Part I

[In Las Vegas in 2002, Jackie, one of the city’s two Genii, loses his partner in a fight with the Genii of Los Angeles. In San Diego, simultaneously, the vampire Tribute destroys his creator. And in New York City in 1964, two spies discover that they are targets for assassination, and follow their would-be killer to Las Vegas.]

Tribute and the Scholar. Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.

My plane taxied up to the gate at McCarran International Airport a little after one A.M. I’m limited to short flights for practical reasons; the good news is, the redeye is usually uncrowded.

I love Las Vegas.

Nobody ever notices me in Vegas. Now that I was on my own, I was thinking of staying on permanently.

Don’t get me wrong. I never expected to survive. I thought I’d go down into oblivion with Sycorax, red stain of my borrowed blood on her lips and a fistful of my hair knotted in her hand. I never expected to see another sunrise. Not that I’ve seen one in 25 years, mind, but you know what I mean. But one minute my gut was clenching, twisting around my poisoned dinner, and the next Sycorax was staring at me in glazed shock, her pale hands fastened on her own wax-white throat as she sank to her knees.

If I’d known it would be that easy I would have handled this years ago.

If I’d known Jesse would leave me alone for half an hour if I did it….

Eighteen hours later, I was on a plane, and less than two hours after that I was stepping across the band of desert heat between the cool of the airplane and the air-conditioned jetway and following the cattle through McCarran’s D gates to the tram.

There’s a funny thing about Las Vegas. You keep seeing people you think you might halfway recognize. Some of them are minor celebrities, lounge acts, washed-up actors and pop stars who were the Next Big Thing twenty years back. And some aren’t.

So people turned to look at me, one or two, as I made my way from the tram over the gaudy carpet and down the escalators. But they weren’t surprised, not at all.

I had no luggage to claim; we learn to travel light. But McCarran makes you exit through Baggage Claim whether you need to or not, and I had “Go Down Moses” stuck in my head, somehow—you know, Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt’s Land. Tell ol’ Pharoah, Let my people go—and was concentrated on not singing it too loudly where anybody could hear me. Which is how I almost tripped over the spy.

You have to understand, I wasn’t supposed to know he was a spy. I was supposed to see an athletic, black-haired man in a polo shirt and khakis, turning to hand a cased tennis racket to his companion. The other man was black, broad-shouldered, wearing his hair parted on the side and greased in ringlets in a style I hadn’t seen since I was a mortal man. They both reeked of Brylcreem.

It smelled like 1965.

I wasn’t supposed to see the way their eyes met for a moment before they glanced over each other’s shoulders, either, or to notice that their three-dialed waterproof wristwatches matched. But I’ve shot up a TV set or two in my time, and I noticed, and stepped wide to go around the pair of them rather than bumping shoulders with the athlete. A little faster, a little smoother than a mortal man should have managed, and the black man’s gaze locked on me like a gunman’s sights.

And he blinked, and tilted his head to one side, and then offered a wry, contemplative smile. “King,” he said. “I didn’t know you were in the game.”

“I’m not,” I answered without bothering to fix my voice. “I’m the real thing. More or less.” And I showed him the fangs.

He stepped back: one, two—the racket case raised defensively in his hand—and I beat it for the exit while his partner was still turning to see what had caused his dismay. There was a taxi waiting.

I took it.

There’s real, after all. And then there’s real.

And if I was going to spend any time in Las Vegas, I was going to have to find out what was going on to bring two of those to the streets of Sin City. And not its native media ghosts, either.

No, a couple of strangers in town.

#

The assassin and the man behind the curtain. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

There were two men already in the office when the assassin got there; one dead, and one alive. The dead one stood behind the live one. The living one was hunched over a laptop computer. The dead one was peering over the living one’s shoulder, trying not to drip brains down his back.

Bugsy Siegel looked up when the assassin walked through the door, and frowned. For a dead man, he had an effective stare. He hadn’t died pretty, and it still showed.

Ghosts don’t heal, and when Bugsy was shot, the hitman put enough lead into the back of his skull that much of his face came off the front side when it exited. One eye was missing, the cheekbone shattered, the empty socket oozing clotted blood and matter. The back of his head was a pulpy mess; it contrasted vividly with his dapper gray double-breasted suit.

Even by the assassin’s standards, what was left of him wasn’t easy to look at. But the slow trickle of gray matter down his skull hadn’t slowed him any. “You didn’t get him,” he said, and walked through the desk and the Mage whose laptop he had been frowning at a laptop screen to glower at the assassin from closer in.

“No,” the assassin said. There was no point in denying it. “Hello, Felix,” he said.

Felix Luray didn’t look up from the computer. “It’s the stories,” he said, and flexed his hands together to crack his knuckles. “You’re going to have to find some way to work around it, so they can be killed. The bad news is their fans are still out there, keeping them alive. So they’re real as…real as Robin Hood. Or the Easter Bunny. The good news is, capturing them should be no problem. That’s in genre.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” the assassin said dryly, and went to pour himself a drink. “And I can tell by the looks on your faces that Angel and Goddess didn’t manage any better.”

“Goddess is dead,” Felix said. “The revenant John Henry Kinkead bashed her skull in with a sledge hammer.”

Fumes stung the assassin’s nose. The crystal was heavy in his hand, warming quickly from his skin. He sipped. “Well, saves me having to kill her, then. Who’s ‘the revenant John Henry Kinkead?’”

“The One-eyed Jack,” Felix said. “John Kinkead was the third governor of Nevada. He died circa 1904 in Carson City. Fits the name and general description, and the timing’s right.”

“Huh.” Felix was eyeing the assassin’s glass speculatively. The assassin poured a second drink and passed it over; Felix poured half the measure on the rug, where it vanished, wicked up without a trace. Bugsy looked pleased. “What does his name win us, Mr. Luray?”

“Perhaps a little symbolic leverage,” he said with a shrug, and tasted his drink. “We’ve got the dam, of course, but a little more never hurts. Jackie gave Benjamin a run for his money a few years back, I hear—”

Bugsy turned his head and spat. It didn’t leave a mark on the carpet. “That faggot’s no match for a real Mage, Felix. Sure, he knows a little hedge-craft. But it ain’t real magic, not the sort of thing you boys used to do.”

“Still do,” Felix said easily, and tipped out a little more vodka onto the floor.

“Well, yeah,” Bugsy said. “But what I mean to say is, there ain’t no more like you, Felix. No more like the Prometheans that built the dam, right? Or the railroad.”

“No,” Felix said, very quietly. “I’m the last.”

Bugsy grinned, sending a thick clot of blood skating down his ruined cheek. “See? You won’t have no problem with Jackie.”

The assassin smiled tightly. He didn’t mention his own research and experience, or what they had taught him about Felix Luray, and why he hadn’t been invited to the war that had put an end to the rest of the Prometheans. A pity, the assassin thought; he’d found them useful allies in the past, despite their desire to feel that they were pulling all the strings.

Still, half a Mage—a failed Mage, if you preferred, a defrocked one—was better than none.

“So I take it our next objective is neutralizing the other genius, the Stewart boy.”

“Not at all,” Felix said, swirling his drink and savoring a slow, pleased smile. “Angel took care of that while you were busy in London and New York. Everything’s under control.”

#

The One-Eyed Jack and the Steel-Driving Men. Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.

The John Henrys waited for me on the corner of Third and Bonneville, across the street from the chain-link around the construction site and in the shade of some old elms and a ragged toilet brush of a Mexican fan palm. The right-hand John Henry rested a twenty-pound sledge against his corded sweat-shining dark neck, his other hammer leaned up against the gray cinderblock wall behind him. He wore canvas pants and not much else, and if the girls giggling on the sidewalk in the sweltering heat could have seen him, they would have turned to admire the ridged expanse of his chest.

The left-hand John Henry, skeletal and paperwhite behind a luxuriant growth of moustache and blazing tubercular eyes, treated his terrible cough out of the silver flask in his breast pocket. That hack around a chest full of bloody slime was so much a part of his legend he couldn’t get rid of it even dead.

Like the silk cravat with the diamond stickpin, like the nickel-plated six shooter concealed by the fall of his stylish gray coat. Stylish in 1881, that is. A little out of place as I crossed Bonneville against the light, walking through the wall of thermonuclear Las Vegas sunshine, and drew up in front of the dead men. They looked startled to be seen; as I hesitated in the gutter, a brunette in fuchsia short-shorts and not much else walked through the right-hand John Henry, head rocking in time to the beat of her portable CD player. The left-hand John Henry coughed into a silk handkerchief, leaving a spot like the jeweled heart of a snowy plain of Queen Anne’s lace, and turned to watch the girl walk away. I was scared enough of him that my guts turned to water in my belly, but I thought of Stewart and I made myself walk forward. Ghosts. I called up ghosts.

The right-hand John Henry puffed up his enormous chest and looked away, free thumb hooked through the loops of his pants. His thighs strained threadbare dun cloth, much mended, as he shifted his hammer on his shoulder. The left-hand John Henry folded the cloth to hide the thumbprint of blood and tucked it into his pocket. Not the one with the flask. He sighed.

“She’s a lady of ill repute, Doc,” drawled the right-hand one. I stopped in front of them.

“She’s a woman who knows her own mind,” the left-hand John Henry—Doc—replied in a rich slow voice like seasoned honey, and drew himself up to face me. “And as for ill repute, I have a little of my own. Some easy virtue, too. Do I know you, sir?”

“No,” I said, holding out my hand. I felt them taking in my cargo pants, Doc Martens and earrings, my tattooed biceps and the ring through my nose. The eyepatch didn’t look so out of place in all that. A Cadillac crept behind me, wary of the construction dust. Pale eyes and dark tracked its purring glide. “But my name’s Jack. One-eyed Jack, they call me.” Neither moved to shake, and I let my hand fall to my side.

It got the smile from the left-hand John Henry I’d half-hoped for. A gambler. And a quick wit, too. “My given name’s John, as well.”

“It’s why I called you back. You, Dr. Holliday. And Mr. Henry, here. You know—”

“I know I’m dead,” John Henry said. He looked at the sledgehammer in his hand and set it down, leaned it back against the dust-colored wall. “Where are we?”

“Las Vegas.”

“New Mexico? It’s changed some.” Doc Holliday leaned back on the heels of his shoes and looked up at the pale sky overhead, squinting after a jet contrail.

“Nevada.”

“Huh.” He turned his head and coughed into his handkerchief again. “Then that’s changed some too, I imagine. What did you bring us back from the grave for, son?”

He died at thirty-five, and I’m over a hundred. But I wasn’t about to argue age and life experience with Doc Holliday. Even if I was something more than mortal, myself. “I need help,” I said. I had a pretty speech prepared, but looking up—way up—into the frowning brown eyes of John Henry left no room for anything but honesty. Might be because the man was a symbol for honesty. I swallowed and looked over at Holliday, but it wasn’t any easier to meet his eyes. “I’m the One-eyed Jack. The spirit of Las Vegas, its anima. Somebody shot my buddy, and I want to get them back. So I called you up. Namesake rite, tequila and promises. But since there were two John Henrys who fit the bill, I got the both of you.”

A pedestrian edged around me, seeing a ratty one-eyed homeless boy with a lightless dyed-black snarl of hair, standing on a downtown street corner talking to himself. We get that a lot around here: the straights are used to madmen out of doors in Vegas.

“What makes you think we can help with that?”

“You’re—” Who you are. New World demigods in the making, the Chuchulainns and Beowulfs and Yellow Emperors of the Americas. Folklore creatures.

Like me. “You’re Doc Holliday, sir. That there is John Henry the drillman. You’re American legends, sir.”

Holliday opened his mouth, but a coughing jag took him and he fumbled in his pocket for his flask and drank quickly, neatly, even when I thought he’d choke. The whiskey calmed his cough and he shook his head as he screwed the silver cap back on. “Jack, I never killed but three, four men in my lifetime. And every one of those bastards deserved to die.”

