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That was true. My Snow White coloring made most makeup unnecessary. I was your natural woman, until I ran into unnatural situations. Like this.
“Just a little light lip gloss,” I said between clenched teeth.
“Even better.”
I was not going to flirt with a guy whose fly I’d just locked down. I was tempted to leave him here to free his own ass. Except …
“Your back—?” I asked.
His long hair shook with his head. “—is my eternal unhealing wound, thanks to your innocent meddling. Forget that. I need to be free, not pain-free.”
Still, Snow’s sensitive white skin had turned scarlet under his wrist manacles. My hands fretted at the bonds that imprisoned him. The dark metal was so cold and slick, my fingers iced at the touch. The familiar twined around my wrist as a bracelet dangling only one edged charm, a four-inch diamond-grit jeweler’s saw on a chain. The miniaturized shark’s teeth no more nicked the black metal than the same saw or an acetylene torch could impact my silver familiar.
“Black-moon tarnished silver, Delilah,” Snow said. “I thought your silver talent could counter any supernatural traps, but I see you can’t. Get the hell out while you can. Protect the Inferno CinSims.”
“From what?”
Then I remembered a pretty damning lost detail in this whole misunderstood mess. “Why did I spot Lilith among the groupies upstairs? She only manifests outside my mirror when things are really wrong.”
“Don’t you know?” he asked. “She’s your shadow, not mine.”
The black lenses reflected me eyeing them suspiciously. “She’s been yours, too, Snowman! She’s not here now. Why not? Everyone I know has been sucked one way or another into this hell, haven’t they? These fevered groupies are just the Greek chorus, not the female lead…”
Oh. I realized that the current cast of characters was missing a powerful key figure I had spotted earlier but might not have truly recognized.
“And I’m not the female lead either,” I said aloud. “I wasn’t even supposed to be here. It all began with…”
I focused on the Grizelle cub stalking back and forth between the lines of now-cowed women nursing their stinging glitter wounds. Only in Vegas. But the glitter-whip marks were another element that looked worse than it was. We were all being played.
I surveyed the vast soundstage from polished floor to the blackest, emptiest most opaque heights above us all.
I’d always teased the Lilith in my mirror that Mom, if we’d had one, had named us after shady ladies in biblical times. Delilah was an Old Testament seductress and spy who brought Samson to the same plight Snow faced, blinded and chained, only by a sing
le vengeful woman instead of a hen party.
“Lilith?” I asked myself. Maybe not my Lilith. Now I wasn’t sure who I’d seen in my own image upstairs in the mosh pit. I sure wasn’t invoking my double, because there was no silver-backed mirror here to magnify my few powers, only darkness.
Still, a terrifying theory had me by the throat. Something had possessed these groupies to assault Snow instead of worship him from afar. Or someone.
“Lilith,” I repeated, scared now of an answer.
Maybe I was looking for a Lilith who dated back before Eden, back before the Fall and even maybe before Satan’s Fall from heaven. Maybe I was going for the east-of-Eden sweepstakes, the woman reportedly kicked out of Eden like Cain, the font of all feminine evil from what some believed were myths and tales banned from the Old Testament, or maybe she was just one vastly misunderstood mama …
I named her and Named her beyond any duplicate of me in the mirror.
“Lilith!” Lilith, the Lilith. I called, and therefore conjured her.
Whew. Wind came screaming through this empty time tunnel, reaming the hell out of Hell.
Planting my boots and my purely human will, I stared past the wind-tossed black veil of my hair and found a giant sister image flashing on and off in the surrounding darkness. She was ghostly of skin, with long, long dark tresses mirroring the toss of mine in the windstorm of her manifestation.
Not my double, but my enemy. Everything’s enemy. Lilith Unplugged.
She’d appeared in human form but was still the crimson-pupiled demon succubus of legend. Even I had to admit she looked particularly fetching in an iridescent snakeskin gown with a mermaid fishtail train that matched her chartreuse irises.
The Grizelle cub, recognizing that a really serious player had joined the game, leapt to rip its front claws down Lilith’s green gown. The claw marks sealed as fast as Grizelle could make them, the cub snarling with greater rage every time the damage of her attacks came undone.
Lilith’s lithe white arms, pale as a serpent’s underbelly, spread to welcome the cowed groupies into her devouring, almost maternal, gesture and proximity. They came stumbling atop each other in a rush, slavering over their new idol, madness resurfacing in their eyes.
