Virtual Virgin

Chapter Ten

THE MAN WHO stepped from behind the clawing glamour-puss looked confused, but unruffled as any man could who’d just fought off a sexy CinSim.

“Ric! Thank God. Somehow the familiar cracked the lid on my steel coffin.”

“Delilah? How’d you get here? What do you mean . . . coffin? I just pushed the elevator Up button and . . . here you are waiting to pop out of the car like a jack-in-the-box.”

“More like a Jill, I hope.” I frowned at the femme fatale still trying to glue herself to his side. Was that . . . it couldn’t be! Screen vamp Maria Montez.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“Ah. Research.”

“Does ‘research’ always make you look so sheepish, amor? And exactly where is ‘here’?”

Looking around, I glimpsed black-and-white film vistas of native girls in tropical lagoons cheek by, uh, lower cheek with slinky dames on nightclub floors. Whether nature or nurture, the scenes were populated by gorgeous, more ungowned than gowned, Hollywood stars of the pre-Technicolor days.

Uh-oh, Irma warned. Our main man has been window shopping on the naughty side of Vegas.

This time Ric grabbed my upper arm. “I don’t want to explain here, in front of the, um, populace. Let’s just hop back into the elevator and get to the main floor.”

“The main floor where?”

He looked startled. I usually knew where I was coming from, if not always where I was going.

“Delilah, are you . . . all right?”

“Pretty much, or so you whisper in my ear nights. Regularly.”

Ric closed his eyes as if hoping all this, even I, would go away.

“So, Ricardo, you have some ‘’splaning’ to do. Where are we?”

“At the Inferno.”

Now it was my turn to be speechless. I turned to examine the bullet elevator. I’d never seen one like it at the Inferno, not even on the way to Snow’s penthouse.

“Where did you think you were?” Ric asked.

“Maybe . . . in some fey-sprung time trap. Loretta Cicereau is loose and set me up for a big fall in mirror-land. You haven’t seen her? She’s out to destroy you and seemed in a big hurry.”

“Maybe she can’t find me.”

“I sure wouldn’t have been able to. What is this place and why was that CinSim siren pressing wrinkles into the left arm of your best suit?”

“Let’s just get into the elevator and out of here, Del.”

“I’m not anxious to hop back on the Claustrophobia Closet. Isn’t there another exit?”

Ric looked around. I noticed some of the dark-haired CinSim honeys abandoning their exotic settings and gathering like the three brides of Dracula around us. Ordinarily I’d have loved to interview each and every one, unemployed reporter and rabid film fan that I am, but something was wrong here and it involved a “honey” of my own.

“I’m not leaving, Ric, until you tell me what this weird place is. It can’t be anywhere at the Inferno I’ve seen. . . .” The light was dawning and it was colored lurid red.

“It’s the, ah, entertainment level of the Nine Circles,” he said.

“The Nine Circles of Hell? I know Snow has a key club at the Limbo level, where all the noir movie sets are stocked with the appropriate CinSims. So what are these babes in the woods doing here on their own?”

“You do punch L on the elevator floor layout to get here,” Ric said.

“Really? I’d thought it would be B for bimbo.” I was beginning to get a dark suspicion.

Ric looked over his handsome tropical suit shoulder at the encroaching lovelies.

“It’s the Lust level, Delilah, and these babes will eat a guy alive.” He grabbed my arm and pulled us both back into the elevator car.

“What should I hit?” I asked, ready to split now that he’d confessed to Mama. I had a lot more questions.

“M for Main, I guess.” Ric kept anxious watch as lily-pale hands with black fingernail polish reached out to stop the elevator doors from closing.

I pushed the button, and the doors shut out the longing, zombie faces of the Lust level attractions just in time. The elevator car didn’t move, and my stomach indulged in the classic sinking feeling. Now we were both trapped.

“What button did you hit?” Ric eyed the lit board.

I pointed at one.

“Delilah! That’s not an M for Main. That’s a V.”

I leaned close to study it in the dim light. “I thought it’d been used so much only the middle of the letter was still visible. So what’s on V?”

Ric put his palms to his temples to wash his face free of the sudden worry lines. “V as in . . . Violence. I didn’t get out of Jesuit high school without knowing my Dante’s Inferno.”

“Snow probably ghostwrote the whole thing. I don’t remember a major class of damned sinners in Dante’s map of Hell starting with V.”

“You’re right that; there’s an invisible M involved. M as in Murder. Murderers.”

The elevator decided it had tormented us enough by remaining shut but motionless. It whooshed down smoothly, then stopped with a jolt harsher than a condemned prisoner’s body reaching the end of its noose.

By then I was the siren hanging on to Ric’s right arm with my left. I was not letting him out of my custody until the Las Vegas Strip’s version of Hell was behind us both.

The elevator doors parted. My other hand hovered over the floor buttons. I’d hit the real Main the instant the elevator registered it had reached this floor and was ready to rise again. I punched the right steel circle and . . . nothing happened. All I felt was a depressing lack of depression under my forefinger. Maybe the buttons were jammed.

