Virtual Virgin dspi-5

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  There are real advantages to living in a Las Vegas version of an animated Disney fairy tale. I have a wardrobe witch and a kitchen witch and a yard troll. I almost expected Lilith to ask who was the fairest of all.

  Lilith didn’t. She did laugh until the red of “our” top went fluorescent for an instant before she vanished. I was looking at myself for real, truly alone again. Sort of.

  Wicked witch, Irma ground out in my ear.

  “She may well be,” I agreed. “And you are truly the last secret about me Ric isn’t in on. He now knows I can see my identical self in the mirror, what his shrink foster mother called a shadow sister. He doesn’t know I also hear voices.”

  But you do, Joan of Arc, Irma replied. Only it’s voice, singular.

  “Look, I am no longer a warrior maid. My virgin issue was resolved three months ago, thanks to Ric.”

  At twenty-four, Irma jibed.

  “I had my reasons, as we found out in Wichita.”

  Lilith didn’t have those issues. Can’t you get her on the wrong side of the mirror yourself? What’s keeping you from following her?

  Good questions.

  “You’re right. I’m being a wuss,” I muttered. “Just because I’ve sorta done a vengeful murderess wrong is no reason not to use my mirror-walking talents.”

  Right. And what’s with the silver familiar? Where is it?

  I closed my eyes to take inventory in a body-sensing moment. “Oh. It’s hiding out as an ankle bracelet under my right wide-legged pant bottom.”

  Skin-tight leggings are in and you’re doing wide-legged retro sailor suits. Figures.

  “The familiar must duck for cover when Lilith is occupying the mirror because she doesn’t have one herself.”

  The familiar is envy-worthy. It’s on my bucket list.

  “You’re disembodied, Irma. You can’t have a bucket list. And being locked into a shape-changing hunk of sterling silver is like wearing a pair of mobile steel handcuffs, trust me.”

  Even now I could feel a cold, feathery shiver as the familiar slunk up my leg into its default position as a dental-floss-fine hip chain. I eyed my image in the mirror.

  I’d faced some seriously dark, subconsciously buried news about myself back in Wichita and survived. Now it was time to confront what was keeping me from using and expanding my ability to walk into and through mirrors.

  Maybe I could drag Lilith back out with me this trip, screaming and kicking in physical form. My gut felt a satisfying melted-caramel glow. Try to deal with real life like I do, Shadow Me.

  So I walked forward to meet my reflected grin, feeling a breath, a sigh, a supersheer curtain of cool liquid silver clinging to my body like ectoplasmic Saran wrap. Then I was on the other side of myself, seemingly alone in a dark, bare place, a vacant soundstage built for psychic phenomena, an empty mirror viewed from the opposite dimension, a place of eternal twilight.

  My world and welcome to it. I walked farther forward, poised for whatever would come, for what, or whoever, I would encounter. Bring it on.

  Chapter Three

  YOU CAN’T GO anywhere eerie in the post–Millennium Revelation’s many underworlds, I’d learned the hard way, without sensing overbearing powers.

  The fey remained an ancient presence everywhere, leaving traces in the form of mercurial paths, just as pre-Christian civilizations leave buried cities and fallen monuments and statues of forgotten gods.

  That’s what I sense when I walk in mirror-world, and what I encountered during my one expedition to the nomadic pestilence called the Sinkhole, under Las Vegas.

  No sooner had these thoughts crossed my mind than a forest of skeletal, frosted trees materialized around me. Palm-sized, faceted jewels dangled like glittering fruit from their stunted limbs. You’d think I was shopping for red-carpet trinkets at Fred Leighton’s vintage jewels joint in the Bellagio. I could easily reach up to pluck them from the branches.

  Except . . . the silver familiar was weighing heavy around my wrists, a thick chain swaying between my sudden new pair of manacles.

  “Off,” I commanded, as I would a dog, but not mine. Quicksilver doesn’t take commands.

  I knew enough not to grab for fey fruit, but I’d never tried a verbal order on the familiar, which had come to me via someone I didn’t trust. It didn’t move a molecule.

