I'd known nothing about lust, except being the unwilling object of it, whether blood lust or sex lust, until I met Ric, but I knew it was impulsive, untidy, and best taken with generous dollops of love.
I didn't feel the love here in the heart of the ex-Egyptian empire at the Karnak Hotel and casino. In fact, I really thought I ought to be going.
"Your ka-sendings," I mimicked their expression. "Those were the killer hyenas I ran into outside the Dead Zone club?"
"You did not 'run into' them," Kepherati said coldly. "They ran into you. They were sent for you. We wished to interrogate you in ka form. Had you been compliant then, you wouldn't be here walking and talking as a living person. Your northern warrior-dog and your vampire servant and you yourself damaged the temporary bodies of our ka-spirits."
So they'd wanted me dead, a spirit to drain of information and toss aside. They'd underestimated human will. And I'd like to see Sansouci called a "vampire servant" to his face, but it chilled me that they'd known what he was when I'd just discovered it last night.
Speaking of faces, theirs were still glued to each other. No wonder their eyes seemed a trifle crossed, like those of some Siamese cats. Such soul-searching postures left them deaf and blind to actions on the fringe.
I eyed the many polished surfaces of the great chamber. Mirrors in their day had not been glass, but buffed metal. I wondered if my silver mediumship was supple enough to slip through metal as well as silver-backed mirror.
If it wasn't, I risked smashing my atoms on hard bronze, not soft silver.
But I was alone, with no one else to worry about, besides Irma.
Go for it, chickie-baby. These far-too-friendly he-shes creep me out. They won't even notice we've left the room.
I doubted that, but this was probably the best opportunity to try something.
I checked Peter Lorre as Ugarte. He had tuned out like an abandoned hand puppet and stood inert a few feet away. He had led me here and his usefulness was over.
Mine was too, as far as I was concerned.
I glimpsed my own image, small and wee, in the sun disk headdress between the horns of a magnificent statue of Hathor. The goddess was sometimes portrayed with a cow's head; this headdress wasn't on a bovine head, though, but on the usual attractive head an Egyptian woman.
The statue was maybe eleven feet all, even seated in a throne chair. A Royal Uraeus, the hooded cobra, was centered on her forehead. Her white gown was tight and she wore beaded anklets and armbands. The figure's skin was painted a yellowish hue, her jewelry in red, blue and green with gold accents, but the sun disk was the purest, most polished metal surface in the vast chamber and it wasn't gold, but silver for some reason. Then I got it. No, it wasn't a sun disk, but a moon disk. This was a moon goddess.
Madrigal wasn't here to amplify my mirror-walking abilities. I was about to risk a fatal concussion on a weird do-si-do with a quasi-reflective surface. Risk not. reap not.
I sent my mind leaping up into my own pixie-sized reflected image, tensed my muscles and pantomimed the mental leap with fast, fearless action. First up to her cold sculpted lap. feeling oddly like one of those mini-adult doll-size painted Egyptian children.
Then I dove upward to her elaborate headdress, imagining the two-foot diameter moon disc as a cool silver pool I could dive into. I felt a cold crash of cymbals in my brain, a jolt to every bone and muscle in my body.
As I crouched there, chilled and shaking for what seemed a truly split second of time, I saw the tomb painting of the slim Egyptian pair in profile, their shoulders and chests faced out, frozen in some eternal throne room.
I was not timeless. I had a heart and head that needed to start ticking again. I leaped behind and beyond the tray-sized disc on the figure of an ancient goddess. I passed through another split second, utterly blank and black.
Then it was as if I was speed-dating Mirrorland.
I was shot through a tunnel of shadowed time and space, fast-forwarded past all the eerie places I'd had access to, including the Sinkhole or maybe even deep space.
My body emerged in cold water, upright, and my eyes blinked open through a curtain of liquid to see a crowd of squealing tourists backing away from the spray my appearance here caused. They started clapping.
I stood there dripping silvery strings of water in a Karnak fountain that spit golden discs of gambling chips from a small cow's mouth into a huge pool. Apparently I was taken for a performing acrobat. Tourists stood nine-deep around the fountain, still clapping as I waded out of the water, pulling my dripping hair back from my face.
I paused to bow my head and curtsy, then hopped over the shallow rim of the fountain onto dry marble.
"How do they do it?" a she-tourist asked a he-tourist. "They must have a trap door in the statue someplace. Then she tumbles out, pre-sopping, to look like she came from the fountain."
I looked up at the twelve-foot high statue of the goddess Hathor, seeing my dripping reflection in her mirrored moon-disk headdress. My head ached as if it was holding up that huge symbol. Thank you, ma'am.
All I had to do next was slip through the crowds, past the guards and out of the Karnak's dark shadows into the blazing desert daylight of Las Vegas.
I shuddered from the combination of my wet hair and clothes in the meat-locker air-conditioning and a sense of having communicated with too many of the dead way too closely.
Among the weirdly attired bellmen, security guards and roaming performers, one wet woman in tourist duds was eminently overlookable.
I finally burst back out on the Strip, basking in the blare of sunlight and heat.
Hermie was waiting with Dolly, top cranked down. He'd obviously taken several unauthorized joy rides, but he was back here when I needed him.
"Home, James," I said, hopping into the passenger seat.
I'd never let anyone, even Ric, drive Dolly before, but I was still shaking, fuzzy-brained, and seeing double from my mental-physical leap through solid silver. And my menstrual cramps were killing me, although they proved I was still alive and kicking.
"Where is home, doll?" Hermie asked, obviously hoping for a long journey and a huge tip.
I wasn't about to lead anyone from the Karnak to Hector Nightwine's estate and my small piece of home, sweet heaven on it. I puzzled for a moment.
"The Inferno and make it snappy," I said, pulling out some dough to get him back to the Karnak and grinning at the idea of a demon needing cab fare.
Funny thing. After my brief inspection of the Karnak, darned if the damned Inferno didn't feel like home.
Chapter Twenty-six
"YOUwent to the Karnak? Alone? Jesus, Delilah!"
Ric had caught me on the cell phone coming back from the Inferno in Dolly. We'd met on the far fringes of a Sonic Drive-in lot. Now we were leaning against our parked cars and exchanging sour little nothings.