John Henry shifted balance beside him, a mountain changing its stance. “I heard it was fifty, Doc.”

“Stories grow in the telling, son.”

I’d done some reading since Stewart got killed. “Wyatt Earp said you were the most dangerous man he ever knew, and the fastest gun.”

Holliday laughed and stroked his moustache, straightened his cravat. “Wyatt never minded stretching a tale till it squeaked protest, and you know what the papers are like.” He couldn’t hide a pleased smile. “He was right about one thing.”

“Doc?”

I was maybe three feet from Holliday. Before I could have moved, even shouted, his revolver was out of the hip holster and leveled at my chest. He cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger so quickly I didn’t have time to close my eyes before the report boxed my ears.

So I saw the bullet hit my chest, go through, and pass without a whisper of sensation. Holliday laughed and spun his pistol back into his holster. “Ghosts,” he said, and took another swig from his flask, squinting in pain.

“Well,” I answered. “I called you up with a task in mind, gentlemen. And you can’t go back to rest until we figure out how to do it. So—immaterial or not—I suggest we go get a drink and talk it over.”

“I can’t drink your liquor,” Doc Holliday said, as John Henry fell silently into step on my other side.

“I’ll pour it on the ground.”

I led them toward the Strip. Dead men don’t mind the heat.

#

The American and the Russian. Somewhere in the Desert Inn Hotel & Casino, 1964.

Bram Stoker—that Bram Stoker—said of Teddy Roosevelt that he was a man you couldn’t cajole, couldn’t frighten, couldn’t awe. Some mornings, I wake up certain that the ex-president has somehow managed to get himself reincarnated as my partner.

He won’t be cajoled. Neither will he be beguiled.

Someone must have lied to him once. Someone I would like very much to find, someday, and talk to.

Because if he weren’t so darned frictionless, I might be able to get him to talk to me a little more about what he said about Oswald—

“What are you writing?” the Russian said, toweling his hair as he walked out of the bathroom, and the American crumpled the sheet hastily and dropped it into the wastebasket by his knee.

“A letter to my aunt, but it’s not coming out well. Ready to go down and see if the café is still serving?”

“What’s the expression? No locks, no clocks?” The Russian looked about for his shoes and sat on the bed to tug them on. “And then we need to try to figure out why the assassin’s here.”

“Because if we know what he’s doing—”

“—we know where he is.” Their eyes met, and a brief smile passed between them. “What do you plan to do with him if we do track him down?”

The American grinned, knowing he looked like a shark. What do you mean if? “Kill him. In cold blood. Preferably from a distance and from hiding. We’ll work out a justification later.”

“Excellent,” the Russian said, stamping his feet into his black loafers. “Get your coat. And don’t forget your concealed carry card. This is Vegas.”

“Yes. They don’t care if you have a pistol on your hip, but God forbid there’s one under your coat.” The American stood and followed his partner out, pausing for a second to hang the Do Not Disturb card and trap a strand of his own dark hair between the lockplate and the tongue. “Breakfast or drinks?”

“Both?” The Russian glanced over his shoulder hopefully, and the American nodded.

Halfway down the fire stairs, the Russian reached back and laid a hand on the American’s sleeve, and the American glanced down to meet his partner’s sidelong glance. His hand slipped under his coat, but he didn’t draw the weapon, though his thumb rested against the safety lever. “Did you hear?”

“—footsteps?” The Russian flattened himself against the wall, one hand raised unnecessarily for silence. The American held his breath.

Always better to get trapped in a stairway than an elevator, if you have to get trapped. Of course, it could be a hotel guest, climbing for exercise. Two hotel guests. Climbing quickly. In complete silence, the American skipped four steps backward and crouched with his gun in his hands, covering his partner and the landing below them.

The footsteps came closer, hesitated before the turn. The American heard a noisily indrawn breath. “Gentlemen. If we promise not to draw our guns, will you put yours away?” A familiar voice, pitched in a light, ironical range.

“You tennis-playing son of a bitch,” the American called back, delightedly. The Russian had already stepped away from the cinderblock wall and holstered his piece, and was moving forward as two tall, muscular men—one Caucasian, one black—gained the landing, shoulder to shoulder, and paused. The American looked from one to the other, at their polo shirts and skin-tight white jeans, a contrast to his own and his partner’s sober suitjackets and monochrome ties. He burst out laughing, and was rewarded by a sideways, fleeting smile from the Russian. “What brings you two to Las Vegas?” He extended his hand to the tennis player, who clasped it heartily.

The black man leaned against the wall and crossed his arms, biceps bulging under the tight sleeves of his shirt. “The same thing as you two, I presume,” he said, middle Atlantic accent and a light bass range. “Only a little more officially, if the rumors are true.”

“We’re here to see a man about a horse,” the American answered, still grinning. The rational corner of his mind recognized the giddy relief as honorably discharged adrenaline, and his partner’s second sideways glance told him the Russian knew it too. I’m more worried about the assassin than I thought.

“We’re on vacation,” the Russian elaborated, extending his right hand to the scholar. They clasped briefly, the scholar muttering something in a language the American didn’t recognize, but which his partner apparently knew well enough to answer in. “We were just about to get something to eat. Would you care to join us?”

“Delighted,” the athlete said, reversing course lithely. He grinned over his shoulder, and the American spread his hands in bemused acquiescence. Obviously the Russian thought it would serve some purpose for the four of them to be seen in public together, and the other agents were willing to play along.

“Do you, ah, need to head back to your hotel and get ties?”

The athlete shrugged, as if letting the suggestion slide off his back. “At seven o’clock in the morning, in Las Vegas? You don’t suppose the Brown Derby’s still open this late? Or open again this early?”

“There’s a Brown Derby in Las Vegas now? I only knew about the one in Hollywood.”

“Age of globalization, man,” the scholar said, falling into step beside them. “Age of globalization.”

#

One-Eyed Jack and the King of Rock & Roll. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

I paused on the east side of Las Vegas Boulevard, near the flat rubble-graveled lot where the old El Rancho had stood vacant for so many years, and watched the ghost of Bugsy Siegel smoke a cigar while brains dripped down the back of his collar. Bugsy didn’t seem to notice me, or my entourage, but I had the weirdest prickle as if he’d just been staring at me. Anyway, he wasn’t the sort of thing I was used to seeing in broad daylight; I preferred the John Henrys, frankly, who followed along single file, barely wincing when the tourists walked through them.

Little ghosts don’t interact much, but they can be a damned pain in the ass if they’re mad enough, and powerful enough.

Doc Holliday cleared his throat twice before I realized he wasn’t coughing. He just wanted my attention. “Speaking of ghosts and shadows, Jack—” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, and I followed the gesture.

I’ve seen a lot of strange things. The ghost of an imploded hotel sitting healed and shimmering like a mirage in the evening sunshine wouldn’t take a prize by any means, but it was enough to make me blink and rub my eye. That was what Bugsy’d been looking at; a parking lot filled with tailfinned Cadillacs and Buicks with five-body trunks, with Nash Ramblers and a ‘63 Corvette, candy-apple red, a pedestrian in a close-tailored gray gabardine suitcoat and a skinny black tie slowing down to take a lingering look. I could see the rubble through his shoes.

“That’s unusual,” I said. John Henry grunted on my left side, and I chuckled a little nervously. “I hope I didn’t call up every ghost in the city.”

“If you did, you don’t know your own power, Jack.” Holliday ducked his head to light a cigarillo, shielding the flame of his Lucifer match with his hands. “That looks to my practiced eye like some sort of a natural supernatural manifestation, if you know what I mean. Where did you want to drink?”

“The Brown Derby,” I said, checking the angle of the sun. It would be dark soon enough, and if we hurried we could hit the lull between the dinner rush and the post-show crowd.

If we hurried.

I beckoned the John Henrys along. We had a while to walk still, and I’d need better clothes for the Derby. Lucky for me there are shopping malls the length of the Strip these days. I hung on to my Doc Martens; they’d be fine if a little selfconsciously trendy under a suitpant, and the damned things take a year and a half to break in right. I changed in a washroom and stuffed my old clothes in a wastepaper basket. I never liked that t-shirt anyway, and the cargo pants were torn.

We walked into the Brown Derby at eight fifteen p.m. and were seated right away. Or, I should say, I was seated. The John Henrys followed, drifting through the table to take their chairs. It wasn’t a bad table, in the smoking section with a view of the bar. I had just ordered a vodka martini and was hiding my small talk with the ghosts behind the menu when an Elvis walked past. Which is not unusual in Vegas, by any means.

Except he looked like Elvis Presley.

Nobody looks like Elvis. I don’t mean, nobody dresses like Elvis, or apes his hairstyle, or tries to move like Elvis. Because sure, people do.

I knew Elvis Presley. Nobody looks like Elvis—except his daughter, that is—and nobody moves like him, either.

And this guy wasn’t dressed like professional Elvi dress. Soft sandy blond hair fell down in his dark blue eyes, not dyed matte black, and not greased into a pompadour. He slunk across the gaudy casino carpet like a panther, total confidence and strength, and the collar of his black leather gothcoat was turned up to hide the hammer-edged line of his jaw. He scanned the crowd as if he were looking for somebody but he didn’t quite know who, and it hit me with the force of a kick in the belly who he was. What he was. Who he had to be.

Elvis. Of course. I blinked hard. Which means Stewart is really—

—gone.

Surreptitiously, I raised my hand to flip the patch off my otherwise eye. And blinked harder, because the second I did it I could smell the old blood and the midnight on him, clots of darkness wound through his soul like so many slimy clumps of rotting leaves. Not what I thought he was, then. Not my new partner, my opposite number, my ally.

Oh, Vegas has enough problems this summer without one of those. Muttering an excuse to the John Henrys, I came around the table on a jagged line to intercept as he made for the casino. I trailed him casually, sidestepping MegaBucks and scurrying around the blackjack tables, trying not to move so aggressively that the eye-in-the-sky would spot me for a threat. I didn’t mean to hurt him any; just warn him off. Tell him to head north for Chicago: the windy city’s animae have always had a habit of taking in strays.

But I saw him stop, intent on something that had drawn his eye—a flash of golden hair alongside a strobing slot machine light—and my eye followed his, and I saw—

“Stewart?”

Walking hunched forward slightly as he made some sort of a point with his hands—jab, jab, jab—animated in conversation with three companions, the hairstyle different, longer, but the crooked nose unmistakably the same.

He didn’t hear me. I wasn’t close.

The vampire’s gaze fastened on the four men crossing the casino floor, and he stepped back into the shadows behind a row of video poker machines, obviously eager that Stewart and his three companions shouldn’t see his face. I glanced after the vampire as he faded from view, but Stewart took precedence. And if the bloodsucker chose to stay in my city, I’d run across him again eventually.

I hurried toward Stewart, making a mental survey of his companions as I came, trying to decide if an intercession was in order, or an introduction. Introduction, I decided. By the tenor of the conversation, these were Stewart’s friends. Especially the shorter of the two strong-chinned, slender, black-haired men, who bore a superficial resemblance to one another. The final man was African-American, muscular and athletic, handsome in a rugged rather than a Tiger Woods sort of way. Familiar, too—but everybody looks like somebody famous, in Vegas.

“Stewart,” I called, and held out my hand as the little group drew abreast of me and started to pass me by.

Stewart blinked and turned to me, a thin vertical line between his eyes. “I beg your pardon. Do I know you?” he asked, and my heart thumped once in my chest and went still.

It wasn’t him. It could have been, from fifteen feet. From close enough to shake his hand, however…no. Not quite. Not the face, and not the faint European accent and subtle precision of pronunciation. But another one was the coldness of the equal subtlety and precision in his eyes.

“No,” I said, and backed away. “I beg your pardon. But you look very much like someone I—”

I used to know.

I turned on the heel of my Doc and went back to the restaurant, cursing myself for failing to follow the vampire instead. Cursing myself for the hope I’d felt, however briefly, and for the fresh sharpness of the broken ache in my chest.

