“You tell me,” said Opal.
“I don’t know. I feel like I walked into an electric fence. Everything in my head is still going kabong.” She lifted the hand she had bled from, stared at her finger. “Can a rock be a vampire? What’s wrong with this shoot, Opal?”
“You’re the professional observer,” Opal said. She was relieved Erika was talking like a person with sense after whatever had happened to her on the rock. It didn’t make her feel like sharing anything with a woman who had been nothing but an irritation in her life so far.
“Yes, but you’re the one with all the secrets.”
“Let me know when you decide to respect my privacy,” Opal said. “Until then, I’m not telling you a thing.”
“But I—but—” Erika gripped her forehead with her free hand. “My head hurts.”
The crew had finished devouring all the sandwiches, and most were on their feet again, leaving behind wads of plastic wrap, dented aluminum cans, crumpled paper napkins, and crumbs on the folding tables the caterers had set up for lunch.
Magenta rose from the table. “I saved you a cheese sandwich. Something happen?”
Opal glanced behind her. Phrixos had his palm on Neil’s forehead now, and the director wasn’t fighting him anymore; his eyes were closed.
“I think it’s bad,” she muttered.
Magenta looked where Opal was looking. “Uh-oh. What’s D.G. doing to our director? What’s with Flashbulb here?”
“She bled on the altar stone. Then Dark God put her on it.”
“That does sound bad,” Magenta said.
“Whyever would you say that?” Erika asked. “Because that shambling monster as good as assaulted me? Or because the rock bit me, then Tasered me, and Miss Too-Big-for-Her-Britches let it happen?”
“What?” Magenta asked Opal. “This was going on and you just stood there?”
“I was sort of—in a trance myself.”
“The rock Tasered Erika?”
“I touched it and it paralyzed me! It drank my blood! Then that giant goon laid me out on it like a sacrifice, and”—she put her hand to her forehead, gripped it as though she could squeeze a memory out—“and I’m not sure what happened next, except it hurt, and I feel really weird. Kind of—not alone.”
“Opal,” said Magenta.
The first assistant director called, “All right, people. We’re burning daylight. Let’s get back to it. Stand-ins, we need to check the lighting again. Cast, go to Makeup for repairs. Crew, assume the position!”
The pull of work tugged them back to their stations. Erika, her cameras once again draped around her, trailed Magenta and Opal back to the trailer, but Rod turned her back at the door. Her screeches of rage in response were only halfhearted, trailing off with one last nonspecific, “I’ll get you, bitch!” before Rod shut the door in her face.
Phrixos sat in his chair with his hood down, his eyes burning, looking like some wild thing captured against its will and ready to attack. Bettina and Gemma waited in their chairs, both pale and unhappy. Doreen hovered near Gemma, though technically she wasn’t supposed to be in the trailer during makeup unless there was trouble. Rod had already gone to work on Ariadne. No one spoke, the sign of a truly troubled shoot.
Opal stood at her workstation facing the mirrored wall, her back to the trailer. She could see the others reflected as they went to work. She placed her palms flat on the counter. The tools of her trade were around her, and she pulled together the identity she had built for herself since she left home: skilled, respected, solid and reliable, invisible, accomplished, creative, resourceful, inspired.
Not enough, she thought, and remembered the new people she had become on this particular project: witch friend to Lauren and Magenta, Corvus’s girlfriend, Phrixos’s walking nourishment supply, information collector.
Not enough, she thought again. She closed her eyes and found her inner study. Some of Flint’s energy still floated there, a bumbling fireball. Come, she whispered to it. Help me open to my shadow self.
Obedient, the fire seeped through her, sent bright warmth into all her dark corners, found the door she had shut on the self who knew how to manipulate and hurt other people, the part of her that most resembled Phrixos. Fire formed the key to pick the lock for her, but she had to turn the doorknob herself. She reached out and did it, pulled the door open and stepped through.
