I grabbed the nineteen-thirties cigarette case from Lilith’s hand, my palm loving the incised Art Deco lines it felt, the sleek compactness . . . thinking Vida would know and love this artifact of her era . . . rats, sentimentality sucked! My thumb found the strike wheel and pushed hard. A sturdy little flame flared into life . . .

. . . and its tiny glare reflected off long glass tubes lining the top of a bullet-shaped coffin on the floor in the small chamber built to house only it.

“The vampires sleep in this space cocoon thingie and there are roomfuls of them up here?” Lilith asked, sounding in awe for the first time I’d ever heard her do so.

I didn’t have time to explain. “Help me drag this out of the room.”

“It looks heavy.”

It ain’t heavy, it’s my maybe baby sister, and she is sometimes very dense.

Thanks, Irma.

“You like to flaunt those hard-candy girlie biceps?” I challenged Lilith. “Use ’em.”

Together, but mostly me, we manhandled the awkward “coffin” out of the room and through the open door. We heaved it upright on the outside wall, where it looked mighty like a space-age mummy case.

I raced back into the room, striking Lilith’s ninety-year-old lighter time and again before it ran out of fluid, hunting two things: a loose old-fashioned male plug lying around and a female receptacle, known in the building trades as an “outlet,” in the wall.

Sometimes they are pain in the neck to connect and sometimes they make beautiful music together.

I returned to the balcony flushed with effort. Lilith was leaning her crossed arms on the railing, looking down. “The vamp girls are really slingin’ hash now. And those dumb guys are keeping their sunglassed eyes glued on the girls’ gyrating hips, baby, not their lips. That’s guys for you.”

“Stand back by the doors,” I said.

She turned. The upright tubes lining both the bottom and the top of the plugged-in case were tinging and buzzing and blushing pink and yellow. “You don’t tell me what to do, Dee.”

“Lilith! What happens next could blind you. Nose to the wall. Cup your hands around your face when you get there.”

“And you?

“I’m gonna aim this little Venusian Palace death ray and then do the same as I told you.”

Lilith was boot-scuffling her way to the wall like a reluctantly obedient three-year-old. That girl had issues. “The Venusian Palace is a Vegas Strip residence tower behind the Gehenna Hotel.”

“Right. Remind me to tell later you how it made the news. We are about to invent Vampire Fire.”

She reluctantly helped me (so much for her muscle tank top) manhandle the “coffin” (so aptly named by Lilith), to face the Dancing with the Stars super-ultra-huge mirror ball trophy hanging above the crazy-lit floor below.

“Now,” I ordered her. “Nose to the wall, eyes shut, and hands cupping your face.”

She cozied herself up to the painted concrete like it was a six-foot-two hunk. “I’m going to think beautiful thoughts. Of your boyfriend.”

“Whatever makes you docile.”

Every muscle in my body was shaking from overextension as I turned myself into the wall and cupped my own hands to put my eyes totally in the dark.

Below, the music was reaching its climax with the shrill of police sirens amping up the mix. I could picture the gyrating couples, vampire and human, reaching the end of the set with a mutual—but so misguided on both sides—mass predatory pounce . . . except the mirror ball was (I hoped but dared not look) broadcasting a strange new light into the frenetic mix below.

The sirens and guitars shrieked and my spine burned with the bites of a thousand fire ants as a totally atonal mass scream of dying vampires joined the last chords.

I heard an electrical apocalypse.

All the breakers in the place burned out at once, even through the light-reddened flesh of my hands I glimpsed when the house went dark as the vampires went down.

First, there was silence.

Then, the buzz of people muttering discontent. Questions floated up.

“Where’re the freaking lights?”

“We’re blind as bats.”

“This is a gyp joint.”

“We want our money back.”

“The band’s really unplugged!”

“Eeew, goo.”

“Yeah. What’s the gunk on the floor?”

I kicked the electrical cord out of the “coffin” with its blackened glass tubes and ran to the balcony railing, gazing down.

Some of the lights were slowly warming up and coming on again.

