The place was packed. If possible, even more beautiful types had squashed into the already stuffed-with-tourists lobby since the last time I looked. There was no way to shift without being seen, and I didn’t feel up to it anyway.
Maybe I did look like a bag lady, but this was supposed to be hell. If they could have satyrs serving in the bar upstairs and incubi manning the salon and cocktail waitresses in devil ears wandering around, a random street person shouldn’t shock anybody. And if it did, that was just too bad. The universe might hate Casanova, but it was conspiring to starve me.
And I had had enough.
I was taking back control of my life, or at least my dinner.
I was heading out.
Or, you know, skulking behind the check-in desk, because I didn’t want to get tossed out on my ear.
Fortunately, nobody was checking in at the moment. I got a couple of glances from the staff, but most of them knew me by now, and crawling behind the desk was one of the least strange things they’d seen me do. Nobody tried to stop me, and I scuttled from there to a service corridor, through the back of an ice cream shop and out into the lobby again. Right where the hellscape gave way to an Old West ghost town, if the Old West had featured plastic cactuses and neon cocktail signs and overpriced boutiques.
And a fiberglass donkey cart with a flashing taco sign.
I could have sworn a heavenly chorus started singing, if that hadn’t been really unlikely around here. I lurched forward, drawn by the siren call of seared meat and habanero sauce, my mouth watering and my eyes glazed. And ran right into the front of a starched dress shirt.
“You thin’ I don’t know you by now?” Casanova demanded, his Castilian lisp showing up along with what looked like a full-on snit.
“Oh, for the love of—get out of my way!” I told him, trying to muscle past.
But I didn’t have much muscle left, and Casanova, despite acting like a little bitch half the time, was a master vampire. I didn’t go anywhere. Goddamnit!
“You are not ruining this for me,” he told me menacingly.
“I’m just trying to get in the freaking taco line! I don’t even know what ‘this’ is!”
“This is my attempt to save a failing business,” he hissed, grabbing me by the arm and jerking me behind a couple of fake hay bales. “I am about to be on television, coast-to-coast coverage, in prime time!”
“For what?”
“For that!” Casanova said, gesturing at a big-toothed guy with a lapel mike who had just emerged into a cleared area in front of the lobby. He and the dozen black-shirted guys he had running interference were blocking most people’s access to the elevators around the corner, but nobody seemed to mind. They were too busy watching him as he grinned at a professional-looking video camera.
“Fiends,” he told it suddenly, with every appearance of relish. “Ogres. Giants. Freaks of all kinds. If you don’t believe in monsters, you’re part of a tiny minority. Throughout history, almost every culture on earth has believed. Even odder, they have all believed in the same monsters.
“Take zombies for instance: ‘I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living . . . I shall make the dead outnumber the living.’ Where do you think that quote comes from? Stephen King? Night of the Living Dead? No. It’s from an ancient Babylonian epic that was written five thousand years ago. It’s one of the oldest written works in the world. Zombies . . . have a pedigree.”
“What is this?” I asked, feeling my stomach drop for a totally new reason. “How did the press get in here?”
“I invited them,” Casanova said shortly.
“What?” I looked up at him in disbelief.
“Do you have any idea how hard it is,” he asked fervently, “to make a profit when half your rooms and most of your staff have been appropriated by the damned senate?”
The “damned senate” was the vampire senate, which had lost its usual hangout in an earlier attack in the war. They’d temporarily moved in here, since the casino was owned by one of their own, being part of Mircea’s extensive portfolio. So far, that had gone better than I’d expected, what with a bunch of senior masters and their entourages crowding up the place. But that could easily change—like tonight, for instance.
“Are you insane?” I hissed. “You know what’s upstairs. What on earth could possibly have made this seem like a good idea?”
“I’m looking at her.”
“What?”
“Oh, how quickly they forget!” he said, sneering. “Or do you perhaps vaguely recall all but destroying my hotel a little over a month ago?”
“Which time?” I asked uneasily. Because, okay, there’d been a few incidents.
