THE ELEVATOR DOORS opened on deserted halls depicting the eternal Egyptian decorative combo of earthly and afterlife paradise and a passage through the murky underworld separating these two desirable states.

We all paused, awed. Ancient oil lamps cast an ambient glow like the high-tech, ultraviolet-filtering low lights museums use to shield irreplaceable artworks. They illuminated everything.

The hundreds of thousands of ordinary humans who produced the Egyptian culture's prodigies of architecture, art, writing, and religious complexity for their time and place were almost supernaturally gifted.

Add to them a vampire's eternal life and strength and they were terrifying.

They always say, "Don't look back."

That's what someone somewhere sometime must have told Dorothy Gale after she got back from Oz, I bet. Dorothy, don't look back! Don't see the curled toes and striped socks of the Wicked Witch of the East lying dead under your tempest-tossed house. You didn't kill her. Fate did. You can't afford to feel guilty in a land where Wicked Witches will eat you alive.

Irma was playing Greek chorus to me at this moment.

Girl, don't follow that yellow brick road. They play for keeps here. Death is the game, my pretty, and those ruby red slippers of yours? Take another gander. They're black butt-kicking boots. No pretties here but us.

I looked around at the large jars and linens, deciding we'd arrived in a mortuary temple storeroom. I'd been boning up on ancient ways along the Nile since my first foray "way down in Egypt land," as the old spiritual put it, where Moses told Pharaoh, "Let my people go."

I glanced at Ric, trying to picture him as the Charlton Heston film version of Moses. I saw a bit of the liberator but not the asexual religiosity, thank goodness.

Quicksilver growled as Ric did a rapid visual survey.

"Great stuff for the tourists," Ric said, "but my dream featured the deep, dark, down and dirty parts. That's where we need to go if we're going to free anybody from being kept as enslaved food for an aristocracy of immortal vampires."

Ric's glimpse of enslaved vampire food kept like cattle in cavern camps overrode the memories of his own torture for now. I was thankful for anything that banished such pain. Still, how could we three rescue "herds" of people who'd survived thousands of years beyond their time?

He must have explored far beneath the royal pomp and circumstance areas of the Karnak's inner necropolis to have discovered the vampires' human food supply before he'd been captured and became it.

I shivered inside my warm catsuit. Helena's therapeutic intervention still dampened Ric's bad memories. What would happen when they fully exploded back into his consciousness?

If he remembered his torment, would he also remember I'd kissed him back from apparent death, or the brink of it? Would he love me for doing it? Or not. Love me or loathe me? I was becoming a person with either friends and lovers or enemies, nothing in between.

Did I really want to awaken every morning in a city like Las Vegas with its hidden underworld of blood, lust, greed, and death? Did I want to call a glittering playground built upon the exploitation of so many victims home? Maybe we all do that, unknowingly. That was the trouble with the Millennium Revelation. Nobody with eyes and a brain could pretend to be ignorant and innocent anymore.

Rats. That made life hard but... maybe more worth living? Or not losing, at least.

I nodded at Ric. "Lead on, amigo, and we'll follow."

We were a team, yes, but sometimes one had to take the initiative. He moved forward with the bold caution of a point man in a SWAT operation.

So far we'd only intruded on the lavishly decorated corridors of an ancient Egyptian tomb. Although the chambers and halls we passed were empty, we never had a sense of being alone. The eerily lifelike painted bas-relief human figures on the walls ensured that. In shades of red, yellow, blue, and green, the people alongside us were forever frozen in their daily occupations of work and pleasure, their black-outlined eyes always facing the viewer and on us.

The hieroglyph of their god Horus, an ever-vigilant open eye, supposedly had inspired the watchful "private eye" logo of the first and most famous private detective agency in the world.

The nineteenth-century U.S. Pinkertons' "We never Sleep" motto and open eye symbol had set the PI standard ever after.

So in the shadow of sloe-eyed, life-size Egyptian hunters and courtiers and pharaohs and boatmen and handmaidens and beast-headed gods, Ric checked every corridor each way.

