“Cursed? Like bespelled?”
“Maybe that way. On the surface, it looks like a vengeful dead dame’s got him on her radar.”
“And I can help … how?”
“You got rid of the daughter he offed. He thinks you’re the one to banish this new dame.”
“What do you mean,
“You weren’t as cooperative as he likes his women to be.”
“You mean alive and kicking.”
“I do. Not a problem for me, though.”
“Why can’t
“He won’t listen to any of his pack, and I’m the hostage help, so I rank even lower. You’re the perfect undercover operative to figure out what’s going on.”
“But you’re still his top enforcer.”
“Because I can still outkick werewolf pack butt. Just because my … dining partners are voluntary doesn’t mean I can’t unleash the vampire bloodlust that kept me alive, so to speak, for seven centuries or so.”
“A real Jekyll and Hyde.”
Sansouci nodded. “The best … and worst … of both worlds. Don’t forget that, Delilah, while you admire my designer sunglasses.”
Sansouci had pulled out opaque black Gucci shades with titanium frames. Dark glasses began to be commonly used only during the Great Depression, when some vampires learned that keeping their eyes shaded allowed them to stroll around unsizzled by broad daylight. Once unhumans went public after the recent Millennium, the vampires were even more eager to live “normal” lives without being labeled serial killers, which tended to get them hunted down, staked, and beheaded.
“Let’s take a trip down the Strip,” he suggested.
“Cicereau’s still got it in for me, and I’m not dressed for work.”
Sansouci eyed my party getup. “The boss is so many decades behind the times, that outfit will lull him into thinking you’re a nice girl. This looks to be another corporate exorcism job. He’ll pay you well to get the freaks off his back.”
“Like the teenage daughter he murdered back in the forties?”
“Like Loretta, yeah. With werewolves, alpha pack power is thicker than blood.”
“I’ll do a meet with Cicereau,” I said, “but that’s not saying I’ll take the job.”
Still, I wondered what fresh “ghosts” were bugging the Vegas mogul. And I knew my carotid artery was safe in Sansouci’s company, if not much else.
“You want your
“At least I don’t leave scales on the leather upholstery.” Sansouci eyed Manny’s case of all-over orange psoriasis. “Off-black Porsche Boxster with terra-cotta leather interior,” Sansouci spit out, handing Manny a claim ticket.
“Shallow and overrated,” Manny sniffed. “Figures.” He jumped into an idling Lamborghini and raced it up the ramp.
Vegas supernaturals can get edgy with each other. Being in an entertainment venue usually keeps that under control. I could charm or bribe the lower-order supers to my investigative causes. Manny, formally known as Manniphilpestiles, was a demon who’d made it all the way to “pal,” like the Invisible Man CinSim, who’d also saved my skin. I wouldn’t trust Manny with my soul, though, a recognizable commodity in Vegas long before the Millennium Revelation had brought the supers out of the closet.
“Minor-order demon punk,” Sansouci muttered.
“A poor thing, but mine own,” I agreed. “Your red-orange car interior color screams über-carnivore. Manny will certainly know whose name to shout around if I turn up missing.”
Sansouci shook his head. “I’ll get you back here in one untoothed piece, if Cicereau’s newest problem children don’t do you in.”
The Gehenna was a sprawling hotel-casino that rose from the flat landscape, a dark, glassy tidal wave frozen in midcrash. It seemed poised to devour, like huge wolfish jaws.
Inside, an elegantly dark and menacing forest theme prevailed, interpreted in green marble, wood tones from black to gilt, and lurid lighting glittering like migratory flights of fireflies in the casino areas. There was where Theme Décor met Taking Care of Business.
Even in 2013 you can’t enter a Vegas hotel without the raw sights, sounds, and smells of a casino assaulting your senses from the common business areas of the registration desk to the theater and restaurants.
More than drink glasses sweat in these dark, icy mazes of flashing lights and chiming slot machines spread across acres of puke-patterned carpeting. Greed is the color of money in Las Vegas. The overpowering smell is well-salted deodorant.
Over the clanging, chiming, whooping, coins-colliding noises programmed into the slot machines came a faint, high, sweet trilling that made me look up to find the source.
I backed out of the casino’s clang into the aisle to hear it better, so mystified and eager to trace the sound that Sansouci had to jerk me out of the way of an oncoming luggage cart.
“So you’ve noticed it already,” he said.
“Noticed what?”
“That’s what you’re here to tell Cicereau.”
I also noticed that even slot machine patrons were looking up for the source of the singing after every button push, not staring at the reeling blurred icons that would tell them whether they’d won or not.
“That sound is … oddly angelic,” I said, “for an enterprise sporting the hellish name of Gehenna.”
Sansouci shrugged. “That sugary-sweet high pitch drives the werewolves crazy. Their hearing is acute and this stuff never stops.”
“And you? You don’t find it … mesmerizing?”
“
“I can’t even pick up a tune as a hitchhiker,” I said. “My tin ear tells me we’re hearing a heavenly … soprano.”
“Thin soup. Sopranos always sound to me like they’re being throttled,” he added.
“That’s because most guys don’t like opera.”
“Do you?”
“Uh, no,” I admitted. “But I have to admit I find this endless … aria-like perfume in the air addictive.”
“Good,” Sansouci said. “Find out where the sonic Chanel No. 5 is coming from and end it. You’ll get Cicereau’s eternal thanks—for about five minutes and a few thou—and I’ll be glad to have him off my back, totally nonhairy, despite the demon parking punk’s jibe.”
“As if I’d care to know. This … sound isn’t coming over the hotel sound system?”
“First place I looked. No. And I checked the security control room too. You pioneered those routes when Cicereau’s daughter’s ghost took over the hotel audiovisual systems until you exorcised her.”
“Loretta had good reason to haunt her murderous father, and I’m no exorcist. I just figured out how to make some other supernatural gag her. That’s what I am, a lowly human problem solver. Who is this … superb-voiced siren?”
“Someone or something that will shortly drive the paying customers away and the Gehenna’s wolfpack mad. I wouldn’t care, but the vampires aren’t ready to move on Cicereau yet.”
“Some are planning to?” This was hot news in the old town tonight.
Sansouci’s grin was wicked. “That’s for me to know and you to find out. You’re the paranormal investigator. Investigate.”
He gave me a little shove in the taffeta bustle, so I was propelled back onto the marble-floored hotel
