Dancing With Werewolves (31 page)

Behind the reflected fingerprints an image assembled bit by bit.

Flattened pink pads, curved gray nails . . . claws. A vague, two-legged shape. Then a fanged, terrifying face, half pale flesh, half gray fur with gleaming blue-green eyes backlit by carnivorous yellow.

The mirror was making me into a monster, assembling a werewolf version of myself . . . or connecting me with a supernatural shape-shifter inside it.

I pulled my fingers away, but they were bound as if by Superglue. I really wasn’t this appalling vision! I pulled harder. My flesh seemed to peel away, leaving glowing raw pink spots. Had the mirror changed into an acid pool that had eaten off my own fingerprints?

With a sizzling, hissing sound, the monstrous reflection vanished.

My fingertips felt as raw as open sores. Had there been any decent light in this hallway, I probably would’ve swooned to see the damage. As I watched, the mirror bulged out in the same starfish spots that my fingers had touched.

Blue-white hands came reaching through, stretching the mirror’s surface like Saran Wrap. Those cool blue hands were the color of Madrigal’s front-surface glass. Now the entire mirror surface was a cool blue lake. I plunged my throbbing, skinned fingertips into it, as into ice water.

I felt a bracing tingle, and then
she
assembled before my eyes, in the mirror, my severed self, naked where I was clothed, serene where I was battered, soothing where I was agitated.

When her full figure was visible, I stepped away and broke our contact.

Her silhouette wavered, flashed through a rapid-fire of alterations from demon to the dead girl of Sunset Park, and ended by reflecting me entirely, dressed as I was, looking as I did now.

I stepped even farther back, exhausted.

Somehow I knew that no mirror image of me-made-flesh existed at the Gehenna anymore. All those expensive billboards would have to be painted over.

Madrigal’s act would be all Sylphia’s and Phasia’s again.

Cicereau would be furious.

Nobody would be able to explain it.

Not even me.

At least that left only one dangerous mission to accomplish onsite at the Gehenna.

I had to break back into Cicereau’s office to copy the photo of his dead daughter. That would be proof enough of the old-time crime victim for Nightwine, and my own satisfaction. Getting back in shouldn’t be a problem. For now, the ghost of myself was still supposed to be alive and well and performing nightly. It was still five hours to show time.

Masquerading as my own reflection, as Margie, I’d be in and out of there in a heartbeat.

Chapter Fifty-Two

Ric would have been worried that I was off and running without waiting for him, but there were lots of things I didn’t want to explain at the moment. Like my mirror-split personality.

Quicksilver was still out on big doggie business, so no one witnessed my exit from Nightwine central. I’d used Godfrey’s codes to disable the security cameras when I came home. I didn’t want anybody in the main house to tumble to my intentions and try to talk me out of them, or any record of my criminal intent.

When I departed again, I was, in fact, as good as a ghost of myself.

I wore a black leotard and Spandex leggings. My black ballet slippers and best vintage black satin opera gloves had rosin on the soles and fingertips to give them more traction. I was entering a reptile-arachnid world and I needed to slither with the best of them, even if only by artificial means. I’d removed the thin sterling hip chain I wore for Ric—it was fragile and might snap during exertion, but I worried about the glaring reflectivity of the silver familiar. It could really cook my cat burglar act if it migrated somewhere obvious at a key moment! But, not to worry. The prescient thing had instantly morphed into a duplicate of the sterling chain and settled on my hips. One might think Snow had intentions of usurping Ric. At least I knew this chain wouldn’t snap . . . although it might bite.

This time I parked Dolly two long Las Vegas Strip blocks away from the Gehenna, where nobody bothered with security cameras, and retraced my escapee steps. Into the laundry Dumpster and up the chute I went, crawling like an insect. I passed the churning central mechanical systems and finally arrived at the theater’s backstage area.

The first show wouldn’t open for more than three hours. It was late afternoon. Everything and everybody unloosened their corsets and breathed at a major hotel and casino during the hours that change over from day to night.

I prowled the deserted backstage area, feeling an unhappy twinge of homesickness. My reflection had adapted quite well once I was gone. I sensed that. Madrigal had been thoroughly pleased at this outcome, also his pets. They had liked the Stepford Wife me, tamed, predicable, not upsetting the status quo.

Too bad. Stepford Divorcee was here now and this was Splitsville.

First, I had to confront the blue-toned front-surface mirror in which I’d split in two.

The mirror surface was inert, as it had always been. When I touched my black-gloved fingers to their reflection, my whole hand plunged right through. Whole. Uncorrupted by debased mirror images. I stepped through again.
Presto-change-o
, I was in Cicereau’s office, the slim flash drive case flat against my hip inside the leotard, concealed. The drive was memory overkill—I was only after one image—but a CD was more difficult to conceal in Spandex and I could hardly email that damned and damning file to myself from his machine.

