Celebromancy

by Michael R. Underwood

  The bodyguard considered for a moment, looking at Jane, then Ree, then the broken window. “I’m going to go get Yancy. Stay with her, okay?”

  Ree nodded, one hand caressing the star’s sweat-slicked hair.

  Danny stood, grabbed his gun, then nodded and left the bedroom. He closed the door behind him, leaving Ree with a sobbing superstar, the fading smells of sex and fear, and her own troubled thoughts.

  • • •

  Yancy showed up wearing a blue robe that screamed anniversary present, with his initials monogrammed in gold. He’d clearly just been asleep. Ree saw other lights on in the trailer camp, and far more activity than normal at whatever o’ clock in the morning it was. It was too dark out to be anything later than four.

  “How is she?” Yancy asked, his face drawn with worry.

  Ree looked down to Jane by way of illustration. The star looked to be catatonic, occasionally twitching and sobbing.

  “Are you going to explain what the hell is going on here?” she asked. Jane had become unresponsive, though she seemed conscious. Ree had no intention of leaving Jane unless it was at a hospital. This had happened on her watch, even if she didn’t know she was on duty.

  Yancy stood at the base of the bed, looking at Jane with patently paternal worry. “She’d talked about nightmares, had for months. I told her to take it easy, to get help, but it wasn’t just withdrawal—at least, not normal withdrawal, from the drugs. This is something else.”

  “No fucking duh,” Ree said, pointing to the broken window. She paused for a moment, considering how many of her cards she should lay on the table. But subtlety had never been her strong suit.

  Fuck it.

  “Last time I checked, normal withdrawal doesn’t include your actual demons appearing to carry out the night terrors, at least not in any cases I’ve ever heard of. She obviously does magic, and it sounds like you know that. I don’t have a magician badge or anything, but I’m in the know, so it’d be great if you could spill the beans now.”

  Yancy raised an eyebrow. She imagined he didn’t get challenged like that very often. But she didn’t exactly have a lot of time to dance around the issue, since there might still be an invisible monster prowling around the neighborhood. He walked over to the window side of the bed and leaned in to push aside a stray strand of Jane’s hair, a tender and familiar touch. He stood and stepped back, fear crossing his face.

  He sighed and said, “I need some coffee.”

  “Me, too,” Ree said.

  Danny brought over a chair, and Yancy sat. “How much do you know about Celebromancy?” the director asked.

  Ree did a double take. “Say what?”

  “Celebromancy.”

  “I saw the lightsaber, Ree,” Danny said, pointing to the discarded prop. “You’re not just anybody.”

  Fair enough. Not like it did me much good. What kind of monster shrugs off a lightsaber?

  Not the point, she reminded herself.

  She’d heard of the style, but only in passing. She’d seen Geekomancy, Bromancy, and Atavism (aka Furrymancy) up close, as well as whatever it was that the vindictive Rorikon Strega Lady Lucretia did. But she had only been in the game for six months and didn’t know everything.

  “Almost nothing,” Ree said finally. “It has something to do with fame. So that thing with the crowds last night was Celebromancy?”

  Danny nodded. “When the fans spotted her, she started to lap up the attention.”

  “I knew it!” Ree said, thinking back through the previous day, how quickly Jane had gotten her makeover before the press conference, and the way she reached epic levels of magnetism at the club, glowing like a gigawatt bulb.

  Yancy continued. “When she gets that charge, she can enhance her looks, use some energy to get more attention to get more energy. It creates a feedback loop. But now she can’t control it. Once she gets going, she becomes erratic, uncontrolled. That’s not how it normally works, not how it used to work.”

  Yancy took a breath of imminent exposition, and Danny turned to walk out of the trailer. Please let him be getting coffee, Ree thought.

  “Celebromancy has been around for as long as I have, and probably long before that. It might even date back to the time of the Shakespeare, troubadours, or even the geisha, for all I know. But some people, the born performers in the world, can tap into the attention they’re given, use it like fuel, then weave it into spells to look more beautiful, act more powerfully, hold a crowd’s attention, or crush a rival.”

