Smoke and Ashes

by Tanya Huff

“How domestic.”

  “Oh, about this much. It’s a mess in here by the way. You should clean your oven.”

  “I figured I’d just…move.”

  “Men are disgusting,” Leah announced stepping over to the bed. She pulled a can of nutritional supplement out of her shoulder bag, popped the tab, and held it out. “Drink this first. It’ll take the edge off and keep you from choking.”

  Although nothing hurt, he was embarrassingly weak and just starting to wonder about sitting up when Henry’s arm slid under his back and lifted him up to lean against the pile of rearranged pillows. “You’re good at that.”

  “Too much practice.”

  “It was my choice, Henry.”

  The vampire’s eyes were shadowed. “I know. But she suspected you’d try a healing when you were strong enough. She could have warned me or stopped you.”

  “She is the cat’s mother,” Leah muttered.

  “My grandma used to say that.” Amy appeared beside her holding a plate of food. “So you shouldn’t. And you…” She switched her attention to Tony. “…should drink that so you can eat, so you can get your strength back, so you can get back out there and kick demon ass.”

  Henry watched him while he drank. The supplement was supposed to taste like chocolate. It didn’t. It tasted the way people who’d never had chocolate thought chocolate might taste based on descriptions of the cheap waxy shit they sculpted into rabbits at Easter.

  Henry watched him while Leah quickly unwound the bandage on his left wrist and he flexed the fingers, checking that everything worked the way it was supposed to.

  Henry watched him while he forked Chinese food into his mouth. Actually, all three of them watched, but Henry’s gaze was the heaviest. Leah kept her expression neutral—probably so as not to provoke Henry—and Amy made pig noises.

  “Want more?” she asked when he finished. “Never mind.” She took the empty plate before he could reply. “Stupid question.”

  Beginning to feel better, Tony sat up straight and Leah leaned in to remove the gauze wrapped around his torso. Henry’s hands were there first. She backed up, her own raised in exaggerated surrender.

  Tony shivered as cool fingers touched his skin, checking that the punctures had healed and the bruises were gone. They lingered last against his throat where the bite mark had been. This time it was gone. The skin was smooth.

  “Your choice,” Henry said softly and straightened.

  “What just happened?” Amy demanded as she set another filled plate of food on Tony’s lap.

  “Our little boy just grew up.”

  Pausing just long enough to glare in Leah’s direction, Tony dug in as Amy snorted.

  “As if.”

  Just after three, Tony dropped Amy off at her apartment.

  “Are you going to be okay?” he asked as she leaned back into the car.

  “Me? I’m fine. Why?”

  “You’ve got to be up in three hours for work.”

  “I sit on my ass most of the day, I’ll be fine. Besides, I’ve never needed a lot of sleep. What about you?”

  “Me? I’m fine.” He’d damned well better be ’cause that whole healing thing had fucking hurt.

  “Uh-huh.” She looked as though she was planning to argue but thought better of it. “Just be careful, okay? And thanks for letting me help. This stuff is, you know, real.”

  He frowned, not sure he understood. “Real?”

  “We’re saving the world from demons who want to slaughter and enslave us, Tony, and it doesn’t get more real than that.” Straightening, she hung her Vampire Princess Miju backpack over one shoulder. “Keep me in the loop or it’s chow mein noodles under the fingernails,” she growled and quietly closed the car door.

  Real demons. Two words guaranteed not to show up in the same sentence in most lives. Tony watched Amy trot into her building, waiting until he saw the light go on in her apartment before he turned the engine back on and put the car in gear. It was chivalry she wouldn’t thank him for, but tough. Demons weren’t the only metaphysical creatures wandering around the lower mainland, and she had a big “I believe” stamped on her forehead.

  Henry pulled out right behind him.

  Tony’d slept all day and hadn’t wanted to waste any more time, so the moment the calories kicked in, he left Leah asleep in his apartment and headed for the one easy access weak spot of the six she’d mapped out with Jack.