  Then I heard a sinister rustle among the leafless, unmoving branches, like whispers in a language of shifting forest sounds. No wind brushed my skin, but some ghostly animation was stirring the trees on either side. I walked the open path between them, bound like a prisoner en route to a scaffold.

  What a hateful setup! I’d visited mirror-world before without encountering this fanciful toll booth before I even got forty feet into the journey.

  As I walked, a piece of glittering black against the surrounding dark became clearer.

  Something tall and narrow and worse . . . winged—think demon or dragon or gargoyle or a supernatural unknown—barred my way. The closer I got, the bigger it got, though I could glimpse only the come-and-go sparkle of its skin, or was that a . . . hide?

  Bogey incoming at high noon, Irma caroled in my brain.

  Bogeyman was the better word. The glimpsed musculature was male, broad at the shoulder and narrow at the hip, but lithe and fast, its glamorous surface a midnight sky all starry and depthless.

  I had a feeling if I had seen its actual outline, every pore or scale or horny joint or thorny appendage, I’d run screaming back to the Enchanted Cottage.

  Too late. No going back. In mirror-world you pushed forward to come out another mirror. Another exit. Or not.

  My pace never slowed, although my heartbeat quickened. I wanted to curse the familiar for hampering my hands, but I knew it was only posing as a bond and was really a weapon that hadn’t decided its necessary form yet.

  Not for nothing had I scaled twenty-foot-high pillars and looming statues of animal-headed gods in the subterranean underbelly of the Karnak Hotel’s vampire empire. I’d freed an ancient chained god. I was going to let a Black Hole of Feydom stop me?

  Taking in the probable shape of the negative image, I took a running jump at it and felt my shoes sink into solid sinew as I leaped up and up, my nostrils burning with a two-edged scent as sharp as ammonia or as addictive as absinthe. Just like the fey to be either corrosive . . . or cloying. I might as well have been climbing some museum reconstruction of a lost dinosaur. Unseen claws ripped at my sleeves and flared pant bottoms, and I felt the sickening wrench of cloth only millimeters from skin and bone.

  At last I was at the summit, far above the fruit trees. I looped my manacle chain around any part of darkness I could lasso. I tightened and wrenched my makeshift garrote, using my entire body, and was shaken off like an errant dandelion head.

  I went flying . . . forward, at least, not back. I hit the unseen path hard and curled into a defensive ball, blinking my eyes open. I saw nothing but the dark, so rolled over onto my side and looked again.

  More undifferentiated darkness stretched ahead, but through it—as if caught in a follow spotlight—strode a muscled brown giant of a man, sporting shoulder-length locks like some circus Samson.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. A woman named Delilah could deal with a long-haired muscleman.

  Besides, we’d met before.

  Chapter Four

  “WHERE IN THE Nine Circles of Hell under the Inferno Hotel have you been for the past week?” he greeted me when we were still forty feet apart.

  “Oz,” I said, not exactly lying.

  The details of the man’s figure came into focus, lit by his own faint golden aura. His gladiator boots were the real thing—leather straps and heavy metal everywhere—and therefore the envy of any runway model. He wore a hip-hung item that was part loincloth, part Roman soldier kilt. His shoulder-blade-brushing mane of bronze hair was about as long as his kilt, so he was altogether a tasty sight for the females in his audiences.

  Not my type, though.

&
nbsp; “Since when,” I wanted to know, “does the Gehenna Hotel house magician want to see me? Your werewolf boss hates my guts, except as appetizers for his pack. You itch to escape his indenture, but don’t want to rile him. And since when do you mirror-walk, Madrigal?”

  “Magic fingers,” he said as we closed to conversational distance, waggling his own. “Once you’d used my front-surface glass mirror as a fey prison for Cicereau’s crazy daughter’s ghost I was forced to improvise other equipment for my stage illusions. During that process the girls helped me find a fey path through another mirror.”

  I looked up, nervously. The familiar was now an innocuous wrist bangle with a Hello Kitty face.

  “The girls,” his two feral fey assistants, were aerial creatures. Visitors to Vegas might see the magic show and take them for pretty little sparkling fairies, but both were venomous. They were also jealous of any females coming near their giant rescuer and now possession, Madrigal.

