Virtual Virgin

Page 7

Ric thanked the family Charles and looked down to see a quizzical white-and-gray wire-haired terrier eyeing his pant leg with intent to water.
“Asta, no!” Nora ordered, but Nicky merely bent to pick him up and install him on the barstool Ric had vacated.
Ric left them there, a family portrait in dramatic black-and-white against the vividly colored liquors above and the dancing demons below, both under glass.
Chapter Seven
I STOOD BECALMED and frantic in a mirror-world turned into a thorny trap.
Where was Ric now? Who would warn him he was under attack if I was confined to fey stir?
Loretta Cicereau had used my curiosity and my guilt at imprisoning her to reverse our roles. Her boyfriend was not only dead and unrevivable, but mine might soon be in the same state by her hands.
“Any magic you can use to help me overcome this wall you created?” I asked Madrigal.
His broad bare shoulders shrugged. “Phasia and Sylphia supplement my powers, but they’ve gone off to sulk now that I’ve put a wall between us. I’m in the doghouse with them as much as your clever canine Quicksilver ever was, but they won’t abandon me here forever. They’re just miffed you and I reconnected through mirrors. Where’s the wolfbane of Cicereau’s pack now?”
“Not where I could really use him.” I couldn’t help sounding brusque. “I’ve never taken Quicksilver into mirror-world. It’s not like I need a bodyguard every minute.”
“Allow me to disagree.” Madrigal looked around. “I called up a protective wall, but this overgrown cage is like Sleeping Beauty’s thorn forest, and she was stuck behind the briars for . . . what? Decades?”
“Who’s counting? This thorn-spiked jungle transformed from those leaf-bare trees that were so petite and frosty and pretty when I entered the mirror, kinda like your fey assistants when I first met them and their claws were in.” I looked around and up. “The entwined branches lock us in on three sides, even on the Black Beyond above us.”
“Mirror backings are painted black,” Madrigal pointed out. “No wonder the edges of everything inside the mirror are dark and look impassable.”
I paced and tried not to grind my teeth. “I hope Loretta can’t travel with the speed of the disembodied now that she’s physical again. I’ve got to get out and get to Ric fast. I’ve got to get there before her.”
Madrigal again shrugged brawny shoulders. “I’m a novice at mirror magic, compared to you, but I believe even if you managed to retrace your steps, you’d be back to wherever you entered the mirror.”
“That would be my residence,” I said absently. “The hall mirror there is a prop used for the Wicked Queen’s talking mirror in Snow White.”
“Really! Any magician would chop off his left hand to get ahold of a mirror with that provenance for illusions.”
“What good is it doing me now?”
“If that’s the mirror I’ve come toward from my own stage mirrors, it might amplify my magic, at least some. I don’t know how, though. I can quench the fire.” His theatrical gesture did just that, but the thick tangled wall remained.
“I haven’t time to wait for your apprenticeship to take hold.” I looked around desperately.
There was still no “back.” Madrigal was right. The towering thorn trees hemmed us in and the floor was black stone. I stamped my heel on it, which only sent an impact tremor up my foot and leg. Well, I was no dormant Sleeping Beauty waiting for my prince to come rescue me. I needed to go rescue him, so this Jill had better start climbing the beanstalk.
“What are you doing?” Madrigal asked as I leaped up three feet onto the nearest thick branch. “There’s nothing up there but matted limbs.”
“And homicidal thorns,” I said, discovering ten-inch-long spears hidden among the twisted, almost tortured black branches.
It was like climbing wrought iron with an ice storm slick on it. The surface now was numbingly cold, and slippery. And me wearing my midriff-baring salsa dancing top. Soon the red knit would be dyed a deeper shade of scarlet, if I didn’t watch it.
I’d always had a knack for climbing. I remembered unsanctioned solo adventures along the river cliffs, clutching fistfuls of leaf-stripped, whip-thin branches to pull myself over eroding roots and fallen tree trunks. River cliffs? In Wichita? Those memories must be from that summer camp I didn’t remember much.
I stayed close to the tangle’s interior. That meant the higher I went, the more the growth turned into an arch. Soon I was clinging upside down like . . . Sylphia. My palms were reddened and sweaty. I looked down over my shoulder. Yikes! It would be a two-story fall to solid stone.
