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By Root 6482 0

manned by a lot of maroon-and-beige uniformed men, but there were silent guardians, too. There were two elaborate reproductions of sarcophagi placed in an upright position, one on each side of the main lobby doors. They were fascinating, and I would have enjoyed the chance to examine both of them, but we were swept into the building by the staff. One man opened the car door, one examined our identification to make sure we were registered guests—not human reporters, curiosity seekers, or assorted fanatics—and another pushed open the door of the hotel to indicate we should enter.

I’d stayed in a vampire hotel before, so I expected the armed guards and the lack of ground floor windows. The Pyramid of Gizeh was making more of an effort to look a bit like a human hotel than Dallas’s Silent Shore had; though the walls held murals imitating Egyptian tomb art, the lobby was bright with artificial light and horribly perky with piped-in music—“The Girl from Ipanema” in a vampire hotel.

The lobby was busier than the Silent Shore’s, too.

There were lots of humans and other creatures striding around purposefully, lots of action at the check-in desk, and some milling around the hospitality booth put up by the host city’s vampire nest. I’d gone with Sam to a bar supply convention in Shreveport once when he was shopping for a new pump system, and I recognized the general setup. Somewhere, I was sure, there would be a convention hall with booths, and a schedule of panels or demonstrations.

I hoped there would be a map of the hotel, with all events and locations noted, in our registration packet. Or were the vampires too snooty for such mundane aids? No, there was a hotel diagram framed and lit for the perusal of guests and scheduled tours. This hotel was numbered in reverse order. The top floor, the penthouse, was numbered 1. The bottom, largest floor—the human floor—was numbered 15. There was a mezzanine between the human floor and lobby, and there were large convention rooms in the annex to the northern side of the hotel, the rectangular windowless projection that had looked so odd in the Internet picture.

I eyed people scurrying through the lobby—maids, bodyguards, valets, bellmen. . . . Here we were, all us little human beavers, scurrying around to get things ready for the undead conventioneers. (Could you call them that, when this was billed as a summit? What was the difference?) I felt a little sour when I wondered why this was the order of things, when a few years ago, the vampires were the ones doing the scurrying, and that was back into a dark corner where they could hide. Maybe that had been the more natural way. I slapped myself mentally. I might as well go join the Fellowship, if that was how I really felt. I’d noticed the protesters in the little park across the street from the Pyramid of Gizeh, which some of the signs referred to as “The Pyramid of Geezers.”

“Where are the coffins?” I asked Mr. Cataliades.

“They’re coming in through a basement entrance,” he said.

There had been a metal detector at the hotel door. I’d tried hard not to look when Johan Glassport had emptied his pockets. The detector had gone off like a siren when he’d passed through. “Do the coffins have to go through a metal detector, too?” I asked.

“No. Our vampires have wooden coffins, but the hardware on them is metal, and you can’t empty the vampires out to search their pockets for other metal objects, so that wouldn’t make any sense,” Mr. Cataliades answered, for the first time sounding impatient. “Plus, some vampires have chosen the modern metal caskets.”

“The demonstrators across the street,” I said. “They have me spooked. They’d love to sneak in here.”

Mr. Cataliades smiled, a terrifying sight. “No one will get in here, Miss Sookie. There are other guards that you can’t see.”

While Mr. Cataliades checked us in, I stood to his side and turned to look around at the other people. They were all dressed very nicely, and they were all talking. About us. I felt instantly anxious at the looks we were getting from the others, and the buzzing thoughts