THAT EVENING I managed to pay another low-profile visit to the Inferno. Although the nurses had reported regularly to my cell phone that Ric was still comatose but "building up strength," I needed to check on him. At least daily. And discreetly.

I did not want to see, or be seen by, Snow, either in rock idol or CEO guise. That meant I'd be wise to avoid his associates, like the house watchcat Grizelle and even my dear friend detective Nick Charles at the Inferno Bar.

I picked 11:30 P.M., when Snow was finishing up his second show and Grizelle was nearby to beat off the nightly Brimstone Kiss groupies if the usual security couldn't handle them. I wore touristy garb from a cheap Strip souvenir shop: loose cotton slacks and gaudy white T-shirt, fanny pack, and billed cap screaming VEGAS! in living sequined color.

Not even the Invisible Man was around to pinch my scuttling butt as I made for the rear freight elevators, then switched to the main ones. I arrived unobserved except by the cruising mirrored security balls that only reported overt oddities.

Outside the bridal suite accommodations where Ric was building iron-rich blood while Helena 's psychedelic "spell" kept his mind and emotions in healing suspended animation, I paused.

Hmm, Irma noted. It's more than odd that no one is questioning our surreptitious comings and goings. I smell conspiracy. Is everyone pretending you're pulling the wool over their eyes because you're such a sad case these days? You are becoming the pity fuck of the whole damn Inferno Hotel staff, girl!

That hurt.

Although Irma had always told me the truth when no one else would, I shrugged off her concerns. What mattered was getting Ric through this and figuring out how to protect us both in the future.

In post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas? Sure it was an impossible dream. So was what Ric and I had, and I was determined we would have again: life, love, and a plan to kick supernatural ass.

AS I'D HOPED, Ric had stablized since Helena had "bewitched" him. He was off all IV drips and functioning normally, though still in a deep sleep most of the time, especially at night. Even the nurses weren't on during the graveyard shift from eleven to seven, the one still on duty told me.

"He's looking good," said the heavy-set brownette, name tag "Inez." "I leave at eleven so if you wanta take over on your own, chica..."

She must have taken letting-go lessons from Helena Troy Burnside. I didn't need further encouragement. I approached Ric's bedside as softly as a cat over the plush gold carpeting. God, I hadn't been kidding myself thinking of him as a sleeping prince.

The color had crept back into his skin. Its golden brown shade only made the black of hair and eyelashes and beard stubble look more dramatic. My hormones surprised me with a surge so strong I didn't know myself. Oh, baby, you have come a long way.

The blood-infusion IV pole was gone, leaving Ric totally unattached to tubes.

Oooh, I could attach to him mucho plenty, me on top of the poor sick man and administering play CPR. Delilah! Control yourself. Irma was keeping quiet. This was my libidinous moment. And then, the demons of doubt flailed me. Maybe the Brimstone Kiss was too potent to unleash on a live guy. Maybe it would reverse itself, and Ric's state of recovery.

From loving lust I plunged back into self-doubt.

Rats. It wouldn't hurt to sit with the sick and look.

I AWOKE, SENSING a nightmare.

Not mine, for once.

Ric was murmuring and stirring under the covers.

I'd fallen asleep bent over in the bedside chair, my arms and head braced on the bed, even my casual clothes feeling tight and sticky.

Ric's hands and feet began twitching, as Quicksilver's will during a dream. I thought of checking with the nurses but remembered the double doors were locked, keeping us in and everyone else out.

If Ric was about to be scared conscious, I wanted to be there the moment he opened his eyes.

I turned on the bedside table lamp, the warm light putting his features into relief, like a sculpture. The small LED clock read four in the morning. I put a hand on his upper arm, but the muscle twitched away at my touch.

His limbs began flailing as he turned and coiled into the light bed coverings, moaning now, as if from remembered pain. It had to be that. The memory of pain. His body wounds were healed. Even the gaping neck wound was finally closing, the nurses had said.

Ric wrenched himself around on his side, facing away from me, the silly string ties of the hospital gown pulled loose, baring his welt-scarred back.

Gentle bed-table lamplight became a vicious spotlight illuminating the rutted surface of a blasted moon. I reached forward to pull the gown closed, sparing him even my eyes. He reacted by spinning onto his stomach. I caught my breath.

Just as I slept only on my stomach to fend off my nightmare memories of being pinned on my back by something alien, Ric must have trained himself to sleep on his back to hide the thick whip scars from any bed partner.

