Virtual Virgin

Chapter Eighteen

SO MUCH FOR anticipated sweet dreams.

I’d come home and thrown myself across the bed on my stomach to think, without changing clothes, but first I’d kicked the damn frou-frou shoes halfway to the baseboard.

I must have dozed off for a short time.

A nightmare woke me up not long after midnight. I’d witnessed the ranting false Maria about to be burned at the stake . . . and then she turned into me instead of back into the robot.

No reassurance was handy. Quicksilver was out. Whether he tracked down lady canines or rogue supers on these midnight expeditions, he had his own doggie private life to live too.

So, groggy and disoriented, almost sleepwalking, I found the toppled pair of heels on the cold wooden floor and jammed them on my feet before wandering into the hall to make sure I was still me and still here in the Enchanted Cottage.

Sure enough, there I stood in the funky-framed hall mirror, still wearing my Loretta-era lilac frock, only with nightmare-tousled hair.

I was just wondering where Loretta was now when my reflection made a face.

“Lame outfit.”

It wasn’t Irma talking so I wasn’t surprised to face my doppelganger mimicking me down to my feathery insteps in the mirror.

“You always hide in plain sight,” I told Lilith, as I gazed at her . . . me.

“You’re always too chicken to venture too far into my world, ducks,” she complained in return.

“Loretta Cicereau is haunting it pretty hard these days.”

“Are you afraid of that vintage prom queen? Or me?”

“Why should I mix it up with you in mirror-world? The only time you actually deigned to show up in person in my reality, a pack of fiendish hyenas on your heels drove me into the clutches of the Karnak Hotel vampire underground.”

“‘Clutches,’” she mocked. “Kinda melodramatic for a former reporter. Face it, vampires and the Strip are more happenin’ than your usual back-alley investigations. Come on, Dee. Come visit me and I’ll take you on a real interesting trip.”

“I don’t do drugs.”

“Yeah, another black mark on your record. The trip I have in mind doesn’t require artificial enhancement, unfortunately. How’d you like to meet Mama?”

For a moment, words wouldn’t come. “You’ve met her?”

“I know where she hangs these days.”

“You . . . admit you’re my sister?”

“Ooh, you should see your face, Dee-li-lah. As if you’d tasted a moldy pickle. Or something naughtier . . .” Lilith’s puckered lips produced that calculated wicked expression I knew well.

“Don’t go there, Lil,” I jibed back. “I know you’re mad, bad, and probably deeply sad.”

“Oh, psych me out! I’m just sayin’ we take a stroll on the Darkside of the mirror. You’re the one who’s got a knack for using those nasty biting-back fey paths.”

“You can’t go there?”

“I’m your mirror-image, Dee. I can’t go anywhere without you. Don’t you know that by now?”

“But . . . you claim to have led a separate life from mine, even back in Wichita.”

“Yeah, I’m the tawdry side of uptight, all right, but I’m always on your invisible leash.”

Lilith my own personal CinSim? Interesting possibility. I resisted her distracting taunts, working it out.

“I’ve only seen you in the mirror, only been able to mirror-walk since I came to Las Vegas.”

“To find me, right? You had to want to do that to see me, and now you do.”

I went silent. Lilith’s existence depended on my will, my feelings? Poor thing!

“Come on, Dee, don’t wait until I need to pee and vanish into a powder room. A reunion with Ma would do us both good.”

“Why do you know about her and I don’t?”

“Because you didn’t want to until now.”

“And you think I care now?”

“Care? No. I don’t either. Why should we care? She dumped us.”

“Maybe not entirely.” I was thinking of my “scholarship” checks at Our Lady of the Lake girls’ high school.

“Well, I’m ditching your Alice in Wonderland outfit. I’m not going to be seen like that outside your mirror.”

Lilith extended ragged, grimy fingernails to me and the mirror’s surface, my vintage outfit melting off my reflection as she moved. She looked lean and mean in her hip-bone-hugging jeans and the same cheap, glitzy skull tank top I’d seen earlier.

“Something’s missing in your look,” I said slowly.

“Oh, how suspicious you sound. You look a little naked too. Where’s your Snow-powered silver familiar?”

“Snow has no effect on the familiar. I have that from his own lily-white lips.”

“You’ve had other things from his lily-white lips.”

“Once. In an emergency. And you?”

Lilith laughed, then flourished a scrawny gym-graduate arm over her head.

Black inked patterns were climbing it like a fey thorn forest, images overlaying images . . . the tattooist’s traditional barbed-wire hearts and banners, quickly followed by Egyptian hieroglyphics, Morse code, Dolly’s license number, Celtic knots, signs of the Zodiac and the planets, Ric’s phone number . . . and my locker combination from Our Lady of the Lake!

The twisting string circled around and around her arm. It could have been a Times Square messaging billboard . . .

“Think Mom will greet me with open arms?” she asked.

“So, you’re a living road map of my life? You only record the minutiae, though.”

By now Lilith’s moving tattoos had congealed into an alarmingly 3-D eel on her arm. To judge from the pugnacious head and mouth on her flexing bicep, it was a viper moray with two sets of long, needle-sharp fangs. She flexed her muscle to make the fully armed tattoo jaws snap.

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 found. I was a foundling, Lilith. An abandoned infant. Where did you come from?”

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 your riveted ass pockets with my World War Two pinup platform heels.”

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 Metropolis movie. “Does that tricked-out cell phone of yours get a signal in mirror-world?”

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 Casablanca came up while the lyrics of “I Love Paris” played like a whisper in the vast, inhuman space.

“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 Cleopatra version look wimpy. It was Beyoncé belting out “Get Me Bodied.”

“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. Kazzam!

