THE NEXT MORNING, after I awoke stiff and with tingling feet, I was booted out by the attending nurses.

With Ric in Helena 's time-slowed state, I had a choice of occupations.

I could sit by his bedside day after day, waiting for something to happen, or I could do what I'd always done, push out into the bigger world and make something happen myself.

The heave-ho seemed a perfect opportunity to do some quick, minor investigating.

Most of the things that had happened to me and Ric in Las Vegas since we'd met a few weeks ago had changed our lives and almost caused our deaths.

I needed to understand what every dedicated reporter needs to know: who, what, when, where, and why.

And I knew just where to begin.

TO ANYONE REARED in the Midwest, calling upon someone at home without notice was incredibly rude.

I cringed to park Dolly's huge shiny black presence, so like a stylish hearse, outside Caressa Teagarden's Sunset City residence, all exterior shingles and peaked roof, a gingerbread cottage for the Millennium Revelation.

I neared the front door but still I hesitated to knock. When "Sun City" retirement communities cropped up in Sunbelt states more than half a century ago, they were viewed as enlightened communities that encouraged the aging population to unite in child-free environments. The oldsters would never have to worry about breaking a hip by tripping on abandoned roller skates and could travel anywhere to see their families.

The Millennium Revelation changed even that.

Nowadays " Sunset City " is the Shangri-la for older people. These post-Millennium Revelation communities for the aged thrive in the hammock-shaped "smile" that the warmer Lower Forty-eight states create, from North Carolina to northern California through all the temperate zones in between.

Instead of signing up for "adult living" that would morph into assisted living and then medical bed-care until death, aging people could have themselves sucked and tucked to a fare-thee-well, then sign up to live on indefinitely in a physical virtual reality state as long as their money lasted.

It wasn't that different from the previous plan, except that weird science and possibly supernatural mojo were involved.

Of course, the Sunset City owners and operators never revealed exactly what they were doing. It was a "proprietary" program, rumored to rely on cellular and cloning experiments by the Koreans, later snapped up by the elusive Immortality Mob.

The artificially preserved oldies but goodies were happy. Their offspring may have resented not inheriting the family estate but could look forward to an extended self-care plan also. (I hate to call it an "extended life" plan. To me, it didn't seem so much life as the illusion of it.) I guess a lot of people had settled for that even before the Millennium Revelation.

Still, my unannounced visit was Caressa's fault. She wasn't listed in any directory either by a phone number or an email address. She was also "at fault" for following me from the Wichita Sunset City to this one near Vegas. Unlikely coincidences like that were starting to make me highly suspicious.

When I'd "interviewed" her recently, pretending to follow up on our mysteriously canceled Kansas appointment earlier, I'd originally made the usual mistake of the arrogant young. I'd considered her the typical rambling old dear living in the past. She was also the only "old-looking" person I'd met in Sin City, with the exception of Howard Hughes.

Caressa Teagarden had managed to take the "mummified" look out of the museum and return it to the parlor. I admired her for ignoring the siren call of eternal youth and beauty so easily achieved today.

"Oh, it's you again, my dear girl," she greeted me after I finally knocked on her unlocked front door and she edged it open. Unlike the usual glamorous Sunset City residents, Caressa's slight body curled over a supporting cane and her pale facial skin was crossed with tiny arroyos begging for a flash flood of daily moisturizer. I can't say how pleased-pink and lovely she looked.

"I was so hoping for another chat," her raspy voice welcomed me. "Don't pussyfoot around. Come in and sit down."

Hospitality was a challenge at Caressa's place. The furnishings all looked as elderly as she did.

I'm not fat, but I am farm-girl solid. So I perched precariously on a tiny wooden rocking chair with a needle-point seat that seemed like it belonged in a Victorian child's playroom. It was meant for adults back in the days when five feet tall was common for both men and women and thirty-five was the average life span.

"You can stop clutching that silly briefcase on a strap. Put it down."

I leaned my messenger bag beside the chair, feeling the silver familiar's charm-laden weight on my wrist as if reminding me of its presence.

"You reporters always have more questions," she told me. "Hurry them along. I take a daily afternoon nap, you know."