A pulsing muscle in his cheek caught the light of the ancient lamps that allowed us to proceed without using our small, high-intensity flashlights.

Some seductive perfume in the smoke-wafting oil blended with the dusty, dry air and snaked almost physically through these chambers and narrow passages that angled up and down without stairs.

Ric always took the downward path.

Claustrophobia? Oh, yes. I had it.

Yet this grandiose tombscape also felt seductively peaceful, even intimate. All those white-garbed silent figures we passed seemed to acknowledge us in our somber cat-burglar black as we stalked images of their daily lives.

Were they Egyptian frieze angels on eternal watch, cast in the exquisite concrete of their long-dead culture? A TV reporter learns to look for visual metaphors. These pleated linen, wing-shaped kilts and skirts and capes seemed celestial and reassuring.

Except that talk of "dead" cultures was a mind-blowing concept now that we'd seen some still "lived" on... undead.

I was glad to spot no throne rooms or the beautifully neurotic twin sibling pharaohs I'd encountered on my first visit.

Truthfully, I hoped never again to glimpse them or their court musicians and armies of animated mummies and tomb-painted legions leaping off the walls to battle intruders like us.

Nor did I ever want to see again that dank, undecorated dungeon reached by some underground mirror of the River Nile, where Ric had been tortured until virtually every drop of his blood seeped into thirsty undead throats.

I still wasn't clear how the hellish river under the Inferno Hotel, doubtless the Styx, connected with a new supernatural Nile. Did moving water resemble a literal bloodstream in this Millennium Revelation world, linking cultures current and ancient, as well as lusts as old as time and as new as the latest cell phone model? At least this section of the Karnak's lower depths was dry and so far deserted.

The lamplight cast Quicksilver's canine profile ahead of us. His sharp snout and ears reminded me of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead. His entire body stiffened in warning, ears pricked even farther forward, eyes staring, shoulder muscles quivering.

I put a containing hand around his collar... and pulled back stung fingers. The silver circles dotting the wide black leather were pulsing like overheated hearts, hot enough to raise coin-shaped blisters on my fingertips.

Oh my.

Ric's warning grip on my upper arm dimpled my steel-studded catsuit. We formed a linked trio in an instant, each in physical touch, all on high alert. I felt battle resolve amplify and echo between us like the drumbeat of a common heart.

We faced a darker opening, with no hint of hanging oil lamps beyond it.

Ric stepped through. We all did.

Our eyes slowly adjusted to a subtle twilight.

Gone were the lavish decorations. We stood among a thick convention of pillars like the towering black basalt ones that surrounded the Karnak Hotel entrance on the Las Vegas Strip.

These pillars, though, were of more human height, only twenty-some feet high, and made of humble yellow stone. So thick they still seemed squat, the forest of supportive pillars upheld a cavernous underground area we could see no end to.

"A royal basement?" I asked in a whisper.

The vast space with its unseen distances reverberated my three words into a muddled chorus from perhaps a thousand lips, losing all meaning in the process and becoming a rasping hiss.

I clapped a hand over my loose lips.

Too late to rethink and shut up. I'd already roused a native. From around one fat pillar popped a bizarre figure like an ancient Egyptian jackal-in-the-box.

It was half my height. I felt Ric's grip ease at that fact.

A growl reverberated into a pack of hellhounds as my dog brushed past us. Quicksilver wasn't standing off. To him, short stature was no sign of weakness. His canine grin became a widening maw and the long, low, gargled growl in his throat made a more menacing warning than any hundred rattlesnakes could broadcast.

"Aha!" cried our challenger, stomping his bare feet on the sandy stone floor and pumping his chubby hands up and down like an annoyed toddler. "Dance music at last in my deserted domain! Who goes there? Who comes to greet Bez? Man or beast, or pretty woman?"

