The next morning, I found the window-glass in place and intact. Ever since, when I parked Dolly in iffy areas, a nasty poison-green aura haloed the car. I figured it was pixie halitosis.

If I could bottle that arsenic glow, I'd have a really innovative method of car security. Nobody in Vegas messes with pixies, I'd learned fast. They're the equivalent of supernatural fleas: tiny, hungry, able to leap from one host to another in a single bound and bite. They cursed as much as your average American teenager, but real curses, not just bad words. Curses corrosive enough to move all the hair on your head to your toes.

So I left Dolly in the parking lot of a new high-rise time-share. Quick and I trotted through the Downtown "Experience"-a blocks-long barrel vault canopy, ninety feet high at its peak, that combined a pedestrian mall with a not-at-all-pedestrian sound and light show.

The venerable Four Queens Hotel and Casino had been reinvented as an exotic Temple to Ishtar, Medusa, Isis and the original sexpot Lilith. No Delilah. I guess overeager hair stylists aren't sexy-scary goddesses, even though it's sooo hard to stop them from snipping too much off.

Overhead holographic images evoked great world tragedies of fire and flood, featuring thousands of screaming, falling bodies hurtling right at you. There were no sappy Celine Dion renditions of "My Heart Must Go On." A rock band howled to back up their death agonies.

Tourists in Capri pants and Bermuda shorts were gaping open-mouthed at the kaleidoscope of destruction playing out above, tiny camcorders attached to their cell phone earjacks, so they could look and shoot instead of point and shoot. They resembled Borg wannabes. Creepy! Quick and I passed them like dust on the wind.

I headed for the area's outskirts. I figured that the Sinkhole would find you if you wanted it to. Or if you looked like you belonged there.

Amazing how even the biggest tourist attraction in the world makes room for sleaze. I was soon walking along unkempt strings of one-story shopping centers. Half of the shops were deserted. The other half sold fortunes, cut-price show tickets, lottery tickets, exotic lingerie and massages.

Beside me, Quick growled. I put my hand on his shoulder. It reached my hip. He was three times the size of most wolves. Good dog! The thin silver chain with a cross around my neck coiled like a snake and slithered down my black-knit sleeve to my wrist. It became the mace-like spikes on a leather wristband.

If my unwanted bodyguard was showing its fangs, we must be nearing the Sinkhole.

Quicksilver's hackles rose under my fingers along with his prolonged, low growl.

Good. We were there. Now all we needed was not to "get into" anything. I was hoping to tap the same eerie psychic energy that had helped me find the Sunset Park bodies when co-dowsing for the dead with Ric.

First I felt the heavy metal beat from the Downtown Experience quicken under my feet, through the thick leather soles of my motorcycle boots. It rumbled on and on, like Quicksilver's growl.

The sidewalk broke into smaller blocks, then heaved, then shattered.

The ground was giving way underneath us! I curled my fingers into Quick's thick black leather collar studded with silver-dollar-size moons in phase from crescent to full. If he hadn't been born half wolfhound, he would have been all wolf. As it was, he hated werewolves, even half-werewolves.

My punk leather wristband tightened hard enough to take my pulse.

Pounding. My pulse pounding.

Spinning. My head was spinning, the low-rise buildings around me were falling down, together. Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

We fell. Together. My fingernails digging into my own palms, Quicksilver's sharp wolfish muzzle tilted up at the moon.

And then the carnival music rose up to snap at our senses. We rode a merry-go-round of sound and fury screwing deep into the earth. I held on to the dog collar for dear life, Quick's and mine. No wonder it was called the Sinkhole.

We plunged, bucked, gained our feet and braced them. Stood.

In another world.

I looked at the slick, wet pavement, smooth as glass. Exotic heavenly bodies reflected in its surface, but when I looked up, all was matte black. No firmament, neither stars nor neon signs. I realized I was looking down through black glass. And the starry heavens were below us.

I inhaled deeply.

Quick looked up at me with blue eyes paled to mirror silver. I saw myself reflected in them: blond biker chick with icy gray CinSim eyes. Not really me. How would my skittish informer recognize me? I figured it had to be someone from Cicereau's mob. Cesar had tried to have me killed and failed. No one knew that but Ric and Cicereau's people.

Looking around, I heard the hiss of roller blades. Teens in black neoprene jumpsuits whizzed by on their narrow runners, one crouching to cruise between Quicksilver and me.

"Watch it," I yelled after the cheeky speed demon.

"You watch it, biker bitch!" the kid hollered back. "Watch me score rings around you."

Not what I was here for. I ducked into the nearest dark doorway. Two "doormen" stood guard at either side of the entrance: tall, lean figures so cadaverous they looked like candidates for Vegas coroner "Grisly" Bahr.

Even though their stinking breaths were as effectively repellent as laser security beams, we evidently passed muster and went through the doors. A flash indicated I had been photographed. Quick squeezed his eyes half shut. Don't modern security measures make your blue eyes blink?

My own eyes, with the gray contact lenses acting as indoor sunglasses, scoped out a mixed bag of supernatural sleazes at the crowded bar. They were all checking me out, visible drool decorating the corners of their mouths. No other women here. I retreated, Quick doing the back step with me until we were in the eerie, windless echo chamber of the Sinkhole's main drag again. It exhaled the same artificial pumped-in air of the Downtown Experience topside.

I checked the name of the first establishment we had seen, "Mudflaps" Limbo Bar," and joined the oddly silent figures shambling along the street. In the smoky fog, it was hard to make out their faces.

After ten minutes of what felt like walking on a treadmill, we didn't seem to have gotten anywhere. Could this be an outpost of Hell, a true "Limbo" of some kind? If so, the creatures of the underworld and overworld would mingle. One thing made the place really weird: the background chime and chuckle of slot machines was missing. There wasn't a casino to be heard down here. Unreal.

As if responding to my mental critique of the silence, distant wailing instruments began to play. Quick sat on his haunches to bay up at the moon. Well, where a moon would be. I saw someone had turned on a huge blood-red planet of shifting light that bled through our smoke Plexiglas sky like the Devil's nightlight.

Then I spotted a sign in soft white neon: Wrathbone.

This must be the place.

Inside, Wrathbone's was as dark as the Devil's left nostril.

The clientele crowding the bar and tables were a mob of human and unhuman cutthroats ranging from such past masters of villainy and oddity as Jack Sparrow's pirates to werewolf and vampire gangs to the Star Wars cantina denizens. Large white neon hieroglyphs lit the bordering dark brick walls. I didn't want to stare at any one individual or object because I didn't want to encourage attention. I was the most recognizably female person there and one of the few humans.

Maybe the creepiest unhuman in the place was the mummy wearing a black trench coat, felt fedora, dark glasses and black leather driving gloves in the corner.

Was he a Cinema Simulacrum or a Cinema Symbiant? His wrapped linen was wedding-day white and looked as crisp as priest's collar against the black accessories.