Chapter Forty-Nine

The winners clung together, weeping, unable to leave the foot of the deserted stage.

The losers ebbed away to the Inferno Bar, or to the gaming tables and the rest rooms, where they probably surveyed their tragic, bereft faces in the mirror and gave them soul kisses.

Horse hockey! I caught up with the crew that had made for the Inferno Bar.

"... hung like a horse," one of the losers was saying.

Ludicrous. I was an objective reporter. You can't, uh, snow me. Hung like a hunky mortal man, if I had to make a guesstimate. That I could was a bit annoying.

"My God, that scarf! I'd give anything to have it around my neck. I bet it feels just like his hair."

One of the true believers focused on me, stroking my wig in a creepy way. "You felt it. The scarf. What was it like?"

I wanted to say "China-silk import chiffon, really cheap."

I said, "Like air, clouds, steam heat."

Man, this was easy; I had them swooning on their bar stools. I ordered an Albino Vampire to up the ante. They hadn't realized that option existed, so I was swarmed.

"It's a house drink," I said, "really smooth and creamy."

It hurt not to claim credit as I watched the cash register ca-ching at a rapid rate as Albino Vampires were served all around.

A hard-faced brunette wiggled onto the bar stool beside me after pushing off a blitzed blonde to make room for herself. "You're new in town."

"Right."

"Do you know about the Club?"

Yeah. You put it on your steering wheel to keep creeps from stealing your car. "Club?"

She leaned way nearer than I needed. There were vampires, and there were vamps. "Club AV/DC."

Okay. I wasn't born yesterday even if I was from Kansas. AC/DC meant alternating current or alternative lifestyle. The latter meaning was a code word for folks who swung both ways. Bisexuals. Also nowadays, bi-humans or unhumans. Different strokes for different folks, and very different folks, but this gender preference stuff had all gotten a lot more complicated after the Millennium Revelation.

AV/DC, on the other hand, might mean Albino Vampire/ Doting Cows.

The brunette pressed a card into my sweaty palm. "We meet every night. Have a few drinks. Dance. Watch Cocaine impersonators. You might like the scene."

No, I needed to research the scene. "Thanks! Impersonators?"

Her breath riffled the phony hair around my neck. "You won't need to lose out on any Brimstone Kisses there."

My blood, predictably, ran cold. Was she was hinting that an illegal vampire club had attached itself to a star? Snow.

Is that what had made Lilith a shadow in my mirror?

Naturally I showed up at a gathering the next night in a one-story shop near downtown that had obviously gone belly up. Times were tough even in Las Vegas. This felt a lot like going to an AA meeting, not that Alcoholics Anonymous had ever been my thing. I'd covered the organization as a reporter. I found the religious bent hokey but it had worked for a lot of people, including the TV station owner. The news biz still ran on eighty-proof for blood.

The Cocaine Club occupied an end spot in the usual one-story strip shopping centers that dominate Las Vegas off the Strip with a Capital S.

I brought a covered casserole, as requested, even though I had to buy it at Albertson's deli and heat it in the cottage microwave, then transport it in a padded aluminum wrapping. Anything to look properly domestic while getting my... rocks didn't quite apply to girls... hormones off. I set the casserole, Velveeta and macaroni, down beside the huge aluminum coffee urn. Like that was the only drug here. Yeah. You could smell Albino leather here like perfumed pheromones.

The women-and the attendees all were women; apparently the Brimstone Kiss didn't do cross-gender- had that frantically worn look of desperate housewives. They were the same personally enterprising women who had made romance cover model Fabio a household name for a brief shining moment thirty years ago. Given the usual male incapacity for dealing with women beyond sex, generation, and child support, I could get these babes' fantasies.

On the other hand, despite my early childhood experiences, I was beginning to think I really liked most men: Ric... my male guard dog, Quicksilver... maybe even, on a particularly generous day, my un-American Idol Snow... and could cut them some serious slack under the right circumstances.

"You have a Web site?" I asked the aggressive chick whose shoulders would rival a defensive lineman's. It had been listed on the card: brimstonesluts.com.

"Definitely. It's an online world. I hear you almost got the Kiss last night."

