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I drove Dolly hoave Quicksilver a ht bath in the Jacuzzi tub He loved the jets

He seeh petting, grinning and panting and wagging his tail He was,o rinse his mouth of jackal or hyena or whatever hair and blood at the kitchen water bowl

I cleaned the dog hair out of the drained tub, refilled it, and took a long soak in fresh, steahs sink against the pu jets Not my time of theit out through the paralyzing pain A career woman didn’t want to look wimpy on the job I particularly didn’t dare look wi in the tub-the silver fa ht about Sansouci’s startling confession

Why would he tellhis boss/reeo and desert Cicereau and the Gehenna? Was it part of a vaht he could use me to topple the olf ht vaht, fuck as well as suck, and do both delicately enough to leave a woman healthy and hearty and ready for the next round

It was no secret why he enjoyed being so cooperative I’d finally faced h to understand what I hadn’t back in Kansas I was a natural-born Goth girl, with death and resurrection built-into ure out pretty young what their type of look is, and who their type of guy is What attracts what I’d been repulsed by the half-breed, pushy, hungry vamp boys I attracted, but had finally encountered a mature vampire with a s giant strides

Okay So Sansouci ht mean I could use him

It didn’t mean for a moment that he wouldn’t try to usebytable-even h that I used the surface as a colass of the Bailey’s Irish Creae and cruised the Web for scavenger dogs

I came up with jackals and hyenas Both were native to the African and Indian continents Jackals were sand-colored, sharp-eared and foxy, smaller than wolves What had attacked ht as the third-world version of wolves No such luck

Hyenas were bigger, stronger and weirder They had a bear-like look because their rounded ears and small heads seemed out of sync with their thick, solid bodies, and their back legs were shorter than their front ones

The weird part was that these heavy-set creatures- who could go carnivore or scavenger-were considered to be related to dainty, agile critters like ooses

In fact, they were such formidable beasts I ed

Quicksilver and I had beaten the, not that I’d gazed long on his handsome face in carnivore mode

The spotted hyena see all h the hyena bite is bone-crushing and bear-trap strong, the beasts’ best survival weapon is industrial-strength storistle, tooth, claw and hoof to liquid nutrition

And then there’s that eerie, taunting, ghostly laugh So the name of their next victim

Oooh De-lie-lah-ha-ha-ha

My name lent itself to hyena h

I had to wonder why so kitchen trash coence near that of apes, but there was no doubt why the hyena’s reproductive system made them the eternal object of fear, superstition and hatred

I read on with interest, soover my shoulder Or whatever

Oh me-oh-my-o This is better than Animal Planet porn Did you see that? Hyena females dominate the sets the goodies This is where Woy Gross

I read on about the female hyena’s outsize clitoris, a pseudo-penis that also functions as vagina and birth canal I wondered about her cra really nasty-tempered

All modern hyenas live in arid environas Close Their ability to digest all the hard, horny nasty bits got theluttony, uncleanliness and cowardice African witches and sorcerers are thought to fly on thearded thereedy hermaphrodites

Ooh, said Irma Hyenas couldn’t be eaten, so they’d naturally multiply in peace And people believed in "werehyenas," like we didn’t have enough wolves and tigers and bears "wereing" around after the Millenniuht the hyena changed its sex froe, multi-useful clitoris

I sat away fro to think

Why would anyone sic supernatural hyenas on a girl and her dog in Las Vegas?

What had I done to rile thecreatures, born to be stuffed toys, sending hyenas after ht and kill a cobra, but it was still just a sned to root out poisonous ver, formidable predators Guess that hy they’d turned up in Las Vegas: desert environuls, predatory ang work for? I couldn’t see Cesar Cicereau needing a hyena pack to compete with his olves And Snow he’d never underwrite any beast as greedy and clumsy and mismade as a hyena

I pulled out an older drawnboom outdated maps faster than shoe styles Which were the African desert-themed hotels? Probleas hotel implosions adorned by fireworks, with photos and videos, just another for desert-theets of destruction Was that an accident, or soo, in 1993, io The Sands had fallen in 1996 for the Venetian The Aladdin had gone bankrupt in the eighties and risen from the ashes of a 1998 iust of 2000, just before the Millennium Revelation

The terrorist attack of September 2001 had made Arabian themes unmarketable and the hotel had morphed into Planet Hollywood by 2007

In 2001, the venerable Desert Inn took a dynah-roller palace, the Wynn

I o, one last oasis of desert ertip pinned the shape of a pyrayptian-theypt was in North Africa

Luxor was the s back then had liked the implication of "luxe" in the word The Luxor ’s pyra from the peak that was visible in outer space It once had an inside ith "Cleopatra’s barges" giving tourists a lift

That idea had been lifted froas hotel, the Crystal Phoenix, which had pioneered the idea of a "Love Moat" back in the day Now the Venetian had its gondola canals, the Inferno its "river" to gao in 2012, had its own " Nile"

And an eighteen-foot-high statue of a hyena-headed gayptians, Lady Luck had two faces and possibly two genders

I re valet at the Inferno who’d noticed Dolly when he parked her He’d worn the beaded collar, linen kilt and jackal-head mask of a Karnak employee

Maybe I had an "in"

By the ti on the Web, it was 4:00 am After another hot Jacuzzi soak for my cramps, I doped myself up on more Darvon and curled up with two old-fashioned rubber hot water bottles in soft fleece coverings I’d found in the bed

I’d spent ages on my feet on hard surfaces yesterday and felt just like a beat cop: I ached fros all the way to

This wasn’t the kitchen witch’s territory, so I didn’t knoho or what my bed warmer was, but ht and I slept like a la by the bed, until mid-afternoon

Holy hyenas! I needed to burn rubber, and not the ones filled with cold water in e on my cell phone, but I’d call hi to tell hi," I told Quick after I threw on sootof McDonald’s awaited me The kitchen witch was an extremely practical supernatural, and always knehen I needed a fast hand in the food departrowled, so I threw him some of , craear I’d need to wear so you could get into the hotel-casinos withNext time, buddy"

Those heavenly blue eyes watched , even about the cra maw snapped up every fry I tossed its way

Within an hour, I breezed Dolly past the Inferno hotel again, pausing at the entrance untilother cars into parking slots If parking valets aren’t going to abuse your ride by gunning the to fall in love forever He immediately spotted me, or, rather, Dolly

It was a relief to not be the center of irl Those are fins to kill for," he said, ad Dolly’s sleek black flanks