I’d hoped for nice tidy Buffyverse piles of dust. Instead, I saw puddles of bloodred.

Dazed, formerly cool ravers had ripped off their sunglasses and were wandering the half-lit dance floor, keeping their dancing shoes out of the vamp girl Jell-O.

“What is this stuff, Silly Putty?”

“That hot babe I was dancing with ran out on me when the lights all went out.”

“Ouch. Mine gave me an Indian burn on the arm when she vamoosed.”

Up in rafters, I commented to Lilith, “More like a sunburn.”

“Awesome.” She leaned so far over the railing I had to grab the back of her low-rise jeans. “What did we do?”

Now it’s ‘we,’ Irma pointed out, when it was really thee and me.

And mostly me. I was almost too exhausted to explain.

“When this was a real health club,” I said, “it was so totally California it offered suntanning machines that are banned nowadays. They use ultraviolet light, the artificial equivalent of sunlight, deadly to vamps. The mirror ball fractured that lethal light into a thousand laser stakes spinning down onto the dance floor in a few seconds.”

“So what’s the Venusian Palace effect?”

“It’s one of those new hotel-condo towers, part of a nine billion dollar development.”

“I hear that right? Nine billion?”

“It was built before the Great Recession. Anyway, the hotel-condo walls were all made of concave curved glass. When the Nevada sun hits the surface it creates a beam of concentrated solar energy that can melt plastic and singe hair. It was burning the patrons in the pool area. You get the same effect when you focus a magnifying glass on a piece of paper on a hot sidewalk.”

“You focus your stupid magnifying glass on the National Enquirer pages on the Las Vegas Strip. How that burning hair thing happens is way too nerdy and painful for me,” Lilith said. “You ready to blow this joint? If I only had one in my hand.”

“Now that the vamp girls are history we could go down the street and confront our mama together, safely.”

“Not interested. I’ll let you keep on doing the heavy lifting, Dee. Click those simpy heels together and get us home to Vegas.”

“I’m not sure I can.”

“What? I’m stuck in this nowhere town on a street with your name?”

“Maybe if we walked back to the exact place we showed up along this street.”

“I am not an ‘exact’ chick.” Lilith frowned. “Besides, that’s quite a hike and we’d have to go through all those geeky guys looking for Ms. Goodbar down there. I’m just along for the ride,” she said.

Dare I say ‘whined’?

I shook my head at Irma’s comment and pulled my cell phone from my pocket. The address on Delilah Street in Corona, California, was still on the backlit screen. The folks living here would have no idea what lurked around the corner. What would Vida do now?

Or us? We weren’t on fey paths anymore. How would we get home? These heels of mine were just anonymous vintage wear. They didn’t have a “click” option.

My smartphone did, though.

I wandered toward my own improvised Venusian death ray—the open, upright tanning bed. All right! The vertical bulbs’ blackened centers acted as a mirror backing. I could see my image vaguely reflected in the vertical glass array, with Lilith shadowing me.

In for a penny, out for a pounding. Could I make another giant leap for humankind, or would I zap us both into scattered atoms of fairy dust?

I sighed and pulled up Vegas on the phone’s map app, targeting Sunset Park.

No way did I want to aim exactly for my front door and have Hector Nightwine’s ever-present spy cams reveal his Enchanted Cottage was far more than a reconstructed movie set.

I closed my eyes and hit the button and wished on a star—or a planet, my inspiration, Venus—for good luck. I may even have clicked my peep-toe heels together ever so softly. . . .

Nothing. I felt nothing, not even a breath of wind.

Then I heard something pounding toward me and opened my eyes.

Wow. I saw an oncoming bolt of cold lightning, greyhound big and fast and, duh, gray. It almost knocked off my heels. Also, it battered my ears with barking and a bunch of really too hot, slimy, and thorough ear licks for a public park.

“Quicksilver, down! Good dog. Down. Happy to see you too. You’re my ever-lovin’ American Express card. Shouldn’t have left home without you.”

He finally obeyed and gamboled around me in circles of joyful greeting without jolting the phone out of my hand or me off my feet.