I let her continue to take me for what I'd been, a TV reporter, trying not to stare at the dark blue veins atop her hands.

Was her life's blood darkening and pooling in her extremities rather than running through them? Should I even be bothering this slip of shaky mortality relying on a semi-holographic appearance?

"Well?" she demanded.

"I do have questions. You mentioned your real name was Lila and you had a twin sister Lili, whom you lost track of in young adulthood."

"So? The Depression separated a lot of families and siblings."

"I may have been separated from a twin at birth," I told her.

"That is the beginning of a great story."

"Not if it's your life. They called me Delilah, after the street I was found on as an abandoned infant."

"Delilah. Most old-fashioned. Most naughty! It would have done well on the screen in my heyday, Delilah."

I gritted my teeth. Her coyness was getting as cloying as brown-sugar candy. "I saw my double on TV recently, in a bit part."

Caressa shrugged. "It's a start, but the internet is better for ambitious young people like you these days."

"She went by the name of Lilith."

"Are you accusing me of something, Delilah?"

"Knowing too much?"

"About what? Dragons?"

"We were... are Delilah and Lilith. You and your twin sister were Lila and Lili. Isn't that too much of a coincidence?"

"I was not named after a street," she said icily. "We took stage names, my sister and I. Both Lili and Lila were popular names in the nineteen twenties. Too popular. When my Hollywood career took off I made myself Caressa Teagarden."

I have a wordplay mind. I couldn't help musing that DElilah and LiliTH almost equaled DE-A-TH.

That reminded me of Vida, the nineteen-forties mistress of Vegas werewolf mobster Cesar Cicereau. I'd seen her in a photo with him and the daughter he'd later had murdered, Loretta, whose bones Ric and I had found in Sunset Park. Vida. Wordplay. Vida equals Avid equals Diva.

"Did you ever know a beautiful brunette named Vida?" I asked

"A woman named Vida had a bit part in Gone With the Wind, and then she was, whoosh, out of Hollywood."

To Vegas? Where she later was made into a vampire at the behest of Howard Hughes, so a glamourpuss could bite him into eternal billionairedom?

"And you never saw or heard of your twin sister again?" I asked Caressa.

"No." Her expression took on an elaborate wide-eyed overinnocent look suitable for silent films. "Only once, many years later, the same year they made Gone With the Wind with that gorgeous, neurotic English girl and The Adventures of Robin Hood with that pretty Flynn boy and The Wizard of Oz with that chubby girl. I could have played the Good Witch Glinda in Oz, did I tell you?"

She had. Apparently it was a chorus with her.

"I finally had the right vocal range, and could outtrill Billie Burke anytime."

"Nineteen thirty-nine, that was a record year for top-notch Hollywood films," I prodded her.

"Yes, well." Caressa looked miffed. "Lili sent me that ring I gave you on your last visit that very same year. She said the stone was a piece of the prop mirror from the Disney Snow White of 1937, and both of our careers were kaput, but if I cared to ask who was still 'the fairest of them all,' it was she. Lili. Not me, Lila."

"But you were twins."

"Not identical emotionally. And blood doesn't guarantee love. Nothing does. Rivalry and hate are easier."

"I still want to find my double, Lilith."

"Wear the ring I gave you. Maybe it'll attract Lili," she cackled. "Deal with her and see if you like it."

"You're saying the Snow White mirror fragment in the ring might be... magic? Wasn't everything simply a drawing in a cartoon movie?"

"One would think so. Lili was always a lying chit. You think sisters are a gift? Hah! Those animation artists worked from life. Snow White was acted by a real girl. They could have made a prop mirror as an artist's model or a promotional device.

"The mirror was a very popular character in the film. But now, who needs actors when you can manufacture Cin-Sims? The world has gone to the dogs, my girl, and the werewolves. Watch out that you don't get bitten. Especially by film fever," she whispered.

She'd sounded just like the Wicked Stepmother disguised as the witchy crone urging Snow White to "Come, bite."

I already had been bitten by the Millennium Revelation and Las Vegas so I didn't intend to nibble on anything new. Still, I'd reexamine the cheap green ring on my mantel-piece. First, though, I needed to learn more about angels and demons.