I knew who they were now; the penny had dropped.

Not just not Stewart.

Ghosts. More ghosts, summoned up out of the collective unconscious, called up out of the soup of story. I shook my head, sat down in my still-warm chair, and looked up into the eyes of the memory of two dead men.

At least I’d thought of something the John Henrys could do to help until I figured out how to manage Angel, immaterial or not. I bet they could be pretty good at keeping track of a vampire, if they were careful, and stayed out of sight.

Meanwhile, I could try to figure out what it was that I’d summoned home to Vegas. A namesake rite wasn’t supposed to work that way—and I shouldn’t have had the power to do it, even if it did. I was starting to think I’d managed to call home every ghost—media, legendary, and the ‘little’ ghosts, the ghosts of the unquiet dead, like Bugsy out there—with even the vaguest of connections to my city.

That could get confusing.

Especially if two or three Howard Hugheses showed up.

#

Part II

Tribute and the Streetwalker With A Heart Of Gold. Las Vegas, Summer, 2002.

It was full dark by the time I left the mint-green glow of the MGM Grand behind me and walked north, counting the cracks in the sidewalk. The desert itself was my enemy, but at least the mountains ringing the valley gave me a long anticipation of sunrise and cut the sun’s descent short when it slid down the sky in the West. Headed for California and points out to sea.

The skinny kid with the eyepatch troubled me, but I didn’t know why I ran. Hell, I didn’t quite know what I was doing in the MGM to begin with, other than staying out of the sun: they’d be unlikely to hire an Elvis impersonator. I needed a club, a cabaret. Someplace that wouldn’t expect afternoon shows.

I could live by murder and theft. When I exhausted the resources Sycorax had left me.

That doesn’t put you on a stage, does it?

But the kid. Thousand-dollar suitjacket bought off the rack, and a cheap high-school dye job. Scarred urban combat zone boots peeking out from under his pinstriped trousers. Hell, maybe he was a rock star. It wasn’t like I’d been keeping track.

Except he’d been sitting at his table pretending not to talk to a couple of mismatched ghosts, and he’d practically leaped over it to give chase when he’d seen me. And then I’d run smack dab into the media ghosts I’d seen earlier, and they’d been all buddy-buddy with another pair, who also didn’t belong in Las Vegas, all of them dressed as if it were forty years ago and most of the country watching television in black and white.

And I could swear I’d seen that black-haired kid’s profile somewhere, before.

If I couldn’t have a milkshake, I was ready to kill for an explanation. But since I didn’t see a way to get either, I went out looking for gigs.

I got a little interest, too, even with my shift requirements. It was good to know, after so long, that I could still lay down a tune, and by the time I finished my third cold call I was feeling pretty good about myself. The manager stood me a beer, and I sat down in a booth beside the juke box to pretend to drink it and retie my shoes.

And found myself tidying the salt shakers while I watched a dark-haired girl who was far too young to be in a bar. Any bar, and the guy she was with wasn’t quite old enough to be her father. He didn’t look like anybody’s father, anyway; in fact—

—in fact, he looked a lot like one of the media ghosts I’d ditched in the MGM Grand. The shaggy yellow hair, at least, and his profile when he turned just right. This one looked dazed, though, his eyes not quite tracking as he watched his skinny, no-doubt-about-it-hired-for-the-evening companion play with her French fries. What kind of a stoner John buys a hooker a meal and watches while she draws in the ketchup?

Maybe she was his kid sister, after all. Even if they didn’t look a thing alike.

“She’s trouble, Ace,” Jesse whispered in my ear. But I ignored him, or pretended to.

I didn’t like him to know how much of a comfort it was, having him there.

She looked up at me and quirked an eyebrow, then, and I saw the glow of city lights in her eyes. “Evening, King,” she said. Soprano, no breath control.

“Name’s Tribute.” I abandoned my beer on the table when I walked over. The blond man scooted away from me at her hand gesture, and didn’t quite offer a grunt by way of acknowledgment. He was all twisted up inside himself like macramé—any fool could tell—but when he tracked me with a scarred sideways glance I could see the lights shimmering in his eyes, too. Interesting. They really didn’t look like they went together, if you know what I mean.

“Funny sort of a name,” she said. “I’m Angel. This is Stewart. He’s a local.”

“And you’re not?”

Her eyes sparkled when she dimpled at me. She reached out and laid one hand on my arm. Her bitten fingernails were painted chipped, glittering green. “I’m from Los Angeles. And I hear you’re looking for a job.”

“I might be.” I was trying to sound casual instead of wary, and I wasn’t sure I succeeded. There were thirteen fries on her plate, and seventy-two sesame seeds on the bun of her half-eaten burger.

I looked down and straightened the unused place settings. The last thing I needed in my recently simplified life was to get involved in some sort of a turf war between the genii of cities. My kind generally tried to stay out of the way of their kind. Them, and the media ghosts and race memories and legendary men and critters like the sasquatch and the squonk. I worry about spending time with any creature who is essentially a story made flesh. They change too much, too easily—and too many of them aren’t even aware that a world outside their circumscribed reality even exists.

I ran into Dracula once. I’m hoping I never meet Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She’d kick my ass. “It would depend on the job.”

“Bodyguard?” She smiled and reached out to take Stewart’s hand when he curled himself back into the corner of the booth, drawing his heels up onto the vinyl like a child. He tugged his hand free and wrapped the arm around his knees, shivering. I couldn’t quite tell if the look in his eyes was beseeching or simply flat blue madness, and I glanced back down at the girl.

“That’s not really my kind of gig, baby—”

“King,” she interrupted, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “Do you want to hustle in a dive like this for people who have no idea what you really were? Who’ll think you’re a bad imitation because they’ve stopped seeing how bad all the other imitators are?”

It was the wrong tack to take. Or maybe I was just tired of her coy, self-conscious gestures. Girls these days have an edge on them I don’t remember from befre; they were like cagebirds then, pampered doves, their naivete the core of their charm.

Or maybe I’m talking about myself again.

“Take your time,” she said, before I could say no. “Think about it. I’ll find you again and we’ll talk. Come on, Stewart.”

I threw a twenty on the table to cover their tab, and stood up to let him follow her out.

#

The Russian and the Three Capitalists. Somewhere in Las Vegas. 1964.

The Russian expected trouble. Which wasn’t unusual: he always expected trouble. Although it was true that conditions for Americans who weren’t white Anglo-Saxon Protestants weren’t quite as horrid as he’d been raised to believe, back home, they were bad enough. And Vegas wasn’t called the Mississippi of the West for nothing.

So he was surprised and pleased when they were seated immediately, and not even tucked away in a corner near the kitchen doors.

“Man,” the scholar said as the food arrived, laying his napkin across his lap. “Did we order enough?”

The American grinned as the athlete and the Russian simultaneously reached for the fruit plate. “Have you ever seen my partner eat?”

“No,” the scholar answered, hands deft as he sorted his silverware. “Have you seen mine?” He jerked his head sideways, at the rapidly diminishing pile on the tall man’s plate. “I have no idea where he puts it.”

The Russian, already chewing, kicked his partner lightly under the table. The American’s mouth closed with an audible snap, and he stuffed a bite of bread inside it to keep the words plugged up. “So,” the American said, when he’d washed his mouthful down with steaming coffee, “can somebody explain to me why we think it’s wise for all four of us to be sitting in a public place when we’re on the hunt for a rogue agent?”

“Simple,” the athlete answered, without looking up from his plate. “We’re bait. This Cobb salad is the best. And it’s huge. You should try some.” He leaned back from his dish, raising his fork as if he expected his tablemates to lunge for the salad like a pack of feral dogs.

“If we’re bait, who’s our backup?” The American leaned forward, interested now. “And how did we wind up drafted?”

“You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, the Department briefed us on New York.” A grin on the scholar’s face as he lowered his voice—not to a whisper that might attract attention, but rather to a murmur. “The backup is classified, but they’re from an agency that has an interest in protecting MI-6’s reputation even if MI-6 won’t do it itself.”

“A team the assassin won’t expect,” the athlete finished for his partner, resuming his relationship with the Cobb salad. “Because he thinks one of the partners is badly hurt.”

The Russian chuckled. “The English girl. It is good to hear she’s on her feet again.”

“We heal fast.”

“So I’ve noticed. That doesn’t answer the question of why we join you in serving as—bait.”

The scholar nudged his partner, who gave him a dirty look from under a falling dark forelock. “You’re not going to fit into your tennis whites if you keep eating like that.”

“Perhaps we can play, later,” the Russian said.

The athlete looked up, a predatory grin creasing his face. “Five dollars a game?”

“On my salary?”

“My partner is cheap,” the American said, and the Russian rolled his eyes.

“Who is it that is always borrowing money from whom?”

“Cheap, but well-spoken—”

The scholar coughed, twining his fingers together over his plate. He had enormous hands, boxer’s hands, the skin dark on the backs and pale across the palms. “You wind up helping because your faces are recognizable. Your identities are public and you’re already targets. And it’s not like you two have to maintain a cover. So it doesn’t destroy your usefulness if you’re made.”

“Our controller put you on to us, didn’t he? We’re supposed to be here on vacation; the home office takes no responsibility for this mission.”

The scholar grinned around his buttered bread. “Our home office does. At least State is staying out of this one—”

“They can have it, if they want it. But it’s not exactly their cup of tea. They’re better with conspiracies.” The American turned his fork in his fingers, contemplating the light reflecting from the tines. “I don’t know how you two live undercover all the time.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad. See the world, meet interesting people—” The athlete spoke with his mouth full of salad.

“—and be captured and tortured by them,” the Russian finished. “Are you going to eat that dinner roll?”

“No,” the American answered, and pushed him the bread plate, then looked across the table at the scholar and shrugged as if to say, what are you going to do? “I don’t suppose you know what the assassin is playing at, do you?”

“Our English friend has a theory.” The athlete’s fork described a trembling circle in the air as he washed his salad down with sparkling water.

The Russian poured tea from the little pot on the table, surprised at the quality. Most Americans seemed to think that adequate tea was a matter of dunking a paper bag full of fannings into water that had been allowed to over-cool. This was brewed properly, boiling water over loose leaves. Earl Grey. He softened his voice, holding the cup to his lips to conceal the outline of his words, and modulated his tone to hide any trace of concern. “Will we meet the English team?”

“Not until the affair is over, if everything goes according to plan.” The athlete forked through his salad, ferreting out crumbles of bacon and egg. “With any luck, the assassin will think they’re incapacitated in England.”

“Tell me the theory.”

The athlete offered them both a wry grin. The American put his fork down and reached across the table for the saltshaker, idly leaning it at an angle in a vain attempt to balance it. It wobbled and fell; he caught it and tried again.

“You’re doing it wrong,” the athlete said, before he could make a third attempt.

The American looked up. “Ah, excuse me?”

“You’re doing it wrong.” His capable hand brushed the American’s square-fingered one aside; the Russian glanced up for a moment and saw the wry, almost patronizing twist of the scholar’s lips. The Russian traded a quick flash of a grin with the scholar, sure their partners were too engaged in their ridiculous competition to notice.

The athlete lifted the salt shaker from the American’s fingers and tilted it upside down, letting grains scatter on the tablecloth. He pushed them into a pile with his fingertips and angled the base of the shaker against it lightly and precisely. The Russian held his breath as the athlete opened his fingers like the teeth of a crane and lifted his hand away.

The shaker never moved.

“Bravo,” the American said, softly, and the scholar slapped the edge of the table and made the salt shaker clatter down on its side.

“Oh,” he said, “the wonderfulness of you.”

The Russian hid his smile behind his palm until he got it under control, set his teacup down, and leaned forward, elbows on the table as he drew a licked finger through the tumbled grains. The hairs on his nape shivered; they were being watched. “You American spies are all alike.”

“Pampered?”

