Virtual Virgin

Chapter Three

YOU CAN’T GO anywhere eerie in the post–Millennium Revelation’s many underworlds, I’d learned the hard way, without sensing overbearing powers.

The fey remained an ancient presence everywhere, leaving traces in the form of mercurial paths, just as pre-Christian civilizations leave buried cities and fallen monuments and statues of forgotten gods.

That’s what I sense when I walk in mirror-world, and what I encountered during my one expedition to the nomadic pestilence called the Sinkhole, under Las Vegas.

No sooner had these thoughts crossed my mind than a forest of skeletal, frosted trees materialized around me. Palm-sized, faceted jewels dangled like glittering fruit from their stunted limbs. You’d think I was shopping for red-carpet trinkets at Fred Leighton’s vintage jewels joint in the Bellagio. I could easily reach up to pluck them from the branches.

Except . . . the silver familiar was weighing heavy around my wrists, a thick chain swaying between my sudden new pair of manacles.

“Off,” I commanded, as I would a dog, but not mine. Quicksilver doesn’t take commands.

I knew enough not to grab for fey fruit, but I’d never tried a verbal order on the familiar, which had come to me via someone I didn’t trust. It didn’t move a molecule.

Then I heard a sinister rustle among the leafless, unmoving branches, like whispers in a language of shifting forest sounds. No wind brushed my skin, but some ghostly animation was stirring the trees on either side. I walked the open path between them, bound like a prisoner en route to a scaffold.

What a hateful setup! I’d visited mirror-world before without encountering this fanciful toll booth before I even got forty feet into the journey.

As I walked, a piece of glittering black against the surrounding dark became clearer.

Something tall and narrow and worse . . . winged—think demon or dragon or gargoyle or a supernatural unknown—barred my way. The closer I got, the bigger it got, though I could glimpse only the come-and-go sparkle of its skin, or was that a . . . hide?

Bogey incoming at high noon, Irma caroled in my brain.

Bogeyman was the better word. The glimpsed musculature was male, broad at the shoulder and narrow at the hip, but lithe and fast, its glamorous surface a midnight sky all starry and depthless.

I had a feeling if I had seen its actual outline, every pore or scale or horny joint or thorny appendage, I’d run screaming back to the Enchanted Cottage.

Too late. No going back. In mirror-world you pushed forward to come out another mirror. Another exit. Or not.

My pace never slowed, although my heartbeat quickened. I wanted to curse the familiar for hampering my hands, but I knew it was only posing as a bond and was really a weapon that hadn’t decided its necessary form yet.

Not for nothing had I scaled twenty-foot-high pillars and looming statues of animal-headed gods in the subterranean underbelly of the Karnak Hotel’s vampire empire. I’d freed an ancient chained god. I was going to let a Black Hole of Feydom stop me?

Taking in the probable shape of the negative image, I took a running jump at it and felt my shoes sink into solid sinew as I leaped up and up, my nostrils burning with a two-edged scent as sharp as ammonia or as addictive as absinthe. Just like the fey to be either corrosive . . . or cloying. I might as well have been climbing some museum reconstruction of a lost dinosaur. Unseen claws ripped at my sleeves and flared pant bottoms, and I felt the sickening wrench of cloth only millimeters from skin and bone.

At last I was at the summit, far above the fruit trees. I looped my manacle chain around any part of darkness I could lasso. I tightened and wrenched my makeshift garrote, using my entire body, and was shaken off like an errant dandelion head.

I went flying . . . forward, at least, not back. I hit the unseen path hard and curled into a defensive ball, blinking my eyes open. I saw nothing but the dark, so rolled over onto my side and looked again.

More undifferentiated darkness stretched ahead, but through it—as if caught in a follow spotlight—strode a muscled brown giant of a man, sporting shoulder-length locks like some circus Samson.

I breathed a sigh of relief. A woman named Delilah could deal with a long-haired muscleman.

Besides, we’d met before.