Virtual Virgin

Chapter Eleven

WE’RE MAROONED IN Hell, Irma wailed.

I had no answer.

“We’re lucky to escape,” Ric said. “Loretta went from skeleton to ghost to physical again, laughing maniacally all the way.”

“She is a pistol,” I admitted to Ric, “loaded for vengeance. To think she was empowered by being exiled to wherever the fey have retreated! Once again, I tried to contain one of the Sunset Park couple from doing damage to humans and only made the situation worse.”

“It’s Loretta’s vengeful spirit that’s causing all the trouble, not you.”

Ric punched his fist into the unresponsive elevator button and scowled upward. We could watch each of the previous six levels of Hell light up to spit out Cicereau. Presumably, he was able to claw his way back on in his quest to reach the main Inferno Hotel level.

How he’d make his way through the daylight crowds to his own Gehenna Hotel turf in his current condition was his problem.

“This dead-serious version of Dante’s Hell can’t be part of the Inferno Hotel,” I said wearily, leaning against the rough rock wall that surrounded the sleek steel elevator doors. “Public taste these days can be dark, but a blood river stocked with thousands of undead tortured corpses of murderers would get monotonous. Are you sure you’re not wounded, Ric, or bleeding? I saw blood.”

“Delilah, I don’t feel a thing.”

“That might be some fatal poison from the centaur arrowhead working. We’ve got to get you back into Las Vegas central to make sure you’ll all right.”

Ric patted his left side. “Relax, Delilah. Loretta shot the suit, not me. For intent to do evil, Loretta lives up to her father’s rep. In terms of effective, er, execution, she’s a failure. But we do need to find an exit fast, something other than death by blood river.”

I turned in a frantic circle. “Even if we had managed to snag an elevator ride, I think Loretta and the fey have some control there. But there’s no other way out.”

Ric looked left to the river of churning corpses, then right to the sleek metal elevator doors. Their closed state seemed like a slap in the face to our survival.

“They didn’t have elevators in Dante’s day,” Ric pointed out.

“No. That’s an extension the Inferno Hotel made into real, raw, raving Dante’s Inferno territory. I curse the moment I suggested you drop in on Snow to watch a freaking movie. It’s his fault.”

“Delilah.” Ric bent to kiss my cheek. Bent? Oh, right, I’d lost my sling-back heels on the journey to this hellhole and was now barefoot. No wonder the rocky ground roughed up my soles.

His kiss descended to my neck, and clung.

“You came to Hell itself to rescue me,” he murmured against my carotid artery. “The least I can do is spring us from this trap.”

I jerked away. “You can do that?”

He shook his head at my doubt. “One sentence will explain my plan. I agree this is not part of the Inferno’s tourist attractions, although that elevator is. I don’t even want to speculate on what our host, Christophe, did to set up his Millennium Revelation hotel empire, or what backers he used.”

“Probably the Black Prince of Darkness,” I suggested. “Opposites attract.”

“Not relevant to our situation.”

“Which is pretty dire. I mean, barefoot in Hell?”

Ric smiled “Listen, Del. I studied Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso in high school, remember?”

“We got Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter.”

“Sorry,” Ric said. “I can assure you that Dante Alighieri did not have elevators in his hometown of fourteenth-century Florence or in his Inferno.”

I looked around. “You’re saying there are service stairs in Hell?”

“Not really formal stairs. According to the Jesuit brothers in high school, Dante’s Inferno is shaped like the caldera of a volcano.”

Do we do volcanoes? Irma asked.

“Too Science Channel for me,” I told Ric. “Caldera is the inside of a volcano?”

“It funnels down inside the volcano.”

Ooh, I get it. Think a really big zit after the gooky white stuff has burst and leaves this red pit in your cheek.

Irma’s analogy was too gross to dwell on, and I was too weary to think with my left brain, and my blank face probably showed that.

“Think an ancient amphitheater,” Ric said.

My mind was blank except for Oedipus Rex.

“A football stadium.”

“Oh. Rings and tiers of seats, wider at the top, narrower at the bottom. Why didn’t you say you were talking martini glass? Hell is shaped like a shaken-not-stirred James Bond martini.”

Ric grinned. “That’s the stuff. It’s a rocky road carved out of raw earth and stone, one really big and rough-hewn circular staircase. What spirals down, can spiral back up. Come on!”