"Yeah. So close." My fingernails tapped the table as I poured steaming amber liquid into my Styrofoam cup. The cup was white, but beyond that it was nothing the real Snow would touch on a bet.

"That's okay, honey. There are more of us than them." Her consoling hand-clutch almost stapled my knuckles together, thanks to her painted claws.

"What exactly does a Brimstone Kiss do?"

"Take you to paradise."

"What kind of paradise?" I was not the type to take even a free pass to heaven. One never knew what one was getting.

"I don't know! The recipients are all too incoherent to say. Pleasure Central, I guess. And nobody comes back down to write memoirs."

Hearsay. I was all for nirvana, but I had to have a free sample first.

I left the group meeting with a lot of questions.

Most of them were for Snow, if he would answer. Or if I could make him.

Chapter Fifty

I was beginning to pick up a pattern. Then. Now.

Christopher. Christophe. Krzysztof, maybe. Who knows what other variations?

My charm bracelet had changed into a silver circle of lips. Cold silver lips.

I suppose Snow knew where I was going around Las Vegas, knew what I was doing.

Whoever he was, Christopher or Christophe, he was a complex being, probably supernatural, and he wanted something from me I wouldn't freely give. So he was just Cicereau in mime make-up as far as I was concerned.

I made sure to hit the Inferno the next night long after the show, when the sweat of performance and the sweet brain-freezing liquidity of the Brimstone Kisses were history. I wondered if he was affected at all, felt anything profound himself. Nah. Most womanizers weren't that sensitive.

I donned a royal blue poplin suit I'd used for attending political lunches for WTCH-TV and hot pink fifties pumps. The silver familiar apparently approved of the footwear, because it immediately slithered up my arm and down my side and leg to become a slender ankle bracelet. Call my look Business Brazen.

Nick Charles offered me an Albino Vampire at the bar, but I declined. Didn't need any high-octane oral stimulants tonight.

Snow showed up in black this time: slacks, jacket, silk shirt, and sunglasses. Maybe he homed in on my silver accessory, which still sported buttoned lip charms. Like his lips were sealed. Right.

Snow gathered me into a half-time rumba. He'd been expecting me. So I got right to the point.

"Why do you do it?" I asked.

"Dance?"

"Snow all those women."

"Because I can?"

"So. You're a human drug."

"Who says I'm human?"

"I wish you were."

"Why?"

"I might like you. A little."

He stepped back and stood apart from me, holding my hands in the extravagant open posture of a dance that had frozen in time. "I like you. A little."

"Then we're even."

"No. Never even." He smiled and swept me into a Dancing with the Stars gallop around the dance floor. I felt quite breathless, but then I always felt breathless with Snow.

"Are you Christopher?" I asked in hard inquiring reporter mode.

"Who is Christopher?"

"A saint."

"No."

"A sinner?"

"Sometimes."

"A user?"

"Even you say I'm a drug. Not a user."

He was too right. I tried another tack.

"I'm searching for a killer."

"You're a hunter. And a victim. And a-"

He stopped speaking. I really wanted to know what his third evaluation of me was. I wanted to know as badly as any Snow groupie wanted a Brimstone Kiss. So of course I couldn't let on.

And I was... a woman who needed answers. To puzzles, to people, to unhumans.

"Snow. You both hinder and help me. Why?"

"Perhaps you need both."

"That answer stinks!"

"Then why are you here?"

"I need to know what Las Vegas vampire got it on with a werewolf mob boss's daughter in the late forties."

"You want me to just give it to you?"

"Ah, what are we discussing?"

"Your perennial caution flatters me. What I'm saying is, you don't want to work for it. You don't want to cheat me out of it, you just want me to hand it to you."

"I don't want that. I need that. I don't have time for games."

"Want and need. Interesting concepts. Close, but very different, after all. What if I said that I needed you to beg for what you want?"

"I'd say, Styx it!"

He laughed. "You're clever, if lazy. Your blundering investigation happens to have hit upon the moment when the werewolves won the Werewolf-Vampire War. Neither side will thank you for exposing that long-buried secret."

"I don't like either side."

"I'm sure the feeling is mutual and will become even more intense, given time. All right. You have knocked over all my defenses. I am helpless. I'll give you what you want, although it most certainly will not be... what you need."