A skin of darkness settled over her, snugged against her in every expanse, crease, recess, every fine hair and blemish. It seeped under her surface. She twitched, settling it, then scratched an elbow. The new self itched! Hey, hey, it said, what have I missed? Whoa, lots of life! Wow, what’s going on here? How neat is that?
She lifted her eyelids and stared at herself in the mirror, saw darkness staring back. She closed her eyes and asked herself what the hell she had just done. What I needed to, she decided, and shuddered. She studied herself again, smiled, and saw the extra intensity darkness gave her, the beckoning that said, Come closer. I have such interesting things to tell you.
Hey, said her second self, show me the guy.
She turned. Phrixos stared at her, his face unreadable beneath its overcoat of leaves and glitter. He sat up straighter. “What have you done?” he asked.
She felt wings at her back, flames at her fingertips, a blaze behind her eyes. All defenses, because her second self could tell how dangerous Phrixos was. She smiled at him, too, because second self felt the pull of attraction between them. It wasn’t Corvus her second self wanted.
“Ready?” asked one of the production assistants from the trailer door.
“She never even touched him,” Bettina said, pointing to Opal and Phrixos.
“He doesn’t need any help,” said Opal. “He’s perfect.”
“You didn’t even look at the photos,” said Bettina. “You’re a total slacker.”
Opal raised her brows and looked at Bettina with the glare of an older sister who can do things to you while you’re asleep if you piss her off. Bettina lost color. She leapt to her feet and fled the trailer.
“How’d you do that?” Gemma asked, rising from her chair as Magenta tried to pat her cheek with a powder puff.
“I’ll demonstrate, if you bother me,” Opal said. Her voice had deepened just a little.
Everyone in the trailer turned to look at her. In the resulting silence, the P.A. said, “We needed you ten minutes ago, people! Come on!”
Phrixos rose, tipped Opal’s chin up, and kissed her. Instead of letting him draw from her, she drew from him, sucked off a draught of his energy. He tasted sweet and sour, smoky and sharp, scary. He tried to move into her as his essence crossed her tongue, but Evil Opal knew how to drag all of him out of Corvus’s body. Something in her spun darkness to wrap him tighter and deeper in a cocoon of night, though she couldn’t paralyze him; she felt him struggling, and countered with more until at last he lay silent.
Corvus staggered when he let her go. She stared up at him and saw that Phrixos’s green glow had faded from his eyes. “What?” he said in Corvus’s voice.
She smiled. “Well, that’s a handy trick. You’re wanted on the set, Corr.”
“I am?”
She turned him and aimed him toward the door. “I’m right behind you.” She felt drunk and a little staggery herself. The taste of the banished god was still on her tongue, intoxicating to her second self. She grabbed her bag and followed Corvus down the steps in the wake of Ariadne, the two girls, their Makeup and Wardrobe people, the mother, and the guardian.
“Which scene are we doing?” Corvus asked Opal as they rounded the backdrop and headed for the altar.
“Mom’s death scene. You studied it last night with Lauren at the restaurant, remember?”
“Vaguely,” he said.
“So far it hasn’t been working out very well. Everybody’s in a mood, especially Neil. We spent six hours getting it wrong, and then we broke for lunch.”
“How did I get to be me in the middle of the day
? I’d pretty much given up on that.”
“I forced it,” said Opal.
“You did?” He studied her as they walked. “How?”
“I used a trick that probably won’t work twice,” she said. “Now you’re going to have to act happy while you’re sprayed with special effects blood. Oh, and just before lunch, Phrixos actually woke the rock by spilling Erika’s blood on it.” The grass was still vibrant with energy, and the rocks glowed with it. The music was there, too, half a melody that played, cut off, started again. Beneath it all was a slow pulse, the heartbeat of something huge, old, and resting. Resting, but awake now.
The hairs on Opal’s arms and legs bristled. The muscles in the back of her neck twitched. Whatever lay under the ground recognized her presence, and wanted her.
“Over here,” bellowed Neil. “Quit lagging!”
