Hex Appeal Page 18

  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.

  I’d made my way downstage until I was behind Dark Snow, who was bumping and grinding to beat the band with his ’57 Custom Les Paul Black Beauty electric guitar. Could I have ever dreamed I’d think Snow was the Super in the white hat and way more wholesome than this hell-bent CinSim doppelgänger?

  As the groupies starting boosting each other up to climb onto the stage and reenact the bad scene from below the Inferno, Quicksilver came loping in from stage right. An oversize wolf at full power run, silver fur riffling in the spotlights, is a vision to behold.

  The audience screamed encouragement when Quick spotted Anger in his sequined flame-covered costume, Lilith’s green eyes just starting to inhabit his while he beat the hell out of the drums.

  It felt like we were all tumbling around in a thunderstorm.

  Like lightning, Quick took them both down, Anger and Lilith. His ferocious leap set the percussion instruments rolling off the stage into the overexcited audience. Entering with a shrill chorus of arfs behind Quicksilver came … Asta, gray all over with black markings. As in his movies, the noisy canine turned coward and dove for shelter among the scattered drum set, ass-up and tail down.

  What an animal act!

  Where had Lilith shifted to? The possession-drained band was losing its force, and I was running out of Sins to expel Lilith from. Wait! Envy, with her green dress on, was a natural for Lilith’s next victim. The rocker’s eyeballs were looking like kiwi-jam-slathered toast when a huge white tiger took her down with velvet paws before she could make another move.

  Me, I’d had no idea how powerful my rock-star black leather and silver-studded catsuit could be. I hip-butted Sloth into the mosh pit with my wrist mirrors flashing—leftovers of Lilith’s possession dying in his eyes at first physical contact—and surveyed who … and what … was still standing.

  Grizelle. Huge again? And Asta onstage? They couldn’t both occupy the same space, unless …

  Before my wondering eyes, Light Snow appeared from stage right to riotous applause and shouting. He grabbed a guitar from the rack in front of the upset drums and strode straight toward Dark Snow, rocking into a dueling guitar act.

  Of course. Lilith now occupied the CinSim Snow.

  The crowd was ecstatic. Man, that was way too much demonic possession, hard-rock leather and shaking going on. The frenzy generated by the Seven Deadly Sins battling an ancient soul-sucking demon would be a sure sellout ticket on any tour.

  Grizelle, again her own formidable human self, was pacing the stage’s rear, awaiting the chance to pounce on Lilith/Dark Snow.

  I squinted beyond the houselights, trying to spot my friends at the Inferno bar.

  No luck.

  Wait a minute.

  We had me, Quicksilver, Grizelle, and Real Snow onstage.

  Light Snow was playing his white Stratocaster as if he were alone in the universe engaged in a duel with the devil. Maybe music was his magic. It was sure almost deafening me even though the Sins had gone quiet.

  I glanced at the mosh pit. All the ravening groupies from below were back in place, squeeing and screeching and jumping up and down but staying put, competing for the black scarves Dark Snow lofted into their midst … scarves that were turning whiter than snowflakes as they fell.

  Was it all reverting to normal? Did Lilith finally have no handy soul to possess next? Grizelle and I were not easy takeover options. Even as I watched, I again spotted my Lilith mirror image, my badass but so far purely human double almost crowded out and lost among the groupies. I’d first seen her there from the Inferno bar. She’d led me into the mirror and this control-freak battle with her big bad namesake.

  As the possessed Dark Snow bent to commune with screaming groupies, my Lilith’s white hands grabbed and climbed the color-changing scarf, her own freaky living black tattoos doing the kind of silver-familiar jig up her forearms I experienced.

  Lilith was boosted from the shoulders of the fans right onto the stage.

  I zeroed in on Dark Snow’s black leather back, wondering if the same whip wounds were now tormenting Lilith. Something was. The CinSim’s entire figure stiffened, then demonic Lilith’s head and face came swiveling around to face me, a whirlwind of long black hair whipping her savage features.

  Oh. So Exorcist. And me with only a Catholic school education to deal with her.

  And a mirror-twin sandwich.

  I tried to wrench off a mirror wrist cuff to toss to my Lilith, but the demon snarled to show an Alien maw striking snakelike from her icy cover-model features.

  Too much horror-movie imagery. I angled my arms and wrists into a tortured configuration that bounced a reflection of my Lilith into my other wrist mirror and zinged the demon right between the eyes. Don’t it make your green eyes bloodred?

  Blinded by the light, the demon screamed as she deserted Dark Snow to the piece of animated vintage film he was, and turned her seductive femme fatale form toward the mosh pit, fleeing to the ever-easy groupies.

  Not now.

  Her mirror-me namesake stood there, a solid barrier between the demon and her enchanted flock, leaving the demonic Lilith totally on her own, without a home, like a rolling stone … and not the rock-band sort.

  The demon’s screaming female form undulated like a sound wave until it flickered off and out.

  Lil and I faced each other across a void that didn’t involve a mirror for only the second time in our so-far-separate lives. My soul sister winked, and winked out, too. Onstage, Dark Snow was fading to black as Light Snow’s screaming guitar and onstage charisma overpowered Lilith’s recent CinSim plaything. Behind me, the Seven Deadly Sins were shrugging off the Lilith drug and reassembling, recovering their grooves and rocking out like the usual maniacs.

