Neon Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

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

  Lilith’s deep contralto croon hypnotized the agitated women. They sank into a tranquilized pile around her, their eerily green irises reflecting emotions of Lust and Envy. What a rock star wannabe this Lilith was.

  I glanced over my shoulder to Snow. “I know when you pissed me off. When did you piss off the mother of all demons?”

  “Millennia ago.”

  That was headline news to me, but before I could react he added, “I got you here to protect the Inferno CinSims. Period. I didn’t expect you to have the guts or juice to call out a major demon. Lilith won’t distract for long. She’ll want to expand her power now that you’ve invited her physical self to appear. Leave her to me and escape while you can.”

  Well, thank you, Snow. Nothing like a client 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 screw-up on your part.

  Trouble is, that crusader part of me can’t abandon any 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.

  If Lilith had wanted Snow bound, how could I free him? My hands continued to fret at the bonds that imprisoned him. The dark metal was so cold and slick my fingers iced at the touch.

  “Black-moon silver dates back to the Fall, Delilah,” he said. “You can’t counter Lilith’s twisted silver traps, Delilah.”

  “I have another purely human power you didn’t underestimate. I’m not afraid to fight.”

  Even against Grizelle in her full tiger form.

  Even against my twisted sister Lilith.

  Even against the original Lilith who was kicked out of Eden for being the world’s first and best bad girl. And she and I had something in common. Snow. Why did she have it in for him?

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

  Snow’s face turned away, my angry image fading in his 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.

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

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

  “And the curse is…?”

  His long seconds of hesitation felt like an eon when Lilith’s weird bonding interlude with the groupies was likely to end any moment.

  “Spill it,” I ordered.

  I suspected his eyes closed behind the sunglasses. He bit his pale lips whiter. Telling the truth seemed true torture. Finally he spoke. “The curse? I can only give pleasure, never receive it.”

  Unfulfilled forever? Tragic irony for a sex symbol. I processed the ramifications. That 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 that test, but maybe it wasn’t his test, maybe it was Lilith’s.

  I remembered that humiliating moment, paying the price for Ric’s rescue, fighting the unwanted response to an enemy’s paranormal sexual power. I hadn’t been the only one there fighting the facts of life and failing.

  “No wonder,” I said, “Lilith is as mad as hell and won’t take it anymore, like the groupies. You cheated on her. On her curse.”

  With me.

  As much as I hated to admit it, I’d just seen again that 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 sighed. “So you won’t be wasting any more empathy time on me, Delilah?”

  “Hell, no. I tend to side with girls, even when they’re making fools of themselves over some man.”

  As a snarling Grizelle took a guardian stance at Snow’s feet. I turned to face Lilith.

  She’d settled into mere lifesize human form and awaited me like a headmistress would a wayward pupil.

  “You confront as well as summon me?” She stepped away from the demon-drugged groupies at her feet, who were dreamily pulling hairs out of their heads a single filament at a time. “Do you know who I am now, interloper? Do you know whose curse you toy with? How powerful I am?” she demanded.

  “As a matter of fact, I do. And I know that knowledge is power.”

  “Do you even know who or what he is?”

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

  “You must be pleased, Delilah, as I am, 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 inferior intermediaries.”

  Her lurid eyes glittered hotter, the green irises 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. “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 goal here.

  “Maybe he is, but you are tiresomely predictable, Lilith. I know your rap sheet. 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, but you don’t know my names.”

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

  Behind me, Snow gave a taunting laugh. “Guess she’s got your number, Lilith.”

  Let the supers squabble. I knew one thing else about Lilith, one so-egocentric weakness. And that I could use.

  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 as my finger scribed the large, 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. And sometimes showed me as my twin sister Lilith.

  Snow spoke again to distract her. “You need to get on Facebook and drum up some fans beside my gullible groupies, Lilith.”

  I heard Snow smother a curse, and guessed the black-moon metal cuffs were searing his sensitive albino skin at Lilith’s command. That reminded me too much of Ric’s ordeal. I set my jaw as my forefinger moved faster in its glove of liquid metal.

  A large mirror was forming here now, with the silver familiar providing the reflective backing. The familiar and I were unveiling Disney under glass, for obsidian is a polished black stone, a dark mirror, and both I and Lilith were standing on it.

  The demon sensed my actions and looked down to see what I was doing, the fatal mistake I’d hoped for.

  Lilith stared unblinking at 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 her own image, so 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 hig
h school little-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.

