Smoke and Shadows (58 page)

“Yes. I ducked a crowbar and your makeup artist nailed me with a can of hair spray.”

Frowning hurt, too, so Tony stopped doing it. “Sort of remember seeing one fly by.”

“It was an interesting battle. Interesting finish.” Henry hadn't been able to get to Tony until the light faded. He'd had to stand, surrounded by the fallen, fighting restraining hands, unable to do anything while Tony screamed. Yeramathia, whatever or whoever Yeramathia was, didn't give a damn what he considered his. “What else do you remember?”

“Golden light. The Shadowlord . . .” He waved a trembling hand. There weren't really words for having seen a man dissolve in light. “I remember pain.”

“That's because you were touching the pattern when Yeramathia answered.” Arra's voice cut through the memory. She stood, arms folded, by Raymond Dark's desk. Apparently, frowning caused
her
no trouble at all. “What were you thinking, boy? Were you trying to get yourself killed?”

Tony shifted in Henry's grip until he faced her. “I was thinking that your pattern was wrong.”

“My pattern?”

“Yeah. Your pattern. I've seen it more recently and it was wrong. So I fixed it.”

“You fixed it?”

“Yeah.” Her expression had begun to worry him. “No big. I just tugged one line over a bit.”

“You
just
tugged one line over a bit?” She was staring at him again, only this time her mouth was open. As Tony was about to point it out, she closed it with a snap. “Right. Well. Next time . . .”

“No.” He'd gotten his definite back. “There isn't going to be a next time. We barely survived this time. Go home, Arra, you know you want to. Go home when the timer goes off and start a new order or raise chickens, I don't fucking care.” Head throbbing, he let himself sag against Henry's shoulder for a moment. Plenty of time to be butch later. “Just go home and close the gate after you.”

“Come with me.”

“What?” So much for sagging.

“Be the start of my new order. The Shadowlord has been destroyed, but there remains much work to do on the other side. I could use the help of someone who does not run away from a fight. The help of someone who will not let others run away.”

“What?” He squirmed around and looked at Henry who didn't seem all that surprised. “What the hell is she talking about?”

“She's telling you that you can be a wizard, Tony. If you want to.”

“Me?”

“You,” Arra answered. “You see what others do not. You reach out where others fear to. You are able to touch power and mold it to your use.”

The lack of contractions was beginning to seriously freak him out.

“I saw this in you from the beginning. There is great potential in you. You could become . . .” She paused, snorted, and rolled her eyes. “Well, I'm not promising anything but you could become competent with training and practice.”

“Me?”

“We'll work on articulate as well.”

“She's serious?”

Henry nodded. “And abrasive. But I believe her.”

He could go through a magical gate to another world and become a wizard. He could learn to work the energy of that world, bend it and mold it to his own ends. He touched the memory of the Shadowlord; he could learn to command shadow.

His throat was dry.

Tony swallowed, dragged his tongue across his lips, and got slowly to his feet. Henry helped rather a lot with the latter.

“Arra.” A deep breath. “I'd rather have perpetual root canals.”

Arra sighed, reached into the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt, and handed Henry a twenty. “I still say it was worth a shot. He's an annoying little shit, but I hate to see that kind of potential wasted.”

“He's not wasting it,” Henry told her as he pocketed the money.

“Bull. He's a production assistant at a third-rate . . .” CB cleared his throat from the doorway and Arra adjusted for his presence. “. . . second-rate production house.”

“Yeah, now,” Tony protested.

“He can go far here as well,” CB added. “Eventually. Right now, it's 11:12. If you're right about the timer, the gate's about to open.”

There were people sprawled up against every solid surface on the set. Most of them were drinking a familiar smelling cocktail—Tony noticed that every prop capable of holding liquid as well as the coffee cups from the office kitchen had been put in service. People looked confused but docile, content to suck back the potion—the potion that he'd made—and stare around them with wide, bruised eyes. A few of the crew were sprawled but not drinking, their eyes closed and their arms lying limp by their sides.

Consequences.

“Are they . . . ?”

“No,” Henry told him. “Just unconscious. Probably a couple of concussions. Arra said she'd take care of them.”

“Is anyone . . .”

“Charlie Harris and Rahal Singh.”

One for the Shadowlord. “Did you . . . ?”

“Yes.”

And one for Henry. “Are you okay?”

The corner of Henry's mouth that Tony could see curved up into something not quite a smile. “I've killed before, Tony.”

“I know.” He tightened his grip on the vampire's arm, not because he was in danger of falling but because he needed Henry to understand that he
did
know. Even if, in true guy fashion, they weren't going to talk about it. Big difference between killing for food or for vengeance or even caught up in Darkness and killing without intending to or wanting to. “You up for comfort food later?”

That evoked an actual smile and an incredulous laugh. “If you are.”

“Date.” As Arra made her way around the edges of the set, stepping over arms and legs and cables, he noticed a complex pattern drawn in chalk in the center of the floor. “What's that?”

“Memories,” CB rumbled from behind him. “Ready to be erased. You and I,” he raised his voice to the point where Arra turned toward them, “are not a part of it.”

She rolled her eyes. “We've been over this.”

