I ended up having to call a cab from the office of the Araby Motel, a cheesy place opposite the 1001 Knights Hotel.

The driver was snotty about giving a dog a ride, so Quicksilver had a good run home. Luckily, we'd been on the south end of the Strip and Hector Nightwine's estate wasn't that far away for Quicksilver.

In fifteen minutes the four charging bronze horsemen of the Apocalypse that guarded the gates loomed into the headlights.

The cab driver was happier cruising along to my more modest entry area down Sunset Drive to let me out. Quicksilver was waiting there for me to disengage the security system and open the gate. He was just being polite. He could scale the eight-foot wall, but didn't like to alarm the main house.

After our unexpected nocturnal adventure, I made sure he had fresh water and some doggie treats and left him with a puppy biscuit sticking out of his awesome muzzle like a small green tongue-tip.

Upstairs, on my way to my interrupted beauty sleep in my bedroom, the meager light caught my image in the long mirror at the hall's end.

I nodded at myself and moved on, absorbed.

Wait!

The self I'd nodded at was nude!

I ducked back into the hall.

Yup, the nude "me" in the mirror was as whitewashed as my pale Black Irish skin was in the light of day. The tangle of black on my head repeated at the crux of my legs. Sure, I'd seen myself nude in a mirror before, but always critically: pale skin that would burn but not tan, the fairly tall frame with too much breast and hip. I was an unfashionable hourglass. That's why vintage clothing looked cool on me. I'd always loved the looks of female Silver Screen stars. To paraphrase Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, "They had faces then." They also had busts and hips, S curves and sensuous thighs. But this image wasn't me. It was me in a separate semblance. This was Lilith. Maybe I could tell by her faint blue aura. Or the tiny blue topaz stud in her nostril. Look at her and see me, once removed.

I blushed to view my body objectively. I was used to seeing myself as deficient: lacking relatives, lacking a home, an identity, a positive body image, a Blue Fairy with a star to wish upon...

I forced myself to confront what usually made me cringe.

"Are you me?" I asked.

My mirror image didn't answer, but her mouth moved as if she was interrogating me.

"Lilith?" I hadn't meant to sound either tentative or desperate. But I did, both.

Seeing this double of me on network TV is what brought me to Las Vegas to put up with such things as Count Dracula as an alarm clock.

Her mouth mimicked my word. Lil-ith.

"Are you dead?"

She winked at me. Assumed a fashion model pose.

"You'll never make it in the rag trade, Lil," I told her. "Too busty."

She stuck her tongue out at me.

Nothing in the magic mirror had ever interacted so boldly with me before.

"Why don't you speak?"

She shrugged, lifted her dark eyebrows. Eloquently, she asked without words. Why speak?

"I need to know I'm not alone." I sounded needy, even to myself.

Honesty seemed too much for her. She looked aside, flashed her profile, which duplicated mine, and vanished.

"Wait! Lilith!"

I rushed the mirror, pressed against it. My fingertips retreated. The surface was not only warm, but there was no distance between my splayed, groping fingers and their reflection.

The Enchanted Cottage mirror used front-surface glass, like Madrigal's magic-act mirrors! Although I'd learned that any mirror bowed to my presence, front-surface mirror seemed more powerful. That was a fact I could use and build on. Madrigal, the magician at the Gehenna, would know more. Besides, he hadn't been surprised by my Alice-through-the-looking-glass antics in his stage mirror. I wanted to know more about how and why.

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall," I murmured, my hot cheek pressed to the cooler glass, thinking of Lilith. "Who's the fairest of them all?"

It didn't answer, which was a relief.

What were the odds that the bad old dreams from my orphan days wouldn't resurface that night, Enchanted Cottage comforts or not?

The Millennium Revelation reality offered the resurgence of supernatural figures dating back centuries and even millennia; my personal nightmares always had a modern and even a science-fiction edge.

The group home half-vampire bullies who hassled me were only another twist on a common male adolescent type... gang members. They were minor annoyances.

My most frequently rerun nightmare was "Alien Abductee."

Now that was really out of this world.

Yet, I'd always be there again, flat on my back under powerful overhead lights that made my captors into featureless white-clad shadows. I'd be naked as a CSI corpse with the memory of a flimsy white sheet being stripped away.

I never quite knew what bound me down. Maybe it was just the paralysis of nightmare, but I was incapable of moving or of speaking.

Just as I was frozen in place now, once again in the relentless grip of dreamland.

