Tempt the Stars

really unlikely around here. I lurched forward, drawn by the siren call of seared meat and habanero sauce, my mouth watering and my eyes glazed. And ran right into the front of a starched dress shirt.
    “You thin’ I don’t know you by now?” Casanova demanded, his Castilian lisp showing up along with what looked like a full-on snit.
    “Oh, for the love of—get out of my way!” I told him, trying to muscle past.
    But I didn’t have much muscle left, and Casanova, despite acting like a little bitch half the time, was a master vampire. I didn’t go anywhere. Goddamnit!
    “You are not ruining this for me,” he told me menacingly.
    “I’m just trying to get in the freaking taco line! I don’t even know what ‘this’ is!”
    “This is my attempt to save a failing business,” he hissed, grabbing me by the arm and jerking me behind a couple of fake hay bales. “I am about to be on television, coast-to-coast coverage, in prime time!”
    “For what?”
    “For that!” Casanova said, gesturing at a big-toothed guy with a lapel mike who had just emerged into a cleared area in front of the lobby. He and the dozen black-shirted guys he had running interference were blocking most people’s access to the elevators around the corner, but nobody seemed to mind. They were too busy watching him as he grinned at a professional-looking video camera.
    “Fiends,” he told it suddenly, with every appearance of relish. “Ogres. Giants. Freaks of all kinds. If you don’t believe in monsters, you’re part of a tiny minority. Throughout history, almost every culture on earth has believed. Even odder, they have all believed in the same monsters.
    “Take zombies for instance: ‘I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living . . . I shall make the dead outnumber the living.’ Where do you think that quote comes from? Stephen King?
Night of the Living Dead
? No. It’s from an ancient Babylonian epic that was written five thousand years ago. It’s one of the oldest written works in the world. Zombies . . . have a pedigree.”
    “What is this?” I asked, feeling my stomach drop for a totally new reason. “How did the press get in here?”
    “I invited them,” Casanova said shortly.
    “What?” I looked up at him in disbelief.
    “Do you have any idea how hard it is,” he asked fervently, “to make a profit when half your rooms and most of your staff have been appropriated by the damned senate?”
    The “damned senate” was the vampire senate, which had lost its usual hangout in an earlier attack in the war. They’d temporarily moved in here, since the casino was owned by one of their own, being part of Mircea’s extensive portfolio. So far, that had gone better than I’d expected, what with a bunch of senior masters and their entourages crowding up the place. But that could easily change—like tonight, for instance.
    “Are you
insane
?” I hissed. “You know what’s upstairs. What on earth could possibly have made this seem like a good idea?”
    “I’m looking at her.”
    “What?”
    “Oh, how quickly they forget!” he said, sneering. “Or do you perhaps vaguely recall all but destroying my hotel a little over a month ago?”
    “Which time?” I asked uneasily. Because, okay, there’d been a few incidents.
    “But zombies are newcomers compared to Weres,” the announcer told us. “There are cave drawings from fourteen thousand years ago depicting humans with animal faces, or transforming into beasts of all kinds. From Europe come tales of the most famous Weres of all: werewolves. But did you know, in Central America there are stories of were-jaguars? In central Asia, of were-bears?”
    “The huge battle?” Casanova whispered, spitting mad. “The one I’m still making repairs for?”
    “Oh.” That one. “What about it?”
    “Well, word got out, didn’t it? Containment isn’t so easy when you have giant magical melees taking place in the air over the damned roof! We did the best we could, but ever since, there have been rumors. They finally became so insistent that the senate decided it would be easier to have the
Hogwash
people come in—”
    “What people?”
    “You must have seen them,” he said impatiently. “With the little horns and the squeals and the—oh, never mind! The point is, their shtick is debunking urban legends and the like. If they come here and don’t find anything—”
    “And if they
do
?”
    “Then there’s everybody’s perennial