Hex Appeal (22 page)

“Lilith?” I asked myself. Maybe not
my
Lilith. Now I wasn’t sure
who
I’d seen in my own image upstairs in the mosh pit. I sure wasn’t invoking my double, because there was no silver-backed mirror here to magnify my few powers, only darkness.

Still, a terrifying theory had me by the throat.
Something
had possessed these groupies to assault Snow instead of worship him from afar. Or someone.

“Lilith,” I repeated, scared now of an answer.

Maybe I was looking for a Lilith who dated back before Eden, back before the Fall and even maybe before Satan’s Fall from heaven. Maybe I was going for the east-of-Eden sweepstakes, the woman reportedly kicked out of Eden like Cain, the font of all feminine evil from what some believed were myths and tales banned from the Old Testament, or maybe she was just one vastly misunderstood mama …

I named her and Named her beyond any duplicate of me in the mirror.

“
Lilith
!” Lilith,
the
Lilith. I called, and therefore conjured her.

Whew.
Wind came screaming through this empty time tunnel, reaming the hell out of Hell.

Planting my boots and my purely human will, I stared past the wind-tossed black veil of my hair and found a giant sister image flashing on and off in the surrounding darkness. She was ghostly of skin, with long, long dark tresses mirroring the toss of mine in the windstorm of her manifestation.

Not my double, but my enemy. Everything’s enemy. Lilith Unplugged.

She’d appeared in human form but was still the crimson-pupiled demon succubus of legend. Even I had to admit she looked particularly fetching in an iridescent snakeskin gown with a mermaid fishtail train that matched her chartreuse irises.

The Grizelle cub, recognizing that a really serious player had joined the game, leapt to rip its front claws down Lilith’s green gown. The claw marks sealed as fast as Grizelle could make them, the cub snarling with greater rage every time the damage of her attacks came undone.

Lilith’s lithe white arms, pale as a serpent’s underbelly, spread to welcome the cowed groupies into her devouring, almost maternal, gesture and proximity. They came stumbling atop each other in a rush, slavering over their new idol, madness resurfacing in their eyes.

I glanced over my shoulder. Lilith’s deep contralto croon was hynotizing the agitated groupies. Their eerily green irises seemed to reflect emotions of lust and envy. What a rock star wannabe she was.

“I know when you pissed
me
off,” I told Snow. “When did you piss off the mother of all demons?”

“Millennia ago. I didn’t suspect you’d have the smarts, guts, or power to call out a major demon. Her distraction won’t last long. She’ll want to expand her presence now that you’ve called her here. Leave me to deal with her. Escape while you can.”

Well, thank you. Nothing like an employer who’d tricked you into ending an involuntary bondage scene between a sex idol and his adorees … and then considered your outing a major monster a screwup on your part. Trouble is, I can’t abandon any living being in trouble, human or paranormal, even Snow. Tell me life is hard and not fair. Tell me death is a tango dancer, and I’m naïve and old-fashioned, but do not tell me I can’t do what I need to.

Even against Grizelle.

Even against my sister Lilith.

Even against the Lilith who was kicked out of Eden for being the world’s first and best bad girl. But why did she have it in for Snow?

“I know what Lilith has done to you lately. What did
you
do to Lilith?” I demanded.

Snow’s face turned away again, my angry image fading in the sunglasses with the gesture. “Not what I did. What I didn’t do. It’s what
she
wanted to do with
me.
”

Ah. Hell hath no fury like a female demon scorned. So she’d cursed him. How?

“We all want to undo you, Snow,” I told him dryly. “Now, listen up. This is not just any Lilith, right? This is not my mirror-me. This is really Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was driven from Eden for wanting to be on top?”

The sunglasses tilted down toward my face. “Yes, but it’s me she’s cursed, not Adam.”

“And the curse is…?”

His second of hesitation felt like an eon knowing Lilith’s sick interlude with the groupies was likely to end at any moment.

“Spill it.”

“I can only give pleasure, not receive it.”

Wow. I processed that. It sort of explained the Brimstone Kiss. It didn’t explain why he’d stopped giving them after he’d forced me to accept one. He’d said I’d failed the test, but maybe it wasn’t
his
test, maybe it was Lilith’s.

“No wonder,” I told him, “she’s mad as hell and won’t take it anymore, like the groupies. You cheated on her.”

With me.

As much as I hated to admit it, I’d just seen I could get a rise out of Snow. If that wasn’t a symptom of pleasure, I don’t know what was with a man.

He smiled. “So you can’t spare any more empathy time for me, Delilah?”

“Hell, no. I tend to side with the girls.”

