Virtual Virgin dspi-5

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  A horse ambles through the corral, led by a poky cowpoke.

  “Is the horse a zombie?” a smart-ass voice calls from the audience.

  “No. Horses calm feral zombies. Consider the ranch a rehab facility for the supernaturally abused. Here’s one reason I’ve come here today. I know how skeptical people who haven’t fought in the trenches of the border wars the US and Mexican governments are waging on drug cartels gone demonic can be. Still, you might have seen traces of a new and hidden force on the crime front, the Immortality Mob at work in your own cases.”

  Now the murmurs are serious, questioning.

  “Some of you might have borderline abilities of your own that will aid in your work. I’ve come before you, risking ridicule, to ask you to merely open your minds. It starts with inhuman traffickers smuggling zombies like those I showed you into the US from Mexico. Next comes a secret process to combine them with figures from black-and-white film. Only the silver nitrate in vintage film can animate zombies and that may be a scientific lead. Las Vegas is the nexus of this latest illegal trade.”

  “Isn’t it always?” someone yelled. “Viva Las Vegas.”

  Ric clicks again. The screen switches from still images to moving ones. “Here’s some of the Immortality Mob’s handiwork. You may recognize a few favorite movie sleuths.”

  I sure do, and settle back in my seat with a nostalgic sigh as the luminous black-and-white scene plays onscreen.

  Nick Charles, in his white tie and dark dinner jacket, is leaning on the Inferno Hotel bar, handing a martini to his sophisticated wife, Nora, whose plunging neckline draws a lot more wolf whistles from this crowd than my buttoned-up navy-blue career blazer.

  “I deduced where the body is buried, darling,” Nicky drawls, “but I need Asta to dig it up.”

  “I am not having Eau de Corpse on Asta and all over our apartment.” Nora is her delightfully feisty self. “You’ll have to take Asta to the groomer after the dog does its dirty work for you, and you’ll need to visit the groomer too, or there’ll be no treats for the both of you.”

  Even as chuckles echo through the room, a white blur passing in front of the bar obscures the famous film couple.

  “Pay no attention to the man in the white suit,” Ric says quickly. “He wasn’t supposed to be in the film clip.”

  Snow? The Inferno Hotel owner and albino rock star had been caught on film, like a ghost? What is that about? Why is Snow showing up in a conference room in Quantico, Virginia?

  Ric turns to face the screen. “And, by the way, in real life that horned skull you saw first off belonged to a half-demon CPA. Okay. This is . . . an example of how the Immortality Mob manipulates illusion and reality for its own profit.” The film jerks, breaks, resumes.

  More wolf whistles. The robot from the silent film Metropolis stands front and center, a curvaceous silver metal woman robot out of a Playboy centerfold.

  Ric hasn’t revealed the truly fantastic side of his dead-dowsing gifts . . . not just raising the dead but raising a dead actress off the movie screen in her robot likeness.

  I want to stand up and explain how it’s all done through mirrors and the power of silver, the silver that can vanquish werewolves and even vampires sometimes and can now walk characters off the silver screen.

  Once again I watch Ric raise Brigitte Helm, a dead silent-screen actress in the form of the robot costume that had been molded to her body.

  People are used to 3-D movies, but seeing this blend of human and machine walking off the screen into their midst without the aid of the usual eye devices is even too much for FBI agents. They run screaming, overturning chairs in their fever to escape the room. My hands lift to block the painful light from the huge screen, from the sight of the Second Coming of the Silver Zombie.

  I guess the Cadaver Kid has more than made his point.

  “Ow!” RIC SAID beside me, suddenly.

  At least he recognized my existence again.

  “Delilah! Your flailing elbow almost put my eye out.”

  A small lamp clicked on from the direction of his voice. I stared at his at his naked chest, at his eyes blinking in the light—one espresso-brown, one silver if not disguised by a brown contact lens, as it wasn’t at night—and looked around.

  Oh. We’re not in Quantico anymore, unless an FBI conference room has a double bed.

  What’s new? Irma, my in-board invisible friend, has kicked into On in my head again.

  “This isn’t Quantico,” I said slowly.

