“I call on Miss Delilah Street to stand and testify. She knows I only needed to touch the backs of her hands on a dowsing rod to dredge up the dead.”
I stand.
A wolf whistle shrieks from somewhere and another anonymous guy calls, “The pretty shill in the audience, Montoya. Cheap trick.”
I can see Ric smolder from fifty feet away at someone inadvertently calling me a “cheap trick,” but I can speak for myself.
“Can you argue with his FBI record?” I ask. “I’m a former award-winning TV reporter, no shill and no patsy, and I don’t believe in water dowsing.”
That gets the group mumbling again, bewildered that I’m not supporting the speaker who’d introduced me.
“But I do believe in dead dowsing,” I go on, “because the Vegas police dug up the seventy-five-year-old bones of an embracing couple on the park site where”—How am I going to put this delicately for a mostly male crowd? Not possible—“where I saw and felt the dowsing rod act as if it had a twenty-mule team pulling it.”
The mental picture of the mules distracts attention from how I saw and felt the dowsing rod perform, which is just too, too phallic for bureaucrats. The audience quiets as I sit back down.
“Most authorities,” Ric reminds them, “most people don’t believe anyone can water dowse, or dowse for precious ores and stones, much less the dead. Traditionally dowsers favor certain tree woods, like willow, but most can also use bent metal rods, glass, or improvise with a coat hanger if necessary. I’ve even dowsed with barbed wire.”
A mass intake of breath makes the room seem to sigh. The audience has made the leap to realizing how painful that would be . . . barbed wire spinning in your palms so hard and fast the point of the Y aims down.
Ric nods. “Tore my hands up on that occasion, ladies and gentlemen, but the blood is necessary for stage two of my facility. When my blood drops to the ground where the dowsing rod has indicated it harbors a body, the dead will rise.”
Actual gasps fill the room.
Ric clicks a 3-D night scene into life on the screen behind him. At first glance, to me, it looks like a still from the first great zombie movie, the black-and-white Night of the Living Dead.
“This is a night shot of a desert ranch I call the Lazy Z,” he explains. “I’m not presenting a day scene because I don’t want any landmarks to betray its location. These are zombies I’ve reclaimed from the traffic in unhumans across the Mexican border.”
A horse ambles through the corral, led by a poky cowpoke.
“Is the horse a zombie?” a smart-ass voice calls from the audience.
“No. Horses calm feral zombies. Consider the ranch a rehab facility for the supernaturally abused. Here’s one reason I’ve come here today. I know how skeptical people who haven’t fought in the trenches of the border wars the US and Mexican governments are waging on drug cartels gone demonic can be. Still, you might have seen traces of a new and hidden force on the crime front, the Immortality Mob at work in your own cases.”
Now the murmurs are serious, questioning.
“Some of you might have borderline abilities of your own that will aid in your work. I’ve come before you, risking ridicule, to ask you to merely open your minds. It starts with inhuman traffickers smuggling zombies like those I showed you into the US from Mexico. Next comes a secret process to combine them with figures from black-and-white film. Only the silver nitrate in vintage film can animate zombies and that may be a scientific lead. Las Vegas is the nexus of this latest illegal trade.”
“Isn’t it always?” someone yelled. “Viva Las Vegas.”
Ric clicks again. The screen switches from still images to moving ones. “Here’s some of the Immortality Mob’s handiwork. You may recognize a few favorite movie sleuths.”
I sure do, and settle back in my seat with a nostalgic sigh as the luminous black-and-white scene plays onscreen.
Nick Charles, in his white tie and dark dinner jacket, is leaning on the Inferno Hotel bar, handing a martini to his sophisticated wife, Nora, whose plunging neckline draws a lot more wolf whistles from this crowd than my buttoned-up navy-blue career blazer.
“I deduced where the body is buried, darling,” Nicky drawls, “but I need Asta to dig it up.”
“I am not having Eau de Corpse on Asta and all over our apartment.” Nora is her delightfully feisty self. “You’ll have to take Asta to the groomer after the dog does its dirty work for you, and you’ll need to visit the groomer too, or there’ll be no treats for the both of you.”
Even as chuckles echo through the room, a white blur passing in front of the bar obscures the famous film couple.
“Pay no attention to the man in the white suit,” Ric says quickly. “He wasn’t supposed to be in the film clip.”
Snow? The Inferno Hotel owner and albino rock star had been caught on film, like a ghost? What is that about? Why is Snow showing up in a conference room in Quantico, Virginia?
Ric turns to face the screen. “And, by the way, in real life that horned skull you saw first off belonged to a half-demon CPA. Okay. This is . . . an example of how the Immortality Mob manipulates illusion and reality for its own profit.” The film jerks, breaks, resumes.
