Smoke and Shadows (11 page)

Lee's dressing room door was open when Tony reached it. He paused, wiped sweaty hands against his thighs, and leaned forward just enough to see inside. Still in costume, Lee stood in the center of the room, slowly turning in place. It looked almost as though he was seeing the room for the first time.

“Uh, Lee?”

He continued turning until he faced the door, then stopped and frowned.

Tony had no idea why he was suddenly thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger in
The Terminator.
“Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

And
The Terminator
thing fell into place. Lee was staring just slightly beyond him, like he was accessing an internal filing system. “Can I, uh, get you anything?”

Focus snapped onto his face and a long finger beckoned Tony forward. “Come in and close the door.”

“The door?”

He'd never seen Lee smile like that before. It was almost . . . mocking. “Yes. The door. Come into the room and close it behind you.”

Unable to think of a reason why he shouldn't, and not sure he wanted to, Tony did as he was told.

“Turn off your radio.”

“But . . .”

“Do it. I don't want to be interrupted.”

While you're doing what?
Tony wondered as his left hand dropped to the holster on his belt. But Peter had sent him. He was supposed to be here.

“I want you to tell me things.” The actor's voice stroked over him like wet velvet. “In return, I will give you what you desire.” The requisite vampire-show leather coat slipped off broad shoulders and hit the floor. The burgundy shirt followed a heartbeat later.

Half a dozen heartbeats actually, given how quickly Tony's heart had started beating. The total weirdness of the situation helped him keep a partial lid on his physical reaction although he was definitely reacting. A dead man would react to a half naked Lee Nicholas and—given a specific dead man—Tony knew
that
for a fact.

As Lee reached for him, he astounded himself by stepping back.

This was rapidly becoming everything he'd ever dreamed of and a bad soap opera scenario pretty much simultaneously.

No
! Another step and his shoulder blades were against the door. This was wrong! It was . . .

It was . . .

He slammed his head back against the door, almost had it, and swore as the memory slipped away.

CB stared down at the sheet of drawing paper on his desk. The lines pressed into the surface had gone gray again, just for an instant. He frowned. He didn't like mysteries and he had already wasted far too much time on this one.

Still frowning, he opened his desk drawer and pulled out a pencil.

Palm flat against the cool skin of Lee's chest, Tony struggled to ignore the little voice in his head trying to convince him to shut the fuck up and enjoy the ride. “Lee, this is, uh . . .”

“What you want. I give you what you want; you give me what I want. There are other ways I could gain the information, but since you're here . . .” His voice trailed off as his hand connected with Tony's crotch.

“No, you don't WANT to be doing THIS . . . Fuck! Stop doING that!”

“No.”

“Look, I don't want to hurt you.” The words emerged kind of jumbled together, but he managed to sound like he meant the threat.

Again, a smile that didn't look like it belonged on Lee's face. “Try.”

Damn.
Four years on the streets, four years with Henry; he could take care of himself if he had to. A little more difficult when he really didn't want to hurt the guy feeling him up, but still . . . Tony tensed, and froze. There was something wrong with Lee's shadow. There was something wrong with shadows in general.

CB worked carefully, methodically, quickly; stroking a line of graphite along the imprinted pattern.

Tony jerked back against the door, partially because of the sudden rush of memory. Partially because of what Lee was doing. Wondering how a guy got selected for sainthood, he twisted away and gasped, “You're a minion of the Shadowlord!”

Which sounded so incredibly stupid, he regretted the words the moment they left his mouth.

Lee stared at him for a long moment, blinked once, and started to laugh. “I'm a what?”

Oh, crap. Now he was going to have to repeat it because there really wasn't any variation on this particular theme. “You're a minion of the Shadowlord.”

“That's what I thought you said.” Scooping his shirt up off the floor, Lee shrugged into it, still chuckling. “You know, you're a very weird guy.”

Tony merely pointed.

Lee's shadow appeared to be investigating a pile of shadow magazines.

It was a cheesy effect on screen and unexpectedly terrifying in real life.

The actor sighed, reached out, and slapped Tony lightly on one cheek. “Who's going to believe you? You're nobody. I'm a star.”

Tony cleared his throat. “You're a costar.”

The second slap was considerably harder and almost seemed to have more of Lee in it than shadow. “Fuck you.”

“You're not leaving this room.”

“Is this supposed to be where I strike a dramatic pose and tell you that you can't stop me?” Lee leaned closer, his position a parody of his earlier seduction. “Guess what? You can't.”

And he couldn't.

The shadow dropped the magazine and swept across the room, holding him against the wall. Tony couldn't move, he couldn't speak, and most importantly, he couldn't breathe. It was like being trapped under a pliable sheet of cold charcoal-gray rubber that covered him from head to foot like a second skin, curving to fit up each nostril and into his mouth. Obscenely intimate.

As the door closed behind the thing controlling Lee's body, the shadow flexed, flopped away from him, and slipped through the final millimeter of open space.

Bent over, sucking his lungs full of stale, makeup redolent, slightly moldy, but glorious air, Tony spent a moment or two concentrating on breathing before straightening and staggering toward the door.

He had to stop Lee before he left the building.

He should never have let him leave the dressing room.

He should never have gone
into
the dressing room.

And hard on the heels of that thought, came a second.

And a third.

Completely redrawn, the pattern appeared to be a random squiggle. A pointless collection of curves. Nothing had happened when the final line had been retraced. The pencil set aside, a hand laid flat on each side of the paper, CB stared down at the nondesign and wondered exactly what he thought
would
happen.

How could he recognize the answers when he didn't know the questions?

“CB?” Rachel's voice over the intercom broke into his fruitless speculation. “Mark Asquith from the network is here.”

He swept the paper into the trash. “Send him in.”

Tony pounded out into the middle of the production office and realized his quarry was nowhere in sight. Had he guessed wrong? Had the thing gone through the soundstage instead? He took the half-dozen extra steps to Amy's desk. “Have you seen Lee?”

“Yeah. He's gone.”

“What do you mean gone?”

“I mean, gone. As in not here.” She snorted derisively. “As in was an ass to Zev and strutted out. As in Elvis has left the building. As in . . .”