  “I hope not.” Ric’s pupils widened as they got used to the light. “You had a major dream?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Bad?”

  “No. Good, I guess. At least at first.”

  He braced his head on his hand to turn to me and block the harshest rays of the bedside lamplight. “We’re in a motel in Cold Creek, Colorado, Del, one that’s a teeny bit more upscale than the one we stayed at on our way out to Kansas from Vegas. We’ll be home late tomorrow. Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Maybe I get different dreams now that I can lie on my back.”

  “I gotta say that’s nice. We can finally sleep and, ah, do other things any which way we want. You’ve pretty much ditched that phobia against lying on your back now that you know what caused it.”

  “Ye-es. Except having Family Services implant an unnecessary intrauterine device that morphed to coat my pelvic bones and organs in sterling silver makes me feel like an unnatural woman. Like the semiBionic Woman.”

  I don’t mention “like a dime-store Silver Zombie.”

  His hand burrowed under the covers to find my left hip bone and swiped across like you would on a computer screen, smooth and fast, to the opposite hip bone.

  Umm, amorous, Irma moaned.

  He got the reaction he wanted. I felt the silver familiar’s thin hip chain writhing in anticipation and my fingers found a new charm tickling my temporary belly-button ring . . . in the Y-shaped form of a dowsing rod.

  “You feel like my woman in the middle of the night,” Ric said. “Maybe that imported metal only makes your pelvis stronger, makes your, uh, reactions more intense, especially in this new flat-on-your-back position. We should test that theory.”

  Even the silver familiar had been won over by our sexy FBI lecturer. Unfortunately, we’d be back to unfinished business all too soon in Las Vegas.

  “We have a lot to do when we get back tomorrow,” I fretted.

  “Such as?” Ric was totally awake now.

  “You need to find out more about that silver she-devil you waltzed off the movie screen into our lives. Snow grabbed her and the film she came in on and flew out of Wichita, leaving us to make the three-day drive back to Vegas.”

  “She’s his property.”

  “But your responsibility. I don’t get why you’re eager to wash your hands of her.”

  “They’d rather be on you.”

  Seriously amorous, Irma noted.

  “I’ve got issues of my own to follow up on when we get home,” I pointed out.

  “Such as?”

  “I can’t let a werewolf mobster’s daughter keep me out of mirror-world just because I tried to stop her from doing harm and she escaped.”

  “You can’t escape Loretta Cicereau and I can’t escape the Silver Zombie, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t see any trace of either of them here and now.”

  He hadn’t had my nightmare either. Loretta had been one of the embracing skeletons we found on the day we’d met.

  “So,” Ric said, “I see no reason not to take advantage of the fact that you woke me up.”

  “Quicksilver?” I asked.

  “Out and about. Your dog likes night patrols, you know that. So do I.”

  And I did too.

  He nuzzled my neck under my hair, a green light to foreplay that would implant a red-hot and blue hickey on my pale skin. We’d be back home tending to far less interesting unfinished
business all too soon.

  So I gave up worrying about robot dreams and vengeful ghosts.

  But I knew I’d have to look myself in the mirror as soon as I got back to Vegas.

  Chapter Two

  SOME PEOPLE HAVE trouble facing themselves in the mirror, but just seeing my own image looking back would be a treat, even if I looked like hell.

  Trouble is, I’m as likely to view a kleptomaniac doppelganger named Lilith as my own face and body.

  The differences between me, Delilah Street, and Lilith Quince are . . . not visible to the naked eye. Not even mine. I’ve often wondered if even Ric would be able to tell between me and my shadow twin.

  Really, I don’t ever want to have to find that out.

  Meanwhile, here I am, the morning after that harrowing but liberating road trip to my hometown, back in Vegas and mirror-gazing again. There’s lots of unfinished business between me and my mirror. Lucky me. I’ve made enemies in two dimensions.

  Right now, though, I’m seeing only my own face for a change.

  What I see is what you get. I stand five eight barefoot, pushing six feet in my sling-back heels, the vintage shoe I’m wearing at the moment. What I weigh is not anybody’s business, especially Lilith’s. My India ink-black shoulder-brushing hair is just long enough to put up for wet work. My skin is so white I don’t tan or singe in the sunshine; I sear.