"Last time I visited, you also claimed you were the last living descendant of a man, Jean-Christophe l'Argent, who carved gargoyles on Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris to fend off a devouring dragon that lived in the Seine."

Sacre cow! It was only when I repeated her ancestor's name that I remembered argent was French for silver. Silver was a word and a metal and a color that had a lot to do with me.

"I 'claimed'?" she challenged me. "Do you disbelieve Caressa?"

"Hardly. I came here to tell you I recently saw the darn dragon with my own eyes. Gargulie, isn't that its name?"

I'd deliberately garbled the dragon Gargouille's French name. It was pronounced "Gargooee," and had been adapted to the guardian "gargoyles" her ancestor carved to defend the holy place from the river monster.

Her eyes in their frills of wrinkled skin shone like black diamonds.

"You saw Gargouille himself? In all his glory? Aren't you the clever minx? The way you walk is hard but there may be hope for you yet, Delilah Street. Where did you see him? When? How was the old devil?"

"Where? I saw him four days ago, raised in service as a tugboat in a dark river under the Inferno Hotel."

"Yes? Yeees," she purred, her transparent hand clutched into an ecstatic claw over her bony, age-freckled chest. "Dark rivers are very good for dragons. Running water is both sacred and profane."

"You said that the people of medieval France threw maidens and murderers into the Seine for Gargouille once a year. Why?"

"Could it be a dragon is a cousin to a unicorn? Thus the maiden? You were a virgin when you first started out to see me at the Wichita Sunset City, Delilah, but you aren't now. It's a good thing you didn't see Gargouille until you were no longer a maiden and are not yet a murderer. He will devour both extremes, but leaves the middle alone."

I blushed that she seemed to know my private life. Did all Las Vegas? After Ric's spectacular almost-death... maybe.

"Why," I asked, "were innocence and guilt sacrificed together to save the people of Paris?"

"Virtue and vice in single doses can be lethal. Nothing and no one is all good or all bad."

"It's true that the Gargouille I saw was tamed, reconstituted from his own ashes thrown into the subterranean river. The creature was resurrected, and then... ridden. Then it vanished under the waters, which had been shallow."

"That is only possible because half a millennium has passed since the dragon was banished. Do you remember by whom?"

"A holy cardinal," I repeated her tale, "but Gargouille's master this time was hardly holy or a cardinal of the Church."

"How do you know?"

"A modern-day rock star? Decadence is the life-form's middle name as well as lifestyle. Your day in the early-twentieth-century movies was far too genteel for that sort of thing."

Caressa's head thrust back on her scrawny neck. She laughed until I feared she'd shake it completely off.

"My day! The Roaring Twenties? Cigarettes, bathtub gin, gangsters, and the Black Bottom? Sex, drugs, and income tax cuts? We were debauched beyond words, my dear girl. Or could be, if so inclined."

She had a point. People tend to think the "old days" were quaint antiques stored under dusty bell jars atop doilies when they were "modern" at the time.

"Don't make such a face, Delilah! You're still learning and may live long enough to benefit from it if you ask the right questions of the right sources. So. I think you know who harbored Gargouille's ashes. Dragons never die. You have seen my distant cousin, Christophe, raise one. He must not yet be a murderer if he can do that. Yes, I knew he was raising Hell, if not dragons in Vegas, why else would I come here? Tell me all the rogue is up to these days besides making that modern cacophony on a stage?"

I sat on the ridiculous kiddie-size chair, reduced to mental sputtering.

I could hardly seethe on about an extorted kiss to a crone clearly a hundred years or so old. Wild youth. I could hardly confess my fears about violating the natural order by reviving my lover with a secondhand soul kiss when I sat with a creature whose natural order had long since been outlived.

Cousin Christophe?

Not a murderer. Yet. As I wasn't. What a relief.

But a holy cardinal? Those guys were supposed to be celibate, although that didn't always happen, particularly among the Medici popes.

Christophe? Celibate? The notion took my breath away. Cocaine never slept with his groupies. Could the sexy bastard possibly be holier than moi now that I was no longer virgin?