Hex Appeal

by P. N. Elrod

  Above the feeding frenzy loomed Snow’s profile, ghost white face and long hair turned sideways, neck cords strained, albino eyes shut, denuded of the ever-present sunglasses.

  By then I’d jerked a pathway through the clawing groupies so eager to close ranks and fight off rescuers. My arms lashed out, the tentacles of silver chains cutting slashes in their black Seven Deadly Sins and snowsluts.com T-shirts, other tentacles wrapping their necks and bare forearms.

  The swinging metal stingers left silver comet trails in the air … and streaks of glitter on the black knit and the flesh beneath the raw-edged rips, on the women’s arms, lifting to defend now, not assault. Their fevered demands became moans as I slashed them into stumbling away, cradling their arms and mumbling.

  “That hurts … burns … stings.”

  Only then did I realize what the monsters engraved on my silver cuffs were … jellyfish.

  Most jellyfish stingers were not homicidal, but protective. So far, no major harm had been done. Grizelle, that intractable … huntress … had used her formidable baby teeth to snag jeans legs and T-shirt sleeves, dragging the groupies away over and over, until they clustered in a supine moaning clot.

  Now I had to face—how it pained me to attach this word to Snow, but it was true—the victim. Not only did I dread the sight of the bloody rock idol … this was my deepest personal trauma, a Ric rerun, only with Snow instead, my worst nightmare starring my best enemy.

  I approached, taking in the man manacled against a towering black basalt wall. Way too much Samson for this Delilah.

  Bloodsucking lip prints covered Snow’s pristine white skin and bleached leather like a graphic design and his bare face … I’d never before seen those semicircles of white eyelashes innocently curved along his eyelids. They reminded me of severed snowflakes.

  Something winked from the floor at his feet: his shiny black sunglasses, torn off and tossed down. He was an albino, no matter what else he was. Even Snow didn’t deserve to be crucified by his idolaters, his weak vision identified and their protection cast away. His pale blue-veined eyelids still danced to the REM mode, barely visible yet jerking in that unmistakable tic of nerves on edge. Genetically defenseless.

  I bent to retrieve the fragile sunglasses.

  “Hey, leave that! It’s ours,” a groupie shouted.

  A couple rose to charge again, trying to topple me from performing my one good deed, but Grizelle protected me during my ass-out moment.

  I elbowed away any still-upright groupies with my flailing glitter whips, climbed Snow like a Sherpa, and placed the sunglasses over the rock god’s spotlight-blinded eyes.

  I let myself slide down the marble sculpture of his form, back to the obsidian floor of this place, satisfied his eyes were open again and hidden behind the same tiny, gleaming reflection of me I faced every time we met.

  With his full persona in place, he struck me as way too cool and invulnerable again. I’d never seen his back flinch after he’d inherited Ric’s boyhood beatings, and at the moment he even seemed a bit amused by my race to his rescue.

  “So,” I said to Snow. “Are we good now?”

  His head bowed toward my presence. “You’re good,” he said. “But you could be better.”

  If he wasn’t hurting, I wasn’t feeling merciful … more like had, and mad.

  “Let’s consider,” I said, “the thousand cheesy films of women chained and mauled. Maybe you ‘asked for it,’ rock star. Not that I’d ever tell that to the Pussycat Dolls.” Who maybe had, too. Sex objects could be so obvious.

  Why couldn’t we all just keep our kinks in the bedroom closet?

  Because they made money.

  “It’s my job, Miss Street.” He made it sound more like a vocation.

  I’d noticed that two of the snaps beneath his costume’s gem-studded fly had popped open during the struggle among his frenzied fans to claim a piece of him. I mean, who could miss that bling? I was able to get my fingers, uh, down under to press the snaps decorously shut.

  “And doing that isn’t yours,” he finished.

  Interesting, though. Snow was obviously not getting off on this mass grope scene any more than I was … or … wait … not until I appeared in the neighborhood.

  What to do? If I stepped away, I’d leave him even more exposed to the fanimals, so I stayed put as a barrier and nervously rubbed a bloodred stain on his torso, managing only to smear it.