  Yancy took a breath. “It’s that last one that got Jane in the situation she’s in now.”

  If she can charm people, then how much of last night was real? Ree asked herself, a churning in her stomach as she considered the implications. Some of the night was a blur, but she very clearly remembered Jane stopping and asking her if she wanted to proceed with the sexytimes. She could have used the mind-whammy, but I don’t think she did.

  “Again, more with the explain-y,” Ree said, circling a hand in a go on gesture.

  Note for those in odd circumstances: When in doubt, get more information.

  Yancy continued. “There are mantles in Hollywood, Bollywood, and anywhere with enough of a celebrity culture to have a hierarchy. There’s The Most Handsome Man, The Elder Statesman, Idoru Ichiban, The Grande Dame, and here, we have America’s Sweetheart.” He pronounced the titles with capitalization, giving a clear sense that they each had their own weight.

  A chill wind whirled its way into the trailer through the broken window, raising goose bumps on Ree’s shoulders.

  “Jane was a child star, but a few years ago, fresh off of her success with Young Love, she made a bid to seize the title of America’s Sweetheart. It’s a tremendously powerful mantle, belonging to the actress who transcended fame to become forever enshrined in American hearts, no matter her origin.

  “The bid failed epically. As far as I can tell, the reigning Sweetheart, Rachel MacKenzie, got wind of what Jane was doing and cursed the ritual, making the power that Jane had accumulated backfire.”

  If there was anyone who could possibly be called America’s Sweetheart, there was no denying that it was Rachel MacKenzie. After her film Downtown Girl beat Pretty Woman to the modern-Cinderella punch and cinched her an Oscar, she’d gone from one charmed project to another. They were all fairly brainless popcorn flicks, but they made mad bank.

  She’d aged gracefully from ingenue to mature beauty, though a magic-is-real world made a lot more sense than plastic surgery to explain why the now-forty-seven-year-old MacKenzie looked even more gorgeous today than she had in her thirties.

  Yancy ran a hand through his bed-mussed hair. “Now whenever Jane uses Celebromancy more than a tiny bit, it starts to color her judgment, overwhelms her, makes her seek out more attention.”

  “So all of those scandals and arrests were her drunk on magic?” Ree asked. That put Jane’s last year in a way different light.

  Yancy sighed. Ree took that as a yes. Ree ran through the last year of tabloid headlines, trying to imagine what the star had been through, her power tainted like Saidin in The Wheel of Time. Except just for her.

  “It becomes a feedback loop, and it leaves a mark . . .” Yancy said. “And it’s gotten worse. It used to just knock the wind out of her; she’d wake up the next day tired, a bit out of sorts, like she’d had a poor night’s sleep. Then it was nightmares in earnest and hangovers in the morning. The worse it got, the more she needed to use Celebromancy to look the way she wanted, which just made things worse.”

  Yancy looked to the thankfully-sleeping Jane. “She talked about the thing in her nightmares, but this is the first time it was really here, as far as I know. I told her to take it easy, but she’s been a star since she was fifteen. It’s part of who she is, and who could walk away from that?” The director shrugged. “I know I couldn’t.”

 
Danny returned with two steaming mugs of coffee.

  Score!

  He handed a mug each to Yancy and Ree, then produced a brown bag filled with cream and sugar. Ree Tasmanian-deviled through the bag for a handful of natural sugars and tore them all at once to pour in.

  She took a long breath, the caffeine hitting her system faster than The Flash imitating E. Honda’s Hundred Hand Slap. “So why haven’t you done something about MacKenzie?”

  Yancy took out cream and poured it into his mug, then grabbed a stirrer. “If we could have taken her on, we would have been able to counter her curse. My power is in proxies. I’m not at the auteur level of folks like Tarantino, Whedon, or Lucas; I don’t get the power myself. I bring people’s attention to my actors, namely Jane, and work with them. Jane’s the real powerhouse here.”

