Virtual Virgin

Page 3

“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.
“What will you do?” Ric asked before I could forget myself and tell Irma aloud that it was an accident, not an assignation.
“I, ah, have some unfinished business from Wichita to settle.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m taking your shrink foster-mama’s advice and facing some of my own demons without even having to leave the Enchanted Cottage.”
“So, after a night without you, tomorrow morning I’m indentured to view an almost-three-hour-long silent film from 1927.” Ric sighed.
“There’s a stirring, newly recorded symphonic sound track.”
“Watching it with Christophe is not my idea of a film date.” He never used the nickname I did: Snow.
“I know, but Snow’s the only one in the world who owns the long-lost, utterly complete version of the film. You’ll be amazed by how scary-relevant that Holy Grail of filmdom called Metropolis is to our lives and times,” I said in farewell.
“I hope there’s popcorn,” Ric grumbled.
“And you’ll see the Silver Zombie again, offscreen and in person.”
“Not a draw, Delilah. She freaks me out. I’m not the Immortality Mob or a CinSim collector like Christophe and Hector Nightwine. I don’t want the responsibility for any being that can be commanded by anyone else, including me.”
“Admirable. The film will do an even better job at freaking you out than its iconic va-va-va-vroom automaton.”
“I still think you’re jealous. She’s mucho curvy for a robot, but cold metal is not my turn-on.”
“That shiny silver exterior is plastic wood molded onto the body cast of the actress, so she’s not as cold as you think.”
“She’s still born of silver nitrate film,” he pointed out, “on which the robot body was almost a solid image beyond what any human actor could convey, other than Joan of Arc in battle armor. I can see how powerful that could be in the wrong hands.” He hesitated. “I’ve had some . . . disturbing dreams since I called that thing off the film reel and into real life.”
“Me too. We need to discuss all this, after you’ve seen the movie.”
“Just go and be mysterious about your next steps, Del. I might be mysterious about how I get on with Christophe and Metropolis.”
By then we were at his house, so I’d bribed him with a quick good-night kiss. As soon as he’d exited Dolly, my prize ’56 Eldorado convertible, Quicksilver leaped from the backseat into the vacant front passenger seat while it was still warm.
Ric shook his head. “If anybody is jealous of anything, it would be me of that dog.”
“You’ve never had a pet?” I asked as Quicksilver growled. “I mean animal companion.”
“Just goats. I get hooved herd animals more.”
I remembered his south-of-the-border childhood captors had called him goat-boy. Grrr. I wish we had fully wiped out El Demonio during the perfect storm of a showdown at the Emerald City Hotel and Casino in Wichita.
Next time.
Given the battle of wills Ric had going on with his former boyhood captor, now a major drug lord, I knew another, maybe even final, confrontation was inevitable. Neither demon nor Ric Montoya ever gave up.
REVISITING LAST NIGHT’S memories of the serious enemies Ric and I had made in Vegas made my head start to ache. I put a hand to my hot-skinned forehead without remembering I was gazing at my double in the mirror, that I was showing weakness to my sister image, my enemy.
“Poor Delilah,” Lilith cooed in that irritating way of schoolgirls who lay on the “jealous” as thick as strawberry jam on English muffins . . . or toes.
She ran her still-upraised hands down and then up her opposite elbows to her shoulders, and then down again over her breasts and behind her back. The motion clothed her in the twin of my red top like a paint tool in Photoshop.
“What an obvious stripper move,” I complained, “just to filch this old thing I’m wearing. Your wiles are wasted on me. Get your own wardrobe witch.”
There are real advantages to living in a Las Vegas version of an animated Disney fairy tale. I have a wardrobe witch and a kitchen witch and a yard troll. I almost expected Lilith to ask who was the fairest of all.
Lilith didn’t. She did laugh until the red of “our” top went fluorescent for an instant before she vanished. I was looking at myself for real, truly alone again. Sort of.
Wicked witch, Irma ground out in my ear.
“She may well be,” I agreed. “And you are truly the last secret about me Ric isn’t in on. He now knows I can see my identical self in the mirror, what his shrink foster mother called a shadow sister. He doesn’t know I also hear voices.”
But you do, Joan of Arc, Irma replied. Only it’s voice, singular.
“Look, I am no longer a warrior maid. My virgin issue was resolved three months ago, thanks to Ric.”
At twenty-four, Irma jibed.
“I had my reasons, as we found out in Wichita.”
Lilith didn’t have those issues. Can’t you get her on the wrong side of the mirror yourself? What’s keeping you from following her?
Good questions.
“You’re right. I’m being a wuss,” I muttered. “Just because I’ve sorta done a vengeful murderess wrong is no reason not to use my mirror-walking talents.”
Right. And what’s with the silver familiar? Where is it?
I closed my eyes to take inventory in a body-sensing moment. “Oh. It’s hiding out as an ankle bracelet under my right wide-legged pant bottom.”
Skin-tight leggings are in and you’re doing wide-legged retro sailor suits. Figures.
“The familiar must duck for cover when Lilith is occupying the mirror because she doesn’t have one herself.”
The familiar is envy-worthy. It’s on my bucket list.
“You’re disembodied, Irma. You can’t have a bucket list. And being locked into a shape-changing hunk of sterling silver is like wearing a pair of mobile steel handcuffs, trust me.”
Even now I could feel a cold, feathery shiver as the familiar slunk up my leg into its default position as a dental-floss-fine hip chain. I eyed my image in the mirror.
I’d faced some seriously dark, subconsciously buried news about myself back in Wichita and survived. Now it was time to confront what was keeping me from using and expanding my ability to walk into and through mirrors.
Maybe I could drag Lilith back out with me this trip, screaming and kicking in physical form. My gut felt a satisfying melted-caramel glow. Try to deal with real life like I do, Shadow Me.
So I walked forward to meet my reflected grin, feeling a breath, a sigh, a supersheer curtain of cool liquid silver clinging to my body like ectoplasmic Saran wrap. Then I was on the other side of myself, seemingly alone in a dark, bare place, a vacant soundstage built for psychic phenomena, an empty mirror viewed from the opposite dimension, a place of eternal twilight.
My world and welcome to it. I walked farther forward, poised for whatever would come, for what, or whoever, I would encounter. Bring it on.
Chapter Three
YOU CAN’T GO anywhere eerie in the post–Millennium Revelation’s many underworlds, I’d learned the hard way, without sensing overbearing powers.
The fey remained an ancient presence everywhere, leaving traces in the form of mercurial paths, just as pre-Christian civilizations leave buried cities and fallen monuments and statues of forgotten gods.
That’s what I sense when I walk in mirror-world, and what I encountered during my one expedition to the nomadic pestilence called the Sinkhole, under Las Vegas.
No sooner had these thoughts crossed my mind than a forest of skeletal, frosted trees materialized around me. Palm-sized, faceted jewels dangled like glittering fruit from their stunted limbs. You’d think I was shopping for red-carpet trinkets at Fred Leighton’s vintage jewels joint in the Bellagio. I could easily reach up to pluck them from the branches.
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.
Bogeyman 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.