Cesar Cicereau and his werewolf mob were the biggest losers. They'd won the werewolf-vampire war for the city decades ago, but a powerful vampire strain had been building secretly and subterraneously all along. The Karnak was far more than a new hotel-casino on the Strip. It was a visible announcement that the vamps were back, big-time: not assimilated vamps, or pseudo vamp wannabes, or even newly evolved "daylight" vamps like Sansouci. These were ruthless, Old World, blood-thirsty, power-hungry vamps with ambition and access to new Millennium Revelation methods of blended science and magic to raise more of their kind.

By sending Sansouci and support forces to Snow, Cicereau admitted the times were changing. I could see a lot of new alliances, and contentions, arising between everyone from Snow and Cicereau to Hector Nightwine and the CinSims to Howard Hughes and everyone else.

And Snow? If I could get my head around our personal wrangle, I'd admit he'd probably been the most up-and-coming force in pre-Karnak Vegas. In some ways he struck me as a kind of guardian, but one whose hands were tied. He hadn't played Brimstone Kiss with me as simply a sexual game, which was some comfort. It was a "job interview" of sorts. He was searching for a woman unsusceptible to the orgasmic kiss. I, with my virginal and murky non-sexual background, must have seemed a darned good candidate for resisting the Kiss. Which I had, but not enough to suit him, and not enough to avoid passing it on as a life-restoring force.

Lucky for Ric you agreed to the smooch, Irma said softly in the back of my mind, but we didn't totally resist the ecstasy, sister. My toes are still curling.

Shut up, I told her. I'm thinking.

As soon as Ric is recovered, I had a lot of things to do, like settle what's happening with the CinSims, who violated their set boundaries to help me. And I must find Lilith. Is she a Snow kissee who failed the test too? They knew each other before I hit town. Does she know about me? Or care?

And now Snow thinks I've perverted the Kiss to a function it should never have had. Can I kiss just anyone back from the dead? Kinda doubt it. The emotional mojo I poured into Ric was love and desperation-driven. It came from the connection we formed inadvertently dowsing for the dead together in Sunset Park. Is Snow right? I have I doomed Ric to become some quasi-alive zombie monster?

No, honey. Irma broke into my thoughts again. Even the mighty Snow can't know that for sure. How do you think he got all that long white hair? Dude's obviously a worrywart.

She made me laugh at last. Why borrow trouble? Ric and I would cope with whatever this second chance at life and love offered.

"Tomorrow," I told myself firmly in the immortal words of Scarlett O'Hara, "is another day."

"He won't be fully conscious for another day or two," said someone behind me what may have been minutes or hours later.

I felt my shoulders tighten even more at the sound of Snow's vibrant stage-seasoned voice.

"We won't know what you've made of him until then," he added.

I lashed myself around in the bedside chair. "And what about what you've made of me?"

Snow wore a black velour jogging suit. He'd had the forethought not to appear in the costume that would forever remind me of my humiliation.

"You're not dead," he pointed out.

"And he is? They take his blood pressure every hour. It's low, but steady."

"There are many ways to be dead and undead these Millennium Revelation days, Delilah. You may have invented a new one."

"What? Me? Only me? It was your supposedly potent Brimstone Kiss I may have passed on. Maybe that was all you, and nothing to do with me."

"And you'd like to think 'love' revived him? That's why you're so angry with me?"

"That's as likely as a proxy kiss from… whatever you are. Besides, I thought you didn't do men."

A small smile touched those pale lips. "You don't know who or what I do. I just came up to see if you needed anything."

"Less of you. If it didn't make sense to treat Ric here, I'd have him out of the Inferno in no time."

"This suite has been donated to him, not for your sake. I only came to warn you that you'll need to be prepared. We have no idea what's come back in Ricardo Montoya's body. Not even Grizelle."

"I do. Ric Montoya. He'll need time to mend, and more time to come to terms with that vicious torture, but I can tell you he never cracked. He never conceded anything, not his services in raising the dead, not a clue to how he did it. Nothing. Nada."

Snow moved forward to put a hand on Quicksilver's head. The dog growled softly but never took his eyes off Ric, with rapid sideways glances to myself. If I gave the word, he'd tear Snow's hand off.

It was his guitar slashing right hand, too. I was tempted. I deserved something back for my useless exercise in self-humiliation.

"This one probably knows better than we do what he'll be like," Snow said, not moving his hand. "But he can't speak."

Quick gave a short, sharp bark. Snow removed his right hand and lifted his left.

A small blindingly iridescent object was in it. A computer flash drive. He handed it to me. A peace offering? As if ever!

"You might want to stop publicly insisting on tracking down the killer of my groupie after you see that."

"Why?"

"Just look at the recording, Delilah."

"It's the hotel security record of the night of the murder?" I guessed, curious at last. "From the Dumpster area where the body was left? You kept it secret?"

"It's my hotel, my Dumpster, my security recording, my groupie. I didn't think the police needed to see it."

"You are so bad." I took the thumb drive, eagerly. This could exonerate me.

By the time I'd opened up and turned on my laptop computer on a nearby table, Snow had left as silently as he'd come. He wasn't nicknamed Snow for nothing. For soft and silent snow.

It took me a couple minutes to move my mind from Ric to tasks like operating a computer, but I finally clicked the drive into the proper port.

The first image spotlighted the empty delivery area and the Dumpster. I fast-forwarded until I spotted a person in the frame. Two persons. I recognized my groupie, even in the dim black and white light of night. She was facing the security camera and mauling someone whose back was to me.

The groupie was pleading, grabbing, begging. Her hands were reaching for the other person's neck, almost as if to tear off the face, pull out the hair.

I got the shivers, remembering her clinging assault inside the Inferno after Snow had left me that evening. That crazy woman was like glue, invading my space. I saw the object of her obsession lift an arm and bat her away. The elbow caught the groupie in the forehead.

She fell hard and crashed the back of her head into a metal dolly leaning against the Dumpster side.

The other person turned to leave, face caught by the camera.

Myself, reaching up to pin my disheveled hair back into a French twist.

I stood up.

Lilith!

Then she really wasn't dead!

But we are, honey, Irma said, emerging again. At least legally.

And how! Lilith was a murderer?

That babe's gotta be taken for you, unless you can find and produce Lilith to clear yourself. You'd turn her over to Homicide to face the gas chamber after going to all that trouble to find her? No way.

I slapped my palms hard on the desktop, until they stung, trying to feel something. Snow had admitted he kept a lot of things from me. Now I knew he kept them from the police as well.

Something about the recording bothered me, but I was too exhausted to name it.

Was this a bone thrown to a woman who'd failed the Brimstone Kiss test and had almost lost her lover? Or something to hold over her head? Because, surely, he had kept the original.