  No, I’m not a vampire. So let me inter that idea and slam the final nail in that coffin.

  My eyes are the electric-blue color that halos an acetylene torch flame, always a dead giveaway to my identity, so I sometimes use gray contact lenses.

  I used to loathe my pallid Black Irish skin, partly because tans were hot in the Wichita farm country where I grew up; mainly because I thought dead-white skin attracted vampires. Being an ex-TV reporter of the paranormal, I’ve tried that airbrush foundation all the newscasters switched to when HDTV came in, but I look even more made-up, laid out, and corpse-ish with that fake instant tan on my face.

  During that recent road trip home to Kansas, I was finally convinced my coloring is pretty cool, after all. Now that I call Las Vegas home–where talking, moving Cinema Simulacrums from old black-and-white films are celebrity tourist attractions—hey, I’m three-quarters of the way there if I simply rock my gray contact lenses and add black lipstick.

  My guy likes my lips glossed red and cherry-flavored, though, and loves to put it on me and lick it off, which makes for inventive nights. At the memory, I ran a fingertip over my top lip, feeling so Marilyn Monroe. If I could only lose my obsession with this phantom skank, Lilith, in my mirror, life might be almost perfect. I closed my eyes, rerunning the top five horizontal moments of the past week’s getaway, leaving out the rotting zombies on speed and the weather witches riding lightning bolts.

  “Do we feel pretty?” a snarky voice asked.

  I had to decide whether I was hearing my internal secret pal since grade school, Irma, or if I was talking back to myself in the mirror again.

  Sure enough, my reflected lips were moving.

  “Great to be here in Vegas again,” Lilith said, stretching her bare arms overhead to show off a clingy tank top with silver studs spelling “Vegas Sucks” above a large skull-and-crossbones strategically placed to frame our boobs.

  “Goth is so over,” I told her.

  Lilith loves to flaunt her Bad Girl tastes when she isn’t dolling herself up in exactly what I’m wearing at the moment, which is low-rise seventies bell-bottom jeans and a midriff-baring top with ruffled sleeves to the elbow. Ay caramba. Olé. I’m a vintage girl.

  “You must be meeting Ric later,” she said. “He goes for the belly-dancer exposure.”

  “Vegas is hot,” I answered demurely.

  “So is Ric,” Lilith answered. “I should pay his mirror a visit.”

  “Can you? Without me there?”

  “Argh. You there? No way. I’m a doer, not a viewer.”

  “Then, what are you doing here?”

  “Checking out the old wardrobe to see if you’re wearing anything worth stealing. It’s my favorite hobby.”

  The feeling was not mutual. I was tiring of these two-way mirror conversations with myself, of always seeing Lilith on the other side of something. She’s haunted me in mirrors since I saw her being autopsied on CSI V one TV night last spring.

  I did come to Las Vegas to find her, but I’d expected a physical being or a tombstone, not a will-o’-the-wisp on silvered glass.

  “Lilah . . . Ric does know about me, right?” she asked.

  “Yes.” I made my answer short and sharp.

  Ric had only found out about my secret mirror-shadow days ago. With all the follow-up on the literal fallout before we left Wichita, we hadn’t discussed several revelations that could affect our separate lives, and maybe our love life. I particularly was carrying my usual invisible knapsack of guilt.

  “Where is Wonder Rod-boy?” Lilith prodded.

  I debated whether or not to tell her I’d sent him off to see the wizard, Christophe, aka Snow, the Inferno Hotel’s albino rock-star owner, to view a movie. That would be hard to explain. You had to have been there.

  WE’D MADE IT back from Wichita and I was dropping Ric off at his house for the night before ferrying Quicksilver and me back to the Enchanted Cottage on the Hector Nightwine estate.

  “You should call on Snow first thing tomorrow,” I told Ric, “and get him to show you the Metropolis film that features your new virtual girlfriend.”

  “You’re not jealous of an old-time movie CinSim that’s more a metal costume than flesh?”

