"Blame the victim?"

I jumped when his fist pounded the table and grabbed the stem of my Albino Vampire to keep it from tipping over. I was partial to the drink even if it was a rip-off. His heavier glass just washed expensive Scotch over the side.

"'Love' is the poison that killed Loretta Cicereau," Sansouci said. "'Humanity' was never in the game. I don't have any of it anymore."

"You wouldn't be so angry if you didn't."

That huge hand caught me by the back of the neck and dragged me out of my seat and across the table until he could whisper in my ear.

"What am I? I am vampire. I am a daylight vampire. Every day and night is prey time for me." I felt his teeth and then tongue brush my pounding carotid artery. His breath was lukewarm on my face, not hot like a canine's. Like Quicksilver's. What was a vampire doing working for a werewolf mob? He was still spitting words like nails.

"You came to me. You followed me. You put me to the question. How did I know you tailed me? You're menstruating. I can smell your blood. It's like catnip to a tiger. You're so ready for me. I can take you to places darker than the Sinkhole and make you enjoy it."

All right, I was really scared now. Human or unhuman, this was a man who'd been asked to jettison his protective instincts to kill the young girl he'd guarded. That he'd hated doing that was to his credit. That he'd do the same to a girl he admittedly liked was pre-proven.

I faced down his angry stare, though, literally shaking in my boots, but nowhere else, until he broke the impasse by brushing his lips hard against mine, a sharp fang raking my bottom lip. I was shoved back into my seat, tasting my own blood.

At least I was proven right. My pasty-skinned looks attracted vampires. Even the big boys. They wouldn't want to use me up too soon. Waste me outright. I really shouldn't be alone with this guy. As he had tried to tell me.

I wondered how Loretta had felt when her own bodyguard as well as her father turned on her.

"So you killed her," I speculated, not believing I was pushing a super and a murderer to confess. Inquiring reporters need to know the way vamps need to suck O-negative.

"I didn't stop it." He leaned back against the high wood booth. A vampire with a conscience. He'd been waiting decades for someone to confess to and I guess I'd do.

"She knew?" I asked softly.

"She knew." He closed his eyes. "I didn't want to see her that way."

"Dead but not undead?"

The green eyes opened a slit. "Having sex like that."

"You don't seem to have any problem with me and sex."

"I've never been your bodyguard."

"I see. It was a territorial thing. Her father must have felt the same way."

"We knew it was going on. He wanted to send a message to the vampires."

"That's why the chip from the never-built Inferno was thrown in the grave along with the thirty silver dollars- as a symbol of her betrayal of the werewolf clan."

He nodded.

"And the live mutilation of the boy, her rape and shooting?"

Sansouci's lips were full and well-arched, but now they became a stark line before he finally spoke again. "She told you that? Cicereau wanted to send a message to me. The media spins werewolves as the cuddliest of the supers, all that fur, but they can be the most savage. Vampires would never waste bodies and blood that way."

"And what did this brutal message say?"

"There'd been a twenty-year lull in the werewolf-vampire war. Now he was stating things had changed- he'd mercilessly put down any vampire insurrection, starting with me."

"This was decades before the Millennium Revelation," I confirmed.

Sansouci laughed. Not a happy sound. "The Millennium Revelation marks the moment when you humans got the picture. We supernaturals had been out there all along, dismissed as myths in modern times and persecuted as monsters in the Dark Time."

"Why are you telling me this?"

He finished the scotch. I realized I'd at least lived to see a vampire drinking something other than blood. I needed to find out what daylight vampires really were, what drove them, and what limited them. Soon. Maybe Ric would know. Or Snow.

Meanwhile, I sipped my Albino Vampire. It contained all of my mouth-pleasing favorites in liquor form: white chocolate liqueur, vanilla vodka, and a delicious drizzle of yummy raspberry. If this was a "last meal" at least it was a corker of my own invention. And it lulled the constant drill of my cramps. What more could a girl ask for?

"The Albino Vampire is the house drink of the Inferno Hotel," I said suddenly. "What's it doing here?"

"Christophe owns this place. It's called the Dead Zone."

"Then why did you choose it for our chat?"

"It's the only unhuman watering hole the werewolf mob avoids because Christophe owns it."

"And you're a vampire seeking a hideaway, if only for a few hours."

"So much for running you down to eat you."

"No, I doubt vampires are much for chasing their victims. We come to them."

He shrugged as if to say "Well?" Here I was.

"But I didn't know what you really were. So why are you running with the werewolf mob?"

"Wolves were extinct on the British Isles by the end of the seventeenth century, were extinct in Europe by the twentieth century and in France by the 1920s. But here in the U.S. southwest, wolves hadn't quite been hunted to extinction in the 1930s and forties. It suits werewolves to live where there can be confusion between a natural wolf population and their own packs. Think of them as like… the Mormons."

"The Mormons!"

"They weren't welcome elsewhere, they were persecuted and driven out, so they migrated to a desert wilderness no one else wanted and built an empire."

"Are wolves polygamous?"

Sansouci laughed again. "No, but they are polyamorous." He'd leaned closer, like a big bad wolf. "Why? You want to try werewolf love? I have connections."

"One human at a time is plenty for me," I said quickly.

He nodded. "Montoya is a useful ally for an amateur like you. For now. For a human, he knows the score."

That prickled. "But not about the werewolf-vampire war."

"No. Because I'm telling you."

"Why me?"

"Because you asked. Because you're the only human to ever escape Cicereau's Starlight Lodge run-down, and because I want to see that bastard eat sand." He grinned.

"You're thinking I could be your tool," I told him. "For revenge. If you've worked for Cicereau all these decades, why do you want revenge?"

"The vampire empire, which has deep European roots, and-more importantly for this country-English as well as Eastern European, was ageing. All civilizations rise and fall. We were used to rising again, but the New World was riper for a carnivorous tribe, like the werewolf packs-especially the French ones, who were the most active-than our vampire way of loose associations and, forgive me, lone wolf operations."

"You didn't play well with others, including your own."

"Delilah, you do have a way of nailing the situation."

The waitress was back. Sansouci ordered another round. When she lingered with flirting on her mind-she was wearing a blood-red velvet ribbon around her neck and precipitous cleavage-he swatted her rear bustle and told her to get lost until she had drinks to set down.

We kept silent until she returned with our orders and left again.

"I invented the Albino Vampire, you know," I said.

"No kidding. So you get a cut of your own drink profits?"

"Snow stole it."

"Snow?" The word was sprung like a wolf-trap.

Not everybody used Christophe/Cocaine's nickname, I guessed, but probably everybody knew it.

"We've had words."

Sansouci was quiet, recalculating. "You-on nickname terms with Christophe? I don't like it."