Wouldn’t you know it was tough-guy Bogart/Blaine who’d wandered from his proper place in the hellfire bowels of the Inferno Hotel? He’d made it all the way to the ground-level bar. There he’d asked for me, Delilah Street. Well, he didn’t exactly ask for me, personally.
He’d muttered about a woman of my description: “black and blue.” That’s me on a police blotter-black hair, blue eyes. Add a funeral-lily pale complexion and red lips and you have Snow White wearing Lip Venom gloss.
Since my “summoning” then and my exhausted return now, my attire had gone from a midnight-blue velvet gown among my personal vintage clothes collection to an armored catsuit fit for a sixties James Bond movie action climax.
The steel-studded, patent-leather suit and crotch-high flat-heeled boots I wore, sans the black mail hood, were unnaturally light and tight and adapted to the wearer’s physical dimensions, permanently.
At least Grizelle said so.
That’s why I’d worn the thing home under a jersey caftan. The suit moved like muscle with my weary body and kept me upright, thanks to spandex and some possibly supernatural spell known only to Snow.
For all its creepy flexibility, the outfit felt as hard as a scarab’s shiny carapace. Inside it my joints creaked as if cased in concrete. My mind felt duller than a battle-worn sword and my heart heavier than a black hole filled with lead.
How odd that instead of a weapon I now toted something as trivial as a Prada shopping bag loaded with my clothes from my original dress-up outing to the Inferno. I pulled out midnight-blue sequined pumps-call them Dorothy Gale in mourning-and matching evening bag, and a tiny but significant container of Lip Venom plumping gloss.
All very chichi, yet to me the limp blue velvet vintage gown draping the crook of my arm was now about as attractive as a vamp-drained corpse.
I let it slide to the floor with the shoes and bag as soon as I crossed the cottage threshold, the beginning of my personal safety zone.
There was no place like the Enchanted Cottage for R &R.
My landlord, another triple threat like Snow-TV producer, film buff, and morbidity entrepreneur Hector Nightwine-had duplicated a film set as a livable guest house on his estate.
I can’t swallow the fairy tale that quaint settings create a stage for true love, as happened in that movie. Still, since the Enchanted Cottage had been recreated in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, what had been merely “charming” before was now actually “charmed,” in the sense of hosting a mostly unseen magical staff.
Yup, I knew that lodging me here was like reinventing Snow White with pixies and gnomes instead of workaholic dwarfs. The best part was these shy, often unseen creatures worked for me, not Hector.
And work they did, leaving no domestic duties to distract this kick-ass late-model Snow White from just how bad things looked for her Prince Charming.
Chapter Two
A FIRE DID a mazurka in my parlor fireplace, even though this was a simmering Las Vegas June. The parlor was a shadowed Victorian retreat crammed with bric-a-brac. I veered toward the comfort inside, drawn by the hearth flames as if they were the bloodied, beating heart I imagined pulsing inside my own body.
The lobster-tank-size plasma television in the media corner reflected my passage. I jerked to a stop and whirled to face it, my hand reaching for a weapons belt I’d left behind in the Inferno’s bridal suite.
I spied only a shadow of myself, black-on-black. Or maybe my doppelganger, Lilith, was moving in that dark world I could sometimes walk into through mirrors. Even the promise of one of Lil’s rare personal appearances couldn’t breach my frozen self at this lost moment.
I went to the wooden mantel above the fireplace, focusing on the black glass vase embossed with the undulating form of a five-toed imperial Chinese dragon. It drew me as if it too held the magnetic warmth of a hearth fire.
With Quicksilver guarding my sleeping prince at the Inferno, my first dog waited here to welcome me home. Sort of.
Achilles’ ashes rested inside the black mantel top vase. I stroked the dragon on it. Now I’d actually seen one breathing fire.
A blackened ring with a green stone was a new addition to the mantelpiece, a gift from a strange old lady living a half-life at a Sunset City retirement village near Vegas. She’d recently acquainted me with the historic and fearsome medieval Parisian dragon Gargouille, whom I’d just met in person and in massive physical form when Snow had resurrected it from its ashes.
How’s that for a brand-new Las Vegas attraction? I tried to laugh at the thought, but couldn’t.
I edged down the mantelpiece to inspect an alien addition. Wow. A huge juicy muffin squatted on a china plate. EAT ME, a paper tag ordered in tiny type. Beside it, a mug of tea broadcast the seductive, steamy scent of licorice. DRINK ME, a matching tag read.
Eat me. Drink me. I grimaced at the hidden sexual and sacrificial religious undertones I now saw in those “whimsical” Alice in Wonderland instructions.
Muffin. Tea. How homey. I hadn’t eaten in… thirty-six hours. My body needed this, I knew. So I took my post-battle snacks to the upholstered wing chair near the fire, setting plate and cup on a small end table.
The cranberry-walnut muffin was delicious, but I noted the taste from a distance and used the tea to wash it away until I felt refreshed enough to walk upstairs.
The tall mirror at the upper hall’s dimly lit end was as dark and unseeing as an ordinary mirror, though it was made of unusual front-surface glass with a blue cast.
Nothing moved in the looking-glass now, not the ghost of a mobster’s daughter named Loretta Cicereau, not my doppelganger, Lilith Quince. Not even my reflection. Did a black mourning pall now obscure the sometimes magical surface?
The cottage interior was a strange blend of an earlier century’s country charm abetted by up-to-the-minute conveniences. My bed was an old-fashioned four-poster but I could hear the modern Jacuzzi bubbling in the adjoining bathroom.
I entered the bedroom to find the Enchanted Cottage shocking the patent-leather boots off me once more. Someone or something had suspended a white-linen 1940s frock from a hook beside a closet that had expanded to hold all my clothing, vintage and contemporary. Below the dress waited white lace-up oxford pumps to match. Who’d been playing personal shopper in my closet?
Pulling off my knit caftan, I sat on the dressing table stool to struggle out of the long tight boots, then stood to unfasten the supple battle suit, letting it pool like a small tarpit at my bare feet.
Except for a thin silver chain around my hips, I was nude. You don’t put modern underwear beneath the clingy vintage velvet gown I’d worn to the Inferno.
Walking into the bathroom, I winced to remember my humiliating bargain for Ric’s rescue, which resulted in Snow’s half-stripping that gown from me. He’d somehow even relieved me of the unwanted, shape-shifting silver familiar. I’d hated accepting the familiar back after our bargain was made, but freeing Ric required every weapon I could command, even a thing I loathed.
Betray a lover to preserve him.
I shuddered from cold in that cozy, hothouse atmosphere and eyed the Jacuzzi tub’s inviting cauldron of churning water. Chilled to the bone and soul or not, no way would I loll in comfort anywhere while Ric suffered elsewhere.
In the shower, I turned on the water and walked under the spray before it had time to warm.
The Enchanted Cottage got me again. Instead of the icy, punishing sleet I craved to wash me free of my Brimstone Kiss sins, I got a welcome massage from a hot spray of water.
When I stepped back onto the plush area rug outside, the sight of the blue velvet gown hanging fresh and un-wrinkled above the blue-sequined pumps I’d worn to the Inferno gave me another unwanted chill.