Madrigal looked small and wee, like an elf, not a muscleman.
If only these were the short graceful tree limbs I’d seen when I first crossed into the mirror, the frost forest dangling glittering gemstones out of a fairy tale.
I looked up through the twisted mass of limbs and thorns and spied a flash of light just as I heard a tree limb crack. Now that I was hanging from the nasty growths, my weight had become too much for individual branches.
I climbed yet higher into the spiked nest. Yes.
This was a giant, thawed version of the frost forest. Huge pendants of faceted gemstones dangled above me, glimmering stars in a midnight-black sky. A clear glassy one was nearest.
If I broke the supporting limb and leaped into the plunging teardrop of rock crystal or zircon or even diamond, I could catch my reflection and jump through to . . . somewhere else.
That would require split-second timing and phenomenal luck.
And . . . those facets were another kind of thorn. The mirror of the dangling gemstone had already been shattered in a sense, to magnify the play of light. It would be like leaping through jagged plate glass into a network of deadly security lasers shooting back and forth inside. I’d be creamed corn.
Okay. I needed to woman up.
Marilyn Monroe had crooned that “diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” but they aren’t if you’re contemplating a leap of faith into the infinite hall of mirrors and angles inside a faceted jewel about four feet high.
Looking below, I saw the impressive figure of Madrigal still foreshortened to dwarf size.
Looking around the thorny hedge forming the wide archway, I spotted Sylphia and Phasia hanging upside down like bats, dainty, glittering bats preparing to loosen their unnatural holds and swing down to cocoon me as they once had imprisoned Loretta.
“Madrigal!” I shouted down. “Do you see it? The glimmer through the forest of branches.”
“Barely,” he shouted back.
“It’s cut like a diamond.”
“A diamond. That size? It would be invaluable.”
“It is invaluable. It’s my way out. I want you to melt it into a cabochon, a smooth rounded oval. Can you do that?”
“Alter an object? That large and distant? Transformation is a magician’s basic illusion. I possess some real talent beyond tricks, but, Delilah, I can’t guarantee anything. Even if I smoothed the stone, it might be acid inside, or boiling water. I’d have to melt it through a process similar to nature.”
I eyed the one slim chance I had. “Don’t worry, Madrigal. I have to break a limb, hopefully not one of mine, to get this piece of hard cold stone to drop. The chances of me connecting with it as it falls are a hundred to one. Just jump out of the way so no pieces of it contact you.”
“I can see it well enough to concentrate my illusion over its surface. If my power is enough to make illusion real, you’ll have your free-falling smooth mirror. For now, hang back.”
I scurried down a long branch, puncturing a thigh. Luckily, the proven power of sailcloth was hard for even mirror-world thorns to pierce deeply. I got a rip and a scratch instead of a stab wound.
After checking my injury, I looked up.
The faceted giant gemstone was changing, its edges and brilliancy softening. It elongated into a melting marshmallow of a surface, so I bent my knees, pushed back my arms like a skier heading down a steep snowy mountain, and sprung off my thorny perch.
The familiar had stretched into heavy loops of climbing rope on my right wrist. I grabbed one cool coil, lifted my arm, and started big circling gestures until it was a looping silver blur.
I wasn’t wearing my ruby red slippers from the Emerald City Hotel and casino today, so I had no magic heels to click together. Instead, I thought of losing myself in Ric’s one silver iris. And added his arms. My mirror mojo might respond to a kinder, gentler emotion than desperation.
There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, I heard Irma whispering hopefully in my mind. Like we’d ever had one. A home, not a mind.
I’d have to count on the familiar being able to extend or shrink so I hit the diamond’s rounded central plane dead on. When I launched into what I hoped was a trapeze-style swing into and through the dangling gemstone mirror above me, I felt the dang sling-back shoes slip off my heels, and then off entirely.
I had a second to hope they didn’t brain Madrigal as they fell, then everything around me exploded into an icy nova of light and cold. Hunched in an upright protective fetal position I felt the familiar release from the limb as it wrapped and coiled around my forearm again, its job done.
For an instant my body hung in space before my stomach tightened as I passed through a smooth cool barrier like plunging through a swirl of soft ice cream.
