Hex Appeal

SNOW JOB by CAROLE NELSON DOUGLAS

Everyone wondered why a Sin City bigwig like Christophe performed twice nightly as “Cocaine” with his own rock band at his Inferno Hotel venue. That was like “the Donald” leading a fifties doo-wop group nightly at the Trump Las Vegas, although that very thought was more shuddersome than a pack of feral zombies invading a tea party.

Everyone was dying to know, in a 2013 Vegas packed with supernatural moguls, just what flavor of paranormal the Seven Deadly Sins’ lead singer, Christophe, aka Cocaine, aka Snow, was. Rumor whispered that he was an albino vampire, but Snow maintained that was way off base.

Except for the albino part, obviously.

One night between shows, the rock-star mogul stepped firmly out of character.

“Get me Delilah Street,” Snow told his security chief, Grizelle, even though he knew that the formidable shapeshifter hated Delilah Street almost as much as Delilah Street claimed to hate him.

“You’ve never asked me to provide you with a woman before,” Grizelle observed.

“I’m not asking now. She’s a paranormal investigator.”

“She’s a self-advertised paranormal investigator. I find her annoying. I thought you did, too.”

His colorless lips sketched the shadow of a smile. “I do.”

“She’s a bloody amateur,” Grizelle went on, “and she’s the Cadaver Kid’s girlfriend, or hadn’t you noticed?”

“She’s going to be my bloody amateur next. And, Grizelle, I notice everything, including when you’re jealous.”

“Jealous? Who’s got your back with tooth and claw?”

“You do.”

His pale hand stroked the top of her gleaming ebony hair, which was styled into shoulder-length braids. She was a tall, handsome woman with watered-silk skin, a moiré pattern of black and deepest gray that outshone her emerald green silk sheath dress and metal-heeled gladiator sandals.

As Grizelle leaned into his fond gesture, her moiré skin sprouted black-and-white fur, and the green gown dwindled into the concentrated gleam of feline irises. Now that Grizelle had shifted into a huge black-striped white tiger, her platter-sized paws rested on the broad shoulders of Snow’s white leather jumpsuit, and her emerald eyes were slitted with devotion as one furred cheek rubbed her scent on him.

Her gesture almost dislodged the black sunglasses he always wore to shield his presumably pink eyes from the light.

“I’m going to need a human investigator in my corner very soon, Grizelle,” he whispered into her large, tufted ear.

The white big cat eased down onto all fours before rising in her human form, shaking her stripes into velvety black skin and satiny black hair. Her flashing emerald eyes evoked the glitzy green costume of Envy in the Seven Deadly Sins band.

“I’m your security chief,” she reminded her boss. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I told you. Delilah Street isn’t here.” His voice held the sharpness of command now.

“She doesn’t like you,” Grizelle half growled, sounding cattier than a soap-opera diva. “It might be difficult to convince her to jump at your call.”

“I’m sure you’ll devise a plan. Don’t wait. Something wicked this way comes.”

You’d think a girl could get a peaceful night’s snooze in a cozy Enchanted Cottage. Sleeping Beauty managed it for decades in a drafty old castle.

My bedroom isn’t located in any fairy-tale joint, but in a replica of a 1940s honeymooner’s nest from a movie named The Enchanted Cottage. Inside it, the film story line went, true love had overlaid movie star looks on a plain old maid and a disfigured war hero.

I awoke to the sound of repeated gunfire and sat up, blinking like a gothic heroine in my filmy-curtained four-poster bed, and immediately scanned for intruders.

One of my two casement windows was open and banging against the wall. The light sweat of alarm on my skin didn’t detect so much as a breath of night air, never mind a window-sash-crashing wind.

Checking the bedroom floor, I saw no sign of my devoted rescue dog. Quicksilver was known to enter and exit the cottage windows at night, though discreetly and without drama, but never on the second floor.

Next I noticed that the creepy “bugs-moving” feeling along my thighs wasn’t my nightshirt riding up. It was the crocheted bedspread slowly ebbing to the bed’s foot.

Since this is post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas and not your father’s Sin City, but one crawling with supernaturals, I had immediate suspects. The first were the often unseen domestic “helpers” that came with the Enchanted Cottage. The second most likely suspect was a first on my list—a genuine ghost.

I grabbed the absconding coverlet with both hands and jerked it up to my waist again.

It jerked back down.

I leaned forward to jerk harder.

Something grabbed my T-shirt front and tugged even more. I fell facedown on the foot of the bed as that unseen “something” outflanked me to pinch my now-exposed rear.

This indignity ruled out a disembodied ghost, but not the mischievous pixies, gnomes, and poltergeists that abound in the borders between the paranormal and natural worlds. My house “spirits” so far had been as good as two-thousand-dollar-an-ounce gold. Something you could count on.

They’d never resort to anything as crude as this spectral horsefly bite.

I rolled over and off the bed, my slender ankle bracelet thickening as I went into uproot-and-expel mode. In seconds, my silver familiar had migrated to my rear and transformed into a really heavy and cold metal fanny pack.

That form was Vegas-appropriate, sure, but not helpful. Nothing would pinch my butt again, but I didn’t need a rear anchor right now either.

My yell and karate kick were meant to clear my immediate space.

Instead, the unseen Something grabbed my extended ankle and jerked again.

I would have gone belly-down on the floor if I hadn’t caught hold of a bedpost, spun around it, and kicked my legs back onto the bed to crawl over the crumpled coverlet and jump off the other side.

“Show yourself, coward,” I shouted from the floor as a diversion.

I launched myself at the wall near the door, hoping to run into my invisible visitor. I detected a momentary brush with something so elusive, I ended up plastered against the wallpaper, a floral design with blossoms bigger than my hands.

I heard a high-pitched, self-satisfied … giggle.

“Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet,” a crazy voice sing-songed.

It came from the open, gently tapping window.

I charged the sound. When I got there, something lifted my hips so only my toes touched the floor. A forceful push could catapult me past whoever or whatever was there, through the open window to the flagstones below.

My unseen dancing partner released the dangerous grip with a patronizing pat on the fanny pack that had me cursing. I’d already curled my fingers around the closing window frame and swung inward with it to the wall. Once my feet were flat on the floor again, I slammed the window shut and held it closed with my back, sealing in my tormenter.

“… and she began to cry,” the disembodied voice taunted.

By now I was panting hard but hardly tearful. The silver familiar had finally got the message that I could defend my own rear better than eight pounds of solid sterling (would that my glutes were that pumped). It looped around my bicep as a funky designer cuff … a lariat-in-waiting.

I surveyed the room. Everything was dead still, even my airy bedpost curtains. The shut window was no longer a point of entry or exit.

My glance fell on the stainless-steel water bowl against the opposite wall, kept in my bedroom for Quicksilver’s midnight security rounds when he was home. It was ten inches across because I’m talking a 150-pound dog, part wolf, part wolfhound. I sometimes thought his nights out might be spent chasing his own tail.

Great! Just when I could use him guarding my besieged tail here at home.

I caught a glimmer of something in the mirror over my dresser. Mirrors have been doors for me ever since I came to Las Vegas, so I see more in them than most people. Is it me or Sin City? Or a combustible combination of both? Watch this space.

Right then, I realized my filmy bedpost curtain was gathered into a fan of folds about … five feet six inches above the floor. Something clutched the fabric.

I jumped onto my bed again—most solo fun I’ve ever had on it—bounced and caromed off the opposite wall, bent to grab the dog’s water dish … and flung the contents at the empty space between me and the bedpost.

For an instant, a wet figure took weird negative shape, like a strip of old-time camera film soaked in developing fluid.

“Strip” is the word. I ripped the coverlet from my bed and leapt on the being playing peekaboo behind the bedpost. My pounce encountered, and drove back, a solid form. I pushed forward until I pinned it to the wall.

