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“Yup. Oh, you’re a gorgeous demon witch with a lot of revenge due you. God’s first and final mistake, made from the same human clay as Adam, his equal, not his wimpy rib. Your successor, Eve, took the apple and lost paradise, but you played the serpent for the Fall, didn’t you? Hell hath no fury like a first wife scorned,” I paraphrased, “and you have a minor immortal fury on. So … Snow is Adam?”
“Snow is more than mere man.”
“Snow is … Satan?”
“He’s more than mere devil.”
Loved the new slant on Snow, but that wasn’t my main goal.
“Maybe he is, but you are tiresomely predictable, Lilith. You suck the life from children born and unborn, the blood from the human, the soul from the eternal. You haunt men’s dreams and drain them to death. You can only be banished by the uttering of eight hidden names…”
“So you do know me. You don’t know my names.”
“Wikipedia knows your secret names nowadays, Lil. You are outdated.”
Behind me, Snow gave a short, taunting laugh. “Guess she’s got your number, Lilith. You need to get on Facebook, drum up some fans besides my gullible groupies.”
I knew one thing else about her, one so-egocentric weakness. And that I could use.
While Lilith glared at Snow, her expression cold and her eyes burning hot, I bent to trace a large pattern with my forefinger on the obsidian floor, watching the silver-familiar chains run liquid down my fingernail to pool and spread and sink into the blackness.
I heard Snow’s smothered cry of pain and guessed that the black-moon metal was searing his skin at Lilith’s command. He’d spoken to distract Lilith, and the last thing I wanted was owing him for more pain incurred on my behalf.
My forefinger moved fast to contain the widening mercurial puddle by scribing the fanciful curlicue form in my mind … the frame of Snow White’s wicked stepmother’s mirror that reflected me in the Enchanted Cottage’s upper hall.
Even Lilith sensed my
actions and looked down to see what I was doing, a fatal mistake.
There was a mirror here now, with the silver familiar providing the reflective backing. We were unveiling Disney under glass, for obsidian is a polished black stone, a dark mirror, and we were both standing on it.
Lilith stared unblinking into her own reflection—pale white face, long dark hair, glittering green gown—a wavering writ on water.
Some old texts said Lilith had been enamored of staring into a mirror. I’d ensured that her own image would seduce her yet again. That weakness momentarily drained her demon powers and made her just another shallow mean girl simpering in a high-school girls’ room mirror.
Lilith screeched as she realized I’d made her trap herself, then she fled with a Wicked Witch of the West meltdown into the reflected image at her feet.
After she vanished, I spotted my own image resolving on the wind-riffled oil-slick surface left behind and dove down after her. An icy plunge from this dark empty abyss brought me into a soaring arrival in dark, overpopulated chaos, teeming with enough sound and fury to make my ears bleed. In the mosh pit, groupies were swaying hypnotically, screaming for the Brimstone Kiss.
Around me, Lust and Envy and Greed, oh my, rocked out. Was this me or Lilith joining the Seven Deadly Sins on the Inferno concert stage, and was I really doing a hip-banging boogie with … Lust?
That busty, redheaded wench on backup electric guitar had more moves than a corkscrew. Lust’s color-enhanced green eyes went supernova while I glimpsed Lilith inhabiting the performer’s succubus soul. The withering contact shorted out even Lust. Her leering, lascivious face grew blow-up-doll blank. Lust froze into a mannequin position, then her limbs began lifting like a puppet’s.
What a vindictive witch Lilith was. If she shut down the Sins into motionless zombies, the band’s rep would be ruined.
Oh, yeah? The show must go on.
I heard and saw the audience screaming and whistling like a tidal wave under a thousand spotlights. Made me want to give them their money’s worth. I grabbed the flame-fronted guitar from Lust before Lilith got the performer’s hands in gear, noticing that the silver familiar was now a pair of wrist cuffs, both bearing flashing ovals of mirror.
My more-than-air-guitar act flashed the Lilith eyes out of Lust, leaving her standing with hands as currently empty as her dazed irises.
Where was Lilith? I edged downstage next to Greed. From the back, the bass guitarist glittered with gilt braid and the green-orange colors of paper money. As I came abreast, a fading green glint in his robotic gaze said Lilith had scavenged his soul, as she had those of so many others long before this joint concert date of ours.
Lilith was no longer physically present. She was soul-hopping to keep ahead of my two-wristed mirror punches. If every Sin had worn my mirrored kick-demon accessories, she’d be gone for good. I still didn’t know what kind of supernatural Snow was, and I sure didn’t know who or what sang and stomped and strummed in his onstage band. Whatever they were, they were taken unawares. Lilith could keep systematically possessing the Sins band members’ bodies to avoid a showdown with me and my mirrors.
The only way I could exorcise her from this stage and place and time was to leave her nowhere to hide. We were the same physical type—dark hair, pale skin—so I was her walking mirror image, but I needed more than a serial soul-chase, I needed a coup de gras. The lost chord, the final karate chop, the worst-case scenario for an egocentric demon with a bloodthirsty edge.
The stage floor throbbed to the earthshaking thumps, and human hearts, including mine, were fibrilating all over the place. Lilith was amping up the vibration and sound system into heart-attack mode.
