by Butcher, Jim
“Right, exactly.”
“So what name do you go by?” I asked.
“Jack Rockhardt,” Jake replied promptly. He eyed me for a moment, his expression assessing.
“What?” I asked.
“You mean you don’t recognize the name? Or me?”
I shrugged. “I don’t have a TV. Don’t go to those theaters, either.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Really? Are you Amish or something?”
“Yeah, that’s it. I’m Amish.”
He grinned. “Maybe you’d better come inside with me. I’ll introduce you around.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” Jake said.
We went on into the building, a place with sterile beige walls and invincible medium-brown carpeting. Jake led me to a door with a computer-printed sign that read, GREEN ROOM, and went inside.
A long conference table ran down the center of a comfortably sized room. Doughnuts, drinks, fruits, bagels, and other foods of every description were laid out on trays down its length. The room smelled like fresh coffee, and I promptly homed in on the coffee machine for a cup.
A plain-faced woman in her mid-forties entered, wearing jeans, a black tee, and a red-and-white flannel shirt. Her hair was tied back under a red bandanna. She seized a paper plate and dumped food on it at random. “Good morning, Guffie.”
“Joan,” Jake responded easily. “Have you met Harry?”
“Not yet.” She glanced over her shoulder at me and nodded. “Wow. You are very tall.”
“I’m actually a midget. The haircut makes me look taller.”
Joan laughed and popped a doughnut hole in her mouth. “You’re the production assistant, eh?”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “So let’s produce.”
“I thought that was Arturo’s bag.”
“He’s the director and executive producer. I’m the actual producer. Makeup, cameras, lighting, sets, you name it. I handle the crew and the details.” She turned to me and offered her hand, shaking off sugary doughnut goodness as she did. “Joan Dallas.”
“Pleasure,” I said. “Harry Dresden.”
Joan nodded. “Come on then. There’s still a lot to do before we can shoot. Guffie, get to the dressing room and clean yourself up.”
Jake nodded. “Are they here yet?”
Her tone of voice became annoyed. “Giselle and Emma are.”
There was a moment of silent, pregnant tension. Jake winced and headed for the door. “Harry, nice to meet you. Joan’s okay, but she’ll work you to death.”
Joan threw an apple at him. Jake caught it when it bounced off his chest, crunched into it with his teeth, and held it in his mouth so that he could wave as he left the room.
“Grab yourself some food, Stilts,” Joan said. “You can help me put cameras together.”
“I was hoping to talk to Arturo before we got going,” I said.
She turned around with two plates loaded with breakfast pastries. She hadn’t bothered getting any fruit. “You’re a funny guy. He’s probably not out of bed yet. Bring that box of cookies. If my blood sugar drops too low I might take your head off.”
She led me down a short hallway to a cavernous room—a shooting studio. A slightly raised stage held an unlit set, which looked like a lavishly appointed bedroom. Arrayed in a line in front of it were several black plastic crates and a freestanding shop light. Joan flicked it on and started opening crates, popping a bit of food into her mouth every third or fourth movement.
“Nice place,” I said.
“Been a bitch,” Joan said between bites. “Last company here was supposed to be some kind of computer production deal, but they had to be lying. They redid all the wiring in here, routed in way heavier than they were supposed to have. Took me a week to get things working, and then I had to turn their old gym into something like a dressing room, but this place still isn’t up to code.”
“Ye canna change the laws of physics,” I said.
She laughed. “Amen.”
“Engineer then?” I asked.
“By way of necessity,” she answered. “I’ve done sets, lighting, power. Even some plumbing. And,” she said, opening boxes, “cameras. Gather ’round, gofer boy; you can help.”
I settled down while she laid out parts from heavy plastic crates. She assembled them, several professional cameras and tripods, with the surety of long practice. She gave me instructions as she did, and I did my best to help her out.
There was a pleasant, quiet rhythm to the work, something that I hadn’t really felt since the last time I’d been on a farm in Hog Hollow, Missouri. And it was interesting—technology was unfamiliar territory for me.
