THE GEHENNA WASN'T done with me yet.
Sansouci steered me into a guest bathroom near the door to Cicereau's suite and told me to clean up.
In the mirror I saw his point. No chance I was regarding Lilith's image this time. Blood dotted my face, hair, and the jabot of my white blouse. A few swipes with an evaporating soap product cleansed the face and hair. The blouse would just have to pass as polka-dotted. I wiped the blood drops off the gray toes of my shoes and the bell-bottoms of my black pants. The black jacket absorbed dark red and looked fine to the casual glance.
The silver familiar wasn't about to waste its glory on my bloody cravat. It snugged around my hips again, under the pants. I leaned against the green marble sink and called Ric to tell him I was all right and heading home from the Gehenna.
"You sound breathless," he answered.
"I have my reasons, which you'll know when we meet up."
When I stepped out again, an equally gore-free vampire henchman was awaiting me in the entry. Must be a matching boys' room through the opposite door. It occurred to me why a werewolf mobster would provide lavatory facilities at the door to his elegant private penthouse. Must have a lot of messy underlings visiting to report on the latest hits and misses.
"Slick thinking," Sansouci said.
"Yeah. It's pretty obvious why Cicereau's visiting goons would need to tidy up right here at the front door."
He frowned, then eyed the unmarked doors.
"Not these rest rooms. I meant your slick trick, conjuring a hallucinatory exit for the Karnak's revived killing machine. Forty-some floors ought to stop reanimated bones pretty cold. What happened to Loretta?"
"That was just a mirror image I summoned like the one I left behind here for a while. Loretta is still bound in Madrigal's backstage mirror."
He nodded. "I better hustle you outa here before Cicereau forgets he's grateful, and then make sure that mirror trick is holding."
No rest for the wicked, as they say.
We zipped down in the next elevator, picking up hotel guests as we stopped at lower floors. No one recoiled or flared their nostrils, so we must have looked-and smelled-fairly normal, as normal as a silver medium and a daylight vampire could be.
Once on the hotel's thickly tourist-populated main floor, Sansouci steered me through the casino to a gilded cage. I pulled against his one-armed custody at the very sight of bars.
"It's a cashier's cage. Relax."
Sansouci flashed a Gehenna/Magus/Megalith consortium gambling card, a credit card for gamblers. I'd barely glimpsed the holographic image that flipped from an Annie Liebovitz portrait of Cesar Cicereau to a wolf's-head before Sansouci slapped it down on the brown marble counter and slid it through the cage.
The woman on the other side wore a one-shouldered rabbit fur corset and purple-dyed rabbit ears. I guess "Prey" was her middle name. She batted metallic green false lashes as she pushed a wad of bills under the cage bars.
"Somebody must have hit the jackpot," she simpered at Sansouci. "I get off in forty-five minutes, big boy."
"My women do it much faster than that," he noted, swooping up the stash and handing it to me.
"Ah, do you have a money bag or something?" I asked the now thoroughly miffed cashier.
"Stick it in your-" she began as Sansouci turned me away from the cage into the clatter and chatter of the casino.
He stopped a passing cocktail waitress tricked out as a calico cat. "Got a nickel slot bonanza bag?"
She produced a pink burlap bag into which Sansouci dropped my loot.
In ten minutes of twisting through the milling throngs we finally exited the cold and glamorously dark interior at the hotel's entry canopy.
"While you were irritating Cicereau," he said, "I dialed Nightwine's majordomo."
"Godfrey? You know Godfrey?"
"I know how things work in this town. I figured you'd need a ride." He waved a hand.
That's right; I'd been driven here by limo. My God, there idled Dolly, my '56 Cadillac convertible, shining like a decapitated Black Maria police wagon from the thirties.
I turned, grateful. "Sansouci, you're amazing."
He gave me a rough little shove. "Get outa here before Cicereau accuses you of ripping him off and has you arrested. His gratitude lasts about as long as a five-dollar whore's blow job."
I was feeling the stress of the last couple hours so I stumbled forward at Sansouci's ungentlemanly push. Why was he irked with me? I'd saved his bacon and his boss's too.
As I neared, I saw the black Caddy didn't have a red leather interior like my Dolly. And ace attorney Perry Mason was at the wheel.