  Separate cars because Henry had his own inflexible timetable.

  New Westminster had been replacing old water mains for some time now. According to Leah, Mckaseeh had plans to pop a demon through in the trench on Fader Street. Tony drove past and stopped at the Hume Park end of the road.

  “In case an insomniac across from where I’m working glances out the window and reports something hinky going on,” he explained to Henry’s raised eyebrow as the vampire got out of his car.

  Henry made a noncommittal noise.

  “It could happen,” Tony muttered as they walked back.

  “Is there no security on the site?”

  “Just the kind that drives by every couple of hours. If they show up while I’m wizarding, you can go talk to them.” He sketched a set of air quotes around the word talk.

  “Thank you for letting me help.”

  Sarcasm? Tony didn’t think so. Henry sounded just as sincere as Amy had and, come to think of it, just as sincere as Lee had earlier. He frowned. Why would people be grateful for a chance to die by demon? Because no one likes to sit around with their thumb up their butt when the world is ending, feeling helpless.

  Whoa. Epiphany. In a time of crisis no one wanted to feel they were less than they were.

  He wasn’t just sending his friends and coworkers out into danger, he was empowering them. Okay, except for Henry who was about as empowered as it got all on his own. This didn’t mean he could thoughtlessly thrust them into danger, but he could stop feeling so friggin’ guilty about the danger they were in.

  I wonder if I will…

  The Arjh Lord’s weak point was at the bottom of the trench, the shimmer nearly indistinguishable in the dark patterns of turned earth and old pipes.

  Tony peered down into the construction site, his weight sending a small avalanche of dirt off the crumbling edge. “If I burn the rune then tip it on its side, then shove it out over the trench, and you hold me in place, I could push it down into the pit without having to climb down there.”

  A red-gold brow rose.

  “Not going to happen, is it?”

  Henry pointed along the trench. “I think you’ll be safest climbing down there at the end where the new pipe has been laid. It’s a gentler slope.”

  For not particularly large values of gentle.

  Surfing the last meter on a wave of rubble, Tony hit bottom buried knee-deep in dirt. He glanced back at the new angle and sighed. Getting out was going to be fun.

  But first the fun of dragging his lower legs free and then the fun of getting to the weak spot without breaking his neck.

  Cocking his head, he could see the shimmer, but he couldn’t see his footing.

  Memo to self. Next time, bring a flashlight.

  First, buy a flashlight since he didn’t own one.

  Because he didn’t need one…

  The first couple of weeks after the haunted house, he’d practiced the Wizard’s Lamp spell obsessively, but it had been months and he wasn’t 100 percent positive he remembered the wording.

  Or, as it happened, how much juice to give it.

  Any possibility of developing night vision was obliterated in the sudden flare of brilliant white light which broke his concentration so completely that it shut off again almost immediately.

  “That was unpleasant,” Henry snarled.

  Tony peered up through the afterimages at where he thought Henry might be standing. “Sorry.”

  “Just do what you came to do and do it quickly before someone arrives to investigate that flare.”

  �
��You think someone saw it?”

  “I think they saw it in Alberta.”

  He didn’t so much find the shimmer as trip and fall into it. He expected it to feel unpleasant, but it actually felt anticipatory. A moment spent considering who was doing the anticipating added in the unpleasant.

  After burning the first rune, he realized that they shed enough light for him to find a path.

  “I should’ve just dragged a rune along with me,” he muttered, shoving it through the weak point.

  “Yes, you should have.” Henry had, of course, been able to hear him. He wasn’t sure why he could hear Henry, whether it was a vampire thing or a wizard thing or Henry just didn’t care who he woke up, figuring he could handle anything that lived in New Westminster. “There’s a car coming,” he continued, breaking into Tony’s musing. “If it stops, I’ll deal with it.”

  “Sure.” The musing was new. He never used to muse.

  The car stopped right about the time Tony was pushing through the second rune. He waited until he heard Henry’s quiet, “Can I help you, Officer?” and then burned the third rune on the air.

