I was used to being a failure, but I wasn’t used to failing at a job.
After Madrigal’s last Margie-less show was over and the myriad stagehands had left, I crept back to the theater and climbed the black iron ladder against the outer brick wall high into the flies.
Above me the deadened lights—as shuttered and heavy-lidded as a hooker with industrial strength mascara—could cast no cold, critical eye on my feeble maneuverings on the wires and lines that stretched down to the stage.
I just wanted to rehearse on my own, discover what I could—and couldn’t—do in this new arena I’d never chosen.
I grasped one of the bungee cord lines, wrapped it around my wrist as Madrigal had instructed, and . . . jumped. Flew like Peter Pan. Dive-bombed. Let myself out on a string of elastic until I thought I would crash and burn, then let myself be snapped back to the top of the building, waiting for my skull to shatter bricks.
I was a human yo-yo. I never hit sidewalk or sky, but boomeranged back and away from disaster at the very instant of impact.
I finally clung to one of the high perches where the performers rested before the next death-defying plunge. Scared, exhilarated, and beginning to get the rhythm of fall and rebound, of being a human Slinky. Also of trusting the equipment, the instructor. Wait! Wasn’t this all a metaphor, maybe, for human relationships?
Madrigal would not let me crash and burn. His masters didn’t want that. He wouldn’t tolerate it, no matter how bound he had been. I crouched, panting alone in the dark, watching the one bare light bulb left burning below, an ancient theatrical custom called the “ghost light.”
I guess I was beginning to know a few things about ghosts. And light. And myself.
The impact came out of nowhere like a clock’s narrow metal pendulum swinging into me: unannounced, sudden, slicing.
I was off my safe perch, spinning into empty air, grabbing for any stopgap.
I caught a hanging bungee cord. It burned the skin from my palms before allowing me to rebound, then bounce down and up, and finally dangle forty feet above the stage floor. Low enough to see salvation. High enough to die.
I tried to decipher what had happened.
I was alone. I was working the ropes and bungee cords. I was making progress! I had been . . . seen. Watched. Sabotaged. Torpedoed.
I looked down. None of Cicereau’s very earth-bound werewolves were prowling. Even Quicksilver had been left cooped up in our quarters. Dumb me, thinking I was a solo act.
So I looked up.
I spotted two gleaming figures, lithe and alien.
One came plunging down at me, spewing loops of lucent fibers like strings of pearls.
The other came sweeping across my lifeline, living tendrils from her head whipping around my bungee cord and severing it.
I had no choice but to grab a viscous rope of . . . spider web.
Ooh
. Sticky. Stretchy. The black stage floor was rising
like a solid wave, ready to crack my skull. The brain
inside that skull understood that Madrigal’s familiars
were strenuously objecting to my new alliance with him.
Familiar. I didn’t spin spider silk from my . . . well, let’s not think what. I didn’t have snaky Medusa locks to use as hangman’s nooses.
I knew something they didn’t know. I had a familiar of an albino.
I felt a strong silver tug. I was instantly wearing a strongman’s belt, an all metal-mesh waist-cincher draped with chains on silver rings. The chains whipped out to loop around Phasia’s snaky tendrils and pulled her down, down, down.
I heard a strangled screech.
I was too busy rebounding up to the ceiling to much notice.
Sylphia, she of the temporarily tender heart, was scurrying, all four limbs working in mirrored tandem, so they were eight, up the farthest reaches of her glittering web.
I floated like a butterfly, I stung like a bee. My silver chains sliced through her web like a buzz-saw through butter.
Once again I found a tiny perch high above everything and clung there.
Sylphia and Phasia surged upward at me, possessive female venom on the move. They were tiny, super-strong blends of will and tenacity and pathetic need. Madrigal was their god, but he was not their species, as I was not.
For the first time, I understood the driving frustration of the vampires at Howard Hughes’ hospital bachelor pad who had striven to claim me, in vain. (Excuse the expression.) These creatures and I were not compatible, and Madrigal wasn’t compatible either with his lethal, ladylike familiars, but they were locked into an uneasy trio.
What, or who, was I compatible with? Ric. Ric. I wanted to think just Ric.
But also, a little. . . with Madrigal, or these spider/snake harpies would have never tried to destroy me.
And . . . maybe, on a very bad day, Snow.
Shit.
But I had to use what tools I had.
I sent out my own built-in tendrils (although they were actually add-ons) and after ten frantic minutes of old-time herding and roping I had both familiars trussed up under the ceiling in cocoons of silver chains, silk, and snaky hair. They were bundled up like spider food, but they reminded me of naughty Victorian girl-children: pretty, dainty, and malevolent, like the illustration of the “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf” in a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, who had ended up chained down in Hell covered with spiders and snakes and other creepy-crawlies, oh my.
I left the Slime Twins to work their way out of their own webs and mine. The silver chains broke off my belt and kept them in tight custody while I slipped down.
Before I left, I asked Sylphia to meet me in the theater after the final rehearsal the next day. I had to use what tools I had, even if they venomously hated me.