"Godfrey has told me you've been absent without leave for far too long, Miss Delilah," the CinSim Perry said sternly as he leaned over the wide front bench seat to open the passenger door. "I'm taking you straight home, no argument. Now get in."
"No argument," I promised, relieved.
Perry was a CinSim but he seemed to be totally mobile, unlike most, and nobody would mess with him in this town anyway. He was a man of size, with a sterling legal reputation to match. He was also Big Daddy for a lifelong orphan like me. A girl couldn't have a better escort.
As we pulled out of the overlit neon canopy into the blitzkrieged Las Vegas Strip night, I couldn't help studying the Gehenna's exterior perimeter for signs of a resurrected vampire who'd fallen to earth-hard. Thanks to me. I saw nothing but milling tourists, yet in the distance I heard a wolflike wail.
In what seemed like no time, Perry's Cadillac throbbed next to the real Dolly in my Enchanted Cottage's driveway.
"Get some rest," he ordered in his brusque yet kindly way. "Godfrey said you've had a long day."
"Yes, Perry. Thanks so much for the ride."
He leaned across the long leather bench seat to advise me further. "And watch that fellow who walked you out of the Gehenna. He looks like a gigolo."
I laughed to imagine Sansouci's reaction to that. "You don't have to worry, Mr. Mason. I'm a very cautious girl."
He nodded satisfaction as I got out and watched him glide away in engine-growling, shiny-black barracuda glory.
I sighed and turned toward my home, sweet home, aka the Enchanted Cottage, wanting to hit the shower, put on some blood-free clothes, and relax.
Then my cell phone vibrated. The famous Strip dead zones were sure working now.
Why did I have a queasy feeling? Could the wolfish wail have been a distant chorus of screaming police sirens I'd heard as Perry Mason had chauffeured me away from the Gehenna?
"Delilah!" Ric's voice was easy on my ears but not the urgent note in it. What was the expression that so fit Sansouci tonight? No rest for the wicked. I'd been wicked enough tonight to impress a werewolf mob kingpin and a vampire... and make a permanent enemy of my first mirror BFF, Loretta, now my new Best Fiend Forever
"Where are you?" Ric and I asked in tandem, then laughed.
"I just now got home," I said.
"I bet you had a lot to catch up on after..." He paused, probably aware of others close enough to overhear. "After our latest assignment," he finished in lower tones. "Listen, I know it's late but I need you at the coroner's. Grisly Bahr called me over for a private talk about some missing corpses. Now he's got a supernatural pile of mystery meat coming in fresh from the Gehenna. And where've you just been?"
"Uh, the Gehenna."
"I figured the dead meat is no mystery to you."
I decided not to mention I was actually the chef on that one. Not yet, at least, until I knew what officialdom was doing.
"No."
"Better keep that between me and thee," Ric said. "Kennedy Malloy is en route to Grisly's place too."
"Sure I should show up at all?"
"Why not?"
"Captain Malloy liked you first."
He laughed. "She's a professional associate, that's all."
"To her, so am I."
I may be new to the dating game but I knew enough to realize that even smart guys like Ric could underestimate the depth of a woman colleague's interest. Few decent guys were out there. Lots of competition for them.
"I've been getting some flashbacks," Ric said in a lowered tone, after a pause, "and some flash-forwards maybe too. You really okay, chica? I had a bad feeling an hour or so ago."
Yeah, well... I'd been getting multiple bad feelings about then too.
"We'll have a one-on-one later," he added. "After our date at the coroner's."
Actually, I couldn't wait to see what Grisly made of what was left of Loretta's risen Prince Charming turned avenger. It was even possible the fall hadn't, ah, killed him.
BEFORE SEEING RIC, I needed a quick shower and change. Dried blood was not the latest shade in streetwear, even in Vegas.
I turned to the steps leading to my charming arched front door and only then noticed Quicksilver's gray fur blending into the aged wood. He sat there on prick-eared alert, his neck ruff fluffed and his blue eyes half closed in that mute, rebuking look smart dogs get.
His black nostrils flared to inhale the invisible traces of blood and gore from my clothes and skin.
How dare you have fun without me? his guard dog look and posture screamed, in the best canine form, of course.
"I suppose you want to shower with me too?" I asked.
He stood and shook out his thick, silvery coat, then grinned.
"No, you don't. Stay down here and guard Dolly. I need to make tire tracks to the coroner's office as soon as I'm decent and dry."