Except for Quicksilver, who continued to growl into the creature's curly-maned, blunt feline face, we were speechless. Ric and I had been primed to face insanely blood-thirsty vampires from a civilization that, in the search for eternal life, had invented the most death-centered culture in the ancient world.

Instead we meet a stumpy, grumpy figure from a flea-bag traveling circus?

"Well?" this "Bez" demanded again, in perfect English. "I've been waiting centuries to see natives beyond my prison doors. Are you man or woman? I can tell by the hyena breath that this rude individual at my level is a beast."

Quicksilver whined a question and suddenly sat on his haunches. The creature had passed his acid test. It bewildered rather than awakened his combined canine and lupine instincts.

"To answer your question. We are all three," Ric said.

I remembered that the lion-bodied, human-headed sphinx had offered a riddle to all who passed in some old fable.

"Ah, but is she pretty?" came another query.

I couldn't fault Bez for asking. My black hair resembled the shoulder-length wigs both men and women wore in ancient Egypt. My camo-streaked face was missing elaborate Cleopatra eyeliner. And I didn't wear a long tight skirt.

"What's it to you?" Ric asked, not intimidated.

The figure did a clumsy somersault directly into our path. "Nothing and everything. Pretty women are a specialty of mine. Ugly ones too. As you may notice, I have no claim to beauty myself."

I eased out my held breath and scanned our otherwise still-unpopulated surroundings.

No, no incoming spectral or physical hyena packs. No charging zombie mummies. No terra-cotta-skinned warriors armed with spears, battleaxes, bows and arrows. No royal gold chariot bearing twin male and female pharaohs braced for battle.

Just this impish squat figure blocking our passage.

Well, had we met our one Munchkin in this murderous Land of Egyptian Oz?

Was he-and I noticed the operative organ, rampant and outsize, that confirmed it beneath his round belly-a chubby Cupid-like court jester? His head was at about my waist level and, given his lascivious grin, I was not really comfy with that, even in a fully covering catsuit.

His legs and arms were all hairy muscle and his face surrounded by curly hair and long beard. He was a jug-eared, lion-maned, Egyptian-collared and kilted, rotund creature, both jovial and sinister.

I couldn't decide if he was a pet or a demon.

From Quicksilver's continuing blend of whimper and growl, he was as confused as I was.

Not Ric. He'd pulled out his boot knife, a wicked eight-inch blade, and aimed it at the navel on the jolly little potbelly, just above the too-obvious male member.

"Aren't we the pretty foursome?" the creature demanded, unfazed and preening. He leered at me. "I bet you bear a tattoo of my image on the inside of your thigh, if you're the pretty lady."

Ric's fist had him up in the air by the bunched beaded collar, dangling. Ric kept the powerful kicking legs two feet from his tensed torso, doing no harm.

"What," he demanded, "have you to do with this lady's thighs?"

"Nothing! And everything! Good sir. Fine sir. Gentle sir. I will give her sweet childbirth, that's all."

"Thanks, but no thanks," I said. "You think I'd wear a tattoo of your person on my flesh?"

He shrugged and appealed to the dog.

"It does look too wet and slippery to hold ink," he conceded of my thigh. "Yet many ladies do and are the better for that. I should introduce myself so you will explain your most fascinating selves.

"I am Bez, cousin of the goddess Bast, lion cub in some guises, otherwise humble domestic servant, protector of households and the birthing process, and licker of lady parts when invited."

Quicksilver went to his belly, stretched out his legs, and fixed his canine jaws and eyes on what delicate bodily part-as with Cicereau's goons in Sunset Park-he considered the creature's "spleen." One leap and...

Ric shook the little man. I realized Bez was a dwarf. Ric's personal history of childhood slavery would keep him from hurting anything with a childish aspect unless he was dangerously and personally challenged. Bez might be many things, even dangerous at times, but now he was merely a friendly and curious obstacle. Ric's frustration must be immense.

"What are you doing down here?" he demanded.

"What your gentlenesses must also be doing down here," Bez said. "Exploring maybe, patrolling. The Lands of Their Joint Majesties are minor above, but major below."