See, those who wield the primordial forces of creation have a long-running grudge with physics. Electronic equipment in particular tends to behave unpredictably—right up until it shuts down and stops working altogether. Old technologies seemed more stable, which was one reason I drove around town in a Volkswagen Beetle that had been built before the end of the Vietnam War. But newer products—videocameras, televisions, cell phones, computers—would die a horrible fizzling death after any extended time in my presence.
There was a sense of order to what we were doing that appealed to me on some level. Putting parts together, locking them into place, lining up plugs into their corresponding sockets, taping groups of wires together so that they wouldn’t get tangled. I did well enough that Joan sat back and watched me work on the last camera on my own.
“So how is this supposed to work?” I said. “What happens next?”
“The lights.” She sighed. “The damned lights are the most annoying part. We have to set them up so that no one looks too shiny or too wrinkly. Once that’s done, I’ll let the technical manager handle sound, and go ride herd on the actors.”
“Metaphorically, I hope.”
She snorted. “Yes. Some of them are decent enough—like that blockhead Guffie. But if you don’t push them into getting things done, they’ll never be ready for the set on time. Makeup, costume, that sort of thing.”
“Aha. And some of them are late?” I asked.
“Scrump will be,” she said. It almost came out a growl.
I pushed. “Who?”
“Tricia Scrump. Actress.”
“You don’t like her?” I asked.
“I despise that self-absorbed, egotistical little bitch,” Joan said cheerfully. “She’ll play the princess and everyone else in the cast will know that they don’t have to show up on time, or be ready to go on time, or be entirely sober, since Her Lascivious Highness Trixie Vixen will be showing up late to everything anyway, high as a kite and doing exactly as she pleases. I long to slap her silly.”
“You shouldn’t repress your emotions like that,” I said.
She let out a belly laugh. “Sorry. No reason to drag a newbie into old politics. Guess I’m just upset to be working with her again. I didn’t expect it.”
Aha. Hostility for the porn starlet. That’s what we in the business call “motive.” Joan did not strike a creepy, murderous strega vibe with me, but I’d learned the hard way that a skilled liar can look innocent right up until she stabs you in the back. I dug for more information like a good investigator. “Why not?”
She shook her head. “When Arturo left Silverlight Studios to start his own company, he made a lot of people angry.”
“What do you think about that? The move, I mean.”
She sighed. “Arturo is an idiot. He’s a kind man, and he means well. But he’s an idiot. Anyone who works with him now risks getting blacklisted by Silverlight.”
“Even Trixie? I mean, if she’s a big star, won’t the studio kind of kowtow to her?”
Joan leaned down to check a connection I’d made, shoving the plug in. “Are you on drugs or something? She’s a big star with a limited shelf life. They’d replace her without blinking.”
“She sounds gutsy.”
Joan shook her head. “Don’t confuse cou
rage with stupidity. I think she’s vapid enough to actually believe she’s too important to lose.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you don’t like her much.”
“Doesn’t matter whether or not I like her,” Joan said. “It’s my job to work with her.”
I watched her set her mouth in a firm line as she started closing cases and stacking them up. I was willing to bet that Tricia Scrump, a/k/a Trixie Vixen, didn’t have the same kind of professional resolve.
I helped Joan pick up the crates and tools and stack them against the far wall of the dim studio. She moved briskly, tension and distaste simmering under the surface of her determined expression. I studied her as covertly as I could. She clearly wasn’t happy to be here. Could she be gunning for Arturo with some kind of heavy-duty entropy curse?
It didn’t track. There hadn’t been any hostility when she spoke about Arturo. And if she were a strong enough practitioner to throw out deadly spells, she wouldn’t be able to keep up a career amidst so much technology. If she was harboring vengeful feelings toward Arturo, she was the best actress I’d ever seen.