  Luckily Madrigal and I had minimal chemistry, even when Cesar Cicereau had forced me into performing a sexy stage illusion with him. The werewolf mob boss had hoped the media frenzy spawned by my double Lilith’s nude autopsy appearance on CSI V would turn me a ready-made media star.

  I declined to stand in for anyone and had opted out via the hotel’s industrial laundry chute at the earliest opportunity.

  “I’ve come to lay Loretta Cicereau’s ghost to rest,” I told Madrigal. “She’s just a kid, not even twenty. Maybe she’s had time to cool down after trying to take over the computer and electrical systems in her father’s hotel. He did have Loretta and her vampire lover murdered decades ago, after all, in a brutally nasty way.”

  “Mobsters are like that, Delilah. So are mobster’s daughters. Loretta has been out for blood ever since some strong demonic presence has been paying court to her in my mirror.”

  “I sensed, even glimpsed, a looming evil influence as soon as I passed through the mirror on my end. Any guesses what it is?

  “No idea. During my magic act I’ve detected a black miasma hanging over the hotel, nothing Loretta could summon, which makes it even more disturbing.”

  “Would Loretta really consort with a demon to take revenge on dear old Dad?”

  “In a skipped heartbeat. And she wants revenge on more than Cesar Cicereau. You’re not exactly a model citizen now that you’ve taken down Loretta’s resurrected lover—gruesome revenant that he was—all the way down forty stories to smash his immortal bones to bits on the Las Vegas Strip. I wasn’t there, thank the Dread Queen, but Sansouci is still talking about that trick.”

  Knowing Sansouci, Cicereau’s security guy, he probably approved the way I’d separated the dead lovers once again. Like a lot of perfectly ordinary people who’ve been horribly wronged, even ghostly mob princess Loretta and her Polish prince charming had hungered for restitution and revenge. They could accomplish it paranormally now that the Millennium Revelation had exposed all the dark powers and beasties among us . . . besides us.

  “They were originally innocent victims,” I reminded Madrigal, and myself. “Maybe Loretta can go to some rehab house for ghosts if she’s seeing things more clearly now. Her resurrected lover was a new Frankenstein’s monster. Tourists are not meant to be collateral damage. I hope to talk some sense into her. Dead bones don’t dance, not even in today’s really wicked Vegas.”

  “Things have changed, all right.” Madrigal’s expression showed the dark side of grim.

  Or should I say Grimm?

  That’s when two dive-bombing mini-comets came at me out of the black nowhere, screaming like nest-defending blue jays. Sylphia was tangling in my hair while shooting pale, glittering webs of spider goo around my wrists and ankles. Madrigal once had called it “spit and fairy dust.” Meanwhile, Phasia’s dark, sinuous snaky limbs and iridescent locks of hair came twining around my neck.

  Now I was getting a taste of the means Madrigal and I had used to bind Loretta in his magic-act mirror. The only difference: I was alive, not a ghost. Their lethal clinging-vine act was halfway to strangling me.

  “Sylphia! Phasia!” Madrigal commanded, coming to untwine them. No dice. Their sticky and creepy extrusions kept moving to another spot, burning where they touched.

  I could feel the silver familiar on the move, ringing my fingers with metal knuckles. A chill gloved my fingers as claw-long nail sheaths like Fu Manchu wore sprouted from all eight fingers. Nothing on the thumbs, so I didn’t scratch myself.

  Good familiar. Smart familiar. Now I had to figure out how to use these instant weapons.

  I ignored the twining horror-movie appendages and went straight for the violet gleam of the sisters’ slanted predatory eyes. The pupils thinned to an X-shape on each iris. My new artificial-nail job could make those Xes into asterisks.

  Sylphia was mute but Phasia’s cries became shrieks as they both recoiled from my silver claws. The entrapping net they’d spit at me broke from their dainty little bodies and spattered the dark floor of mirror-world, splashing tiny galaxies of glitter at my feet.

  They still hovered twenty feet above Madrigal and me, hissing like mini-Medusas. They couldn’t fly but they could attach and climb, which made me shudder to wonder what structures might loom unseen above our heads.

  “What’s with your fey assistants?” I demanded of Madrigal. “I thought you had them under control.”