“Precedent suggests we have no reason to trust you.”

“Does precedent suggest what I have to say to that?”

Then the gate opened and Tony's knees buckled. Fortunately, Henry caught him before he reached the floor. He figured he'd used up his lifetime allotment of smacking into horizontal surfaces.

“You shouldn't be so close.”

He struggled back into what was more or less a vertical position. “I need to see this.”

As darkness roiled down from an empty place by the ceiling—the Shadowlord's reinforcements coming without being called—Arra lifted both arms over her head and rapidly sketched another pattern in the air. She looked like she always did, but she looked like a wizard, too. Acceptance, Tony realized suddenly. She looked like she'd accepted what she was and what that meant.

Pattern complete, she pushed it forward. There was a sizzle and flash when it hit the darkness. A hiss and a flash as it hit the gate. A distant scream as it disappeared and there was a flashback through the gate so bright Henry threw both arms in front of his eyes. Tony sagged back against CB's momentarily comforting bulk.

He felt the gate snap closed. Arra was still standing there. He must have tensed because CB murmured, “She'll go another time. There are things here that need taking care of.”

Right. Of course. “The cats.”

“Also the cats.” Chester Bane looked out over the soundstage and realized he had been a part of something remarkable. The defeat of an invading evil. The more significant defeat of personal demons. The discovery of a hero in an unlikely place. And the whole damned thing had put them seriously behind schedule. Still, he allowed reluctantly, it could have been worse. They could also be over budget. “Mr. Fitzroy, if you could assist me with . . .”

The bodies, Tony filled in silently.

Blinking away what must have been painful afterimages, Henry nodded at CB and turned again to Tony. “Will you be all right?”

Tony slid sideways until his weight was against the lid of Raymond Dark's coffin. “I'll be fine.”

Eventually.

As the two men moved away, another moved in.

Cradling his left arm against his body, Lee stared at Tony for a long moment.
Did people always do this much staring or am I just noticing it now?
He blinked, then asked himself,
“Why not?”
and stared back.

“That was . . .” The actor's brows nearly met over his nose. “There were . . .” He swallowed and, looking as though he was maybe thirty seconds from a total meltdown, jerked his head toward the place where the gate had been. “There was light. What the hell was that?”

“This is television.” Tony swept his arm around in a gesture expansive enough to take in both cameras still pointed toward the center of the set. “It was a special effect.”

“Bullshit. I'm not stupid, Tony. Or blind. What's going on.” He took a step closer, well within Tony's personal space. “Talk to me.”

“All right.” He raised a hand to cut off any immediate questions. “But not tonight.” He touched his throat. “Hurts. We'll talk tomorrow.”

Green eyes narrowed. Wrong color but otherwise a dead man's expression. “Promise me.”

“I promise.”

An easy promise to make since Arra was already erasing the chalk memories drawn on the floor.

“No, CB says Mason's fine.”

Arra snorted as they crossed the soundstage. “I can't say that I'm really surprised. If anyone had ego enough to cope with being shadow-held for so long, it would be Mason Reed.” She nodded toward the stepladder. “It's almost time. If there's anything you want to know . . .”

She wanted him to ask about meaning-of-life stuff. She'd been rediscovering her wizard roots over the last three days and wanted him in on it. Tony started to shrug but cut the motion off short as Whitby protested the movement. Both cats had been protesting the indignity of the cat carriers since they'd left the co-op.

“Anything at all,” she insisted.

Fine. Tony sorted through unanswered questions searching for one he wouldn't mind having an answer to. There were a lot more of the other kind. “If the Shadowlord had no power here, how did he hold CB?”

“I'm about to leave this world forever and that's it?”

“Yeah. Why? Don't you know?”

Arra snorted and turned toward him at the base of the ladder. “Probably a minor binding spell. The close confines of the coffin helped hold it and hitting the floor broke it. Don't forget to get the gas gauge on the car fixed.”

“I won't.”

“I've left my laptop down in the workshop.”

“It's still working?”

“Apparently it landed on Everett and bounced. But that's beside the point; it has some things on it you might be able to use.”

“I'm not a wizard.”

She snorted again. “Damned right you're not. Here.” She handed him the second cat carrier. “Hold Zazu until I'm up the ladder.” First step. Second step.

Not very interesting to look at actually. “It would look a lot more wizardy if you levitated or something.”

Third step. “And you'd block this area from the rest of the soundstage? Or maybe you'd rather tell a studio audience where I'm going.” Fourth step.

“You didn't have to go through this morning. You could have gone through tonight.”

Fifth step. Sixth. “I didn't feel like it. The police have finished with me, I'm out of here.”

The RCMP investigation into the “special effect accident” that had killed Charlie Harris and Rahal Singh had been strangely vague considering that they were the third and fourth bodies connected to CB Productions in less than a month. In the end, no charges had been laid and the newspaper coverage had given the show a ratings bump. With any luck, Constables Elson and Danvers would get tired of dropping by before CB got tired of finding them in the building. Unfortunately, Arra's wizardry had had less effect on the insurance industry. CB's enraged commentary on the rise in his rates had probably been heard at the company's head office in Montreal—whole sentences were still echoing around the soundstage.