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 through the jammed parking lot until I came to a curb where I could stop and figure this out.

Giggle operated like a fey clone of Groggle, so I swiped around and got up its map program . . . Terra Infirma. I made a face at the name, no doubt a jab at unmagic-bearing mortals. Those fey, on the mischievous side when they weren’t being wicked deadly. I texted in the location.

“This neighborhood is just what it looks like,” I murmured as much to myself as Lilith. “It’s a light industrial area. Small manufacturing companies.”

Even as I spoke, I recalled what Hector had called the Immortality Mob when I first arrived in Vegas. Could this be a secret outpost . . . or headquarters . . . for that mysterious operation? A Vegas version of George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic company that offered special effects on a supernatural scale?

After remembering her presence I reported to Lilith. “The other buildings are deserted at night. The rock palace probably doesn’t have any neighbors to complain. Doesn’t seem a likely place to find long-lost moms.”

“Then, let’s head back to Rave Machine for some surefire fun. You can dance if you ditch the statement spike heels.”

I wasn’t ready to give up on the ghost in the machine.

I used the phone’s camera to pan the area. It showed a few other boxy buildings, most one-story, dark, and surrounded by vacant parking lots. I walked along the curb until a sodium iodide light’s peachy glow lit up the signpost.

“Delilah Street,” Lilith breathed behind me. “So this is Corona, California. Home of raves and . . . us?”

“No home here.” I studied the cell screen’s list of businesses along this section of the street. Small manufacturing companies, mostly.

“What a snoozer street.” Lilith was jigging from foot to foot, hands down her jean pockets, stuck in rebellious teen mode. “I’m heading back to the rave for some fun. If Mom’s around here and worth finding, she’ll show up there.”

“Lilith.” I sighed. “That’s an unrented building, I’d bet. The current occupants are there illegally.”

“Illegal is part of the thrill, but what would you know about that? The first man you ever got it on with is the Law.”

“Ex-law enforcement. Ric’s a private consultant now.”

“Still has the soul of a federale, if he still has a soul.”

“You have any other setting but ‘taunt’?”

“Now’s when you tell me I’m a very unhappy girl acting out.” She pouted and turned her profile to flash the tiny blue topaz nose stud I used to also call mine before I discovered her.

What an odd feeling to want to slap yourself in the face.

“Why bother?” I told Lilith. “You dragged me here and now all you want is music, music, music. I’m going to check out the scene farther down the street. I’ll pick you up at the rave on the way back, if my route happens to go that way.”

In this deserted area, my every high-heeled step sounded as loud as a single clap of hands. After a couple yards, I could hear her emo-girl boot-drags fading in the opposite direction.

Without Lilith to worry about, my elation at this trip in time and space came bubbling out. Loretta Cicereau wasn’t the only one who’d walked fey paths. I’d put myself and Lilith in California, three hundred miles from Vegas, in the blink of a smartphone screen.

A faint tinny sound was all that remained of the rave. I passed lit signs that hawked manufacturers of rubber products and energy food and drink lines. Did my . . . our mother toil at one of these places in daylight hours? Was she an assembly worker? A receptionist? Or a sales rep, maybe?

No. Not a sales rep. I wanted to find her in humble circumstances, a former unwed teen whose life had been a string of impulsive mistakes, like me and Lilith. I wanted her to be someone I could pity and feel superior to, glad I’d never known her. I was getting over what the social services in Wichita had done to me, but Mama was the First Cause. The Root of All Evil. I stopped. Looked at the phone I was clutching as if to crush it.

Unsettled anger issues, maybe? came Irma’s chirpy tone. My advice: lose the rage and stow the smarty phone in your pocket.

“You’re back.”

You got rid of the doppelganger. Three’s a crowd.

“Lilith was getting tiresome,” I agreed, “but you are too.”

Me? I’m your best scout. See that two-story building with the corrugated steel sides?

I looked, and nodded. “There are cars parked around it.”

Cars? That meant . . . occupants. Now. At night.

I pushed my almost seventy-year-old shoes into a trot. I sounded like a hansom cab horse in a Sherlock Holmes movie, but in less than a minute I’d passed the sixty or so parked small sports convertibles, feeling a deep pang for the absence of Dolly’s immense and protective Cadillac bulk.

The familiar chimed faintly on my wrist, like an old clock. I was so lost in my vintage dreams that what I actually saw when I made it around the building’s corner hit me like a tidal wave.

The entire front facade was a dazzling plaid of colored neon you couldn’t see from the back parking lot. I heard music on Delilah Street again, but this beat made my hips and skirt sway to the rhythms of salsa, cha-cha, merengue, sexy samba.

If only Ric was here. We could party.

That brought me back to “Terra Infirma.” Hard.

“No,” I said aloud to Irma. “The last thing I want is him messing around in mirror-world.”

Or with your Mamma Mia.

Irma’s words made me squint to see the front entrance, mirrored glass doors with a cursive neon sign above them: LA VIDA LOCA.

I straightened and swung my self-advertising shoes ahead of me one pavement-banging step at a time. This was the place that had paid for my costly sanctuary from the group homes, the nun-run private girls’ high school where I’d been a charity student until I graduated, hit state college, and made it to a BA in journalism on my own.

Mama was . . . Latina? Then, where had my Black Irish coloring come from? Oh, my. I hoped to God I didn’t have a supernatural father . . . uh, besides Him.

Meeting myself in the mirror before I swung the door open, I saw my flushed cheeks emphasized my black hair and blue eyes and made my glossed lips pale by comparison. My vintage forties ensemble was really . . . ugh, perky. What I do to keep Hector Nightwine from stomping all over my druthers.

I yanked the door open and entered.