More wolf whistles. The robot from the silent film Metropolis stands front and center, a curvaceous silver metal woman robot out of a Playboy centerfold.
Ric hasn’t revealed the truly fantastic side of his dead-dowsing gifts . . . not just raising the dead but raising a dead actress off the movie screen in her robot likeness.
I want to stand up and explain how it’s all done through mirrors and the power of silver, the silver that can vanquish werewolves and even vampires sometimes and can now walk characters off the silver screen.
Once again I watch Ric raise Brigitte Helm, a dead silent-screen actress in the form of the robot costume that had been molded to her body.
People are used to 3-D movies, but seeing this blend of human and machine walking off the screen into their midst without the aid of the usual eye devices is even too much for FBI agents. They run screaming, overturning chairs in their fever to escape the room. My hands lift to block the painful light from the huge screen, from the sight of the Second Coming of the Silver Zombie.
I guess the Cadaver Kid has more than made his point.
“Ow!” RIC SAID beside me, suddenly.
At least he recognized my existence again.
“Delilah! Your flailing elbow almost put my eye out.”
A small lamp clicked on from the direction of his voice. I stared at his at his naked chest, at his eyes blinking in the light—one espresso-brown, one silver if not disguised by a brown contact lens, as it wasn’t at night—and looked around.
Oh. We’re not in Quantico anymore, unless an FBI conference room has a double bed.
What’s new? Irma, my in-board invisible friend, has kicked into On in my head again.
“This isn’t Quantico,” I said slowly.
“I hope not.” Ric’s pupils widened as they got used to the light. “You had a major dream?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Bad?”
“No. Good, I guess. At least at first.”
He braced his head on his hand to turn to me and block the harshest rays of the bedside lamplight. “We’re in a motel in Cold Creek, Colorado, Del, one that’s a teeny bit more upscale than the one we stayed at on our way out to Kansas from Vegas. We’ll be home late tomorrow. Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Maybe I get different dreams now that I can lie on my back.”
“I gotta say that’s nice. We can finally sleep and, ah, do other things any which way we want. You’ve pretty much ditched that phobia against lying on your back now that you know what caused it.”
“Ye-es. Except having Family Services implant an unnecessary intrauterine device that morphed to coat my pelvic bones and organs in sterling silver makes me feel like an unnatural woman. Like the semiBionic Woman.”
I don’t mention “like a dime-store Silver Zombie.”
His hand burrowed under the covers to find my left hip bone and swiped across like you would on a computer screen, smooth and fast, to the opposite hip bone.
Umm, amorous, Irma moaned.
He got the reaction he wanted. I felt the silver familiar’s thin hip chain writhing in anticipation and my fingers found a new charm tickling my temporary belly-button ring . . . in the Y-shaped form of a dowsing rod.
“You feel like my woman in the middle of the night,” Ric said. “Maybe that imported metal only makes your pelvis stronger, makes your, uh, reactions more intense, especially in this new flat-on-your-back position. We should test that theory.”
Even the silver familiar had been won over by our sexy FBI lecturer. Unfortunately, we’d be back to unfinished business all too soon in Las Vegas.
“We have a lot to do when we get back tomorrow,” I fretted.
“Such as?” Ric was totally awake now.
“You need to find out more about that silver she-devil you waltzed off the movie screen into our lives. Snow grabbed her and the film she came in on and flew out of Wichita, leaving us to make the three-day drive back to Vegas.”
“She’s his property.”
“But your responsibility. I don’t get why you’re eager to wash your hands of her.”
“They’d rather be on you.”
Seriously amorous, Irma noted.
“I’ve got issues of my own to follow up on when we get home,” I pointed out.
“Such as?”
“I can’t let a werewolf mobster’s daughter keep me out of mirror-world just because I tried to stop her from doing harm and she escaped.”
“You can’t escape Loretta Cicereau and I can’t escape the Silver Zombie, is that what you’re saying?”
“Right.”
“I don’t see any trace of either of them here and now.”
He hadn’t had my nightmare either. Loretta had been one of the embracing skeletons we found on the day we’d met.
“So,” Ric said, “I see no reason not to take advantage of the fact that you woke me up.”
“Quicksilver?” I asked.
“Out and about. Your dog likes night patrols, you know that. So do I.”
And I did too.
He nuzzled my neck under my hair, a green light to foreplay that would implant a red-hot and blue hickey on my pale skin. We’d be back home tending to far less interesting unfinished business all too soon.
So I gave up worrying about robot dreams and vengeful ghosts.
But I knew I’d have to look myself in the mirror as soon as I got back to Vegas.
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.