Virtual Virgin

Chapter Four




“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.

Or should I say Grimm?

That’s when two dive-bombing mini-comets came at me out of the black nowhere, screaming like nest-defending blue jays. Sylphia was tangling in my hair while shooting pale, glittering webs of spider goo around my wrists and ankles. Madrigal once had called it “spit and fairy dust.” Meanwhile, Phasia’s dark, sinuous snaky limbs and iridescent locks of hair came twining around my neck.

Now I was getting a taste of the means Madrigal and I had used to bind Loretta in his magic-act mirror. The only difference: I was alive, not a ghost. Their lethal clinging-vine act was halfway to strangling me.

“Sylphia! Phasia!” Madrigal commanded, coming to untwine them. No dice. Their sticky and creepy extrusions kept moving to another spot, burning where they touched.

I could feel the silver familiar on the move, ringing my fingers with metal knuckles. A chill gloved my fingers as claw-long nail sheaths like Fu Manchu wore sprouted from all eight fingers. Nothing on the thumbs, so I didn’t scratch myself.

Good familiar. Smart familiar. Now I had to figure out how to use these instant weapons.

I ignored the twining horror-movie appendages and went straight for the violet gleam of the sisters’ slanted predatory eyes. The pupils thinned to an X-shape on each iris. My new artificial-nail job could make those Xes into asterisks.

Sylphia was mute but Phasia’s cries became shrieks as they both recoiled from my silver claws. The entrapping net they’d spit at me broke from their dainty little bodies and spattered the dark floor of mirror-world, splashing tiny galaxies of glitter at my feet.

They still hovered twenty feet above Madrigal and me, hissing like mini-Medusas. They couldn’t fly but they could attach and climb, which made me shudder to wonder what structures might loom unseen above our heads.

“What’s with your fey assistants?” I demanded of Madrigal. “I thought you had them under control.”

He was staring at my taloned fingers, which made me examine them in the light of the magical halo that surrounded him. The three-inch curved silver scimitars bore etched decorations I’d have liked to study, but I wanted full use of my hands even more.

Instead of nail-gazing, I flicked my fingers and the claws vanished. Even the magician blinked and frowned at the effect. Only I’d felt cool silver rivulets eeling under my palms and up my forearms to vanish under my clothing faster than the eye could see.

“Visible claws are a hot girly fad on the Strip,” I told Madrigal, keeping my eyes watching upward.

“My girls have been volatile lately.” He shook his glam locks.

I’m not saying his fey friends didn’t have reason to be possessive of a half-dressed hunk like Madrigal.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into them, Delilah. They seem to regret teaching me to enter the spaces behind mirrors, but it’s really amped up my act. What’s most unsettling is what’s happened to Loretta Cicereau while you were gone.”

“What could happen? Her ghost was trapped in your front-surface mirror and wound with the same immobilizing web the fey sisters just tried to use on me.”

I gazed up. “Mortal but mobile, girls,” I announced. “Mess with me and I have the teeth to bite back.” I raised my hands and fluttered my naked fingers. The dimly seen pair retreated into almost total darkness.

“They were always possessive,” I said, “but now they’re downright hostile.”

“That’s what I came to tell you. You may think they’ve changed, but it’s Loretta who really has. Trapping her in fey lockdown may have backfired.”

“How?”

“Using the bonds of feral fey may have put her into the Dread Queen’s power. I didn’t notice at first, but Loretta’s ghostly form has been solidifying in the mirror. Now she’s looking as lively as a well-fed vampire corpse in its coffin.”

“Maybe the fey girls are jealous of her.”

I barely got the words out of my mouth before another screaming Mimi was heading right for me—us. She came barreling out of the darkness like a berserk ship’s figurehead, all head and shoulders and trailing body and clothes. Images of ancient Greek harpies, Viking Valkyries, and other mythic female monsters fast-forwarded through my brain.

I raised my naked arms and hands before the familiar could make its move, but so did Madrigal.

“Robaceous trilobelius,” he bellowed a spell.

A thorny bell jar of brambles sprang up around and over us and burst into eerily silent beating orange flames.

The colors lit up the hovering forms of Loretta and her two petite former jailers.

Loretta’s eternally pretty seventeen-year-old face screwed into a cartoon snarl of hatred. “My father ruined my life,” she screamed like an overemotional teen, “and your interference on his behalf ruined my death and resurrection, and Krzysztof’s too.”

Her tirade reminded me that Loretta’s vampire medieval Polish prince bore a name not that unlike Snow’s French form of it. Could there be a connection? It might be a clue that Snow really was a vampire, despite his denials.

Loretta’s furious gaze transferred to the man by my side. “Madrigal, you and Sansouci have always been my father’s toadies. You now walk the old fey paths, as this meddler does. Your feeble magics can’t protect you from the fey powers that soaked into my spirit while immobilized in your trap.”

“Loretta,” I warned. “Revenge will hurt you more than anyone.”

“Drop the pious clichés, Delilah. I can smell a taste for revenge on your own soul. See what you think about revenge after I finish with the one who revived me from death. You will know what it is to lose your lover as horribly as you took mine.”

She fled into the dark like a falling star, swift and then . . . gone.

“Ric,” I breathed. I turned on the puzzled magician. “Madrigal! She’s gone after Ric. Banish the barrier.” He frowned. “Don’t argue with me. I can hold off your fey without hurting them, although they won’t return the courtesy.”

“It’s not that I won’t, Delilah.” He stretched his hands into the flames of his ensorcelled wall of thorns. “The girls can’t pass through my illusion, but I can’t unmake it without their aid.”

“You mean . . . we’re protected but also trapped?”

He nodded. Grim again. “Very much like Loretta was in my mirror.”

Impetuous by fear for Ric, I charged the fiery nettles in a fury, already what Loretta had predicted of me, wanting to tear her down to bones and bury her again. The thorn tips were so sharp my arms and hands sprouted bloody pore-sized bites all over that burned like fire ants.

I fell back. Madrigal’s magic wouldn’t hurt him, but it would tear and burn anybody, maybe anything, else.

Ric and I hadn’t checked in that morning by phone yet. I had no idea where he was, en route to the Inferno Hotel or already there. I hoped to hell Loretta didn’t either but I doubted a woman betrayed and then turned fey-tainted ghost could be stopped by much.

I leaped again for the thicket of thorns despite Madrigal’s shouting, “No!”

Again I rocked back and forth on the floor, tormented by an agony of flaming thorn bites that echoed my inner fear for Ric. I’d stopped Loretta’s resurrected lover from a mass-murder tear through the Gehenna Hotel, but I couldn’t do a thing now to protect the one person who meant everything to me.

If only I’d opted for a film date at the Inferno Hotel with Ric and Snow.