orgasm.