Chapter Thirty-Seven
Rehearsals began that very day. A leotard and tights, rose pink, had appeared in my closet. From noon to 4 pm Madrigal and I worked out.
"You're too tall, too heavy, too busty, too clumsy," Madrigal said when he saw me clothed in neck-to-ankle Spandex that made me feel way too naked.
We weren't alone during this embarrassing summation. A tiny doll of a girl in a white outfit like mine hung back in the wings, watching us.
"Syl," Madrigal called with an extravagant bow and arm gesture. She came running onstage as lightly as a forever pre-pubescent ballerina. Her hair was Swedish white-blond and her skin had the sugary glow of a pastel gumdrop in blended Easter candy colors, lavender, white, yellow, pink. She was the born sugarplum fairy.
For the next hour I watched her curl into a box that seemed no more than a square foot in dimension and squeeze into six-inch false backs behind deceptive magical cabinets. Syl was triple-jointed, fairy-like, and astounding. She not only collapsed every joint in her body, she coiled into herself like a Slinky. She was also mute, I finally figured out. And her full name paid tribute to her physical plasticity: Sylphia. Emphasis on the PHEE as in a form of Sofia. Which meant wisdom in the ancient world. Or maybe the phee in her name was for fey.
Whatever, I watched them work together in awe and shame.
Lilith and I were an insulting replacement for Sylphia's abilities and artistry, bit players who should have stayed on the bottom fifth of the Screen Actors Guild membership list. But here we were with our shiny cheap media magic and had to perform.
That first afternoon Madrigal taught me to curl into a fetal bundle as small as my stiff and medium-boned frame could manage, but when I had to do it in a lady-sawed-in half box, I freaked from the dark confinement.
Sylphia fluttered to my side, tiny hands soothing my shaking shoulders. Her face was a mime's mask of heartfelt sympathy. I looked into her pale almond eyes and wondered, was she an enforced worker here too? Was Madrigal?
He unpeeled her from me with gentle fingers, then un-pretzeled me not quite so gently.
Madrigal seemed major upset. With me, with the situation. I couldn't blame him. Nobody professional wanted an amateur for a partner. We split for the dressing rooms. I tried not to watch Syl shed her leotard and tights like a paper cocoon. Mine were sweaty and seemed glued to my tense, damp skin.
A knock on the door revealed Madrigal, already changed into thick green terrycloth, the house robe.
Syl's thin eyelashes fluttered distress as he beckoned me out, silently.
He was our fearless leader. I followed.
He walked me into his private dressing room and then the shower, turned on the water, and tested it on his wrist as if warming milk for a baby. Then he pulled the opaque glass door shut as water pattered inside. He stripped off my leotard and tights with one long gesture, not bothering to watch as I hopped, naked, to free my bare feet from the snarl of Spandex. He dropped his terrycloth robe, yanked open the door on a cloud of steam, and stepped in with me before I could register anything but a wall of caramel-colored skin. Luckily, the shower was so frothy neither of us could see much but hot mist. Nor could anybody else, even a spy camera.
"They can't hear us in here," Madrigal murmured in my ear, his hand on my elbow.
I flailed a bit, still freaked by our sudden nude tete-a-tete.
"This is the only way. The werewolves revere human mating rituals. They only mate once a month in furred form. Naked human lust 24/7 inspires them. They'll assume our presumed union will guarantee your continuing cooperation."
Oh.
Madrigal pulled me more closely under the shower's hot tropical rain. He also pulled me closer against him. I didn't want to think how nice all this wet heat and slippery skin felt after the frigid uncertainty of being snatched from the Las Vegas streets and forced to turn myself into a human Windsor knot.
"I hear your name is Maggie," he said.
"Lilah," I corrected. I was starting to split personalities, not wanting to pass as my maybe-sister, not willing to be fully answerable as myself.
"You're too solid for this profession," he said, "but Cicereau only expects me to make a show of you, not a true performer. Neither of us deserves to be a pawn in the were-packs' game."
He was pretty, oh, solid himself.
Gad! I'd put myself in a position where my new sensual self was bereft and alone. Who wouldn't welcome an ally in this situation? Who human? So what was Madrigal? Better question, who was I? Was it normal to be a little edgy yet excited when suddenly naked with an attractive stranger in a tropical steam bath of a shower? Pardon me for not knowing. They didn't teach us anything about this at Our Lady of the Lake Convent School. In fact, I couldn't remember much that they had taught us at OLLCS. While I was dithering, my trip back down Amnesia Lane pretty much killed any knee-jerk libido I had left.
What remained were the usual mysteries and insecurities, hints and allegations. Sure, my background was weird and isolated, but I'd managed to pass as a smart, savvy cookie since college. Trouble was, I had no idea what "normal" was. I did realize that I had pretty much shut down any sexual outreach or input after whatever bad had happened, whenever and wherever that was.