The grin allowed a long pink tongue dangling room, reminding me that we were now twins in the healing department.
"And don't drool any stray saliva on Dolly's leather upholstery!"
Inside, I first had to stash my cash from Cicereau in the... uh, okay... the open floor safe I spotted in the parlor.
"Thanks," I muttered to my resident guardians.
Then I rushed up the steep stairs, shedding clothes as I went. I hopped in the hall to kick off my gray sling-backs and wriggle out of the bell-bottoms.
I'd resolved to avoid looking in mirrors for at least a day but still glimpsed my frenzied hopping in the tall mirror at the hall's end.
No bound and gagged Loretta, thank the mirror goddess, but another figure hopping there in eerie time with mine. A naked Lilith, putting on what I tore off.
Just too bizarre! I fled into the bedroom and the bathroom beyond it, toward the sound of pelting shower water, thank the secret pixie or who- or whatever had turned it on!
In moments, pink water swirled around my bare feet in the shiny hole-pierced drain, reminding me of Snow's pink ruby collar gemstones and matching eyes behind the dark sunglasses.
Argh! I didn't want to remember any part of Snow, particularly his presumably bleeding back. Still, if anyone deserved to suffer on Ric's behalf, it was Snow, who'd charged me a personal price for saving Ric's life.
Wait. He hadn't saved a thing. I'd done that. He'd taken his blood money-i.e., my kiss-for the mere attempt at a rescue mission.
Which had worked. As his supposedly enslaving Brimstone Kiss had not.
So why was I furious?
Stress, Delilah. Irma's voice soothed me like a slippery bar of soap stroking my shoulders. You're just stressed.
And seeing Lilith in my hall mirror donning my discarded clothes doesn't help, I railed at Irma. Who does she think she is? Besides me?
She doesn't have me, Irma soothed.
But she has my clothes and she's done it before! That's what got me accused of being the Snow groupie killer on that hotel security tape. It was Lilith, not me, on the scene, and I'd be judged crazy if I tried to say that.
I wrapped myself in one of the huge coat-tree-hung towels that dried me from ankle to armpit in three steps, then stood thinking on the plush bathroom carpet as the wet soles of my feet sank in. Something else sank in.
In that inadvertent Inferno crime-scene security-camera shot Snow had held back from the police, Lilith had been wearing the same striking vintage evening ensemble I'd rented only a few hours earlier at D��j��-Vous, the costume shop Snow owned.
That I'd tried on in the D��j��-Vous dressing room mirror.
Lilith could "'nap" the clothes from my own image in a mirror! I stomped out into the hall. She/I were a set of overlapping images, one towel-draped, one wearing the blood-worn clothes I'd just dropped to this very floor.
They should have been lying there, puckered and empty. Corpselike. The floor was dry and clean.
Back to the bathroom.
Mrs. Peel's freshly cleaned and pressed "Carnaby Street" sixties suit and ruffled shirt hung from the clothes rack. Lilith wasn't stealing my look, she was duplicating it.
I shook out my mane of wet hair and felt a jet stream of warm air riffle it like a blow torch. Did a demon hairdresser come with the place, just now announcing its presence in an emergency? Maybe the Enchanted Cottage was only three-fourths Disney and one-quarter imp. Or vice versa. And the mirror could be as much my enemy as my friend, as Loretta had so recently proven.
I nodded my head slowly, speaking not exactly to Irma or to my invisible dresser or to Mrs. Peel's empty suit.
"Makes sense. If I'm wearing this outfit and I saw Lilith jumping into it, my mirror image can duplicate any wardrobe item of mine reflected in a mirror to masquerade as me."
Not to worry, Irma purred in my inner ear, she copped the unwashed, used clothes. You aren't exactly the same at all. What a stupid skank!
By then I was redonning the outfit, not pausing to consider its blood-drenched recent past. The Enchanted Cottage was just doing its job: putting the best, freshest face on everything that had been tainted.
There was only one thing it couldn't counter: the mischief unwanted guests like Loretta and Lilith could get up to in the front-surface glass of my hall mirror.
Quicksilver was already perched on Dolly's passenger seat before I could get the keys out of my messenger bag and open the driver's-side door.
"What have I told you about jumping over the door when the window's down?" I demanded. "Okay, be snarky."