Seeing the Enchanted Cottage again when I drove home that morning reminded me of the scarred film couple who had fallen in love under the place's spell in the film named for it.
Scars were just that: evidence of past pain. They had no power to hurt again, unless we let them. Although it pained me that Ric had been brutalized as a child and still felt enough shame to hide the traces, he was healthy, well-adjusted, successful and more concerned about my past traumas than his own.
I wondered if we could really root out the truth about my phobias if we went back to Kansas. There was a lot more truth to root out here first.
Now I settled into every-day tasks. Quicksilver greeted me at the door with fevered licks at my face.
"Yes, a walk. A run, rather. Just let me change."
I freshened his water and food bowls and ran upstairs to change into terrycloth shorts and jogging top. I knew I'd need another shower when we came back and grabbed a protein bar on our way out the door.
Sunset Park 's red-dirt paths attracted joggers because of the trees. The ducks were quacking around the lake, the sun was still bearable and I felt almost as strong and sleek as Quicksilver. Even Kon Tiki, my name for the lone, Easter Island stone head on the little artificial lake's sad excuse for an island, seemed to wink at me as we raced past.
Once back at the cottage, I resolved to stop dwelling on personal discoveries for a while and concentrate on what I didn't know, and needed to, here in post-Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, where so little was what it seemed.
I felt a rising dissatisfaction with my opposite number, Lilith. Glimpsing her a couple days ago in my mirror, pert and sassy, had sharpened my fears that she was indeed dead. If so, my quest to find her. my main reason for being here in Las Vegas, was pointless.
Was my theory that I only glimpsed the dead in mirrors right?
Achilles was still a no-show there, but he was just a dog. He meant much more that that to me, of course, but maybe in the world of immortals dead dogs are only glimpsed crossing the Rainbow Bridge to disappear thereafter into a vague hereafter.
I was having trouble with the Vague Hereafter and maybe I should start dealing with it right here and now.
I showered and changed into jeans and T-shirt for the day and then went into the hall.
The mirror was tall and narrow with an elaborately carved wooden frame.
This narrow hallway kept the light to a minimum. Shadow was the mirror's natural environment.
I traced the carvings with my hands, realizing close up that it was a frame of demonic and gargoyle faces, some human, some beastly, some horned and barbed. It seemed the glaring eyes and open maws I traced yearned to trap my fingertips in their shallow three-dimensional surface of carved and polished wood.
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!