“Ow! My eye,” the voice howled. “Jack put in a thumb and pulled out a plum—”

“Enough with the nursery rhymes! If I wanted a naked man in my room,” I told my unseen prisoner, “it wouldn’t be the Invisible Man. Now, get decent, then explain yourself.”

Releasing mushy biceps—mad scientists aren’t much for working out—I folded my arms under the message on my sleep T-shirt—KICK SASS.

“Nice pecs,” Dr. Jack Griffin, aka the Invisible Man, commented on my posture with another giggle.

Where’s Fabio when you finally think you need him?

I stepped back a stride to watch a reverse strip show.

My abused crocheted coverlet, probably made by pixies, or possibly even Madame Defarge, began to elevate like a cobra from a basket. It twisted around and around as it went higher, making my visitor seem to be donning a Roman toga.

“Here.” I tossed a rhinestone-banded fedora from my dresser top to his approximate middle. “Put this on. I like looking people in the face, even when they’re invisible.”

“Snazzy hat,” he cooed, giggling as my hat levitated over the room scenery between the togaed shoulder and his forehead.

My uninvited guest was no threat to anything but my patience. He was a rogue Cinema Simulacrum, or CinSim. Old black-and-white movie characters filmed on silver nitrate could be overlaid on illegally smuggled zombies from Mexico. The mysterious Immortality Mob leased them to Vegas attractions, where they were chipped to remain in suitable settings. My personal affinity for silver made me their champion. They, in turn, were my best confidential informants in town.

“Say, Miss Street,” the Invisible Man cajoled. “I just had to have a little fun with you. Can’t you take a joke?”

“Why now? And how’d you escape the Inferno Hotel on the Strip to get all the way over to Hector Nightwine’s Sunset Road estate and my digs on it?”

“I’m an invisible man of mystery.”

“You’ll be unseen chopped liver if you don’t start talking.”

He adjusted the hat to the jaunty angle I used when I wore it. Ruin it for me, why don’t you?

“I’m the only unchained CinSim in Vegas, darlin’ girl. I can go where I want because nobody can see me.”

“Why would a major Vegas mogul like Snow let one of his valuable leases go wandering so far?”

“I’m not as visibly valuable as the Inferno Hotel’s other CinSims. Nick and Nora Charles are chipped to the Inferno bar with that darn dog, Asta. The noir CinSims have their own custom sets on the Limbo level. The bordello CinSims like Errol Flynn and Marilyn Monroe inhabit the Lust level right below.”

Mention of Limbo and Lust “levels” didn’t faze me. The Inferno sat atop a re-created Nine Circles of Hell.

“I’m just an off-balance oddball,” Dr. Jack said, “as I was in my film life. Mr. Mad Scientist, always considered more smart and crazy than sexy. An invisible CinSim gets no recognition. You, at least, put up with me. I thought you even really liked me.”

He sounded pouty now.

“I like you fine. At the Inferno Hotel, not in my bedroom.”

“That’s what I broke even my long-distance bonds to come and tell you. Things aren’t fine at the Inferno Hotel. It’s haunted.”

“The house muscle, Grizelle, is tiger enough to handle it.”

“My dear lady. Grizelle is … no longer … what she was. No one or nothing at the Inferno is.”

“What’s new about that? Snow is just doing his usual control-freak act.”

“Snow’s no longer in control. Look at me!”

“I can’t.”

“Oh, sure, Miss Street, I like to give girls at the bar the occasional fanny pinch, but when did I get into serial assault on asses? Tonight. Then, heading here, I almost ended up way down the freeway in Laughlin. All us Inferno entities are possessed. Haywire. Any minute, the news will hit the thousands of tourists trekking in and out of the hotel. And now Snow’s nowhere to be found.”

“Small loss,” I muttered, shaken despite myself. “Since when am I backup security for the Inferno?”

“It’s all so horribly wrong, Miss Street. The slot machines are spitting out razor blades. At the Inferno bar, your white-chocolate Albino Vampire cocktails are pouring out as dead dark as Black Russians. The ‘perfect film wife,’ Nora Charles, has runs in her silk hose, and hubby Nick Charles is out of gin!”

Dr. Jack’s last complaint alarmed me the most. Thirties booze-hound detective Nick Charles running out of Boodles was like the film Casablanca running out of doomed lovers. Sheer travesty.

While I stood there wondering what suit of armor I should wear to a cursed Las Vegas hotel, my casement window slammed open again. This time the cause was all too visible.

A huge wolfhound-wolf-cross dog with vampire hearing and fangs and a bloodhound sniffer—wanted to know who’d been tipping over his water dish and messing with his rescuer from a fate worse than death … euthanasia. I grinned approval at his superdog two-story jump. No need to play nice and use the first-floor doggie doors tonight.

Quicksilver’s bounds abused my bedspread again. He landed by the upended bowl, skidded through the spilled water, and scented the unseen intruder. As I stepped away from confining Mr. Elusive, Quick leapt with paws extended at the exact shoulder height to pin the Invisible Man to the wall.

“Thanks, partner. Keep him busy while I get ‘decent.’ And no peeking,” I warned Jack Griffith, “even if you are a doctor.”

“I’m not that kind of a doctor and Rin Tin Tin here seriously needs a manicure. Ouch!”

“I know. He likes his nails long, and I don’t ever argue with that muzzle.”

Living in an Enchanted Cottage has its benefits. I slipped into my endless closet, still wondering what to wear to an unspecified widespread haunting, and closed the door. A hovering pixie made herself into Tinker Bell so I could see in the dark.

I sighed. Deeply, madly, truly. Snow and I had cherished a heavy-duty mutual loathe-hate relationship since I came to Las Vegas several months ago in search of my double, my possible sister, Lilith Quince. She was my mirror image, and mirrors had turned out to be my medium after the Millennium Revelation pulled back the curtains on the supernaturals coexisting among us.

Call me one weird sister, but I wasn’t high on bailing out the Inferno, or its owner. I’ve never been into male sex symbols. I’m not talking about the planet Mars with the provocative little arrow. Blatant onstage booty calls for screaming female fans and profit insult my intelligence. Elvis would have swiveled in vain. Justin Timberlake would have to get his screams and squees from some other chick.

Cocaine, aka Snow, played Pride incarnate as lead singer in his Seven Deadly Sins band. He ended each show by enslaving his mosh-pit groupies with a post-concert Brimstone Kiss that had them swooning and coming back again and again—and never getting another smooch.

What a racket to sell tickets. The least he could do was sleep with the poor lovesick fans, but he never did, just teased them and left them panting.

Jerk!

This was not about Snow, I reminded myself while squirming into the steel-studded vampire-fighting catsuit I owed to the Inferno security wardrobe. The shiny black fabric was supernatural Kevlar, suppler and stronger than leather and up to facing down any unknown but wayward supernatural capable of turning an entire hotel and all its contents … well, upside down.

My silver familiar, a souvenir of my ongoing war with Snow, left its default position as a thin hip chain under the James Bond–ish wet suit and eeled down a tight sleeve. It emerged clamped on my left wrist as a pair of handcuffs locked onto the same arm.

Cool look. I hoped the familiar would schedule a rerun the next time I was out for dinner with my investigative partner and dead-dowsing significant other, Ric. That would keep his mind on dessert.

I stuffed my feet into Ed Hardy motorcycle boots and emerged through the closet door as the pixie winked out. The Invisible Man, a learned scientist in his day, gave a piercing wolf whistle.

“Quicksilver, leave kitty!” I called my dog off just as his very visible fangs neared Dr. Jack’s very invisible throat.

“Toss me my fedora,” I told Dr. Jack. “I like to look professional going to a job.”

“My work here is done.” His voice was a rasp. “May you and the very big doggie live long and prosper.”

Quick let his forelegs click to the floor. He picked up one wet paw and wrinkled his muzzle.

“Not your mess,” I told him. “we’re walking into a much bigger one. What’s your position on anyone or anything who mucks with our CinSim friends?”

