Chapter Forty
Madrigal stood behind me, his fingertips on my shoulders.
We were alone on stage and faced the mirrored back wall of his favorite place-switching cabinet.
Our images were reflected, but mine was hazy, shimmering at the edges with a halo of aura. My eyes in the mirror were not so much blue as transparent. The entire surface had a blue cast.
Madrigal extended his spread fingers to it. They touched the surface, the way kids play at making "spider" in the looking glass.
"Do you notice anything?" he asked.
"You could play concert piano with that finger spread?"
"Thanks. I like steel drums. Look at the reflection."
I did, frowning. I prided myself on being observant, but this was like a trick picture puzzle. There was the mirror with its weird blue cast, there was us looking as we usually did. I wasn't about to say we made a handsome couple, although we did. I was way too aware of Sylphia and Phasia hanging in the flies overhead, quite literally. Maybe asleep in their spidery, serpentine nests. Maybe not.
When did arachnid and reptile familiars sleep? Not often.
"Front-surface glass," Madrigal said finally, answering his own question. "There's not that eighth-inch gap, that discrepancy between the real object and the reflected one that gives away that it's just a reflection. It's useful for kaleidoscopes. I'm the only magician in Las Vegas to use it."
I placed my spread fingers on the glass. He was right. I was touching fingerprint to fingerprint, with no break in image.
"Why use it?" I asked. "Audiences never see or suspect the mirrors are there if the illusion works, and no one in the audience ever gets close enough to study the reflection."
"Not inside the cabinets, no. But I know the difference, as do my assistants. I want my illusions to be as perfect as possible."
"Great, but-"
"I'm telling you that this is a custom-made and rather rare mirror. If you do have any 'way' with mirrors, maybe you can find a new way with this mirror."
Oh. I put my other hand on the mirror and stepped closer. My eyes looked ��ber-blue in the mirror's twilight indigo color. It reminded me of a vintage Evening in Paris perfume bottle. It made inky blue-black highlights shimmer in the hair of my reflection and gave my dead-white skin the faint azure glow of skim milk.
I didn't feel that I was gazing at my double, Lilith, but at a more translucent image of myself. Like the thin skin that can form over sitting milk.
Translucent. Light drawing through, not at. I pushed my fingertips hard against the cold glass surface and felt it warm as they sank into it. I felt them dent it, as they would living flesh.
I took a deep breath and plunged my right hand through, jangling charm bracelet of keys and all. It disappeared, and my flesh sprouted goose bumps from my right forearm to all over my body.
Madrigal's fingers lifted from my shoulders. "You feel as cold as dry ice."
Dry ice. A mere mist. Chill and foggy, often used as a stage trick.
"I'm going in," I said.
"Wait! I don't know what's going on here. What's on the other side?"
"Maybe freedom." What did I have to loose, except maybe my skin peeling off in an acid bath?
I walked into my own image, which was not totally my own image, into the sheer frigid stream of wintry breath beyond the blue horizon.
My blood thickened and pooled into sludge in my veins. My heart stopped, like a clock paused between tick and tock. I had a split second to regret Quicksilver. Ric. My lost Lilith. That was about it. A pathetic litany of a life. Maybe Nightwine on a good tick-tock.
Me! Alive and ticking.
I was walking down a long corridor of blue ice, like the inside of a diamond. I saw forms entombed there. Human. Half-human. Not human at all. I faintly recognized some from my unremembered past. Kids. Teachers. Nuns. A ghost of Lilith seemed to stalk me through the tunnel, its image impressed briefly over every semi-familiar face I glimpsed.
Finally I walked into a dead-end of cold metal reflections, surrounded by myself in every direction. This was nightmare, not release!
Then I knew exactly where I was, and my pulse began to thaw from a ponderous, sleepwalking rate to high excitement.
The stainless steel elevator! I was alone inside it and it was moving, swift and silent as a mercury current. The doors opened soon after, splitting my image, easy as axle grease, through them. I felt like Moses walking through the Red Sea, only I was parting liquid walls of frozen water. I passed through, into a dark, dimly glimpsed passage: the hall leading to Cicereau's office.
