Dancing With Werewolves (25 page)

Chapter Forty-Two

I moved as I always did, because I chose to, beyond the mirror backing of the wet bar. It was still like breaking through a sheet of ice as gossamer as a dragonfly’s wing.

Dragonfly like, I darted along silver tunnels. I traversed aluminum air-conditioning ducts, into a chill headwind. I must have been crawling, because the ducts were too square to allow for an upright human to pass, but it felt like swimming, as if I were moving through half-setJell-O.

I broke through a thin blue skin and was suddenly facing myself.

Neither one of us was wearing a thing, except for the cellophane afterbirth coating of the front-surface mirror.

I was back on stage and not happy.

Then I noticed that my double didn’t wear a familiar form . . . and felt my living silver talisman weaving itself into the hair at the back of my neck, out of sight, but not out of mind. Creepy. Still, I appreciated its loyalty and discretion.

“This is insane,” I told Madrigal. “I can’t do this.”

“No.” He embarrassed me further by walking around me and my twin in a figure eight pattern, summing us up fore and aft.

A terrycloth robe dropped on me from above. I looked up. Sylphia was hanging sullenly from a silver thread, playing chaperone.

While I shrugged into the heavy material, Madrigal studied my mirror image.

“It’s not Lilith,” I said.

“No. And it’s not you either. It’s your reflection in the mirror.”

“Reflections don’t peel off into their own personas.”

“You already have one double whose existence you never suspected. Maybe this explains Lilith.”

“She was real enough to fool a camera and crew and a director.”

Madrigal lifted one of my reflection’s hands. It was limp, lifeless. “Only a reflection, as I told you. Without my magic, she wouldn’t even stand up.”

“
Your
magic?”

His attention was all on . . . Del 2.0. “
Umhmm.
I do have some that isn’t bound.”

“Then maybe you did all of this. It isn’t my ‘way with mirrors’ at all.”

I did so not want it to be me. I didn’t believe in this shit.

“Maybe.” Madrigal turned so fast his dreadlocks whipped his own cheeks. “It’s time for you to leave.”

“I think so too.”

I had a lead to pursue in the real world . . . a real, weird, solid lead!

Cicereau’s
daughter
was the dead body.

If the Sunset Park deaths went back to the Werewolf-Vampire War in the forties, my romantic Romeo and Juliet idea was much more likely. The thirty pieces of silver in the grave represented betrayal, and what could those young lovers have betrayed but “both their houses?” House Werewolf and House Vampire. If only the vampire swain would appear in my magic mirror at the cottage to confirm my theory! But the girl had seemed to imprint on me. I wondered if the guy had imprinted on Ric somehow. Certainly their passion had affected us both. Me, mostly. Ric, I could tell, was not sexually retarded in the slightest.

It’s not fair, Irma grumbled, the guy always had the edge!

If I could prove all this, Nightwine would have a terrific supernatural cold case to present on
CSI V
. I’d have solved my first Las Vegas mystery and would have a real income again, and Ric would . . . well, he’d have the satisfaction of knowing who his dowsing rod had dug up. And maybe he’d also have some useful incriminating information on one of Vegas’s biggest crime bosses.

While I was daydreaming, Sylphia and Phasia spun down to the stage floor on their eerie bodily-fluids-made rope.

Madrigal turned to me. “Get dressed in what you wore here and get the dog.”

I nodded to the stage wings. “I don’t need to get Quicksilver.”

He was waiting just out of the audience sight lines, a happy doggie smile on his face to see me back in this location.

“Here are her clothes.” Sylphia threw the jogging shirt, shorts, and shoes at me.

Wow. Everybody wanted me out of the Gehenna but Cesar Cicereau.

I joined Quick in the wings to don the clothes, sitting on the cold stage floor to pull on my socks and shoes. A cold silver circle under one sock told me where the token was now, an almost reassuring normality. What I wouldn’t give to leave this creepy magic show and return to creepy Nightwine Manor and Sunset Park!

I finished tying the shoelaces and then eyed the pallid naked image of myself a bit nervously. She stood beside the prop cabinets, inert as a mannequin. I hated leaving that behind, this shadow of myself. It was like letting a voodoo priestess have a hank of your hair and an envelope full of fingernail clippings and then slip off to Hell with them. Beside me, Quick growled agreement.

