"BASTARDS!"

The deep-toned bellow beside me sounded like a cry of the damned from Hell.

It was Ric, visiting the Land of Dream and finding out-takes from his recent all-too-real nightmare of capture, torture, death, and revival.

He'd sat up, sweeping off the black satin sheets and reaching out to throttle unseen attackers. "Hell-born bastards!"

"Yes, but you escaped them. You're free now." I tried to soothe but sounded ineffective even to me.

"They're not free," he shouted, pushing out of bed and scrabbling for his clothes in the dark.

This was a walking, talking nightmare. I felt for my own shed clothes alongside the bed.

Ric was heading for the bedroom door, mumbling about car keys.

I stumbled after, barefoot, pulling on my jeans as I went and sticking an arm through my knit-top sleeve. Wherever he was going I was going with him, but not bare-chested too.

The door to the garage was already slamming shut. I rushed through to hear the garage door grumbling as it lurched upward and the driveway security lights came on automatically. Ric's house had the latest "smart" gadgets.

Whew! Hermie had literally "delivered" already, keys and all. The Vette engine roared into hot-throated life. I yanked open the passenger door and jumped in just as Ric shifted gears, backed out, and turned into the street with a banshee engine howl.

The garage door and lights were closing down, computer-controlled.

The low classic sports car was controlled by a driver who was a nightmare walking, with a crazy woman riding shotgun on what promised to be a wild ride.

Funny how when you save someone's life you don't want him to throw it away.

"Ric," I yelled over the whine of the four-hundred-horsepower engine. All those powerful hooves were almost striking sparks off the pavement. "Where are you going?"

"The bastards," he growled, increasing our speed to over one hundred, I'd bet. The side windows were open, so I practically had to hold my hair on... until a silver net of a scarf materialized to do the job for me.

I figured if my silver familiar was not panicking but being practical, I should be too.

I stopped trying to rubberneck and read the speedometer needle. I eyed Ric's fierce profile instead as we took a freeway on-ramp at high speed. His eyes squinted against the wind but they were open, and the car varoomed up Highway 95 dead center of the lane, as if it ran on a track instead of costly vintage gasoline.

"Where are we going?" I shouted.

"To Hell," he shouted back.

Oh, well. As long as this wasn't just an aimless race to nowhere...

At this hour of the night we met only a few lonely big rigs heading south. The low-slung Vette was surprisingly solid but did a little stomach-churning boogie as the semis tried to suck us into their slipstream.

Actually, if I hadn't been worried about Ric's state of mind, I've have enjoyed the heck out of this furious fun-house escape trip.

By now we were so far from anywhere anyone wanted to be from or go to that the desert was a blank black canvas. We saw only what the headlights revealed.

It was like cutting the dark with a butter knife, or a bronze bullet.

Without warning, Ric braked hard and spun the small steering wheel. The Vette did a TV chase-scene 180 and stopped.

We were facing back into the night we'd dissected with speed, a ton and a half of low-slung Detroit steel, and Ric's justifiable nightmare fit of rage.

We both sat there panting, feeling the cool desert wind curry our hair with its sagebrush-scented fingers.

In the distance, something howled.

"Coyote," Ric said, finally looking at me. "Not wolf. Even the werewolves don't come way out here to hunt."

His hands were still strangling the small steering wheel. I understood what the car represented to him, the same thing that Dolly meant to me. Choice, refuge, and escape.

I looked nervously behind us. No headlights coming. Ric seemed calmer here. He was desert-born, after all.

"'Bastards,'" I repeated. "Were you thinking of capturing El Demonio and his cartel crew?"

His head snapped to face me. " Helena told you all the current specifics of that? What else did she spill?"

We would either go soap opera here, or not. "Lighten up, Montoya. You are such a trial for us mothering types. Of course we talked all about you. She even gave me sex tips."

" Jesus, Del!"

He looked so shocked I almost laughed. "For me, not you. Seems she could tell I was an uptight virgin who didn't have a clue."

"Not so much lately," he said absently.

"So, who are the 'bastards' that drove you out of a nice warm bed with me into the desert dark?"

"Not 'who,' what. I just remembered that part."

"The tsetse flies and leeches? The biting and draining?"

He was shaking his head even as I suggested that, as if his torture and temporary "death" were trivial matters already far behind him. I hadn't yet told him he might have been clinically dead, though.

"No, nothing to do with me," he said. "I risked that sort of thing every time I went to Mexico the past year."

His casual confession made me shudder in the chill night desert air. No wonder Helena was concerned. Ric had been flirting with a rematch with El Demonio and his henchmen for years. A wimp he was not, at least not on his own behalf.