“Pah.” The tea got cold quickly in these little china cups. Glasses were better. “Americans know nothing of pampering—Smug, I mean,” he said, interrupting himself.

“You were worried about the widow?” The athlete dusted his hands together, lips pursing.

“The Englishman’s partner is an old friend. I was concerned.” Ignoring his partner’s amused, sideways blink. “Share the theory, if you would.”

The scholar’s expressive lips twitched. “We think it has a bunch to do with your partner, in fact.” He darted a glance at the American, who choked on his coffee. “Your partner, the widow’s partner, and my partner—”

“Why would she and I be the targets, then?” The Russian leaned forward, intrigued.

“The widow, you, and myself. Work with me, man.”

The Russian glanced at the American to see if perhaps he understood. The American raised his shoulders and tipped his head in his trademark exaggerated shrug.

“Because the assassin works alone.” The scholar’s tone made it seem as if the answer was obvious.

The Russian pursed his lips slightly and shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t understand what that has to do with anything. He works alone, so he thinks other agents must, as well?”

“Sure, if he’s going to consume them.”

“Con—” The American set his coffee cup down with a rattle that betrayed the unsteadiness of his hand. “Like, ‘Two Bottles of Relish’?”

“Munch munch. Yum yum.” The tennis player’s grin widened cartoonishly. “Our partners are too different. But you and I—” an eloquent gesture with his fork “—have a great deal in common. And in common with the assassin.”

“And the Englishman,” the scholar added.

Something still tickled the back of the Russian’s neck, and he gave the appearance of paying rapt attention to the conversation while, in fact, his eyes flickered from one reflective surface to another. He sat back in his chair, gnawing on a fingernail as the American protested. “But what does that have to do with any—”

And then the scholar and the athlete exchanged a look that the Russian knew very well: it was a look he had traded with his own partner many, many times. And the scholar shook his head, and said, “Pal, they don’t know.”

The athlete’s eyes got wide, and the fork moved back and forth again. You-me-them?

The American ran a thumbnail along his jaw. “We don’t know what?”

The Russian cleared his throat as a flash of movement in a silver cream pitcher on an adjoining table finally resolved itself into the image he’d sought. The black-haired young man in the strangely cut suit who had accosted them on the casino floor. Watching over his shoulder from a dark table in the corner. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Explanations may have to wait. I believe we are being observed.”

The American glanced over his shoulder, abrupt and unsubtle. The Russian felt him about to rise from his chair and braced himself to stand, but the athlete reached out and placed a hand on the American’s sleeve. “Talk to us before you talk to him,” the athlete said, when the American’s golden-brown eyes locked on his own near-black ones.

The American hesitated, glanced at the Russian, and shook his head. “I’m just going to go make friends,” he answered. “You can stay here if you prefer.”

Silence, and then the athlete shook his head and withdrew his hand. “I think my man and I had better be there to hear this.”

#

The Assassin is troubled. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

The assassin squinted through a telescopic sight which, for once, was not attached to a firearm, cursing convenience. Too convenient, rather, that all of his targets should gather in one place, at one time. Too convenient, and a bit unsettling that they had followed him successfully to Las Vegas.

He must have been careless. Carelessness would not do.

He would have to manufacture a convincing errand here in Sin City. The spies couldn’t be permitted to discover the purpose of his visit, to discover his links to Angel. At least not before he could remove the Russian and the scholar, and…prevent their partners from reporting in.

He needed them. But he didn’t need them here, and he didn’t need them now. What he needed here and now was a sacrifice—and a ghost would not suffice. He pushed his forelock out of his eyes irritably and frowned. “All stories are true,” he muttered under his breath, pocketing the scope and fading behind a half-wall as the four men slid their chairs back and stood, as one. “But some stories are truer than others.”

Which made him think about pigs.

Which made him think about the Russian, and laugh.

#

One-Eyed Jack and the Four of a Kind. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

He didn’t really look that much like Stewart. Not really, not now that I was studying rather than reacting. Broken nose, sure, but the jaw was different, and the way he moved, and the muscle on his forearms, and the exact shade of his hair—

I got caught looking, of course.

All four chairs slid back as if they were wired and all four men stood at once as if somebody had pulled on their strings. I didn’t rise.

Instead I let the city lights shine in my eye and fixed their apparent leader with a stare. He didn’t stop short, which impressed me. I can be pretty intimidating, when I try.

Instead he tucked his hands into the pockets of his trousers without bothering to unbutton his slate-gray suit-jacket first. “We’re still not whoever you thought we were,” he said, an American with a flat Midwestern accent. He slouched, dropping his chin against his collar, his forehead wrinkling as he looked at me through his lashes. “But seeing as this is a second date, I thought it might be interesting to find out a little more about you.”

The direct regard was meant to be unsettling, the body language disconcerting. He was good at it, and the blond with the accent hung back right where I would catch his cold blue stare any time my eye happened to slide off those of the spokesman. I wasn’t about to let that happen, though.

I stood up and extended my hand. “I’m Las Vegas,” I said. “But you can call me Jackie.”

He drew one hand out of his pocket. His jacket pulled taut, momentarily, over the bulge in his left armpit, and I knew he saw me see it. “Las Vegas,” he said, brow creasing more as he straightened and extended his hand. He glanced left and right, as if looking for the cameraman. “You’re named after the city?”

“He is the city,” the black man said in educated tones. “That’s what my man here was going to explain to you before you got all hot and bothered.”

The American’s clasp was dry and callused, and he didn’t flinch, although he angled a disbelieving glance at the taller men. Obviously, he thought he was used to getting some pretty strange things in his breakfast cereal.

“Pleased to meet you, Las Vegas,” he said, eyes meeting mine again as our hands dropped apart. “I’m the Wreck of the Hesperus. Now that we’re acquainted, do you mind explaining why you’re following us?”

Oh, what the hell. These are the good guys, right? Always the good guys, modern day knights in their modern-day armor of suitcoats and shoulder holsters. That’s why the world remembers them, hummed under its breath like the rhythm of a rhyme learned in childhood after half the words have been forgotten. A little something to kick the darkness back.

Sin City’s not afraid to talk turkey, even to ghosts. Little ghosts can be a problem; a lot of the time they haven’t got much of themselves left, and the ones that do are generally real angry about something or another. They might not even be people anymore: just collections of energy patterns. Legendary ghosts, like the John Henrys, are strong because they’re made up of so many layers of fact and myth and memory. Media ghosts are really just modern legendary ghosts, but they’re usually not as powerful, not having been…laminated out of the stuff of story for so many years. On the other hand, based on their games with the salt shaker, apparently media ghosts can do what legendary ghosts cannot, and lay hands on things.

And like Doc Holliday, all four of these carried guns. “Well,” I said, keeping my hands in sight, “how much do you gentlemen know about animae and ghosts?”

“Animae?” the Russian asked, just as the scholar glanced over his shoulder at his partner and said, “some,” out of the corner of his mouth.

“Geniuses,” the athlete said, his eyes very dark. He held out a hand and I took it; his had ridged callus, like somebody who spends a lot of time holding a golf club or a tennis racket.

The scholar shook his head and shrugged apology at me. “Genii is the word the tennis bum is scratching his head over.”

“Hey, man—”

It was a game, I realized—and the other pair knew it too, from the sly communicating smile they shared. The Russian stayed a little behind the American, covering his back, as the athlete stepped away. “All right,” the American said, scratchy tenor voice and an arched eyebrow. “I’ll play the idiot child. What are animae?”

The scholar coughed, and licked his lips. “This was the thing we were just going to explain before we came over here”—he shrugged, and looked helplessly at his partner, and tugged the American’s sleeve a little to turn him away—“y’see, you and me, man…all of us, really. We’re not exactly real.”

#

Part III

The American and the end of an era. Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer 1964/2002.

The American looked at the Russian, who crossed his arms and tilted his head before nodding slightly–a gesture that encompassed a fifteen-minute conversation, brought them into concord, and formalized a plan. <>We’re not exactly real. “You have five minutes,” the American said. “Go.”

The kid knotted both hands in his strangely cut hair. “It’ll take more than five minutes, sir. Look–can we maybe sit down? Join me at my table–”

“We have to settle the bill,” the athlete said, with a glance back at the spies’ own table.

“I run a tab. I’ll pay for it. Please. Just sit.” He stepped aside and tugged a chair away from the table, turning it to display its seat. “You see, I think it’s half my fault you’re all here in the desert, and I’ve got problems of my own. And I’d like to buy you a drink and sort things out.”

“My man doesn’t drink.” The athlete glanced over his shoulder.

The scholar wasn’t smiling, and his brow had furrowed a little deeper. He leaned forward and crossed his arms. “I’ll take a coffee,” he said, and placed himself very definitely in the chair Jackie had drawn out.

“I’ll take a coffee too.” The Russian sat down across from the scholar.

The American watched, unsettled. We’re not exactly real. He pulled out the chair beside his partner, while the athlete retrieved one from an empty nearby table, tilted it, and spun it around. The American leaned forward on his elbows once everyone was settled; the chill in his gut wouldn’t slack. “All right,” he said. “So you’re the whole box top. Let’s, ah, hear it. Explain to me why we’re not–”

“–exactly real?” The young man smiled, showing even teeth above a pronounced jaw. “When it comes right down to it, I’m not exactly real either. We’re conjured beings, embodiments of the collective unconscious, if you will.”

“The zeitgeist.” The Russian, sounding unwilling, but fascinated. The American shot his partner a look; he shrugged. It wasn’t an apology. “Funky.”

“Prove it,” the American said.

“Well, for one thing,” the scholar said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his legs, “there was no Brown Derby in Vegas in the sixties–”

“You say ‘in the sixties’ as if it’s something else now.”

“It’s two thousand and two,” the athlete said. “Don’t look at me like that, man. I only know ’cause they woke us up again. We were walking through all the old ghosts and dreams same as you, caught up in our story.”

“Who’s they?” the American asked.

The athlete gestured broadly, taking in the restaurant patrons, the casino beyond it, the city and the world. “The ones who tell the stories,” he said. “And your next question is going to be, ‘What do you mean, ghosts and dreams?’ Isn’t it?”

“Yes–”

“Take an example.” The athlete glanced up at the ceiling. “The MGM Grand wasn’t here in the sixties. There wasn’t anything here in the sixties. And the Desert Inn, where you’re staying–it’s a ghost as well. They imploded it. You guys are sort of a memory, something that got left over, created by the world’s collective memory of the stories that were told about you.”

“Jetways.” The Russian, and the American knew that focused tone in his voice very well. It was the tone that meant a clue had just snapped into place, revealing a much larger section of the puzzle. It was a tone he trusted, although he couldn’t always follow the twists that brought it on. “Jetways, jetways.”

The kid–Jackie–was looking at the Russian, a thin smile playing with the corners of his mouth until the American couldn’t take it any more and snapped, “What?”

“There are no jetways at McCarran Field–”

“There were no jetways at McCarran Field,” Jackie said calmly. “It’s McCarran International Airport now, and the seventh busiest in America.”

“The lights I saw when we were flying in.” The American’s gut gave one more squeeze of denial, and then it settled down and let him think. When you’ve eliminated the impossible–

Hell, it wasn’t as if his career hadn’t spanned U.F.O.s, killer robots, and radio controlled vampire bats. His own nonexistence wasn’t such a big stretch, after that. “You’re telling me I’m a fairy tale? Make-believe?”

He ignored the Russian’s sharp, offended stare. Whatever his partner had been about to say was cut off when the waitress arrived, was roundly charmed by the assembled, and departed with their orders. The American looked at Jackie again as Jackie shrugged, one-shouldered, and lit a cigarette. “I’m telling you what I know.”

“Fine. All right. I believe you–” He could almost be amused by the surprise his friends evinced at his willingness to believe what they were telling him. Mind control rays, earthquake machines, being told one’s life was a mass hallucination: all in a day’s work. The coffee came, and he picked up his cup to hide the way his hands wanted to shake. “–now on to the interesting question, Mr., ah–

“Just call me Jackie.”