"You're a guard dog of sorts?" Ric asked.

"A guard god. Yes, a humble one, or I would be much closer to the throne room. But, really, sir"-his oversized head leaned inward-"if you yourself do not harbor millennia of blood tastes, you'll much prefer these empty, natural caverns, home to those who would practice the old ways but also have no way to defend their preferences, alas."

"The new ways," Ric said, "require legions of cowed and unwilling blood donors, indentured for centuries, being born and dying for one reason only: to be food."

"Food. Ah, yes. One of my favorite things. I admit to a lion-size appetite despite my small size. I must say I like being of this elevated stature your gentle grasp permits."

The bizarre head that combined features of a chubby man and a lion looked from right to left and back again.

"However, since I am charged with the safe passage of life from mother to child, and most of these born here are meant to be drained, ultimately to the death, I suppose I am obligated to help any liberators rash enough to venture below. I saw you captured here, man-stranger. Your valiant fight gave me hope my people might someday face a kinder fate. If you could use a guide to the Underworld, I would volunteer myself."

Ric lowered Bez to his chunky legs with a swallowed curse.

"All right for now, Shorty. I'd not seen your like down here, during my brief and, as you state, violent earlier visit. You seem harmless enough."

"And nice to see you again, sir. Harmless? Always my major advantage, sir, among a very formidable pantheon of predatory-headed gods," Bez said with a bow. "It's true I'm partial to the ladies but my role is guardian, which leaves me stranded at a lot of portals while others have all the fun."

Ric was still dubious. "Such as inspecting women's thighs, no doubt."

Bez peered mischievously around Ric at my dark-clad legs. "She wears no linen sheath but I sense the female. No tattoos of me? Not a one?"

"Alas, no tattoos at all, especially of you," I answered.

"I am considered a lucky charm."

"But you're not Irish," I noted. There was something leprechaunish about him, also Puckish. He was also clearly Egyptian, although oddly so.

"Eye-rish?" he echoed me. "Does that have something to do with the Eye of Horus, which never sleeps? Speaking of such, I advise moving on. Like the River Nile, to move is to make new and in moving one is safer than still water.

"So speaks Bez, the guardian."

RIC CLAPPED AN arm around my shoulder as we and Quicksilver followed our cavorting guide.

Despite Bez's assurances, we all kept looking left and right, back and ahead, keeping a 360-degree eye on our surroundings. The area did indeed seem deserted, though we figured from Ric's seeing hundreds of corralled people down here that some nasty people herders must lurk ahead.

Ric leaned near so I could place my whisper for his ears only.

"If such a creature as this Bez can exist here, perhaps it's a safer zone."

"Don't count out Coyote," he growled back as deep and low as Quicksilver.

"Coyote?" I was lost. Didn't he mean hyenas? They're the African-and now new-ancient Egyptian-variety of canine.

"Trickster god," he hushed back.

Oh, Irma whispered in my inner ear. I've heard of that dude. Well known among Native Americans in the Southwest. Remember that trickster gods are two-sided coins, Dee. Sometimes helpful, sometimes definitely not!

I nodded, puzzling Ric, who didn't know I'd never outgrown my childhood invisible friend. In fact, I had two invisible friends now, counting the Invisible Man CinSim at the Inferno.

I was always happy to know that Irma and her strong survival instincts were aboard. When she came out to chat, it boded well. Bez might be a guardian god but I packed a guardian goddess.

Speaking of goddesses, I felt the silver Wonder Woman coronet melting down my cheekbone and neck, a cool thread snaking down my torso to wrap my left thigh. Oh, no! The silver familiar was faking a Bez "tattoo" on my leg. More subtle mockery? Snow might claim the amulet's activity was only driven by my own conscious and subconscious, but I knew he'd get a vengeful kick out of my skin being marked, even temporarily.

I had to stop worrying about what Snow might or might not do to me now that I'd really done him wrong. It was messing with my mind at crucial times.

