Brimstone Kiss

by Carole Nelson Douglas

Chapter Nineteen

   

  Now that I had two dead chicks and a guy to investigate, I was alternating between my paying and personal case loads.

  With a big fat new clue in my quiver, it was time to concentrate on the Sunset Park case. Bad timing, though. My usual three days of menstrual agony hit me hard, as if the mirror was punishing me for teasing a secret out of it.

  I wasn't about to run with Quicksilver in the park, but I'd always worked through menstrual cramps with a stiff upper lip, so late that afternoon I donned my pseudo-cop clothes and duty belt. Quick and I shared a roast beef sandwich snack in the kitchen before going out to get Dolly on the road.

  I was going trolling in blond disguise again, this time on the Las Vegas Strip opposite the glittering sprawl of the Gehenna hotel and casino.

  I needed updated info and insight on the werewolf owner, Cesar Cicereau, and wanted more specifics on magic, mirrors and me. Before I'd escaped Cicereau's pack of hit-werewolves at Starlight Lodge and before mi amor, Ric, had obliterated a bunch of them with his silver-bullet-spitting Uzi, Cesar had hoped to mount my head and hide on his hunting lodge walls. Was I still a wanted woman? I should be able to find out from an inside man. Madrigal, the indentured magician I'd been forced to work with briefly, who had first abetted my Adventures in Mirrorland, might just be him.

  After valet-parking Dolly at the hotel-casino opposite, the towering Babel, and hiking to the Strip, I paused to admire the Gehenna's façade, an angular forest of glittering verdigris and copper glass towers. Only someone who knew the owner for a werewolf would realize the colors suggested a forest at sunset, both the tranquility of nature and the hot blaze of blood at the end of the hunt.

  Since a couple of Cicereau's goons had abducted me from Sunset Park to first bring me here and I'd escaped the hotel through the vast bowels of its service systems, I wasn't sure where to enter.

  Quicksilver growled softly beside me, recognizing our former prison.

  "You can't go inside," I told him. "You were with me on my previous visit and the boss man's men would recognize you. "

  His wolfish ears perked and angled at my every word. Almost-humanly expressive pale blue eyes seemed to pick up my meaning instantly and reject it. He whined his frustration, but when I said, "Stay," he sat on the hot sidewalk.

  I hated to disappoint Quicksilver. He'd saved my life more than once. And I'd saved him from Haskell's bullets. We were partners.

  So I told him to nap under a high-riding pickup truck and waited until he drag-tailed to the spot and circled to lie down. I also adjusted my street-cop utility belt sagging with various nasty tools of the trade.

  With my black leather pants and motorcycle boots, a short-sleeved black shirt, and kiddie souvenir gold "shield," I looked enough like one of the city's numerous security personnel to pass for a hotel security guard. The outfit was hot for Vegas, but you can't have naked cops, and I wasn't about to don the seriously non-serious khaki shorts real Vegas cops wore. I needed all the gravitas I could muster.

  I fluffed my chin-length platinum wig and adjusted my aviator-style sunglasses, then joined the tourists taking the escalator up to the bridge over the Strip.

  Las Vegas heat in early summer can singe your eyelashes off, but it's dry heat and you don't have to worry about anyone seeing you sweat. The black leather belt was old enough to squeak in the dry air, announcing my presence with a nice air of gunslinger.

  By the time I pulled open the huge copper door handle of the Gehenna, I was still dry. I plunged into the hotel's dark, icy interior, leaving my sunglasses on and waiting for my eyes to adjust to the extremes in light.

  I hadn't bothered to wear my gray contact lenses today, not expecting to deal with anybody who'd recognize my natural baby blues.

  At least, I hoped I wouldn't have to.

  A major problem was weaving my way through the mammoth hotel's public areas to the theater, far at the rear, and its even more distant backstage area. The casino area was right off the main lobby. Once I worked my way through the crowds there, the chime of slot machines masked the jingle-jingle-jingle of the belt's attached handcuffs.

  These cuffs were the real deal, not another handy-dandy manifestation of the form the silver familiar had taken in the Sinkhole. I'd stopped and bought a pair at a sex toy shop on the way to the Gehenna. Hey, this is Vegas! There are way more of those than cop shops. I'd also picked up a couple of canisters of pepper spray at a sporting goods store.

  Checking above for surveillance cameras, I noticed automated birds twittering away in the canopy of stained glass leaves above the gaming tables. Clever. The small barn owls with the 360-degree swiveling heads must be mechanical cameras. Their unblinking yellow-glass stares were capturing the images of every passing person.

  It was hard not to bump into tourists who stopped unexpectedly to coo about the "cute" animated birds in the faux foliage. Right, cute. Those eye-in-the-sky birds had probably X-rayed their clothes down to the skivvies and recorded their credit card and driver's license numbers and their retinas.