The figures leaned closer, blocking some of the light. The needle-in-the-navel clich�� felt as real as memory. I glimpsed a long thick silver instrument at the foot of the table. It was coming towards me, held in white hands with fingers as smooth and boneless as a stingray wing, more cartilage than muscle and flesh.

The giant stingray motif hovered over all these dreams, looming beyond the blinding overhead light like an albino bat with a wingspread of twelve feet.

I couldn't breathe, as if the atmosphere was water-heavy.

If I couldn't breathe, I certainly couldn't scream, even when the approaching instrument vanished as it neared my torso.

Not even when the hovering heads drew in until all light was gone except for a searing luminous halo behind them

I escaped into another nightmare.

Something seized me and slammed me upright against a wall.

My eyes batted to close and filter out the punishing light.

They slowly adjusted to see another ring of hounding beings... These had faces. Snarling, fanged, pimpled and scarred. The local half-vamp hoods were after me again for "blood and booty." Rape and a liquid supper.

I knew how to fight them off and raised my trusty diamond-dusted nail file to the nearest blood-shot eye.

My fist was empty! I was unarmed. Only a long thin chain wrapped my knuckles, a flimsy piece of jewelry, not a weapon.

I struggled, but four of them held me pinned upright against the wall. I couldn't move or scream. Something hard and metal prodded between my legs. They were going to rape me with a knife!

A scream struggled to stutter its way out of my throat, but one contorted face came too close to focus on, the bared canine fangs already dipped in fresh blood and dripping more...

The dreamscape changed, the wall behind me pounded with a salsa rhythm, echoing my rapid heartbeat, massaging my spine because I was pressed hard against it by another body.

A tongue was flicking back and forth along the edge of my lips, tickling, teasing them open for a direct inward thrust. That forward motion was followed by more lateral moves, by lips encompassing mine, lower and upper in turn, caressing.

The man's weapon was hard as knife steel and pushed vertically against my crotch.

His hands were on my bared hips, the hips his hands had exposed on the dance floor when he jerked my skirt down from my waist until it was a low-rider model slung below my navel.

He was breathing hard and so was I.

My thighs were slick. Was my body wounded from the previous dream? Menstruating? No, it was welcoming this man, my dream lover.

The man's hands and mouth were hot and persuasive, teasing my body into a matching rhythm with his subtle hip thrusts, making it thirst for conjoining.

Now I fought to hold back a... sensual moan.

I'm not the kind of girl to go limp against a hall wall in a dance club. Hell, I don't even dance well. But the man knows how to lead me and I want him to.

I open my eyes to see Ric's dear, dark-eyed face, to hear his Spanish murmurs of love and passion and it's all right. We're at Los Lobos salsa club, where the werewolves change under the full moon.

I have changed. What was once threat is now temptation, teasing, pleasing, deeply wanted. I smile at Ric, tongue-kiss him back, rock my hips hard into his... and wake up.

Ooh la la, what a bitchin' place to let an invisible friend down flat, Irma croons. Um, that man was soooo habeñera hot for us! Even I could feel the fire. Go back to sleep. I want to get to the necking session in the car and the first fuck in the bathroom mirror later and our second orgasm.

That's my business. I don't need to be reminded and I'd never put it in those crude terms.

You are almost twenty-five, girlfriend, and I am right there with you. You can't afford to give up a single rerun of a feminine thrill, not even in your dreams. And ain't Ric's Latin lover act so way better than dodging half-vamp bully boys or alien probes from Hell? Let him at me! Play it again, Samantha. And again and again.

I ignored Irma's irritation, letting myself drift back into the moment when nightmare had segued into wet dream. My nightmares had never had a happy ending before. Ric had awakened pleasure in me where I'd been conditioned to feel panic.

The deep gratitude I felt for that might have been love. I didn't know. An unwanted orphan doesn't much feel the love. I knew my body loved him. I knew the joint psychic link we'd felt when we dowsed together for an innocent cache of water in Sunset Park and found that the dead supernatural had sealed our sensual connection.

Umm. I'd forgotten the rocking motion of his hips against mine in that dim nightclub hallway. The slick liquid glide of his lips against mine. The glint of his gold wristwatch on his olive-skinned wrist. The luminous whites of his eyes against the swollen-pupil black of desire in his eyes. That narrow gold belt snaking around his hips.

I snuggled in the smooth sheets, opening my mind and heart to the possibility of Ric. Irma purred in the back of my mind. I was just more up front about it.