  “No. Might as well be jealous of Robby the Robot.”

  “Tomorrow morning? Christophe’s Inferno Hotel penthouse? Without you to referee?” Ric had asked.

  “Right,” I’d said. “He owes us, and besides, Snow’s such a film nut he’ll gladly sit through all almost-three hours of the restored version with you. Metropolis is his prize acquisition. I’d be excess baggage.”

  Irma had hastened to jump in. And “baggage” is exactly what Snow would call you after your latest joint adventure—or should I say “assignation”?—in one of his domains in Wichita.

  “What will you do?” Ric asked before I could forget myself and tell Irma aloud that it was an accident, not an assignation.

  “I, ah, have some unfinished business from Wichita to settle.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’m taking your shrink foster-mama’s advice and facing some of my own demons without even having to leave the Enchanted Cottage.”

  “So, after a night without you, tomorrow morning I’m indentured to view an almost-three-hour-long silent film from 1927.” Ric sighed.

  “There’s a stirring, newly recorded symphonic sound track.”

  “Watching it with Christophe is not my idea of a film date.” He never used the nickname I did: Snow.

  “I know, but Snow’s the only one in the world who owns the long-lost, utterly complete version of the film. You’ll be amazed by how scary-relevant that Holy Grail of filmdom called Metropolis is to our lives and times,” I said in farewell.

  “I hope there’s popcorn,” Ric grumbled.

  “And you’ll see the Silver Zombie again, offscreen and in person.”

  “Not a draw, Delilah. She freaks me out. I’m not the Immortality Mob or a CinSim collector like Christophe and Hector Nightwine. I don’t want the responsibility for any being that can be commanded by anyone else, including me.”

  “Admirable. The film will do an even better job at freaking you out than its iconic va-va-va-vroom automaton.”

  “I still think you’re jealous. She’s mucho curvy for a robot, but cold metal is not my turn-on.”

  “That shiny silver exterior is plastic wood molded onto the body cast of the actress, so she’s not as cold as you think.”

  “She’s still born of silver nitrate film,” he pointed out, “on which the robot body was almost a solid image beyond what any human
actor could convey, other than Joan of Arc in battle armor. I can see how powerful that could be in the wrong hands.” He hesitated. “I’ve had some . . . disturbing dreams since I called that thing off the film reel and into real life.”

  “Me too. We need to discuss all this, after you’ve seen the movie.”

  “Just go and be mysterious about your next steps, Del. I might be mysterious about how I get on with Christophe and Metropolis.”

  By then we were at his house, so I’d bribed him with a quick good-night kiss. As soon as he’d exited Dolly, my prize ’56 Eldorado convertible, Quicksilver leaped from the backseat into the vacant front passenger seat while it was still warm.

  Ric shook his head. “If anybody is jealous of anything, it would be me of that dog.”

  “You’ve never had a pet?” I asked as Quicksilver growled. “I mean animal companion.”

  “Just goats. I get hooved herd animals more.”

  I remembered his south-of-the-border childhood captors had called him goat-boy. Grrr. I wish we had fully wiped out El Demonio during the perfect storm of a showdown at the Emerald City Hotel and Casino in Wichita.

  Next time.

  Given the battle of wills Ric had going on with his former boyhood captor, now a major drug lord, I knew another, maybe even final, confrontation was inevitable. Neither demon nor Ric Montoya ever gave up.

  REVISITING LAST NIGHT’S memories of the serious enemies Ric and I had made in Vegas made my head start to ache. I put a hand to my hot-skinned forehead without remembering I was gazing at my double in the mirror, that I was showing weakness to my sister image, my enemy.

  “Poor Delilah,” Lilith cooed in that irritating way of schoolgirls who lay on the “jealous” as thick as strawberry jam on English muffins . . . or toes.

  She ran her still-upraised hands down and then up her opposite elbows to her shoulders, and then down again over her breasts and behind her back. The motion clothed her in the twin of my red top like a paint tool in Photoshop.

  “What an obvious stripper move,” I complained, “just to filch this old thing I’m wearing. Your wiles are wasted on me. Get your own wardrobe witch.”