Think, Delilah, don't let guilt grab the steering wheel from you!

I didn't need Irma to goad me on this subject. I was far too aware of what Snow had done to me and I had done to him. I was concluding neither of us came out looking good from that juvenile, supernatural one-upmanship contest.

So I reconsidered the familiar's latest shift on my epidermis. That damn mobile silver hitchhiker might consider it vital to mark me with Bez's sign of protection. I surely wasn't a pregnant woman in need of a mystical midwife. I might surely be a mortal woman requiring supernatural Egyptian protection in the coming hours.

MEANWHILE, I HAD two keen hunting dogs for partners.

"I recognize this stone forest." Ric pushed past Bez to palm-stroke a shoulder-high scratch on one massive pillar. "I used my fingernails to etch my path."

"Hieroglyphic cookie crumbs. Good thinking, Hansel."

I rushed ahead to another marked pillar. The faint marks on the exposed fresh stone stood out down here, even in the eternal twilight glow.

"Naughty, naughty!" Bez cried, dancing after us as if his bare feet trod hot sand. "The royals don't want any graffiti but their own on their walls and pillars."

Ric and I caught each other's glances, then laughed. We had reason to scoff at the royals' rules after enduring separate capture by them. Being considered trespassing graffiti artists tickled our senses of humor and survival. When your life is on the line, there's no sense going down sniveling.

Quicksilver demonstrated the same spirit by stretching his six-foot length up a pillar and dragging a front fang along it. He turned to grin at us. A crooked line like a faint lightning bolt was his mark.

That sky-set signature was more than appropriate. I noticed the silver circles on his collar had swollen into almost full-moon roundness down here. Did that mean he sensed the lurking presence of his canine cousins, the royal hyena corps? I hoped not.

"How'd you get this deep on your own?" I asked Ric. "I trapped myself in a mummy case-guarded hallway near the hotel levels. I only descended a few levels to reach the royal throne room for a disdainful interrogation session. The Twin Royals had nothing on Captain Kennedy Malloy of the LVMPD in the disdainful department, I must say."

Ric eyed me sideways, amused. Little did he know he owed his two coffee-dark irises to a contact lens I'd slipped into the one that had turned silver.

"Kennedy isn't as possessive as you think," was all he said.

"Maybe not, Mr. Tequila Smoothie Montoya, but I'm a lot more possessive than you think."

Ric hadn't been conscious to see me poised to battle Grizelle's huge tiger form to the death.

He smiled ruefully. "I lucked out to get this deep unchallenged. In the desert you learn to move silently, so the rattlesnakes don't strike. We don't want to linger down here. The last time I did that it didn't turn out so swell. So, no, I didn't take your handy dandy elevator ride down, I just followed the yellow sandstone road."

When I lifted my eyebrows, he swept his rubber sole over the yellow sand covering the limestone. "These paths go down stories and stories, like the staircases in the London Tube. Ever been there?"

"Nope. No Tubes in Kansas except for funnel clouds. When were you in London?"

"A couple of years ago when I was still with the FBI. Some very old bodies that needed finding were buried deep."

"I bet."

Apparently our new guide didn't want us dawdling. Bez did several handsprings past, popping upright to bar our way again.

"I am Bez," he announced again. "I am only a minor god. Some say I was imported from Nubia, a lesser being, but I am an offspring of the Nubian lion-god."

"Impressive," Ric said. "One of Hercules' twelve labors was to defeat the Nemean lion."

"I can add to that," I said. "Samson wore a lion skin and was also said to have defeated a fierce lion, but Delilah-"

"-trimmed his mane," Ric finished with a grin. "Hey, little big guy," he said to Bez, "you do realize you're traveling with the mighty Delilah?"

"Ah, no. Thank you for the warning. One would not wish to lose one's mane to the mighty Delilah."

