"Delphine Delgado," I told him, keeping my own name secret. "I'm new in town and I need to know a bit about the Karnak. When it was built, why this particular decor."

"You a cop or something?"

"Heavens no, Mr. Hermesaphritus. I'm a scout for Women's Werewear Daily. Animal-headed supermodels are the rage in all the hip rag mags nowadays. We might shoot a big fashion spread here."

"Don't we have a PR person who could tell you all that?"

"Of course, and I'll check in there soon, but first, I need the inside dope. I want to know all the fascinating nooks and crannies that only the staff sees, places that would make absolutely fab fashion-shoot backgrounds."

Hermie was looking dubious, even downright scared. Scared demons get big purple goose bumps and it is not a pretty sight on all those scales, even if they are tanned a toasty brown. Obviously, very low-level demons staffed the Karnak service areas.

Hermie confirmed that by reeling off a list of visitor no-nos. "You stay in the designated public areas. You don't wander. The security guards here would just as soon bite your head off as look at you if you're caught somewhere you shouldn't be."

I had a feeling he was speaking literally. Okay, I'd been warned. Quicksilver was not with me. I was on my own. I'd just have to do my darnedest to keep my head while trying to nose out why yet another big Vegas hotel was setting the hounds on me.

I left Dolly in the dark, with Manny spit-polishing her steering wheel with demon-knows-what, and walked back to the entry area for a date with an ancient empire.

Chapter Twenty-four

The entryway consisted of a double row of massive black pillars that squeezed out all the Las Vegas sunlight and made you feel your way inward. You felt like an archeologist exploring a lost temple in the noonday sun that drove Englishmen and dogs mad. Vegas could vie with Egypt for that.

As I moved between the close-set columns, my hands started out dancing off the hot stone, and then jerking away from the flash-frozen inner row of pillars that had turned icy cold from the interior air-conditioning.

I never encountered an actual set of doors, but soon stepped into a vast echoing chamber too wide and high to be called a mere lobby. It was more a gigantic reception hall, anchored at the far end by a thirty-foot high statue of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead. Nope, my attacking canines had not been jackals, which had a leaner and less hungry look.

Egyptian figures painted on tomb and temple walls were usually pretty lean and mean and lithe. Their art style of showing bodies facing front and heads in profile made shoulders wide and hips slim, a posture savvy female fashion models adopt today.

The towering statue portrayed Anubis striding forward, a broad-shouldered, slim-hipped hunk of black stone surmounted by a sharp-eared and sharp-muzzled canine head wearing a golden headdress. He carried a gold staff, wore a golden kilt, and matching, uh, accessories and had pointed ears the Big Bad Wolf would envy.

Given the importance of burial rituals to the Egyptians, I shouldn't have been surprised that the Karnak was a massive tomb of a place. Tourists scurried like ants from the gilded reception desk through various painted and hieroglyph-incised interior pillars to the elevators, the Pyramid Tomb Trail, the Sphinx Theater, the Nile Barge Ride, the Valley of the Kings Shopping Mall and the Necropolis Casino.

I edged along the hall's hedging pillars until a steady ching-bah-ching of slot machines overpowered the constant echo of shuffling shoes and raised voices. Hermie had told me not to miss the hall leading to an adjacent high-roller high-rise that was off-limits to the public and the regular staff.

It was lined, he said, by mummy cases-supposedly real mummy cases with real mummies inside-and ended at a chariot of solid gold that was rumored to descend and whisk special guests to a secret lower level crammed with authentic tomb treasure.

What intrigued an ex-reporter the most was the off-limits part, not the glitz and the gold. Not so my silver familiar. Just the thought of treasure had the silver slithering restlessly over my skin, gathering and spreading thin to cover my chest with a wide, cold Egyptian collar, front and back. Like me and the CinSymbs, the thing had an uncanny urge to dress for the proper period surroundings.

There were no mirrors in the corridor except the polished black granite behind the parade of mummy cases on either side. No mirrors meant no mirror magic to use for a quick exit, if I had the ability to use it here and now which, after my talk with Madrigal, I thought iffy anyway.

I eyed the giant coffins on either side. These mummy cases were an awesome seven feet high, many gilded and brightly painted with fantastic creatures and mysterious, to me anyway, hieroglyphs.

At the far end, the golden chariot gleamed, a delicate yet useful object attached to a rearing pair of black marble horses. I couldn't see an exit from the charmed circle where down lights from above made the chariot look like it was constructed from liquid fire.

A nasty series of creaks and rustles kicked up behind me, flowing after me in a distant wave. I was getting close to the chariot and didn't want to turn back to look.

And then something stepped out from around the steed statues, backing its confrontational stance with a basso growl and a hideous laugh that echoed into a roar down the corridor and back again. The laugh would have been Boris Karloff-corny in an old horror movie, but here it was utterly spine-chilling.

This was no indignant high roller upset by some nobody approaching his elite retreat. This was one of the beasts that had attacked me outside the Dead Zone. In the glaring light I could study its powerful, hunched shoulders and fang-filled jaws.

Behind me the rustle and creak had escalated to a constant murmur of oncoming motion. I should be panicking at that eerie flood of sound, like an oncoming infestation of locusts, but I'd been studying more than the chariot in the nearing niche where Toothy might soon floss his fangs with my bones. I'd been analyzing the entire vignette.

Toothy lowered his brutish head, reminding me of a mythical hellhound who guards the gates to horror and despair and eternal torment. I started loping, making my strides long, and then even longer.

With that momentum, I vaulted up and over Toothy's gnashing fangs and into the golden chariot. It shivered on its wheels, but I leaped again, touching the front guardrail with one foot, and pounced onto the back of the nearest stone horse. I was content to balance there for a moment, then slide down to cling, arms and legs braced on the broad back, hands wrapped around the gold leather harness.

Meanwhile, the hellish hyena-hound beneath me was hurtling its powerful but awkward body at the smooth stone stomach of my eight-foot-high mount. Only then did I look over my shoulder, and shudder.

All along the corridor I'd passed, every painted coffin lid had swung open. Talk about unhinged! A mummy had stepped out of each to inspect me. They now stood at attention in two lines that narrowed at the other end, like a vee of flying geese, making a return escape impossible.

I was sealed in by a double line of animated mummies, their age-browned cerements coming undone enough to offer a peek-a-boo look at the dry bones and desiccated skin beneath.

It was a stalemate unless the mummies decided to rush me. Their wrappings were old and frail. I could unravel them quite a bit before they could return the favor with my own plump, moist and firmly attached skin, although I didn't fancy the clawlike look of the hands that had escaped their bindings.

I figured Toothy below me was all muscle and no brain and wouldn't find a way up my mountain of marble horseflesh.