fingerprints all over me. I wasn’t used to being simply human. I thought of Loretta Cicereau first sensing the fey twins’ webs all over her ghostly image.
Someone . . . something . . . had made Loretta take physical form again.
Someone . . . something . . . had wanted to undo my clever method to freeze a girl gone wild. That same force was bottling me on the inside of a giant . . . bullet.
I would not go gently into that shining metal night, like Metropolis’s human heroine Maria went from lying comatose in a glass coffin in a mad scientist’s laboratory into the instant mummy case of a robot suit, no matter how glamorous. I pounded my fists against their distorted fuzzy reflections.
I stopped, feeling like Superman confronting Kryptonite for the first time.
Stainless steel was somewhat reflective and had a reflective chrome component, but contained not a bit of sterling silver or silver nitrate. It was not a friend of mine, and it had been chosen to entomb me, to torture me with what might be happening to Ric beyond my power to prevent it.
Panting, I pushed my face and body tight against the curved side of my personal mummy case. I’d have to rely on Ric to save himself, and maybe me.
Oops. I was kissing myself. I was so close to my blurry reflection that I couldn’t focus. My palms felt the metal warming against my touch. Was I sensing just a reflection, or was I contacting Lilith?
Whatever I saw was just my height, and just my coloring, a pale face with a halo of cloudy dark hair.
I brought the spread fingers of both hands up to my face, trying to push the image away. The silver familiar streaked across my shoulders and down my arms to my wrists, like a mitten string inside your heavy coat. Only kids who’d grown up in a climate with cold winters, as I had in Kansas, knew that feeling. Instead of mittens, though, the familiar encased my wrists and first knuckles in chain-mail workout gloves. Cool but . . . impractical.
I spread my hands apart to study the effect, and the stainless steel wall in front of me split. The two halves of my reflection slid to the edges of my vision, and a 3-D version in living black-and-white, a knockout brunet Cinema Simulacrum, stood barring my way out.
I was eager enough to escape to push right into her, which might feel bizarre. Humans up top avoided contact with the CinSims, very aware of the zombie body in possibly questionable condition beneath the attractive monotone surface.
Dreading first contact was not necessary. Two hands in glorious living color grasped her off-white upper arms and shuffled her aside.
“Get lost, chica de cine,” someone said.
Chapter Ten
THE MAN WHO stepped from behind the clawing glamour-puss looked confused, but unruffled as any man could who’d just fought off a sexy CinSim.
“Ric! Thank God. Somehow the familiar cracked the lid on my steel coffin.”
“Delilah? How’d you get here? What do you mean . . . coffin? I just pushed the elevator Up button and . . . here you are waiting to pop out of the car like a jack-in-the-box.”
“More like a Jill, I hope.” I frowned at the femme fatale still trying to glue herself to his side. Was that . . . it couldn’t be! Screen vamp Maria Montez.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“Ah. Research.”
“Does ‘research’ always make you look so sheepish, amor? And exactly where is ‘here’?”
Looking around, I glimpsed black-and-white film vistas of native girls in tropical lagoons cheek by, uh, lower cheek with slinky dames on nightclub floors. Whether nature or nurture, the scenes were populated by gorgeous, more ungowned than gowned, Hollywood stars of the pre-Technicolor days.
Uh-oh, Irma warned. Our main man has been window shopping on the naughty side of Vegas.
This time Ric grabbed my upper arm. “I don’t want to explain here, in front of the, um, populace. Let’s just hop back into the elevator and get to the main floor.”
“The main floor where?”
He looked startled. I usually knew where I was coming from, if not always where I was going.
“Delilah, are you . . . all right?”
“Pretty much, or so you whisper in my ear nights. Regularly.”
Ric closed his eyes as if hoping all this, even I, would go away.
“So, Ricardo, you have some ‘’splaning’ to do. Where are we?”
“At the Inferno.”
Now it was my turn to be speechless. I turned to examine the