The trouble with breaking physical barriers is that you can’t scout ahead. Even as my body emerged crouched on the wet bar, I saw that the joint was jumping.

Not only was Cicereau present, and his butch bodyguard Sansouci, but my most non-favorite wanta-meet, Detective Hardboiled, Half-balled Haskell.

At the moment I was a scintillating reflection in a dozen silver surfaces. Maybe if I kept the dazzle going, I’d be overlooked.

“You’ve been useful before because you were human, Detective Haskell,” Cicereau was saying. “Now you are neither flesh nor foul, but a freakish half-breed. You don’t even know which super bit you, half-werewolf or debased vampire or something worse.”

There was something worse?

“I’m a half-were now.” Haskell spat the words through distended fangs. He looked a mess. Everything human about him had degraded and mixed with the worst of beastliness. “I can do even more special work for you.”

“Such as?”

“I know where to find that meddling Maggie you’re missing.”

“Madrigal has been here having a fit when you arrived because she’d disappeared, and I admit I’ll drop a bundle in advertising, but I don’t want her, Haskell. She’s more trouble than she’s worth. Just get out of here.”

Sansouci made it happen in one muscle-bound moment.

One down, two to go.

“Scum,” Sansouci said, wiping his hands on his black denim thighs. “Now half-breed scum.”

“Agreed.” Cicereau smiled. “Still, scum is always useful, always has been. No trace of my Margie?”

“Your little Margie has left the building. Gone.” Sansouci sat in the swivel chair before the desk, then swiveled my way. I thought,
Sparkle, sparkle, little reflective star
.
Hide me
.

“Think that Madrigal had anything to do with it, despite his indignant act?” Cicereau asked.

“No. He had the perfect new trick worked up. I saw it in rehearsal. It rocked.”

“Yeah, it did, didn’t it? What hooked you, like, as just an audience member?”

So I had to listen to Sansouci rave about me being swathed in silk and then naked in serpent coils and elevated into thin air and having a rhinestone apple sucked out of my throat. These mob guys made a fanged Howard Hughes look enlightened, but what the hell else did they have to do?

“We’re still probably better off without Margie,” Cicereau concluded. “Dames will always turn on you and then you have no choice but to off them, which makes you feel bad.”

I shuddered to imagine Cicereau’s farewell speech to his own daughter sixty-some years ago, if he’d even bothered to be in on the kill.

“I’m gonna check on the high-roller baccarat tables.” Cicereau rose from his desk and from behind his restored computer.

“I’ll hold the fort, boss,” the black-and-silver haired Sansouci said, standing.

He would make a damn impressive werewolf, and I didn’t even want to tangle again with him in human form. I hoped “the fort” meant more than this office.

Apparently it did, for Sansouci eyed everything, then slipped out the door. I heard the security system beep into action after he left.

It hurt to stretch myself back into unmirrored form, but I hopped from the wet bar onto the floor and made for the computer on Cicereau’s desk.

The flat-screen monitor showed the same wallpaper as before, a Disney forest scene teeming with rabbits, squirrels, and deer, all great prey for wolves.

I moved right to Photo Album, found the deeply buried

family pic from 1949 and copied it onto my flash drive.

The drive whirred as happily as Jiminy Cricket for a

second or two. I was ready to chirp myself when I tucked

the earring-sized portable drive into my Spandex tights.

Everything was going perfectly until all the power in the room went out, which meant all the lights too. Trouble was, I needed light to see a reflection to walk into. While I froze, being a thinking being, and realized someone must have rigged the power outage from outside the office, a huge heavy web fell atop me.
Boobytrap!
Also triggered from outside. A net seemed hokey for the Cicereau operation, so who would have motive or opportunity, and the nerve to use Cicereau’s office for his or her own purposes? It sure wasn’t Sylphia’s web, not these scratchy rope fibers. I fought the cumbersome netting, and was still fighting it when the lights and power came back on.

The office door opened and in walked . . . Detective Haskell in all his half-were glory.

Chapter Fifty-Three

Talk about a list of people you’d most like
not
to meet in heaven, or hell; Haskell was now
numero uno
in my book.

The lights showed that I was tangled in a huge, heavy-duty fishing net. The more I thrashed, the more tangled I became. This must have been rigged after my first break-in. Still, I didn’t see Sansouci or Cicereau racing back to gloat. Believe it or not, that tightened the sulfuric acid knot in my stomach behind the hidden drive even more.

Haskell grinned, showing yellowed teeth between a pair of rusty red fangs. You could have nicknamed him Canadian Sunset. Then he spoke.

“Our friends here at the Gehenna underestimate you, and they sure underestimate me, Miss Delilah Street.”