  I did not belong here, nor my big dog.

  We slunk offstage with Grizelle. Maybe we were an exiting backup group. Once in the wings, Quicksilver arfed and streaked back to the Inferno bar, Asta on his tail, to check on the CinSims. Something slapped my impenetrable catsuit on the butt.

  “Great show,” Dr. Jack whispered in my ear as he breezed by.

  Grizelle eyed me hard, her iridescent snake-belly eye shadow gleaming like Lilith’s irises. “Forget what just went down, or you’ll be cat kibble tomorrow.”

  The familiar had become a harmless charm bracelet, dangling tiger heads, guitars, and demon horns.

  “Nice work,” Snow said.

  He’d ducked into the wings before an encore. The lipstick marks were history, along with the reddened skin under the wrist man
acles. Those manacles were no longer tarnished black-moon silver but platinum or white gold, nothing so common as my silver familiar. My silver abilities hadn’t freed him, but once I’d outed and distracted Lilith from keeping him bound, he’d been able to invoke some conversion magic of his own.

  “So the curse of Lilith is gone?” I asked.

  “No, but she is. For now.”

  “She must have possessed your groupies. What does the curse have to do with them?”

  “You have to know?”

  “I deserve to know.”

  His sunglasses eyed the stage, not me. “Why did I offer no more than the Brimstone Kiss to the mosh pit? Maybe there’s nothing more.”

  Snow pleading impotency? That stopped me cold.

  “That’s really true? Must hurt worse than your back,” I said.

  Maybe I’d imagined my effect on him, or that it had fueled Lilith’s jealous rage, my own form of arrogance. Maybe the heat I thought I’d been picking up had just been frustration.

  He nodded. “You have no idea, Delilah.”

  “No satisfaction for eternity? Kinda mean. All because of Lilith?”

  “What do you expect from a bitch goddess?”

  “Those groupies,” I pointed out, “gave their all for your after-concert Brimstone smooch. Then you stopped doing it. You can’t blame them resenting your going cold kiss on them.”

  “I know you encouraged them into ‘recovering’ from an addiction to the hope of the kiss, but it did deliver more than they ever imagined.”

  “Multiple orgasms from a single kiss that they can never get again? You never kiss the same groupie twice. A vibrator is a lot more reliable.”

  “And here you came to Vegas just months ago an old maid.”

  “Twenty-four isn’t old.” He had me grating answers between my teeth, as usual.

  “It is for a virgin.”

  “Ex-virgin. So you got nothing from all the Brimstone Kisses you handed out to the groupies for so long but an ego boost and the sadistic pleasure of knowing they’d eventually remain in the same condition as you, unsatisfied.”

  “According to their signature song, it worked for the Rolling Stones.”

  “You sent Dr. Jack to my bedroom … You hired me on the sly. Why?”

  “Not me directly.”

  “Grizelle doesn’t count. She loves you. She hates me. Yet she rolled over and let me lead. It’s not like we were dancing here. Why?”

  “You’re right. I ordered her to.”

  “Why?

  “Maybe because I knew you’re the only woman in Vegas who wouldn’t be distracted by the opportunity to maul me.”

  I snorted. “You so flatter yourself, but you’re right there.”

  “Maybe because you’re the only woman in Vegas with still a streak of mercy in her soul.”

  That I couldn’t answer. Guilty as charged.

  “I know what you despise, but what do you want, Miss Street?” His colorless fingertips reached out to the familiar around my wrist. “I’m momentarily the grateful mogul. You have me at your mercy, like Samson under the spell of Delilah. Extort me.”

  Now, did the unmerciful minority of my soul feel like taking him up on that offer? Did some taint of Lilith’s jealous, demonic fury linger with me, wanting an eternal piece of him, too? Nothing personal.

  “Damned white of you,” I said. “You’ve run up quite an unpaid tab at my little Darkside Bar. I’ll take what you owe me out in IOUs as needed.”

  “That’s pretty vague coming from a hard-boiled dame like you.”

  “So suffer for a while longer. You’re apparently used to it.”

  As I walked away, I considered the endless options of a future with Snow in my debt.

  Maybe my mercy could temper our loathe-hate relationship, but how little did I love him? Let me count the ways.

  * * *

  Author’s Bio:

  Carole Nelson Douglas’s sixty novels include S.F./fantasy, mystery, and romance bestsellers. Her cozy-noir Midnight Louie, feline PI mysteries number twenty-four. Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, began prowling 2013 Vegas-from-Hell in Dancing with Werewolves and was last seen in Virtual Virgin. Carole collects vintage clothing and homeless animals and does dance. Visit her website: www.carolenelsondouglas.com.

  OUTSIDE THE BOX

  by P. N. ELROD

  To paraphrase a line from the movie—it wasn’t in the book—vampires are like chocolates; you don’t know what you get until you open the box.

