Dancing with Werewolves

Chapter 40~42

 
Chapter Forty
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 ber-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.
"I'm going in," I said.
"Wait! I don't know what's going on here. What's on the other side?"
"Maybe freedom." What did I have to loose, except maybe my skin peeling off in an acid bath?
I walked into my own image, which was not totally my own image, into the sheer frigid stream of wintry breath beyond the blue horizon.
My blood thickened and pooled into sludge in my veins. My heart stopped, like a clock paused between tick and tock. I had a split second to regret Quicksilver. Ric. My lost Lilith. That was about it. A pathetic litany of a life. Maybe Nightwine on a good tick-tock.
Me! Alive and ticking.
I was walking down a long corridor of blue ice, like the inside of a diamond. I saw forms entombed there. Human. Half-human. Not human at all. I faintly recognized some from my unremembered past. Kids. Teachers. Nuns. A ghost of Lilith seemed to stalk me through the tunnel, its image impressed briefly over every semi-familiar face I glimpsed.
Finally I walked into a dead-end of cold metal reflections, surrounded by myself in every direction. This was nightmare, not release!
Then I knew exactly where I was, and my pulse began to thaw from a ponderous, sleepwalking rate to high excitement.
The stainless steel elevator! I was alone inside it and it was moving, swift and silent as a mercury current. The doors opened soon after, splitting my image, easy as axle grease, through them. I felt like Moses walking through the Red Sea, only I was parting liquid walls of frozen water. I passed through, into a dark, dimly glimpsed passage: the hall leading to Cicereau's office.
I felt invisible. I'd moved into the ghost of my previous reflection in that elevator. Was there some simulacrum of myself still in Cicereau's office? What had been reflective there? No mirror. A mob boss doesn't like to look himself in the eye. The walls had been dead black. The carpet equally absorbent and dark. The desktop had gleamed, but it was warm and bloody, not cool and blue.
Ah. A slab of horizontal mirror behind the wet bar counter. And there had been a vintage mercury glass ice bucket, too. A lovely, rotund, convex gleam of reflection, backed by a mirror, grabbing the shape of every body in the room into a bent version of themselves, including me. Great camouflage in case I was caught.
Bless you, booze brother, for the traditional bar decor! But for you I wouldn't be able to break into this room.
I found myself crouching on the black marble wet-bar top in front of the ice bucket.
The marble was gravesite cold and I was warm, living, whole. I scrambled down to the deep green carpeting, studying the scene.
The office was empty at this hour past midnight. Cicereau was probably rambling through his gambling hell or toasting high rollers in forty-thousand-dollar-a-night four-thousand-square-foot suites.
The flat computer screen was framed in silver, a wireless ebony keyboard and mouse lay before it. Evidently even guys with large canines liked Bluetooth.
My face reflected in the slumbering dark screen until I rolled my fingertips over the mouse ball. Hmm. Reminded me a little of the head on Ric's stick shift. On the car, my friend Irma piped in. Don't mess up your first disembodied breaking and entering with distraction.
I'd never broken and entered anything before, and I certainly didn't feel disembodied. I was here. In person. Okay. Now I felt grounded.
I felt free, in control of the surroundings and myself. Was I really... a physical being? I felt everything I touched. I felt here. So what had I left behind? An image of me? A ghost? Lilith?
No time for an identity crisis. I sat in Cicereau's big leather chair and clicked and rocked and rolled through his personal computer files. Where to look? The business stuff had to be hidden behind high security passwords. But I wasn't an IRS man or a Fed after his current crimes. I wanted to know about his past. Where? My Documents. Photo Album.
And there they were. The grandkids. They unmistakably were grandkids, lapfuls of wedge-faced wolfling kits, looking as human as all get-out. Grinning with missing teeth. Wonder when the fangs came in? Kindergarten? Fourth grade had always been a challenging time. Maybe then. First shape-change? Maybe at puberty when all that embarrassingly private body hair begins growing. Hey, a furry face is a way to escape zits for a while.
And Cicereau was beaming in all the pictures, wearing that barrel-chested suit coat, looking rapacious in a purely corporate way. Cicereau in all the pictures, grinning behind the wee ones' parents. Looking not a week older than he had in his office a day ago.
And Cicereau finally pictured wearing a fedora in black-and-white images, grinning toothily next to heavyset guys in wide-lapelled pin-stripped suits. Gangsters. Wise guys. And then Cicereau wearing a vintage tuxedo, like my pal Nicky, with a benign just-family grin on his pack-Family face. No silver hair, no beer belly, a sleek, slim fortyish father standing next to his achingly slight, sweet Cinderella of a daughter who was elfin where he was earthy, shy where he was sly, dewy where he was already looking dissolute.
Two things were clear: Cicereau had found an immortality potion that didn't make him into a half-were.