  The car pulled away as he finished and he drew a two foot W—Because today’s show is brought to you by the words wizard and whatever—to light his way out of the pit.

  Almost out of the pit.

  The slope began to crumble. “Henry!”

  Strong fingers closed around his wrist and yanked, defying gravity and slamming him into the reassuringly solid barrier of Henry’s chest.

  “Do you have to make even the easy ones difficult?” the vampire murmured, the words cool against the back of his neck.

  “I didn’t make it difficult,” Tony panted. “It was in a pit! What did the cop want?” he asked, pulling far enough away to see Henry’s face.

  “He wanted to know about the light.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  A flash of teeth. “That he didn’t want to know about the light.”

  Four down, twenty-three to go.

  “Okay, Jack and Leah will keep mapping out the sites, so we don’t have to figure out how to deal on the fly—they get the information back to CB; he works out the plan. I use the location search cover for the shopping mall and the restaurant and the garage while Amy runs interference.” Tony picked the list up off CB’s desk and shoved it in his back pocket. “That’s a start anyway.”

  “If you want, I could stay here and plan with CB while Lee runs interference,” Amy offered.

  “Mr. Nicholas is working this morning,” CB growled. “In spite of the damage to my building, we are still attempting to shoot a television show here.”

  She rolled her eyes. “No point in saving the world if we can’t save Darkest Night?”

  “No point at all.” He wasn’t kidding.

  “No, no, they’ll walk through the actual mall, but the chase scene will play out here in the gritty back corridors of commerce.” Amy’s voice drifted around the corner to where Tony was pushing runes between the brackets that had once held some kind of storage rack. “It’ll be an exotic locale with lots of atmospheric shadows and very little chance of anything expensive getting broken.”

  The head of mall security snorted. “That’s almost exactly what your boss said when he called.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s big on nothing expensive getting broken.”

  It was harder to spot the shimmers without Leah beside him playing Marco Polo with her belly, and a scrawled note directing them, “Toward the back of the restaurant,” wasn’t a lot of help. Tony took an embarrassingly long time to find the weak spot on the wall of the walkin freezer.

  “Is there something missing here?” he asked the restaurant manager.

  “Yeah, used to be a set of shelves that bolted to the wall. We took ’em out about a month ago, why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m wondering what a vampire’s going to be detecting in my freezer.”

  “Aliens,” Amy drew the manager back out into the kitchen. “Kept on ice by the CIA. But don’t worry, no one will ever connect this freezer to your restaurant, so you won’t be overrun by hordes of alien conspiracy freaks. Unless you want to be.”

  “No, it’s like there’s this car accident, see, and they bring the car back here. But Raymond Dark suspects that it wasn’t an accident and that the car didn’t really hit a tree. Okay, it did hit a tree, but the tree really did jump out into the road.”

  The way the garage owner and both mechanics were hanging on Amy’s every word, not to mention her cleavage and the very, very short skirt she was wearing over the black tights and combat boots, Tony figured he could have turned the ’63 Thunderbird on the rack into a pumpkin and none of them would have noticed. Not that he’d do anything so heinous to such a wicked ride, but still.

  Later, he mentioned that she was disturbingly good at coming up with freaky story ideas.

  “I know.” She slouched lower in the seat and pulled out her phone to call the office. “It scares me a bit, too.”

  Seven down.

  Tony had an entire barbecued chicken for lunch, a 500-gram tub of potato salad, and three organic bananas Amy made him eat for the potassium. He was hungry, sure, but he still felt great. That last healing had totally been worth it.

  “Leah’s marked two more construction sites I can do after dark. If I can get another three tears sealed up this afternoon, well, I’m starting to think we might actually be able to win this.”

  “I am uplifted by your confidence. Another banana?”

  “No, thanks. Three’s fine.”

  “For the last time, Mr. White has been called away, and I don’t care what television show you’re from; no one goes into his office without his permission.”