  His hair brushed my embarrassed pink face as his head bent to watch me, knowing what I didn’t until my fingers touched the sticky dab of red, retreated, and I inhaled the scent of perfume, not coppery blood.

  No wonder Snow had suffered this apparent feeding frenzy so stoically.

  Instead of bloody sucking marks, these “vampire” groupies had left … lipstick kisses on almost every inch of exposed flesh, which Snow had a lot of. He was a bloody Andy Warhol canvas. Oh, blessed Bela Lugosi! I hadn’t prevented a physical ravening; I’d interrupted a rave, a rainbow party gone bad.

  “It’s only lipstick, Delilah.” Snow so loved stating the obvious when I’d missed the boat. My moral outrage only got me a ticket on Roll-Your-Eyes line. My time here had been wasted, and I looked like an idiot.

  “I see that. Now,” I admitted.

  “Even you wear lipstick sometimes.”

  That was true. My Snow White coloring made most makeup unnecessary. I was your natural woman, until I ran into unnatural situations. Like this.

  “Just a little light lip gloss,” I said between clenched teeth.

  “Even better.”

  I was not going to flirt with a guy whose fly I’d just locked down. I was tempted to leave him here to free his own ass. Except …

  “Your back—?” I asked.

  His long hair shook with his head. “—is my eternal unhealing wound, thanks to your innocent meddling. Forget that. I need to be free, not pain-free.”

  Still, Snow’s sensitive white skin had turned scarlet under his wrist manacles. My hands fretted at the bonds that imprisoned him. The dark metal was so cold and slick, my fingers iced at the touch. The familiar twined around my wrist as a bracelet dangling only one edged charm, a four-inch diamond-grit jeweler’s saw on a chain. The miniaturized shark’s teeth no more nicked the black metal than the same saw or an acetylene torch could impact my silver familiar.

  “Black-moon tarnished silver, Delilah,” Snow said. “I thought your silver talent could counter any supernatural traps, but I see you can’t. Get the hell out while you can. Protect the Inferno CinSims.”

  “From what?”

  Then I remembered a pretty damning lost detail in this whole misunderstood mess. “Why did I spot Lilith among the groupies upstairs? She only manifests outside my mirror when things are really wrong.”

  “Don’t you know?” he asked. “She’s your shadow, not mine.”

  The black lenses reflected me eyeing them suspiciously. “She’s been yours, too, Snowman! She’s not here now. Why not? Everyone I know has been sucked one way or another into this hell, haven’t they? These fevered groupies are just the Greek chorus, not the female lead…”

  Oh. I realized that the current cast of characters was missing a powerful key figure I had spotted earlier but might not have truly recognized.

  “And I’m not the female lead either,” I said aloud. “I wasn’t even supposed to be here. It all began with…”

  I focused on the Grizelle cub stalking back and forth between the lines of now-cowed women nursing their stinging glitter wounds. Only in Vegas. But the glitter-whip marks were another element that looked worse than it was. We were all being played.

  I surveyed the vast soundstage from polished floor to the blackest, emptiest most opaque heights above us all.

  I’d always teased the Lilith in my mirror that Mom, if we’d had one, had named us after shady ladies in biblical times. Delilah was an Old Testament seductress and spy who brought Samson to the same plight Snow faced, blinded and chained, only by a sing
le vengeful woman instead of a hen party.

  “Lilith?” I asked myself. Maybe not my Lilith. Now I wasn’t sure who I’d seen in my own image upstairs in the mosh pit. I sure wasn’t invoking my double, because there was no silver-backed mirror here to magnify my few powers, only darkness.

  Still, a terrifying theory had me by the throat. Something had possessed these groupies to assault Snow instead of worship him from afar. Or someone.

  “Lilith,” I repeated, scared now of an answer.

  Maybe I was looking for a Lilith who dated back before Eden, back before the Fall and even maybe before Satan’s Fall from heaven. Maybe I was going for the east-of-Eden sweepstakes, the woman reportedly kicked out of Eden like Cain, the font of all feminine evil from what some believed were myths and tales banned from the Old Testament, or maybe she was just one vastly misunderstood mama …

  I named her and Named her beyond any duplicate of me in the mirror.

  “Lilith!” Lilith, the Lilith. I called, and therefore conjured her.