Madrigal came over to us, squatted, and addressed us both. “This is the one opportunity for you to escape with no one the wiser. I can animate your reflection enough to fool an audience. This spares you unwanted exposure, Del, gives Cicereau what he thinks he wants, and gives me the time to plan my . . . our . . . own escape.”

“But . . . who or what are you?”

The murky green eyes drew close to my own.

“A magician who doesn’t need to waste time answering your questions. The route out of here will be hard. You and the dog must rely on Sylphia and Phasia, as against your natures as that is.”

Quicksilver’s hackles rose at the news of our partners in flight. “It’s the only way,” Madrigal said. He slapped his awesome thighs. “I don’t want you two cluttering up my stage and agenda any longer.”

Why not? I was used to being unwanted.

                                                                                          * * * *

Our escape hatch was exactly that: a hatch in the stage wall, about the size of an oven door. It was fine for Phasia and Sylphia, and even me, but it was a tight squeeze for Quicksilver, even if he belly-crawled.

I didn’t like to see a proud dog like Quicksilver crawl, not to mention the tight corners he’d have to turn in the building’s extensive mechanical ducts. We would be doing the equivalent of navigating a great pyramid’s narrow alleyways between secret chambers.

“Can’t you just sneak us out through the hotel’s public areas?”

“Of course I can,” Madrigal said, “My tricks of legerdemain could even keep you out of plain view most of the time. But Las Vegas hotel-casinos have the most advanced, pervasive surveillance system in the world. Your passage will look strange enough to betray me if Cicereau’s technicians should happen to spot it in a random check.

“You will not appear to be gone, thanks to your mirror-silver substitute. Your furred familiar has always kept out of their sight. If they ask later, I can always say that the dog ran away. They never liked his presence anyway.”

Quicksilver growled at this, whether from contemplating the hatch we were clearly about to vanish into, or recognizing Madrigal’s slight.

“Okay,” I said. On second thought, I wanted Quick with me when my life was in Phasia’s and Sylphia’s tiny cross-species hands.

Madrigal pounded the rusted-in handle open. Phasia and Sylphia were glow-worms slithering into the opening’s black vacant mouth. I wriggled in next, regretting that my warm-weather jogging clothes left my knees and elbows exposed to scrape metal.

Quicksilver took a last deep inhalation of my scent (
embarrassing!)
and we disappeared, head and tail, from the stage area and Madrigal’s little world.

The mechanical ducts were surprisingly spacious, perfectly suited to hands and knees work. I suppose the extensive air-conditioning systems such huge buildings required needed frequent tending.

Great. So now I could fret about crawling right into the face of some workman. I could hear mechanical groans, wheezes, and pings all around us, as if we were in a haunted house.

Phasia and Sylphia stopped frequently as the hidden network of ducts intersected. It was truly freaky to see Phasia extend her long thin tongue to “sniff” the air for human traces. She could have had a fine future in X-rated movies. Not that Sylphia was any slouch.

She spit out web and dropped over black edges on a viscous thread, returning to nod and lead us forward again.

Of course, Quick’s long curved nails made a constant rat-scratching sound, which echoed until our party sounded like an advancing army of rodents the size of Godzilla. Luckily, as we progressed, the clack and clatter and groan and sputter of so many mechanical systems functioning overpowered any sound one of us could make.

Our progress stopped when I ran into Phasia and Quick into me because Sylphia had frozen. With our silence, we heard a strident cacophony like eighteen million machines being tortured by ghosts.

Phasia’s snaky tendrils twined around my neck and head and her sickeningly supple tongue tasted my ear. I heard hissing vibrations rather than speech. “The central chamber for all the operating systems. Your last stage of the journey will bypass this, but you must go on alone.”

Red working lights illuminated the area and my eyes slowly adjusted enough to see the door to another hatch.

“You can take this route to the outside,” Sylphia said.

“Is it safe?” I asked.

“Safe enough for your breeds.”

And if we went tumbling down into the maw of a furnace, say, or a garbage compactor, who would ever know what had happened to us?

I eyed the round metal hatch uneasily. “How do I get it open?”

Phasia’s Victorian doll’s face registered contempt. Then her flowing curls became writhing serpents that fanned out around the round door, fastened on, and twisted.

There yawned another black hole to nothing, but I was growing pretty tired of our escort service.

I shrugged and eyed Quick. He looked like a dog that was more than ready for “walkies.”