  Ree took a sip of her coffee, which was just barely on this side of scalding. It would have been solidly on the other side if Ree hadn’t burned off most of her taste buds in the caffeine-filled years before. Jane had indulged Ree’s request to have her old boss Bryan Blin supply the coffee for the set. She closed her eyes and savored the familiar butter and hazelnut flavors of the Sunnydale Blend.

  The director took a long swig from his own cup. “It was a risky move, but she was so sure of herself, thought it was the best thing to do. MacKenzie is just in it for the money. She only takes popular films, formulaic low-hanging fruit. She got more money and power, and just put it all back into getting more money and power.”

  Yancy’s face was red with frustration as he spoke.

  “But Jane, she was actually helping people. She was experimenting, bringing in new talent, trying to tackle real issues. Every project we do, Jane donates 30% of her take-home to women’s charities, children’s charities, used the attention she got to shine a light on inequity, and got people revved up about finding solutions.”

  Ree nodded. Up until last year, it seemed like Jane had spent a season every year somewhere in Africa, rural India, Haiti, wherever there was need that went unnoticed in the States.

  “She was so eager to take that next step . . . see what good she could do with that power . . .” Yancy stopped again, his eyes locked on the young star.

  “Do you know for sure that it was Rachel MacKenzie who did the whammy?” Ree asked.

  “Not for certain,” Yancy said. “But she’s still got the mantle, so the rumors seem to be dead-on. Hollywood is one big rumor mill, and once you factor out the more idiotic hype machines, we’re pretty good at keeping apprised of what’s going on, magically-speaking. It’s an open secret in the biz, like the fact that a splinter sect of Scientologists are alien-worshipping sorcerers who have magical indoctrination camps out in the desert.”

  “I knew it!” Ree said.

  Yancy raised his free hand, palm open and out to calm her response. “Not that we could take that evidence to the feds. At least one alphabet-soup agency is clued in, but they seem to leave well enough alone, at least as far as Hollywood is concerned. They learned their lessons at the end of House Un-American Activities Committee, when Reagan and Disney pivoted to clean house of the competition.”

  All fear the Mouse-stapo, Ree thought.

  “The big multimedia companies have their own stables and their own agendas, fueling their ambitions with the star power harvested by their films and shows. That’s why Jane and I went independent a few years back. But we made some enemies when we left Cosmic Studios.”

  “Well, that’s not scary at all,” Ree said, considering what it’d be like to have a megacorp in her rogue’s gallery. “But how does that explain the invisible monster-hag-thing?” Ree asked, gesturing to the room and to Jane.

  “She complained about nightmares, of something invisible attacking her in her dreams.”

  “Like Freddy Krueger?” Ree asked, shivering. She hadn’t slept well for a month after seeing that movie as a kid. She took another sip of coffee.

  “Not quite. And it’s never come through into this world, as far as I know. This is beyond me, and it has me worried.” Yancy leaned back in the chair, then turned to Danny. “Someone stays with her through the morning, and then at all times. She won’t like it, but I’m going to insist.” Yancy glanced at Ree. “Well, almost all times.”

  Ree nearly snorted coffee out her nose.

  She took a second to reclaim her semblance of composure and asked, “Are we going to stop filming?”

  Yancy nodded. “I can’t in good conscience ask her to work like this. I asked her not to take the pilot . . . It was too dangerous, not until she had more control, could stop the flow of magic before it overtook her.” He shook his head. “We need to fix this, and soon. I don’t think anyone can convince her to take it easy if she doesn’t want to. She’d much sooner burn out than fade away.”

  What craziness have I gotten myself into?

  Ree took a long swig of coffee, letting the marvelous mistress of caffeine have her way with her neurochemistry. “So we just have to find MacKenzie and get her to undo the curse, right?”

  Like that will be simple, she challenged herself.

  I’m trying to sound confident here, okay? she responded inwardly.

