THE SOUND OF pounding footsteps.
An echo of mine? Or Lilith's? I couldn't picture Snow running to save my soul, or his own.
I raced along a dimly lit row of waste cans behind the closed storefronts. Once I rounded the row's end, I'd have to run even farther in the opposite direction to get back to Dolly. Then I'd need to drive away before the distant police car sirens arrived, forcing me to explain my presence.
The good part was I could honestly play the innocent klutz who'd triggered the alarm, so I was mostly still steaming about Lilith's vanishing on me. At least in Dolly I could cover more ground than she could on foot.
The parking lot lamp at the row's end was growing larger, like the light at the end of a tunnel. A black silhouette inside it was getting larger too.
The image of lurking darkness inside the light was classic suspense movie stuff. I wanted to believe Lilith had had a change of heart and decided to face me.
As a burst of high, mocking laughter echoed off the concrete blocks I ran faster. I didn't expect a sentimental encounter. By now I wasn't looking for Lilith to be a soul sister. Maybe an alibi would do.
After all, she'd known Snow before I had, had even joined the Snow groupies' online community. She had somehow "stolen" my clothing of the moment to play on the physical fact of our identical appearances. Worst of all, she'd been taped knocking out a Snow groupie outside the Inferno in my exact likeness. Accident or plot?
So I wasn't running toward her with open arms, but with my key ring bristling through all my right-hand knuckles. The silver familiar sent chills up my torso and limbs, poised to become the weapon I needed on a millisecond's notice.
Then I realized why my metal familiar was hesitating about choosing a shape. The image ahead of me shrank as I came closer but the laughter reverberated, seeming to isolate my name in a sound studio... De-lie-lahahahahahaha. Dee-lie-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.
The thrown-back head, bulking shoulders and thin-legged shadow before me focused into a grinning hellhound hyena from the Karnak Hotel.
And the echoes of its cackling behind me repeated like a tape loop suddenly sporting eight tracks.
I glanced back to see a pack of the terrifying creatures bunched behind me, coming up fast.
I veered left, away from the lights and the parking lot and my faithful ride and the police cars and the street and the passing vehicles.
My left hand clasped a cold smooth metal handle. When I lifted my arm a streak of neon-pink light rippled over an undulating silver snake. The whip's snap was metal-sharp. A hiss of electric lightning sizzled into the warm evening air.
Good choice. I paused to lash my arm across the oncoming pack. Their unnerving laughter turned to screams of rage as the silver trail slashed through their ranks. For an instant they faded, then those ungainly, misshapen bodies took bristle-furred shape again.
I turned to run, the silver whip coiling around my waist to keep me from entangling with it.
Amazing how flat-out flight can get your body zigzagging around anything in your way. I seemed to almost walk over fallen trash cans along the shops' back walls, kicking them behind me into my pursuers like cylindrical bowling balls. The backbeat scratch of long, lethal hyena claws on concrete was a rhythmic counter to the guttural arias of inhuman laughter overtaking me.
My lungs were burning to the point of bursting and my sides felt like some magician had skewered me with a dozen very real sword blades.
For an instant I saw myself reflected in a glass door to interior darkness. The glass glowed softly green from a night-light inside. I glimpsed posters of castles and pyramids beyond the reflection of my form outrunning the night. Close enough to a mirror? Lilith again?
I'd more happily risk plunging through this quasi-mirror as an escape if I wasn't chasing some taunting, unreal image of Lilith... I felt the encompassing comfort of the familiar melting as I hurled my body full-speed at the solid glass.
The suspended moment when my feet left the asphalt made me almost temporarily blind, when the sirens and the laughter abruptly ended, when I couldn't feel the familiar at all...
Or anything.
Then I saw that my reflection or the image of Lilith had shifted. It was webbed with glittering patterns, the face distorted in a demonic scream. My last conscious sight was the bereaved ghost of Loretta Cicereau. She was as mad as hell and not going to take it, or me, anymore.
Wrong mooove, Irma wailed before she went silent too.