I put my legs through the hole and pushed off with my hands, Alice down the rabbit hole. There was no lost kitten ahead of me but a big, bruising dog was hard behind me. We whirled away, riders on a water-park slide that wasn’t wet or in a water park.

Curiouser and curiouser.

We landed together in a cloud, a cloud that smelled of powder, and detergent, and perfume, and sweat, and precious bodily fluids. If I smelled all this, I could imagine what a wall of pungent and confusing scents was hitting Quick’s super-sensitive nose.

I actually stifled a squeal as we plummeted to a stop. It had been rather fun. Then I blinked at the artificial daylight that was pressing down on me like a migraine headache.

It took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust and determine where we were.

We were in a giant Dumpster-sized bin at the back of the Gehenna, surrounded by towels and bed linens. We’d left the sinister hotel that had held us prisoner by . . . a laundry chute.

Actually, struggling out of all that smothering fabric and heaving ourselves over the giant bin’s edge onto the inner service courtyard’s asphalt surface was the hardest part of our journey out of the hotel.

Quicksilver and I finally stood on the Strip sidewalk, buffeted by packs of tourists pushing trails up and down the famous street.

Against the horizon of neon lights, the Gehenna’s signage stood out. Live and in person! it trumpeted.
Margie, as You’ve Only Glimpsed Her: Nude and Dead. Again.

And here I’d taken Nightwine for a necrophiliac creep. That was before I’d met Cesar Cicereau, mob boss and hotelier . . . and father of one of the dead bodies in Sunset Park.

So who was the guy whose grave sweet Jean from my cottage mirror had shared? Who was the man to whom she had given her girlish heart and body? I kinda wondered that about myself too.

Who had made her own father want her dead?

And who had made it possible for werewolves to live on like vampires, eternally?

Ric knew a lot about werewolves and maybe vampires, and maybe more about me than I felt comfortable with. That could be because I wanted someone to know it for the first time in my life. Even though there was a lot about Ric I didn’t know, and might never know.

Oh, well. Hell! Yeah, literally.

Chapter Forty-Three

Quicksilver and I hoofed it back to our Sunset Road home, footsore but happy to be together and free. I patted his head as I punched in the code that would open the gates to our cottage.

“They didn’t much like you at the Gehenna, but I sure was glad you were there.”

He made excited whining sounds that meant:
let me in and at my food bowl, Mama!

Inside I found the cottage rooms neat, cool, empty, and peaceful.

Only the blinking red light on the cottage’s non-vintage answering machine intruded on the homecoming mood.

First I filled Quick’s water and food bowls.

Then I gobbled some cherries and grapes from the refrigerator and poured myself a gleaming goblet of Merlot. I’ve never been a wine snob and Hannibal Lector can keep his “nice Chianti” for the liver-eating among us, which were unfortunately too populous lately, post Millennium Revelation.

Then, ever the reporter, I skimmed the Las Vegas papers that had piled up and found a second front-section story that made me raise my eyebrows and then some.

Last . . . I listened to my messages.

First.

“My God! Del! Where are you? I’m frantic. Your cell is on voice mail. All I get here is an answering machine . . . ”

Ric’s voice. I replayed the message.
Would I like to be a spider-sylph with him in my web!
Truthfully, the sound of his voice snapped me the last bit out of a very bad dream.

I redialed instantly and got his cell phone.

“Del! You’re back. What the hell happened? I’ve been frantic—”

Hey, I liked somebody being frantic about me, especially twice.

“I’m okay. It’s been . . . surreal. Can we meet? Talk about it? I’ve drummed up some good leads.”

“Leads? Do you have any idea? I need to see you.”

“Right. I have lots of new info.”

“Screw the info. I need to see you. See that you’re all right.”

“Where? When?”

“Now. Um, I don’t know. Where do you want to be seen?”

“With you.”

There was a long pause. “I know you’ve been through something. I don’t know what. What will make it better?”

“You.”

An even longer pause.

“How?”

“Just get over here.”

“Your dog on the premises?”

“Yes, but he’ll be off for a run by the time you get here. He’s ready for one.”

                                                                                          * * * *

Ric arrived only ten minutes after Quicksilver left.

I let him in, kissed him with fresh layer of Lip Venom on, and then settled him down with his own glass of Merlot. Between my tingling lip gloss and the wine, he was licking his chops like Quicksilver enjoying a steak.