I turned as a snarling Grizelle took a guardian post at Snow’s feet and advanced on Lilith. She’d settled into mere life-size form and was awaiting me like a headmistress with a wayward pupil.

“You confront as well as conjure me?” She stepped away from the demon-drugged, smiling groupies pulling their hair out a single filament at a time. “Do you know who I am now, feeble interloper? How powerful I am?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Do you know who or what
he
is?”

“Snow, International Supernatural of Mystery? Nope, but I intend to find out in my way on my own time.”

“I know what you are, Delilah. You must be pleased to see your enemy bound at the mercy of such trifling fools as these enamored human females.”

“No, Lilith, I am not.
I
don’t care to use intermediaries.”

Her lurid eyes glittered hotter, the green haloed with scarlet. “Are you
daring
to refer to me?”

“Yup. Oh, you’re a gorgeous demon witch with a lot of revenge due you. God’s first and final mistake, made from the same human clay as Adam, his equal, not his wimpy rib. Your successor, Eve, took the apple and lost paradise, but you played the serpent for the Fall, didn’t you? Hell hath no fury like
a first
wife
scorned,” I paraphrased, “and you have a minor immortal fury on. So … Snow is Adam?”

“Snow is more than mere man.”

“Snow is … Satan?”

“He’s more than mere devil.”

Loved the new slant on Snow, but that wasn’t my main goal.

“Maybe he is, but
you
are tiresomely predictable, Lilith. You suck the life from children born and unborn, the blood from the human, the soul from the eternal. You haunt men’s dreams and drain them to death. You can only be banished by the uttering of eight hidden names…”

“So you
do
know me. You don’t know my names.”

“Wikipedia knows your secret names nowadays, Lil. You are outdated.”

Behind me, Snow gave a short, taunting laugh. “Guess she’s got your number, Lilith. You need to get on Facebook, drum up some fans besides my gullible groupies.”

I knew one thing else about her, one so-egocentric weakness. And that I
could
use.

While Lilith glared at Snow, her expression cold and her eyes burning hot, I bent to trace a large pattern with my forefinger on the obsidian floor, watching the silver-familiar chains run liquid down my fingernail to pool and spread and sink into the blackness.

I heard Snow’s smothered cry of pain and guessed that the black-moon metal was searing his skin at Lilith’s command. He’d spoken to distract Lilith, and the last thing I wanted was owing him for more pain incurred on my behalf.

My forefinger moved fast to contain the widening mercurial puddle by scribing the fanciful curlicue form in my mind … the frame of Snow White’s wicked stepmother’s mirror that reflected me in the Enchanted Cottage’s upper hall.

Even Lilith sensed my actions and looked down to see what I was doing, a fatal mistake.

There was a mirror here now, with the silver familiar providing the reflective backing. We were unveiling Disney under glass, for obsidian is a polished black stone, a dark mirror, and we were both standing on it.

Lilith stared unblinking into her own reflection—pale white face, long dark hair, glittering green gown—a wavering writ on water.

Some old texts said Lilith had been enamored of staring into a mirror. I’d ensured that her own image would seduce her yet again. That weakness momentarily drained her demon powers and made her just another shallow mean girl simpering in a high-school girls’ room mirror.

Lilith screeched as she realized I’d made her trap herself, then she fled with a Wicked Witch of the West meltdown into the reflected image at her feet.

After she vanished, I spotted my own image resolving on the wind-riffled oil-slick surface left behind and dove down after her. An icy plunge from this dark empty abyss brought me into a soaring arrival in dark, overpopulated chaos, teeming with enough sound and fury to make my ears bleed. In the mosh pit, groupies were swaying hypnotically, screaming for the Brimstone Kiss.

Around me, Lust and Envy and Greed, oh my, rocked out. Was this me or Lilith joining the Seven Deadly Sins on the Inferno concert stage, and was I really doing a hip-banging boogie with … Lust?

That busty, redheaded wench on backup electric guitar had more moves than a corkscrew. Lust’s color-enhanced green eyes went supernova while I glimpsed Lilith inhabiting the performer’s succubus soul. The withering contact shorted out even Lust. Her leering, lascivious face grew blow-up-doll blank. Lust froze into a mannequin position, then her limbs began lifting like a puppet’s.

What a vindictive witch Lilith was. If she shut down the Sins into motionless zombies, the band’s rep would be ruined.

Oh, yeah? The show must go on.

I heard and saw the audience screaming and whistling like a tidal wave under a thousand spotlights. Made me want to give them their money’s worth. I grabbed the flame-fronted guitar from Lust before Lilith got the performer’s hands in gear, noticing that the silver familiar was now a pair of wrist cuffs, both bearing flashing ovals of mirror.

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.