“–Jackie.” Smoke curled around the young man’s fingertips and outlined the patch over his eye as he raised the cigarette again, but didn’t puff.

“The interesting question. You said you summoned us.”

“Yes.”

“How? And to what purpose?”

“Ah,” Jackie said, and dropped the cigarette in his ash tray before he reached for the creamer. “That’s what makes the question so interesting, you see. I’m not exactly sure. But I have a couple of propositions to make, if you like.” He locked gazes with the American. Neither looked down.

The mug was burning the American’s fingers. He lifted them to his lips and blew on them, and laughed at the back of his throat. “I don’t suppose you play chess.”

Jackie smiled hard. He was missing a tooth far back in his mouth. “Only for money, my friend.”

#

Tribute faces the music. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

Half an hour before dawn, I found my way back to the room I’d rented at the Motel 6 just off the strip. It had enormous windows, but the black-out drapes reached floor to ceiling, and I made sure to overlap them and pin them in place with the chair. One of the consequences of what I am is that I can make out the patterns on the hotel bedspread and carpeting, even in the dark.

The bed was that spongy texture only hotel mattresses have. I squared my shoes underneath, lay down on it and pulled the pillow over my face. It was a little bigger than King-sized, no matter what they called it; I could have laid three of me down side by side.

I couldn’t sleep.

By sunrise, I was ravenous.

Sycorax and the poisoning had taken it out of me in more ways than the metaphorical, and I would need something that night if I was going to keep passing for a mortal. And feeding–

Isn’t quite what the romantic fancies of novelists and poets and moviemakers would make it. The stable of willing paramours, the idyllic pleasures of the feast–

No.

It’s not like that at all.

It didn’t matter when I was with Sycorax. I took what she told me when she told me and tried to put it off as long as I could, and I mostly pretended I couldn’t hear Jesse. Especially when he asked me to have him exorcised, to let him go.

But things were different now that I was on my own. I found I had qualms.

In addition to my qualms, I had questions. Like Angel and Stewart, and why Angel was out of her city. And why they were with each other, and not with their own partners. And what was wrong with Stewart.

I rolled over in the dark behind drawn curtains, keeping a healthy distance from the scalding brightness that glowed faintly around the edges of the blackout curtains and contemplating whether coming to Vegas had been such a good idea. It didn’t have to be here. I knew that.

But I wanted it to be here. Vegas had changed even more than I had; I barely recognized the place. But we’d been traveling for the better part of three decades and it wasn’t like I could just go home to Tupelo. I haven’t got much good to say about Sycorax, bless her black little heart, but twenty-five years with her filled in the gaps in a public school education pretty well. And besides. Las Vegas was a place where I could perform, and nobody would find it strange that they never saw me out in the sunshine.

I could pass.

There’s nothing more pathetic than an insomniac vampire.

I sat up in bed, reached for the remote, and turned the television on.

Maybe forty minutes later, the corridor door opened. I’d heard the footsteps pause in front of it, but I didn’t get off the bed, even though it didn’t sound like a chambermaid. They usually don’t wear military boots.

Once he opened the door, I caught the scent of leather and sweat and nicotine and the blood under his skin, and then I didn’t need to turn. The black-haired kid in the suit and Doc Martens slipped inside and shut the door behind himself. “King,” he said, smart enough to stay in the narrow corridor with the bathroom on one side and the closet on the other and to keep his back to the door, “we’ve got to talk.”

“How did you find me?” Not bothering to disguise my voice for once. Even though he had to be expecting it, he startled: fresh salt sharp in the cool musty air. His flickering heart kicked up a notch.

“I got lucky,” he said, layers of irony lacing his voice. Something there I’d have to tease out someday. I didn’t turn to look directly, but I saw him move out of the corner of my eye. He jerked his chin at the television. “You gonna shoot that?”

“Nah,” I answered, thumb on the mute button. “It’s too much of a pain in the ass when you haven’t got a road manager to fill out the paperwork for you, and besides, I haven’t got a gun. My next question is supposed to be how you got through the locked door, but that’s easy. So–how’d you recognize me?”

The hurt in his voice was thick and evidently artificial. “You don’t remember me, King?”

“I go by Tribute, these days.” I left the remote on the bed when I stood up, rug fibers catching on my socks, and tightened the covers before turning to have a look at him. Just a mortal boy, but it would be cocky to let him get in between me and the window in daylight. “The King–that’s somebody else. Where should I remember you from?”

“Vegas,” he said, stepping forward so the bathroom light would fall across his face. One eye was covered by the eyepatch. The other one sparkled in a way I’d seen too much of lately. I squinted at the face, though–the eyepatch stood out, and there was no telling what color his hair was under a couple of gallons of Gothic black. He looked a bit like Dean Martin, maybe–a much skinnier Dean, with higher cheekbones and a thinner nose–and when I pictured him with shaggy dark brown hair or a slicked DA, I nodded.

There are always people around the entertainment business whose role is never made particularly clear. They’re attached to somebody, or they know somebody, or somebody owes them a lot of favors or a lot of money. They’re glad handers and compromisers and the sort of people who throw parties that nobody dares miss. I’d seen this kid before, all right, and I’d thought at the time he was one of those people. A good-looking little pansy, nice enough, better conversationalist than me.

But he hadn’t aged a day in thirty years, and gold-and-white streetlights shimmered behind his unpatched eye. Yeah. I knew his name. “Jackie.”

“You do remember.” He folded his arms and stepped back, leaning, the crease in his trousers pulling tight as he kicked one foot up and braced the sole against the door.

“Yeah,” I say. “I think I gave you a Cadillac.”

A quick look down, and he scratched his ear. “It wound up welded to a stand at the 15 and Jones a few years back, being used as a billboard. They painted it pink. Perfect symbol of Las Vegas, if you ask me.”

“Yeah. Perfect. I didn’t know you were Vegas, Jackie.”

“Would you have treated me any different if you did?”

“At the time, I’d never heard that cities had genii and I didn’t believe in vampires or werewolves, so probably not.” He didn’t look down and his heart didn’t skip when I smiled, and I smiled wide enough that even human eyes would catch the way my front upper teeth hooked over the bottom row. “You’re here to run me out of town.”

His breathing quickened, just a touch. The lines beside his eyes deepened. I almost heard the incidental music shift tempo, a little bit faster, a little bit louder. “I came to ask what you thought you were doing here.”

“Just moving from Memphis to the Luxor,” I said. He gave me the blankest look ever, and I sighed. No use wasting any jokes about the underworld on him either; he wouldn’t get any more use out of them than I would have back in 1962. “Just looking for a place to stay out of the sun for a while.”

“It seems unfair somehow that you didn’t need my permission to be here.”

“Walking into a city isn’t like walking into somebody’s house–”

“Las Vegas is my house. And don’t you forget it, King–”

“–it’s more like walking into somebody’s hotel room.” As dryly as I could pull off, and to his credit, he tipped his head to the left, acknowledging the hit. Hah. I wondered if I would have been that clever in the old days, if I’d given myself half a chance.

Probably not. As Ted Williams once said, if you don’t think too good, it’s best if you don’t think too much.

“Touché,” Jackie said. “We still have a problem, King. What are we going to do about you?”

“I’ve got no interest in hunting your city out, kid.”

“I’ve got no intention of letting you hunt my city at all, King. And I’m older than you. I just aged better, is all.”

What was his word? Touche. “Most people did. But that’s all behind us now, isn’t it? Tell me something, Jackie–”

I let it hang but he didn’t jump in again, and he didn’t uncross his arms. I wondered if he had a stake up his sleeve. Rowan and garlic, and a cross of silver threaded on a chain around his neck. There was no shortage of crossroads near here to bury the body under. My lip twitched up; I wondered if I could go on down to one and sell my soul for the power to sing the blues, the way old Robert Johnson was supposed to have done.

He was looking at me smiling, and I looked right back. “–what can you think of that belongs in Vegas more than me?”

He didn’t blink. “Sunrise, King. I’ll give you tonight to set your affairs in order and to get out of town. For old time’s sake, I’ll give you tonight. I’d head for Salt Lake. Not a lot of myth brewing up there, and those boys don’t keep a very good eye on their town.”

“Mormons taste like shit,” I said when he hesitated. His lip curled, but I didn’t manage to crack him up.

“You can’t stay here. I’ve got too much on my plate right now to even think about having a vampire in town.”

I’m embarrassed to admit it took that long for the penny to drop. I should have listened a little better to old Ted. “Your full plate, Jackie….”

He nodded, his one eye gleaming in the shadows, his gaze locked on mine.

“Has that got anything to do with why your other half is running around Las Vegas with a genius from LA?”

Touche, indeed. His heart kicked, and I smelled the cold sweat on his skin as he came toward me. Too smart to walk out into the room, but he was just out of arm’s reach when he stopped. “What do you know about Stewart, King?”

“Call me Tribute,” I said for the second time. “Give me your parole, Jackie, and I’ll give you mine, and come sit down and we’ll crack open the minibar, and I’ll tell you.”

“Your parole?” Incredulous: his rising eyebrows shifted the eyepatch enough to show a pale thread of untanned skin on his cheek. “You’re going to promise me you won’t hunt in Vegas? I don’t really think–”

“Don’t be dense. Of course I can’t promise that.” I stepped back, away. Closer to the window, but careful of the white-hot glow that still limned the edge of the curtain. “But I won’t take any of yours, and I won’t take anybody you’ll miss.”

He was watching, measuring, but I had the advantage. I could smell the eagerness on him, the need to know trembling on his skin. It smelled like a win.

I held my peace, humming a few bars of a Big Mama Thornton standard as I swung an armchair around, where it wouldn’t be too close to the light.

He stepped into the room. “What do you know about Stewart?”

“It’s not much, baby.”

“I’ll take it.”

“I can stay?”

He stopped. His lips twisted, and he turned away to inspect the rack of bottles on top of the minibar. “Bit early for the hard stuff.”

“Did you get any sleep last night?”

“This is Vegas. Baby. Nobody sleeps.” He waited for me to look. His decision hung on the air around him like the smell of blood, delicious and thick. He’d have liked to have hit me; his frustration was metallic, harsh. “How do I know you’re not jerking my chain?”

“If you don’t like my peaches, Jackie–”

“It’s not shaking your tree that concerns me.” He picked a mini and cracked the seal, a sharp, limited sound. The scent of bourbon filled the hotel room and I sneezed. “All right,” he said, and knocked the whole bottle back without bothering to dump it in a glass. He put it down and stepped away; I tidied it against the others. “Screw it. Tell me what you know, King, and I’ll tell you if you can stay.”

#

The Assassin and the ghosts of Gods. Los Angeles. Summer, 2002.

It had been a long time indeed since blood–with or without the trappings of authority–had bothered the assassin. He wouldn’t flinch from the blood of a cop.

Not even the need to do it eye to eye, and hand to hand.

The assassin climbed the steps two at a time, the carpet sticky beneath his shoes where it wasn’t threadbare. He paused at the landing and looked up, caught the eye of Angel, in a red pleather skirt, descending. Her hips swayed as she danced over worn treads to the industrial strains of Object 775. The music, loosely so termed, blasted from a chopped Honda Civic parked under a partially burned-out sign visible through the rain-streaked window on the landing. The window was stuck halfway open. The sign read Gilbert Hotel.

Angel nodded, and the assassin nodded back. “He’s in the room?”

She smiled, an expanse of pricey dental work, and held up a hand to show a buck fifty in quarters pinched between her finger and thumb. “Two twenty seven. I told him I hadda buy rubbers.” She winked, scraping a platform sole across the edge of the stair to cock her hip, and then made doe eyes. “Fifteen minutes all you need?”

“It won’t take longer,” the assassin said, and turned around to smile at her derrière as he passed her on the flight.

She’d left the door unlocked. The assassin slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves and turned the handle silently. The cop was in the bathroom with the door just cracked; he hadn’t thrown the chain.