“You’re going to make me an addict of a girly beauty product,” he said. “So where have you been?”

“And where have
you
been? But me first.”

“Suits me, believe it.”

I told him about my abduction and brief magical stage career at the Gehenna. I didn’t mention my new mirror-melting facilities.

“I’m not surprised,” Ric said after a couple steadying sips of wine. “You did the right thing. Undercover credo: don’t struggle when you’re outmanned, pretend to go along, and then get the hell out. Plus, you’ve identified one of the corpses in Sunset Park. Good job.”

I loved it when Ric treated me as an investigative equal. I’d been kidnapped by a couple of incompetent wise guys. It had been more freaky than threatening, and I had gotten myself free, with more knowledge than we’d had before. Of course, I didn’t mention the mirror or the “girl I’d left behind . . .”

“So I come home to a pile of newspapers,” I went on.

“I subscribe too.”

“Then you must have read this little article.”

I knew the small-type headline by heart:
City detective attacked in sinkhole.
I watched his face as he saw it: total LE (law enforcement) non-reaction. That’s when I knew.

“What’s the Sinkhole, Ric?”

“Badder than bad. More north than North Las Vegas. Actually, its location seems to . . . . move. You don’t want to go there, even if you can find it. It’s where the worst predatory unhumans hang out, the penny-ante, low-brow loser unhumans, I should say.”

“Kind of a Brigadoon for hell-raiser set. Why do you think Detective Haskell was there?”

“Probably had a snitch in the area. Haskell is pretty penny-ante and low-brow himself.”

“True.”

I got up, collected Ric’s wine glass, and refilled it. Mine too. When I brought his glass back, I brushed knuckles with him.

He flinched. Not much. Just enough.

I sat down opposite him. “The newspaper says that Haskell was attacked and beaten. Pretty badly.”

“Couldn’t have happened to a nastier guy.”

“He’s in the hospital, Ric. The story says he was mutilated. In a very sensitive area. Chewed.”

Ric put down the wine glass. He stood up. A good offense is the best defense. “What? You think I’m a freaking werewolf?”

“I can see your bruised and cut knuckles from here. I think you should tell me what you did.”

“Am I asking you the gory details of your sojourn at the Gehenna? I’m sure there are some.”

“A few. Nothing serious. What did you do to Haskell?”

“First I got seriously mad. No one mauls you but me.”

“I’m so flattered.”

“So I faked a snitch appointment and went down to the Sinkhole at night and beat the hell out of him. It was a fair fight. If he’d had any balls he could have beat the hell out of me.”

“Apparently he doesn’t have much for balls now.”

“That wasn’t me. I left him unconscious and got out of there. He didn’t even see what hit him, didn’t know who I was. Something else must have got to him after I left.”

“You don’t sound sorry.”

“Are you?”

“
We
might be. He’s still alive. He must have you on his list of possibles.”

“No, I tell you. I dressed for the neighborhood.

You

wouldn’t have recognized me. He didn’t see anything

coming but my fists. I suppose you’re pissed because I

went out and avenged your honor. You’re liberated and

you wanted to do it yourself.”

“I’m liberated,” I agreed, “and I want . . . you.”

He actually waited for the rest of my sentence. “I want you
to
. . . .”

Here’s the thing. Sure, I wanted to solve the crime, get the better of Nightwine’s pride and money, establish myself as a player in Las Vegas, get the hot story, save that poor dead girl’s soul maybe, but mostly I wanted Ric.

“I want a date. Formal.”

“Easy.” He sounded relieved. The little woman just wanted a formal night out, a date. “Where? When?”

“Some hotel. Some restaurant. You know Las Vegas, but maybe you don’t know me. You pick. The place, the time, the action.”

I almost heard his breath stop.

I’d been putting my faith in him and I didn’t really know a thing about him, except he was as good as I was about maintaining secrets. Seeing Madrigal and his mysterious assistants had made me unhappy with the status quo with Ric. This wasn’t going to work unless I got behind those very attractive barriers he erected. Why did he never shed his clothes? Why did he like to control my vertical and horizontal so much?

Yeah, I had phobias to overcome. But so did he.

This had to be an equal deal. I was willing to play a little strip poker if I got a little strip poker back in return. So. My challenge. Me. Stripped. And his play. Next.