Carole Douglas - Virtual Virgin

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.

Bogey man 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.

“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.

“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.