My silver familiar wasn’t getting into any crude pissing contest, but it emigrated from a discreet garter under my dress that I could feel, but not flaunt, to a heavy charm bracelet I’d seen before, dangling a slew of mysterious items including a doghouse, ball chain and leg iron with lock, binoculars, wishing well with bucket, mummy case, globe, scissors, chariot, high-heeled platform sandal, and wolf’s head. Someday I’d solve the clues in that assortment. Meanwhile . . .
“Okay, Mirror Me,” I told Lilith, eager to meet her on neutral ground that wasn’t part of my everyday life. “I’m convinced you’re improperly attired enough to greet monsters in the mirror-walk. Me, on the other hand . . .” I held out my arms, indicating my Hector-cajoling outfit of ladylike vintage frock, high heels, and charming bracelet. Window dressing was always a great disguise.
“You’ll confuse the hell out of them,” Lilith said. “Death by boredom, Little Miss Go-to-Meeting. Mom will love your quaint apparel, girl. She always liked you best.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You at least got a last name.”
“Street? That was for where I was
Her eyebrows waggled above over-made-up smoky eyes that looked startlingly blue in contrast to the smudges above . . . and below.
“Your worst nightmares, Delilah. You gonna be a big girl and show me the way? I want to know why I’m stuck with you as much as vice versa. Grab your cell phone and join the party. You do have pockets in that loser antique frock, don’t you?”
I did indeed, but I had no reason to trust Lilith or even to wish her well. She was not a sister in any interpretation of the word and why would I care about the woman who deserted me? Maybe because I did always want to know who, what, when, where, and why, the reporter’s bywords.
I ran back to the bedroom and slipped my PhD-level phone into my dial-phone-era dress pocket.
“Stand back,” I told Lilith on my return to the hall. “I’m coming through, and if you make any aggressive moves, pussycat doll, I will stomp
I PUSHED INTO the mirror as if going through a revolving door. At once, my arms plunged into tepid Jell-O and even the quality of the air thickened as I joined my mirror-image in the dim reaches beyond the glass.
This was scary. Crossing over had always been an airy process. This implied that Lilith might have real physical presence, not merely a psychic presence, like the ghost of Loretta before she’d struck her fey-changeling bargain.
A deep breath had me inhaling Eau de Motorcycle chick—gasoline, leather, and some heady cologne that blended musk and magnolias. Lilith’s earthy scent took my breath away. She’d always been unreal before, an image just a thirty-second of an inch away in dreamland.
Only the silver familiar awakening to materialize around my forearm in a 3-D tattoo pattern of gleaming barbed wire shook me from freezing under the spell of a solid Lilith. I’d no idea it had a competitive streak. Maybe I did too.
“You have the coolest jewelry, though,” Lilith said. Her debauched wink was just like the Bad Maria’s in the
I had no idea, but the familiar reverted to a bangle bracelet as I pulled it out of my skirt’s hip pocket and turned it on. My usual wallpaper of Rick and Ilsa’s parting scene in
“Mush,” Lilith groaned, cringing away like a senior citizen at a rave.
No problem. While I watched, my settings vanished to be replaced by an eerie undersea cosmos of shifting greens and blues and red-orange hot Inferno Hotel firescapes. I was fixated when a golden version of the Silver Zombie materialized and stripped off pieces of the metal carapace until she was down to her skivvies—real gold leggings and a metal bra that made Theda Bara’s hot-for-1917
“Hey there, Delilah, that’s way cool for you.” Lilith was circling me while I watched my supposedly smart phone reinvent itself as a hard rock venue.
The rock audio-visuals finally faded.
I put my attention on Lilith, still circling like a street-gang shark, looking shorter than me in her scuffed low- heeled motorcycle boots. But she wasn’t.
“Mom will like you best,” she decided. “And I prefer it that way.”
“We have to find her before she can play favorites.” I studied my now-alien cell phone screen. I do believe it was currently on . . . Feynet. “I suggest we keep moving.”
“Pump in ‘Delilah Street.’ You do know how to spell your own name?”
“I’ve done that. There are dozens of them. Some with nearby ‘Lilith’ streets.”
“Spooky.”
“I favor Corona, California. That seemed to ping a ringtone when I mentioned it to you.”
“That was in the bathroom mirror in Snow’s suite at the Emerald City Hotel in Wichita, Sis.” Lilith licked her chapped lips. She obviously wasn’t slathering them with Midnight Cherry Shimmer gloss like I had been. “I can never think straight when Snow’s around. Can you?”
“Obviously, or I wouldn’t remember our mirror conversation. I doubt knocking my heels together will get us anywhere in mirror-world.”
“Pity-party time. The ruby red slippers were the coolest part of the whole movie.”
“You. A shoe slut? Or was it the ‘home’ idea?”
“No place like it, I hear,” Lilith said with a crooked grin. “So you’re the mirror explorer. I just come when called.”
“The phone is wonky. I use Groggle, but there’s a Giggle search engine on this thing now. I’ll try to zero in on the map location.”
“Aren’t you clever? Let’s bounce outa here.”
Lilith tried to lean over my shoulder to watch, but I shrugged her off. I hadn’t forgotten she’d been lurking around the exterior of the Inferno Hotel when someone had downed one of Snow’s mosh-pit fans with a blow to the head from behind. And that got “me” on the crime scene security camera.
I was getting dizzy from turning around to keep the info between me and my cell phone, so it didn’t faze me when some loud, pulsing, lyric-less music (unless you counted “Uh-uh-uh”) came screaming banshee-loud out of my overheating palm.
I looked up. The bland blackness of mirror-world was being stabbed with bolts of color vibrating to the frantic beat of rock music on speed. We stood in the middle of a jam-packed crowd of would-be cool clubgoers all wearing sunglasses.
“Where are we?” Lilith shouted in my ear.
I’d say a soundstage lined with scaffolding, with every kind of illumination—neon, spotlight, fairy lights, strobe lights, even cop car headache bar flashing lights—draping every surface. And they all reflected crazily in a huge mirrored ball rotating in the dark sky of the second-story ceiling.
Even the concrete floor beneath our feet vibrated.
“Hard-core,” Lilith cooed in my ear.
I blinked my eyes against the kaleidoscope of violent light.
“You’re too emo for this scene,” I shouted back. “Let’s bounce again.”
I used my cell-phone camera to scan the room until the black hole of a possible door out of this madness was center screen. I took a photo.
We were standing in the cool night air, outside the box under the giant neon RAVE MACHINE sign. All that mania and high wattage was reduced to only the bass beat pounding to escape the windowless black metal door at our backs.
“Why’d we leave the rave?” Lil asked. “And how are you whipping us around this whip-ass place?”
I didn’t answer. I needed to prove my suspicions: that my cell phone was infected with pixies. I walked