  Whew. Wind came screaming through this empty time tunnel, reaming the hell out of Hell.

  Planting my boots and my purely human will, I stared past the wind-tossed black veil of my hair and found a giant sister image flashing on and off in the surrounding darkness. She was ghostly of skin, with long, long dark tresses mirroring the toss of mine in the windstorm of her manifestation.

  Not my double, but my enemy. Everything’s enemy. Lilith Unplugged.

  She’d appeared in human form but was still the crimson-pupiled demon succubus of legend. Even I had to admit she looked particularly fetching in an iridescent snakeskin gown with a mermaid fishtail train that matched her chartreuse irises.

  The Grizelle cub, recognizing that a really serious player had joined the game, leapt to rip its front claws down Lilith’s green gown. The claw marks sealed as fast as Grizelle could make them, the cub snarling with greater rage every time the damage of her attacks came undone.

  Lilith’s lithe white arms, pale as a serpent’s underbelly, spread to welcome the cowed groupies into her devouring, almost maternal, gesture and proximity. They came stumbling atop each other in a rush, slavering over their new idol, madness resurfacing in their eyes.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Lilith’s deep contralto croon was hynotizing the agitated groupies. Their eerily green irises seemed to reflect emotions of lust and envy. What a rock star wannabe she was.

  “I know when you pissed me off,” I told Snow. “When did you piss off the mother of all demons?”

  “Millennia ago. I didn’t suspect you’d have the smarts, guts, or power to call out a major demon. Her distraction won’t last long. She’ll want to expand her presence now that you’ve called her here. Leave me to deal with her. Escape while you can.”

  Well, thank you. Nothing like an employer who’d tricked you into ending an involuntary bondage scene between a sex idol and his adorees … and then considered your outing a major monster a screwup on your part. Trouble is, I can’t abandon any living being in trouble, human or paranormal, even Snow. Tell me life is hard and not fair. Tell me death is a tango dancer, and I’m naïve and old-fashioned, but do not tell me I can’t do what I need to.

  Even against Grizelle.

  Even against my sister Lilith.

  Even against the Lilith who was kicked out of Eden for being the world’s first and best bad girl. But why did she have it in for Snow?

  “I know what Lilith has done to you lately. What did you do to Lilith?” I demanded.

  Snow’s face turned away again, my angry image fading in the sunglasses with the gesture. “Not what I did. What I didn’t do. It’s what she wanted to do with me.”

  Ah. Hell hath no fury like a female demon scorned. So she’d cursed him. How?

  “We all want to undo you, Snow,” I told him dryly. “Now, listen up. This is not just any Lilith, right? This is not my mirror-me. This is really Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was driven from Eden for wanting to be on top?”

  The sunglasses tilted down toward my face. “Yes, but it’s me she’s cursed, not Adam.”

  “And the curse is…?”

  His second of hesitation felt like an eon knowing Lilith’s sick interlude with the groupies was likely to end at any moment.

  “Spill it.”

  “I can only give pleasure, not receive it.”

  Wow. I processed that. It sort of explained the Brimstone Kiss. It didn’t explain why he’d stopped giving them after he’d forced me to accept one. He’d said I’d failed the test, but maybe it wasn’t his test, maybe it was Lilith’s.

  “No wonder,” I told him, “she’s mad as hell and won’t take it anymore, like the groupies. You cheated on her.”

  With me.

  As much as I hated to admit it, I’d just seen I could get a rise out of Snow. If that wasn’t a symptom of pleasure, I don’t know what was with a man.

  He smiled. “So you can’t spare any more empathy time for me, Delilah?”

  “Hell, no. I tend to side with the girls.”

  I turned as a snarling Grizelle took a guardian post at Snow’s feet and advanced on Lilith. She’d settled into mere life-size form and was awaiting me like a headmistress with a wayward pupil.

  “You confront as well as conjure me?” She stepped away from the demon-drugged, smiling groupies pulling their hair out a single filament at a time. “Do you know who I am now, feeble interloper? How powerful I am?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “Do you know who or what he is?”

  “Snow, International Supernatural of Mystery? Nope, but I intend to find out in my way on my own time.”

