A modesty veil of steam welled up like a geyser from the floor, obscuring me to my neck. The nuns would be as proud as if I'd publicly disavowed patent leather shoes.

"Did you do that?" Madrigal asked.

"Do it? No, I just thought-"

"Thought what?"

"That…that I was a little overexposed for conspiring under the guise of coed showering."

He stepped closer, behind me.

Oh, no. I apparently was now sensitized to rear approaches.

His arms reached out of my shoulder-high mist to place both his palms on the mirror.

"Touch it again," he said.

Well, um, "it" was one of those sneaky indefinite pronouns and my mind was no longer the lofty, pristine summit of rational thought it had been.

"The mirror," he added more softly, his voice thrumming at the top of my head. There was just enough purr in it to tell me that he grasped, and was male enough to enjoy, my confusion.

Damn! I would become the coolest chick this world had ever seen someday. Meanwhile…I did as he suggested.

And then I saw what he had seen, which wasn’t just me naked, but which was the mirror, softening, blurring under my hands. As if I could sink into it.

My palms were tingling way more than any other part of me, which was an improvement, in my estimation. I felt icy electrical static nips at the very heart of them, where headline and heartline and lifeline met and crossed. This was the hollow center of my hands, which I could never flatten to any surface. This was…the navel of my hands, as I had one at the center of my body.

I'd never felt anything in these zones before, but now they were almost alive. My hands pushed into the silver graven image of themselves and it was as if I were touching a second self lurking just beyond my sight.

Madrigal's hands commandeered my shoulders. "Lilah. Come back."

I didn't want to. I was enthralled by Mirrorland. I could sense others moving out there, even picture myself out there.

Madrigal pulled my shoulders back until I was pressed against his hot, wet body, so physical, so crude compared to the call of Mirrorland, of those insubstantial, shifting things in the mist.

He wrenched himself and me away from the mirror to face the mechanics of the shower, the steamed-over glass door, barely visible and a poor excuse for the magical looking-glass door I'd just opened in the mirror, and the glitzy, gleaming overdone gold shower head and controls.

He'd wrenched me away from all that by pressing me against all of him. Was that my choice? The power of magic and the mind? Or the power of desire and the body?

If so, I never wanted to make that choice.

"Relax, I won't crowd you, here or onstage."

Madrigal's grip loosened. I sensed his mind backing off slightly, the usual singsong sensuality in the words, yet our closeness had turned comrade-like. Even as I breathed a sigh of relief, I wondered what he really wanted. I wondered what I really wanted of him and if I could betray him if I had to.

"I have friends who'll be looking for me," I warned.

"So did I."

Not good.

"We'll have to work up a routine for them," he said.

"I want out. Can't you tell? I'm claustrophobic and I have major issues about being bound in that damn horizontal corpse position from CSI."

"That industrial-strength familiar of yours might be a key."

I tried to feel the silver upon my body: the thin, hip-slung chain I wore under everything, a talisman of Ric and his…I guess it was love. I wanted to believe it was love. And where was Snow's hair shirt, as he had called it? I couldn't feel it, hadn't thought of it, felt it, since being abducted.

"My familiar?" I asked, playing for time to think. He surprised me.

"The were-hunter. Don't think they don't know what he really is. They must know they can't have you without suffering its presence. They must want you very badly."

Oh. Quicksilver. Were-hunter. Sounds serious. Good dog!

"Not as badly as I want them," I answered.

"You think you're a hunter too?

"I am. A hunter of the truth."

He laughed, hard. Okay, that was a pretentious line but we crusading journalists get a little over-intense at times. I told him what I had used to be, not that long ago.

"Investigative reporter? I wish you could do an expose on this operation."

"Sylphia. You two can't leave?" I asked.

"It's not that simple. We could maybe. Each in our own way, but we'd have to forsake the other. She's not the only one to consider."

I nodded, although he couldn't see the gesture. "You're lucky to have such solidarity."

"And cursed."

"I'm neither lucky nor cursed. Help me get out of here when I need to go, and I'll do my best to come back for you and Sylphia."

"All you have going for you is that were-hunter."

And I didn't know what the hell a were-hunter was, except the obvious. I had a deep-down feeling that Quicksilver was way more than anyone might take him for, even the werewolf mob. Even me.

"What are we working on tomorrow?" I asked.

"The mirrors."

"Mirrors?"

"Everything magic is mirrors."

"That's where you could really teach me something. I may be too tall, too heavy, too busty, too clumsy, but I think you're right. I might have a way with mirrors."

I felt his large hard hands on my ribcage, his thumbs softly brushing the roots of my breasts until I shivered.

"I was speaking of the attributes of a stage magician's assistant. I wasn’t speaking of my own personal preferences."

Okay. His unbreakable bond to Sylphia wasn’t sexual or romantic. That realization made me uneasy but I liked him even the better for it. And what had he meant by a "stage magician" as opposed to…some other kind? Like the real thing?

"We have to let them believe we have mated." He Frenched me in the shower, tasting fluoridation and my fear long enough so that I knew he liked it. Liked what? The water, the fear, the sweet sensuality, the danger of our hidden alliance? Who knew?

"Use my robe when you leave. Cicereau and his were-goons don't deserve a thrill."

He left me there, wet and steamy. I grabbed the fallen terrycloth robe as soon as I stuck a toe out of that shower. Then I checked for the silver familiar.

It was again a charm bracelet-did that mean that it would work like a literal charm? This time it was a jangling collection of sterling silver keys, with one lock among them all: a wolf's head, its open fangs the aperture that all or any of those keys would slam home to.

Snow had spoken. Or I liked to think he had. The keys to everything I sought were here. Okay. That gave me an agenda. An investigative reporter always liked that.

Syl descended from the dark of the theater flies on a thread of unseen spider-silk.

I watched her, overwhelmed.

Madrigal's huge hands were on my waist, but his eyes were on Syl.

"Exquisite," he said.

"What is she?"

"I don't know. Fey. Fairy. Far too good for the Gehenna."

"How did you two-?"

"Familiar." His hands slid away from my waist. "Damn!"

I felt his anguish as if it was my own, but it was a formally expressed anguish.

"Our alliance was our doom, yes?" he said. "She was far better than I had earned at that point. I supposedly 'saved' her from indenture to the Dread Queen, but I was indentured myself, although I didn't know it then." He shrugged away his frustration. "My 'act' depended upon her."

"Dread Queen? Are we in Alice in Wonderland, or what?"

"Wonderland." He gave a weary little snort. "Don't worry your little head about it. They're my look-out, and you do need to look out. They're not really mortal, but you sense that."

I watched. Watched Syl swaying slowly from the upper dark to the spotlit ground. I was sure that she did it for him.