His eyes closed, I could see in the dashboard uplight, holding in the brown contact lens. I had so much more to confess to him. Better do the rest gradually. Ric was replaying some horror other than his hours in the hands of the Karnak vampires, something more painful for him than any physical abuse.

I laid my arm along the seat back, stroked my fingers into the soft hair at his nape. "Tell me, amor."

He shivered this time, a frisson of present pleasure overlying the just-past horror that had gripped him.

"I only glimpsed it, like a flash of some ungodly circle of Hell. The people, the numbers and numbers of people, and so many of them children."

I waited.

His eyes opened as he faced me again, features contorted by rage and disbelief. "Children. Do you realize what that means, Del? This goes far beyond a few tourists disappearing at the Karnak recently."

I nodded. "They were prisoners?"

"Yes, and now that you've told me about the vampires, I realize they'd been captive for years, maybe decades and centuries. They were penned like cattle, food stock for an entire buried civilization of vampires. Bred to feed the future since far, far in the past. Bred to reproduce and replace themselves. Virtually naked, filthy, fed to be drained and finally cast away, mindless as zombies, barely sensate."

He described a scene of the damned in Hell.

"Surely," I suggested, "their dainty pharaohships don't sip from unclean stock? Did you meet them at all?"

"I dreamed it all again. I was caught in some endless gray underworld and taken before their thrones. The splendor you describe around them is a blur. They wanted me to tell them how I raised the dead. Since dowsing is an inborn talent, it's not a translatable skill. They didn't want to hear that and had me taken below again, but not before a pair of crocodile-headed guards held me immobile and the pharaohs each drank from the vampire bat-bite scar on my neck."

This time I shut my eyes. That damn boyhood "vampire bat bite."

"Those ancient, noble vampires are spoiled and lazy, Del," Ric said, knowing I blamed myself. "It was the easiest point of entry. After sharing a bloody kiss they blotted their lips on a linen square and watched as I was dragged away. I think they always get First Blood when there's a mass feeding, after the victims have been cleaned and stripped for the real bloodbath."

"No wonder you tried to outdrive your dreams," I said.

Glancing again into the side-view mirrors, I saw only darkness in the distance. It was as if everything living in the night had drawn away from our presence and the matters we discussed and the fates we'd escaped.

"They've got to be destroyed," he said matter-of-factly. "All of them, all the profiteers and string-pullers who exploit the supernatural-human struggle to come to terms with each other. I don't care if they're some corporate 'Immortality Mob,' the Mexican crime cartels, our own rogue human citizens, or subterranean vampires. You say a 'coalition' of Vegas bigwigs organized a rescue party for me? That could be promising. How'd you manage that?"

"You know. I started with Christophe and the Brimstone Kiss."

"Smart, I see that now." Ric grinned at me, happily innocent of how deeply I'd felt the price I'd paid. "It takes a bastard to shut down a city of bastards. He could be king of this town if he wanted to. Guess he can't surrender the stardom and those idolizing mosh-pit groupies."

"I'm sure that's an inducement to someone with an ego as big as the Convention Center," I said, nervously, glancing again to the side-view mirror.

Two tiny yellow eyes flashed far and wee in the darkness behind us.

"Maybe we should get going," I suggested.

"We're okay."

"You've done this before?"

"Yeah, when things get to me. Usually I drive until I'm out of gas and then walk to the lights to get some."

I looked around at the enveloping dark. "What lights?"

"There are always lights somewhere in the dark if you keep going long enough and walk far enough."

"Uh, very philosophical, but those headlights are closing in on us from behind. Even if they're not, I do not want to meet whatever would have eyes that big and move that fast."

Ric glanced to the rearview mirror above the dash.

"Just a deadheading semi driver speeding."

The headlights swelled to the size of fireballs. "Ric!"

I squinched my eyes shut, braced my feet, and hunched my shoulders, anticipating a rear-end collision. Jeez, after all we'd gone through we'd be bug juice on the front of a massive grille. At least no one would suck us dry. I wondered if Grisly Bahr would ID us...

Ric floored the Vette. I was slapped back so hard and fast in the seat the wind was sucked out of my chest. We accelerated to max in what felt like five seconds flat. When I glanced in the side mirror the two paired headlights were shrinking down to bug size themselves and my heart was pounding for nothing.

"That was a rush," I commented.

"Nothing like a near miss to make you feel alive again," Ric said, letting the car slow down to twenty miles over the speed limit.

Was I going to argue with anything that made him literally feel alive again? Nope.

His hand on my inner thigh promised that I'd soon be feeling very live again myself. We had lots to think about: Vegas supernaturals and politics, the nature of Hell in world mythology, revenge, death, destruction...

Was it any wonder that making love, not war, came out on top? At least if I was.