Virtual Virgin

Chapter Two

SOME PEOPLE HAVE trouble facing themselves in the mirror, but just seeing my own image looking back would be a treat, even if I looked like hell.

Trouble is, I’m as likely to view a kleptomaniac doppelganger named Lilith as my own face and body.

The differences between me, Delilah Street, and Lilith Quince are . . . not visible to the naked eye. Not even mine. I’ve often wondered if even Ric would be able to tell between me and my shadow twin.

Really, I don’t ever want to have to find that out.

Meanwhile, here I am, the morning after that harrowing but liberating road trip to my hometown, back in Vegas and mirror-gazing again. There’s lots of unfinished business between me and my mirror. Lucky me. I’ve made enemies in two dimensions.

Right now, though, I’m seeing only my own face for a change.

What I see is what you get. I stand five eight barefoot, pushing six feet in my sling-back heels, the vintage shoe I’m wearing at the moment. What I weigh is not anybody’s business, especially Lilith’s. My India ink-black shoulder-brushing hair is just long enough to put up for wet work. My skin is so white I don’t tan or singe in the sunshine; I sear.

No, I’m not a vampire. So let me inter that idea and slam the final nail in that coffin.

My eyes are the electric-blue color that halos an acetylene torch flame, always a dead giveaway to my identity, so I sometimes use gray contact lenses.

I used to loathe my pallid Black Irish skin, partly because tans were hot in the Wichita farm country where I grew up; mainly because I thought dead-white skin attracted vampires. Being an ex-TV reporter of the paranormal, I’ve tried that airbrush foundation all the newscasters switched to when HDTV came in, but I look even more made-up, laid out, and corpse-ish with that fake instant tan on my face.

During that recent road trip home to Kansas, I was finally convinced my coloring is pretty cool, after all. Now that I call Las Vegas home–where talking, moving Cinema Simulacrums from old black-and-white films are celebrity tourist attractions—hey, I’m three-quarters of the way there if I simply rock my gray contact lenses and add black lipstick.

My guy likes my lips glossed red and cherry-flavored, though, and loves to put it on me and lick it off, which makes for inventive nights. At the memory, I ran a fingertip over my top lip, feeling so Marilyn Monroe. If I could only lose my obsession with this phantom skank, Lilith, in my mirror, life might be almost perfect. I closed my eyes, rerunning the top five horizontal moments of the past week’s getaway, leaving out the rotting zombies on speed and the weather witches riding lightning bolts.

“Do we feel pretty?” a snarky voice asked.

I had to decide whether I was hearing my internal secret pal since grade school, Irma, or if I was talking back to myself in the mirror again.

Sure enough, my reflected lips were moving.

“Great to be here in Vegas again,” Lilith said, stretching her bare arms overhead to show off a clingy tank top with silver studs spelling “Vegas Sucks” above a large skull-and-crossbones strategically placed to frame our boobs.

“Goth is so over,” I told her.

Lilith loves to flaunt her Bad Girl tastes when she isn’t dolling herself up in exactly what I’m wearing at the moment, which is low-rise seventies bell-bottom jeans and a midriff-baring top with ruffled sleeves to the elbow. Ay caramba. Olé. I’m a vintage girl.

“You must be meeting Ric later,” she said. “He goes for the belly-dancer exposure.”

“Vegas is hot,” I answered demurely.

“So is Ric,” Lilith answered. “I should pay his mirror a visit.”

“Can you? Without me there?”

“Argh. You there? No way. I’m a doer, not a viewer.”

“Then, what are you doing here?”

“Checking out the old wardrobe to see if you’re wearing anything worth stealing. It’s my favorite hobby.”

The feeling was not mutual. I was tiring of these two-way mirror conversations with myself, of always seeing Lilith on the other side of something. She’s haunted me in mirrors since I saw her being autopsied on CSI V one TV night last spring.

I did come to Las Vegas to find her, but I’d expected a physical being or a tombstone, not a will-o’-the-wisp on silvered glass.