Almost ready to giggle despite our surroundings, I pictured myself carrying oversize shears in my duty belt holster, the kind I'd once found at an estate sale, used at newspapers in hot-lead typesetting days to cut across copy paper with one swipe of giant blades. Delilah Street: the Amazon scissors queen.

A few good slashes to curtail Samson's God-commanded locks had made the biblical Delilah's reputation. I intended to slash whatever needed it and a lot more than hair.

Bez was dancing on impatient feet again. "One must not idle. We must pass these unmoving pillars to arrive elsewhere."

Quicksilver was the first to follow Ric's sinuous path forward. In several minutes we'd woven between a couple blocks' worth of lavishly decorated pillars. I was gaining new respect for Ric's inbred desert survival skills. He must have been hard to capture. Only being outnumbered by hordes of Egyptian vampires probably had accomplished it.

Plus, he'd penetrated the heart of their evil empire, if you hankered to use old movie-serial terms. My first visit here had just brushed the surface. I had no talents the Egyptian vampires could use, so they hadn't tried that hard to keep me.

In retrospect, I found that rather insulting.

By now the spare stone underground vastness had developed a foul smell. Quicksilver's black nostrils were flaring with distaste. I recognized the unhappy combined reek of stale meat and fresh excrement.

Ric caught my eye and looked down. The sandy floor had darkened, like the ground of a bull ring, as if with blood.

No. It was damp. With water.

I didn't hear any fresh-flowing stream like the underground rivers used during the Inferno invasion of the Karnak. We were in a very different section. This was seepage from below.

Bez, who'd paused, gargled distress low in his throat, the feisty lion cub. Quicksilver echoed him.

"We're near the... encampment," Ric warned me. "You can smell the human occupation."

I inhaled deeply. Yes. Blood, shit, and tears. My heart clutched. As a paranormal TV reporter in Wichita, I'd covered a couple of brutal cattle mutilation sites in the boonies.

Cows made such pathetic victims. Large, bulky creatures, they were never built to run away like horses. They'd been fashioned to graze, essentially as helpless against serious, or even supernatural, predators as housecats and backyard dogs.

Why did these harmless animals allow savage mankind to make them into domestic slaves? Into beasts of burden and consumption? I'd never understand what domesticated dogs and cats got from their association with a creature as abusive and bloodthirsty as man, whether up to his one final death... or now, to supernaturally extended lifetimes far beyond the single death allotted ordinary animals and less cannibalistic humans.

What would I give to live?

I knew what I'd give to keep Ric living. Almost anything.

"Almost" was a weasel word. I'd probably give my life, then some trickster supernatural might give me more lives and what would my "sacrifice" have been worth? Caring so deeply about another person was new to a wary woman who'd until now invested emotion only in speechless animals that couldn't reject her.

Just days ago I'd considered an unwilling kiss the ultimate price to pay in terms of sovereign personal freedom. Now... it wasn't that simple. Now I knew I could kill as well as kiss.

Quicksilver rubbed his consoling muzzle against my hand. I'd give up a lot before I'd lose him, too, but living life only to stop its inevitable losses didn't seem to be a winning game after the Millennium Revelation.

"Delilah," Ric whispered from ahead, his single word slithering between the stone pillars.

I realized I'd let him get out of sight... and Bez too.

Quicksilver and I rushed through the crowded pillars, following the scent of herded humanity. Ric was striding ahead into the stench-ridden air, sure and determined. Quicksilver and his supersensitive nose pushed past me to trot in Ric's wake.

Thanks to the intense perfumes the ancient Egyptians used, I'd never scented true life in the Karnak Egyptian underground, as Ric had. He didn't just find and sometimes raise zombies, he knew the scent of the human flesh that had made them, even if it was decaying.

I was also aware we were approaching the place where Ric had been captured before. Quick sure smelled danger, dashing back to circle me, then ahead to Ric, shifting his keen, sky-blue eyes this way and that, hunting imminent enemies.