  As she vanished, I spotted my own image resolving on the wind-riffled oil slick surface left behind and dove down into myself and 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, the reunited 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, red-headed 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 soul. That withering contact shorted out even Lust. Her lascivious face grew blow-up doll blank. She 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.

  The audience was screaming and whistling like a tidal wave under a thousand nova stars. Made me wanta give them their money’s worth. I grabbed the flame-fronted guitar from Lust before Lilith got the performer’s hands in gear, noticing my silver familiar was now a pair of wrist cuffs bearing flashing ovals of…mirror.

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

  Where was Lilith now?

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

  If I still didn’t know what kind of supernatural Snow was, 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 was no longer physically present. She was soul-hopping to keep ahead of my two-wristed mirror punches, avoiding a showdown, systematically possessing the Sins band members. The only way I could exorcise her from this stage and hotel and place and time was to leave her nowhere to hide.

  Lilith and I were the same physical type—dark hair, pale skin—so I was her walking mirror image, but I need to do more than engage in a serial soul-chase. I needed a coup de gras, the final karate chop. I needed to write the worst-case scenario for an egocentric demon with a bloodthirsty edge.

  The stage floor throbbed to the earth-shaking thumps, with human hearts, including mine, fibrillating all over the place. Lilith was amping up the vibration and sound system into cardiac arrest mode. It felt like we were all tumbling around in a thunderstorm.

  I’d boogied downstage until I was behind Dark Snow, who was beating the devil out of the ’57 custom Les Paul Black Beauty electric guitar I’d seen pictured on Snow’s website. Could I have ever dreamed I’d consider Snow the Super in the white hat and way more wholesome than this hell-bent possessed CinSim doppelganger?

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

  The audience screamed encouragement when Quick spotted Anger in his sequined flame-shaped costume. Lilith’s green eyes were just starting to gleam though Anger’s gaze while he hammered the hell out of the drums.

  With one bound, 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 a ham actor!

  Where had Lilith shifted to? The possession-drained band was losing 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 studs 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 the 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, Snow and his white leather jumpsuit 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 crowds went wild. 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 sure sell-out ticket on any tour.

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

  I squinted beyond the house lights trying to spot my friends at the Inferno bar.

  No luck.

  Wait a minute.

  We had me, Quicksilver, Grizelle and Snow onstage.

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

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

  Was it all reverting to normal? Even as I watched, I again spotted my Lilith mirror-image, my bad-ass 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, Lilith Quince’s white hands grabbed and climbed the color-changing scarf he held, her own freaky black living tattoos doing the kind of silver-familiar jig up her forearms I experienced.

  The fans boosted Lilith onto their shoulders and 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 a major demon.

  And…a mirror-twin sandwich.

  I tried to wrench off a mirrored 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 Lilith Quince into my other wrist mirror and zinged the demon right between the eyes, bagging my own Gorgon. Don’t it make your green eyes bloodred?

  Lilith finally had no handy soul to possess. Grizelle and I were not easy takeover options. The groupies had fixated on the real Snow now, with all their obsessive souls. My Mirror-me image stood at
the stage edge, a solid barrier between the demon and her once-enchanted flock.

  Lilith Quince and I faced each other across a void that didn’t involve a mirror for the only the second time in our so far separate lives. I fisted my hands and raised my mirrored wrist bracelets to acknowledge her, then knocked the mirrors together. They met with a Klieg-light flash.

  Blinded by the silver familiar’s doubled light, the demon screamed as she deserted Dark Snow to the piece of animated vintage film he was, and turned her femme fatale form toward her namesake.

  My mirror-image, my bad-ass but so far purely human double, stood her ground and winked at me…and then winked out of sight, leaving the demonic Lilith without a home, all on her own, 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.

  I lowered my wrists and glimpsed my soul sister’s image fading back into Mirrorland.

  Onstage, Dark Snow was fading to black as Snow’s screaming guitar and performer’s charisma overpowered Lilith’s CinSim plaything. Behind me, the Seven Deadly Sins were waking up, shrugging off the Lilith drug, and rocking out like maniacs.

  I did not belong here, nor my big dog too.

  We slunk offstage with Grizelle. Maybe we’d be taken for an exiting backup group.

  Once in the wings, Quicksilver gave a farewell arf and streaked back to the Inferno Bar to check on the CinSims. Something slapped my impenetrable catsuit on the ass.

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

  Grizelle eyed me hard, her iridescent snake-belly eyeshadow 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. Even they were no longer tarnished silver but platinum or white gold, nothing as common as my sterling silver familiar. It had become a wide Art Nouveau bracelet of a woman with major flowing hair. Me or…Memorex?