I felt invisible. I'd moved into the ghost of my previous reflection in that elevator. Was there some simulacrum of myself still in Cicereau's office? What had been reflective there? No mirror. A mob boss doesn't like to look himself in the eye. The walls had been dead black. The carpet equally absorbent and dark. The desktop had gleamed, but it was warm and bloody, not cool and blue.
Ah. A slab of horizontal mirror behind the wet bar counter. And there had been a vintage mercury glass ice bucket, too. A lovely, rotund, convex gleam of reflection, backed by a mirror, grabbing the shape of every body in the room into a bent version of themselves, including me. Great camouflage in case I was caught.
Bless you, booze brother, for the traditional bar decor! But for you I wouldn't be able to break into this room.
I found myself crouching on the black marble wet-bar top in front of the ice bucket.
The marble was gravesite cold and I was warm, living, whole. I scrambled down to the deep green carpeting, studying the scene.
The office was empty at this hour past midnight. Cicereau was probably rambling through his gambling hell or toasting high rollers in forty-thousand-dollar-a-night four-thousand-square-foot suites.
The flat computer screen was framed in silver, a wireless ebony keyboard and mouse lay before it. Evidently even guys with large canines liked Bluetooth.
My face reflected in the slumbering dark screen until I rolled my fingertips over the mouse ball. Hmm. Reminded me a little of the head on Ric's stick shift. On the car, my friend Irma piped in. Don't mess up your first disembodied breaking and entering with distraction.
I'd never broken and entered anything before, and I certainly didn't feel disembodied. I was here. In person. Okay. Now I felt grounded.
I felt free, in control of the surroundings and myself. Was I really... a physical being? I felt everything I touched. I felt here. So what had I left behind? An image of me? A ghost? Lilith?
No time for an identity crisis. I sat in Cicereau's big leather chair and clicked and rocked and rolled through his personal computer files. Where to look? The business stuff had to be hidden behind high security passwords. But I wasn't an IRS man or a Fed after his current crimes. I wanted to know about his past. Where? My Documents. Photo Album.
And there they were. The grandkids. They unmistakably were grandkids, lapfuls of wedge-faced wolfling kits, looking as human as all get-out. Grinning with missing teeth. Wonder when the fangs came in? Kindergarten? Fourth grade had always been a challenging time. Maybe then. First shape-change? Maybe at puberty when all that embarrassingly private body hair begins growing. Hey, a furry face is a way to escape zits for a while.
And Cicereau was beaming in all the pictures, wearing that barrel-chested suit coat, looking rapacious in a purely corporate way. Cicereau in all the pictures, grinning behind the wee ones' parents. Looking not a week older than he had in his office a day ago.
And Cicereau finally pictured wearing a fedora in black-and-white images, grinning toothily next to heavyset guys in wide-lapelled pin-stripped suits. Gangsters. Wise guys. And then Cicereau wearing a vintage tuxedo, like my pal Nicky, with a benign just-family grin on his pack-Family face. No silver hair, no beer belly, a sleek, slim fortyish father standing next to his achingly slight, sweet Cinderella of a daughter who was elfin where he was earthy, shy where he was sly, dewy where he was already looking dissolute.
Two things were clear: Cicereau had found an immortality potion that didn't make him into a half-were.
And I had found... her.
The girl in the blue dress buried in Sunset Park's sand and stone. Her. The girl with a heart full of first love and a body primed with unleashed feral passion. Her. Born to be wild.
Her. Doomed to be slaughtered.
Her. One of Ric's Sunset Park dead bodies. The long-dead girl I had channeled through the medium of Ric's dowsing rod. In a way, she was my older, younger, more sensual self.
Cicereau's daughter.
Chapter Forty-One
While I stared at the happy black-and-white family photo on the computer screen, awash in puzzlement and naked envy, I heard a clunking sound somewhere out there.
