Carole Douglas - Virtual Virgin

“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.

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.