“First place I looked. No. And I checked the security control room too. You pioneered those routes when Cicereau’s daughter’s ghost took over the hotel audiovisual systems until you exorcised her.”
“Loretta had good reason to haunt her murderous father, and I’m no exorcist. I just figured out how to make some other supernatural gag her. That’s what I am, a lowly human problem solver. Who is this … superb-voiced siren?”
“Someone or something that will shortly drive the paying customers away and the Gehenna’s wolfpack mad. I wouldn’t care, but the vampires aren’t ready to move on Cicereau yet.”
“Some are planning to?” This was hot news in the old town tonight.
Sansouci’s grin was wicked. “That’s for me to know and you to find out. You’re the paranormal investigator. Investigate.”
He gave me a little shove in the taffeta bustle, so I was propelled back onto the marble-floored hotel concourse. Sansouci. Always the gentleman vampire muscle.
I hopped into line behind another bellman-propelled luggage cart, protected from the milling crowds, and headed for the main atrium circled by elevators to the Gehenna’s various hotel floors and condo towers.
The haunting soprano voice kept me gazing up and around like a geek at an electronics exposition, tripping over my own feet, even though being gauche enough to tangle your killer heels is a Vegas mortal sin.
Being tone deaf doesn’t make for musical expertise, but this eerie, sweet as Heavenly Hash voice had me hooked. Since I’m also Black Irish, I was a Celtic woman deep down. I didn’t even notice that I’d slowed to a stop to listen until a couple dozen tourists dragging wheeled bags jammed up behind me, screeching annoyance at my back.
Before the rude crowds could mess my crinolines, they suddenly stared upward too, shouting and pointing and hitting the marble floor all around until I was the only upright long-stemmed rose in the garden.
That’s when I spotted a large, dark blot streaking down toward me. An ape in a Mad Hatter outfit wearing a fright wig of coarse hair instead of a top hat swung down on a bungee cord. Before I could duck away, a huge hairy hand snagged me around the corseted Audrey Hepburn waist and swung us both up, up, up several floors to the sustained high-note accompaniment of the heavenly voice and my furious alto scream of protest. In seconds, my powerful captor used the upper-body strength of a circus strongman to perch us like gargoyles atop the highest railing of the Gehenna Hotel’s towering atrium.
First, I checked his grip on the thick brass rail. His feet curved like talons around the metal, but wore soft leather shoes curled up at the toes and down at the heel, slippers Santa’s elves would wear. My gaze inventoried the odd bits of wardrobe clothing his squat distorted body, then studied a pale bony array of bulbous cheeks and forehead and forked chin, every feature somehow pulled off center like a melted plastic mask. One eye was entirely missing. Rather than a mouth, the creature had a broken-toothed maw. A bushy eyebrow over that bright malicious single eye finished off a face twisted into a grimace a gargoyle would flee, shrieking.
Even at this suicidal height, I’d have pushed off from my captor just to avoid an inescapable double jeopardy of death by asphyxiation: the mixed reek of garlic and onion breath. While I calculated how to tip us backward onto the safety of the balcony fronting the elevators, the powerful arms spun me sideways to lift me like a trophy above the misshapen head.
While my stomach made an imaginary drop of forty stories and the siren’s voice soared to higher melodic peaks up here, my captor’s terrifying maw shouted something over and over to the crowd below.