Pipes maybe? The massive air conditioning system in these mega-hotels coughing? No! The private elevator doors opening.
I stood, clicking out of Cicereau's Photo Album as fast as I could while checking the room for hiding places. I doubted I could manage any mirror tricks on such notice. I was too new at it. Besides, Madrigal had probably helped me out on the other end.
Here, I was on my own.
So, what's new, Kansas pussycat?
I eyed the moony globes of the lighting fixtures. The last thing Cicereau and his staff needed to know was how I'd managed to break in here. I mustn't get caught. I grabbed a stapler from the desk and rushed to the door.
I couldn't hear any oncoming footsteps because of the thick carpets but I sure sensed incoming unfriendly fire. I dialed the light control to dark and with one whack the heavy metal stapler slammed the shattered plastic control to the carpeting.
The room went dark. Thudding feet were coming toward me at a dead run. One pair. One man. I had to knock him unconscious before he saw me.
I made sure to stand far enough back that the opening door wouldn't nail me. I still clutched the stapler. In a locked-down position it made as good a blackjack as anything.
It was against my nature to sandbag some unsuspecting henchman who was just doing his job, but I'd have to steel myself to do it. And hit hard enough to knock him out. I put myself back in my self-defense class mode; first, scream like a girl; then, fight like a guy. Actually, the first scream needed to be the deepest, most manly voice I could manage, shouting "No!"
Mike Wu had insisted that we all have an inner toddler with a visceral tendency to obey that parental shout, even serial killers.
Trouble was, I didn't want Cicereau and minions to even know my sex. The stapler across a skull was going to have to shout "no!" for me.
I waited, trying to keep my breathing from gushing like a geyser in the silent room.
Someone slammed the door flat against the wall and immediately shut it. Good thinking. He knew that one piece of wall was vacant and took it himself. And now he had me trapped.
I heard him move across the shut door, blocking it for good measure. And then I heard a lock snap. Just one of those cheesy set-into-the-doorknob switches, but it'd be hard to find and release quickly in the dark.
I had to take him down.
Right now his hand was brushing the wall on the right side of the closed door, looking for the light control dial.
The patting motions found the empty plate, and paused.
I couldn't help nodding, although no one could see me in the dark. Right. No light.
Except I saw two faint gleams turn on. About two inches apart. Yellow-green. Funky chartreuse, actually.
Shoot! This was some kind of super and he knew how to make those little lights of his shine. His eyes. Wow. Maybe six feet off the ground. I was five-eight in my magic show workout ballet flats. It was going to be tough to get high enough to hit his head.
On the positive side, those reflective irises told me whether he was facing fore or aft.
So... just how much did they see in the dark?
I crouched low, hearing him move toward the desk.
The computer chimed as he turned it on. The screen would add some ambient light to the room. Can't have that. I stood and hurled the stapler at the sound.
The display screen slid across the desk and shattered to the floor.
There also went my only weapon.
I'd slid back to the door during the crash and turned the knob button sideways. That was the "open" position, wasn't it? I'd seen these locks a thousand times on rest room doors.
The chartreuse eyes moved up from the level of bending over the laptop to full height again.
They came slamming toward the door just as I sidled away.
He thumped to a full stop against the wood. If I'd still been standing there, I'd have been caught, and semi-crushed too.
Maybe I should give up now, while I still had an intact skeleton. What would Cicereau do to me, really? I was his prize performer.
I'd only been snooping in his private office, digging up the dirt on his long-dead daughter. Maybe he'd thank me. Maybe he didn't know what had happened to her. Maybe I could hallucinate in the dark. There weren't any photos of her on his trophy wall. No, he himself had wanted her dead and buried for some reason. Ric and I had unearthed her, against all their hopes and plans, promising to make her loss and death into a cause c��l��bre again.
While I calculated this and that, the eerie green eyes lunged at exactly where I was standing.
I stepped one giant step away, soundlessly, the carpet muffling my movement.