“What the freaking hell!” a mad-bull sort of voice demanded from beyond the locked-open elevator doors. I looked around Ric to see a stocky guy wearing a teal velour sweat suit. His wet ringlets surrounded a bald spot and he was blocking the elevator exit, hairy hands akimbo on his hips.

“You! Girly. Look at me. I’ve seen your sweet kisser before and the circumstances were not good.”

He glared at Ric next. “And you, punk, what are you doing on the spa level of my hotel dressed like a Cuban drug lord? I deal with your kind on less personal levels.”

Now I saw that sweat was dripping off the man’s nose, onto the large gold wolf’s head on a thick chain around his equally thick neck.

“You, punk,” Ric said, pushing a palm against the guy’s dry velour shoulder and intimidating him into a backward shuffle. “We took your kind down daily when I was in the FBI. Don’t like my suit? Yours stinks. Literally.”

“This is my hotel,” the guy snarled, showing fangs. “I could have you torn to pieces in five seconds flat.”

I’d moved forward with Ric to keep him from doing anything regrettable before we understood what was going down here, beside the elevator.

“And what hotel is this?” I asked, pretty sure all of us had been jerked into a non-Vegas venue, a fey purgatory, maybe.

The guy cast a quick, narrow glance around, then swiped one arm over his brow. He was starting to pant.

“Man, it is hot here. And I don’t recognize the . . . hallway.” He ignored Ric to fasten his confused brain on me. “You’re that naked TV autopsy babe with the huge Internet fan club, minus the maggot beauty mark on your upper lip. Maggie. That’s right. I had you in the palm of my hand. That Adam and Eve act with Madrigal would’ve gone mega-huge. The Gehenna Hotel would have been the number-one show spot in Vegas. But you wouldn’t cooperate.”

He tried to strut forward to grab me, to assert that unpleasant piece of my past when I’d been his prisoner. By now I’d recognized Loretta’s father, Cesar Cicereau, fresh from a Gehenna spa workout room, hijacked to Hell as I had been.

Ric pushed back the head of the werewolf mob like he was a pizza deliveryman trying to pass off a cold pie.

“I’ve heard about your plans to use this woman in your stage show against her will,” he said in full law-enforcement mode. “Let’s see, how many felonies does that make, Cicereau? How many life sentences—and you’ll live a long time, from what I’ve heard—for kidnapping, human trafficking, false imprisonment, slavery—”

While Ric paused for inspiration, I leaped in. “Animal abuse . . .”

“Animal abuse?” Cicereau was indignant. “I have a hunting license from the state. And I am an animal, lady! Sometimes more than others. It’s a family trait.”

“I’m referring,” I told him, “to the anaconda that served as my sole sarong during the run-through of that magic act you forced me into. No one got legal permission from the snake, much less me.”

“Look.” The salt-and-pepper pelt on Cesar Cicereau’s chest was growing thicker and thornier. “This heat is . . . killing me.”

His coarse features were elongating in the nose and jaw, and the middle-aged bald spot was lost in a widow’s peak of furred thatch that dipped to the bridge of his muzzle . . . I mean snout.

Even Ric backed off from his macho nose-to-nose duel with the werewolf mob boss. The man was shifting before our eyes and the moon wasn’t full yet.

The mob boss looked around, beady eyes glazed, panting painfully.

As a dog owner—companion—I forgot my major beefs with the guy, including his pack hunting me down like a wounded deer at Starlight Lodge—to feel, well, a teensy bit sorry for him.

“How’d. How’d I g-g-g-et heh-heh-here?” he panted, dropping into a crouch as long curved nails from his hands dug into his own thighs until they brought up blood.

I owed Cesar Cicereau one long revenge fantasy, but this was not it. More like him being hog-tied naked onstage by a boa constrictor that emphasized every fat roll and made his weenie look like an earthworm, but otherwise I’m not really the vengeful type. So far.

Ric pulled back to whisper something less than romantic in my ear. “I don’t have any silver bullets in my semiautomatic, but I can probably strangle him if he goes lobo and attacks us. He looks more attacked himself than aggressive. What’s going on here?”

I knew. And I knew we were next, Ric probably first. That would be Loretta’s strategic mistake. Taking her revenge out first on her father.

“This elevator is disabled,” I said, punching the Main button one last, useless time. “Maybe it only goes down. Loretta has got to be lurking somewhere.”

“Then, let’s force her into the open.” Ric grabbed Cicereau’s elbow and hustled him over gray slabs of slate toward an aurora of light dead ahead.

It was like running into a close-up of the sun, but that was a visual effect only.

After a few steps we had to stop. We stood on the brink of a river of blood, with corpses floating by just beneath the surface of the current. Cicereau seemed to recognize some. His clawed half paw reached toward the bodies rolling gently over as they passed.

“Victims?” Rick asked.

I eyed Cicereau, now cowering on his human haunches beside me. The atrocious teal of his sweatpants was turning black up to his knees as the blood river water lapped at his ankles like a liquid tongue.