He'd failed to be vigilant once with me. Now, in a half-conscious state, he was exposing his whole back... not only exposing it but reliving the wounds that had disfigured it.

His back muscles twitched as if writhing under the cut of the braided leather bullwhip wielded by a cowardly bastard. A child being beaten mercilessly by a grown man.

"Ric, Ric," I whispered, trying not to wake him but to prod him into a comforting defensive posture again. Concealing the scars, even unconsciously, would make him feel more secure. I couldn't bear watching his body relive that brutal punishment.

I crawled up onto the bed, but could do nothing. He was thrashing too wildly. I couldn't cover him or soothe him. I could simply witness the pantomime of the invisible whipping, only one of many he'd endured as a boy.

It was as if I was being scourged. I flinched every time his back muscles quivered and I keened along with his moans, feeling a dark, deep Irish grief I'd never known in myself.

This was the downside of love, such total involvement in another's pain that you are helpless to ease. I was kneeling over his brutally bared back, surprised when raindrops started dotting the rutted skin. Oh. My tears. I, who'd never cried, not even as an orphaned, unwanted child. Especially not as an orphaned, unwanted child.

Tears were storming down my cheeks. The thought of my own salt water striking even scars was so abhorrent I slapped the wetness off my face, hard to the side, so they wouldn't sting wounds I couldn't believe had ever truly sealed. I felt I was pouring fresh acid on them.

I bent to kiss away my tears, to consume my own corrosive saltwater sorrow.

Ric moaned deeply.

I reared away, horrified, rasping frantic whispers. "Ric, I'm sorry. Sorry! I never cry. I didn't mean to hurt you again."

My tears glowed on his back like drops of radioactive dew in the lamplight, in my mind. Were my tears cursed now, as well as my lips?

"I'll fix it! Somehow. Fast!"

I kissed along one raised furrow, tasting my salt and trying to retract it back into my body and being, suck it away. I felt like a fucking vampire. God, no. No more pain!

Ric moaned again. Oh, my God, I was right! Ric could feel every touch as it was happening twenty years ago. I sat back up on my heels, debating whether to call the nurses or call Quicksilver and use his healing saliva and tongue again, since mine were so useless and even harmful...

The lamplight still revealed every ugly knuckle-thick welt knotting his flesh.

Except... one welt had shrunken, withered flat into a thin scar line, the one my lips had traced in anguished remorse. My forefinger lightly followed the silver line. Ric moaned softly again. I blinked, feeling the alien wetness still on my eyelashes, seeing more clearly.

Had I... kissed away... a whip welt?

Only one way to know. I bent and kissed along another eight-inch soul-scar of Hell. I jerked back.

Ric's moan was more guttural as his torso writhed deeper into the mattress. I made tight fists in shared anguish as another welt shrank to a faint scar line as smooth as the untouched flesh on either side.

I held my breath, clapped my hand to my mouth to hold it in, realizing what had happened. If I was willing to inflict fresh pain on Ric I would be able to... to reduce his scars to ghosts of themselves, make them faint reminders only.

Trembling, I bent and deliberately traced an ugly welt with my lips and tongue, evoking another cry of pain.

Or...

Oh. Ric's moans weren't from pain. They were from pleasure.

I couldn't believe it. I bent to his nearer shoulder and ran my lips lightly over the first hardened ridge of flesh they felt. The thick scar melted into another faint gleam as flat as the finest silver wire.

I began teasing him. A healing kiss high along his left hip. Again below the waist. His pelvis was grinding against the sheets, his moans soft and sensuous. Back to a shoulder, the middle of his back.

The growing tracery of healed welts was like a reverse tattoo, pale on his desert dusky skin, making a pinwheel of strokes that almost resembled some primitive artwork found painted on an ancient tribal rock.

I felt a triumphant joy in my work. Somehow, I was replacing old pain with new pleasure, erasing the past and even its evidence, undoing El Demonio's deviltry. Even Ric's brutal brush with the Karnak vampires couldn't entirely undo this night's work. The only visible scars of his indentured childhood were fading to shiny healed flesh. He'd be truly whole again.

My body was shaking slightly with the wonder of it. I was still feeling tearful but stemming that tide, half wanting to cry while I laughed, excited by my lover's having the world's most insanely literal wet dream because of me...

The double doors to the bedroom burst open as if a SWAT team were attacking. The bridal suite had turned from a night sanctuary of sexual healing into a predawn death trap.