  “I know what you are, Delilah. You must be pleased to see your enemy bound at the mercy of such trifling fools as these enamored human females.”

  “No, Lilith, I am not. I don’t care to use intermediaries.”

  Her lurid eyes glittered hotter, the green haloed with scarlet. “Are you daring to refer to me?”

  “Yup. Oh, you’re a gorgeous demon witch with a lot of revenge due you. God’s first and final mistake, made from the same human clay as Adam, his equal, not his wimpy rib. Your successor, Eve, took the apple and lost paradise, but you played the serpent for the Fall, didn’t you? Hell hath no fury like a first wife scorned,” I paraphrased, “and you have a minor immortal fury on. So … Snow is Adam?”

  “Snow is more than mere man.”

  “Snow is … Satan?”

  “He’s more than mere devil.”

  Loved the new slant on Snow, but that wasn’t my main goal.

  “Maybe he is, but you are tiresomely predictable, Lilith. You suck the life from children born and unborn, the blood from the human, the soul from the eternal. You haunt men’s dreams and drain them to death. You can only be banished by the uttering of eight hidden names…”

  “So you do know me. You don’t know my names.”

  “Wikipedia knows your secret names nowadays, Lil. You are outdated.”

  Behind me, Snow gave a short, taunting laugh. “Guess she’s got your number, Lilith. You need to get on Facebook, drum up some fans besides my gullible groupies.”

  I knew one thing else about her, one so-egocentric weakness. And that I could use.

  While Lilith glared at Snow, her expression cold and her eyes burning hot, I bent to trace a large pattern with my forefinger on the obsidian floor, watching the silver-familiar chains run liquid down my fingernail to pool and spread and sink into the blackness.

  I heard Snow’s smothered cry of pain and guessed that the black-moon metal was searing his skin at Lilith’s command. He’d spoken to distract Lilith, and the last thing I wanted was owing him for more pain incurred on my behalf.

  My forefinger moved fast to contain the widening mercurial puddle by scribing the fanciful curlicue form in my mind … the frame of Snow White’s wicked stepmother’s mirror that reflected me in the Enchanted Cottage’s upper hall.

  Even Lilith sensed my
actions and looked down to see what I was doing, a fatal mistake.

  There was a mirror here now, with the silver familiar providing the reflective backing. We were unveiling Disney under glass, for obsidian is a polished black stone, a dark mirror, and we were both standing on it.

  Lilith stared unblinking into her own reflection—pale white face, long dark hair, glittering green gown—a wavering writ on water.

  Some old texts said Lilith had been enamored of staring into a mirror. I’d ensured that her own image would seduce her yet again. That weakness momentarily drained her demon powers and made her just another shallow mean girl simpering in a high-school girls’ room mirror.

  Lilith screeched as she realized I’d made her trap herself, then she fled with a Wicked Witch of the West meltdown into the reflected image at her feet.

  After she vanished, I spotted my own image resolving on the wind-riffled oil-slick surface left behind and dove down after her. An icy plunge from this dark empty abyss brought me into a soaring arrival in dark, overpopulated chaos, teeming with enough sound and fury to make my ears bleed. In the mosh pit, groupies were swaying hypnotically, screaming for the Brimstone Kiss.

  Around me, Lust and Envy and Greed, oh my, rocked out. Was this me or Lilith joining the Seven Deadly Sins on the Inferno concert stage, and was I really doing a hip-banging boogie with … Lust?

  That busty, redheaded wench on backup electric guitar had more moves than a corkscrew. Lust’s color-enhanced green eyes went supernova while I glimpsed Lilith inhabiting the performer’s succubus soul. The withering contact shorted out even Lust. Her leering, lascivious face grew blow-up-doll blank. Lust froze into a mannequin position, then her limbs began lifting like a puppet’s.

  What a vindictive witch Lilith was. If she shut down the Sins into motionless zombies, the band’s rep would be ruined.

  Oh, yeah? The show must go on.

  I heard and saw the audience screaming and whistling like a tidal wave under a thousand spotlights. Made me want to give them their money’s worth. I grabbed the flame-fronted guitar from Lust before Lilith got the performer’s hands in gear, noticing that the silver familiar was now a pair of wrist cuffs, both bearing flashing ovals of mirror.