He lifted a rear leg and did nothing more.

I nodded. “That’s right. You took out that Kansas weather witch’s TV tower with one well-placed piss during her electrical storm. Let’s go see what’s shaking at the Inferno Hotel and find out who needs pissing on now.”

I looked around. My bedspread was a pyramid of folds on the floor, topped by my slightly used fedora. I decided I could leave home without it.

Just driving up to the Inferno in my vintage Cadillac convertible, Quicksilver riding shotgun in sunglasses, almost shocked the catsuit off me … not that anybody on the Vegas Strip would much notice a naked woman these days.

They sure couldn’t miss the hotel’s drastically altered façade. I parked on the curved driveway well before the entrance canopy, so I could gaze up. Neon was busting out all over up and down the Las Vegas Strip.

Not at the Inferno. Tonight it was less the Technicolor erupting volcano and more the smoldering ruin. The usual exterior fireworks had faded to cold, colorless flames the shades of ashes … the gray and black and white of a vintage film, like the CinSims inside.

Tourists elbowed in and out of the massive front doors, eyes on free-offer flyers, oblivious to the racket, bustle, and anyone else, as usual.

So I was only secondarily shocked almost out of my butt-stomping booties when my parking valet pal, Manny, opened my Caddy’s driver’s side door.

Good grief! Manny’s usual vibrant orange demon scales were dolphin blue-gray instead, and his mood was as subdued as his color.

“Dolly’s looking a bit lackluster, Miss Street,” he said.

“Well, sure. Her paint job isn’t reflecting the neon-bright flames ringing the hotel for sixty stories up. You look a bit down in the forked tongue and tail yourself.”

Manny shrugged as he slid into her red leather upholstery. “Something’s different about the hotel? You got me.”

Beside me, Quicksilver whimpered his suspicions.

“You’re right,” I told my dog. “The Invisible Man wasn’t wrong.”

We left Manny punked out behind the steering wheel as we hoofed it along the crowded sidewalk. I looked back to see the speed-demon valet putt-putting Dolly’s three hundred horses up the parking ramp. I’d never let Manny floor it like the regular leadfoots, but that exit was seriously lame.

Every hair on Quicksilver’s body stood on end the moment the hotel’s entry doors whooshed shut behind us. My studded wet suit felt warm and cozy, but the skin of my exposed face and hands tightened as if plunged into ice water.

The usual over-air-conditioned casino atmosphere had gone even more arctic.

Quick clung to my left hip, Mr. Service Dog incarnate.

I plunged through any crowd openings, heading straight for the Inferno bar, where my favorite tipsters hung out. I was relieved when a tall, dark-haired man in white tie and tails caught my eye.

Nick Charles, the famous detective, was still at his CinSim post. My relief trickled out in a sigh. If Nick Charles was on duty at the Inferno bar, all was right with the post–Millennium Revelation world.

He turned to greet me, a quizzical eyebrow arched toward his receding hairline of wavy hair. “Miss Delilah Street, as I don’t live and breathe. Aren’t you a treat to see in your upscale long johns?”

He hoisted his constant prop, a martini glass that was perpetually half-empty or half-full, depending on your life philosophy.

“I’m so glad to see you.” I actually gushed I was so relieved to find Nick being his normal self.

“That goes double for me, as my vision often does. I have a mystery to solve that has me hammered.” He uttered a puzzled complaint. “There is swill in my glass.”

“There’s always expensive swill in your glass,” I pointed out.

“This stuff is undrinkable, and from me that’s saying something.”

I leaned forward to sip from the rim that swayed to and fro with his well-oiled sense of balance. We could have been on the QE II. A wavelet washed into my mouth.

“Oh, Nicky. This won’t hurt you. It’s just … water.”

Nick’s dapper shoulders shuddered. “Poison! Nora.” His voice lifted to summon his wife. “I’m being poisoned.”

“Hang on for a minute, Nicky dear,” she trilled from the other side of bar. “I’m coming, but Asta is being a perfect beast!”

Quicksilver was not an Inferno bar regular, but he sensed when things were awry. He gave his yard-troll-at-the-cottage-door growl that was half-inquisitive and half-desirous of a snack.

Nora came jerking around the bar’s other side in all her willowy high-fashion glory, up to an impudently tilted and veiled hat overshadowed by a large gray ostrich feather.

Quicksilver leapt forward with a pounce and growl that indicated prey.

I had no leash but my voice. “Leave kitty,” I ordered. It worked in Sunset Park, and here he’d stopped on a whisker although his discontented growl kept going and growing until the sound of a squalling baby rose to my ears.

How odd for Quicksilver to carry on like a coyote pup.

I looked down. Quicksilver was silent, but his blue-eyed gaze also fixed on something … a critter the size of a wire-haired terrier but with huge-clawed paws that churned the carpeted floor while a sound like an angry monkey grated through its fangs.

My jaw dropped, then stood to attention again in amazed speech. “That’s … not … Asta.”

“Of course it is,” Nora cooed fondly. “He’s just throwing a tantrum. Isn’t he, dear?” she asked Nick.

No, it was a real “kitty,” sort of. And not a he. I recognized the white-and-black-striped coat of Grizelle’s white-tiger form, but now she was just a … baby, a fifty-pound cub with demonic green eyes staring straight at me as if ready to tear my heart out.

For an instant, the fuzzy-wuzzy adorable black-and-white baby-tiger stripes morphed into short frothy white petticoats and blouse under a full-skirted black apron. The long gray claws became dark Mary Jane shoes on white-stockinged feet, and the cub’s face was surrounded by petite black pigtails tied with poison green ribbons. So cute it was scary! I stamped my Ed Hardy tattooed motorcycle boot at her, and Grizelle’s fierce, but truly “girly,” expression returned with a snarl to a tiger-cub likeness with the rest of her.

What was going on here?

Nick’s martinis turned to tap water? Awesome security chief Grizelle reduced to a leashed tiger cub? Nick and Nora not noticing the major family pet switch? What else was wrong at the Inferno Hotel?

“Why didn’t you tell me Miss Street is trespassing again?” asked a resonant baritone that could strike twenty-five thousand people silent … or set them screaming mindlessly.

I turned fast. The Inferno owner, operator, and rock-star mogul stood so close I almost got leather burns from his black jumpsuit. We could have gone on the Inferno stage with his cub and my dog as an animal act.

Curiouser and curiouser, with neon on it.

The suspected albino vampire’s skin and shoulder-blade-brushing hair were both as white as white could be, but he was not the usual milky monovision with a blindfold of dark glasses the only off-color note. Gone was his bleached-leather stage costume. Instead, his jumpsuit was dead black, as black as those signature sunglasses.

“It’s our bar,” Nick’s voice came over my shoulder in a grumpy slur. “We were leashed here first.”

“You tell him, Nicky.” Nora struggled to untwine the tiger cub’s lead from around her gray silk hose. Major snags to match the unsightly existing runs were in their future.

“I believe you mean ‘leased,’” Snow corrected Nicky.

I tried not to ogle Snow’s skintight Elvis-comeback black leather outfit although doing so came with my job as a paranormal investigator. As with his usual white leather jumpsuit, also borrowed from Elvis, this one was open to his navel like a red-carpet starlet’s dress.

The black outfit was how I knew we were dealing with a CinSim of himself that Snow had commissioned. Simple for an albino. He was all white to begin with. The perpetual sunglasses that protected his light-sensitive irises were always black.

He only had to have himself shot on a bit of rare surviving silver nitrate film.

Then the image was impressed onto a fresh zombie 3-D body canvas through the Immortality Mob’s so-far-secret process. Las Vegas was the cusp where cutting-edge science and paranormal-fueled magic met … and was turned into pure old-fashioned profit. But only vintage silver nitrate film would work. Get ahold of a precious piece of it and …

Prest-O Change-O, you had an exact reproduction, on cue, on tap, at Snow’s command. He’d bought and manufactured his dark double. He hadn’t grown his own in the mirror, as I apparently had with Lilith.