If he’d had the opportunity to live more than a day or two, he might also have had the opportunity to learn better. “That was quick, sweetheart,” he called over running water.

The assassin kept his back to the wall, his shoes shining despite the muddy streets outside, and slid his right hand under his immaculately pressed lapel to retrieve the Walther PPK from his shoulder holster. The silencer screwed down oiled threads like a kiss gliding down a woman’s belly.

He thumbed the safety off.

“Don’t call me sweetheart,” he snapped, and shouldered aside the door.

The cop had stripped his shirt and his bullet-proof vest off, and stood before the mirror clad in a white singlet and his uniform pants. A wad of money lay crushed up on the scarred bathroom counter; peeled silvering on the back of the mirror and the sickly overhead light gave the cop’s reflected face the appearance of leprosy. He was half-bald, Caucasian, a small paunch doming his belly. The assassin caught sight of his own chiseled face in the mirror over his target’s thickly muscled shoulder, his black hair drooping over one grey eye, his scar livid white against skin flushed with excitement. He leveled the Walther.

The cop half-turned, eyes wide, reaching with a knuckle-crushed hand for the automatic holstered at his hip. He never touched it.

The assassin grouped two bullets through his target’s heart, then sank the third one in between his eyes while he was still falling, blood and brains and bits of white like a dropped china bowl all over the place. The loudest sound was the crack of the bathroom mirror as a tumbling bullet exited the dead man’s body and punched through glass to the wall behind.

He met Angel in the lobby four and a half minutes later. The blood hadn’t spotted his shoes. “Did you get what we came for?” she asked.

He patted the pocket over his heart. “How did Los Angeles ever produce a police officer as her Genius?”

Angel smiled and took his arm so he could squire her down the steps and outside into the rain. The Bentley was around the corner. She squeezed his coat sleeve between long red nails detailed with tiny airbrushed unicorns. “He was on the take,” she said, and stood on tiptoe to kiss the assassin’s cheek.

*

Part IV

The Russian plays roulette. Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

Jackie said he’d give them plenty of time to think about it, and the Russian didn’t doubt he meant it. Still, the four spies didn’t sit still long; the American and the athlete rose as one, the Russian and the scholar a half step behind. The American’s hands were balled up in his pants pockets, ruining the line of his suit. The Russian was amused–as the Russian was often amused–to discover that he could now discern nuances in the gesture. This particular manifestation meant that his partner was thinking hard, and more than a little irritated.

“Where are we going?”

“Someplace private,” the American said, shooting the Russian a sideways glance and then staring over his own shoulder at the athlete, a tacit request for permission. The scholar stayed at the athlete’s back like a fetch, a frown carving the lines in his forehead deeper.

“If you’re onto something, man, share the wealth–”

The American flashed the athlete one of his legendary smiles. “In a minute. I’ve got a question for you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. The Vegas my partner and I saw when we walked in here looked a hell of a lot like the nineteen sixties.” He gestured widely, an arc that took in the roulette wheels, the card tables, the croupiers and the dealers and the jangle and wheeze of slot machines in uniform ranks like light-up tombstones in a military cemetery.

“It did, didn’t it?”

“Yes, and this–doesn’t.”

The Russian felt his own smile tug his lips wide. He nudged the American with his elbow. “You want to know if it will help us get any privacy to go back there.”

The American didn’t look at him, just the other two. “Would it?”

“Well–” They traded a familiar glance. The scholar shrugged. The athlete smirked. “It won’t keep the assassin off. That’s his time as much as ours.”

“What about that Jackie fellow?”

“I can’t rightly say.” The athlete had a gangling, slouchy habit of motion that the Russian thought would reveal considerable power and grace when he chose. “Worth a try.” He looked around, craning his neck to take in everything from the gaudy carpeting to the jangling machines and the high, light-patterned ceiling in one sweep. “Here? Now?”

“No time like the present,” the Russian said, and laid light fingers on the crook of his partner’s elbow before he closed his eyes and concentrated. He remembered the walk from the Desert Inn to the MGM Grand; the athlete or the scholar must have done something to move them from then to now?

Mustn’t they?

He pictured the Strip the way he’d last seen it, the Hacienda and the Desert Inn and the shell of the El Rancho Las Vegas hunkered down, a fire-raddled hulk. Heat struck his face, a wall of it like an oven, a weight of it like a punishing hand on his hair. He opened his eyes, let his hand drop, and turned.

Desert stretched around them, flat, the Las Vegas Strip a black ribbon in the middle distance spangled with teal and black and silver Thunderbirds and Buicks and a single candy-apple red Pontiac Tempest GTO with the top down, dust curling from under its whitewalls.

“Mmm,” the American said, turning to watch the latter–and the blonde hair that streamed out from under a green and rust scarf behind the driver’s wheel.

“The car or the girl?”

“It’s too far away to appreciate the girl properly,” the American said complacently.

The Russian laughed. “Remember, I’m farsighted.” He turned and caught the athlete’s eye, and then the scholar’s. “Voilà, gentlemen.” With an expansive gesture: “I give you–nineteen hundred and sixty-four.”

The scholar slipped a hand under his jacket and came up with a snub-nosed .22 revolver. The Russian eyed it warily, but the scholar just flipped it open and started checking the loads. Five were chambered; the big man dug a sixth from his pocket and thumbed it into the chamber. He snapped the assembly shut with a practiced twist of his wrist and let the hammer down easy.

“That’s a pretty dainty gun for a big guy like you.”

The scholar hitched his thumbs through his belt loops and smiled. “You require a big pistol, son?”

The American’s eyebrows went up. He glanced from the scholar to the Russian and back again in patent disbelief.

The Russian bit down on his grin as the athlete cleared his throat, pointed back and forth between them, and said, “You won that one. I think he won that one. What do you think? Do you think he won that?”

“I think I burn easily,” the Russian said, and marched forward. “The Hacienda is this way.”

“The Hacienda’s a dump!”

“They have a bar, don’t they?” The other three fell in behind him without further argument. “Tell me–who do you expect to meet that you require more than five bullets for?”

“It’s nineteen sixty-four–”

“We have observed that.” Sharply enough that the American snorted and the athlete coughed. The scholar sent the Russian an amused glance; he caught it and sent it back. “Who do you expect to meet out here?”

“Just about nobody,” the scholar admitted, tucking his gun into his belt. “Except the opposition.”

“It’s even too early for Kolchak,” the athlete said.

“Who?”

“My point exactly.” The athlete frowned at the American, leaning across the Russian’s line of sight to do it. “All right, pretty boy. This is as private as it gets. Let’s hear it.”

“Easy,” the American said, smoothing his forelock out of his eyes. “I think our new friend Jackie needs us a heck of a lot more than we need him.”

The scholar smiled. “He thinks he summoned us.”

“By accident. Along with a whole bunch of other…”

“Ghosts.” The Russian gave his partner the word bluntly. It wouldn’t look like empathy to an outsider, but he didn’t care what an outsider thought. He shouldered the American, and the American shouldered him back, packmates communicating.

“Ghosts,” the American said. “But we know what we’re here for, and we know why we came.”

“Yeah, MI-6 leaving us to clean up their mess.”

The Russian snorted at the athlete. “In my homeland, they have a more efficient manner of dealing with disgraced former employees. One finds a pistol loaded with a single bullet on one’s desk. One is intended to know how to address the matter from that point.”

“I’ve wondered about that. Why only one bullet?”

“It is not expected that one Russian will make two mistakes.” Delightful, when they walked into it. It almost made up for the blistering heat on the nape of his neck and the packed earth under his soles cooking his feet in his shoes. One-handed, he loosened his tie. “In any case, my partner is correct. Our friend Jackie may be a poker player, but he’s no spy. And if he means to use us to get his vengeance on the…genius…who killed his partner, it would take little in the way of moral suasion for me to use him in return.”

The Russian glanced up from his shoes as they touched the melted, sticking tarmac of the Strip. The Hacienda was appreciably closer, and if he turned left, he could see the “drive carefully” side of the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign. He blew his hair out of his eyes, checked for oncoming traffic, and walked faster. The athlete and the scholar paced him easily, the American nearly trotting to keep up.

The athlete was nodding. He leaned forward one more time as they gained the western side of the highway. “So you think there’s a way to use him to get to the assassin?”

“I think it can’t hurt to give it a whirl,” the American said, leading them up the driveway to the casino. “We’re catching a cab back, gents–”

The scholar held the door for the rest of them, but the American balked a moment, glancing up. “No air curtain.”

“You mostly get those downtown, where people walk in and out a lot. Come on; Uncle Sam doesn’t pay you to air condition the Mojave.”

“Uncle Sam doesn’t pay me at all,” the American retorted, but he stepped inside, and the Russian followed tight on his heels, breathing a sigh of relief as cool darkness closed around them. A moment later, and they were ensconced at the bar, the only four customers this early in the morning.

The scholar contented himself with orange juice. The American and the athlete ordered mimosas, and the Russian a bloody Mary. “So, what’s your plan?” he asked his partner, when they’d each had a chance to get in a few pulls of their drinks, and suck on a couple of ice cubes.

“I’ll let you know when I figure that out,” the American answered. His eye lit on something over the Russian’s shoulder, and he finished his drink in one long swallow and clinked the glass on the bar. “I’m improvising. Excuse me for a moment–” He stood, straightened his tie in the bar mirror, winked to his partner, and took off in pursuit.

The Russian checked his watch. “He’ll either be back in fifteen minutes, or four hours,” he predicted confidently, watching in the bartender’s looking glass as the American strolled up to a pretty brunette near the one-armed bandits, exuding gallantry.

“What’s his batting average like?” The athlete watched more openly, with a professional interest.

The Russian pursed his lips, working through the sports metaphor. “He swings at every ball,” he answered at last. “He has to knock a few out of the park, yes?”

“What if we have to get in touch with him?” The scholar, looking less amused and more annoyed.

“He has his cigarette pack. I can call him if I must.” A long sigh, and another sip of his bloody Mary. “So,” he said, turning on his stool and glancing up at the athlete with calm interest. “About that tennis match–”

#

One-Eyed Jack and the house of the rising sun. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

Vampires sneeze like cats. Who knew?

I concentrated on amusement to keep another image the hell out of my head–Stewart, alive, and bound to Angel somehow, drugs or magic or something else. It took a lot of willpower to walk down the stairs rather than stomp, but I thought I had my heart rate back to normal by the time I walked out into the parking lot. Both John Henrys waited by the front door of Jeremiah’s Steak House. I paused in the shade as they crossed the asphalt and glanced over my shoulder, drawn by a whisper of breeze and the tang of ozone. Storm clouds piled up behind the Spring Mountains, not quite pushing over; another alleged monsoon season that was going to pan out mostly dry.

In ‘99, the rain nearly washed the whole damned town away. Just goes to show you never can tell.

In any case, the moisture in the air warmed the sunlight to a glow less like a welding arc and more like the sort of thing you might want to go out and walk around in and feel on your hair. It shone through the John Henrys, rendering them momentarily translucent, until they stepped into the shadow of the overhang.

“Did you find him?” asked the steel-driving man, shifting his hammer over his shoulder. Doc coughed into his handkerchief and reached for his flask.

I nodded and looked back up at the mountains remote behind a forest of power lines, billboards, and low-pitched roofs. I didn’t feel like looking anybody in the eye, and the center of my chest felt like John Henry had caved it in with his hammer. “I found him. I want to thank you gentlemen for your help–”

“You know you can’t dismiss us now,” Doc said, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Not ’til the business you called us up for is finished. And this isn’t it.”

“No. This isn’t it.”

John Henry’s hammer didn’t ring on the concrete when he set it down by his feet and leaned the handle against his bulky thigh. He hooked thumbs as thick as two of my fingers together through the beltloops of his canvas trousers and dropped his head, staring at the ground in between my boots. “Do you want us to stick around and make sure he leaves town?”

