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I went flyingforward, at least, not back I hit the unseen path hard and curled into a defensive ball, blinkingbut the dark, so rolled over onto ain

More undifferentiated darkness stretched ahead, but through it--as if caught in a follow spotlight--strode a th locks like soh of relief A wo-haired muscleman

Besides, we’d met before

Chapter Four

"WHERE IN THE Nine Circles of Hell under the Inferno Hotel have you been for the past week?" he greeted me ere still forty feet apart

"Oz," I said, not exactly lying

The details of the olden aura His gladiator boots were the real thing--leather straps and heavy metal everywhere--and therefore the envy of any runwayitem that was part loincloth, part Roas his kilt, so he was altogether a tasty sight for the females in his audiences

Not h

"Since when," I wanted to know, "does the Gehenna Hotel house uts, except as appetizers for his pack You itch to escape his indenture, but don’t want to rile hiers," he said as we closed to conversational distance, waggling his own "Once you’d used lass host I was forced to i that process the girls helped h another mirror"

I looked up, nervously The fale with a Hello Kitty face

"The girls," his two feral fey assistants, were aerial creatures Visitors to Vegas ic show and take the fairies, but both were veno near their giant rescuer and now possession, Madrigal

Luckily Madrigal and I had minimal che a sexy stage illusion with him The olf mob boss had hoped the media frenzy spawned by my double Lilith’s nude autopsy appearance on CSI V would turn me a ready-made media star

I declined to stand in for anyone and had opted out via the hotel’s industrial laundry chute at the earliest opportunity

"I’ve coal "She’s just a kid, not even twenty Maybe she’s had ti to take over the computer and electrical systems in her father’s hotel He did have Loretta and her vao, after all, in a brutally nasty way"

"Mobsters are like that, Delilah So are hters Loretta has been out for blood ever since so court to her inevil influence as soon as I passed through theover the hotel, nothing Loretta could su"

"Would Loretta really consort with a dee on dear old Dad?"

"In a skipped heartbeat And she wants revenge on more than Cesar Cicereau You’re not exactly a model citizen now that you’ve taken down Loretta’s resurrected lover--gruesome revenant that he was--all the way down forty stories to sas Strip I wasn’t there, thank the Dread Queen, but Sansouci is still talking about that trick"

Knowing Sansouci, Cicereau’s security guy, he probably approved the way I’d separated the dead lovers once again Like a lot of perfectly ordinary people who’ve been horribly wronged, even ghostly ered for restitution and revenge They could accomplish it paranormally now that the Millennium Revelation had exposed all the dark powers and beasties ainally innocent victio to sos more clearly now Her resurrected lover was a new Frankenstein’s e I hope to talk some sense into her Dead bones don’t dance, not even in today’s really wicked Vegas"

"Things have changed, all right" Madrigal’s expression showed the dark side of grilike nest-defending blue jays Sylphia was tangling in oo around al once had called it "spit and fairy dust" Meanwhile, Phasia’s dark, sinuous snaky li around al and I had used to bind Loretta in his host Their lethal clinging-vine act was halfway to stranglingto untwine the to another spot, burning where they touched

I could feel the silver faers withnail sheaths like Fu Manchu wore sprouted fro on the thumbs, so I didn’t scratch ure out how to use these instant weapons

I ignored the twining horror-leam of the sisters’ slanted predatory eyes The pupils thinned to an X-shape on each iris My new artificial-nail job could make those Xes into asterisks

Sylphia was mute but Phasia’s cries became shrieks as they both recoiled fro net they’d spit at me broke from their dainty little bodies and spattered the dark floor of litter at al andlike mini-Medusas They couldn’t fly but they could attach and cliht loom unseen above our heads

"What’s with your fey assistants?" I deht you had theers, which ical halo that surrounded him The three-inch curved silver scimitars bore etched decorations I’d have liked to study, but I wanted full use of , I flicked ician blinked and frowned at the effect Only I’d felt cool silver rivulets eeling underfaster than the eye could see

"Visible claws are a hot girly fad on the Strip," I told Madrigal, keeping irls have been volatile lately" He shook his gla his fey friends didn’t have reason to be possessive of a half-dressed hunk like Madrigal

"I don’t knohat’s gotten into the me to enter the spaces behind mirrors, but it’s really a is what’s happened to Loretta Cicereau while you were gone"