Virtual Virgin

“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