Virtual Virgin Page 0,49
could feel, but not flaunt, to a heavy charm bracelet I’d seen before, dangling a slew of mysterious items including a doghouse, ball chain and leg iron with lock, binoculars, wishing well with bucket, mummy case, globe, scissors, chariot, high-heeled platform sandal, and wolf’s head. Someday I’d solve the clues in that assortment. Meanwhile . . .
“Okay, Mirror Me,” I told Lilith, eager to meet her on neutral ground that wasn’t part of my everyday life. “I’m convinced you’re improperly attired enough to greet monsters in the mirror-walk. Me, on the other hand . . .” I held out my arms, indicating my Hector-cajoling outfit of ladylike vintage frock, high heels, and charming bracelet. Window dressing was always a great disguise.
“You’ll confuse the hell out of them,” Lilith said. “Death by boredom, Little Miss Go-to-Meeting. Mom will love your quaint apparel, girl. She always liked you best.”
“How do you figure that?”
“You at least got a last name.”
“Street? That was for where I was found. I was a foundling, Lilith. An abandoned infant. Where did you come from?”
Her eyebrows waggled above over-made-up smoky eyes that looked startlingly blue in contrast to the smudges above . . . and below.
“Your worst nightmares, Delilah. You gonna be a big girl and show me the way? I want to know why I’m stuck with you as much as vice versa. Grab your cell phone and join the party. You do have pockets in that loser antique frock, don’t you?”
I did indeed, but I had no reason to trust Lilith or even to wish her well. She was not a sister in any interpretation of the word and why would I care about the woman who deserted me? Maybe because I did always want to know who, what, when, where, and why, the reporter’s bywords.
I ran back to the bedroom and slipped my PhD-level phone into my dial-phone-era dress pocket.
“Stand back,” I told Lilith on my return to the hall. “I’m coming through, and if you make any aggressive moves, pussycat doll, I will stomp your riveted ass pockets with my World War Two pinup platform heels.”
I PUSHED INTO the mirror as if going through a revolving door. At once, my arms plunged into tepid Jell-O and even the quality of the air thickened as I joined my mirror-image in the dim reaches beyond the glass.
This was scary. Crossing over had always been an airy process. This implied that Lilith might have real physical presence, not merely a psychic presence, like the ghost of Loretta before she’d struck her fey-changeling bargain.
A deep breath had me inhaling Eau de Motorcycle chick—gasoline, leather, and some heady cologne that blended musk and magnolias. Lilith’s earthy scent took my breath away. She’d always been unreal before, an image just a thirty-second of an inch away in dreamland.
Only the silver familiar awakening to materialize around my forearm in a 3-D tattoo pattern of gleaming barbed wire shook me from freezing under the spell of a solid Lilith. I’d no idea it had a competitive streak. Maybe I did too.
“You have the coolest jewelry, though,” Lilith said. Her debauched wink was just like the Bad Maria’s in the Metropolis movie. “Does that tricked-out cell phone of yours get a signal in mirror-world?”
I had no idea, but the familiar reverted to a bangle bracelet as I pulled it out of my skirt’s hip pocket and turned it on. My usual wallpaper of Rick and Ilsa’s parting scene in Casablanca came up while the lyrics of “I Love Paris” played like a whisper in the vast, inhuman space.
“Mush,” Lilith groaned, cringing away like a senior citizen at a rave.
No problem. While I watched, my settings vanished to be replaced by an eerie undersea cosmos of shifting greens and blues and red-orange hot Inferno Hotel firescapes. I was fixated when a golden version of the Silver Zombie materialized and stripped off pieces of the metal carapace until she was down to her skivvies—real gold leggings and a metal bra that made Theda Bara’s hot-for-1917 Cleopatra version look wimpy. It was Beyoncé belting out “Get Me Bodied.”
“Hey there, Delilah, that’s way cool for you.” Lilith was circling me while I watched my supposedly smart phone reinvent itself as a hard rock venue.
The rock audio-visuals finally faded.
I put my attention on Lilith, still circling like a street-gang shark, looking shorter than me in her scuffed low-heeled motorcycle boots. But she wasn’t.
“Mom will like you best,” she decided. “And I prefer it that way.”
“We have to find