“Murderers,” I guessed. “He’s offed a lot of other werewolves and rivals and inconvenient humans in his time, most fiendishly his young daughter and her ancient vampire Romeo.”

“And we messed with Loretta’s plans for resurrection and revenge, so she’s out for blood,” Ric concluded. “Plenty of it here.”

As we watched, a splash to our right let us glimpse a fresh body rolling into the river. The man lifted a horror-stricken face above the gentle waves, then an arm and shoulder.

Ric leaned forward, instinctively planning to drag the guy out. I grabbed hold of Ric’s collar, fearing the worst. It came with the swiftness of a wedge of arrows that pierced the drowning man’s arm, neck, and face. With a primal groan he swept past us, sinking.

More arrows shot into water, striking the submerged forms that rose up with horrible cries before sinking again.

“Diablo!” Ric swore. “Here they torture corpses. Is this truly Hell?”

I glanced at Cesar Cicereau, crouched trembling at our feet in a half-shifted state of overheated panting and shivering cold. The sharp sound of something hard striking stone echoed behind us. I turned farther to squint into the shadows behind us and jumped back to glimpse a seven-foot-tall naked male with long shaggy hair and a horned head.

“Centaurs patrol this place,” Ric breathed, nodding to the boulder-strewn ground we all stood on. “Their role here is to torture the murderers.”

Only then in the bloodred shifting light of the river did I notice the horse chest and body and hooves that made up the vision’s lower half.

“We’re not murderers,” I told Ric.

“He is.” He looked down at Cicereau, who seemed on the verge of slipping into the bloody river to escape the hooved nemesis that shot the searing arrows.

Ric looked up at me. “And you are.”

“Prince Krzysztof, you mean. But . . . he was slaughtering tourists and Cicereau’s bodyguards. Krzysztof wasn’t even truly alive. He was animated bone and pieces of ancient organs and skins from the mummifying process. I stopped . . . it . . . from destroying innocent life.”

I heard the hooves of the single centaur drawing near behind me, and whirled back to face it. In the crimson light cast by the river, I saw the centaur had a rider, not a ghost rider but a physically solid girl.

Girls and horses had gone together like anklets and Mary Jane shoes since My Friend Flicka had been painted on a cave wall, but this girl wasn’t standard issue anything.

Loretta Cicereau’s long tangled hair still trailed the once-imprisoning webs of Sylphia as if she was wearing a macabre bridal veil. She rode the man-beast barefoot and astride, her floor-length blue taffeta forties gown bunched up bustlelike behind her bare flanks, an oddly Teen Amazon look.

She carried the arrow-strung bow while the centaur paused, snorting through his flared human nostrils, fists akimbo on his hips, which were also shining sorrel equine shoulders. He was naked skin and muscle above the human hips, nude except for the diagonal slash of a leather band across his chest that held a quill full of arrows an elbow bend away from him and right at Loretta’s fingertips behind him.

“You and the centaur you rode in on don’t have any power over us,” I told her. “We’re not truly dead, not fair game for your kind.”

“But I can torture and kill you.” Turning, she aimed the bow past the centaur’s broad shoulder, “and what would torment you most, murderess, is his death.”

She drew back the bowstring, but I rushed the smooth-hided horse-belly she straddled, grabbing a bare foot to drag her off the bizarre mount and to the ground.

The arrow in her bow shrieked free, blurring as it passed the edges of my vision, aimed at Ric, who’d been standing right behind me.

I screamed and turned, still clawing for Loretta’s bare ankle.

From my feet, a snarling lupine figure bounded up in attack, sinking claws and fangs into the centaur’s left shoulder. The man whinnied as the horse’s lower limbs stumbled sideways. I’d momentarily thought Quicksilver had attacked, but it was a half-werewolf Cesar Cicereau whose repeated, growling lunges drove the beast off its stride and to the ground.

Loretta was falling sideways toward me. I caught the ends of her long hair and wrapped it around my hand, jerking her head around and her body hard to the ground, my eyes fixed on Ric, still standing.

What had she done?

Ric held out his left arm, dazed by blood-river red coloring the inside of his pale jacket sleeve, the outside of the pale suit coat.

By then my boot was pinning Loretta’s all-too-solid flesh, her bow-holding wrist, to the stony ground and the silver familiar was binding that same wrist to the empty half of the handcuffs I now wore. Despite being down and immobile, Loretta was screeching with mad triumph, a banshee announcing a fresh death.

I turned again to stare, horror-struck, at Ric.

He looked down cautiously, lifted his left arm farther out.

“I’m all right.” He sounded more surprised than I was by those words. “The arrow . . . must have skimmed 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 you,” she told me.

Owie! Irma yelped.

“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 Metropolis. The subterranean depths where the workers toiled harbored a sleek steel exit door with Circles of Hell labeled M, L, and one through nine after that.

“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 tinged above us. Level number six was lit up, and stayed that way.

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.