* * * *
Quicksilver sat by my side in the theater’s empty seating area when Sylphia came spinning down from the flies, a fugitive pale glitter against the dark. Theater houses are always dark, even in the daytime, lacking any light but that provided by spotlights.
I knew and had recently felt Sylphia’s compassion. It was running short now that Madrigal and I had been forced to confer daily in pseudo-sexual situations. I doubted that there was any likelihood of consummation between them, only a deathless bond that had no natural way, like sex, of expressing itself.
I patted Quicksilver’s head as Sylphia landed on the neighboring seat, playing the butterfly rather than the bee at the moment.
“You said you needed me.” Her tone was childishly arrogant.
“I need your help, so I can leave.”
“Leave?”
I nodded. “I don’t belong here. I don’t want to be here, which I think you can understand. There are those who miss me.”
“Those?”
“A boss. A lover.”
“Tell me about your lover.” She posed on her heels atop a seatback, the piquant face avid.
I glanced at Quicksilver. “Not in front of the dog.”
“Why?”
“He’s very possessive.”
“Why?”
“He’s my . . . guardian.”
She digested that. “Phasia says if I help you that you’ll be gone.”
“I’d like to think so.”
“And your familiar?”
“Gone with me. I’d never leave him behind.”
I saw her rainbow eyes flash at my last sentence. She was powerful, fey, unhuman . . . and so humanly insecure. For a moment I wondered if she could free them all, all three, in an instant, but didn’t, because it kept Madrigal hers. That wasn’t love, but she wasn’t my species either.
“We will need Phasia,” she said at last.
I nodded.
“She is even more dangerous than I am.”
I nodded.
“I like your . . . dog, is it?”
That was the best she could do.
“He likes me too.”
That threat was the best I could do.
No way could Quicksilver follow the paths these two fey creatures could carve for me. I was on my own with alien female rivals whose only reward would be my absence, by hook or by crook. But first was another rehearsal day, a final preparation for our debut, reluctant as it was for me. I would rather die than mimic it on the Gehenna’s gigantic stage.
* * * *
“I’ve thought about your act,” Madrigal said. “It must reprise the CSI appearance and surpass it. The core of it is the ten-second camera pan of you naked on an autopsy table.”
“One thing. That wasn’t me and I wouldn’t have done it.”
“Right. It was your . . . double. To save that lost sister of yours, would you have done it?”
Well, what was she to me, or vice versa? Strangers. Still, if I could have done that nude bit part and saved her to be found and met by me today . . . but no way would an Our Lady of the Lake Convent School student have done that. Yet, if I was sure it would save her? Lilith? If she was some severed part of me I needed to find and unite with—?
After all, Hector had me on plenty of tape already. A lot of my barriers had been crashing down lately, publicly and privately. Why stop now when it really mattered?
* * * *
So there we were, on stage for a preview for the hotel’s management guys and their wives and girlfriends. My stomach was a storm of nausea and tumult.
“Sylphia!” Madrigal looked and called into the dark above us.
She came twining down on a thread, a thread that unwound into a rainbow of colors . . . aqua, lime, lilac, pink, and yellow.
Each of those colors wove around me, creating shining silk gowns tighter than cocoons, covering and revealing at the same time. I was a moving rainbow of scintillating, titillating fabric and was slowly being levitated horizontal until I floated under Madrigal’s hands, sensing the glittering rainbow mummy wraps that bound me.
His hands paused above my center, my navel, and I wafted upwards, stiff as a board, and felt the iridescent bindings peel away, leaving me . . . naked. The moment was beyond traumatic, but before my stomach could rebel and heave out its contents, Phasia appeared above me. She twined her strong, sinuous muscles around me, a living rope of exotic tinsel. She imprisoned me and clothed me with her thick, dry, scaled length. Her heavy bonds made a bikini over my hips, a bandeau bra over my breasts, a collar around my throat and a turban on my head.
Horizontal. Bound by pulsing serpentine muscles. A nightmare!
I prepared to shriek, drawing whatever shallow breath I could.
Madrigal bent over me, his face as frozen as a dream lover’s. His lips parted as they reached my mouth. They touched mine. I opened for him. He withdrew.
Magic. A glittering red rhinestoned apple was in his mouth, taken from mine, shimmering, bejeweled, saliva-slick, and sensual.
I heard the audience of a couple dozen gasp. I felt their attention shift from me to Madrigal, to the shining forms of Sylphia and Phasia as they wrapped and trapped him ’round and ’round in their spidery, serpentine webs. I thought he deserved better, but that was not what this show was about.
This act was all about the webs of power and submission, not about me. I was utterly forgotten at my most revealing moment, ceding the spotlight to Madrigal and his slinky, shimmering familiars and damn glad of it.That’s Kansas for you.
The werewolf management was on their—for the moment, human—feet, applauding. Drinking, making merry. Good. Hopefully, they’d be out cold when I came calling later tonight.