Vampire Sunrise Page 0,3

vices... drinking, dicing, doing anyone and any illegal substances in sight.

Me, here and now, I'd just OD'ed on fighting supernatural crime. I ached from ankle to angst, but mostly I was mentally sucked dry.

I'd left the Enchanted Cottage thirty-six hours earlier a relatively well-adjusted woman with a mildly important mission... handling a rogue CinSim at the Inferno Hotel. That was more a public relations assignment than a serious case for a fledgling paranormal investigator.

Here I was coming home a virtual zombie, a husk who'd danced cheek-to-cheek with sex and death and destruction and-even more blasphemously-perhaps given life.

When I left my fairy-tale digs I hadn't anticipated meeting a particularly iconic CinSim: Humphrey Bogart as "gin joint" owner Rick Blaine in the 1942 film classic Casablanca. Who wouldn't want to share a bar with Mr. Noir Guy, even if he was just a CinSim?

Once placed, CinSims are chipped to stay where put, within a room or a set range of so many feet. They are property on loan. One of them strolling off assigned premises, even in their home hotel, was big news.

Wouldn't you know it was tough-guy Bogart/Blaine who'd wandered from his proper place in the hellfire bowels of the Inferno Hotel? He'd made it all the way to the ground-level bar. There he'd asked for me, Delilah Street. Well, he didn't exactly ask for me, personally.

He'd muttered about a woman of my description: "black and blue." That's me on a police blotter-black hair, blue eyes. Add a funeral-lily pale complexion and red lips and you have Snow White wearing Lip Venom gloss.

Since my "summoning" then and my exhausted return now, my attire had gone from a midnight-blue velvet gown among my personal vintage clothes collection to an armored catsuit fit for a sixties James Bond movie action climax.

The steel-studded, patent-leather suit and crotch-high flat-heeled boots I wore, sans the black mail hood, were unnaturally light and tight and adapted to the wearer's physical dimensions, permanently.

At least Grizelle said so.

That's why I'd worn the thing home under a jersey caftan. The suit moved like muscle with my weary body and kept me upright, thanks to spandex and some possibly supernatural spell known only to Snow.

For all its creepy flexibility, the outfit felt as hard as a scarab's shiny carapace. Inside it my joints creaked as if cased in concrete. My mind felt duller than a battle-worn sword and my heart heavier than a black hole filled with lead.

How odd that instead of a weapon I now toted something as trivial as a Prada shopping bag loaded with my clothes from my original dress-up outing to the Inferno. I pulled out midnight-blue sequined pumps-call them Dorothy Gale in mourning-and matching evening bag, and a tiny but significant container of Lip Venom plumping gloss.

All very chichi, yet to me the limp blue velvet vintage gown draping the crook of my arm was now about as attractive as a vamp-drained corpse.

I let it slide to the floor with the shoes and bag as soon as I crossed the cottage threshold, the beginning of my personal safety zone.

There was no place like the Enchanted Cottage for R &R.

My landlord, another triple threat like Snow-TV producer, film buff, and morbidity entrepreneur Hector Nightwine-had duplicated a film set as a livable guest house on his estate.

I can't swallow the fairy tale that quaint settings create a stage for true love, as happened in that movie. Still, since the Enchanted Cottage had been recreated in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, what had been merely "charming" before was now actually "charmed," in the sense of hosting a mostly unseen magical staff.

Yup, I knew that lodging me here was like reinventing Snow White with pixies and gnomes instead of workaholic dwarfs. The best part was these shy, often unseen creatures worked for me, not Hector.

And work they did, leaving no domestic duties to distract this kick-ass late-model Snow White from just how bad things looked for her Prince Charming.
Chapter Two
A FIRE DID a mazurka in my parlor fireplace, even though this was a simmering Las Vegas June. The parlor was a shadowed Victorian retreat crammed with bric-a-brac. I veered toward the comfort inside, drawn by the hearth flames as if they were the bloodied, beating heart I imagined pulsing inside my own body.

The lobster-tank-size plasma television in the media corner reflected my passage. I jerked to a stop and whirled to face it, my hand reaching for a weapons belt I'd left behind in the Inferno's bridal suite.

I spied only a