“He’s not leaving town,” I said. They fell into step alongside me, Doc on the left and John Henry on the right. “He’s helping me find Angel.”

Doc’s laugh turned into a coughing fit, his bony elegant white hand pressed against his lips hard enough to blanch away the little color left in them. “Think he’ll be any use?”

“I think so,” I said. “Turns out Angel offered him a job.”

John Henry tossed his hammer idly, letting it turn in the air, end over end, before he caught it by the handle again. His muscles slid and writhed under glossy skin. “What kinda job?”

Stewart.

“Protecting her from me.”

#

The American, the Russian, and the man who shot JFK. Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer 1964.

When the American rejoined the Russian some hours later, the Russian was crosslegged on one of the twin beds in their hotel room, his Walther disassembled on newspaper in front of him. His jacket was tossed carelessly over the foot of the bed. The black leather of his shoulder holster cut across an impossibly white shirt; the American made a note to find out what laundry he used.

“The mechanism won’t rust in the desert,” the American said, closing and locking the door.

“Sand,” the Russian answered acidly, capping the bottle of gun oil without looking up. “You believe them.”

“Don’t you?”

“As much as I dislike admitting it.” He reassembled the mechanism while the American leaned against the wall beside the yellow louvered closet door and watched. “Somehow, it doesn’t surprise me that we would be the last to know.”

“There are implications that could be worked to our advantage, once we understand the process.”

This time the Russian did glance up, a flicker of a smile twitching his lips as he slid the magazine home. The click as it latched echoed with finality. “My thoughts exactly. I finalized some details with our colleagues while you were indisposed”–the American coughed–“and we are to serve as the primary bait. The other team will attempt to locate the assassin through more proactive measures.”

“Tovarisch,” the American said, delighted. “You’ve weaseled us out of the footwork, haven’t you?”

“Weaseled may be an unfairly pejorative term.”

“You have a better one?”

“Given how thoroughly you despise footwork–” The Russian rose from his place on the bed without using his hands, tucking his gun away as he fluidly stood. “I think you could manage politeness. You’ll please remember this the next time you’re sweating in the passenger seat of a Chevrolet, complaining how much your feet hurt.”

“Still, your master plan leaves us getting shot at.”

“All our plans leave us getting shot at.”

The Russian ducked into the bathroom to wash his face and let cool water run over his arms, despite the air conditioning. His hair was still wet from what the American suspected was the latest in a series of cold showers. The American walked past him, crossed the garish carpet to the window, and flicked aside heavy drapes geometrically patterned in shades of rust and tan. “So, how do we play at being bait?”

“An endless succession of pricey meals and dinner theatre, leaving us ostentatiously exposed, would be too obvious a lure, unfortunately.”

“Besides, we’re not on an expense account.” The American let the drapery fall. “Very frugal of the old man, getting us out here on our own nickel.”

The Russian snorted. “He’s nothing if not cheap.”

“Pot.”

“I am thrifty. I am also not eternally broke, like some profligate, bourgeois Americans I could name–” Their eyes met, and they both grinned in affectionate understanding.

“There’s also the issue of Jackie,” the American said, when the silence had lasted long enough.

“Ah, Jackie.” The Russian snagged his jacket and shrugged into it, leaving it unbuttoned over his shirt. “Yes. He will expect us to pay his toll–and I admit to rather liking the fellow. If we can bring him this Angel person he described…spreading good will and so forth.”

“Besides,” the American said, “she killed his partner. And his partner looked like you. There’s got to be an angle there somewhere…” The American looked down and fiddled with his pinky ring, attempting to conceal his second-hand wrath on behalf of Jackie, and Jackie’s partner, and failing. “It, ah. It occurs to me–”

The Russian was looking at him, an expression playing across his face that would have been unreadable to anybody else. “You want to see if we can combine our tasks? Go back to two thousand and two?”

“I don’t know,” the American said. “How do you go about finding the genius of Los Angeles within Las Vegas City limits?”

The Russian looked at the American, and smiled. “Footwork.”

#

The Russian’s feet baked in his shoes and his toes felt as if they’d been gone over once lightly with a carrot grater, but he’d never let it show on his face. Not when his partner limped ostentatiously behind, muttering under his breath. At least the malevolent desert sun had slipped behind the mountains. “We haven’t talked about the…the spooky thing.”

“Jackie mistaking you for his partner?”

“Did he seem a little innocent to you? A bit of un naïf for his role?”

“His role as the spirit of Sin City?” The American craned his head back, looking up at the simulated skyline of New York City rendered in bright primary colors that lorded it over the south end of the Strip, wrapped in the yellow garland of a roller coaster reminiscent of something from a science fiction film. “Tovarisch, what could possibly be more naive than that? New York City with no crime, no grime, no Greenwich Village, no Soho, no Harlem–”

“–no jazz–”

“I bet the hookers even have all their teeth. Look at that place.”

“I take your point. Venice without the toxic water. Remember how sick you got?…”

“Intimately.” The American made a moue, and the Russian laughed at him, quite silently. It didn’t matter; the American always knew when he was being laughed at. “You know, it occurs to me that our chances of finding one girl in all of Las Vegas when we have no photo, and the best description we have is ‘brunette, five-three, one-ten, looks like an LA hooker who thought she could get a role in pictures’ is probably a lost cause. We’ve been trying for hours. What do you say we call it a night?”

“Have we been shot at yet?”

The American checked his watch. “Not since 1964.”

“Then we’re not trying hard enough. The British team can’t nab the assassin if we don’t lure him into the open. Come on–three more bourgeois excrescences to go.”

They walked in silence for a while. The American never seemed to sweat. The Russian mopped his brow with a formerly clean white handkerchief. The Luxor and the Excalibur yielded them nothing, and they wandered shoulder to shoulder, aimlessly, once they entered the tall gold building called Mandalay Bay. Some artificial scent on the air made the Russian sneeze. He dabbed his nose with the same handkerchief, and wiped his watering eyes. The place was huge, arched cavernous hallways oppressive as the sewers and catacombs of Paris. “Oh, brother. Is this the last hotel?”

“It’s the last hotel on the whole goddamned planet–”

“Groovy. We haven’t been shot at yet. Where to next?”

The American sighed and set his heels. “Did you just say groovy?”

“I like slang. Do you want to start on downtown?”

“What if I promised you dinner?”

The Russian bit back a grin. He’d been holding out for the trump card. “A casino buffet?”

“Bait,” the American said, and pointed over his shoulder, back the way they’d come.

“A sushi bar in Las Vegas? Don’t be ridi–”

“This is the millennium, tovarisch. There was a place in the last casino but one called Hamada of Japan. Looked promis…oh, my god.”

“What?” The Russian turned, following the direction of his partner’s shellshocked gaze, his smooth-soled shoes turning on the shiny, dark floor without a squeak. Years of training kept his jaw from actually dropping.

“That’s Lenin.”

“Correction,” the Russian said, starting forward. “It’s Lenin–without his head. Funky….”

“Did you just say?…”

“I wanted to see if you were paying attention. It appears to be a restaurant. And the statue is a replica.”

“That’s a relief. I’d hate to think any real works of art got their heads knocked off. Even Soviet propagandist works of art.” The American was still grinning when the Russian shot him the filthiest look he could muster. He continued, “We eat here.”

“We do not.”

“Don’t you ever get homesick?”

Constantly, the Russian thought. But not for this. But he stopped anyway, looking up at the bulky broad-shouldered statue, encrusted with faux pigeon droppings, and said, “Vladimir Ilyich, where is your head?”

“It’s in the vodka locker,” a smooth familiar voice said from the restaurant’s doorway. “Viva Las Vegas. I think you two have a bit of history to catch up on. And I hear you’re looking for a girl.”

The Russian and his partner turned as one, shoulder to shoulder, reaching for but not producing their weapons. The man leaned against the marble framed entry, hands in the pockets of a voluptuous leather trenchcoat, dark blond hair fallen over his forehead, sunglasses concealing his eyes despite the dimness of the casino.

“Wow,” the American said. “You know you look like–”

“Yeah, I get that a lot. Come on.” He jerked his thumb in direction and turned his back.

Helplessly, the Russian exchanged a glance with his partner. They fell into step behind the stranger, who was carrying on a running monologue without bothering to glance over his shoulder and see if the spies were keeping up. “You’re friends of Jackie’s. And, unless I miss my guess, a little behind the times?”

The American coughed. “A little.”

“American politics have been running downhill since the Kennedy assassinations, really. But the former Soviet Union’s in even worse shape.” The man in the leather trenchcoat shot a speculative glance at the Russian. “I doubt you’ll be pleased–”

“Assassinations? Plural?” the American interrupted, at the same moment that the Russian said “Former?“

“Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles in June of 1968,” the man who looked–and sounded–like the King of Rock and Roll said, checking his stride a little. The Russian hurried to keep up, matching his gait to the American’s. “The Soviet Union dissolved its government peaceably in December of 1991, dividing into fifteen separate countries, most of which are still struggling, economically devastated, eleven years later. It happened just a little more than two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was actually in Kiev when it happened–Ukraine’s had a rough time of it.”

“Ukraine always does,” the Russian said, resignation in his breast. “Are there still roses?”

“Roses?”

“In Kiev.”

The stranger stopped so short that the American almost walked into him. He paused and frowned. The Russian held his breath, his heart tight in his chest, and couldn’t say why the roses mattered, except they did. His hands were sweating. He shoved them into his pockets, ignoring his partner’s concerned glance. The man who looked like Elvis Presley pulled his sunglasses off, tucked them carefully into his breast pocket, looked the Russian in the eye and said, “There were in 1991. There’s worse.”

His partner’s hand was on his shoulder. He leaned back against it, frowning. “Let me hear it.”

“The power plant at Chornobyl–the nuclear plant–you know it?”

“The site had been chosen, but construction had not been started yet, the last I knew.” The Russian dropped his chin, already knowing what the ghost of Elvis would say. His degree was in physics; he knew better than most that the proposed Soviet nuclear plants were an unsafe design. “There was an explosion.”

“In 1986.”

“Of course there was,” he said, and looked up, something that didn’t feel like a smile twisting his lips. “It’s the history of Ukraine, my friend. If it weren’t ideologically questionable, I’d wonder if there were a curse.” He turned on his heel and stalked back toward the maimed statue of Lenin, the precieux faux-Russian bar–he recognized the chandelier, now that he thought about it; he’d seen it in one embassy or another–and, most importantly, the promised vodka locker.

His partner, still visibly rattled by the news that Bobby Kennedy had been shot, was right beside him. He needed the steadying hand on his elbow more than he cared to admit. “I thought we weren’t eating in the tacky nightclub.”

“We’re not,” the Russian said, crisply. “We’re drinking.”

There was Ukrainian vodka on the menu, and they served it both in martini glasses and in samplers of shots frozen into blocks of red-dyed ice. The bar itself had a strip of ice like a hockey rink down the center, and the walls were cluttered with peeling propaganda posters. Coupled with dim lighting, the effect was overwhelmingly claustrophobic, but the Russian’s partner leaned against the bar on his left-hand side and the stranger in the trenchcoat leaned on his right, and there was a certain comfort to be had drinking silently between acquaintances while the decapitated head of Vladimir Ilyich glowered down at him from its high shelf in the glassed-in freezer behind the bar.

The Russian toasted it silently with his second martini glass full of Zlatogor and breathed out through his teeth. He didn’t need to talk; his partner spoke for him. “Did Jack send you looking for us? To bring us…up to speed?”

“Jack sent me looking for his boyfriend. Look, what do I call you guys?”

The Russian and the American exchanged glances and shrugged. “What do we call you?” the American asked.

“Tribute.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Baby, you know that already.” Tribute smiled and swirled the vodka in his shot glass. He put it back on the ice without touching it to his lips and squared his cocktail napkin precisely. The Russian swallowed vodka hard, watching the curvaceous brunette bartender as she slunk from one end of the ice-topped surface to the other.

