I have damnably good aim. The mark was perfectly placed to make a pendant for the black leather collar he wore onstage. He set the empty martini glass on the same end table that held my untouched Silver Zombie.
“Whatever I call it, or her, I’ll protect the Silver Zombie at all costs. And Ricardo Montoya too.”
He stood, so I had to stand also to avoid communing with his crotch.
“I’m the only one in Vegas who has a . . . prayer . . . of doing that with El Demonio and the Immortality Mob and my rival moguls coming for it, and him,” Snow said. “I’ll even protect you, whether you like it or not.”
His smile was tight. “Now do trot those impudent toes of yours out of my sight. I have a show to do and, according to you, groupies to grope.”
I heaved a huge sigh as I checked my watch. The familiar had remained static in this form all day and night, but Grizelle would be waiting to pounce on me in about two minutes if I didn’t leave soon. It was clear I’d have to convince Ric to stay out Snow’s “protection” without confessing the rock star had a habit of compromising women, even me.
“It’s hard to be that way anytime and anywhere,” I muttered.
In the foyer, the elevator doors opened on a thankfully empty car and a Grizelle-free zone.
Time to collect Quicksilver and finally call it a night, with me safe at home in my Enchanted Cottage.
Chapter Eighteen
SO MUCH FOR anticipated sweet dreams.
I’d come home and thrown myself across the bed on my stomach to think, without changing clothes, but first I’d kicked the damn frou-frou shoes halfway to the baseboard.
I must have dozed off for a short time.
A nightmare woke me up not long after midnight. I’d witnessed the ranting false Maria about to be burned at the stake . . . and then she turned into me instead of back into the robot.
No reassurance was handy. Quicksilver was out. Whether he tracked down lady canines or rogue supers on these midnight expeditions, he had his own doggie private life to live too.
So, groggy and disoriented, almost sleepwalking, I found the toppled pair of heels on the cold wooden floor and jammed them on my feet before wandering into the hall to make sure I was still me and still here in the Enchanted Cottage.
Sure enough, there I stood in the funky-framed hall mirror, still wearing my Loretta-era lilac frock, only with nightmare-tousled hair.
I was just wondering where Loretta was now when my reflection made a face.
“Lame outfit.”
It wasn’t Irma talking so I wasn’t surprised to face my doppelganger mimicking me down to my feathery insteps in the mirror.
“You always hide in plain sight,” I told Lilith, as I gazed at her . . . me.
“You’re always too chicken to venture too far into my world, ducks,” she complained in return.
“Loretta Cicereau is haunting it pretty hard these days.”
“Are you afraid of that vintage prom queen? Or me?”
“Why should I mix it up with you in mirror-world? The only time you actually deigned to show up in person in my reality, a pack of fiendish hyenas on your heels drove me into the clutches of the Karnak Hotel vampire underground.”
“‘Clutches,’” she mocked. “Kinda melodramatic for a former reporter. Face it, vampires and the Strip are more happenin’ than
“I don’t do drugs.”
“Yeah, another black mark on your record. The trip I have in mind doesn’t require artificial enhancement, unfortunately. How’d you like to meet Mama?”
For a moment, words wouldn’t come. “You’ve met her?”
“I know where she hangs these days.”
“You . . . admit you’re my sister?”
“
“Don’t go there, Lil,” I jibed back. “I know you’re mad, bad, and probably deeply sad.”
“Oh, psych me out! I’m just sayin’ we take a stroll on the Darkside of the mirror. You’re the one who’s got a knack for using those nasty biting-back fey paths.”
“You can’t go there?”
“I’m your mirror-image, Dee. I can’t go anywhere without you. Don’t you know that by now?”
“But . . . you claim to have led a separate life from mine, even back in Wichita.”
“Yeah, I’m the tawdry side of uptight, all right, but I’m always on your invisible leash.”
Lilith my own personal CinSim? Interesting possibility. I resisted her distracting taunts, working it out.
“I’ve only seen you in the mirror, only been able to mirror-walk since I came to Las Vegas.”
“To find me, right? You had to want to do that to see me, and now you do.”
I went silent. Lilith’s existence depended on my will, my feelings? Poor thing!
“Come on, Dee, don’t wait until I need to pee and vanish into a powder room. A reunion with Ma would do us both good.”
“Why do
“Because
“And you think I care now?”
“Care? No. I don’t either. Why should we care? She dumped us.”
“Maybe not entirely.” I was thinking of my “scholarship” checks at Our Lady of the Lake girls’ high school.
“Well, I’m ditching your
Lilith extended ragged, grimy fingernails to me and the mirror’s surface, my vintage outfit melting off my reflection as she moved. She looked lean and mean in her hip-bone-hugging jeans and the same cheap, glitzy skull tank top I’d seen earlier.
“Something’s missing in your look,” I said slowly.
“Oh, how suspicious you sound. You look a little naked too. Where’s your Snow-powered silver familiar?”
“Snow has no effect on the familiar. I have that from his own lily-white lips.”
“You’ve had other things from his lily-white lips.”
“Once. In an emergency. And you?”
Lilith laughed, then flourished a scrawny gym-graduate arm over her head.
Black inked patterns were climbing it like a fey thorn forest, images overlaying images . . . the tattooist’s traditional barbed-wire hearts and banners, quickly followed by Egyptian hieroglyphics, Morse code, Dolly’s license number, Celtic knots, signs of the Zodiac and the planets, Ric’s phone number . . . and my locker combination from Our Lady of the Lake!
The twisting string circled around and around her arm. It could have been a Times Square messaging billboard . . .
“Think Mom will greet me with open arms?” she asked.
“So, you’re a living road map of my life? You only record the minutiae, though.”
By now Lilith’s moving tattoos had congealed into an alarmingly 3-D eel on her arm. To judge from the pugnacious head and mouth on her flexing bicep, it was a viper moray with two sets of long, needle-sharp fangs. She flexed her muscle to make the fully armed tattoo jaws snap.
