Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

"You said you needed me." Her tone was childishly arrogant.

"I need your help, so I can leave."

"Leave?"

I nodded. "I don't belong here. I don't want to be here, which I think you can understand. There are those who miss me."

"Those?"

"A boss. A lover."

"Tell me about your lover." She posed on her heels atop a seatback, the piquant face avid.

I glanced at Quicksilver. "Not in front of the dog."

"Why?"

"He's very possessive."

"Why?"

"He's my…guardian."

She digested that. "Phasia says if I help you that you'll be gone."

"I'd like to think so."

"And your familiar?"

"Gone with me. I'd never leave him behind."

I saw her rainbow eyes flash at my last sentence. She was powerful, fey, unhuman…and so humanly insecure. For a moment I wondered if she could free them all, all three, in an instant, but didn't, because it kept Madrigal hers. That wasn’t love, but she wasn’t my species either.

"We will need Phasia," she said at last.

I nodded.

"She is even more dangerous than I am."

I nodded.

"I like your…dog, is it?"

That was the best she could do.

"He likes me too."

That threat was the best I could do.

No way could Quicksilver follow the paths these two fey creatures could carve for me. I was on my own with alien female rivals whose only reward would be my absence, by hook or by crook. But first was another rehearsal day, a final preparation for our debut, reluctant as it was for me. I would rather die than mimic it on the Gehenna's gigantic stage.

"I've thought about your act," Madrigal said. "It must reprise the CSI appearance and surpass it. The core of it is the ten-second camera pan of you naked on an autopsy table."

"One thing. That wasn’t me and I wouldn’t have done it."

"Right. It was your…double. To save that lost sister of yours, would you have done it?"

Well, what was she to me, or vice versa? Strangers. Still, if I could have done that nude bit part and saved her to be found and met by me today…but no way would an Our Lady of the Lake Convent School student have done that. Yet, if I was sure it would save her? Lilith? If she was some severed part of me I needed to find and unite with-?

After all, Hector had me on plenty of tape already. A lot of my barriers had been crashing down lately, publicly and privately. Why stop now when it really mattered?

So there we were, on stage for a preview for the hotel's management guys and their wives and girlfriends. My stomach was a storm of nausea and tumult.

"Sylphia!" Madrigal looked and called into the dark above us.

She came twining down on a thread, a thread that unwound into a rainbow of colors…aqua, lime, lilac, pink, and yellow.

Each of those colors wove around me, creating shining silk gowns tighter than cocoons, covering and revealing at the same time. I was a moving rainbow of scintillating, titillating fabric and was slowly being levitated horizontal until I floated under Madrigal's hands, sensing the glittering rainbow mummy wraps that bound me.

His hands paused above my center, my navel, and I wafted upwards, stiff as a board, and felt the iridescent bindings peel away, leaving me…naked. The moment was beyond traumatic, but before my stomach could rebel and heave out its contents, Phasia appeared above me. She twined her strong, sinuous muscles around me, a living rope of exotic tinsel. She imprisoned me and clothed me with her thick, dry, scaled length. Her heavy bonds made a bikini over my hips, a bandeau bra over my breasts, a collar around my throat and a turban on my head.

Horizontal. Bound by pulsing serpentine muscles. A nightmare!

I prepared to shriek, drawing whatever shallow breath I could.

Madrigal bent over me, his face as frozen as a dream lover's. His lips parted as they reached my mouth. They touched mine. I opened for him. He withdrew.

Magic. A glittering red rhinestoned apple was in his mouth, taken from mine, shimmering, bejeweled, saliva-slick, and sensual.

I heard the audience of a couple dozen gasp. I felt their attention shift from me to Madrigal, to the shining forms of Sylphia and Phasia as they wrapped and trapped him 'round and 'round in their spidery, serpentine webs. I thought he deserved better, but that was not what this show was about.

This act was all about the webs of power and submission, not about me. I was utterly forgotten at my most revealing moment, ceding the spotlight to Madrigal and his slinky, shimmering familiars and damn glad of it.

That's Kansas for you.

The werewolf management was on their-for the moment, human-feet, applauding. Drinking, making merry. Good. Hopefully, they'd be out cold when I came calling later tonight.

Madrigal stood behind me, his fingertips on my shoulders.

We were alone on stage and faced the mirrored back wall of his favorite place-switching cabinet.

Our images were reflected, but mine was hazy, shimmering at the edges with a halo of aura. My eyes in the mirror were not so much blue as transparent. The entire surface had a blue cast.

Madrigal extended his spread fingers to it. They touched the surface, the way kids play at making "spider" in the looking glass.

"Do you notice anything?" he asked.

"You could play concert piano with that finger spread?"

"Thanks. I like steel drums. Look at the reflection."

I did, frowning. I prided myself on being observant, but this was like a trick picture puzzle. There was the mirror with its weird blue cast, there was us looking as we usually did. I wasn’t about to say we made a handsome couple, although we did. I was way too aware of Sylphia and Phasia hanging in the flies overhead, quite literally. Maybe asleep in their spidery, serpentine nests. Maybe not.

When did arachnid and reptile familiars sleep? Not often.

"Front-surface glass," Madrigal said finally, answering his own question. "There's not that eighth-inch gap, that discrepancy between the real object and the reflected one that gives away that it's just a reflection. It's useful for kaleidoscopes. I'm the only magician in Las Vegas to use it."

I placed my spread fingers on the glass. He was right. I was touching fingerprint to fingerprint, with no break in image.

"Why use it?" I asked. "Audiences never see or suspect the mirrors are there if the illusion works, and no one in the audience ever gets close enough to study the reflection."

"Not inside the cabinets, no. But I know the difference, as do my assistants. I want my illusions to be as perfect as possible."

"Great, but-"

"I'm telling you that this is a custom-made and rather rare mirror. If you do have any 'way' with mirrors, maybe you can find a new way with this mirror."

Oh. I put my other hand on the mirror and stepped closer. My eyes looked über-blue in the mirror's twilight indigo color. It reminded me of a vintage Evening in Paris perfume bottle. It made inky blue-black highlights shimmer in the hair of my reflection and gave my dead-white skin the faint azure glow of skim milk.

I didn't feel that I was gazing at my double, Lilith, but at a more translucent image of myself. Like the thin skin that can form over sitting milk.

Translucent. Light drawing through, not at. I pushed my fingertips hard against the cold glass surface and felt it warm as they sank into it. I felt them dent it, as they would living flesh.

I took a deep breath and plunged my right hand through, jangling charm bracelet of keys and all. It disappeared, and my flesh sprouted goose bumps from my right forearm to all over my body.

Madrigal's fingers lifted from my shoulders. "You feel as cold as dry ice."

Dry ice. A mere mist. Chill and foggy, often used as a stage trick.