Cheater.

I wondered what immortal bit of lost vintage filmmaking had been sacrificed to Snow’s desire for a double and his deal with the Immortality Mob, not to mention what poor dead schlub got to power the mogul’s needs.

You might get the idea that I didn’t like Snow, but you’d be wrong.

I despised his cheesy rock-star appeal to the “weaker sex” and myself for having to deal with him. If he wasn’t an albino vampire rumor made him, he was some variety of potent supernatural. Finding out exactly what was number one on my bucket list.

There was no arguing that Snow wasn’t the Darkside darling and an American idol. His pale skin was also as muscular as Michelangelo’s major-hot statue of a naked David duplicated at Caesars Palace. I could see why, when Snow’s pelvis was onstage working his white Fender Stratocaster guitar like a giant screaming electric fig leaf, mosh-pit groupies swooned.

But why was the CinSim Snow coming out to play when Snow was still in town?

Was this part of the Inferno “haunting”?

Meanwhile, Nick was showing off for Nora by wobbling up to Snow’s black cowboy-booted physique and going nose to nose. Nick’s film-white finger tapped Snow right between the pecs, dead center of the Jack Frost scars etched like lace and lightning bolts on his bare chest that were either souvenirs from the finger of God casting him down from heaven or souvenirs of some evil entity shocking him back to life in the heart he didn’t have. My theory anyway.

“Those ‘leases’ that confine all us CinSims are leashes,” said Mr. Charles. “And we don’t like it. We’ve got a right to roam, like any Micky Mouse cell phone.”

Snow’s broad shoulders and schooled torso-twist literally shrugged off Nick.

“How you can stay drunk on plain water I’ll never know, Mr. Charles,” he said. “Your lovely wife is having trouble controlling the family pet, as usual, only the pet in question is a juvenile version of my security chief, which is not as usual.”

CinSim Snow knew the score, yet no one noticed but me. He turned my way. Wearing bootheels, I was almost Nick Charles’s six-foot height. Snow still towered.

“You’re the investigator, Miss Street. May I suggest you do your job?”

He walked away from the bar area, the crowds parting as if sensing the passage of the Invisible Man. Once offstage, Snow’s secret mojo allowed him to move around the hotel-casino floor unrecognized by the masses. I looked up at the jumbo HDTV high above. The Seven Deadly Sins were rocking out in an instrumental frenzy, no lead singer/guitarist in sight.

The sound was muted, but they were performing live.

I think.

Back to the family Charles. “You’ve changed your ensemble tonight,” I told Nora.

“Of course.” Her voice lilted with good humor. “Snow purchased the rights to my extensive wardrobe as well as me.” She did a fashion-model twirl. “Otherwise, my bar duty would get boring, for me and for the clientele.”

“But why the hat obscuring your sophisticated-lady face?”

“Can you keep a secret?” Nora turned her back on me, encouraging me to come around for a girlfriend conference.

When I faced Nora and her several-layered veil again, she lifted it for a sneak peek.

Gasping, I saw that Nora’s elegant pencil-thin eyebrows had blossomed into furry Brook Shield caterpillars. Her mascara had run, giving her eyes the spiked, drawn-on look of a circus clown.

“It’s a surprise new look,” she said with a winsome smile.

“Are you girls done?” Nick peered over Nora’s shoulder while she hastened to lower her veil. “I have a phenomenon to report, dear ladies. My keen suspicions have been raised. Would you care to look where I direct, Miss Street?”

I turned again to face the bustling casino with the jumbo HDTV screen high above. The Seven Deadly Sins were rocking out with Black CinSim Snow in place as their lead singer.

“Just look there.” The contents of Nicky’s martini glass almost overran one rim as he pointed.

“All the groupies are going nuts. So?”

“Exactly my opinion of ‘groupies,’” Nick declared. “We didn’t have them in my day. They sound like a variety of aquarium fish,” he said carefully, “fish” being a difficult word to enunciate in his perpetual but charming sloshed condition.

The ace detective tattled on. “I saw our mutual friend, Mr. Snow.”

“Friend? Speak for yourself.”

“I am trying to, Miss Street, if you will deign to listen. At the end of the earlier show, I saw Mr. Snow bend down to present the groping groupies with handsome white silk neck scarves of the type that go so well with my tux.”

I didn’t need more CinSim wardrobe notes, or to know about Snow’s throwaways to his fans now that he no longer bestowed the notorious Brimstone Kiss for some mysterious reason.

“I saw,” Nick Charles went on, “less than an hour ago, the entire mosh pit and our mutual sponsor, dressed all in white like a bride, as usual. I saw the whole k-k-kit and ka-Boodles disappear in a f-f-flash of fire.

“I swear.” He held his bare right palm upright like a witness in court.

I held up a hand for Nicky’s martini glass. How weird to see the clear glass and the liquid inside take on subtle colors as the object left CinSim possession for my custody. I sipped.

Still just water. Flat, dull water. Nick Charles’s vision of mosh-pit hell had not been the Boodles talking.

But if the “real” Snow and his closest fans had been kidnapped, where were they? And how would I get there? Things were so truly topsy-turvy here at the Inferno that it gave me a bold new idea.

“Nora, will you watch Quicksilver while I take ‘Asta’ for a walk?” I held my hand out for the dog leash.

She seemed startled by the idea, but the writhing tiger cub actually rubbed its furry sides back and forth on my calves as I took custody of its lead.

Luckily, my body suit prevented any touchy-feely contact between me and Snow’s shape-shifting security chief now stuck in baby white-tiger form. Grizelle and I would only touch each other if it was hand-to-claw combat, and once, recently, it had been.

“Asta is chipped to stay here at the bar,” Nick warned me.

Grizelle sure wasn’t. From the loud purr that ended in a squall like a human infant’s, I knew she badly wanted out of here and onto the real Snow’s trail, too.

I nodded at Quicksilver to tell him he was the Asta substitute for now. Since he and Grizelle had tangled, too, I knew he’d enjoy supplanting her. He adored CinSims.

Just then, a drunken tourist wearing a Michael Vick T-shirt hurtled toward Nora, reaching for her veil.

“Let’s see the famous face, pretty lady.”

Uh-oh. Wrong logo. The tipsy tourist saw the whites of Quick’s fangs instead. Quicksilver had far more guardian chops than the missing Asta.

Meanwhile, I had a case of hotel haunting to solve.

On the huge screen, the camera panned across the jumping, squealing groupies. One wasn’t moving, so I focused on the still center of the mayhem. Oh. I was targeting my exact image—Lilith, my double-trouble sister from mirror-world. I spun to face the mirror behind the bar that reflected the exact same scene. For only this split-second moment, I could use it.

“I don’t know if shapeshifters can survive breaking the mirror barrier,” I muttered as I leapt toward the image of myself, my hand curled tight around the tiger cub’s leash.

Grizelle answered with a fierce growl. She bounded through the mirror, turning into liquid quicksilver ahead of me, a circus tiger breaking through a paper drum-skin.

I hated to perform my disappearing act in public, but most tourists were eyeing the HD screen, and the CinSims would never betray my trade secrets.

How does a quantum leap through a quicksilver mirror backing feel? Imagine passing through oily dark lightning. Then four paws and two feet landed hard on the black floor of what seemed an empty soundstage.

Not quite empty.

In the farthest darkness, a disturbing spotlit tableau boiled with motion three hundred feet away. If you’ve ever seen a close-up of maggots infesting a corpse on a crime forensics TV show, which I can guarantee you have, that’s what the brilliantly lit postage-stamp-size scene recalled.

I started forward at a gallop, baby Grizelle leaping alongside me like a … well, like a gazelle. I had to wonder how a major beast felt being so totally downsized, and could understand the shapeshifter’s fury. The distant mob scene disturbed me, too.