  “I keep trying to tell you,” Amy sighed, “that my boss phoned and spoke to your boss, and he said it wouldn’t be a problem. We’ll just be in and out.”

  Mr. White’s secretary—executive assistant? Pit bull? Tony had no idea—folded her hands into what shouldn’t have even remotely resembled a threatening position. Shouldn’t have. Did. “Mr. White left no such instructions with me. You’ll have to come back tomorrow when Mr. White is in the building.”

  “But…”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Will he be in later today?”

  One perfectly plucked brow rose. “What did I just say?”

  “Come back tomorrow?”

  She smiled, not exactly in approval. “Did you want to make an appointment?”

  “We had an appointment!”

  “So you say. Not that it matters as Mr. White isn’t here.”

  “Okay. Fine. We’ll make an appointment.”

  “I’m sorry. Mr. White has no time tomorrow. Would Thursday fit your schedule?”

  “What happened to Wednesday?”

  “He’s in court on Wednesday.”

  Amy took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Mr. Bane will call Mr. White again and set something up. We’ll be back.”

  Mr. White’s secretary seemed unimpressed.

  “That was a fucking waste of time we don’t have.” Tony sagged against the elevator wall and glared at their reflections in the stainless steel. “I should come back with a Notice Me Not on and just boogie by.”

  “I thought you didn’t know how to get noticed again after you did a Notice Me Not.”

  “Yeah, well. Flaw in a brilliant plan.” Without Henry around to call him back, he’d be stuck unnoticed.

  “I say we just let the demon trash Mr. White’s office.” Amy snorted, rocking forward and back, heel to toe.

  “Works for me. This could be one of the ones I don’t get to.”

  “Unless you get to all of them, shut Mckaseeh down cold.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  Her lip curled. “Not with that attitude.”

  “Not with only twenty-four hours in a day.”

  “Time travel!”

  “No.” He locked eyes with her reflect
ion so she’d know he was serious. “No messing around with time. It’s a lot more dangerous than demons.”

  “And you don’t know how to give us more time anyway, do you?”

  So much for that whole locking eyes thing. “Well, no.”

  She bounced, once, happy with her victory. “I wonder what’s missing in Mr. White’s office?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” Tony muttered, as the elevator door opened and he pushed past a neoprene-covered bicycle messenger and out into the lobby. “Where to start…”

  “Ms. Wong, please. If you could just wait for a couple more minutes. We’re stuck in traffic. Yes, I realize you’d like to go, but…We’re coming in on Hastings. No, that probably wasn’t the best idea at this time of day. Just give us fifteen…” Amy glanced over at Tony who raised his right hand, fingers spread. “…twenty minutes. No, we won’t be long once we get there. I promise. Thank you. We won’t be long, will we?” she asked, closing her phone.

  “Hard to say, the old Carnegie Library probably has…Hey!” He broke off his explanation to yell at the car ahead of them. “What are your fucking turn signals for, asshole!” And broke back on at: “…a shitload of nooks and crannies. It could take a while to find the exact position of the weak spot without Leah.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to have a while.”

  “You said the library was open until ten every day, Sunday to Monday. And this is Monday.”

  “The person CB spoke to is only there until five and, if you’ll recall, our plans did not enjoy much success in the absence of Mr. White.”

  Tony sighed and geared down. “I’m clinging to the hope that librarians are more helpful than lawyers.”

  Wizards had the same trouble everyone else did finding a parking space in Chinatown at nearly five on a weeknight. Or any other time for that matter. He thought about parking illegally and putting a Notice Me Not on the car but was afraid he wouldn’t be able to find it again later. They got to the library at 5:21. Ms. Wong was not impressed. Nor was she impressed by their desire to just wander around and “get the feel of the place.”

  “You are not the first people who have wanted to use our interior in their television show.” She folded her arms and the toe of one sensible black pump tapped lightly on the tile. “You’re not even the first people this month. Tell me the effect you’re looking for, and I will take you where you need to go. This does not have to take the rest of the evening.”