I lifted my open palm and she crossed it with a warm silver heart that seemed to throb and burn against my skin. Something pure enough, perhaps, and strong enough to make memories as well as memorabilia.
I saw ghostly portraits in the empty double-heart-shaped interior. One was of a woman in a 1500s headpiece. His mother. The other was of young man with short hair, a blond mustache and goatee, wearing a single, small hoop earring. He could pass as a rock star or actor today, but in the 1940s he would have looked like an Errol Flynn swashbuckler wannabe. No wonder Cicereau's daughter had lost her girlish heart.
The name Krzysztof was engraved on one side, and Sophie on the other.
Aha! An eastern European spelling, not French. Still, vampires must have cousins somewhere.
Both mother and son had been vampires, I realized, as I watched the engraved heart-shaped trinket weep a discreet drop of blood, perhaps an illusion performed only for my eyes.
Two women had treasured the locket, Krzysztof's mother for centuries and Cicereau's daughter for only days or weeks, perhaps, as they had in their separate generations treasured the same young man. I closed the locket and gave it back to the girl.
Cicereau's daughter had faced a pre-ordained fate.
As for Lilith…
"Did you give him a token with your name on it?" I asked.
I needed to think of her as more than "Cicereau's daughter," his mere possession.
My question startled her. She froze like a woodland fawn.
"There was no time. There is never time enough. You'll learn that too."
The young woman hid the locket in her tight fingers and turned away, vanished.
I turned to retrace my steps in the void. Walking out of the mirror meant walking into a shiny black curtain. I was back in the hallway, cold and shivering, dizzy, unable to focus. The more time I did in Mirrorland, the more my body paid.
I was sad to leave my first mirror friend with no more intimate a name than my soubriquet from the old song. "Jeanie with the light brown hair."
Still, I had what I needed most, the bone boy's name. Krzysztof. Now I only needed to find out who he'd been and for how long.
Chapter Nineteen
Now that I had two dead chicks and a guy to investigate, I was alternating between my paying and personal case loads.
With a big fat new clue in my quiver, it was time to concentrate on the Sunset Park case. Bad timing, though. My usual three days of menstrual agony hit me hard, as if the mirror was punishing me for teasing a secret out of it.
I wasn't about to run with Quicksilver in the park, but I'd always worked through menstrual cramps with a stiff upper lip, so late that afternoon I donned my pseudo-cop clothes and duty belt. Quick and I shared a roast beef sandwich snack in the kitchen before going out to get Dolly on the road.
I was going trolling in blond disguise again, this time on the Las Vegas Strip opposite the glittering sprawl of the Gehenna hotel and casino.
I needed updated info and insight on the werewolf owner, Cesar Cicereau, and wanted more specifics on magic, mirrors and me. Before I'd escaped Cicereau's pack of hit-werewolves at Starlight Lodge and before mi amor, Ric, had obliterated a bunch of them with his silver-bullet-spitting Uzi, Cesar had hoped to mount my head and hide on his hunting lodge walls. Was I still a wanted woman? I should be able to find out from an inside man. Madrigal, the indentured magician I'd been forced to work with briefly, who had first abetted my Adventures in Mirrorland, might just be him.
After valet-parking Dolly at the hotel-casino opposite, the towering Babel, and hiking to the Strip, I paused to admire the Gehenna's façade, an angular forest of glittering verdigris and copper glass towers. Only someone who knew the owner for a werewolf would realize the colors suggested a forest at sunset, both the tranquility of nature and the hot blaze of blood at the end of the hunt.
Since a couple of Cicereau's goons had abducted me from Sunset Park to first bring me here and I'd escaped the hotel through the vast bowels of its service systems, I wasn't sure where to enter.
Quicksilver growled softly beside me, recognizing our former prison.
"You can't go inside," I told him. "You were with me on my previous visit and the boss man's men would recognize you."
His wolfish ears perked and angled at my every word. Almost-humanly expressive pale blue eyes seemed to pick up my meaning instantly and reject it. He whined his frustration, but when I said, "Stay," he sat on the hot sidewalk.
I hated to disappoint Quicksilver. He'd saved my life more than once. And I'd saved him from Haskell's bullets. We were partners.
So I told him to nap under a high-riding pickup truck and waited until he drag-tailed to the spot and circled to lie down. I also adjusted my street-cop utility belt sagging with various nasty tools of the trade.
With my black leather pants and motorcycle boots, a short-sleeved black shirt, and kiddie souvenir gold "shield," I looked enough like one of the city's numerous security personnel to pass for a hotel security guard. The outfit was hot for Vegas, but you can't have naked cops, and I wasn't about to don the seriously non-serious khaki shorts real Vegas cops wore. I needed all the gravitas I could muster.
I fluffed my chin-length platinum wig and adjusted my aviator-style sunglasses, then joined the tourists taking the escalator up to the bridge over the Strip.
Las Vegas heat in early summer can singe your eyelashes off, but it's dry heat and you don't have to worry about anyone seeing you sweat. The black leather belt was old enough to squeak in the dry air, announcing my presence with a nice air of gunslinger.
By the time I pulled open the huge copper door handle of the Gehenna, I was still dry. I plunged into the hotel's dark, icy interior, leaving my sunglasses on and waiting for my eyes to adjust to the extremes in light.
I hadn't bothered to wear my gray contact lenses today, not expecting to deal with anybody who'd recognize my natural baby blues.
At least, I hoped I wouldn't have to.
A major problem was weaving my way through the mammoth hotel's public areas to the theater, far at the rear, and its even more distant backstage area. The casino area was right off the main lobby. Once I worked my way through the crowds there, the chime of slot machines masked the jingle-jingle-jingle of the belt's attached handcuffs.
These cuffs were the real deal, not another handy-dandy manifestation of the form the silver familiar had taken in the Sinkhole. I'd stopped and bought a pair at a sex toy shop on the way to the Gehenna. Hey, this is Vegas! There are way more of those than cop shops. I'd also picked up a couple of canisters of pepper spray at a sporting goods store.
Checking above for surveillance cameras, I noticed automated birds twittering away in the canopy of stained glass leaves above the gaming tables. Clever. The small barn owls with the 360-degree swiveling heads must be mechanical cameras. Their unblinking yellow-glass stares were capturing the images of every passing person.