As we closed on the action, I realized we were viewing the dark backs of about fifteen young women shoving, pushing, even climbing each other to make contact with a … white marble statue set against a black stone wall.

The obscured figure we neared was not all white now. Telltale blots of red dappled the object of the assault. My emotions sickened to see a rerun in progress of what I’d only witnessed at the bitter end … my partner Ric Montoya’s multiple fang-marked body after a whole freaking vampire empire, including vampire tsetse flies, had feasted on him. I had to stop this.

Closer still, a frantic Grizelle and I bounded, our charging footsteps muffled by the tiger’s pads, my ridged-rubber boot soles, and the attackers’ deafening shrieks.

Now I was close enough to read the backs of the attackers. Backs? Read? What were they? Living billboards? What was I missing? Oh, the women were wearing T-shirts with messages that echoed their shouted words. And those words were becoming clear and scarily familiar.

“You can’t whip us up, then just stop,” peeved female voices taunted.

“How does it feel to be ‘snowbound’?”

“Yeah. Like we were, Cocaine.”

“We want what’s coming to us … the Brimstone Kiss.”

I skidded to a stop. Oh, no. The figure pinned by the ravenous horde was no hunk of unfeeling marble. It had to be Grizelle’s boss and my so-unfavorite Vegas mogul.

The seething, clawing harpies using the real Snow for a climbing wall shouted “Come on, Cocaine, give,” and “Snow up a storm for us,” as well earthier online endearments I also recognized, like “Ice Prick.” Or so the rumor went.

Only my hard grip on the leash kept fifty pounds of snarling tiger cub from scaling the T-shirted human torsos ahead of us. Now I knew what these attackers were, not the relentless ancient tormenters who’d savaged Ric but modern fangirls gone bad. Even fifteen women, crazed enough, can make a mob.

Groupies were indeed Nick Charles’s schooling “fish” … if you thought “piranha.”

“Grizelle,” I ordered, “velvet paws and fangs only. They’re paying customers and fans. The boss would not want them hurt, no matter what. Got it?”

The tiger cub’s white muzzle lifted in grudging acknowledgment. I hoped she didn’t take it out of my skin later, when we were all back to normal, which I swore we would be. All of us, even Snow and the groupies.

Was I still missing something? Maybe I was being naïve, and Snow liked this scene. I had no time to overthink anything. Even my silver familiar jumped ship, abandoning its cool double-handcuff bracelet form. It split to rocket up one arm, across my shoulders, and down to the other wrist so fast I hoped I’d just sensed hot metal burns.

When I looked, my wrists were circled by cuff bracelets. The pair was etched with serious monster designs, snake-pit-tangled shapes I couldn’t name. Sea monster, kraken, giant squid? Both cuffs trailed silver-chain tentacles—more than the average octopus—say nine per wrist.

I was literally “armed” with my own matched set of heavy metal cat-o’-nine-tails. Could I whip community ass now …

The familiar had become such an intuitive part of me, I’d almost forgotten it had been spawned by my unintentionally touching a lock of Snow’s albino hair, and he might be murderously goaded to revenge at the moment.

Would the familiar, no matter how lethal the form, still obey my “prime directive,” think first and do no harm unless about to be harmed? Yeah, I’m a pacifist kick-ass chick. So sue me, but expect to pay court costs.

My only option was wading into the frenzied fans’ midst, jerking anonymous arms and shoulders away from the prey while Grizelle nipped the heels of their churning feet.

Only Grizelle and I knew the worst part of this assault scene, a damning secret that made me squirm with sympathetic pain for a man, or whatever, I despised.

Only we knew the mauling groupies were pressing Snow’s eternally wounded back—damaged because of me—to the hard stone. He was bound between pain and humiliation like a mythical demigod in Tartarus, the Greek abyss below even Hades, and the mother of all hells.

Whatever breed of immortal Snow was, I knew he was vulnerable—or even human enough—to bleed. I’d never seen but often envisioned the raw, meaty mess my driving compassion for my lover, Ric, had made of his back. I hadn’t known it, but every lash scar my lips fresh from an extorted Brimstone Kiss had erased on Ric’s skin had appeared as a fresh welt on Snow’s several hotel stories away.

Vegas after the Millennium Revelation was the kind of naughty world where one good deed would exact at least another bad one in exchange. Ugly speculations were occurring to me in fractured seconds.

My God. What if these spellbound women were no longer just berserk groupies, what if this sinister hotel-wide change also had made them into vampires?

Above the feeding frenzy loomed Snow’s profile, ghost white face and long hair turned sideways, neck cords strained, albino eyes shut, denuded of the ever-present sunglasses.

By then I’d jerked a pathway through the clawing groupies so eager to close ranks and fight off rescuers. My arms lashed out, the tentacles of silver chains cutting slashes in their black Seven Deadly Sins and snowsluts.com T-shirts, other tentacles wrapping their necks and bare forearms.

The swinging metal stingers left silver comet trails in the air … and streaks of glitter on the black knit and the flesh beneath the raw-edged rips, on the women’s arms, lifting to defend now, not assault. Their fevered demands became moans as I slashed them into stumbling away, cradling their arms and mumbling.

“That hurts … burns … stings.”

Only then did I realize what the monsters engraved on my silver cuffs were … jellyfish.

Most jellyfish stingers were not homicidal, but protective. So far, no major harm had been done. Grizelle, that intractable … huntress … had used her formidable baby teeth to snag jeans legs and T-shirt sleeves, dragging the groupies away over and over, until they clustered in a supine moaning clot.

Now I had to face—how it pained me to attach this word to Snow, but it was true—the victim. Not only did I dread the sight of the bloody rock idol … this was my deepest personal trauma, a Ric rerun, only with Snow instead, my worst nightmare starring my best enemy.

I approached, taking in the man manacled against a towering black basalt wall. Way too much Samson for this Delilah.

Bloodsucking lip prints covered Snow’s pristine white skin and bleached leather like a graphic design and his bare face … I’d never before seen those semicircles of white eyelashes innocently curved along his eyelids. They reminded me of severed snowflakes.

Something winked from the floor at his feet: his shiny black sunglasses, torn off and tossed down. He was an albino, no matter what else he was. Even Snow didn’t deserve to be crucified by his idolaters, his weak vision identified and their protection cast away. His pale blue-veined eyelids still danced to the REM mode, barely visible yet jerking in that unmistakable tic of nerves on edge. Genetically defenseless.

I bent to retrieve the fragile sunglasses.

“Hey, leave that! It’s ours,” a groupie shouted.

A couple rose to charge again, trying to topple me from performing my one good deed, but Grizelle protected me during my ass-out moment.

I elbowed away any still-upright groupies with my flailing glitter whips, climbed Snow like a Sherpa, and placed the sunglasses over the rock god’s spotlight-blinded eyes.

I let myself slide down the marble sculpture of his form, back to the obsidian floor of this place, satisfied his eyes were open again and hidden behind the same tiny, gleaming reflection of me I faced every time we met.

With his full persona in place, he struck me as way too cool and invulnerable again. I’d never seen his back flinch after he’d inherited Ric’s boyhood beatings, and at the moment he even seemed a bit amused by my race to his rescue.

“So,” I said to Snow. “Are we good now?”

His head bowed toward my presence. “You’re good,” he said. “But you could be better.”

If he wasn’t hurting, I wasn’t feeling merciful … more like had, and mad.

“Let’s consider,” I said, “the thousand cheesy films of women chained and mauled. Maybe you ‘asked for it,’ rock star. Not that I’d ever tell that to the Pussycat Dolls.” Who maybe had, too. Sex objects could be so obvious.

Why couldn’t we all just keep our kinks in the bedroom closet?

Because they made money.

“It’s my job, Miss Street.” He made it sound more like a vocation.

I’d noticed that two of the snaps beneath his costume’s gem-studded fly had popped open during the struggle among his frenzied fans to claim a piece of him. I mean, who could miss that bling? I was able to get my fingers, uh, down under to press the snaps decorously shut.

