Neon Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  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.

  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 Quince, 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 of convergence could I use it.

  “I don’t know if shape-shifters can survive breaking the mirror barrier,” I muttered under my breath as I leaped toward the image of myself, hand curled tight around the tiger cub’s leash.

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

  I hated to perform my disappearing act in public, but the tourists were eyeing the HD screen, not the bar mirror, 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 spot-lit tableau boiled with motion three hundred feet away. If anyone had ever seen a close-up of maggots infesting a corpse on a crime forensics TV show, which I can guarantee most of us have, that’s what that 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 about 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 people 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 blood dappled the object of the assault. My emotions sickened to see a rerun of what I’d only witnessed at the bitter end…my partner Ric Montoya’s body after the whole ancient Egyptian vampire empire had feasted on him under the Karnak Hotel. I had to stop this apparent replay.

  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 frenzy as they shouted words scarily familiar to me.

  Now I was close enough to read the backs of the attackers. Backs? Read? What were they? Living billboards? Oh, they 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 and 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.

  This was the real Snow—as real as Snow could get—not the CinSim working the show somewhere above and beyond this hidden slice of the Nine Circles of Hell under the Inferno.

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

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

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

  “Grizelle,” I ordered, “velvet paws and fangs only. These demented creatures are paying Inferno customers and Seven Deadly Sins fans. The boss would not want them hurt, no matter what. Got it?”

  The tiger cub’s white muzzle lifted in grudging acknowledgement. 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 White and the groupies. Good thing there were more than seven groupies on this scene.

  Was I missing something? Maybe I was being naive—not hard for a Kansas girl in Vegas—and Snow actually liked this scene. No time to over-think 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 had just sensed hot metal burns.

  When I looked, my wrists were circled by cuff bracelets. The pair were 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.

  Oh. I was literally “armed” with my own matched set of heavy metal cat-o-nine-tails.

  Could I whip community ass now!

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

  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.

  I took my only option, 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 on principle.

  Only we knew the mauling groupies were pressing Snow’s eternally wounded back—savaged 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 had envisioned the raw, meaty mess my driving compassion for my lover, Ric, had made of Snow’s back. I hadn’t known it at the time, but a furious Grizelle told me later that every lash welt my healing Brimstone-Kissed lips had erased on Ric’s skin had appeared 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. Snow was my hostage to fortune. I owed him.

  Ugly revelations 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, pink albino eyes shut, denuded of the ever-present sunglasses.

  I’d never before seen those semicircles of white eyelashes innocently curved along his eye sockets. They reminded me of severed snowflakes. The attackers had first stripped him of the sunglasses Snow wore at all times to compensate for his disability. No fair.

  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 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 blac
k knit and the flesh beneath the fresh rents, 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.

  How fitting. 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 jean legs and T-shirt sleeves, dragging the groupies away over and over, until they clustered not far away 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 a clawed-bloody rock idol…this was my deepest personal trauma, a Ric rerun. Only with Snow the main event instead.

  I approached the man manacled against a towering black basalt wall. Way too much Samson for this Delilah. Bloodsucking lip-prints covered pristine white skin and bleached leather like a graphic design.

  A shiny black grin of glass winked at me from the floor at his feet, the sunglasses torn off and tossed down. 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 our souvenir,” 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, roaring and slashing and knocking them back.

  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.

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

  With his full persona in place, he seemed as cool and invulnerable as ever. Had I ever seen his back flinch after Grizelle said he’d “inherited” the wounds of Ric’s boyhood beatings? Did he even seem a bit…amused…now by my unpleasantly intimate Mount Snow ascent?

  “So,” I said. “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.

  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 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 again without getting too icky personal.

  “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…had not been until I appeared in the neighborhood.

  What to do? My stepping away would leave him even more exposed to the fanimals, so I stayed put as a barrier and tried to rub the bloodred stains off his torso, managing only to smear them.

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

  No wonder Snow had suffered this physical feeding frenzy so calmly.

  Instead of blood-drenched 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 enforced 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. “I see that. Now,” I admitted.

  “Even you wear lipstick sometimes,” he pointed out.

  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’m tempted to leave you here to free your own ass.”

  His lips tightened. Was it from…pain?

  “Your back—?” I asked.

  His long hair shook with his head. “—is my business. Forget that. What I need now is to be free, not pain-free.”

  Still, I saw his sensitive white skin had turned scarlet under the wrist manacles. My hands fretted at the locks. The dark metal was so cold my fingers iced at the touch. Around my wrist, the familiar morphed into a bracelet dangling a single, edged charm…a four-inch diamond jeweler’s saw on a chain.

  Those miniature sharks’ teeth no more nicked the dull black metal than that same saw or an acetylene touch could impact my silver familiar. They were both otherworldly metals.

  “It must be tarnished black-moon silver, Delilah,” Snow said. “I thought your silver talent could counter supernatural traps, but I see it can’t. Get the hell out while you can. Protect the Inferno CinSims from possession.”

  “By what or whom?”

  Then I remembered a pretty damning lost detail in this whole misunderstood mess. “Why was my double, Lilith, among your concert groupies up top? She’s never shown any awareness of you or shown up outside my Enchanted Cottage mirror before.”

  “You don’t know?” he asked. “She’s your shadow, not mine. Your problem.”

  The black lenses reflected me eyeing them suspiciously. “Yours too now, Snowman! I glimpsed her in the mosh pit upstairs, but she’s not here now. Why not? Everyone at the Inferno has been sucked into this hell, haven’t they? Even these fevered groupies are just the Greek chorus, not the female lead….”

  Who was the lead female? 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.

  The Head Her?

  Not Grizelle in her present form.

  “I’m not the female lead either,” I said aloud. “I wasn’t even supposed to be here.”

  This cast of characters was missing a powerful key figure, the ill will behind the chaos swamping the hotel.

  “What aren’t you telling me?” I asked Snow. “That you didn’t want me here, that you needed the silver familiar back to fight off something? Someone…Lilith. Lilith Quince was already here first, among the groupies.”

  I studied the vast black soundstage from polished floor to the darkest, 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 had just faced, blinded and chained, only by a single vengeful woman instead of an entire hen party.

  “Lilith?” I asked myself. Maybe not my stand-in Lilith, as I was a modern stand-in for Delilah in this scenario, playing savior rather than seductress. And maybe Lilith Quince was a stand-in for the Biblical exile replaced by Eve. The world’s First Woman and first woman to be disowned.

  Topsy-turvy. This scene was all topsy-turvy. Never what it had
appeared to be.

  Now I wasn’t sure who I’d seen in the mosh pit. I sure wasn’t about to try to evoke my double. There was no silver-backed mirror here to magnify my minor metallic medium powers, only unreflecting darkness.

  A terrifying new theory caught me by the throat. Something had possessed these groupies to assault Snow instead of worship him from afar. Or someone. Maybe…I was going for the east-of-Eden sweepstakes, for the woman kicked out of Eden like Cain, the font of all feminine evil from what some believed were myths banned from the Old Testament. Or maybe she was just one vastly misunderstood ancient mama….

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

  This Lilith could date back before Eden, back before The Fall and even maybe before Satan’s Fall from heaven.

  I summoned my crusading reporter lust for truth-telling and outed her, named her aloud to one and all, and Named her beyond any mere mortal duplicate of me who could appear in my mirror. The familiar cuffs tightened on my wrists.

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

  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 pale of skin with long, long dark hair mirroring the play of mine in the psychic maelstrom 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 succubus of legend. Even I had to admit she looked fetching in an iridescent snakeskin gown with a mermaid fish-tail train that matched her chartreuse irises.

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