I suppose that could have been possible. But my instincts were sending me mixed messages. On the one hand, they told me that Joan was on the level. On the other, they also told me there was more to the woman than met the eye. Something told me that things were more serious than they appeared—that this situation was even more dangerous than I had originally believed.
It bothered me. It bothered me a lot.
Joan shut the last case and interrupted my train of thought. “Okay then,” she said. “Let’s get the studio powered up.”
“Um,” I said. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here when you do.”
She lifted her eyebrows, evidently waiting for an explanation.
“Uh,” I said. “I have a plate in my head. It’s a little twitchy around electric fields. High-voltage equipment, that kind of thing. I’d rather come in when it was already up and running, so I can back off if there’s a problem.”
Joan stared at me with a lot of skepticism. “Is that so?”
“Yeah.”
She frowned. “How did you get this job?”
Christ, I’m a terrible liar. I tried to think of an answer that didn’t begin with, “Um.”
But I was interrupted.
A surge of silent, invisible energy swept through the room, cold and foul. My stomach twisted with abrupt nausea, and my skin erupted in gooseflesh. Dark, dangerous magic swirled by, drawing my attention to the studio’s exit. It was the kind of magic that destroys, warps, rots, and corrupts.
The kind of magic you’d need to feed a deadly entropy curse.
“What’s wrong?” Joan shook me with one hand. “Harry? You’re shaking. Are you all right?”
I managed to choke out, “Who else is in the building?”
“Jake, Bobby, Emma, and Giselle. No one else.”
I stumbled to my pack and picked it up. If Joan hadn’t helped me balance, I might have fallen down. “Show me where.”
Joan blinked in confusion. “What?”
I shoved the sensation of the dark magic away as best I could and snarled, “They’re in danger. Show me where! Now!”
My tone might have alarmed her, but her expression became more worried than frightened. Joan nodded and half ran out of the studio, leading me out a side door, up a flight of metal spiral stairs, and into another hallway. We sprinted down it to a room with a sign on it that said, DRESSING ROOM.
“Get back,” I said, and stepped in front of her.
I hadn’t yet touched the doorknob when a woman began to scream.
Chapter Eight
I tore the door open onto a room the size of my apartment, lined with freestanding mirrors, folding tables, and chairs. A cloud of foul energies slapped me in the face. Bobby stood off to my right, his expression registering surprise and confusion. To my left stood a woman in the corner of my vision, mostly naked. I didn’t stop to goggle, but ran through the room to a second door. It was partly open and swinging closed again.
I slammed through it into a bathroom as big as my bedroom, which I suppose isn’t all that unusual. The air was hot, humid, and smelled like fresh soap. The shower was running, its glass door broken into jagged teeth. The floor was covered in more broken glass, a little water, and a lot of blood. Two rigid, motionless bodies lay on the floor.
My instincts screamed a warning, and just before I stepped into the pool of bloodstained water, I threw myself into a jump. My shins hit heavily on the counter of the sink and I started to fall. I grabbed on to the faucet and hauled myself up. My shins hurt like hell, but I’d kept my feet off the floor. My brain caught up to my instincts, and I saw what was going on. The two people on the floor weren’t motionless—they were locked into positions of rigid agony.
Sparks leapt up in the back corner of the room. A heavy, high-voltage light fixture had broken loose from the ceiling and fallen, hauling exposed wiring to lie in the thin sheet of scarlet liquid on the floor.
Like I said, I don’t get along with technology when I’m trying to use it. But when I actually want to bust it up, I’m hell on wheels. I extended my right hand at the light fixture, snarled incoherently, and willed raw power over the electric menace like an invisible wrecking ball. The hex rippled through the air, and the live wires exploded into wild blue arcs of electricity for maybe two seconds.
And then the lights went out.
In the whole damn building.
Whoops.
I heard a pair of gasps from whoever was on the floor, presumably Jake and someone named Giselle. I got out my pentacle amulet.
“What’s happening?” Bobby’s voice sounded suspicious. Stars, what a dolt. “Hey, prick, what do you think you’re doing?”