In the real, working world, I'd learned to look good for the camera and pass unmolested through all inter-sexual social situations. My aloofness only made me more attractive, more of a "challenge," to the wrong guys. I'd never met any right guys until Ric. And now-hot dog! �C every guy, except goons, hitmen, and werewolf CEOs, seemed sort of right if I didn't get too picky or wigged out.
While I was doing all this useless navel-gazing, I suddenly saw that I really was seeing my own navel through the mists of steam. And a lot of naked and tattooed Madrigal standing behind me.
I put out my palm until it hit a barrier and married with its own image. The surface I touched was cool, smooth, and solid glass. Mirror. So why was it cold when the shower stall and steam were so overheated?
I had stepped close enough that there wasn't much mist veiling me anymore. I ran my palm down over my reflected image in a hopeless gesture of self-defense.
A modesty veil of steam welled up like a geyser from the floor, obscuring me to my neck. The nuns would be as proud as if I'd publicly disavowed patent leather shoes.
"Did you do that?" Madrigal asked.
"Do it? No, I just thought-"
"Thought what?"
"That... that I was a little overexposed for conspiring under the guise of coed showering."
He stepped closer, behind me.
Oh, no. I apparently was now sensitized to rear approaches.
His arms reached out of my shoulder-high mist to place both his palms on the mirror.
"Touch it again," he said.
Well, um, "it" was one of those sneaky indefinite pronouns and my mind was no longer the lofty, pristine summit of rational thought it had been.
"The mirror," he added more softly, his voice thrumming at the top of my head. There was just enough purr in it to tell me that he grasped, and was male enough to enjoy, my confusion.
Damn! I would become the coolest chick this world had ever seen someday. Meanwhile... I did as he suggested.
And then I saw what he had seen, which wasn't just me naked, but which was the mirror, softening, blurring under my hands. As if I could sink into it.
My palms were tingling way more than any other part of me, which was an improvement, in my estimation. I felt icy electrical static nips at the very heart of them, where headline and heartline and lifeline met and crossed. This was the hollow center of my hands, which I could never flatten to any surface. This was... the navel of my hands, as I had one at the center of my body.
I'd never felt anything in these zones before, but now they were almost alive. My hands pushed into the silver graven image of themselves and it was as if I were touching a second self lurking just beyond my sight.
Madrigal's hands commandeered my shoulders. "Lilah. Come back."
I didn't want to. I was enthralled by Mirrorland. I could sense others moving out there, even picture myself out there.
Madrigal pulled my shoulders back until I was pressed against his hot, wet body, so physical, so crude compared to the call of Mirrorland, of those insubstantial, shifting things in the mist.
He wrenched himself and me away from the mirror to face the mechanics of the shower, the steamed-over glass door, barely visible and a poor excuse for the magical looking-glass door I'd just opened in the mirror, and the glitzy, gleaming overdone gold shower head and controls.
He'd wrenched me away from all that by pressing me against all of him. Was that my choice? The power of magic and the mind? Or the power of desire and the body?
If so, I never wanted to make that choice.
"Relax, I won't crowd you, here or onstage."
Madrigal's grip loosened. I sensed his mind backing off slightly, the usual singsong sensuality in the words, yet our closeness had turned comrade-like. Even as I breathed a sigh of relief, I wondered what he really wanted. I wondered what I really wanted of him and if I could betray him if I had to.
"I have friends who'll be looking for me," I warned.
"So did I."
Not good.
"We'll have to work up a routine for them," he said.
"I want out. Can't you tell? I'm claustrophobic and I have major issues about being bound in that damn horizontal corpse position from CSI."
"That industrial-strength familiar of yours might be a key."
I tried to feel the silver upon my body: the thin, hip-slung chain I wore under everything, a talisman of Ric and his... I guess it was love. I wanted to believe it was love. And where was Snow's hair shirt, as he had called it? I couldn't feel it, hadn't thought of it, felt it, since being abducted.
"My familiar?" I asked, playing for time to think. He surprised me.
"The were-hunter. Don't think they don't know what he really is. They must know they can't have you without suffering its presence. They must want you very badly."
Oh. Quicksilver. Were-hunter. Sounds serious. Good dog!
"Not as badly as I want them," I answered.
"You think you're a hunter too?
"I am. A hunter of the truth."
He laughed, hard. Okay, that was a pretentious line but we crusading journalists get a little over-intense at times. I told him what I had used to be, not that long ago.
"Investigative reporter? I wish you could do an expose on this operation."
"Sylphia. You two can't leave?" I asked.
"It's not that simple. We could maybe. Each in our own way, but we'd have to forsake the other. She's not the only one to consider."