  He was staring at my taloned fingers, which made me examine them in the light of the magical halo that surrounded him. The three-inch curved silver scimitars bore etched decorations I’d have liked to study, but I wanted full use of my hands even more.

  Instead of nail-gazing, I flicked my fingers and the claws vanished. Even the magician blinked and frowned at the effect. Only I’d felt cool silver rivulets eeling under my palms and up my forearms to vanish under my clothing faster than the eye could see.

  “Visible claws are a hot girly fad on the Strip,” I told Madrigal, keeping my eyes watching upward.

  “My girls have been volatile lately.” He shook his glam locks.

  I’m not saying his fey friends didn’t have reason to be possessive of a half-dressed hunk like Madrigal.

  “I don’t know what’s gotten into them, Delilah. They seem to regret teaching me to enter the spaces behind mirrors, but it’s really amped up my act. What’s most unsettling is what’s happened to Loretta Cicereau while you were gone.”

  “What could happen? Her ghost was trapped in your front-surface mirror and wound with the same immobilizing web the fey sisters just tried to use on me.”

  I gazed up. “Mortal but mobile, girls,” I announced. “Mess with me and I have the teeth to bite back.” I raised my hands and fluttered my naked fingers. The dimly seen pair retreated into almost total darkness.

  “They were always possessive,” I said, “but now they’re downright hostile.”

  “That’s what I came to tell you. You may think they’ve changed, but it’s Loretta who really has. Trapping her in fey lockdown may have backfired.”

  “How?”

  “Using the bonds of feral fey may have put her into the Dread Queen’s power. I didn’t notice at first, but Loretta’s ghostly form has been solidifying in the mirror. Now she’s looking as lively as a well-fed vampire corpse in its coffin.”

  “Maybe the fey girls are jealous of her.”

  I barely got the words out of my mouth before another screaming Mimi was heading right for me—us. She came barreling out of the darkness like a berserk ship’s figurehead, all head and shoulders and trailing body and clothes. Images of ancient Greek harpies, Viking Valkyries, and other mythic female monsters fast-forwarded through my brain.

  I raised my naked arms and hands before the familiar could make its move, but so did Madrigal.

  “Robaceous trilobelius,” he bellowed a spell.

  A thorny bell jar of brambles sprang up around and over us and burst into eerily silent beating orange flames.

  The colors lit up the hovering forms of Lore
tta and her two petite former jailers.

  Loretta’s eternally pretty seventeen-year-old face screwed into a cartoon snarl of hatred. “My father ruined my life,” she screamed like an overemotional teen, “and your interference on his behalf ruined my death and resurrection, and Krzysztof’s too.”

  Her tirade reminded me that Loretta’s vampire medieval Polish prince bore a name not that unlike Snow’s French form of it. Could there be a connection? It might be a clue that Snow really was a vampire, despite his denials.

  Loretta’s furious gaze transferred to the man by my side. “Madrigal, you and Sansouci have always been my father’s toadies. You now walk the old fey paths, as this meddler does. Your feeble magics can’t protect you from the fey powers that soaked into my spirit while immobilized in your trap.”

  “Loretta,” I warned. “Revenge will hurt you more than anyone.”

  “Drop the pious clichés, Delilah. I can smell a taste for revenge on your own soul. See what you think about revenge after I finish with the one who revived me from death. You will know what it is to lose your lover as horribly as you took mine.”

  She fled into the dark like a falling star, swift and then . . . gone.

  “Ric,” I breathed. I turned on the puzzled magician. “Madrigal! She’s gone after Ric. Banish the barrier.” He frowned. “Don’t argue with me. I can hold off your fey without hurting them, although they won’t return the courtesy.”

  “It’s not that I won’t, Delilah.” He stretched his hands into the flames of his ensorcelled wall of thorns. “The girls can’t pass through my illusion, but I can’t unmake it without their aid.”

  “You mean . . . we’re protected but also trapped?”

  He nodded. Grim again. “Very much like Loretta was in my mirror.”

  Impetuous by fear for Ric, I charged the fiery nettles in a fury, already what Loretta had predicted of me, wanting to tear her down to bones and bury her again. The thorn tips were so sharp my arms and hands sprouted bloody pore-sized bites all over that burned like fire ants.