I jerked in distaste to hear my name on his peeling, blackened lips.

“You know from how I cracked Nightwine’s fence security that I have my little ways of coming and going in the most unexpected places in town.”

I glanced up, examining the ceiling as I hadn’t before. A dark pattern of rugged wood beams suggested overarching forest branches. The net would have been invisible up there. And Haskell probably had something on a lot of local security firm personnel who would do him favors. Even now, he was exulting in what he had on me.

“The minute I saw those new Gehenna billboards, babe, I knew it was you.”

He circled me and the desk, checking to see that I was tightly wrapped. Thank God I’d quit Photo Album, although Haskell might have been too stupid to figure out what I’d been doing.

“I suppose,” Haskell went on, as the seldom-listened-to invariably do, “you read about my near-fatal mugging in the Sinkhole and thought you were done with Irving Haskell.”

Irving!
I’d forgotten it from the newspaper article.
And who wouldn’t?
Irma asked.
Not an A-list first name
. No wonder he had issues.

His fingers prodded and poked me through the webbing, which made me feel even more like a snared fish.

“Thing is, girlie, does it pay me better to let the management know I got you, or are they tired of you and I can take you home and keep you all to myself?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t breathe. I knew which alternative I preferred. So I screamed. I thrashed, even though it was useless. I threw my full weight on Haskell and managed to kick his feet out from under him so we were rolling on the floor together.

He actually seemed to enjoy this version of dry mud wrestling, but it was worth the nausea if I could get the big boys back in here to play. Against them I had a chance. Slim, but a chance.

I heard the office door slam against the wall. In an instant, Sansouci hauled us both upright and slammed us against the nearest wall. He hit a button on the desk, then sat against the edge, arms crossed, biceps bulging impressively, eyeing us both.

I knew what he was thinking: Which of these two would I like to skin alive the most?

From the quick glance he gave my Spandex cat burglar outfit I could tell that he liked me best, and in my skin.

Everybody hates a loser, and Haskell was a loser born, whether human or unhuman.

On the other hand, I’d made Sansouci look bad to Cicereau, and no guy likes a woman who shows him up to his boss.

I shrugged and did a little Mae West CinSim. “Get this slug off me and I’ll run away with you to the Clark County jail.”

“Don’t listen to her!” Haskell screamed. “She’s the Devil in a black Spandex catsuit.”

Actually, that description didn’t hurt me with Sansouci one damn bit.

He sighed, got up, wrenched the netting off us both, kicked Haskell in the stomach, and spun me against himself one-armed while he pulled the handcuffs from Haskell’s belt. In a thrice I was cuffed behind my back. Sansouci pushed me up against the wall solo while he rolled Haskell into a fishnet rug on the floor.

“Mr. Cicereau,” Sansouci said, “will decide what to do with both of you.” He glanced at me. “Sorry that’s not up to me, Snow White. The Clark County jail sounds like a nice peaceful getaway for us both about now.”

As if cued, Cicereau bustled in, the busy, pudgy executive on a heartburn roll. “So what’s this now?”

Sansouci stood to attention. “Haskell caught her and I caught them both. We throw ’em both over Hoover Dam, or what?”

Sansouci had not been kidding when he’d told me he was sorry! I must be losing my Maggie charisma.

“
Hmmm.”
Cicereau strolled over to me. “She
is
quite a draw.”

“I caught her, boss,” Haskell panted from the floor.

“But you
got
caught.” Cicereau prodded him with his Gucci-shod foot, and then lashed me with a glance that was half-murderous, half-paternal.

I guessed he’d made a very similar decision decades before.

“You did okay,” he told Haskell grudgingly. “You’re still on the payroll. Now make like a wart hog and vanish. We’ll call
you
.”

Sansouci unrolled Haskell from the webbing with one long gesture. Haskell spun so fast he must have gotten rope burns as well as dizzy.

Haskell rose and wobbled out.

As soon as the door shut behind him, Cicereau turned to Sansouci. “Take her to Starlight Lodge. The moon’s about to go full. I’ll decide about her then and there.”

I breathed a sigh of relief to be rid of Haskell until I saw Sansouci’s impassive face flinch slightly. The expression was gone before he pulled me away from the wall by one arm and hustled me out.

I’d been working my black satin wrist-length gloves off behind my back since I’d been cuffed and now was glad I had them to leave a trail. What good that might do was another matter. Quicksilver could follow the scent maybe, if anyone knew where to start looking for me.

Ric might.

Going through the office door en route to the mysterious Starlight Lodge, I felt a sharp, quick pinch on the butt.

Sansouci?
He was looking way too grim to indulge in anything as playful as butt pinching.

But somebody wasn’t.

Like it says in the old song, “Somebody Loves Me.”

The next line is even more apropos to this situation.

“I wonder who?”