And I had found... her.
The girl in the blue dress buried in Sunset Park's sand and stone. Her. The girl with a heart full of first love and a body primed with unleashed feral passion. Her. Born to be wild.
Her. Doomed to be slaughtered.
Her. One of Ric's Sunset Park dead bodies. The long-dead girl I had channeled through the medium of Ric's dowsing rod. In a way, she was my older, younger, more sensual self.
Cicereau's daughter.
Chapter Forty-One
While I stared at the happy black-and-white family photo on the computer screen, awash in puzzlement and naked envy, I heard a clunking sound somewhere out there.
Pipes maybe? The massive air conditioning system in these mega-hotels coughing? No! The private elevator doors opening.
I stood, clicking out of Cicereau's Photo Album as fast as I could while checking the room for hiding places. I doubted I could manage any mirror tricks on such notice. I was too new at it. Besides, Madrigal had probably helped me out on the other end.
Here, I was on my own.
So, what's new, Kansas pussycat?
I eyed the moony globes of the lighting fixtures. The last thing Cicereau and his staff needed to know was how I'd managed to break in here. I mustn't get caught. I grabbed a stapler from the desk and rushed to the door.
I couldn't hear any oncoming footsteps because of the thick carpets but I sure sensed incoming unfriendly fire. I dialed the light control to dark and with one whack the heavy metal stapler slammed the shattered plastic control to the carpeting.
The room went dark. Thudding feet were coming toward me at a dead run. One pair. One man. I had to knock him unconscious before he saw me.
I made sure to stand far enough back that the opening door wouldn't nail me. I still clutched the stapler. In a locked-down position it made as good a blackjack as anything.
It was against my nature to sandbag some unsuspecting henchman who was just doing his job, but I'd have to steel myself to do it. And hit hard enough to knock him out. I put myself back in my self-defense class mode; first, scream like a girl; then, fight like a guy. Actually, the first scream needed to be the deepest, most manly voice I could manage, shouting "No!"
Mike Wu had insisted that we all have an inner toddler with a visceral tendency to obey that parental shout, even serial killers.
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 clbre 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."
Chapter Forty-Two
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.
While I was daydreaming, Sylphia and Phasia spun down to the stage floor on their eerie bodily-fluids-made rope.
Madrigal turned to me. "Get dressed in what you wore here and get the dog."
I nodded to the stage wings. "I don't need to get Quicksilver."
He was waiting just out of the audience sight lines, a happy doggie smile on his face to see me back in this location.
"Here are her clothes." Sylphia threw the jogging shirt, shorts, and shoes at me.
Wow. Everybody wanted me out of the Gehenna but Cesar Cicereau.
I joined Quick in the wings to don the clothes, sitting on the cold stage floor to pull on my socks and shoes. A cold silver circle under one sock told me where the token was now, an almost reassuring normality. What I wouldn't give to leave this creepy magic show and return to creepy Nightwine Manor and Sunset Park!
I finished tying the shoelaces and then eyed the pallid naked image of myself a bit nervously. She stood beside the prop cabinets, inert as a mannequin. I hated leaving that behind, this shadow of myself. It was like letting a voodoo priestess have a hank of your hair and an envelope full of fingernail clippings and then slip off to Hell with them. Beside me, Quick growled agreement.
Madrigal came over to us, squatted, and addressed us both. "This is the one opportunity for you to escape with no one the wiser. I can animate your reflection enough to fool an audience. This spares you unwanted exposure, Del, gives Cicereau what he thinks he wants, and gives me the time to plan my... our... own escape."
"But... who or what are you?"
The murky green eyes drew close to my own.
"A magician who doesn't need to waste time answering your questions. The route out of here will be hard. You and the dog must rely on Sylphia and Phasia, as against your natures as that is."
Quicksilver's hackles rose at the news of our partners in flight. "It's the only way," Madrigal said. He slapped his awesome thighs. "I don't want you two cluttering up my stage and agenda any longer."
Why not? I was used to being unwanted.
Our escape hatch was exactly that: a hatch in the stage wall, about the size of an oven door. It was fine for Phasia and Sylphia, and even me, but it was a tight squeeze for Quicksilver, even if he belly-crawled.
I didn't like to see a proud dog like Quicksilver crawl, not to mention the tight corners he'd have to turn in the building's extensive mechanical ducts. We would be doing the equivalent of navigating a great pyramid's narrow alleyways between secret chambers.
"Can't you just sneak us out through the hotel's public areas?"
"Of course I can," Madrigal said, "My tricks of legerdemain could even keep you out of plain view most of the time. But Las Vegas hotel-casinos have the most advanced, pervasive surveillance system in the world. Your passage will look strange enough to betray me if Cicereau's technicians should happen to spot it in a random check.
