I blinked again. Madrigal and I were standing on the darkened Gehenna stage. Only the perpetually glowing bare backstage lightbulb-known for decades as the “ghost light”-was lit.

It illuminated mere slivers of the dark-floored stage, the hanging black velvet curtain folds, the plain silver frame holding a mirror that shone softly blue, like a hologram. The mirror reflected nothing, neither the magician nor myself. It was half in feyland and half here. It was waiting.

Madrigal looked up, so I did too.

Oooh, Irma murmured. Those creepy feylings abandoned Cicereau and are hanging like Spanish moss from the ropes in the backstage flies.

“Call her,” Madrigal urged.

I didn’t have to ask who. “Loretta.”

Her slight figure appeared, perhaps three inches high. It sped toward the mirror frame and me, growing to lifesize.

“You’re here at last, Delilah,” she said. “You’re ready to free me, let me loose in my home environment in my revived form. Oh! Daddy Dearest will be so frightened! Me back. And free. Krzys back! Free and in solid form. This is my inheritance, finally mine. Delilah, kiss me. Let me through! Let me into you.”

Ooh, Dee girl, the big L smooch is no big deal, Irma muttered, but I do sooo not want to be possessed. Do something, Delilah!

I was getting terminally weary of supernaturals in Vegas who wanted my body. I glanced at Madrigal. He was ignoring the wonder of Loretta’s appearance and looking up. I saw why. Sylphia was dropping her webs upon the mirror frame while Phasia twined her serpentine body down them to add a sinuous decoration to the plain frame.

The fey webs were propagating, twining the frame and pushing inside, sending tendrils like curls down Loretta’s soft cheeks and neck, circling her arms and wrists, glittering, glowing, enhancing, confining.

At first she lifted an arm, enchanted by the iridescent threads falling from above like soft, warm, living sleet. Then they crisscrossed to construct a diamond-patterned veil for her features. She tried to speak but they spun a sugary gag over her mouth. She blinked but they painted sticky iridescent mascara on her eyelashes. She couldn’t close her eyes. Her entire slender body was twined, twined, twined in tender, tensile steel, fey gift wrap and ribbons, until she was a glittering mummified statue, a mannequin from some Macy’s Christmas fantasia display window.

The feys’ thoroughness and speed took my breath away, as it had hers. Wait. Ghosts didn’t have breath, but they could talk. Same way vampires didn’t have circulatory systems but males could get it up for sex.

One of those sweet and sour mysteries of life… and life after death.

MY CELL PHONE vibrated, and I jumped. A cell phone seemed too modern for a place where I’d watched a ghost bound in a mirror.

Ric! I pulled the thin shell out of my riding jacket pocket and clapped it to my ear.

Instead, Sansouci’s voice shouted into my ear.

“I hope you’ve got that girly ghost banished because-” He grunted as I heard Uzi bullets spray in the background. “Get Madrigal up here too. I was jerked back to the elevator the instant you two deserted me in the aluminum tent. By then that killing machine had made it all the way to Cicereau’s-”

A pause, and then I heard the words “freaking bedroom” fading into the distance. I shut and stashed the phone. No time to take a break to call Ric.

Sylphia and Phasia remained coiled around the mirror frame like Art Nouveau nymphs. Madrigal looked puzzled.

“Cicereau and Sansouci need us all upstairs,” I told him. “Fastest.”

He nodded at the creepy pair, then ran into the wings where all the stage equipment was kept.

The fey sisters shot up on Sylphia’s Spider-Girl web into the dark flies, diminishing contrails of iridescence. I cast a final look at Loretta webbed in eerie glitter-bound glamour, a captive ghost. Her mouth had opened to speak and frozen in that impotent, mute position.

Then I followed Madrigal into the unlit backstage area… just in time to be lassoed around the waist by a sticky rope of Sylphia’s spider silk and jerked upward into endless dark until, beside me, Phasia hissed happily.

Now I was as much in their power as Loretta. They were jealous goddesses when it came to Madrigal’s attention and association, and could easily drop me to the floor, which was rapidly vanishing stories below. The theatrical flies seemed to stretch up and up like an enormous elevator shaft. I was rising only by these fey cables, with no solid car to support and protect me.

Before I could fixate on my fears, I was swung into bright light and onto solid carpeted floor where Madrigal waited. There was no elevator car in the shaft, just concrete wall and steel supports. Then I watched a stalled car shuttle past and heard closing doors above. The strongman magician had simply suspended an elevator car at the top of the shaft and climbed the thick cables.

That didn’t explain how the theatrical flies had morphed into one of the elevator shafts, though. I remembered what Helena Troy Burnside had said: many people found their native skills supernaturally sharpened after the Millennium Revelation.

So a stage magician who’d found a pair of fey nestlings could become an enhanced actual magician, thanks to these reverse changelings, his assistants.

Madrigal’s big hand kept me upright while his agile assistants slithered up the hall walls to the ceiling and skittered down the passage to Cicereau’s penthouse door.

I didn’t have an inclination to question anybody’s transportation methods. The trail of bloody footprints on the lush forest-green hall carpeting made talk unnecessary and time precious.

Hard to believe, but I joined Madrigal in pounding down the blood trail to Cicereau’s door to save the werewolf mobster’s skin. Wolfish howls were cutting off in mid-shriek.

Madrigal’s brute force bounded through the shattered wooden door. A charnel house stench of blood and feces kept the two dainty feylings hanging from the door frame in the hall. Human offal overpowered even their predatory snake and spider sides.

Madrigal and I barged inside. In a split second the scene resolved into a mind-boggling series of gruesome vignettes.

Cicereau and the Uzi were both bloodied, the mobster kneeling on his gaudy bed as if huddled in a foxhole. His six wolfish guards lay gutted on the carpeting, a couple changed into full wolf form, clawed feet twitching.

I swallowed hard, thankful I’d left Quick safe at home. He was always too willing to leap into an unfair fight.

Sansouci, against the wall, had taken his fearsome vampire form. Mouth and eyes foaming with blood, he was straining to contain a huge forceful figure part Beowulf, part… mummy, and all monster.

“Krzys!” I cried experimentally. The hulking shoulders and neck shifted in my direction.

Yes, Loretta’s Prince Charming had come back to un-life from his Sunset Park bones. The Karnak vampires’ mystical methods must have managed to clothe bones with muscle and flesh.

His turning at my call not only gave Sansouci a chance to break a chair back for a raw stake, it revealed a face that was a burning-car-accident patchwork of Beauty and Beast. Those pale, Polish-blue eyes he shared with Loretta and Quicksilver shone like aquamarines in a leathery skin cobbled together from beaten gold and stiffened gauze. A few gilt strands of hair glistened on his mottled bone skull. His hips, swathed in a transparent linen Egyptian kilt, showed splitting patches of skin over a raw substructure of naked muscles and tendons.

Apparently the new Egyptian art of raising old vampires was still in the R &D stage. Imagine a Frankenstein monster mummy. No, don’t!

Sansouci was French toast. Cicereau was a werewolf shish kebab and Madrigal and I were about to become either escaping cowards or dead fools.