  Not that I was going to dig up a coffin stuffed with a newly made and hungry vamp. My partner and I would watch from a safe distance, the fresh grave bounded by my heavy-duty holding spell. How the vamp got free from its burial would tell us what breed we had on our hands. They were all dangerous, but some more than others.

  My name is Marsha Madinia Goldfarb, occupation/vocation/inclination: witch. I register the post-dead and help with the orientation to their new lifestyle. Think you can escape bureaucracy by dying? That would be a no. Sooner or later, however badass a bloodsucker you might be, you will deal with someone from the Company, like me, armed with a clipboard and forms to fill out.

  So here I was, my butt parked on a folding campstool in an old cemetery next to an abandoned wreck of an old country church, the sun gone and the darkness thickening.

  Meh. It’s a living.

  I gave a jump when the custom sound system in the Type III ambulance behind me came to life, blasting the air with the Peter Gunn Theme.

  My partner, a vampire named Ellinghaus, began to appear, fading in like old-school special effects: ghostly at first, then forming up and taking on color and solidity. No streaming mist for this guy, he was there or not-there. He timed the fades and formings to the beat of the music. It was his party trick. Not all of them had that kind of control.

  Like the rest, his breed of vamp had a special Latin name with the Company geeks, but the informal designation was “Chicago Special.” It coincided with his personal style. He dressed and acted as you might expect from a guy obsessed with the Blues Brothers, complete down to the hat and sunglasses. He even had the accent. On him, it worked. Other vamps ribbed him about it, often not in a good-natured way, but outside the Company people liked him on sight, thinking he was with some nightclub show.

  Considering his choice of prime Mancini as his waking-up number for tonight, that was close enough.

  Pop-culture packaging aside, Ellinghaus was tough, just couldn’t get around during the day like some of the Dracs could. No shape-shifting, either, but I’d never heard him complain. He’d been in a long, lightproofed storage bench in the back of his home on the road for at least eleven hours and somehow managed not to look rumpled. I could admire that.

  His occupation: keeping an eye on the witch so she doesn’t get damaged.

  Vamps are a dime a dozen, but true spell-slingers are rare, though you wouldn’t think so with my pay scale. More and more, I’d been giving thought to going indie, usually on Friday, when the amount on the check left after Company deductions was only enough to cover basic living expenses. I’d signed a seven-year contract, though. Two more to go for either renewal (and a significant raise) or resigning with the usual confidentiality spell in place for life.

  “Good evening, Miss Goldfarb,” Ellinghaus said. He leaned in through the open window of the cab and shut off the player. He’d made his entrance.

  “Hey, Ell.” I’d tried for five years to get him to call me Marsha or even Mars, but he liked calling me “Miss Goldfarb.” Whatever made him happy.

  “Where are we this fine night?” Used to waking up in a different place than where he’d gone to bed, he was only mildly curious.

  “Still in Texas.”

  “Where in Texas, if I may inquire?”

  “About two hundred miles west of HQ. We’ve been knocked back to the Stone Age. No phone, no Internet. Sorry.”

  He took that pretty well. I hadn’t. “Anyone else joining us?”

&n
bsp; “I don’t think so. No mentor called this one in.”

  His solid form went ghostlike, and he rose straight up like a slow balloon. I should be used to that, but it’s cool to watch and just never gets old.

  “Anything?” I asked when he came back to earth after a good look around.

  “Lots of nothing. No cars on the road. I am thinking this is an orphan case, Miss Goldfarb.”

  “It has that dump-site vibe, yes.”

  He stalked over to the grave, stopping short of the barrier marked by the salt I’d put down, his head tilted, listening for activity. “Must be too soon,” he said.

  Post-death incubation varied, anything from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. More than that, and it’s assumed the change failed. Then we back off and call an investigation team to process as a questionable death, possibly a murder.

  We don’t get many of those these nights, but it happens.

  Most of the time the vampire’s maker is standing by ready to mentor the newbie. In those cases we just fill out the paperwork, hand them a brochure about the benefits of working for the Company, and get out.

  Then there are the orphans who, for one reason or other, don’t have anyone to show them the ropes. It’s shameful and wrong, like the casually cruel mouth-breathing morons who love playing with a new puppy, then abandon the grown dog on the side of the road to starve, go wild, or get killed in traffic.

  When the Company finds the vamps who do that, there are penalties, severe ones. The CEOs take the Stan Lee trope of “with great power comes great responsibility” seriously. It’s the second-most-important rule in the greater community; ignore it at your peril. You make ’em, you take ’em.

  I’d dealt with only a few orphans and counted myself lucky not to be around when the Company caught up with their makers. Word was that it got noisy.

  Responsible vampires don’t pick out-of-the-way, long-neglected graveyards for their protégés. Some brainless jerk had dumped his or her table scraps.

  Tonight’s case was going to be a bitch, I thought.

  The wind kicked up, hot air sweeping through the long, drought-dry grass, making it hiss. The old church creaked like something trying to wake up. It must have been a tidy gathering place once upon a time, but a century of Texas weather had baked it to death. The structure leaned in the direction of the prevailing wind. The front door was on the ground and rotting, and I could see through to where the altar had been. No pews, perhaps those had been carted away to a newer, larger church.