Me.

Solo.

Lilith was nowhere to be seen.

Don’t worry. We’re not going to lose that psycho hitchhiker this easy.

I did worry. I’d gotten Lilith and me to the current address of our foggy vampire roots. Vida. I kinda felt for her. I kinda feared her. Now what were we going to do about it?

Me. I. By myself. Not quite.

I still had a long high-heeled walk home ahead of me. Me and my succulent toes.

Which Quicksilver, confined to the ground by my command, had done a play bow to lick.

I doubted that was what Snow had in mind, but it sure did tickle.

Chapter Twenty-one

“BIG DAY YESTERDAY,” Ric’s voice told me.

“Mmph,” I told my cell phone.

It read 12:52. Why was Ric calling me so late at night after what had truly been a long day?

Wait! Sunshine fell on the bedroom floorboards. Quicksilver lay curled around his giant stainless steel water dish by the dormer windows. It was not last night, it was morning.

Or what passed for it with me, which appeared to be the afternoon.

“Delilah? Are you awake?”

“Barely.”

“I know we need to do a postmortem on Loretta in Hell and me on the Nine Circles’ Lust level and seeing Metropolis, but some honchos from D.C. just hit town wanting to meet on an emergency consultation about smuggling zombies in from Mexico.”

“I saw you speak on that subject,” I murmured. “You were very good. Muy commanding.”

“You did? I’ve never given a formal speech in my life.”

Oh. That had been a dream. Right.

“Well, you’d be very commanding if you did.”

“They’re flying people in from the West Coast and Midwest, so this could run late into the evening. I hate to leave our own matters hanging.”

“Such as . . . ?” I began, still wondering how I could explain my freaky mirror-trek to California and a maybe-vampire mother.

“Dealing with Snow’s astounding offer of sponsorship, what’s best for the Silver Zombie, and how much danger raising her put me in from Vegas bigwigs will just have to wait,” Ric said impatiently.

I yawned. He didn’t know I’d been to the West Coast and back already that very early morning. “I agree. We don’t want to jump on Snow’s bandwagon without plenty of research. It’s okay, Ric. We’ll check in tomorrow.”

Besides, Snow wasn’t the only one worried about Ric.

We cooed our good-byes and I rolled over to sink into that most luxurious of feelings, a long nap in a sunny room.

I should have been wondering what was up with Ric and his government contacts, but my mind was on a maternal vampire—mine!—and recalling how I’d stumbled to find mother substitutes in my early years.

Discovering an apparent vampire mother also ramped up my growing anxieties about Ric, worries about his soul I’d buried under a white-knuckled dedication to his physical survival.

When an unadoptable orphan—whose closest thing to a mother most of her life was shared with Mr. Spock (and look how he turned out)—is all grown up and has an intimacy “issue,” who’s she gonna call on?

As usual, I was more comfy with film people than the real “family” folks in my life . . . like some hard-hearted group home supervisor.

Spock’s human mother, as played by Jane Wyatt on Star Trek, was formerly the mother on Father Knows Best, so she had to put up with a lot of male domination in her day. She remained my model of mature sweet reason. God knew I could use such a woman in my life.

The vamp in California was not my role model.

Our life was way simpler when you were still a virgin early last spring and had nil intimacy, much less other issues, Irma popped up to remind me. So who’s our go-to gal now? Helena Troy Burnside has my vote. She’s only a long-distance phone call away, or we could video conference.

“No Skype,” I told Irma. Helena had spotted only Lilith lurking in my psyche. “If she finds out about you, I’ll be certifiable in her book and no fit, uh, partner for her foster son. You are not going share any screen time with me. Who do you think you are, Irma . . . Lilith?”

Come on, Helena’s an open-minded lady.

“She’s my lover’s foster mother, Irma. It would be embarrassing to look so green in front of her, and I don’t want her to worry about Ric.”

If you didn’t lock me out when you’re gettin’ down with Mr. Yummy Montoya, I’d be all you’d need to advise you, girlfriend.