Vampire Sunrise Page 0,1

supernaturals run the place, and I suspect it's supplied with the wicked stepmother's mirror from Snow White. Although it's been mum with me so far, I do see dead people in it.

The most complicated beings in my brave new world are the CinSims. Cinema Simulacrums are created when fresh zombie bodies illegally imported from Mexico are blended with classic black-and-white film characters. The resulting "live" personas are wholly owned entertainment entities leased to various Vegas enterprises.

Hector and Ric blame the Immortality Mob for the brisk business in zombie CinSims, but can't prove it. Hector wants to wrest the CinSims from the mob's control into his. Ric aches to stop the traffic in illegally imported zombies. It's personal-he was forced to work in the trade as a child.

I'd like to help them both out, and not just because I'm a former investigative reporter crusading against human and inhuman exploitation. My own freedom is on the line from several merciless and downright repellent factions trying to make life after the Millennium Revelation literal Hell.

Luckily, I have some new, off-the-chart abilities simmering myself, most involving silver-from the silver nitrate in black-and-white films to sterling silver to mirrors and reflective surfaces in general.

Which reminds me of one more sorta sidekick: a freaky shape-changing lock of hair from the albino rock star who owns the Inferno Hotel. The guy goes by three names: Christophe for business, Cocaine when fronting his Seven Deadly Sins rock band, and Snow to his intimates. He seems to consider me one of them, but no way do I want to be.

While thinking of my lost Achilles, I made the mistake of touching that long white lock of Snow's hair. The damn thing became a sterling silver familiar no jeweler's saw or torch can remove from my body. Since it transforms into different pieces of often-protective jewelry, it's handy at times. I consider it a variety of talisman-cum-leech.

That attitude sums up my issues with the rock star-hotelier, who enslaves groupies with a one-time mosh pit "Brimstone Kiss."

Then I discovered why those postconcert kisses are so bloody irresistible... and Snow forced me to submit to his soul-stealing smooch in exchange for his help in saving Ric from being vamped to death. This kiss-off stand-off between us is not over.

I've been called a "silver medium," but I don't aim to be medium at anything. I won't do things halfway. I intend to expose every dirty supernatural secret in Las Vegas, if necessary, to find out who I really am, and who's been bad and who's been good in my new Millennium Revelation neighborhood.

Chapter One

DEAD TIRED, I headed "home" in the early evening Las Vegas Strip traffic. Instead of sugarplums-or even three cherries in a slot machine window-other, far less delightful, images danced in my head.

I was only two days of sleep deprivation past an endless night fighting Vegas's hidden ancient Egyptian underworld of bloodthirsty supernaturals. My cup of nightmares was sure to runneth over for weeks with visions of zombie mummies, hyena carcasses, and vampires in eyeliner.

Even worse would be visual reruns of Ric chained to a dungeon wall under the Karnak Hotel, victim of a vicious suck-fest. That was the ancient Egyptian vampire empire's version of waterboarding as they sought the secret of his ability to raise the dead.

Now my investigative partner was out of the Karnak 's supernaturally infested bowels and alive, barely, in a high-rise suite at the rival Inferno Hotel. In an hour, Ricardo Montoya had gone from the pit of Hell to the heavens, or the Vegas version of both.

Following Ric's and my separate life-threatening investigations at the Karnak, I was alive but iffy on the matter of my soul and sanity. Ric was in a coma-possibly more dead than alive-and possibly possessed of a more compromised soul than I was.

I'd been too frantic to do anything but hover over Ric for hours and was finally heading home under doctor's orders to "freshen up" before returning to his comatose side.

Good advice.

Getting myself together enough to drive my big black '56 Caddy, Dolly, through brassy Vegas Strip traffic forced me to focus. My heart felt a faint ping of security when the Nightwine estate's iron side gates opened automatically to admit us.

After parking Dolly near the carriage house, I could hardly wait to enter my soothing rental digs and start to feel human again. In a city built on flash and flesh, unhuman seemed the dominant life, or death, form.

I headed for the Enchanted Cottage, then stopped. Its Hobbity