After all, Hector had me on plenty of tape already. A lot of my barriers had been crashing down lately, publicly and privately. Why stop now when it really mattered?
So there we were, on stage for a preview for the hotel's management guys and their wives and girlfriends. My stomach was a storm of nausea and tumult.
"Sylphia!" Madrigal looked and called into the dark above us.
She came twining down on a thread, a thread that unwound into a rainbow of colors…aqua, lime, lilac, pink, and yellow.
Each of those colors wove around me, creating shining silk gowns tighter than cocoons, covering and revealing at the same time. I was a moving rainbow of scintillating, titillating fabric and was slowly being levitated horizontal until I floated under Madrigal's hands, sensing the glittering rainbow mummy wraps that bound me.
His hands paused above my center, my navel, and I wafted upwards, stiff as a board, and felt the iridescent bindings peel away, leaving me…naked. The moment was beyond traumatic, but before my stomach could rebel and heave out its contents, Phasia appeared above me. She twined her strong, sinuous muscles around me, a living rope of exotic tinsel. She imprisoned me and clothed me with her thick, dry, scaled length. Her heavy bonds made a bikini over my hips, a bandeau bra over my breasts, a collar around my throat and a turban on my head.
Horizontal. Bound by pulsing serpentine muscles. A nightmare!
I prepared to shriek, drawing whatever shallow breath I could.
Madrigal bent over me, his face as frozen as a dream lover's. His lips parted as they reached my mouth. They touched mine. I opened for him. He withdrew.
Magic. A glittering red rhinestoned apple was in his mouth, taken from mine, shimmering, bejeweled, saliva-slick, and sensual.
I heard the audience of a couple dozen gasp. I felt their attention shift from me to Madrigal, to the shining forms of Sylphia and Phasia as they wrapped and trapped him 'round and 'round in their spidery, serpentine webs. I thought he deserved better, but that was not what this show was about.
This act was all about the webs of power and submission, not about me. I was utterly forgotten at my most revealing moment, ceding the spotlight to Madrigal and his slinky, shimmering familiars and damn glad of it.
That's Kansas for you.
The werewolf management was on their-for the moment, human-feet, applauding. Drinking, making merry. Good. Hopefully, they'd be out cold when I came calling later tonight.
Chapter Forty
Madrigal stood behind me, his fingertips on my shoulders.
We were alone on stage and faced the mirrored back wall of his favorite place-switching cabinet.
Our images were reflected, but mine was hazy, shimmering at the edges with a halo of aura. My eyes in the mirror were not so much blue as transparent. The entire surface had a blue cast.
Madrigal extended his spread fingers to it. They touched the surface, the way kids play at making "spider" in the looking glass.
"Do you notice anything?" he asked.
"You could play concert piano with that finger spread?"
"Thanks. I like steel drums. Look at the reflection."
I did, frowning. I prided myself on being observant, but this was like a trick picture puzzle. There was the mirror with its weird blue cast, there was us looking as we usually did. I wasn’t about to say we made a handsome couple, although we did. I was way too aware of Sylphia and Phasia hanging in the flies overhead, quite literally. Maybe asleep in their spidery, serpentine nests. Maybe not.
When did arachnid and reptile familiars sleep? Not often.
"Front-surface glass," Madrigal said finally, answering his own question. "There's not that eighth-inch gap, that discrepancy between the real object and the reflected one that gives away that it's just a reflection. It's useful for kaleidoscopes. I'm the only magician in Las Vegas to use it."
I placed my spread fingers on the glass. He was right. I was touching fingerprint to fingerprint, with no break in image.
"Why use it?" I asked. "Audiences never see or suspect the mirrors are there if the illusion works, and no one in the audience ever gets close enough to study the reflection."
"Not inside the cabinets, no. But I know the difference, as do my assistants. I want my illusions to be as perfect as possible."
"Great, but-"
"I'm telling you that this is a custom-made and rather rare mirror. If you do have any 'way' with mirrors, maybe you can find a new way with this mirror."
Oh. I put my other hand on the mirror and stepped closer. My eyes looked über-blue in the mirror's twilight indigo color. It reminded me of a vintage Evening in Paris perfume bottle. It made inky blue-black highlights shimmer in the hair of my reflection and gave my dead-white skin the faint azure glow of skim milk.
I didn't feel that I was gazing at my double, Lilith, but at a more translucent image of myself. Like the thin skin that can form over sitting milk.
Translucent. Light drawing through, not at. I pushed my fingertips hard against the cold glass surface and felt it warm as they sank into it. I felt them dent it, as they would living flesh.
I took a deep breath and plunged my right hand through, jangling charm bracelet of keys and all. It disappeared, and my flesh sprouted goose bumps from my right forearm to all over my body.
Madrigal's fingers lifted from my shoulders. "You feel as cold as dry ice."
Dry ice. A mere mist. Chill and foggy, often used as a stage trick.
"I'm going in," I said.
"Wait! I don't know what's going on here. What's on the other side?"
"Maybe freedom." What did I have to loose, except maybe my skin peeling off in an acid bath?
I walked into my own image, which was not totally my own image, into the sheer frigid stream of wintry breath beyond the blue horizon.
My blood thickened and pooled into sludge in my veins. My heart stopped, like a clock paused between tick and tock. I had a split second to regret Quicksilver. Ric. My lost Lilith. That was about it. A pathetic litany of a life. Maybe Nightwine on a good tick-tock.
Me! Alive and ticking.
I was walking down a long corridor of blue ice, like the inside of a diamond. I saw forms entombed there. Human. Half-human. Not human at all. I faintly recognized some from my unremembered past. Kids. Teachers. Nuns. A ghost of Lilith seemed to stalk me through the tunnel, its image impressed briefly over every semi-familiar face I glimpsed.
Finally I walked into a dead-end of cold metal reflections, surrounded by myself in every direction. This was nightmare, not release!
Then I knew exactly where I was, and my pulse began to thaw from a ponderous, sleepwalking rate to high excitement.
The stainless steel elevator! I was alone inside it and it was moving, swift and silent as a mercury current. The doors opened soon after, splitting my image, easy as axle grease, through them. I felt like Moses walking through the Red Sea, only I was parting liquid walls of frozen water. I passed through, into a dark, dimly glimpsed passage: the hall leading to Cicereau's office.
I felt invisible. I'd moved into the ghost of my previous reflection in that elevator. Was there some simulacrum of myself still in Cicereau's office? What had been reflective there? No mirror. A mob boss doesn’t like to look himself in the eye. The walls had been dead black. The carpet equally absorbent and dark. The desktop had gleamed, but it was warm and bloody, not cool and blue.
Ah. A slab of horizontal mirror behind the wet bar counter. And there had been a vintage mercury glass ice bucket, too. A lovely, rotund, convex gleam of reflection, backed by a mirror, grabbing the shape of every body in the room into a bent version of themselves, including me. Great camouflage in case I was caught.
Bless you, booze brother, for the traditional bar decor! But for you I wouldn't be able to break into this room.