"You will not appear to be gone, thanks to your mirror-silver substitute. Your furred familiar has always kept out of their sight. If they ask later, I can always say that the dog ran away. They never liked his presence anyway."
Quicksilver growled at this, whether from contemplating the hatch we were clearly about to vanish into, or recognizing Madrigal's slight.
"Okay," I said. On second thought, I wanted Quick with me when my life was in Phasia's and Sylphia's tiny cross-species hands.
Madrigal pounded the rusted-in handle open. Phasia and Sylphia were glow-worms slithering into the opening's black vacant mouth. I wriggled in next, regretting that my warm-weather jogging clothes left my knees and elbows exposed to scrape metal.
Quicksilver took a last deep inhalation of my scent (embarrassing!) and we disappeared, head and tail, from the stage area and Madrigal's little world.
The mechanical ducts were surprisingly spacious, perfectly suited to hands and knees work. I suppose the extensive air-conditioning systems such huge buildings required needed frequent tending.
Great. So now I could fret about crawling right into the face of some workman. I could hear mechanical groans, wheezes, and pings all around us, as if we were in a haunted house.
Phasia and Sylphia stopped frequently as the hidden network of ducts intersected. It was truly freaky to see Phasia extend her long thin tongue to "sniff the air for human traces. She could have had a fine future in X-rated movies. Not that Sylphia was any slouch.
She spit out web and dropped over black edges on a viscous thread, returning to nod and lead us forward again.
Of course, Quick's long curved nails made a constant rat-scratching sound, which echoed until our party sounded like an advancing army of rodents the size of Godzilla. Luckily, as we progressed, the clack and clatter and groan and sputter of so many mechanical systems functioning overpowered any sound one of us could make.
Our progress stopped when I ran into Phasia and Quick into me because Sylphia had frozen. With our silence, we heard a strident cacophony like eighteen million machines being tortured by ghosts.
Phasia's snaky tendrils twined around my neck and head and her sickeningly supple tongue tasted my ear. I heard hissing vibrations rather than speech. "The central chamber for all the operating systems. Your last stage of the journey will bypass this, but you must go on alone."
Red working lights illuminated the area and my eyes slowly adjusted enough to see the door to another hatch.
"You can take this route to the outside," Sylphia said.
"Is it safe?" I asked.
"Safe enough for your breeds."
And if we went tumbling down into the maw of a furnace, say, or a garbage compactor, who would ever know what had happened to us?
I eyed the round metal hatch uneasily. "How do I get it open?"
Phasia's Victorian doll's face registered contempt. Then her flowing curls became writhing serpents that fanned out around the round door, fastened on, and twisted.
There yawned another black hole to nothing, but I was growing pretty tired of our escort service.
I shrugged and eyed Quick. He looked like a dog that was more than ready for "walkies."
I put my legs through the hole and pushed off with my hands, Alice down the rabbit hole. There was no lost kitten ahead of me but a big, bruising dog was hard behind me. We whirled away, riders on a water-park slide that wasn't wet or in a water park.
Curiouser and curiouser.
We landed together in a cloud, a cloud that smelled of powder, and detergent, and perfume, and sweat, and precious bodily fluids. If I smelled all this, I could imagine what a wall of pungent and confusing scents was hitting Quick's super-sensitive nose.
I actually stifled a squeal as we plummeted to a stop. It had been rather fun. Then I blinked at the artificial daylight that was pressing down on me like a migraine headache.
It took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust and determine where we were.
We were in a giant Dumpster-sized bin at the back of the Gehenna, surrounded by towels and bed linens. We'd left the sinister hotel that had held us prisoner by... a laundry chute.
Actually, struggling out of all that smothering fabric and heaving ourselves over the giant bin's edge onto the inner service courtyard's asphalt surface was the hardest part of our journey out of the hotel.
Quicksilver and I finally stood on the Strip sidewalk, buffeted by packs of tourists pushing trails up and down the famous street.
Against the horizon of neon lights, the Gehenna's signage stood out. Live and in person! it trumpeted. Margie, as You've Only Glimpsed Her: Nude and Dead. Again.
And here I'd taken Nightwine for a necrophiliac creep. That was before I'd met Cesar Cicereau, mob boss and hotelier... and father of one of the dead bodies in Sunset Park.
So who was the guy whose grave sweet Jean from my cottage mirror had shared? Who was the man to whom she had given her girlish heart and body? I kinda wondered that about myself too.
Who had made her own father want her dead?
And who had made it possible for werewolves to live on like vampires, eternally?
Ric knew a lot about werewolves and maybe vampires, and maybe more about me than I felt comfortable with. That could be because I wanted someone to know it for the first time in my life. Even though there was a lot about Ric I didn't know, and might never know.
Oh, well. Hell! Yeah, literally.