  The weight of my police duty belt and its array of defensive weapons had taught me the law enforcement swagger. That walk kept the tourists respectfully out of my path and the real security guards subtly nodding to me as I moved deeper into the behemoth of a building.

  Illuminated signs guided me through a couple blocks of casino. Near an arcade of pricey shops, the theater entrance beckoned with a marquee framed in the usual round light bulbs. The house would be "dark" yet, until the 7:00 and 10:00 p. m. shows. I pushed through the blank door.

  "Hey," said a voice behind me. "It's closed. "

  I turned to face a security guard dressed like a Robin Hood merry man.

  "I know. I'm on an errand for the boss. He left his Blackberry here. "

  The guard was a young guy, jumpy. Not good. So I blathered on.

  "I'm just saving Sansouci the bother, but if you want to bother him to check, it's okay by me. " I hit the word "bother" twice, ominously.

  "Ah. . . no. That's fine. We don't need to bother Mr. Sansouci. You go get it. "

  "Thanks, bro. " I waved him toodleloo and ducked into the absolute dark inside, grinning. As I'd guessed, the staff knew Sansouci was no one to trifle with. Not that I hadn't tried, the last time I was here, with middling success.

  Now, the magician Madrigal I could handle, if I could only find the guy.

  I walked down a raked aisle between rows of seats, finally doffing the sunglasses and letting my eyes acclimate until they could focus on the "ghost light" to the left of the stage far below. It's an old theater tradition to leave one light on so anyone coming in doesn't trip over all the technical equipment in the wings.

  Given that Madrigal was something of a real magician, I didn't trust that one small burning bulb a bit.

  The stage seemed deserted, but I walked slowly up the access stairs at the side of the house. Madrigal had an exclusive contract with the Gehenna, perhaps for eternity. None but he used this stage, none but he set it up.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the ghost light soften, then flare. At the same instant, a gossamer steel net fell over my shoulders. Before I could pull any weapons from my hip-slung belt, I was jerked off my feet, swinging upside down and being drawn up into the high flies above like a wriggling fish on a line.

  I kicked hard to grab the super-strong filament and twist semi-upright before all my belt trinkets fell to the floor and my wig hairpins pulled out.

  Meanwhile, I felt a narrow ribbon of cold metal climb my torso under my clothes. It emerged out my short sleeve, twining my arm down to the wrist. Presto-change-o! I had a charm-bracelet chain dangling the cutest miniature wire cutter you ever saw. A Break-in Barbie accessory. There should be such a doll!

  Pulling the implement into my hand, I began snipping links of the net that was forming around
me. The fibers- stringy, gelatinous, yet strong-snapped. More formed to replace the broken lines as soon as I severed them.

  My so-called wondrous opposable thumb was aching from my desperate, machine-gun fast motions. I knew I was up against Mother Nature. Well, a perversion of Mother Nature. Madrigal wouldn't hurt me, much less kill me, but I knew nothing of the sort about his fanatically attached pair of magician's assistants, Sylphia and Phasia.

  A doll-small, gorgeously girly face penetrated the broken links to rub cheeks with mine. Her iridescent skin was colder than the side of an ice bucket.

  "We don't want you back," she whispered, her voice like wind, or rushing water, or the pass of a dagger near your neck.

  "I'm not back," I said. "Just visiting. "

  Phasia's supple serpent muscles tightened around me inside the entrapping mesh her spider-sister Sylphia had woven around me. Phasia was the serpent-sister of the two.

  By now I was hiked so high above the dark stage floor below that snipping net fibers would be suicidal.

  "Phasia!" My cry came out a whisper. The serpent-familiar was tightening her coils on my chest and lungs and heart.

  I could feel the wire cutters lengthening and growing like a sterling silver vine toward Phasia's iridescent-scaled neck. . .

  "Let her go," a voice thundered from below, its deep tolling power vibrating through all of us, felt by all three.

  I was released so quickly that my lungs burned from a massive inhalation. I plummeted down fifty feet to the black floor below and the figure of a man making a small vertical island on it.

  I wanted to shut my eyes, but resisted, seeing that it was a race to the finish. The lengthening silver rope tied around my wrist flung upward to loop around a pipe high above and shortened fast to stop my fall. . . just as my body landed, cradled in the muscular arms of the man bracing his legs below.

  The metal rope released above and fell coiling into a delicate chain around my neck.

  Madrigal lowered me to the floor, still glaring up into the darkened flies.

  "Behave yourselves, spawn of Darkness. Dead humans on our doorstep will inconvenience Cicereau. "

  He eyed my blond wig and black leather, then let my boots touch the floor.

