Murder by Magic by Rosemary Edghill Read Free Book Online

stage air, lifted his head, and almost sniffed the sound of the applause. It was thunderous. Better than ever. He’d survived whatever nightmare the mirrored box had put him through.
    Then it became too much. The continuing racket crashed on his sensitive ears. He shrank again, cowered, even as Majika lifted her arm the better to display him to the admiring audience.
    His heart pounded against the palm of her hand.
    His long white hair was full and thick again, luxurious, and she stroked it with her other hand.
    Majika’s giant face stared down with piercing eyes. His sensitive ears flattened at the horrid screeching of her voice in the microphone as she displayed her triumph of illusion: him.
    Her face came close, smiling.
    “You’ve been such a good boy tonight, Marlon,” she whispered giddily as if to a confrere, “you’ll have extra veggies in your after-show supper, and maybe even a big carrot from Mr. MacGregor’s garden.”
    While his ears and tail drooped with self-recognition, he spied his former form, now bent and shuffling, hastening out of the theater before the crowd began its rush for the exits.

Doppelgangster
    Laura Resnick
    Laura Resnick is the Campbell Award–winning author of several fantasy novels, and more than forty SF/F short stories. She is also the award-winning author of a dozen romance novels published under the pseudonym Laura Leone. In her copious spare time, she wrote
A Blonde in Africa,
a nonfiction account of her journey across the continent. You can find her on the Web at
http://www.sff.net/people/laresnick.
    I t wasn’t no surprise that Skinny Vinny Vitelli got rubbed out. I mean, hey, I’d nearly whacked him myself a couple of times. So had most guys I know. Not to speak ill of the dead and all that, but he was an
irritating
bastard. Vinny could pick an argument with a plate of pasta. He could piss off the Virgin Mother. He could annoy the dead—so it wasn’t exactly a big shock when he
became
one of them.
    A couple of nuns taking a cigarette break found his body in an alley early one morning. He’d been done with four slugs straight to the chest. Which was a little strange, actually, because Vinny always wore the bulletproof vest he got the time he whacked that fed.
    It’s not what you’re thinking. It was personal, not business. Vinny caught the guy in bed with his underage daughter. The vest was lying right there on the floor, and after Vinny impulsively emptied a whole clip into the guy’s torso, he decided the vest was A Sign. (Did I mention he was a pretty religious guy?) See, Vinny had always been afraid of dying exactly the way he’d just killed the fed who’d been stupid enough to take off his bulletproof vest before humping a wiseguy’s seventeen-year-old daughter right there in her father’s house. (Feds. They breed ’em dumb.)
    So Vinny picked the vest up off the floor, put it on, and never took it off since. I mean
never.
Just ask his wife. Well, if you can find her. She hot-tailed it straight down to Florida before the corpse was cold and ain’t been seen since. She was making plans for her new life right there at Vinny’s funeral, yakking on her cell phone with her real estate agent while the casket was being lowered into the ground.
    “It’s a funny thing,” I said to Joey “the Chin” Mannino while the grieving Mrs. Vitelli kicked some dirt into her late husband’s open grave with the toe of her shoe while telling her real estate agent she expected to be in Florida by nightfall.
    “Huh?” Joey didn’t really hear me. He was stroking his scarred chin as he stared lovesick at the Widow Butera. She was glaring back at him. A very beautiful woman, even at forty-five, but bad news for any guy.
    “Give it up, Joey,” I advised.
    “I can’t.” He shook his head. “I’ve asked her to marry me.”
    I slapped my forehead. “Are you nuts?” One of the mourners frowned at me, so I lowered my voice. “She’s had three husbands, and they’re all