Somehow this easy, even indolent, capitulation got my pulses throbbing in all the wrong places, as it was intended to.

"I know who she was, the dead girl in Sunset Park," I added. Fiercely.

The fact was, I cared about who she was. And I cared about who she could have been had someone not decided to staple her sternum with silver bullets. Even if she had been a werewolf. Everything alive started out as innocent and trusting and helpless and deserving as any human baby. Even wolves. Maybe even me.

Not Snow.

"You know who she was," Snow repeated, sounding interested and alert. Obviously, he didn't, and wanted to. "Can you prove it?"

Dammit, no. But... soon. "Yes."

"Then you need to have proof of her partner in crime, and punishment. Of a sort."

I nodded.

Snow turned and strode through the tourist-clogged casino.

I trotted behind to catch up. Interesting. No one reacted to him. Onstage he was instant opium. Offstage, mingling with the hoi polloi, he was invisible. Except to me.

He didn't take me to his office, but to a private bullet elevator to the sky.

Could you say Hyatt? The elevator was all glass outside and all mirrors inside. The sight of Snow reflected into eternity unnerved me more than visions of Lilith and me repeated into infinity. I exercised my new mirror magic and turned the surface to a golden autumnal color with falling leaves and lots of golden Lhasa apsos and taffy-colored spaniels capering.

Snow saw that and touched my arm. "Delilah. No need to fight me. I'm giving you what you want."

He'd made me think that I was a sell-out. I felt tears as hard as amber forming.

"My quarters," he said, preceding me out of the elevator.

What a Snow groupie wouldn't give for this moment! I thought about what I was giving up by relying on his inner knowledge of Las Vegas. I'd rather be working this out with Ric. I should have told him where I was going, what I was doing. But Lilith's trail was my own particular obsession, and Snow understood obsession, at least from being the object of it.

The double doors to his domain were white-mirrored Plexiglas, in which he was a looming black-and-white presence and I was the humble goose girl. The white tiger from his office sat on its huge haunches before the door.

"Grizelle, my guest and I need privacy and a couple of your best Albino Vampires."

The tiger's growl almost deafened me, but its stripes became narrow and then vertical and the huge green eyes tilted and shrank. A black woman over six feet tall with snow-white hair and emerald eyes stood before us, her ebony skin tattooed with charcoal stripes like watered silk and barely covered by a high-fashion black leather miniskirt and halter-top outfit, probably Thierry Muglar and about eight thousand dollars. But maybe she had mugged the hot European designer for it.

"Sure, boss," the were-tiger bitch said, eyeing me like an invading ant she'd like to use to spice her cocoa.

Beyond the doors everything was white except for the black nightview from a wall of windows. Whereas the Paris restaurant window's framed a view of the Bellagio's dancing fountains, this penthouse looked down on the periodically exploding artificial volcano at Steve Wynn's Treasure Island setup. Fire, flame. Orange and crimson damnation. A roar like a pep squad of distant lions, or tigers.

Snow's Man in Black outfit made him the central attraction even in his colorless color scheme. His shirts always opened to the brink of his hip-slung belt and I noticed with surprise for the first time that his chest was hair-free, but was emblazoned by a vertical and horizontal slash of feathered scarring, as if a lightning bolt or Jack Frost had struck him cold dead.

Were these the scars from the finger of God casting him from Heaven to Hell? Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling had been lounging, languid, and an easy mark for the touch of the energized forefinger of God.

Lucifer would have been active. Aggressive. All pride and archangel flight against the light. It would have taken a divine body blow to send him down, down, spiraling into Hell, or into Hell on earth. He would bear divine scars for his rebellion.

I was unaccountably curious about those marks, but they were not my mission here and now.

Grizelle, indeed lean and lanky in her human form, brought in a silver tray with two Albino Vampires on it. I didn't reflect in the tray, and she smirked as I observed that. Were my powers muted here? Or did she just want me to think so?

Like Madrigal's familiars, Snow's right-hand assistants didn't like me.

But then, whoever had, and I'd survived them all.

"You found the chip designs in my office," Snow noted, sitting and sipping like any busy chief executive taking five.

"Right. The Inferno has a history in Las Vegas. It was just... cut short."