He headed back to the bloody river, me on his trail trying to catch glimpses of the left side of his suit coat. It would be incredibly lucky if that point-blank arrowhead hadn’t pierced more than tropical-weight linen-and-silk blend.

I stopped when we were close enough to see the upended centaur’s lower four limbs still struggling to right themselves. Loretta had deserted her faithful steed to hound her father through other levels of Hell, no doubt.

Ric picked up the arrows he’d grabbed and the bow Loretta had dropped. He went over to study the creature’s shoulder gashes. “Too bad Quicksilver isn’t here to fix those.”

“I only soothe scars, not fresh wounds,” I said, although even that was enough to get me into trouble. “That’s why I want you up top ASAP for inspection and treatment.”

“I told you, Del. It was just a graze. Meanwhile . . .” Ric squatted by the downed creature, patting the glossy horse shoulder. “This big guy needs to get on his hooves again. The wounds are superficial,” he told me.

To the centaur, he said, “I’m going to help lever your foreparts up, okay?”

Churning hooves quieted as Ric moved around to face the human torso and head lying sideways on the rocky ground.

“You don’t want to be a sitting target on the banks of the blood river for too long,” he told the man’s fierce, pain-frozen, and helpless human face. “I’ll get you up on your feet again and return the arrows and bow that will rearm you . . . if you’ll carry me and my companion to the top level. You can be down here again and be back on the job in, say, half an hour.”

The man bared square teeth as blunt as any horse’s, but nodded his stiff neck and flowing mane. The human part of the beast hated helping us. The horse part had been trained to do just that.

I watched the magnificent headless horse push itself upright into statuesque equine glory as Ric grabbed the man’s mane and helped the combo-creature to rise as one entity.

As the centaur staggered upright, Ric easily leaped atop the bare back astride . . .

Wow. A two-man, one-horse open sleigh, Irma marveled.

Ric filled the quiver on its human back with the confiscated arrows, but prodded his shoulder blade with the pointed end of the bow as a reminder who was boss. He leaned down to extend me a hand. “I always said I was a hooves kinda guy.”

Me, ride pillion? I usually like to drive myself, but there were no reins here.

So. Ride pillion on a centaur? Priceless.

I vaulted up behind Ric, glad I was wearing bell-bottom pants, since the astride position mimicked the thigh-stretching footprint placement for victims of a TSA full-body scanning machine.

Wait! Irma was insistent. We did horses very well at summer camp.

I clutched Ric like a life raft when the centaur swung into a jolting trot, then got a mini-roller-coaster buzz when it began a canter as smooth as butter. As it galloped on alongside the river, the gait’s rise and swell felt as sweet as a wave to a surfer.

I laughed with relief and an odd joy, my hair flowing behind me like a flag, my arms clasping Ric’s ahead of me, our thighs and torsos conjoined. We had become a bi-beast, a hybrid rider on a hybrid steed.

We sped past levels of Hell at its most horrible, carousel passengers aloof from the angst and the agony. It was if we had been forged into a glass menagerie mythological beast of legend and time.

The heaving belly and pounding hooves beneath us finally slowed.

Ric slid off the centaur’s smooth side and waited to catch me on my own dismount.

The centaur held out a hand and Ric delivered the promised bow to it.

“Wait,” I said, eyeing the creature from switching horse tail to shoulder and then the human head and torso. “The claw wounds are healed.”

The human head spoke for the first time, eyeing each of us in turn. “A good deed in Hell is unheard of. Sympathy heals, but there is none of it below, even for the sympathizer. Best not return, riders.”

With that he cantered away to his eternal round of harrying corpses.

I looked around to see an empty, steel-doored elevator, doors starting to close. We leaped to get on the single car, where I confronted a floor selection panel with a lot of Roman numerals, not Arabic numbers.

“We’re at the V, Vestibule level,” Ric assured me. “That’s above both Limbo and Lust. Hit M as in Main, Delilah, and we’ll be back in the real hell-raising Las Vegas, instead of the surreal Hell of Dante.”

A V is inside an M. V for Victory. I hit the button on the floor panel. Ric and I ascended for several suspenseful seconds. When the car stopped, the doors opened on a mob of waiting tourists. We were back on Vegas street-life level again, where sin was still busy being born instead of being punished.

Sweet.