“Lilah . . . Ric does know about me, right?” she asked.

“Yes.” I made my answer short and sharp.

Ric had only found out about my secret mirror-shadow days ago. With all the follow-up on the literal fallout before we left Wichita, we hadn’t discussed several revelations that could affect our separate lives, and maybe our love life. I particularly was carrying my usual invisible knapsack of guilt.

“Where is Wonder Rod-boy?” Lilith prodded.

I debated whether or not to tell her I’d sent him off to see the wizard, Christophe, aka Snow, the Inferno Hotel’s albino rock-star owner, to view a movie. That would be hard to explain. You had to have been there.

WE’D MADE IT back from Wichita and I was dropping Ric off at his house for the night before ferrying Quicksilver and me back to the Enchanted Cottage on the Hector Nightwine estate.

“You should call on Snow first thing tomorrow,” I told Ric, “and get him to show you the Metropolis film that features your new virtual girlfriend.”

“You’re not jealous of an old-time movie CinSim that’s more a metal costume than flesh?”

“No. Might as well be jealous of Robby the Robot.”

“Tomorrow morning? Christophe’s Inferno Hotel penthouse? Without you to referee?” Ric had asked.

“Right,” I’d said. “He owes us, and besides, Snow’s such a film nut he’ll gladly sit through all almost-three hours of the restored version with you. Metropolis is his prize acquisition. I’d be excess baggage.”

Irma had hastened to jump in. And “baggage” is exactly what Snow would call you after your latest joint adventure—or should I say “assignation”?—in one of his domains in Wichita.

“What will you do?” Ric asked before I could forget myself and tell Irma aloud that it was an accident, not an assignation.

“I, ah, have some unfinished business from Wichita to settle.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m taking your shrink foster-mama’s advice and facing some of my own demons without even having to leave the Enchanted Cottage.”

“So, after a night without you, tomorrow morning I’m indentured to view an almost-three-hour-long silent film from 1927.” Ric sighed.

“There’s a stirring, newly recorded symphonic sound track.”

“Watching it with Christophe is not my idea of a film date.” He never used the nickname I did: Snow.

“I know, but Snow’s the only one in the world who owns the long-lost, utterly complete version of the film. You’ll be amazed by how scary-relevant that Holy Grail of filmdom called Metropolis is to our lives and times,” I said in farewell.

“I hope there’s popcorn,” Ric grumbled.

“And you’ll see the Silver Zombie again, offscreen and in person.”

“Not a draw, Delilah. She freaks me out. I’m not the Immortality Mob or a CinSim collector like Christophe and Hector Nightwine. I don’t want the responsibility for any being that can be commanded by anyone else, including me.”

“Admirable. The film will do an even better job at freaking you out than its iconic va-va-va-vroom automaton.”

“I still think you’re jealous. She’s mucho curvy for a robot, but cold metal is not my turn-on.”

“That shiny silver exterior is plastic wood molded onto the body cast of the actress, so she’s not as cold as you think.”

“She’s still born of silver nitrate film,” he pointed out, “on which the robot body was almost a solid image beyond what any human actor could convey, other than Joan of Arc in battle armor. I can see how powerful that could be in the wrong hands.” He hesitated. “I’ve had some . . . disturbing dreams since I called that thing off the film reel and into real life.”

“Me too. We need to discuss all this, after you’ve seen the movie.”

“Just go and be mysterious about your next steps, Del. I might be mysterious about how I get on with Christophe and Metropolis.”

By then we were at his house, so I’d bribed him with a quick good-night kiss. As soon as he’d exited Dolly, my prize ’56 Eldorado convertible, Quicksilver leaped from the backseat into the vacant front passenger seat while it was still warm.

Ric shook his head. “If anybody is jealous of anything, it would be me of that dog.”

“You’ve never had a pet?” I asked as Quicksilver growled. “I mean animal companion.”