"The founding father disappeared. You were right. He was a vampire. I find it hard to believe he ever became the lover of a naive werewolf girl, a mixed-blood Mafia princess-"

"Some very powerful individuals like naive girls. Must make them feel potent."

Snow's lips twitched, rather than smiled. Behind his opaque black sunglasses his eyes were the usual mystery.

"And vampires like to prey on the innocent," I added. "Makes them feel bad."

"Quite true. Opposites attract. The alliance of werewolves and mob bosses was unfortunate for the Blood Immortals. They must sleep, and sleep makes one vulnerable."

I could second that statement. Sometimes I wished I never slept, never dreamed.

"Do you sleep?" I asked.

"Soundly," he said. "Eight hours like ordinary humans."

"You're not an ordinary human, if you boast about that."

"No. Are you?"

"Mostly."

"What parts are not?"

I didn't answer because I didn't know. "Can I prove who the dead man in Sunset Park was?"

"Have you talked to the coroner?"

"Not yet. I don't know what to ask him."

"Ask if the male victim's heart had mesquite slivers in it."

"A stake?"

"Or your lover's dowsing rod splinters. The wands peel free of bark when they dowse. That very power drives deep beneath the surface, finding and altering, perhaps."

"You're saying Ric accidentally staked the male victim, decades after the original crime?"

"Possibly. Not knowing. Not all of us know our own powers. Not all of us control our powers."

I sipped the pallid cocktail. It was delicious, if I did say so myself, down to the liquor-soaked cherry in the bottom, which was still sweet.

Ric. Did he dowse for more than he knew? Did the act of dowsing change what the rod found? "Not all of us know our own powers." Snow had seemed to sweep Ric and myself up in his mystic trail of bewitchment and hidden purposes.

"Will solving the identity of the dead couple in Sunset Park achieve anything?" I asked.

"It will win you Hector Nightwine's regard. It will upset various powerful and vicious personages around town, which will make you someone to reckon with, and possibly destroy."

"And you?"

"It may suit me very much, as you do, Delilah Street." He lifted his Albino Vampire and ticked rims with mine.

"I don't like being used."

"No one does, you more than most, but one day you will beg me for a Brimstone Kiss."

"Not damn likely."

"No, merely certain." Those cold white lips drew in more of my own creation, the Albino Vampire cocktail. "Check with the coroner on the boy's body. It wouldn't hurt to cultivate the coroner, as only you can. You'll be seeing a lot of him from now on, one way or another."

Chapter Fifty-One

As usual, Snow had implied more than he gave away. The next day I looked up the address of the coroner's office... Most municipalities had medical examiners nowadays, but Vegas still called its head man for dealing with dead bodies a coroner.

An online map site showed the Clark County Coroner's office located on a two-block-long street north of busy Charleston Boulevard, the east-west street that also featured a lot of vintage shops, I noticed as Dolly and I cruised along Charleston with the top down.

I figured I'd need fresh air coming back from the county morgue.

Pinto Lane was not far from Our Lady of Las Vegas Convent school. I was reminded of poor Father Black. Imagine if he saw me driving Miss Dolly these days! My vintage Caddy was as long and black as a hearse, but the red interior and white ragtop gave her a jaunty rather than a funereal look. Still, I could smuggle a few dead bodies in her huge trunk, if I wanted to.

Smuggling dead bodies made me think of Ric. I didn't know if he'd be proud or annoyed that I was taking the investigation by the horns and waltzing right over to interrogate the coroner himself. Having been a reporter gave me the nerve to ask anybody anything, but without official credentials, I wasn't sure that nerve alone would work.

The low-profile morgue building had sculptural brushed aluminum lettering on the outside. I made out the name, Grady Bahr, Coroner.

Dolly dwarfed the other cars and vans in the lot. I slammed the door with a satisfying thump and went in through the glass door into a lobby that looked like a dentist's office waiting room.

A young woman at the walk-up window eyed my blue suit and hot pink pumps. I figured Business Brazen would work on coroners as well as rock stars.

"Delilah Street, PI," I said. "I'd like to see Dr. Bahr."

Darn, I needed to run some pro-looking business cards on the enchanted cottage computer. Maybe pixies would do the graphics for me.

"You don't have an appointment."