“But zombies are newcomers compared to Weres,” the announcer told us. “There are cave drawings from fourteen thousand years ago depicting humans with animal faces, or transforming into beasts of all kinds. From Europe come tales of the most famous Weres of all: werewolves. But did you know, in Central America there are stories of were-jaguars? In central Asia, of were-bears?”
“The huge battle?” Casanova whispered, spitting mad. “The one I’m still making repairs for?”
“Oh.” That one. “What about it?”
“Well, word got out, didn’t it? Containment isn’t so easy when you have giant magical melees taking place in the air over the damned roof! We did the best we could, but ever since, there have been rumors. They finally became so insistent that the senate decided it would be easier to have the Hogwash people come in—”
“What people?”
“You must have seen them,” he said impatiently. “With the little horns and the squeals and the—oh, never mind! The point is, their shtick is debunking urban legends and the like. If they come here and don’t find anything—”
“And if they do?”
“Then there’s everybody’s perennial favorite, the vampire,” the announcer intoned. “How far do they date back? Let’s put it this way: there are shards of ancient Persian pottery depicting blood-sucking creatures. That predates all written records, folks.”
“Then we make a few mental adjustments, erase some footage, whatever it takes!” Casanova said. “But in the end, they’ll go off satisfied and, more important, I will have had an hour-long, prime-time advertisement for free and you are not going to mess that up for me!”
“I’m not doing anything,” I said angrily. “What is your problem?”
“Oh, please! Don’t think I don’t know why those bitches are here!”
“What are you talking about?”
I didn’t get an answer, because a guy in a security uniform ran up, looking freaked. Since most of the security detail around the casino were vamps, and vamps who had seen some shit, it didn’t make me too happy. And for once, Casanova and I appeared to be on the same wavelength.
“What?” he demanded, before the guard even stopped.
“Sir, it’s getting worse. We can’t contain—”
“Then call for backup! They’re filming!”
“Sir, we have called for backup. We have every guard on duty either in place or on the way, but we aren’t, that is, we don’t—”
“Don’t give me that,” Casanova snarled. “There’s only three! Sit on them if you have to!”
“Sir, I don’t think you under—”
“All right, you’re going to have to hold it down,” we were told, by a guy in a black tee with a pink pig on the front. “We’re picking you up on the mikes.”
“So sorry,” Casanova whispered ingratiatingly, and jerked me back against the wall.
“And as for demons, well, they’ve been mentioned in almost every holy book going,” the announcer said. “Along with plenty of secular texts. Take the incubus, for example. A spirit who supposedly visits people in their sleep, for, er, carnal relations. That idea goes back to Mesopotamia at the beginning of written history, at least forty-five hundred years.”
Casanova turned on his vamp again. “They’ll be through with the intro in another minute. Just hold on until—” A chicken flew past his face. “What the—what was that?”
“Sir, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” the vampire said tightly. “We don’t have a minute.”
“But now all these legends, fables, myths, and—yes— monsters, have been brought together in one place, for your entertainment,” the announcer said, throwing out an arm, “in the Vegas attraction everyone’s talking about! Dante’s, where it’s rumored, unexplainable things happen on a regular—”
Another chicken flew by, this time in front of the man’s face. “What’s that? What’s going on?” he demanded, breaking character.
“I do believe you missed one,” a woman’s voice rang out, sounding amused.
“What?”
“In your litany of supernatural creatures. You forgot the most important of all.”
“Forgot who?” the guy asked, looking confused.
But not as much as when a whole flock of panicked birds suddenly descended onto the crowd, screeching and clucking and causing people to duck and squeal. Or when one of them suddenly morphed midflight into a naked vampire. Who hit the floor with a thud and a shriek: “Witches!”
He scrambled up and took off, bare butt flashing the camera, but I doubt anybody noticed. Because pandemonium had just broken loose. Chickens, sheep, and a flock of—yes—pigs were running and soaring and squawking and squealing everywhere, people were screaming and ducking, and something or somebody crashed into the taco stand. Which tipped over, scattering sweet-smelling meat and shredded cheese and my last chance at dinner everywhere.
And I finally reached tilt.
“Stop! It!” I screamed, at the top of my voice, unable to take any more.