“And doing that isn’t yours,” he finished.

Interesting, though. Snow was obviously not getting off on this mass grope scene any more than I was … or … wait … not until I appeared in the neighborhood.

What to do? If I stepped away, I’d leave him even more exposed to the fanimals, so I stayed put as a barrier and nervously rubbed a bloodred stain on his torso, managing only to smear it.

His hair brushed my embarrassed pink face as his head bent to watch me, knowing what I didn’t until my fingers touched the sticky dab of red, retreated, and I inhaled the scent of perfume, not coppery blood.

No wonder Snow had suffered this apparent feeding frenzy so stoically.

Instead of bloody sucking marks, these “vampire” groupies had left … lipstick kisses on almost every inch of exposed flesh, which Snow had a lot of. He was a bloody Andy Warhol canvas. Oh, blessed Bela Lugosi! I hadn’t prevented a physical ravening; I’d interrupted a rave, a rainbow party gone bad.

“It’s only lipstick, Delilah.” Snow so loved stating the obvious when I’d missed the boat. My moral outrage only got me a ticket on Roll-Your-Eyes line. My time here had been wasted, and I looked like an idiot.

“I see that. Now,” I admitted.

“Even you wear lipstick sometimes.”

That was true. My Snow White coloring made most makeup unnecessary. I was your natural woman, until I ran into unnatural situations. Like this.

“Just a little light lip gloss,” I said between clenched teeth.

“Even better.”

I was not going to flirt with a guy whose fly I’d just locked down. I was tempted to leave him here to free his own ass. Except …

“Your back—?” I asked.

His long hair shook with his head. “—is my eternal unhealing wound, thanks to your innocent meddling. Forget that. I need to be free, not pain-free.”

Still, Snow’s sensitive white skin had turned scarlet under his wrist manacles. My hands fretted at the bonds that imprisoned him. The dark metal was so cold and slick, my fingers iced at the touch. The familiar twined around my wrist as a bracelet dangling only one edged charm, a four-inch diamond-grit jeweler’s saw on a chain. The miniaturized shark’s teeth no more nicked the black metal than the same saw or an acetylene torch could impact my silver familiar.

“Black-moon tarnished silver, Delilah,” Snow said. “I thought your silver talent could counter any supernatural traps, but I see you can’t. Get the hell out while you can. Protect the Inferno CinSims.”

“From what?”

Then I remembered a pretty damning lost detail in this whole misunderstood mess. “Why did I spot Lilith among the groupies upstairs? She only manifests outside my mirror when things are really wrong.”

“Don’t you know?” he asked. “She’s your shadow, not mine.”

The black lenses reflected me eyeing them suspiciously. “She’s been yours, too, Snowman! She’s not here now. Why not? Everyone I know has been sucked one way or another into this hell, haven’t they? These fevered groupies are just the Greek chorus, not the female lead…”

Oh. I realized that the current cast of characters was missing a powerful key figure I had spotted earlier but might not have truly recognized.

“And I’m not the female lead either,” I said aloud. “I wasn’t even supposed to be here. It all began with…”

I focused on the Grizelle cub stalking back and forth between the lines of now-cowed women nursing their stinging glitter wounds. Only in Vegas. But the glitter-whip marks were another element that looked worse than it was. We were all being played.

I surveyed the vast soundstage from polished floor to the blackest, emptiest most opaque heights above us all.

I’d always teased the Lilith in my mirror that Mom, if we’d had one, had named us after shady ladies in biblical times. Delilah was an Old Testament seductress and spy who brought Samson to the same plight Snow faced, blinded and chained, only by a single vengeful woman instead of a hen party.

“Lilith?” I asked myself. Maybe not my Lilith. Now I wasn’t sure who I’d seen in my own image upstairs in the mosh pit. I sure wasn’t invoking my double, because there was no silver-backed mirror here to magnify my few powers, only darkness.

Still, a terrifying theory had me by the throat. Something had possessed these groupies to assault Snow instead of worship him from afar. Or someone.

“Lilith,” I repeated, scared now of an answer.

Maybe I was looking for a Lilith who dated back before Eden, back before the Fall and even maybe before Satan’s Fall from heaven. Maybe I was going for the east-of-Eden sweepstakes, the woman reportedly kicked out of Eden like Cain, the font of all feminine evil from what some believed were myths and tales banned from the Old Testament, or maybe she was just one vastly misunderstood mama …

I named her and Named her beyond any duplicate of me in the mirror.

“Lilith!” Lilith, the Lilith. I called, and therefore conjured her.

Whew. Wind came screaming through this empty time tunnel, reaming the hell out of Hell.

Planting my boots and my purely human will, I stared past the wind-tossed black veil of my hair and found a giant sister image flashing on and off in the surrounding darkness. She was ghostly of skin, with long, long dark tresses mirroring the toss of mine in the windstorm of her manifestation.

Not my double, but my enemy. Everything’s enemy. Lilith Unplugged.

She’d appeared in human form but was still the crimson-pupiled demon succubus of legend. Even I had to admit she looked particularly fetching in an iridescent snakeskin gown with a mermaid fishtail train that matched her chartreuse irises.

The Grizelle cub, recognizing that a really serious player had joined the game, leapt to rip its front claws down Lilith’s green gown. The claw marks sealed as fast as Grizelle could make them, the cub snarling with greater rage every time the damage of her attacks came undone.

Lilith’s lithe white arms, pale as a serpent’s underbelly, spread to welcome the cowed groupies into her devouring, almost maternal, gesture and proximity. They came stumbling atop each other in a rush, slavering over their new idol, madness resurfacing in their eyes.

I glanced over my shoulder. Lilith’s deep contralto croon was hynotizing the agitated groupies. Their eerily green irises seemed to reflect emotions of lust and envy. What a rock star wannabe she was.

“I know when you pissed me off,” I told Snow. “When did you piss off the mother of all demons?”

“Millennia ago. I didn’t suspect you’d have the smarts, guts, or power to call out a major demon. Her distraction won’t last long. She’ll want to expand her presence now that you’ve called her here. Leave me to deal with her. Escape while you can.”

Well, thank you. Nothing like an employer who’d tricked you into ending an involuntary bondage scene between a sex idol and his adorees … and then considered your outing a major monster a screwup on your part. Trouble is, I can’t abandon any living being in trouble, human or paranormal, even Snow. Tell me life is hard and not fair. Tell me death is a tango dancer, and I’m naïve and old-fashioned, but do not tell me I can’t do what I need to.

Even against Grizelle.

Even against my sister Lilith.

Even against the Lilith who was kicked out of Eden for being the world’s first and best bad girl. But why did she have it in for Snow?

“I know what Lilith has done to you lately. What did you do to Lilith?” I demanded.

Snow’s face turned away again, my angry image fading in the sunglasses with the gesture. “Not what I did. What I didn’t do. It’s what she wanted to do with me.”

Ah. Hell hath no fury like a female demon scorned. So she’d cursed him. How?

“We all want to undo you, Snow,” I told him dryly. “Now, listen up. This is not just any Lilith, right? This is not my mirror-me. This is really Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was driven from Eden for wanting to be on top?”

The sunglasses tilted down toward my face. “Yes, but it’s me she’s cursed, not Adam.”

“And the curse is…?”

His second of hesitation felt like an eon knowing Lilith’s sick interlude with the groupies was likely to end at any moment.

“Spill it.”

“I can only give pleasure, not receive it.”

Wow. I processed that. It sort of explained the Brimstone Kiss. It didn’t explain why he’d stopped giving them after he’d forced me to accept one. He’d said I’d failed the test, but maybe it wasn’t his test, maybe it was Lilith’s.

“No wonder,” I told him, “she’s mad as hell and won’t take it anymore, like the groupies. You cheated on her.”

With me.