"Like death, investigative matters have a way of just cropping up."

"I'm sorry, Miss Street, but the coroner is a busy official. You can't see the coroner without an appointment."

The bland blond wood door to my left opened. A guy who had enough rusty-gray eyebrow hair to go to Halloween parties as a caterpillar couple peeped through.

"Fortunately, Miss Street, I can see you via the lobby surveillance camera." The sharp pale hazel eyes behind half-glasses eyed my shoes, and then my calves, including the sweet silver ankle bracelet of dangling... skulls. Oh, Snow. "Come right in. I have a few moments. It's fine, Stephanie."

Stephanie rolled her eyes at having her pronouncements ignored, but I was through the door.

Dr. Bahr was a big, vital man in the expected white lab coat; he bustled me to an empty conference room.

"I don't get a chance to see many attractive live young women," he said, collapsing into a wheeled leather chair. "What totally inappropriate information did you want from me?"

"No more than you want from me," I grinned back.

We grinned at each other like a pair of jolly death heads. I'd run into his type before: late middle-aged authority figure who liked to ogle the ladies but meant no harm.

He was pleased that I recognized we could deal.

"I need information on the old murder in Sunset Park."

"Hmm. Now that's a sensitive case."

"I helped find the bodies."

"You?" He was looking suspicious for the first time.

"And Ric Montoya."

The eyebrows reached for the sky. "So you're an associate of the Cadaver Kid? Why isn't he here?"

"We're not married, Dr. Bahr," I said coyly. "He's been in Mexico a lot lately."

"What else is new?" His mouth seesawed left and right with indecision, then the flat of his hand slapped the bare conference table. "All right. I'll answer what I can, but if one word appears in or on the media-"

"Off the record, I swear."

"Can't be too careful. We had to shield all our windows from paparazzi and morgue-robbers. You from Vegas?"

I shook my head. "Kansas."

"You'd be amazed what folks in this town would do to get a hold of a piece of celebrity bodies."

"Nothing amazes me, but the truth."

"Ah. One of those. All right. Ask away."

"The age of the skeletons �C "

"Dead and buried and left alone for sixty-five years or so. That's a good record for undisturbed graves in Vegas, especially now that all the supernaturals are coming out of the closet."

"Their age at death, I meant."

"Young. She was about seventeen. He maybe twenty."

Her Romeo and Juliet, yes!

"And they weren't killed the same way."

Bahr herded his caterpillars into a unibrow frown. "No. Now how did you know to ask that?"

"Just a suspicion."

"You have good suspicions, Miss Street, is it?" He leaned around the conference table corner to eye my ankles again. "And a rather grisly taste in jewelry."

"I thought grisly was up your alley."

"And down my Street, maybe," he quipped, laughing. "Okay, since you suspect so darn much I'm gonna make it easy for you. Normally I'd take you on a tour of the facility first. We have an outstanding decaying corpse room, and a state of the art body parts storage system."

"I don't have time for the Grand Tour. Maybe another day. I want to know about the thirty pieces of silver, the gambling chip, and the causes of death."

"You were there." He was impressed. "That's all top secret. But there were twenty-nine pieces of silver scattered over the bodies."

"Twenty-nine? Was the gaming chip supposed to be thirty?"

"Or thirty-four pieces of silver if you count the pancaked bullets."

"Silver bullets?"

"Yes, ma'am." He leaned close to whisper. "You don't seem too surprised."

"Her. The bullets were for her."

He nodded.

"And the man?"

"Too young to be considered a man. The bone growth showed him to be twenty, but the age of the bone would have better come from a catacomb."

I felt a chill in the super-cool air-conditioning. For the first time I detected a fruity scent of decay overlaid by a wave of bitter orange.

"What killed him?"

"Not who?"

"That's for me and Ric to find out."

"'What' may describe it better. There were thirty pieces of silver. Silver dollars. You were right. But only twenty-nine in the grave. The last one was in the jaws of the man, and he was killed with an axe. Spinal cord severed at the neck."

Now I frowned, and Bahr leaned close again. "One old world method of laying a vampire to rest forever. Coin in the mouth; head cut off, buried for eternity. Except you and Ric came along. You have the Kid's same... knack?"