“So how come you look so much like the Suicide King?” Tribute asked, after the Russian had finished his second drink.

“Suicide King?”

“Jackie’s boyfriend. The Suicide King. Jackie calls him Stewart. Jackie’s the knave of spades, if you hadn’t caught on.”

“The one-eyed jack. Yes, of course. And his partner then would have to be the King of Hearts.” The Russian glanced up as he spoke, then glanced down as Tribute pushed the untouched shot glass toward him. “Boyfriend, you say? I suppose that’s something else that’s changed.” He took the shot glass with a sigh. “I do not know. Do you have any more bombshells to drop on my head?”

“Not at the moment. Although I’m looking forward to your reaction to President Ronald Reagan.”

Tribute had timed it perfectly. The American choked hard, flinching as fiery alcohol bathed his sinuses. He grabbed a napkin and covered the lower half of his face. “Currently?”

“No, back in the eighties. You all are just too much fun.”

The American winced, set his napkin down, and sipped his drink again. “So who shot RFK?”

“Supposedly, a fellow named Sirhan Sirhan, but there are conspiracy theories about that, just like JFK.” Tribute shrugged, drawing circles on the ice with his thumb. A passing matron turned to blink at his profile, shook her head, and kept on walking. The Russian ordered another drink.

“My friend here thinks Oswald did JFK all by himself,” the American said, angling his head to include the silent Russian. The Russian snorted and looked down. “Why did you come looking for us?”

“I didn’t,” Tribute said, swiveling his chair to catch the American’s eye. “I was looking for Angel. Apparently, given that people were talking about two guys dressed funny and asking the same questions I was, so were you.”

The Russian glanced down at the munchie menu to hide his smile. If Tribute had found them, then perhaps the assassin would too. He blinked at the card stock in his hand. “Russian nachos? What on Earth?”

“Blame Julia Child.”

“I love Julia Child. On PBS.” The American was laughing at him, but it didn’t matter. The American never had believed he could cook. “I suppose she’s dead as well?”

Tribute smiled as he shook his head this time. “Still going strong.”

Odd, how that little bit of continuity eased the congealed twist of worry in the Russian’s chest. “What does she have to do with Mexicanized Russian food?”

Tribute shrugged. “Fusion cuisine. The world’s gotten a lot smaller since your day.”

“Our day?” The Russian recognized that tone in his partner’s voice. The American was still working on his first martini. “I’d have guessed our day was your day too. Aren’t you a, what did Jackie call us, a media ghost as well? ‘Cause you’d be, what, seventy or so?”

Tribute turned to them and grinned; the Russian almost startled back into the American’s arms at the glitter of white inhuman teeth. “I died in 1977. And I’m sixty-seven, for what it’s worth.”

“Wampyr,” the Russian said. “Well, well.”

Tribute’s eyebrow rose. “You’re taking it well.”

“We’ve met your kind before.”

“Twice,” the American added, and the Russian turned his back on the vampire–a foolish thing to do, but ten ounces of eighty-proof vodka on an empty stomach after twelve hours in the heat perhaps had dulled his instincts–and shook his head.

“Only once,” he argued. “The other one we never actually met.”

“I was thinking of the fellow with the bats–”

“–random madman. Not a real supernatural being.”

Tribute laughed, drawing their attention back. “That’s refreshing. The next thing people usually say is that I’ve changed. When they actually get to live long enough to figure out who I am, I mean.”

The cold glitter of the vampire’s eyes arrested whatever the Russian might have said in reply. Carefully, he pushed his martini glass back an inch, using just his fingertips, and then steepled those fingertips against those of the other hand. “But you aren’t that person, are you? You’re something else.”

“A predator,” Tribute supplied.

“A predator who remembers being that man.”

The vampire snorted and picked at the ice of the bartop with his thumbnail some more. He’d worn a little groove, although it didn’t melt where he touched it. “If you can call the person I remember being a man.” He shook his head and cleared his throat. “So the One-eyed Jack’s got you all looking for Angel too. Spreading his resources out a bit, I suppose. Look, I’m supposed to lead him to her–” The sharp-nailed hand splayed flat on the bar, as if he meant to stab between the fingers with a knife. A human’s hand would have blanched in places and reddened in others, from the pressure. Tribute’s stayed bland white, porcelain. “–I can lead you as well. After I get some business of my own out of the way.”

The American leaned forward, clearing his throat. “Why are you helping Jack?”

“The likes of me?”

Vodka was making the Russian’s head swim. He needed to eat. And not Russian Nachos. “Yes.”

“Boy’s got to live some place.” The vampire’s shoulders moved under the black leather coat, which draped in folds soft as cashmere. The dark blond hair drifted down into his eyes. “I like Las Vegas. I want to stay. I have to earn that from Jack.”

“You’re buying your way in.”

Tribute showed the tips of his eyeteeth again as he stood. “Besides,” he said, “I’ve met Los Angeles. One city like her is enough, don’t you think?”

“Where are you going?” The Russian reached out to lay a hand on Tribute’s wrist. The vampire suffered the touch; his flesh was cold, as stiff as wax.

“Hunting,” Tribute said, one word full of potent venom. He stepped back, a sharply folded fifty-dollar bill appearing on the bar where he’d been sitting. “Drinks are on me. I’ll catch you later, little spies; you don’t want to come.”

The coat didn’t swirl as he glided toward the door and was gone. The Russian glanced at the American and waggled his eyebrows in a passable imitation of their superior. “Jackie’s boyfriend?”

The American reached out, took the Russian’s martini off the bar, and knocked the whole thing back in a gulp. “Times change,” he said wryly, when his face unpuckered. “You think Tribute’s told Jackie his partner’s alive? Or do you think the Genius of Las Vegas is lying to us?”

“I think it’s going to take a lot of sushi to fuel the thinking process,” the Russian answered. “Do you suppose our money’s any good here?”

The American smoothed Tribute’s bill against the ice. “Better than his money would be there,” he said, and tapped President Grant on the nose. “Come on,” he said, steadying the Russian as the Russian pushed himself to his feet. “Let’s see if we can get ourselves shot in a restaurant.”

“Don’t forget our guardian angels,” the Russian answered, casting a mysterious glance skyward.

“I never forget them. I just prefer not to make them work too hard.”

#

The Assassin and the lady sowing the dragon’s heart. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

The assassin sat in a straight-back chair, polishing his shoes, while the genius of Las Vegas pressed his face into the pillow beside Angel’s thigh and tugged ineffectually against the handcuff locking his right wrist to the bedframe. Angel stroked his hair; he turned further away.

“No.” Flatly, with an edge that told the assassin that the Suicide King was closer to his right mind than he’d been in days. Consent had to be given, and so he was no longer under the influence of the narcotics and witchcraft Angel had been using to keep him pliant.

“Come on, baby,” Angel said, as the assassin slipped his foot into a gleaming loafer. “You have to eat your soup.”

“Or what? I’ll starve to death?” He snorted and rolled onto his back, using the short chain to haul himself up against the headboard. He sat beside Angel, his thin shoulders squared and his jaw working. He leaned away from her and she curled toward him like a mother coaxing a nauseated child. “If you want me to eat somebody’s heart, why don’t you start with your own?”

The assassin stood, making sure his suitcoat hung flat over his pistol. He buttoned both buttons and smoothed his lapels with a flick of his thumbs, checking the look in the mirror. He’d picked up a bit of Las Vegas sun, bronzing his cheekbones. Angel lifted her head, careful to keep the mug of broth in her hand out of reach of the Suicide King. “What do you think you’re doing? I need you here–”

“You’re not going to get him to drink that tonight,” the assassin said, finger-combing his hair. “We need bargaining power. Offer him his partner’s life.”

Stewart blanched.

The assassin blew Angel a kiss. “And in the meantime, love, I have people to kill.”

She climbed off the bed and came across to him, leaving the mug on the dark wood desk beside an industrial-looking beige telephone. She lifted her chin and stared up at him, challenging; he kissed her for real this time, ignoring the Suicide King’s snort of disgust. “Come home safe,” she said, and laid a possessive hand on his upper arm. “I’d hate to have to find another partner with your qualifications.”

“Never fear. And be careful of the poof while I’m gone, Angel.” He winked. “You do look good enough to eat.”

#

Tribute and his cross to bear. Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.

Before I went to kill anybody, I took a walk through the Neon Boneyard. Las Vegas is a city without a history, but the history it doesn’t have was piled up here, baking under the unforgiving sun. It wasn’t the old Las Vegas, of course–not the Vegas I lived in–but it was an echoing ghost of it, acres of boot-marked hardpan and a hodgepodge of metal and glass radiating the heat of the day back into the desert night. Cooling plastic ticked; signs were piled by signs, big ones, medium-sized ones–some of them two or three times taller than me. Familiar names: Sam Boyd’s, the Silver Slipper, Joe’s Longhorn, all fenced around with green-laced chain link, like the damned things might spook and stampede. I stopped by Aladdin’s silver lamp, which sat in a protective sort of bay formed by the curve of the Gold Nugget sign, and cocked my head back to look up at it. Funny how it looked so dated, thirty-odd years later. Quaint, that’s the word I want.

Somebody moved in the darkness, the drifting night air bringing me the rankness of tobacco and cheap bourbon and unwashed man. A lot of bums slept in the Boneyard; it was safer than sleeping on the street. Until I got to town, that is.

I thought about it for a minute. It would be clean, easy. I could do what I had to do and get back on duty following those ridiculously charming escapees from the idiot box around.

All right, it wouldn’t be clean.

And I was hungry, but I could still afford to be choosy–and some down on his luck drunk wasn’t choosy enough for me. Especially not when Jesse frowned at me translucently from the shadows, disapproval plain in his expression though he was holding his tongue. Most people in Vegas are prey, it’s true; the city’s got teeth. But I wanted something that wouldn’t keep me up days feeling guilty about it.

I slipped into the walkway between the Sassy Sallie’s sign and the chain link, jumped over, and caught a cab downtown, looking for irony if I couldn’t find evil. Jesse didn’t follow, and I didn’t blame him. I’d only get a lecture if he were there, anyway. There were a lot of people sleeping on the street, all right. I only had to spend a few minutes hanging around the courthouse and the bus station to get the feeling Vegas doesn’t offer much in the way of safety nets. People slept rough on the grass or on park benches, or moved around looking for something to eat now that the heat of the day had pulled back a little. I killed five minutes watching happy couples being panhandled as they left the courthouse with their marriage licenses in their hands; the bureau’s open ’till midnight weekdays and twenty-four hours on weekends. No blood test, no waiting, and all the papers on public record.

I could walk in there, pay a couple of dollars, and pull my own marriage license application, if I wanted it.

Yeah. Plenty to choose from, and easy pickings. Jackie kept his city clean of people like me. What he couldn’t keep out were the people like people everywhere, because they made him as much as he watched them. And I comfort myself that there are worse predators in the night than me.

It’s a lie, but I comfort myself.

There were still a couple of street preachers working the crowd. The true Las Vegas wedding experience; pick your minister out of the ones on the sidewalk shouting their wares, like hookers jostling on the corner. “Hey, mister,” one of them said to me, as I wandered close, “do you want to get married tonight?”

God forgives us the sins of our mortal lifetimes, if we ask real nice. My religion doesn’t talk much about the ones committed after you die. I turned around and looked him in the eye, and shrugged. “My fiancée’s just run back to the hotel. You wanna come with me to get her?”

“Sure,” he said, and fell into step. Tall black man, heavy set, his hair shaved close to the skull. We walked a few yards, and it was easy enough to grab a wrist and snake him into the shadows. They make it sound so pretty in the books. Tidy little puncture wounds, and orgasmic pleasure spiraling into death.

It isn’t pretty. You wouldn’t want to know. Still, plenty of blood in that one, and if I couldn’t find a record producer, a man of God would do.

You figure they’ll get home safely, right? And if they don’t, it’s their own damned fault.

I never could stand a hypocrite.