I nodded, although he couldn't see the gesture. "You're lucky to have such solidarity."
"And cursed."
"I'm neither lucky nor cursed. Help me get out of here when I need to go, and I'll do my best to come back for you and Sylphia."
"All you have going for you is that were-hunter."
And I didn't know what the hell a were-hunter was, except the obvious. I had a deep-down feeling that Quicksilver was way more than anyone might take him for, even the werewolf mob. Even me.
"What are we working on tomorrow?" I asked.
"The mirrors."
"Mirrors?"
"Everything magic is mirrors."
"That's where you could really teach me something. I may be too tall, too heavy, too busty, too clumsy, but I think you're right. I might have a way with mirrors."
I felt his large hard hands on my ribcage, his thumbs softly brushing the roots of my breasts until I shivered.
"I was speaking of the attributes of a stage magician's assistant. I wasn't speaking of my own personal preferences."
Okay. His unbreakable bond to Sylphia wasn't sexual or romantic. That realization made me uneasy but I liked him even the better for it. And what had he meant by a "stage magician" as opposed to... some other kind? Like the real thing?
"We have to let them believe we have mated." He Frenched me in the shower, tasting fluoridation and my fear long enough so that I knew he liked it. Liked what? The water, the fear, the sweet sensuality, the danger of our hidden alliance? Who knew?
"Use my robe when you leave. Cicereau and his were-goons don't deserve a thrill."
He left me there, wet and steamy. I grabbed the fallen terrycloth robe as soon as I stuck a toe out of that shower. Then I checked for the silver familiar.
It was again a charm bracelet-did that mean that it would work like a literal charm? This time it was a jangling collection of sterling silver keys, with one lock among them all: a wolf's head, its open fangs the aperture that all or any of those keys would slam home to.
Snow had spoken. Or I liked to think he had. The keys to everything I sought were here. Okay. That gave me an agenda. An investigative reporter always liked that.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Syl descended from the dark of the theater flies on a thread of unseen spider-silk.
I watched her, overwhelmed.
Madrigal's huge hands were on my waist, but his eyes were on Syl.
"Exquisite," he said.
"What is she?"
"I don't know. Fey. Fairy. Far too good for the Gehenna."
"How did you two-?"
"Familiar." His hands slid away from my waist. "Damn!"
I felt his anguish as if it was my own, but it was a formally expressed anguish.
"Our alliance was our doom, yes?" he said. "She was far better than I had earned at that point. I supposedly 'saved' her from indenture to the Dread Queen, but I was indentured myself, although I didn't know it then." He shrugged away his frustration. "My 'act' depended upon her."
"Dread Queen? Are we in Alice in Wonderland, or what?"
"Wonderland." He gave a weary little snort. "Don't worry your little head about it. They're my look-out, and you do need to look out. They're not really mortal, but you sense that."
I watched. Watched Syl swaying slowly from the upper dark to the spotlit ground. I was sure that she did it for him.
And then I spied her twin still high above us.
A twin!
She was as petite and perfect as her double, the dark sister with her hair loops of shiny licorice, her skin a glittering dark-neon pattern of turquoise, purple, fuchsia, emerald. She oozed downward on a bungee cord to her lighter sister... twirling, spinning, suppleness personified.
I watched as they met in the middle some forty feet above the stage floor and twined into a lover's knot of sisterhood.
"And now, introducing me," I said. Sardonically.
I saw that we'd all been impressed into service on the stage. Impressed into exploitation, like the CinSims. Only here, with this established triumvirate, I was the odd woman out.
I sighed and dropped my eyes from the fey creatures twining down toward Madrigal and me. Quicksilver was sitting in the empty aisle, looking like he only needed a cigar in his mouth to masquerade as a Broadway angel.
"Phasia," Madrigal told me that evening in the shower in answer to my soggy questions. "Sylphia's... sister, I suppose. Even I don't know. They're why Cicereau keeps me alive and working. The pack ran me down on the streets of Las Vegas when I had a contract at a smaller hotel. Their fangs notched me, their saliva filled my veins." He guided my fingers to the tattoos on his left forearm. I felt a Braille pattern of fang scars underneath the camouflaging ink.
"How? For how long?"
"First Bite," he said. "It makes you their servant, but not a supernatural. How long? Sixty years. So far."
My heart began to beat faster for a reason other than the hot, steaming water. I grasped Madrigal's tattooed upper arms. They seemed the epitome of strength. Why couldn't he use it? "You look thirty years old. You've been in Las Vegas that long?"
"Thirty years is a heartbeat for my kind, but any burr under any kind's skin is eternity."
For some reason I was not eager to probe exactly what he and his assistants were. Also, like most reporters, when I was hot after a certain story, it would take a world war to distract me.