"Is he a vampire?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. No one does. He could be. He certainly has made Cicereau nervous."

"You should like that."

"I do." He smiled. "I just don't like you being on cozy terms with him."

"If you consider hatred cozy-"

"Any strong feeling is dangerous in Las Vegas these days. Beware, Delilah."

"He's a thief."

"So is Cicereau."

"And you?" I asked.

"No. I'm not a thief."

"I believe you."

"You shouldn't."

Sansouci lifted my fresh Albino Vampire drink from the table to taste it. "Congratulations on your bartending instincts. A sweet, seductive girly drink, but with unsuspected kick."

"Thank you. Snow added the cherry at the bottom."

Sansouci lifted the glass to eye the cherry bobbing like a succulent blood clot in the crimson tint at the bottom, then me. "He might have a sense of humor too, but I wouldn't bet on the humanity."

"I don't bet on anything."

That seemed to settle things between us. Sansouci returned my Albino Vampire.

I shrugged this time. "About the werewolf-vampire war."

"I'm a hostage in it," he said.

While I sat stunned, he hunkered over his unwatered scotch like a character from Hemingway or maybe even Melville, and gave me the straight story in a long, unwinding riff of smothered fury.

"The sex and gambling trades seemed natural to the new wave of French vampires arriving in the New World in the early twentieth century. Night work, a constant supply of pliable pretty women, profits. So we hit Hollywood. Rudolph Valentino was one of ours. And a whole bunch of accountants. When the rumors of a lousy desert crossroads becoming a mob destination came up, we wanted in. But the werewolves had been there decades before. You've heard of the Native American Ghost Dance?"

I nodded. "We had an Indian population in Kansas. Something like the last stand against the whites. Didn't the Indians believe that the ghosts of their ancestors would join them in a final battle to banish the white man? Late 1800s. They thought their Great Spirit had given them bulletproof shirts. The Indians lost."

"They lost their shirts," Sansouci corrected me, "magic shirts to repel the white man's bullets. The local Paiutes around Las Vegas here were the tribe that revived the Ghost Dance and that forced all the last stand battles here and elsewhere. The odd thing is that they did have magic shirts."

"They did?"

Sansouci rolled his eyes. "In a way. We vampires had infiltrated them. We could have taken bullets all day. There'd been enough instances for them to believe that. But the werewolves had been playing on the Paiutes' cultural reverence for the natural world. For 'Brother Wolf."

I winced as I visualized the confrontation between Indian and cavalryman, between vampire and werewolf. The gullible Indians had been massacred. The werewolves had driven off the vampires, able to rend their undead flesh before the blood-sucking fangs could get near enough to drain them. A game of rock, paper, scissors that drew blood.

Sansouci ran his tongue around the rim of his scotch glass, panting as if he'd been there. Perhaps he had.

"We needed a truce," he said. "I suppose the vampires were the losers. We withdrew to distant 'reservations'. The werewolves stayed. But there was an exchange of hostages to ensure peace."

"You and-?"

"I don't know who the werewolf hostage was. I was already assigned to Cicereau."

"You must have been somebody to be valuable enough to be a hostage."

The eyes glittered again, but his tone was bitter. "Have-beens are worthless. I'd had leadership ambitions, being the first daylight vampire with the advantages that meant. I wanted to overtake and boot out the werewolf mob, reestablish vampire supremacy. Instead I've been serving the enemy as a damn go-fer for decades."

"And you don't know who the vampire who died with Loretta Cicereau was, really?"

"Really. It was a huge secret, as was the identity of the werewolf who went over to the vampires. Truthfully, any leaders we had left were pretty lame."

"How did Cicereau take over, not only the vampire presence, but even the werewolves? He doesn't strike me as prime alpha material, like you."

His grin was feral. "Flattery will get you more than you want." He went on. "Cicereau was the land agent in those days, a former voyageur. He excelled at collecting pelts. Now he wanted geld. Gold. Money. The werewolves were happy to trot around on two legs then. And their lives were extending. Word was the dry desert sun and air was prolonging their lives. I doubt that, but something was.

"Day was our enemy. We vampires lived forever, so some of our elders from the old country worked to create a daylight vampire, one resistant to this savage desert sun. I was the first successful result, so I was indentured to Cicereau to secretly scout the wolf pack and its territory and pave the way for a vampire resurrection."

"What is the secret?"

"Some of it was so simple it's not a secret: wearing sunglasses in daylight. Dark glasses weren't in usage until the early nineteenth century and then not common until the twentieth."

Of course I immediately speculated about Snow. "And you're telling me all this because-?"

"Because it's moot. Decades later, when Loretta crossed family lines to mate with a vampire, Cicereau figured out we vamps had only gone underground, not retreated. He demanded the Blood Price for the vampires breaking the bargain.

"Blood Price?"

"The werewolves would kill the errant vampire lover. The vampires would kill his daughter." He sipped his scotch. "But we wouldn't have killed Loretta Cicereau, literally 'wasted' her, or the boy. We would have turned her, increasing our numbers and political clout that way. We can't easily reproduce like werewolves."

"Whoa. I've never heard a whisper of that! Vampires can reproduce?"

"In rare circumstances."

"How rare?"

"A human woman with the just-right blood type, and more than that, the right genes."

"How do you find such a rarity?"

"Assuming you want to, endless taste tests, my dear Miss Street."

I wanted to swallow, hard. Is that why his fang had scraped my lip? Gathering a bit of blood type?

He leaned closer, smelling my fear. "Yes, you taste especially sweet, Miss Delilah, like your cocktail. But I'd have to have more to give you a true assessment."

I felt my pulse jump just then, knowing that was the worst way to let a vampire sense me. This sure wasn't some wannabe anchorman bloodsucker. Sansouci was the real deal and he enjoyed seeing my skittish nerves as a sign of his power.

His green eyes snapped with wicked amusement as he leaned back again, watching my chest with two-edged interest as I fought to even out my breathing. "But we don't hunger to reproduce that way. It's time-consuming and awkward and entails sacrifices on the part of both human and vampire. We prefer to choose our recruits full-grown. That's another major difference between vampires and werewolves."

Did that mean that vampires avoided sex? He didn't act like he did.

He went on. "In the Old World model, both breeds agree that humans are prey. That is natural. It's also natural that vampires and werewolves compete over human prey. Vampires like to draw out our feeding, letting our victims linger, savoring the meal, like spiders. Werewolves must gorge on prey over their few feral days of moon-full, killing and devouring like berserkers. If we blend bloodlines, we could have vampires who kill their prey before sufficient blood is drained."

"Can you drain the dead?"

"It's not as physically and psychologically satisfying. And once it stills, blood rapidly loses its flavor and sparkle. As for werewolves, if they were to hoard their kills, they could neglect to finish killing and devouring before they turn human again."