“Magic,” Sansouci muttered.

“Not my magic,” Madrigal answered. “I just have a way with magical stage illusions. Sensitive pressure points lurk beneath all these surfaces. Quite a sophisticated construction. Certainly not made by or for Cicereau.”

His words had Sansouci and me feeling along the slick walls, pushing at points where the shining aluminum seemed to dimple.

I gasped as my particular wall unfolded into a train of compartments.

“It could be a trap,” Sansouci warned. “Explore the unfolding distances too far, and you many never find your way back, or out.”

“Exactly,” Madrigal told him. “Or you may find your way out of Cicereau’s service and Vegas altogether, which you look as eager to accomplish as I am, my friend. Too bad you and I haven’t talked before, vampire. I took you for just another of my jailers.”

“Don’t get optimistic,” Sansouci growled in good imitation of a werewolf mobster. “I swore in the name of my kin and kind to serve Cicereau.”

I wasn’t interested in their dueling macho supernatural conflicts of interest.

“What is this place?” I asked Madrigal. “How can Cicereau claim and use it?”

“As best as I can guess, it’s fey like the Sinkhole, a remnant from the ancient days of earth beyond numbering. The fey have left their mark in every time and place.”

“They’re still present and powerful then?”

“Present but remote. Powerful but feral,” he warned. “The Dread Queen rules in a court consumed with light. She has no heart, or so my feral fey companions say. They’ve stayed with me because desert places like Las Vegas repel the fey. I’ve tamed my assistants enough that they prefer my presence. This place may be a tent the fey moored on ancient earth when it was ripe with dark life.”

“Older than ancient Egypt?”

“As old as the stars,” he answered.

Sansouci snorted, bringing a welcome clap of reality to the scene. “What would a greedy thug like Cesar Cicereau have to do with such airy fairy beings?”

“He inadvertently may have built his gambling hell on a focus point for the fey,” I suggested.

The vibrant wall I touched felt warm. “We truly could be in another dimension for these moments. Cicereau’s daughter couldn’t penetrate this unearthly place.”

“The fey are secretive and unrevealing,” Madrigal warned. “Yes, they’d find the spirits of our own world crude and intrusive.”

Convinced it was safe to talk here, I said, “All right. Let’s not linger. Could I call Loretta into your backstage front-surface mirror and trap her there somehow?”

“As your own image was once mired!” Madrigal got the idea right away. Then he shook his dreadlocked head. “Intriguing but risky. Your mirror double was vague and dispirited, a shadow suitable for a quick illusion onstage, but no more.”

“Whoa,” Sansouci said. “You kept a captive image of Delilah backstage? And I didn’t know about it?”

“Not your business,” Madrigal answered. “Cicereau thought I’d magically conjured the CSI corpse, Maggie. He wanted her kept top secret. Then, thanks to Delilah calling her image back from afar, the mirror version, her simulacrum… vanished before Cesar could decide what to do with her.”

I explained myself to Sansouci, since no one could overhear us except perhaps the Dread Queen and she seemed seriously camera-shy.

“Realizing I’d left another skin behind in Madrigal’s mirror gave me a high ick factor,” I told him. “I used my own mirror to recall or dissolve it.”

Sansouci was eyeing me with disbelief. “You can project and retract yourself in mirrors? No wonder I couldn’t trap you in Cicereau’s office! Yet that fool police detective Haskell suckered you.”

Did I mention I blush easily?

Sansouci watched my face, then chuckled. “Sometimes you’re such an amateur, Street, yet you keep us hopping.” He eyed Madrigal and grinned.

The magician shook his head sourly. “You latter-day vampires are being led around by the wrong bodily fluid. Don’t let your libido make a fool of you. Amateurs can get us in trouble with Cicereau, and he’s no one to cross.”

I caught my breath as Sansouci’s angered inner vamp hardened every muscle. His frame seemed to gain a hundred pounds and six inches. Blood rushed to his eye-whites and lips as they peeled back from shining white canine fangs. This was the big, bad vampire who’d fought off the spectral hyenas from the Karnak Hotel.

“You play a dangerous game with your fey handmaidens, magician,” Sansouci warned. “Don’t mistake the face I show Cicereau with reality. When it suits me, I can still take my humans raw, magic or no magic, fey or no fey.”

Gulp, Irma gurgled softly in my mind. Guess our girly power is a might undercooked to trifle with these dudes.

Yeah. So I might as well appeal to supernatural testosterone with, uh, reason. Madrigal, no lightweight in the human muscle department, was frowning hard by then and I sensed a minor spell coming on.

“You guys should be allies,” I pointed out. “You’re resident prisoners. I’m only visiting at Cicereau’s invitation, remember? Okay, his command. I’m here to do a job for the head honcho. You want to help and get me outa here, or play Incredible Hulks? You gonna let a couple of pretty women, one of them just a slip of a ghost, get you off your game?”

I would never have put myself in league with the dainty Loretta, but after my session with Helena Troy Burnside, I had a fresh appreciation of the power of feminine wiles. Any weapon in an impending paranormal storm.

Astonishingly, they bought my argument. You could visibly see their fury subside. Delilah Street, supernatural peacemaker.

“You want to get rid of me,” I reminded them softly, “you have to help me. How,” I asked Madrigal, “can I use this fey archeological construct to trap Cicereau’s vengeful daughter?”

He nodded, ready to deal. “What’s left of fey territory in our post-Millennium Revelation era,” Madrigal said, still keeping a wary eye on the subsiding Sansouci, “is like a cloth anchored here and there to our world, each touchpoint held down by a single stitch. I found Sylphia and Phasia in such an accidental juncture. Once they’ve been discovered by humans, they’re no longer welcome in fey realms.”

“Like birds that fall out of the nest and humans touch?”

“Exactly. Yet, without a linkage to this human world, they would fade and die.”

“You are the linkage,” I said.

He nodded. “I freed them but they bound me.”

“I may indulge libido,” Sansouci said, “but you embraced the bonds of lethal matrimony.”

Madrigal’s face darkened with bad blood, then his expression softened.

“Many risky supernatural bargains were made on either side of the Millennium Revelation, vampire,” he said. “Some better, or more bitter, than others.”

Sansouci nodded. I sensed a certain truce born of truth between these two men who were not quite simply men. They turned their gaze on me with an unspoken unity that made Irma moan unhappily in my mind.

Divide and conquer was no longer an option. In fact, I was actually glad that I’d helped point out their common cause.

“Madrigal,” I asked the magician, “can you reach your stage mirror from here?”

He turned, regarding the dazzling silver fractured images everywhere. Then he nodded.

“These all must lead to touchpoints. Sylphia and Phasia have marked my stage area. Here.”

He grabbed my shoulders and turned me to face one burnished silver tunnel. I gazed down it and finally saw a simple rectangular frame at the end. Madrigal ran a hand from my shoulder down my arm to my elbow.

“What you see you can find,” he said. “Come with me.”

I felt him step forward and matched the gesture. The mirror so far away was now rushing right at us. I blinked and turned away, expecting impact, shattering, cuts.

“Damn both you mirror-walking freaks to the Inferno underworld!” Sansouci thundered somewhere back down a tunnel of time and space. “How the hell do I escape this Disney action ride?”