"I need to know I'm not alone." I sounded needy, even to myself.
Honesty seemed too much for her. She looked aside, flashed her profile, which duplicated mine, and vanished.
"Wait! Lilith!"
I rushed the mirror, pressed against it. My fingertips retreated. The surface was not only warm, but there was no distance between my splayed, groping fingers and their reflection.
The Enchanted Cottage mirror used front-surface glass, like Madrigal's magic-act mirrors! Although I'd learned that any mirror bowed to my presence, front-surface mirror seemed more powerful. That was a fact I could use and build on. Madrigal, the magician at the Gehenna, would know more. Besides, he hadn't been surprised by my Alice-through-the-looking-glass antics in his stage mirror. I wanted to know more about how and why.
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall," I murmured, my hot cheek pressed to the cooler glass, thinking of Lilith. "Who's the fairest of them all?"
It didn't answer, which was a relief.
What were the odds that the bad old dreams from my orphan days wouldn't resurface that night, Enchanted Cottage comforts or not?
The Millennium Revelation reality offered the resurgence of supernatural figures dating back centuries and even millennia; my personal nightmares always had a modern and even a science-fiction edge.
The group home half-vampire bullies who hassled me were only another twist on a common male adolescent type… gang members. They were minor annoyances.
My most frequently rerun nightmare was "Alien Abductee."
Now that was really out of this world.
Yet, I'd always be there again, flat on my back under powerful overhead lights that made my captors into featureless white-clad shadows. I'd be naked as a CSI corpse with the memory of a flimsy white sheet being stripped away.
I never quite knew what bound me down. Maybe it was just the paralysis of nightmare, but I was incapable of moving or of speaking.
Just as I was frozen in place now, once again in the relentless grip of dreamland.
The figures leaned closer, blocking some of the light. The needle-in-the-navel cliché felt as real as memory. I glimpsed a long thick silver instrument at the foot of the table. It was coming towards me, held in white hands with fingers as smooth and boneless as a stingray wing, more cartilage than muscle and flesh.
The giant stingray motif hovered over all these dreams, looming beyond the blinding overhead light like an albino bat with a wingspread of twelve feet.
I couldn't breathe, as if the atmosphere was water-heavy.
If I couldn't breathe, I certainly couldn't scream, even when the approaching instrument vanished as it neared my torso.
Not even when the hovering heads drew in until all light was gone except for a searing luminous halo behind them
I escaped into another nightmare.
Something seized me and slammed me upright against a wall.
My eyes batted to close and filter out the punishing light.
They slowly adjusted to see another ring of hounding beings… These had faces. Snarling, fanged, pimpled and scarred. The local half-vamp hoods were after me again for "blood and booty." Rape and a liquid supper.
I knew how to fight them off and raised my trusty diamond-dusted nail file to the nearest blood-shot eye.
My fist was empty! I was unarmed. Only a long thin chain wrapped my knuckles, a flimsy piece of jewelry, not a weapon.
I struggled, but four of them held me pinned upright against the wall. I couldn't move or scream. Something hard and metal prodded between my legs. They were going to rape me with a knife!
A scream struggled to stutter its way out of my throat, but one contorted face came too close to focus on, the bared canine fangs already dipped in fresh blood and dripping more…
The dreamscape changed, the wall behind me pounded with a salsa rhythm, echoing my rapid heartbeat, massaging my spine because I was pressed hard against it by another body.
A tongue was flicking back and forth along the edge of my lips, tickling, teasing them open for a direct inward thrust. That forward motion was followed by more lateral moves, by lips encompassing mine, lower and upper in turn, caressing.
The man's weapon was hard as knife steel and pushed vertically against my crotch.
His hands were on my bared hips, the hips his hands had exposed on the dance floor when he jerked my skirt down from my waist until it was a low-rider model slung below my navel.
He was breathing hard and so was I.
My thighs were slick. Was my body wounded from the previous dream? Menstruating? No, it was welcoming this man, my dream lover.
The man's hands and mouth were hot and persuasive, teasing my body into a matching rhythm with his subtle hip thrusts, making it thirst for conjoining.
Now I fought to hold back a… sensual moan.
I'm not the kind of girl to go limp against a hall wall in a dance club. Hell, I don't even dance well. But the man knows how to lead me and I want him to.
I open my eyes to see Ric's dear, dark-eyed face, to hear his Spanish murmurs of love and passion and it's all right. We're at Los Lobos salsa club, where the werewolves change under the full moon.
I have changed. What was once threat is now temptation, teasing, pleasing, deeply wanted. I smile at Ric, tongue-kiss him back, rock my hips hard into his… and wake up.
Ooh la la, what a bitchin' place to let an invisible friend down flat, Irma croons. Um, that man was soooo habeñera hot for us! Even I could feel the fire. Go back to sleep. I want to get to the necking session in the car and the first fuck in the bathroom mirror later and our second orgasm.
That's my business. I don't need to be reminded and I'd never put it in those crude terms.
You are almost twenty-five, girlfriend, and I am right there with you. You can't afford to give up a single rerun of a feminine thrill, not even in your dreams. And ain't Ric's Latin lover act so way better than dodging half-vamp bully boys or alien probes from Hell? Let him at me! Play it again, Samantha. And again and again.
I ignored Irma's irritation, letting myself drift back into the moment when nightmare had segued into wet dream. My nightmares had never had a happy ending before. Ric had awakened pleasure in me where I'd been conditioned to feel panic.
The deep gratitude I felt for that might have been love. I didn't know. An unwanted orphan doesn't much feel the love. I knew my body loved him. I knew the joint psychic link we'd felt when we dowsed together for an innocent cache of water in Sunset Park and found that the dead supernatural had sealed our sensual connection.
Umm. I'd forgotten the rocking motion of his hips against mine in that dim nightclub hallway. The slick liquid glide of his lips against mine. The glint of his gold wristwatch on his olive-skinned wrist. The luminous whites of his eyes against the swollen-pupil black of desire in his eyes. That narrow gold belt snaking around his hips.