THE PILLARS ENDED unexpectedly. We stood below overarching stone ceilings dripping icicle-like stalactites down to form mirror-image stalagmites reaching upward, like lacy stone cathedral spires reflected in a lake. They created an outer fence of frozen stone and glittering minerals from the ancient salt sea that once had covered the Nevada desert. They made a shining canopy that turned the everlasting twilight here into an eternal dawn.

I turned in a circle, gazing up in wonder at a Notre Dame cathedral of subterranean stone that offered soaring arches above, now that we'd passed the pillared forest.

In the massive swoop of stone roof my imagination traced giant veined dragon wings. No Seine River flowed nearby, only the tears of the earth falling downward and piling upward to the stone points of the wings, anchored like tents or fey touchpoints on the ground.

When I'd slowly come back down to earth to follow Ric's stare to level ground, I realized the breathtaking beauty above only made the horror below and ahead of us even more stomach-clenching.

Dark cave mouths yawned open to background a festering crowd of gathered human figures. I saw the crowded, stinking masses prisoner beyond a deep pit. There was nothing ancient or Egyptian about that scene.

On the rim of the pit, caveside, lay gnarly gnawed bones and black-green piles of melting ooze. Picture your refrigerator after a week of disconnection. The stench of rotting meat and vegetation made a Dumpster behind an abandoned food store smell sweet by comparison.

What kept these people where they were? With tentative strides forward, we four finally stood staring down into the apparently bottomless pit separating us from the milling mobs across the way.

I edged closer behind Bez, easily seeing over him.

From the twenty-foot-wide pit that separated the cave dwellers from our party I heard a harsh, scaly stirring deep below. Imagine King Kong dragging his knuckles over an iron mine.

"Viper pit?" I asked no one in particular.

"Not snakes, but other creatures of the Nile banks," Bez said. "Insect life once teeming near the great river are set on guard here to protect the precious, self-generating food source."

Knock out the fancy language and you had the Karnak State Fair Cow Barn, only it never emptied out all year 'round and the "moat" was patrolled by creepy-crawlies.

With a jolt, I realized that the prisoners' front rows were all children, the adults behind them. Their skins presented a patchwork ranging from darker to pale colors and all wore rags of tattered mummy winding gauze.

This close I noticed that the "children" more resembled Bez. I doubted Ric had. A brief glimpse of this scene had stirred his rescue genes. He hadn't yet encountered Bez and realized that the prisoners were petite ancient Egyptian adults and even smaller dwarves combined with-I blanched-some tall, pale folks in shredding knit tops and shorts... the occasional kidnapped tourist.

That dozens of stubby fingers clutched the rags of the taller bedraggled figures behind them was even more heartbreaking. Worst of all, I discerned a few of the "adults" cradling packages that were probably babes in arms.

"They're still here," Ric breathed, as if hoping such a nightmare couldn't be glimpsed again.

He knew better, and so did I.

Beside me, Quicksilver sneezed and boxed at his wrinkled snout. To his sensitive canine nose, the very air we breathed was a torture of noxious, yet carnivore-tempting scents.

It was hard to imagine the immaculately clad Egyptian aristocracy, vampire or not, venturing down by the cave-side to pierce and suck these filthy throats. Expecting a smidge of nicety from a ravening vampire was probably a romantic twentieth-century fantasy the Millennium Revelation hadn't debunked yet.

Ric had evaluated the whole nauseating setup. His expression showed how impossible this rescue mission was, even as the tourists cried, "Help!" and the smaller adults, dwarves, and children called out in no recognizable language but need.

Though Ric's obsession to return here was crystal clear, what two humans, a dog, and a lesser Egyptian god could do for these lost souls was muddier than the banks of the River Nile in ole Egypt Land.

Small, smudged fingers reached across the twenty feet or so between us. Oh, lord, the last thing I could deal with at this moment was unclaimed orphans. And more ancient Egyptian vampires and gods.

Yet those ancient syllables called for aid.

Then I realized the most chilling fact of all.

They were not beseeching Ric and me and Bez, but someone-or something-behind us.