As much as I hated to admit it, I’d just seen I could get a rise out of Snow. If that wasn’t a symptom of pleasure, I don’t know what was with a man.

He smiled. “So you can’t spare any more empathy time for me, Delilah?”

“Hell, no. I tend to side with the girls.”

I turned as a snarling Grizelle took a guardian post at Snow’s feet and advanced on Lilith. She’d settled into mere life-size form and was awaiting me like a headmistress with a wayward pupil.

“You confront as well as conjure me?” She stepped away from the demon-drugged, smiling groupies pulling their hair out a single filament at a time. “Do you know who I am now, feeble interloper? How powerful I am?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Do you know who or what he is?”

“Snow, International Supernatural of Mystery? Nope, but I intend to find out in my way on my own time.”

“I know what you are, Delilah. You must be pleased to see your enemy bound at the mercy of such trifling fools as these enamored human females.”

“No, Lilith, I am not. I don’t care to use intermediaries.”

Her lurid eyes glittered hotter, the green haloed with scarlet. “Are you daring to refer to me?”

“Yup. Oh, you’re a gorgeous demon witch with a lot of revenge due you. God’s first and final mistake, made from the same human clay as Adam, his equal, not his wimpy rib. Your successor, Eve, took the apple and lost paradise, but you played the serpent for the Fall, didn’t you? Hell hath no fury like a first wife scorned,” I paraphrased, “and you have a minor immortal fury on. So … Snow is Adam?”

“Snow is more than mere man.”

“Snow is … Satan?”

“He’s more than mere devil.”

Loved the new slant on Snow, but that wasn’t my main goal.

“Maybe he is, but you are tiresomely predictable, Lilith. You suck the life from children born and unborn, the blood from the human, the soul from the eternal. You haunt men’s dreams and drain them to death. You can only be banished by the uttering of eight hidden names…”

“So you do know me. You don’t know my names.”

“Wikipedia knows your secret names nowadays, Lil. You are outdated.”

Behind me, Snow gave a short, taunting laugh. “Guess she’s got your number, Lilith. You need to get on Facebook, drum up some fans besides my gullible groupies.”

I knew one thing else about her, one so-egocentric weakness. And that I could use.

While Lilith glared at Snow, her expression cold and her eyes burning hot, I bent to trace a large pattern with my forefinger on the obsidian floor, watching the silver-familiar chains run liquid down my fingernail to pool and spread and sink into the blackness.

I heard Snow’s smothered cry of pain and guessed that the black-moon metal was searing his skin at Lilith’s command. He’d spoken to distract Lilith, and the last thing I wanted was owing him for more pain incurred on my behalf.

My forefinger moved fast to contain the widening mercurial puddle by scribing the fanciful curlicue form in my mind … the frame of Snow White’s wicked stepmother’s mirror that reflected me in the Enchanted Cottage’s upper hall.

Even Lilith sensed my actions and looked down to see what I was doing, a fatal mistake.

There was a mirror here now, with the silver familiar providing the reflective backing. We were unveiling Disney under glass, for obsidian is a polished black stone, a dark mirror, and we were both standing on it.

Lilith stared unblinking into her own reflection—pale white face, long dark hair, glittering green gown—a wavering writ on water.

Some old texts said Lilith had been enamored of staring into a mirror. I’d ensured that her own image would seduce her yet again. That weakness momentarily drained her demon powers and made her just another shallow mean girl simpering in a high-school girls’ room mirror.

Lilith screeched as she realized I’d made her trap herself, then she fled with a Wicked Witch of the West meltdown into the reflected image at her feet.

After she vanished, I spotted my own image resolving on the wind-riffled oil-slick surface left behind and dove down after her. An icy plunge from this dark empty abyss brought me into a soaring arrival in dark, overpopulated chaos, teeming with enough sound and fury to make my ears bleed. In the mosh pit, groupies were swaying hypnotically, screaming for the Brimstone Kiss.

Around me, Lust and Envy and Greed, oh my, rocked out. Was this me or Lilith joining the Seven Deadly Sins on the Inferno concert stage, and was I really doing a hip-banging boogie with … Lust?

That busty, redheaded wench on backup electric guitar had more moves than a corkscrew. Lust’s color-enhanced green eyes went supernova while I glimpsed Lilith inhabiting the performer’s succubus soul. The withering contact shorted out even Lust. Her leering, lascivious face grew blow-up-doll blank. Lust froze into a mannequin position, then her limbs began lifting like a puppet’s.

What a vindictive witch Lilith was. If she shut down the Sins into motionless zombies, the band’s rep would be ruined.

Oh, yeah? The show must go on.

I heard and saw the audience screaming and whistling like a tidal wave under a thousand spotlights. Made me want to give them their money’s worth. I grabbed the flame-fronted guitar from Lust before Lilith got the performer’s hands in gear, noticing that the silver familiar was now a pair of wrist cuffs, both bearing flashing ovals of mirror.

My more-than-air-guitar act flashed the Lilith eyes out of Lust, leaving her standing with hands as currently empty as her dazed irises.

Where was Lilith? I edged downstage next to Greed. From the back, the bass guitarist glittered with gilt braid and the green-orange colors of paper money. As I came abreast, a fading green glint in his robotic gaze said Lilith had scavenged his soul, as she had those of so many others long before this joint concert date of ours.

Lilith was no longer physically present. She was soul-hopping to keep ahead of my two-wristed mirror punches. If every Sin had worn my mirrored kick-demon accessories, she’d be gone for good. I still didn’t know what kind of supernatural Snow was, and I sure didn’t know who or what sang and stomped and strummed in his onstage band. Whatever they were, they were taken unawares. Lilith could keep systematically possessing the Sins band members’ bodies to avoid a showdown with me and my mirrors.

The only way I could exorcise her from this stage and place and time was to leave her nowhere to hide. We were the same physical type—dark hair, pale skin—so I was her walking mirror image, but I needed more than a serial soul-chase, I needed a coup de gras. The lost chord, the final karate chop, the worst-case scenario for an egocentric demon with a bloodthirsty edge.

The stage floor throbbed to the earthshaking thumps, and human hearts, including mine, were fibrilating all over the place. Lilith was amping up the vibration and sound system into heart-attack mode.

I’d made my way downstage until I was behind Dark Snow, who was bumping and grinding to beat the band with his ’57 Custom Les Paul Black Beauty electric guitar. Could I have ever dreamed I’d think Snow was the Super in the white hat and way more wholesome than this hell-bent CinSim doppelgänger?

As the groupies starting boosting each other up to climb onto the stage and reenact the bad scene from below the Inferno, Quicksilver came loping in from stage right. An oversize wolf at full power run, silver fur riffling in the spotlights, is a vision to behold.

The audience screamed encouragement when Quick spotted Anger in his sequined flame-covered costume, Lilith’s green eyes just starting to inhabit his while he beat the hell out of the drums.

It felt like we were all tumbling around in a thunderstorm.

Like lightning, Quick took them both down, Anger and Lilith. His ferocious leap set the percussion instruments rolling off the stage into the overexcited audience. Entering with a shrill chorus of arfs behind Quicksilver came … Asta, gray all over with black markings. As in his movies, the noisy canine turned coward and dove for shelter among the scattered drum set, ass-up and tail down.

What an animal act!

Where had Lilith shifted to? The possession-drained band was losing its force, and I was running out of Sins to expel Lilith from. Wait! Envy, with her green dress on, was a natural for Lilith’s next victim. The rocker’s eyeballs were looking like kiwi-jam-slathered toast when a huge white tiger took her down with velvet paws before she could make another move.

Me, I’d had no idea how powerful my rock-star black leather and silver-studded catsuit could be. I hip-butted Sloth into the mosh pit with my wrist mirrors flashing—leftovers of Lilith’s possession dying in his eyes at first physical contact—and surveyed who … and what … was still standing.