Yummy! Irma chortled. Home free with hot fudge on it.
Madrigal’s magic eased my way for only an instant. Then I was breaking through transparent layers of spun-sugar-thin ice, my breath sucked out of my body by a plunge into coldness beyond arctic. I landed with a sickeningly audible crack on one side and hip.
I had crashed into hard metal, stunned, and slid down a slick surface to an even harder floor. Looking around, I saw myself reflected in stainless steel. Was I up against the mirror backing of a giant rhinestone?
Loretta would love to trap me in a cage as I had immobilized her, a bug in a blender.
And I had done it to myself.
Ric was still on his own against the vengeful ghost at large, thanks to me.
Chapter Eight
IT COST RIC a hundred bucks just to take an elevator down to the Seven Deadly Sins Dream-theme Park on the Nine Circles of Hell Limbo level.
He was the only passenger at this late-morning hangover hour. The reflective stainless steel walls of the bullet-shaped car hosted silhouettes of writhing nude women, which made him feel he was starring in the opening credits to a James Bond movie. He even had the concealed weapon.
A sudden turn, and he thought he saw . . . Delilah, like a swimmer viewed through a giant aquarium window, floating, brushing against the smeary glass, her lips almost touching the cold steel sides of the elevator capsule . . . car.
Ric shook off the hallucinogenic vision. Who knew what delusions modern technology could hurl at suggestible tourists in Vegas these days . . . ?
His forefinger hovered over seven different destination buttons, one for every deadly sin. Ric was crazy-curious how anyone could make Sloth entertaining, much less sinful, but pressed “Lust.”
That was the most personal of sins. Employing chipped CinSims as exotic sex trade workers was as degrading as anything Ric could imagine, and he’d seen the worst results of human trafficking in women and children during his work in the Mexican-US Border Wars.
Here, he imagined the reality of involuntary prostitution would be prettied up.
Ironic that he was down here to settle a question of morality.
The doors sliced open without sound, framing a shapely woman with long brunet hair wearing a really short sarong. Flowers bedecked her neck, hair, and the print of the sarong. Everything was in shades of gray accented by black, with a luminous brightness putting the, uh, subtleties of her figure into sharp focus.
“Welcome, Ric” she crooned, lifting a lei over his head and picking up his left hand to lay her right-hand fingers on his. Her eyes closed. “The elevator scans reveal that I am your favored gender and physical type, but you need not choose me.”
“How do you know my name?” he demanded. A credit card would record it but . . . he’d paid cash, not wanting to leave a record.
She pressed his palm to her fulsome cleavage. “My heart tells me you find me comely.”
Her skin felt warm, soft, moisturized. He jerked his hand away. He’d never touched a CinSim before.
People tended not to, even in Las Vegas casinos, but he was in touchy-feely land now, a place of costly carnal knowledge, and it felt . . . creepy, not sexy. That probably was only because he knew a zombie underlay the Hollywood beauty queen’s likeness. She was the sarong film queen of the thirties and forties, Dorothy Lamour, who turned to lust object and comedy with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby on their popular “Road” pictures. Ric had seen enough old TV to glimpse those.
“Come with me,” she said, turning and swaying away. “You can tell me your preferences while we approach our private getaway. Lagoon?” she asked, gazing over her naked shoulder.
He didn’t know whether she meant an assignation site or another new blue cocktail.
When she’d turned back he recognized a different face, more like Mexico, like home. Maria Montez, the name came to him. Must be a mental prod program active down here, so the customer knew what he was getting.
Ric swallowed. Both CinSims were about Delilah’s height and build, curvier than today’s gaunt movie queens. How had the . . . program running this black-and-white bordello sucked his personal preferences out of him during the elevator ride? Maybe those shadowy female figures in the wall had been succubae gauging his subconscious sexual reaction to their various types.
The woman’s figure walking before him lost her sarong. A millisecond of total nudity was covered by a slinky long silver gown with back bared to her waist, a favorite Delilah dress-up look. This outfit coyly offered long sleeves and wide, sequined shoulder pads. An elaborate updo bared her neck, definitely a personal turn-on of his. When she turned her head to look over that glittering shoulder she had the face of Gene Tierney from Laura.