the fey girls are jealous of her.”
I barely got the words out of my mouth before another screaming Mimi was heading right for me—us. She came barreling out of the darkness like a berserk ship’s figurehead, all head and shoulders and trailing body and clothes. Images of ancient Greek harpies, Viking Valkyries, and other mythic female monsters fast-forwarded through my brain.
I raised my naked arms and hands before the familiar could make its move, but so did Madrigal.
“Robaceous trilobelius,” he bellowed a spell.
A thorny bell jar of brambles sprang up around and over us and burst into eerily silent beating orange flames.
The colors lit up the hovering forms of Loretta and her two petite former jailers.
Loretta’s eternally pretty seventeen-year-old face screwed into a cartoon snarl of hatred. “My father ruined my life,” she screamed like an overemotional teen, “and your interference on his behalf ruined my death and resurrection, and Krzysztof’s too.”
Her tirade reminded me that Loretta’s vampire medieval Polish prince bore a name not that unlike Snow’s French form of it. Could there be a connection? It might be a clue that Snow really was a vampire, despite his denials.
Loretta’s furious gaze transferred to the man by my side. “Madrigal, you and Sansouci have always been my father’s toadies. You now walk the old fey paths, as this meddler does. Your feeble magics can’t protect you from the fey powers that soaked into my spirit while immobilized in your trap.”
“Loretta,” I warned. “Revenge will hurt you more than anyone.”
“Drop the pious clichés, Delilah. I can smell a taste for revenge on your own soul. See what you think about revenge after I finish with the one who revived me from death. You will know what it is to lose your lover as horribly as you took mine.”
She fled into the dark like a falling star, swift and then . . . gone.
“Ric,” I breathed. I turned on the puzzled magician. “Madrigal! She’s gone after Ric. Banish the barrier.” He frowned. “Don’t argue with me. I can hold off your fey without hurting them, although they won’t return the courtesy.”
“It’s not that I won’t, Delilah.” He stretched his hands into the flames of his ensorcelled wall of thorns. “The girls can’t pass through my illusion, but I can’t unmake it without their aid.”
“You mean . . . we’re protected but also trapped?”
He nodded. Grim again. “Very much like Loretta was in my mirror.”
Impetuous by fear for Ric, I charged the fiery nettles in a fury, already what Loretta had predicted of me, wanting to tear her down to bones and bury her again. The thorn tips were so sharp my arms and hands sprouted bloody pore-sized bites all over that burned like fire ants.
I fell back. Madrigal’s magic wouldn’t hurt him, but it would tear and burn anybody, maybe anything, else.
Ric and I hadn’t checked in that morning by phone yet. I had no idea where he was, en route to the Inferno Hotel or already there. I hoped to hell Loretta didn’t either but I doubted a woman betrayed and then turned fey-tainted ghost could be stopped by much.
I leaped again for the thicket of thorns despite Madrigal’s shouting, “No!”
Again I rocked back and forth on the floor, tormented by an agony of flaming thorn bites that echoed my inner fear for Ric. I’d stopped Loretta’s resurrected lover from a mass-murder tear through the Gehenna Hotel, but I couldn’t do a thing now to protect the one person who meant everything to me.
If only I’d opted for a film date at the Inferno Hotel with Ric and Snow.
Chapter Five
RIC LOOKED SIXTY stories down to admire the fountains of cavorting flames that enveloped the Inferno Hotel’s towering exterior night and day.
They flaunted every color of a high-Fahrenheit rainbow, azure to orange, gold and red blending with the blue into teal and bright absinthe green.
On the top floor the flame tips formed a dancing set of spearpoints outside the glass walls, but the penthouse temperature was as cool as its ice-white albino master, the Vegas mogul that Delilah called Snow.
Ric tried to see through the fire-shrouded stories but failed to glimpse the Las Vegas Strip. Only the crowding new towers under construction were visible at this level. These were brown-gray skeletons of concrete and iron, ugly and crude at this stage. They reminded him of the architectural equivalent of giant zombies gnawed down to their bare bones.
He felt a shiver despite the exterior flames and forced away a sudden eerie stab