They reached the altar, where the coveners in their recently dried robes, Ariadne in period clothes as the mother doomed to die, and Gemma and Bettina in their white lace dresses as witnesses and innocents waited. Corvus took his mark at the head of the altar, straightened, and turned into a close approximation of Phrixos; it was hard to distinguish them by sight when they were in full makeup, but Opal could sense the spiritual difference.
Phrixos was inside her, and not lying quiet, either, though she had tried to lock his essence away. Her second self was intrigued by him; she let small bits of him out to play, enjoying his dark impulses, though not giving them any weight or power. Opal felt things going on in the back of her mind while she was focused on what was in front of her: Neil harangued his cast about their previous inadequacies and demanded better of them.
“Does that kind of screeching ever work?” Magenta muttered, from beside Opal.
“Sure,” Opal said. “Fear works. You should know that by now.”
Magenta stared into her eyes, then stepped back.
Opal considered this. She had opened to her dark half, and anybody smart should be scared of her, if that change was visible. Maybe she should mask it better. She closed her eyes and thought disguise, one of her best and most practiced skills. She felt the spin of energies as her looks reformed into something nonthreatening, knew each change; she had done this a lot when she was a teenager, to convince her parents she was innocent. Her great-uncle Tobias hadn’t been fooled; he could see under surfaces. She looked toward Magenta again.
“What did you just do? I hate it that you can do makeup without tools.”
“Is it working? Are you reassured?”
“Yeah, and I don’t like that either. Jerk me around! Who were you a minute ago? Almost as scary as the prick.”
“Takes one to deal with one,” said Opal.
Magenta half smiled and glanced toward Opal’s crotch. Opal laughed, and said, “Not quite that way, but yeah, I decided to be my own mean self. Somebody I haven’t been in a long time.”
“Well, that’s weird. Makes me wonder who you normally are. Did it make a difference?”
“Yeah. I did a job on him, locked him up. Right now, he’s Corvus, not Phrixos. Not sure that was smart, and I don’t know that it’ll last, but I managed it.”
“Cool,” said Magenta. “You gonna get nasty, too?”
“I hope not. Can’t rule it out, though.”
“Can you give me some protection?”
Protection. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? She could make talismans for everybody—except Lauren, who had already been tapped by Phrixos, and Erika, who had been attacked by the altar. Maybe she could come up with something that would help even those who had been compromised.
She didn’t have much experience with it, though. Her brother Jasper had worked on it more. Maybe when Uncle Tobias came, which should be any time now, he could help her.
“I—” Opal began, but then Neil yelled, “Is my goddamned blood ready to go?”
“Ready,” said the pale-faced special effects man.
“And it’ll go the right direction this time? It’ll land where I say it’s supposed to land?”
“Yes,” squeaked the man.
“All right, then. One final blocking rehearsal without the blood, and then you lot have no excuses left!”
Opal kept her attention on Corvus, listened to make sure he remembered his lines and knew where he was supposed to go. The girls were flat in their delivery, having said everything twenty times already, but Corvus brought a new spirit to his gloating over the death of one of his character’s most devoted followers.
“Good,” Neil said at last. “Last looks, and let’s make this the actual last, shall we?”
Opal checked Corvus over carefully, referencing Polaroids from the morning shoot. He looked a little less realistic now, but nothing needed work.
“All right, clear the set,” said Neil. His call was repeated, louder, by the first assistant director. Opal fled with all the others to the cast corral. Rod got out his little TV, and they watched as the take went perfectly for the first time that day.
Everyone involved relaxed as soon as Neil called cut. He and the A.D. and the D.P. gathered around a monitor and watched a playback, with the script supervisor right behind them to take notes. Everyone else waited for the verdict.
“All right,” George, the first assistant director, called out, “looks like we got the master shot, finally! Two angles on it. Thank God. Clear the set. We’ll go to close-ups on the principals next. Coveners, you’re done for the day. The rest of you, take five while we set up.”