“Just goats. I get hooved herd animals more.”

I remembered his south-of-the-border childhood captors had called him goat-boy. Grrr. I wish we had fully wiped out El Demonio during the perfect storm of a showdown at the Emerald City Hotel and Casino in Wichita.

Next time.

Given the battle of wills Ric had going on with his former boyhood captor, now a major drug lord, I knew another, maybe even final, confrontation was inevitable. Neither demon nor Ric Montoya ever gave up.

REVISITING LAST NIGHT’S memories of the serious enemies Ric and I had made in Vegas made my head start to ache. I put a hand to my hot-skinned forehead without remembering I was gazing at my double in the mirror, that I was showing weakness to my sister image, my enemy.

“Poor Delilah,” Lilith cooed in that irritating way of schoolgirls who lay on the “jealous” as thick as strawberry jam on English muffins . . . or toes.

She ran her still-upraised hands down and then up her opposite elbows to her shoulders, and then down again over her breasts and behind her back. The motion clothed her in the twin of my red top like a paint tool in Photoshop.

“What an obvious stripper move,” I complained, “just to filch this old thing I’m wearing. Your wiles are wasted on me. Get your own wardrobe witch.”

There are real advantages to living in a Las Vegas version of an animated Disney fairy tale. I have a wardrobe witch and a kitchen witch and a yard troll. I almost expected Lilith to ask who was the fairest of all.

Lilith didn’t. She did laugh until the red of “our” top went fluorescent for an instant before she vanished. I was looking at myself for real, truly alone again. Sort of.

Wicked witch, Irma ground out in my ear.

“She may well be,” I agreed. “And you are truly the last secret about me Ric isn’t in on. He now knows I can see my identical self in the mirror, what his shrink foster mother called a shadow sister. He doesn’t know I also hear voices.”

But you do, Joan of Arc, Irma replied. Only it’s voice, singular.

“Look, I am no longer a warrior maid. My virgin issue was resolved three months ago, thanks to Ric.”

At twenty-four, Irma jibed.

“I had my reasons, as we found out in Wichita.”

Lilith didn’t have those issues. Can’t you get her on the wrong side of the mirror yourself? What’s keeping you from following her?

Good questions.

“You’re right. I’m being a wuss,” I muttered. “Just because I’ve sorta done a vengeful murderess wrong is no reason not to use my mirror-walking talents.”

Right. And what’s with the silver familiar? Where is it?

I closed my eyes to take inventory in a body-sensing moment. “Oh. It’s hiding out as an ankle bracelet under my right wide-legged pant bottom.”

Skin-tight leggings are in and you’re doing wide-legged retro sailor suits. Figures.

“The familiar must duck for cover when Lilith is occupying the mirror because she doesn’t have one herself.”

The familiar is envy-worthy. It’s on my bucket list.

“You’re disembodied, Irma. You can’t have a bucket list. And being locked into a shape-changing hunk of sterling silver is like wearing a pair of mobile steel handcuffs, trust me.”

Even now I could feel a cold, feathery shiver as the familiar slunk up my leg into its default position as a dental-floss-fine hip chain. I eyed my image in the mirror.

I’d faced some seriously dark, subconsciously buried news about myself back in Wichita and survived. Now it was time to confront what was keeping me from using and expanding my ability to walk into and through mirrors.

Maybe I could drag Lilith back out with me this trip, screaming and kicking in physical form. My gut felt a satisfying melted-caramel glow. Try to deal with real life like I do, Shadow Me.

So I walked forward to meet my reflected grin, feeling a breath, a sigh, a supersheer curtain of cool liquid silver clinging to my body like ectoplasmic Saran wrap. Then I was on the other side of myself, seemingly alone in a dark, bare place, a vacant soundstage built for psychic phenomena, an empty mirror viewed from the opposite dimension, a place of eternal twilight.

My world and welcome to it. I walked farther forward, poised for whatever would come, for what, or whoever, I would encounter. Bring it on.