between my arm and torso.” He pieced the action together as he continued speaking. “It burned like a meteor for a moment, but . . . it only nicked me.”
The silver familiar stretched itself into something resembling Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth to bind Loretta’s arms tight to her chest.
Ric, no longer startled, spun to grab the rabid Cicereau by the hackles of fur above his sweat suit. He pushed the half-turned mob boss to the ground again. Then he seized the only weapons available, the arrows from the quill of the fallen centaur, now lying on its side in a tangle of hooved legs, weakened by long gashes in its equine shoulder.
“My aim was true,” Loretta shouted, squirming to work her bare legs around to kick me. “And the next arrow would have skewered
“Not saving the first round for your hated father?” I asked.
She glared at the angry, bloodied half-were. “I want him to suffer longer. I can torment him anytime. You two I want out of my life. Now!”
“You came after us, babe,” Ric reminded her. “How?” he turned to ask me.
“She caught me on the wrong side of the mirror. A lot of that territory is laced with ancient and abandoned fey paths.”
“She’s not fey,” a hoarse voice declared.
Ric and I looked toward the centaur’s pain-wracked face. It remained mute.
The voice came from the ground, all right, but the speaker was the wolfman visage of Cesar Cicereau crawling to get face-to-face with the daughter he’d had killed, who’d come back as a ghost to haunt him and his hotel.
Anyone expecting a feud to be settled or a tender reconciliation didn’t know Vegas and didn’t know mobster werewolf families. They gave dysfunction a good name.
Ric and I stepped back, relieved one Cicereau was hog-tied with silver and the other was caught in transition.
“Why the centaur?” I asked Ric in a whisper.
“According to Dante, they’re the bullying guards on the Murder level. They have chronic anger-control issues and shoot arrows into the passing flood of murderers to make sure they’re in constant torment.”
I could feel my features wincing. Sadistic horses just weren’t in my worldview. Even now I fretted about the wounded horse part.
At our feet, Cesar and Loretta were almost snout to nose and both were showing their teeth. A crimson foam seethed between Cesar’s fangs. Loretta still looked girl-gone-rabid-rabbit.
“How’d you get me to this hellhole, daughter?” he growled at her.
“It’s for murderers,” she snarled back. “You are one. I just had to wait for your errand girl to get near any fey paths and I could send any of you where you deserved to be. And I’m not your daughter. I’m a fey changeling now. They get my ghost serving eternally at the Dread Queen’s court and I get revenge on everyone who ever hurt me and Krzysztof when we were young and in love.”
“Krzysztof was a vampire. He was never young. He was hundreds of years old,” Cicereau spat, spraying Loretta’s furious face with blood drops. “He was an inappropriate suitor.”
She didn’t even blink. “You never cared what anyone did, just that it suited your purpose. You wanted to humiliate the vampire faction and take over Vegas when it was just a sandpit in the dirt road.”
“I did care! I wasn’t going to have any mixed-super couples in my ‘Family.’ Crime lord lore is full of treacherous son-in-laws and take-over operations.”
Meanwhile, the silver familiar had slowly retracted back to my wrist. Both Cicereaus had clawed fingers curled onto the rock ridges beneath their bodies and were holding their positions for undear life.
Ric and I were moving away like a ballet couple doing a particularly slow and soft-footed pas de deux. We knew each other’s minds and moves without having to exchange a look or a word.
There had to be an elevator car in this ghastly place somewhere.
As the heat and roar of the river faded, so did the light.
“I guess ‘hell is other people,’” I quoted Sartre as the warring Cicereaus remained snarling at each other belly to belly, like territorial crocodiles on the banks of the blood river.
“I see the light.” Ric looked ahead of us and it was just like in
“Mezzanine, sir?” I used an old-fashioned elevator-operator trill.
“You bet.” Ric pushed the silver button with the lit halo of light and leaned on the rocky wall. “I’d go anywhere with you, as long as it got us out of Murderers Row.”
“Loretta is right, as you said. I did trick her resurrected boyfriend to his death.”
“You can’t kill a zombie, you can only destroy it, and we’ve both done that to survive. ‘Murder’ has a whole new definition these days, Del. . . . Great, looks like the elevator is behaving itself now. It’s about to give us a lift out of here.”
“Very funny,” I began, when a speeding bullet . . . or something really fast, knocked me into the rock wall so hard it took my breath away.
Ric leaned to catch me before I fell, and that same something knocked him into me.
We regained our balance to see the elevator’s steel jaws closing on a creature that looked like a mangled chupacabra. Its slavering jaws were grinning as it leaped to press a clawed paw against the floor button panel.
Last glimpse.
We looked over our shoulders. Loretta was crawling to tend to her fallen centaur and her father was nowhere in sight.
A bell
We heard a horrible scream echoing from behind the sealed elevator doors.
Apparently it was programmed to stop on every level and Cesar Cicereau was in for a rollicking time escaping six through one.
Chapter Eleven
I had no answer.
“We’re lucky to escape,” Ric said. “Loretta went from skeleton to ghost to physical again, laughing maniacally all the way.”
“She is a pistol,” I admitted to Ric, “loaded for vengeance. To think she was empowered by being exiled to wherever the fey have retreated! Once again, I tried to contain one of the Sunset Park couple from doing damage to humans and only made the situation worse.”
“It’s Loretta’s vengeful spirit that’s causing all the trouble, not you.”
Ric punched his fist into the unresponsive elevator button and scowled upward. We could watch each of the previous six levels of Hell light up to spit out Cicereau. Presumably, he was able to claw his way back on in his quest to reach the main Inferno Hotel level.
How he’d make his way through the daylight crowds to his own Gehenna Hotel turf in his current condition was his problem.
“This dead-serious version of Dante’s Hell can’t be part of the Inferno Hotel,” I said wearily, leaning against the rough rock wall that surrounded the sleek steel elevator doors. “Public taste these days can be dark, but a blood river stocked with thousands of undead tortured corpses of murderers would get monotonous. Are you sure you’re not wounded, Ric, or bleeding? I saw blood.”
“Delilah, I don’t feel a thing.”
