"That's one thing I need from you. Her name. I call her 'Jeanie'."

"Like in a lamp?"

I shook my head. "Like in the old song about the girl with light brown hair."

"Yours isn't light," he said, leaning forward, speaking fast and low, "but black as night. If you were a werewolf, you'd be almost impossible to see on a midnight run."

"If I were a werewolf I would have changed with all the mobsters at Starlight Lodge last full moon. You'd make a handsome werewolf, though." I nodded at his own black hair stroked by dramatic strands of silver.

His smile had an odd edge. "Thanks. So you've imagined me in lupine form."

"Why didn't I see you when I was running for my life from the pack?"

"Cicereau doesn't reward his lieutenants that way, only the soldiers."

"Was killing his daughter and her lover back in the forties a job for the lieutenants? For you?"

He took a long swallow of his drink before answering. "She was sleeping with the wrong supernatural."

"A killing offense?"

"Not…usually. Maybe just marking, or maiming if Cicereau was in a bad mood."

My questions were making Sansouci uneasy. He twisted on his bench seat.

"Her lover was vampire." I made it a statement.

His fingers turned the low thick glass in front of him around and around. "Yes."

"Why were they killed with two different weapons and buried together?"

Sansouci licked his lips. His big knuckles tightened enough to shatter the glass. I was glad he wasn't in werewolf form.

"This is why Cicereau is beside himself about them being unearthed. He's furious you escaped the hunt and that his crew was shredded by zombies. He figures you had something to do with that, but he doesn't know you were involved with revealing the bodies too. There could be an all-unhuman pow-wow called about this."

"Sorry to get all the supers in a snit. Finding the dead couple was an accident."

But I wasn't so sure now. Ric had been dowsing in Sunset Park for reasons more serious than entertaining kids and hick girls from Kansas. He was a consultant expert in finding the dead. Who had he been working for when we found those buried bodies? The police? Or someone way less official? I couldn't let Sansouci see my doubts.

"I know the female victim was Cicereau's daughter. All I'm asking for right now is her first name."

"Why do you want to know?"

"I don't want to know. I have to."

"Why? Cicereau already hankers for your head for escaping his trap. Why keep maddening the beast?"

"I'm the one who found them, rotted to only bones. It was like unearthing Romeo and Juliet. I'd never seen anything that awful. I have to put them to proper rest. They have to be reburied by others than their murderers."

"This is a mission?"

I nodded. "I see dead people."

"And Montoya digs them up. Yeah, I know his rep. Cadaver Kid. Oh, beautiful! You and Mr. Mojo Man are about to become prime targets in this town, you know that?"

I nodded and sipped the Albino Vampire. "This is really good, isn't it?"

"Yeah." Sansouci sounded odd. "Really good," he added in a different tone.

"Why do you come to this place, for the Albino Vampires?"

"I figured I had to let you catch me someplace. This is quiet, private and in a bad enough area of town anything could happen to you and no one would much notice."

"So you could happen to me?"

"Maybe. It's dangerous for you to be here whether I am or not. What made you think I'd help you? Why me?"

I made a face. "You like me? I like you? You like-a-me and I like-a-you…"

I'd gone into that vintage film ditty from a quaint musical called Meet Me in St. Louis. I was always living through something once removed. No wonder mirrors were my thing.

"Don't." Sansouci wasn't looking at me, but his voice was strangely thick. "Nothing is ever that simple. Nothing is what it seems. No one is. Not even you, angel-face."

"That expression is so Bogart as Sam Spade."

"The man had integrity."

"I think you do too."

The silence held for a long time.

"You haven't the slightest idea," he said.

"That's why I need you."

He eyed me hard. "Don't sling words like 'need' around like that. They're weapons."

"I didn't mean to… hurt you."

"What the fuck makes you think you can?"

"Because… I'm instinctively fond of dogs. Because… I see something in you, big bad werewolf. Maybe a bit of humanity-"

"Don't." He half rose and glared at me across the booth. "'Don't go looking for humanity in Las Vegas after the Millennium Revelation. In me or anyone like me."

"What are you like?"

He sat back down. "You don't even know enough to be dangerous. You are danger."

"What are you like?"

His teeth grated the glass edge as he drank again, swallowed, drilled a glance at me. His green eyes glittered like a rain forest after a downpour. He really did look like he'd like to eat me, the hard way. "I'm not werewolf."

So why should realizing that someone is not a werewolf scare the shinola out of me?

I kept my fingers casually loose around the foot of my martini glass. I didn't move.

But my mind and heart were racing together. I'd convinced myself that Sansouci favored me over Detective Haskell. I thought it might be because of my girlish ways. But girlish ways hadn't saved Cicereau's daughter. I'd told myself that an unchanged werewolf was domesticated, like Rover. That they were normal except for the three-or-so-day moon madness thing. Not too different from the average woman with PMS.

But Sansouci wasn't a werewolf. I'd never see those strands of silver gleaming on a noble canine brow in the moonlight. Well, at least I wouldn't have to drill him with a silver bullet or Quicksilver wouldn't have to run him down and tear him to pieces to protect me.

"You tell me what you are," I said quietly.

"'Humanity'," he quoted me with derision. And a shade of bitterness? "You're looking in all the wrong places for all the wrong things, little girl."

"I have to start somewhere."

"You're not going to stop, are you? You're going to pick away at the immortal wounds in this town until you bring apocalypse down upon yourself… and everybody else."

"I just want to put a ghost to rest. It's me she stares at from my hall mirror, so tragically unhappy. She was no more than, what? Seventeen?"

"Loretta."

"What?"

"Her name." Sansouci washed his face with one big hand. I'd never see him with a sharp furry snout and mini-mountain ranges of fangs, with dark curved claws on those big hands. What would I see him as? More than this, certainly.

"Loretta," I repeated. "It's pretty," I decided, picturing the blue-gowned girl in my mirror.

"Seventeen." Sansouci answered me like a robot, still distracted about facing what had happened to the boss's daughter.

He was staring into his drink as if it was a magic mirror with Loretta's young face floating in it.

"Loretta was a cute girl," I said softly. Sansouci was in a semi-feral state at the moment. He might snap my neck as easily as look at me. "I suppose she was just the boss's underage daughter to you."

"Not quite." He clipped off the words like spit.

I knew I looked puzzled.

"I was her bodyguard."

"Oh." And then I saw. "For a long time?"

"For a long time, as human reckoning goes. Since she was a young child."

"And then your orders changed overnight?"

"Then everything changed."

"Why?"

"You have your mirror-maiden's first name. You should get out of here before I decide to eat you, Little Red Riding Hood."

"You're not a werewolf and anyway, the moon isn't right."

"Any night is a full moon for my kind." His eyes glittered with anger. "You pretty young things look so sweet, so tender, but you play with the fire of your own body heat without reckoning on pushing everything male over the edge."