Hex Appeal (P.N. Elrod) (Kitty Norville 4.60)

It came from the open, gently tapping window.

I charged the sound. When I got there, something lifted my hips so only my toes touched the floor. A forceful push could catapult me past whoever or whatever was there, through the open window to the flagstones below.

My unseen dancing partner released the dangerous grip with a patronizing pat on the fanny pack that had me cursing. I’d already curled my fingers around the closing window frame and swung inward with it to the wall. Once my feet were flat on the floor again, I slammed the window shut and held it closed with my back, sealing in my tormenter.

“… and she began to cry,” the disembodied voice taunted.

By now I was panting hard but hardly tearful. The silver familiar had finally got the message that I could defend my own rear better than eight pounds of solid sterling (would that my glutes were that pumped). It looped around my bicep as a funky designer cuff … a lariat-in-waiting.

I surveyed the room. Everything was dead still, even my airy bedpost curtains. The shut window was no longer a point of entry or exit.

My glance fell on the stainless-steel water bowl against the opposite wall, kept in my bedroom for Quicksilver’s midnight security rounds when he was home. It was ten inches across because I’m talking a 150-pound dog, part wolf, part wolfhound. I sometimes thought his nights out might be spent chasing his own tail.

Great! Just when I could use him guarding my besieged tail here at home.

I caught a glimmer of something in the mirror over my dresser. Mirrors have been doors for me ever since I came to Las Vegas, so I see more in them than most people. Is it me or Sin City? Or a combustible combination of both? Watch this space.

Right then, I realized my filmy bedpost curtain was gathered into a fan of folds about … five feet six inches above the floor. Something clutched the fabric.

I jumped onto my bed again—most solo fun I’ve ever had on it—bounced and caromed off the opposite wall, bent to grab the dog’s water dish … and flung the contents at the empty space between me and the bedpost.

For an instant, a wet figure took weird negative shape, like a strip of old-time camera film soaked in developing fluid.

“Strip” is the word. I ripped the coverlet from my bed and leapt on the being playing peekaboo behind the bedpost. My pounce encountered, and drove back, a solid form. I pushed forward until I pinned it to the wall.

“Ow! My eye,” the voice howled. “Jack put in a thumb and pulled out a plum—”

“Enough with the nursery rhymes! If I wanted a naked man in my room,” I told my unseen prisoner, “it wouldn’t be the Invisible Man. Now, get decent, then explain yourself.”

Releasing mushy biceps—mad scientists aren’t much for working out—I folded my arms under the message on my sleep T-shirt—KICK SASS.

“Nice pecs,” Dr. Jack Griffin, aka the Invisible Man, commented on my posture with another giggle.

Where’s Fabio when you finally think you need him?

I stepped back a stride to watch a reverse strip show.

My abused crocheted coverlet, probably made by pixies, or possibly even Madame Defarge, began to elevate like a cobra from a basket. It twisted around and around as it went higher, making my visitor seem to be donning a Roman toga.

“Here.” I tossed a rhinestone-banded fedora from my dresser top to his approximate middle. “Put this on. I like looking people in the face, even when they’re invisible.”

“Snazzy hat,” he cooed, giggling as my hat levitated over the room scenery between the togaed shoulder and his forehead.

My uninvited guest was no threat to anything but my patience. He was a rogue Cinema Simulacrum, or CinSim. Old black-and-white movie characters filmed on silver nitrate could be overlaid on illegally smuggled zombies from Mexico. The mysterious Immortality Mob leased them to Vegas attractions, where they were chipped to remain in suitable settings. My personal affinity for silver made me their champion. They, in turn, were my best confidential informants in town.

“Say, Miss Street,” the Invisible Man cajoled. “I just had to have a little fun with you. Can’t you take a joke?”

“Why now? And how’d you escape the Inferno Hotel on the Strip to get all the way over to Hector Nightwine’s Sunset Road estate and my digs on it?”

“I’m an invisible man of mystery.”

“You’ll be unseen chopped liver if you don’t start talking.”

He adjusted the hat to the jaunty angle I used when I wore it. Ruin it for me, why don’t you?

“I’m the only unchained CinSim in Vegas, darlin’ girl. I can go where I want because nobody can see me.”

“Why would a major Vegas mogul like Snow let one of his valuable leases go wandering so far?”