Seeing Cicereau's daughter in my hall mirror had become less startling, but I still caught my breath. This time she seemed more real than the impish version of my double, Lilith, I'd glimpsed earlier. This decorous girl posing for her first prom photo in a sweetly modest 1940s gown was a world away from the slaughtered lovers in a forgotten Sunset Park grave.
That she'd been killed during the act of love amid a fiery furnace of sexual passion with her ancient yet teen-aged vampire lover seemed impossible. I'd psychically glimpsed them coupling sixty-eight years ago, feeling at the same time a fierce erotic desire I'd never known personally.
At that moment, the dead girl had become my bridge to womanhood. As Ric clasped me tightly from behind, an attractive stranger whose dowsing lesson had now welded our hands together on the forked twig, he and I shared the dead lovers' dying emotions and sensations.
Remembering our unintended orgasms at that moment now made me blush to see the innocent girl who'd awakened them. Ric and I had sensed and shared the lovers' last, impassioned moments, knowing nothing of their Romeo and Juliet youth. My blood heated in memory. Ric and I hadn't been actually intimate until a few weeks later, but we'd been dowsing our own depths, natures, minds, and bodies ever since.
So I stood there staring at the demure girl from a much more innocent era, the once-virgin daughter of mobster Cesar Cicereau and my inadvertent orgasm fairy godmother. I owed her a lot, including justice. Discovering her own father had ordered her killed in that harsh humiliating way shocked me more than the capital crime of murder.
Maybe that was because I'd never known a mother or a father. I'd fantasized, after each interviewing couple left without adopting me, that my real father and mother had been strong and loving and killed in a terrible accident by a hit-and run driver and my infant self, surviving, had been dropped on a faraway corner to be found. Yeah. A fairy tale. Kids do believe them, for a while, me longer than most.
I now had the sexual experience and strength to face the dead girl fully. She wore an orchid corsage on one blue taffeta shoulder. I hadn't seen that in their double grave. I saw their clothes as bits and pieces around them. They must have been killed somewhere else, perhaps in a room at the one-story 1940s motel that evolved into today's monolithic Gehenna Hotel. They must have been picked up in the bed sheets and driven to a deep grave in empty sand desert considered remote from the minor oasis that Las Vegas was back then.
Dumped. Like dirty hotel laundry. And positioned face-to-face, as if still making love. Bastards! Perverted murderers!
My dark thoughts had obscured the young woman's image, although she was still there.
"Please."
I heard the word as if she stood next to me. My inner focus switched to the mirror again. My fingers had reached out to spread on the cool surface. Her hand had lifted to match me, fingertip for fingertip.
I could feel a buzz like electricity.
"I'm not ashamed," she said softly, "of anything you saw or felt in Sunset Park. Only that you know my father killed us."
"How do you know I learned that?"
She smiled. "I feel you too. That's rather nice after all this time in nowhere. I guess I'm like your pretty dog. I followed you home from the park."
"Pretty" was not an apt description of Quicksilver, but I suppose to a naïve teenager, he was just a big, handsome dog.
"Do you see me all the time," I asked, "or just when I'm standing in front of this mirror? How do you know what I've learned?"
"If it involves me, it just blossoms in my head. It's like I'm dreaming after a long time in utter darkness. I'm getting stronger," she said. "I think that's because you are, Delilah."
She said my name so shyly, yet with such pleasure. It made me feel good, like I'd found a friend. Life so far had thrown me competitors, not friends.
"Can you…live again?" I asked her.
"I don't know. Can you come in to see me?"
Probably, but did I want to? I pushed my fingers forward against the faint pressure of hers.
Yes! As my hand had passed into the magician Madrigal's front-surface conjuring mirror, my fingertips thrust through this mirror as if it were melted glass. There was no sense of barrier. It felt like a perfect day when the air is exactly your own body temperature, so you feel naked even while wearing clothes. I said so.
"I've seen you naked too," she said, smiling.
"Here? In the hall?"
"Inside the mirror."
So she'd seen Lilith too! From the other side of the mirror.
"Come in," she said again.
I had to get past my astonishment-and think.
There were many lovely creatures in the Millennium Revelation world that could speak softly and look harmless and could liquefy your soul like a blender set on puree before sucking it clean out of your skin.
Was this girl one of them? Being dead and suddenly having a lingering presence might motivate an unhuman lust for life that would take it from unwary humans.
"I won't bite," she cajoled.
That was a good point. A lot of people did bite these days, and they did a lot more weird things than appear in mirrors while dead. What was she? Certainly werewolf like Daddy. All werewolf or only part?
So I asked her.
"I'm half human. That's why Daddy punished me so severely. A true werewolf, he said before he killed us, would have never betrayed her pack with a vampire."
"He was there?"
"Of course. He had to let us know who did it."
"He…participated?"
Her eyes became all iris, blue like her gown. Pain twisted her features.
"He watched. He made me watch."
"Watch what? Oh. You were second to die," I whispered.
Cicereau was a freaking sadist! Yeah, you had to be a monster to run your enemies down with a werewolf pack at full cry, then mount the heads of your human victims on your hunting lodge wall. But to make your own daughter watch her first love killed…
Her ringers twined with mine. They were the same exact body temperature. In a moment I no longer thought about the strange physical presence of dead flesh, no longer felt that we were not one.
This was the closest physical/mental link I'd ever had with anybody, except for Ric.
I was scared, but too eager to know her full story to break our communion.
In the mirror, a shadow was congealing behind her. I recognized Cesar Cicereau, glowering, his face white and slack, his dark eyes empty holes in his head.
Vague figures circled him, men or rearing wolves.
"They killed my darling first," she said in a hard voice.
"How?"
Her fingers slipped through mine, then stroked my palm and grasped my wrist, as I grasped hers. I was now inside the mirror up to my forearm and my face was leaning closer.