"No," I said, a bit stunned by my instincts turning out to be true.

"Good. I find it rather creepy."

I sat stunned, then laughed! Trust a coroner to find dowsing for the dead "creepy." He was first and foremost a doctor, a scientist.

"We work together," he added. "He had to tell me how; otherwise, it would have hampered my reports. I'm surprised he let you in on his facility."

"You let me into yours."

"Ah." He nodded. "Anything else?"

"It was suggested to me that Ric's wooden dowsing rods could act as a sort of psychic stake."

"You mean kill, as well as find?"

I nodded.

"Interesting theory, but I doubt it."

"What do the police know?"

"Shot and axed. That's all they want to know at the moment. These Millennium Revelation changes have freaked out the criminal justice system. It's just been a few years; the laws are a patchwork that's being fought out in the courts. I hope I've been of service."

I stood. "Very much so, Dr. Bahr." I held out my hand for a shake and he took it in his big paw.

"Call me Grisly. All my friends do. Not that there are very many of them in my line of work."

I worked it through. Grisly/Grizzly Bahr. "Black humor gets us all through."

"You sound like you know a little of what I'm about, Miss Street."

I nodded.

"Bring Ric the next time you come. Not that I'm eager to share the riches, but he's spending too much time in Juarez. He needs a social life and less morbid atmosphere."

And then he laughed.

So did I, so I left.

Driving Dolly home from Pinto Lane, I had the white top down so the wind would freshen my hair and dispel the orange-scented decay of the coroner's facility.

That's when I noticed a huge billboard above the Strip advertising Madrigal's show at the Gehenna.

I'd seen lots of photos of the Strip featuring similarly huge billboards of Siegfried and Roy and one of their white tigers before Roy's tragic accident shortly after the Millennium Revelation. (White tigers are magnificent creatures but they don't hold the same allure for me now that I've seen Snow's shape-shifting bodyguard-cum-personal assistant, Grizelle.)

I'd probably driven by this and matching billboards a dozen times since coming to Vegas, never noticing the striking image of Madrigal posed with a delicate and fey familiar assistant on each brawny bare shoulder. What almost made me make Dolly shriek to a sudden stop was the image of my own airbrushed face behind the trio. And the words: Nightly: Miss Maggie, dead and alive, only at the Gehenna.

The frenetic Strip traffic flow doesn't allow for gawking, so I drove on, stewing. Why not paste up a giant Wanted: Dead or Alive! poster of me all over town? Every Maggie freak around would be hunting me everywhere. The Rococo lettering style actually read "Margie," but you had to look really hard to see that. I was sure Nightwine's non-CinSim lawyers would make hash of that dodge, but legal action could take years.

So it was up to me to provide some illegal action. I had to get that semi-CinSim of myself off the stage and the billboards and out of the Gehenna for good. Pronto! I gunned Dolly onto a side street and headed us overland to Nightwine's place. My place.

When I got there, Quicksilver was out and Ric still wasn't answering his cell phone. I'd tried calling repeatedly to tell him the news from the coroner's office.

I left a message that I had business at the Gehenna. That worried me a little, both of them being out of touch, but I faced a bigger worry: Margie at the Gehenna. There was a slice of me still there and I had to get her out somehow. Right now!

While I paced the cottage living area, I noticed how sparkling clean everything was. I never caught my cleaning crew in action. The place was indeed enchanted, as Godfrey had said. I could use some enchanted good ideas about now.

Only one idea occurred. Could I sneak into the Gehenna's theater before tonight's first show, avoid Madrigal and his creepy-crawly assistants, and do something about Margie?

I went upstairs to change into black cat-burglar clothing, just in case.

I headed down the upstairs hall and turned off into my bedroom.

I stopped.

Walked back into the hall.

It was always in shadow, being an interior passage with no strong lighting source, so the mirror at the end of the hall was always murky, useless for checking how you really looked. You'd only get an approximation.

Only now I got... nothing. No image. No reflection. Nothing.

For a moment I stood frozen. I hadn't reflected in the silver tray at Snow's, either. The old legends said vampires couldn't reflect in a mirror, but that was then and the Millennium Revelation had rewritten the rules. I hoped so, because I definitely didn't want to be a vampire. Anything but that! Well, anything but a werewolf.