  "You're trespassing," he said. "You have no business here. Leave and count yourself lucky. "

  "But I do. "

  Perhaps my voice sounded familiar. He paused in turning away.

  "I do have business here," I explained.

  Madrigal turned back to me. He was built and dressed more like a World Wrestling Federation champion than a magician. The Gehenna Hotel billboards advertising the magic act depicted him as a strongman and the homicidal assistants twin Tinker Bells.

  Competition-level muscles made his tawny skin look sculpted in age-darkened bronze. His thick dreadlocks gleamed like beaten metal. Magicians came in three major stereotypes. The long-haired lean and elderly Gandalf type with flowing gown and beard was one. The short and muscular athlete type like escapologist Harry Houdini was another. The modern model was lean, limber, and dressed to kill, either in formal tails or spandex Las Vegas glitz. Madrigal was in a class all by himself with his unique shtick: power lifter with demonically delicate assistants.

  While I reacquainted myself with his hunky persona, he stared at me, clearly annoyed. Any visiting female threatened his spooky and possessive familiars; I wasn't doing as I was told and leaving.

  "I need to know more about your front-surface mirror," I said.

  And then he got it. A fingertip flipped my blond wig off-center.

  "Delilah? You were lucky to get out of here the last time. Cicereau is so angry that he's destroyed all surviving film of your image, despite its commercial value, even on security tapes. He calls you 'Lodge-leveler'. He lost twenty-three prime werewolf soldiers at Starlight Lodge last full moon night. "

  "My image would be worth a pile if he claimed I was Maggie. "

  "He knows that and no longer cares. Attempting to coerce you into becoming the world's first Maggie in live performance has cost him more than you would have earned him. He's extended my contract fifty years, without any increase in pay. "

  "I'm sorry, Madrigal!" And I was. "It wasn't my idea to get tangled up in your act or with your assistants. "

  He sighed and massaged his trunk-thick neck. "How can I get you out of here fast, so neither you nor I suffer further?"

  "Tell me about your mirror magic. You know I have some link with the looking glass world beyond. I manifested it here for the first time. I need to know why and how. "

  "Why should I tell you anything?"

  "Why are you so hostile?"

  "Why are you playing ignorant? You know far more than I about mirror magic. You were able to abduct the mirror image you left behind here by using remote viewing after you left. Even I can do no such thing. "

  "I don't know how I did it, Madrigal. I didn't do. . . anything. I felt desperate to leave no part of myself, of my soul, here for Cesar Cicereau to exploit on his theater stage. "

  "And so to save some infinitesimal part of yourself from nightly nude exposure on a stage, I and my assistants are indentured for another fifty years. "

  "I didn't know taking. . . it. . . away would cost you anything. How? No one knew about it but you and I. "

  "Even after the lodge slaughter, Cicereau would have gloated if I'd had some remnant, some illusion of 'Maggie', to add to the act. "

  "Hector Nightwine would have stopped it anyway. Legally, the image and the nickname are his. "

  "Possessing that tame remnant would have placated Cicereau even if he couldn't use it on stage. "

  "How?"

  Madrigal looked uneasy.

  "How?"

  "For his private. . . use. "

  "You bastard!"

  I stepped out of his reach and flicked my wrist with anger. The silver rope still attached to it snaked around his neck four times, tight.

  "You're trying to make me feel guilty for taking back a stolen sliver of myself you were willing to pimp out to Cicereau. I suppose you already do that with Sylphia and Phasia. "

  The living metal rope tightened.

  "No. " Madrigal stood very still, all his mighty muscles clenched.

  My attack was bluff. I knew his possessive familiars would soon swoop to his rescue.

  "They'd kill him," Madrigal said, "and he knows that. Only I can control them. Besides, they are too petite and childlike for him. He likes statuesque women. "

  Statuesque. I'd never been called that before. Another ego boost. Still, I was a piker in the statuesque department compared to Vida, the dramatic brunet in the 1940s photo I found of Cicereau and friends, including Sansouci and Cicereau's soon-to-be slain daughter.

  I relaxed my tense muscles and particularly my right wrist. The rope slid away from Madrigal, twining my right arm up to the biceps and adding a striking snake's head to both ends. It was at rest, but not disarmed.

  I was amazed and a bit repulsed by how fast it responded now to my muscle tension and thoughts. It was becoming an unconscious part of me, like a devoted pet.

  Madrigal looked pretty amazed too. He eyed it with loathing and wariness.

  "All right," he said. "You've convinced me that we've sinned against each other equally. " He shook his braided mane with some self-disgust. "These are dark times in a dark place. Come with me. I'll show you everything I know about mirror magic. "