“Where are the damned emergency lights?” said an annoyed female voice. A light flicked on in the dressing room, and Joan appeared at the bathroom door holding a pocket flashlight on her key chain. “What’s going on?”
“Call nine-one-one,” I snapped. “Hurry, there’s bleeding.”
“You need a light,” Joan said.
“Got one.” I willed energy through the silver pentacle. It flickered and began to brighten with a steady blue glow that made the blood on the floor look black. “Hurry, and bring all the ice you can find with you when you come back.”
Joan vanished from the door. She snarled, “Get out of the way, you blockhead,” and her footsteps retreated back down the hall. I got off the sink, splashed into the water, and knelt beside the downed people.
Jake, naked from the waist up, stirred as I did. “Ow,” he said in a rough voice. “Ow.”
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He sat up, wobbling a little. “Never mind. Giselle, she must have slipped in the shower. I came in to help her.”
I turned my attention to the girl. She was young and a little scrawny for my tastes, all long limbs and long hair. I rolled her onto her back. She had a cut running the length of her neck, curving from the base of her ear to above her collarbone. Blood shone on her skin, her mouth was partly open, and her dark eyes were glassy.
“Crap,” I said. I seized a towel from a large shelf of them and pressed it down hard on the girl’s wound. “Jake, I need you.”
He looked up a little blearily. “Is she dead?”
“She will be if you don’t help. Hold this down hard. Keep pressure on the wound.”
“Okay.” He didn’t look steady, but he clenched his jaw and did as I instructed. While I elevated her feet with a rolled towel, Jake said, “I can’t feel a pulse. She isn’t breathing.”
“Dammit.” I tilted the girl’s head back and made sure her mouth was clear. I sealed my mouth to hers and blew in hard. Then I drew back and put the heels of my hands near her sternum. I wasn’t sure how hard to push. The practice dummy in the CPR class didn’t have ribs to break. I guessed and hoped I got it right. Five pushes, then another breath. Five more, then another breath. The blue light f
rom my amulet bobbed and waved about, making shadows lurch and shift.
For the record, CPR is hard to do for very long. I made it for maybe six or seven minutes, and was getting too dizzy to see when Jake told me to switch off with him. We swapped jobs. Joan returned with a big steel bowl of shaved ice, and I had her fold it into another towel, which I then pressed down over the wound.
“What are you doing?” Joan asked.
“She’s cut bad. If we get her heart started, she’ll bleed out,” I panted. “The cold will make the blood vessels constrict, slow down the bleeding. It might buy her some time.”
“Oh, God,” Joan muttered. “Poor thing.”
I leaned down to peer at her face. The skin on the left side of her features and on her throat was covered in blotches of dark, angry red. “Look. Burns.”
“From the electricity?” Joan asked.
“Her face wasn’t in the water,” I said. I squinted between the girl and the shower. “The water,” I said. “It turned hot on her. She got scalded and fell right through the damned glass.”
Joan flinched as if she’d been stabbed with a knife, and her face turned grey. “Oh, my God. This is my fault. I hooked up the water heater myself.”
“Jinxed,” said Bobby from the dressing room. “This whole shoot is jinxed. We’re screwed.”
Joan was holding herself steady, but tears fell from off her chin onto the naked girl. I kept pressure on the injury. “I don’t think this was your fault. I want you to get out front and show the paramedics in when they arrive.”
Her face still ashen, she rose and took off without looking back. Jake kept up the mouth-to-mouth like he knew what he was doing. I was panting and holding the towel and ice against the wound when the paramedics finally showed up, carrying heavy-duty flashlights and rolling a wheeled stretcher between them.
I told them what had happened to the girl and got out of their way, taking a seat on the corner of a counter that ran along a wall of makeup mirrors. Jake joined me a minute later. “Thought I felt her breathe,” he panted, his tone subdued. We watched the paramedics work. “God, this is really terrible. What are the odds of all that happening? You know?”