I went to the kitchen, got my flashlight, and returned to the hall. I turned on the strong beam and walked toward the eerily empty mirror. The flashlight reflected like the one-eyed headlight of a locomotive rushing toward a film camera.

But I didn't move a muscle, according to the mirror. I was invisible. Not there. At all.

I think my heart stopped at what that meant. Was I now locked out of my own medium, the silver-backed mercurial magic of a mirror?

Oh, my.

I'd come up nose-to-nose with the glass. It wasn't the front-surface mirror Madrigal had showed me, the mirror that I'd been able to walk through with the assistance of his magical powers. Yet I couldn't see that this wasn't that kind of mirror, because no matter how close I came, I saw nothing of myself. No reflection.

Because I had been separated from my reflection. My reflection remained behind at the Gehenna, just barely a material girl, a... zombie animated by Madrigal. My God, maybe that was my soul! It was me... certainly, a part of me.

I shuddered at the implications: yet another me out there, to be used and manipulated.

No way.

My fingertips felt the cold smooth surface of the mirror, even if the mirror didn't trouble to reflect them back. This was an enchanted cottage. The mirror must be enchanted too. Maybe I could use it.

I pressed my hot, anxious cheek to the icy surface. It was there. Only I wasn't. Jeannie hid somewhere behind it. Margie could be there too, especially since she was a part of me.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the realest of them all?

"You," a voice whispered back to my unspoken question.

I stood there, shocked. Maybe I was hallucinating. The word conveyed no particular gender, and it sounded so distant that it echoed a bit.

I swallowed, playing this by ear, by my ear pressed to the cold glass. I thought I could feel a slight pulse, like a heart beating. Weird.

I pulled back. "Then let me see myself," I said aloud.

No answer, but my fingertips felt the icy glass warm beneath them. First fingerprints formed where I'd touched the surface, blackened whorls that looked like they'd been inked by an old-fashioned police process.

Behind the reflected fingerprints an image assembled bit by bit.

Flattened pink pads, curved gray nails... claws. A vague, two-legged shape. Then a fanged, terrifying face, half pale flesh, half gray fur with gleaming blue-green eyes backlit by carnivorous yellow.

The mirror was making me into a monster, assembling a werewolf version of myself... or connecting me with a supernatural shape-shifter inside it.

I pulled my fingers away, but they were bound as if by Superglue. I really wasn't this appalling vision! I pulled harder. My flesh seemed to peel away, leaving glowing raw pink spots. Had the mirror changed into an acid pool that had eaten off my own fingerprints?

With a sizzling, hissing sound, the monstrous reflection vanished.

My fingertips felt as raw as open sores. Had there been any decent light in this hallway, I probably would've swooned to see the damage. As I watched, the mirror bulged out in the same starfish spots that my fingers had touched.

Blue-white hands came reaching through, stretching the mirror's surface like Saran Wrap. Those cool blue hands were the color of Madrigal's front-surface glass. Now the entire mirror surface was a cool blue lake. I plunged my throbbing, skinned fingertips into it, as into ice water.

I felt a bracing tingle, and then she assembled before my eyes, in the mirror, my severed self, naked where I was clothed, serene where I was battered, soothing where I was agitated.

When her full figure was visible, I stepped away and broke our contact.

Her silhouette wavered, flashed through a rapid-fire of alterations from demon to the dead girl of Sunset Park, and ended by reflecting me entirely, dressed as I was, looking as I did now.

I stepped even farther back, exhausted.

Somehow I knew that no mirror image of me-made-flesh existed at the Gehenna anymore. All those expensive billboards would have to be painted over.

Madrigal's act would be all Sylphia's and Phasia's again.

Cicereau would be furious.

Nobody would be able to explain it.

Not even me.

At least that left only one dangerous mission to accomplish onsite at the Gehenna.

I had to break back into Cicereau's office to copy the photo of his dead daughter. That would be proof enough of the old-time crime victim for Nightwine, and my own satisfaction. Getting back in shouldn't be a problem. For now, the ghost of myself was still supposed to be alive and well and performing nightly. It was still five hours to show time.

Masquerading as my own reflection, as Margie, I'd be in and out of there in a heartbeat.
    
 

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