“I just now got home,” I said.

“I bet you had a lot to catch up on after…” He paused, probably aware of others close enough to overhear. “After our latest assignment,” he finished in lower tones. “Listen, I know it’s late but I need you at the coroner’s. Grisly Bahr called me over for a private talk about some missing corpses. Now he’s got a supernatural pile of mystery meat coming in fresh from the Gehenna. And where’ve you just been?”

“Uh, the Gehenna.”

“I figured the dead meat is no mystery to you.”

I decided not to mention I was actually the chef on that one. Not yet, at least, until I knew what officialdom was doing.

“No.”

“Better keep that between me and thee,” Ric said. “Kennedy Malloy is en route to Grisly’s place too.”

“Sure I should show up at all?”

“Why not?”

“Captain Malloy liked you first.”

He laughed. “She’s a professional associate, that’s all.”

“To her, so am I.”

I may be new to the dating game but I knew enough to realize that even smart guys like Ric could underestimate the depth of a woman colleague’s interest. Few decent guys were out there. Lots of competition for them.

“I’ve been getting some flashbacks,” Ric said in a lowered tone, after a pause, “and some flash-forwards maybe too. You really okay, chica? I had a bad feeling an hour or so ago.”

Yeah, well… I’d been getting multiple bad feelings about then too.

“We’ll have a one-on-one later,” he added. “After our date at the coroner’s.”

Actually, I couldn’t wait to see what Grisly made of what was left of Loretta’s risen Prince Charming turned avenger. It was even possible the fall hadn’t, ah, killed him.

BEFORE SEEING RIC, I needed a quick shower and change. Dried blood was not the latest shade in streetwear, even in Vegas.

I turned to the steps leading to my charming arched front door and only then noticed Quicksilver’s gray fur blending into the aged wood. He sat there on prick-eared alert, his neck ruff fluffed and his blue eyes half closed in that mute, rebuking look smart dogs get.

His black nostrils flared to inhale the invisible traces of blood and gore from my clothes and skin.

How dare you have fun without me? his guard dog look and posture screamed, in the best canine form, of course.

“I suppose you want to shower with me too?” I asked.

He stood and shook out his thick, silvery coat, then grinned.

“No, you don’t. Stay down here and guard Dolly. I need to make tire tracks to the coroner’s office as soon as I’m decent and dry.”

The grin allowed a long pink tongue dangling room, reminding me that we were now twins in the healing department.

“And don’t drool any stray saliva on Dolly’s leather upholstery!”

Inside, I first had to stash my cash from Cicereau in the… uh, okay… the open floor safe I spotted in the parlor.

“Thanks,” I muttered to my resident guardians.

Then I rushed up the steep stairs, shedding clothes as I went. I hopped in the hall to kick off my gray sling-backs and wriggle out of the bell-bottoms.

I’d resolved to avoid looking in mirrors for at least a day but still glimpsed my frenzied hopping in the tall mirror at the hall’s end.

No bound and gagged Loretta, thank the mirror goddess, but another figure hopping there in eerie time with mine. A naked Lilith, putting on what I tore off.

Just too bizarre! I fled into the bedroom and the bathroom beyond it, toward the sound of pelting shower water, thank the secret pixie or who- or whatever had turned it on!

In moments, pink water swirled around my bare feet in the shiny hole-pierced drain, reminding me of Snow’s pink ruby collar gemstones and matching eyes behind the dark sunglasses.

Argh! I didn’t want to remember any part of Snow, particularly his presumably bleeding back. Still, if anyone deserved to suffer on Ric’s behalf, it was Snow, who’d charged me a personal price for saving Ric’s life.

Wait. He hadn’t saved a thing. I’d done that. He’d taken his blood money-i.e., my kiss-for the mere attempt at a rescue mission.

Which had worked. As his supposedly enslaving Brimstone Kiss had not.

So why was I furious?

Stress, Delilah. Irma’s voice soothed me like a slippery bar of soap stroking my shoulders. You’re just stressed.

And seeing Lilith in my hall mirror donning my discarded clothes doesn’t help, I railed at Irma. Who does she think she is? Besides me?

She doesn’t have me, Irma soothed.

But she has my clothes and she’s done it before! That’s what got me accused of being the Snow groupie killer on that hotel security tape. It was Lilith, not me, on the scene, and I’d be judged crazy if I tried to say that.

I wrapped myself in one of the huge coat-tree-hung towels that dried me from ankle to armpit in three steps, then stood thinking on the plush bathroom carpet as the wet soles of my feet sank in. Something else sank in.

In that inadvertent Inferno crime-scene security-camera shot Snow had held back from the police, Lilith had been wearing the same striking vintage evening ensemble I’d rented only a few hours earlier at Déjà-Vous, the costume shop Snow owned.

That I’d tried on in the Déjà-Vous dressing room mirror.

Lilith could “’nap” the clothes from my own image in a mirror! I stomped out into the hall. She/I were a set of overlapping images, one towel-draped, one wearing the blood-worn clothes I’d just dropped to this very floor.

They should have been lying there, puckered and empty. Corpselike. The floor was dry and clean.

Back to the bathroom.

Mrs. Peel’s freshly cleaned and pressed “Carnaby Street” sixties suit and ruffled shirt hung from the clothes rack. Lilith wasn’t stealing my look, she was duplicating it.

I shook out my mane of wet hair and felt a jet stream of warm air riffle it like a blow torch. Did a demon hairdresser come with the place, just now announcing its presence in an emergency? Maybe the Enchanted Cottage was only three-fourths Disney and one-quarter imp. Or vice versa. And the mirror could be as much my enemy as my friend, as Loretta had so recently proven.

I nodded my head slowly, speaking not exactly to Irma or to my invisible dresser or to Mrs. Peel’s empty suit.

“Makes sense. If I’m wearing this outfit and I saw Lilith jumping into it, my mirror image can duplicate any wardrobe item of mine reflected in a mirror to masquerade as me.”

Not to worry, Irma purred in my inner ear, she copped the unwashed, used clothes. You aren’t exactly the same at all. What a stupid skank!

By then I was redonning the outfit, not pausing to consider its blood-drenched recent past. The Enchanted Cottage was just doing its job: putting the best, freshest face on everything that had been tainted.

There was only one thing it couldn’t counter: the mischief unwanted guests like Loretta and Lilith could get up to in the front-surface glass of my hall mirror.

Quicksilver was already perched on Dolly’s passenger seat before I could get the keys out of my messenger bag and open the driver’s-side door.

“What have I told you about jumping over the door when the window’s down?” I demanded. “Okay, be snarky.”

I fished his sunglasses out of the humungous glove compartment. Dogs love convertible rides but the desert wind is too drying for their naked eyes. And the glare of the Strip at night made sunglasses a good idea. Besides, Quick liked turning heads.

I donned round Audrey Hepburn sixties shades myself.

Dolly’s engine purred like a kitten en route to the coroner’s. Surely my sixties duds revved her fifties Detroit heart. To my mind, clothing stopped being cool in the seventies and drowned in the gaudy, trickle-down Reagan eighties.

When I got to the low morgue building off Charleston I noticed that Nightwine’s nearby soundstage was still grinding away. My heart lurched and clutched to see Ric’s bronze Stingray next door parked beside a white Crown Victoria that had to be Captain Kennedy Malloy’s ride.