I was glad I hadn't fetched a flashlight. Light would only emphasize the shadow creatures I sensed framing the mirror.
The mirror itself was cool and glassy. My fingertips skated over its even surface, finding only their own reflection. I did rather fear finding the Wicked Queen in it. After all, I was a latter-day Snow White, pale of skin, dark of hair.
I laid my cheek against it and saw a shadowed swath of nose and chin. Mine.
And my reflection was oddly immediate. I pulled away and flared my fingertips on the surface again, making pale spider legs. Yes, this mirror used front-surface glass too, which would be very odd for a literal fairy tale artifact.
Madrigal was right. Reflections without the sixteenth-inch of intervention of glass necessary with most mirrors felt different. For me, a silver medium, the effect joined reality with something usually unseen but deeply real.
"Lilith," I called softly. "Are you still there? I'm coming through."
I heard an echoing giggle. But that could have been vagrant pixies watching me from the mirror-frame shadows. Pixies had a rep as secretive, malicious little beings. The equivalent of magical dust mites, they were present everywhere, sucking up the detritus of our unknowing human lives.
Or did Lilith stand just out of sight and giggle at my struggles to find her? What was "just out of sight" in a mirror?
I pushed my face and body close to the blue-tinged glass. Blue like a pale topaz. I thought of Ric and made love to the mirror, opened myself to it, something I couldn't have done, or imagined doing before. I was not group home Delilah or Kansas Delilah any more. I felt more deeply, wished harder, needed more, wanted more.
I wanted inside this mirror.
So did my silver familiar. It stirred around my wrist, its usual sleeping location, and split into five cold, flowing beads as liquid as mercury. In an instant, my thumb and four fingers were ringed in silver at every joint.
I could feel my heart beating frantically as I pressed my icy, be-ringed right hand hard against unforgiving glass. My breath seemed to fog the surface with frost-white. Snow-white…
Oh, my God, did Snow himself have some key meaning for me, my life? Why hadn't I linked the nickname's significance to me and my fairy tale coloring before-?
The mirror's surface was milking over, growing opaque. Nothing was clear as I forced myself-my body, mind, spirit, will-into nothing.
For an instant I was sheathed in ice, in cold so stunning it froze my blood, thought, senses. And then… I was in a dark hall again, only it stretched as far as the frozen eye could see.
I shook myself free of the closed coldness of fear, remembered the warmth of openness, of trust, or maybe faith. I literally shook myself. And felt my mortal form reassemble, take shape and heart.
I'd been there. Now I was Here. Just what I wanted.
I walked forward, into the long dark.
Not a wizard or a psychic or a magician, I soon realized this world inside the mirror would show me what it wanted to, when it wanted to.
I moved on, feeling my arms, my thighs moving as if I was strolling in Sunset Park.
I was solid, I was mortal.
That might be a big disadvantage here, because I was also unarmed except for my uncontrollable silver familiar.
Whoosh!
Young Miss Cicereau swept into place straight ahead, right where I was walking. Into my path. I glimpsed a shadow of the Easter Island head on the island in Sunset Park. It had witnessed Rick and me finding her body there…
Here she was a tender 1940s teenager in a velvet and taffeta blue gown.
"You look so familiar now," she said, surprised. Apparently she had forgotten our earlier linkage in the mirror. Was time all helter skelter in Mirrorland? I couldn't assume it mirrored my world in any way. "You look like my daddy's girlfriend, Vida."
Her casual reference shocked me speechless.
Vida!
I didn't want to be compared to the woman Howard Hughes had made into a vampire so she could turn him in turn. Double bastard! She'd been Cicereau's mistress thirty-some years before becoming Hughes's hot ticket to immortality.
While I mused on sexual and spiritual betrayals, the girl was drifting away from me into Mirrorland's vague shadows.
"Wait! I'm not Vida."
She paused. "Of course not. I know that. You seem so nice. Not from here. Las Vegas, that is. No one from here is very nice."
"It's a gambling capital built on sin, crime and sex."
"Yeah, sure. Does my dress look all right?" She turned, as if I were a mirror she consulted.
"Lovely. I'd adore having it myself."
Absolute truth. Until now, I'd never thought of my freaky mirror as a vintage shopping mall.
"Daddy complains it's too 'old' for me." She sighed. "They are awfully puzzling and, gosh, scary, aren't they?"
"Men?" I ventured.
"Parents. My father is so antique."
Little did she know. She was seventeen going on eighty.
"What about your…boyfriend?" Lover, I figured, was not a word virginal 1940s girls tossed around like toast. Or dice.
"Krzysztof? He's so dreamy."
Bingo! She gave me the first name. Just that simple. Ask the dead girlfriend straight out. Row, row, row your boat, life is but a dream. "Christophe." Very suspicious name.
I took a deep breath. Interrogating a corpse can be tricky.
"Where did you meet Christophe?"
"Oh, in the casino. Where else would I meet anyone? Daddy doesn't allow me anywhere dangerous. He keeps me inside his own little kingdom."
"What does he look like?"
"Daddy?"
"No. Your boyfriend."
"Golly, a real dreamboat! Tall, chiseled features-"
So far, so bad, so Snow.
"-blond hair, wind-gilded skin, perfect manners."
Nope. Just the usual bronze god still desired today.
"He's European?" I guessed.
"Umhmm. Polish. A prince. But he's traveling incognito. No one must know."
And they hadn't known. No one had a prayer of knowing for almost seventy years. A corpse buried in Sunset Park was gone for good… unless a man who can dowse for the dead came along ready to impress a woman, who didn't know she was a silver medium, with a dowsing demonstration… and bingo. The dead rise. And identify themselves at long last.
"That locket," I said. "It's so sweet. Something valuable Christophe gave you?"
She lifted it away from her breastbone to examine it fondly. "Only sterling silver, but it had been his mother's. She told him the right kind of silver was more valuable than gold."