The actors went to the Wardrobe trailer, where they changed out of fake-blood-soaked robes into lounging wear. They came to the cast corral and settled into chairs, most leaning back as though exhausted. The makeup artists cleaned fake blood off everyone who had been spattered for the umpteenth time, and restored their pre-suicide makeup. Doreen, Gemma’s mother, went to the Craft Services truck and came back with several bottles of water. She offered them to Gemma, Bettina, Ariadne, and Corvus, who all accepted.
“Do you want something to eat?” Opal asked Corvus.
He caught her hand and lifted it to his lips. She wondered if Phrixos had found his way back inside—she hadn’t had time to tend to what she had pulled from Corvus earlier. The little dark flurries and explorations some part of her had entertained while the rest of her was being Opal LaZelle, special effects makeup queen, had slowed.
Something moved inside her, something that was not either of her selves. She closed her eyes and tried to wrap it in darkness again, but she felt the taint of it, itchy and exciting, glowing along her mental entrails and trails.
There was no sense from Corvus of threat or invasion, even as his lips pressed against the back of her hand, only a warmth that wakened memories of last night.
The ground was alive with excited anticipation, and it kept trying to send exploratory feelers up through her feet. Something inside her reached down toward the invading energy, but explorations from both directions stubbed against Flint’s shield. She needed time and space to figure out what had happened.
“Actually,” Corvus said, in his own voice, letting her hand slip from his, “I’m starving. I don’t know what he had for lunch, but I don’t think it was enough. Could you get me one of those energy drinks? I don’t have his power over the makeup, to eat with it on and not mess it up.”
“Sure.” Opal went to the Craft Services wagon and got some cold protein drinks and a couple of straws. She brought them back and then stood behind Corvus as he drank, contemplating her inner universe.
Magenta tapped her shoulder, startling her, and she looked up without thinking about who she was. Magenta sucked in breath and took a step back, and Shadow Opal smiled wide, the smile of seduction that said, you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever seen. Come closer. Magenta wavered, not fleeing, not approaching.
Opal straightened, tried to find her usual face. “Sorry. Identity crisis.”
“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” Magenta asked after a pause.
“
Hard to tell at this point.”
“If you have a choice, could you veer toward the good witch end of the spectrum? We really don’t need more bad blood on the set.”
“That’s my usual inclination, when I act like a witch at all,” said Opal.
Magenta glared at her, then said, “Well, anyway, about protection.”
“Protection?” said Corvus.
“Not that kind,” Magenta said. “If this is the good witch I’m talking to, can you say a spell that will protect me from you and the prick?”
“Let me think.” One thing that had worked for her was Flint’s shield, but she didn’t want to give any of that away; she needed it herself. She held up her hand, studied it, turned it over and back, and tried to see how Flint’s shield surrounded her like a clear second skin. What were the components of this energy? It came from Flint, which made it something other people usually couldn’t make or use. She wanted to make more of it. She stroked fingers across it, trying to taste its ingredients. Her younger sister Gypsum was a cook who could analyze components of baked goods by savoring a bite. Opal wondered if she could sample spells the same way, though her darker power might taint them somehow. Opal had never paid much attention to food, and she hadn’t done much magical investigating since she was a teenager, hungry for skills and knowledge that would help her outfight her younger and more powerful siblings.
She lifted her hand to her mouth and pressed her lips to the back of it, touched the tip of her tongue to it. She could barely tell the fireskin was there; it wasn’t trying to protect her from herself. She sucked on it, and then a taste flared in her mouth, a jalapeño scorch across her lips and tongue. Analyze, she thought to herself and to Evil Opal. Replicate.
Offer it energy, and ask it to change the new energy into itself, responded one of her.
Is it a living thing with its own mind?
Don’t know. Can’t break it down, but maybe we can get it to work with us.
She lowered her hand and closed her eyes, shutting out the sight of Corvus staring up at her from the chair, Magenta focused intensely on her, Rod down the trailer tending to Bettina, Gemma in one of the closer chairs with Doreen hovering over her.
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