Grizelle. Huge again? And Asta onstage? They couldn’t both occupy the same space, unless …

Before my wondering eyes, Light Snow appeared from stage right to riotous applause and shouting. He grabbed a guitar from the rack in front of the upset drums and strode straight toward Dark Snow, rocking into a dueling guitar act.

Of course. Lilith now occupied the CinSim Snow.

The crowd was ecstatic. Man, that was way too much demonic possession, hard-rock leather and shaking going on. The frenzy generated by the Seven Deadly Sins battling an ancient soul-sucking demon would be a sure sellout ticket on any tour.

Grizelle, again her own formidable human self, was pacing the stage’s rear, awaiting the chance to pounce on Lilith/Dark Snow.

I squinted beyond the houselights, trying to spot my friends at the Inferno bar.

No luck.

Wait a minute.

We had me, Quicksilver, Grizelle, and Real Snow onstage.

Light Snow was playing his white Stratocaster as if he were alone in the universe engaged in a duel with the devil. Maybe music was his magic. It was sure almost deafening me even though the Sins had gone quiet.

I glanced at the mosh pit. All the ravening groupies from below were back in place, squeeing and screeching and jumping up and down but staying put, competing for the black scarves Dark Snow lofted into their midst … scarves that were turning whiter than snowflakes as they fell.

Was it all reverting to normal? Did Lilith finally have no handy soul to possess next? Grizelle and I were not easy takeover options. Even as I watched, I again spotted my Lilith mirror image, my badass but so far purely human double almost crowded out and lost among the groupies. I’d first seen her there from the Inferno bar. She’d led me into the mirror and this control-freak battle with her big bad namesake.

As the possessed Dark Snow bent to commune with screaming groupies, my Lilith’s white hands grabbed and climbed the color-changing scarf, her own freaky living black tattoos doing the kind of silver-familiar jig up her forearms I experienced.

Lilith was boosted from the shoulders of the fans right onto the stage.

I zeroed in on Dark Snow’s black leather back, wondering if the same whip wounds were now tormenting Lilith. Something was. The CinSim’s entire figure stiffened, then demonic Lilith’s head and face came swiveling around to face me, a whirlwind of long black hair whipping her savage features.

Oh. So Exorcist. And me with only a Catholic school education to deal with her.

And a mirror-twin sandwich.

I tried to wrench off a mirror wrist cuff to toss to my Lilith, but the demon snarled to show an Alien maw striking snakelike from her icy cover-model features.

Too much horror-movie imagery. I angled my arms and wrists into a tortured configuration that bounced a reflection of my Lilith into my other wrist mirror and zinged the demon right between the eyes. Don’t it make your green eyes bloodred?

Blinded by the light, the demon screamed as she deserted Dark Snow to the piece of animated vintage film he was, and turned her seductive femme fatale form toward the mosh pit, fleeing to the ever-easy groupies.

Not now.

Her mirror-me namesake stood there, a solid barrier between the demon and her enchanted flock, leaving the demonic Lilith totally on her own, without a home, like a rolling stone … and not the rock-band sort.

The demon’s screaming female form undulated like a sound wave until it flickered off and out.

Lil and I faced each other across a void that didn’t involve a mirror for only the second time in our so-far-separate lives. My soul sister winked, and winked out, too. Onstage, Dark Snow was fading to black as Light Snow’s screaming guitar and onstage charisma overpowered Lilith’s recent CinSim plaything. Behind me, the Seven Deadly Sins were shrugging off the Lilith drug and reassembling, recovering their grooves and rocking out like the usual maniacs.

I did not belong here, nor my big dog.

We slunk offstage with Grizelle. Maybe we were an exiting backup group. Once in the wings, Quicksilver arfed and streaked back to the Inferno bar, Asta on his tail, to check on the CinSims. Something slapped my impenetrable catsuit on the butt.

“Great show,” Dr. Jack whispered in my ear as he breezed by.

Grizelle eyed me hard, her iridescent snake-belly eye shadow gleaming like Lilith’s irises. “Forget what just went down, or you’ll be cat kibble tomorrow.”

The familiar had become a harmless charm bracelet, dangling tiger heads, guitars, and demon horns.

“Nice work,” Snow said.

He’d ducked into the wings before an encore. The lipstick marks were history, along with the reddened skin under the wrist manacles. Those manacles were no longer tarnished black-moon silver but platinum or white gold, nothing so common as my silver familiar. My silver abilities hadn’t freed him, but once I’d outed and distracted Lilith from keeping him bound, he’d been able to invoke some conversion magic of his own.

“So the curse of Lilith is gone?” I asked.

“No, but she is. For now.”

“She must have possessed your groupies. What does the curse have to do with them?”

“You have to know?”

“I deserve to know.”

His sunglasses eyed the stage, not me. “Why did I offer no more than the Brimstone Kiss to the mosh pit? Maybe there’s nothing more.”

Snow pleading impotency? That stopped me cold.

“That’s really true? Must hurt worse than your back,” I said.

Maybe I’d imagined my effect on him, or that it had fueled Lilith’s jealous rage, my own form of arrogance. Maybe the heat I thought I’d been picking up had just been frustration.

He nodded. “You have no idea, Delilah.”

“No satisfaction for eternity? Kinda mean. All because of Lilith?”

“What do you expect from a bitch goddess?”

“Those groupies,” I pointed out, “gave their all for your after-concert Brimstone smooch. Then you stopped doing it. You can’t blame them resenting your going cold kiss on them.”

“I know you encouraged them into ‘recovering’ from an addiction to the hope of the kiss, but it did deliver more than they ever imagined.”

“Multiple orgasms from a single kiss that they can never get again? You never kiss the same groupie twice. A vibrator is a lot more reliable.”

“And here you came to Vegas just months ago an old maid.”

“Twenty-four isn’t old.” He had me grating answers between my teeth, as usual.

“It is for a virgin.”

“Ex-virgin. So you got nothing from all the Brimstone Kisses you handed out to the groupies for so long but an ego boost and the sadistic pleasure of knowing they’d eventually remain in the same condition as you, unsatisfied.”

“According to their signature song, it worked for the Rolling Stones.”

“You sent Dr. Jack to my bedroom … You hired me on the sly. Why?”

“Not me directly.”

“Grizelle doesn’t count. She loves you. She hates me. Yet she rolled over and let me lead. It’s not like we were dancing here. Why?”

“You’re right. I ordered her to.”

“Why?

“Maybe because I knew you’re the only woman in Vegas who wouldn’t be distracted by the opportunity to maul me.”

I snorted. “You so flatter yourself, but you’re right there.”

“Maybe because you’re the only woman in Vegas with still a streak of mercy in her soul.”

That I couldn’t answer. Guilty as charged.

“I know what you despise, but what do you want, Miss Street?” His colorless fingertips reached out to the familiar around my wrist. “I’m momentarily the grateful mogul. You have me at your mercy, like Samson under the spell of Delilah. Extort me.”

Now, did the unmerciful minority of my soul feel like taking him up on that offer? Did some taint of Lilith’s jealous, demonic fury linger with me, wanting an eternal piece of him, too? Nothing personal.

“Damned white of you,” I said. “You’ve run up quite an unpaid tab at my little Darkside Bar. I’ll take what you owe me out in IOUs as needed.”

“That’s pretty vague coming from a hard-boiled dame like you.”

“So suffer for a while longer. You’re apparently used to it.”

As I walked away, I considered the endless options of a future with Snow in my debt.

Maybe my mercy could temper our loathe-hate relationship, but how little did I love him? Let me count the ways.

Author’s Bio:

Carole Nelson Douglas’s sixty novels include S.F./fantasy, mystery, and romance bestsellers. Her cozy-noir Midnight Louie, feline PI mysteries number twenty-four. Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, began prowling 2013 Vegas-from-Hell in Dancing with Werewolves and was last seen in Virtual Virgin. Carole collects vintage clothing and homeless animals and does dance. Visit her website: www.carolenelsondouglas.com.