Carole Douglas - Dancing with Werewolves

Trouble was, I didn't want Cicereau and minions to even know my sex. The stapler across a skull was going to have to shout "no!" for me.

I waited, trying to keep my breathing from gushing like a geyser in the silent room.

Someone slammed the door flat against the wall and immediately shut it. Good thinking. He knew that one piece of wall was vacant and took it himself. And now he had me trapped.

I heard him move across the shut door, blocking it for good measure. And then I heard a lock snap. Just one of those cheesy set-into-the-doorknob switches, but it'd be hard to find and release quickly in the dark.

I had to take him down.

Right now his hand was brushing the wall on the right side of the closed door, looking for the light control dial.

The patting motions found the empty plate, and paused.

I couldn't help nodding, although no one could see me in the dark. Right. No light.

Except I saw two faint gleams turn on. About two inches apart. Yellow-green. Funky chartreuse, actually.

Shoot! This was some kind of super and he knew how to make those little lights of his shine. His eyes. Wow. Maybe six feet off the ground. I was five-eight in my magic show workout ballet flats. It was going to be tough to get high enough to hit his head.

On the positive side, those reflective irises told me whether he was facing fore or aft.

So…just how much did they see in the dark?

I crouched low, hearing him move toward the desk.

The computer chimed as he turned it on. The screen would add some ambient light to the room. Can't have that. I stood and hurled the stapler at the sound.

The display screen slid across the desk and shattered to the floor.

There also went my only weapon.

I'd slid back to the door during the crash and turned the knob button sideways. That was the "open" position, wasn’t it? I'd seen these locks a thousand times on rest room doors.

The chartreuse eyes moved up from the level of bending over the laptop to full height again.

They came slamming toward the door just as I sidled away.

He thumped to a full stop against the wood. If I'd still been standing there, I'd have been caught, and semi-crushed too.

Maybe I should give up now, while I still had an intact skeleton. What would Cicereau do to me, really? I was his prize performer.

I'd only been snooping in his private office, digging up the dirt on his long-dead daughter. Maybe he'd thank me. Maybe he didn't know what had happened to her. Maybe I could hallucinate in the dark. There weren't any photos of her on his trophy wall. No, he himself had wanted her dead and buried for some reason. Ric and I had unearthed her, against all their hopes and plans, promising to make her loss and death into a cause célèbre again.

While I calculated this and that, the eerie green eyes lunged at exactly where I was standing.

I stepped one giant step away, soundlessly, the carpet muffling my movement.

Green Eyes cursed. It was a growled word, untranslatable, the werewolf equivalent of "fuck" probably.

I so wished for Quicksilver, but this had been a solo expedition. It would have to be a solo escape.

I fumbled behind me and found one of those vintage cigarette stands, the metal equivalent of a birdbath pedestal. I lifted it in both hands and swung it in a wide, blind swath.

It connected with flesh and bone, hard enough that even I winced.

I heard my victim, my stalker, hit the door and slide down it, half-dazed to go by the muffled growls.

I was blocked from the door. My only exit would have to be reflective.

The slab of mirror that reflected the bottles and glasses awaited me, but I needed a door out of darkness and into infinity and a light that would put the mirror into play.

Cigar aficionado Cicereau's office was filled with tabletop lighters. It would be sweet to use the fat-cat werewolf's affectations to escape his security guy.

I fumbled on the bar top until I felt a lighter embedded in a marble miniature of the Gehenna and cocked and depressed the mechanism. Dozens of tiny flames reflected in the glassware, the silver ice bucket, the mirror behind them all.

I saw myself, a crouched pale figure. I saw Green Eyes behind me, the hit man called Sansouci, rising dazed against the solid wood door. I embraced my own reflection and went oozing through the melting mirror-glass, Madrigal's voice in my ears, calling. "Come back."

I moved as I always did, because I chose to, beyond the mirror backing of the wet bar. It was still like breaking through a sheet of ice as gossamer as a dragonfly's wing.

Dragonfly like, I darted along silver tunnels. I traversed aluminum air-conditioning ducts, into a chill headwind. I must have been crawling, because the ducts were too square to allow for an upright human to pass, but it felt like swimming, as if I were moving through half-set Jell-O.

I broke through a thin blue skin and was suddenly facing myself.

Neither one of us was wearing a thing, except for the cellophane afterbirth coating of the front-surface mirror.

I was back on stage and not happy.

Then I noticed that my double didn't wear a familiar form…and felt my living silver talisman weaving itself into the hair at the back of my neck, out of sight, but not out of mind. Creepy. Still, I appreciated its loyalty and discretion.

"This is insane," I told Madrigal. "I can't do this."

"No." He embarrassed me further by walking around me and my twin in a figure eight pattern, summing us up fore and aft.

A terrycloth robe dropped on me from above. I looked up. Sylphia was hanging sullenly from a silver thread, playing chaperone.

While I shrugged into the heavy material, Madrigal studied my mirror image.

"It's not Lilith," I said.

"No. And it's not you either. It's your reflection in the mirror."

"Reflections don't peel off into their own personas."

"You already have one double whose existence you never suspected. Maybe this explains Lilith."

"She was real enough to fool a camera and crew and a director."

Madrigal lifted one of my reflection's hands. It was limp, lifeless. "Only a reflection, as I told you. Without my magic, she wouldn’t even stand up."

"Your magic?"

His attention was all on…Del. 2.0. "Um-hmm. I do have some that isn't bound."

"Then maybe you did all of this. It isn't my 'way with mirrors' at all."

I did so not want it to be me. I didn't believe in this shit.

"Maybe." Madrigal turned so fast his dreadlocks whipped his own cheeks. "It's time for you to leave."

"I think so too."

I had a lead to pursue in the real world…a real, weird, solid lead!

Cicereau's daughter was the dead body.

If the Sunset Park deaths went back to the Werewolf-Vampire War in the forties, my romantic Romeo and Juliet idea was much more likely. The thirty pieces of silver in the grave represented betrayal, and what could those young lovers have betrayed but "both their houses?" House Werewolf and House Vampire. If only the vampire swain would appear in my magic mirror at the cottage to confirm my theory! But the girl had seemed to imprint on me. I wondered if the guy had imprinted on Ric somehow. Certainly their passion had affected us both. Me, mostly. Ric, I could tell, was not sexually retarded in the slightest. It's not fair, Irma grumbled, the guy always had the edge!

If I could prove all this, Nightwine would have a terrific supernatural cold case to present on CSI V. I'd have solved my first Las Vegas mystery and would have a real income again, and Ric would…well, he'd have the satisfaction of knowing who his dowsing rod had dug up. And maybe he'd also have some useful incriminating information on one of Vegas's biggest crime bosses.