  Yancy started pacing. “If anyone can undo it, it’ll be Rachel. But getting to her is easier said than done,” Yancy said, corroborating her doubt. “Rachel will be extra-wary with Jane in town, even if she’s just letting the curse play out without any extra effort. She might not know you by sight, though, so you’d have a better chance at snooping around. Though she’s not exactly accessible.”

  Ree couldn’t say exactly how suspicious to be about Rachel, since more and more companies were filming in Pearson these days.

  He stopped. “But you’re not just a writer, are you? What are you, Cinemancer? Geekomancer?”

  Ree was struck. She hadn’t expected the magic world to be quite that small.

  She nodded. “Geek. And I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve. But Rachel probably has enough bodyguards to run Danny and me straight out of town.”

  Yancy smiled, his eyes still sad. “Probably. But if you could get to her, or get information about the curse, we might be able to go from there.”

  “I know a few people. Not so much on the Celebromancy side, but they should know the field enough to point me in the right direction. Since the right direction tends to be straight into the mouth of danger.”

  “Isn’t that the truth. I’ll leave you to rest, if you can. We’ve called the police, as well.”

  Ree raised an eyebrow. “What are we supposed to tell them?”

  “There was too much of a ruckus for us to be able to cover it up, thanks to the tabloids. They’re camped outside, and the net has already gone berserk with rumors. I’ll do damage control as best as I can. Say you didn’t get a good look at the assailant, and that he left out the window.”

  Ree sighed. “This is going to be a big fucking mess.”

  “Don’t I know it. I’ll do my best to bury the story, but make sure I know what you told them. The best thing for us is for the press to write this off as a crazed fan and go on a wild-goose chase to find a person who doesn’t exist.”

  “Don’t they, though?” Ree asked. “Some invisible ninja attacker person? How many of those are there around?”

  Yancy opened his arms up as if to indicate how should I know? He said, “As many as you can think of, and probably several more.” Yancy folded up the chair, stepped over the bed to kiss Jane on the crown of her head like a father kissing a child good night, then nodded to Ree as he left the trailer.

  “Well, fucksticks,” Ree said to the world in general. She slid carefully out of bed to collect the rest of her clothes and get ready to spin the tale to the police as well as the not-insubstantial chance of getting annoyingly knowing looks from the detectives.

  Not the kind of fame I was hoping for.

 
• • •

  The gods were kind and sent Ree a female detective to take her witness statement. Jane was still out when the police arrived at 4:13 AM, a half hour after the attack.

  The detective reminded her of Kate Beckett (early season, not late—short hair). She was no-nonsense and patently ignored the wrapped-in-sheets form of Jane Konrad and asked only the most general questions about why Ree was there, what they were doing, and what they knew about the attacker and what had happened.

  I won’t scandalize if you don’t, the detective seemed to say with her look. Thank Sappho.

  Jane was still out when Detective Yao was done taking Ree’s statement, so she gave Ree a card and left.

  Ree checked her phone. 4:47. She could flop back in bed and deal with several stages of awkward in the morning, or duck out and head home at ass o’ clock for a few hours of marginally-better sleep at home and deal with the awkward slightly later. But then again, Jane might freak out if she wasn’t there in the morning.

  Hell, she should freak out. And it’s not like you’re BFFs. One night out and a hookup do not a couple make—or even friends, necessarily.

  Ree fell on the side of tired and returned to bed, curling up next to Jane. It took what felt like an eternity, as the hamster on a wheel of her brain dashed along like it was on speed. It wasn’t even the coffee. That much had barely registered to her addict-level tolerance. But eventually, after much wheel-spinning, she did get back to sleep.

  • • •

  The next time she woke, it was light outside, and she smelled the barest scent of perfume. Jane was still sleeping beside her, flopped on the bed in the exact same position she’d settled into after the attack.

  Ree snuck out of bed, dressed, and tiptoed out to the main section of the trailer to scavenge for breakfast. As she clattered around the kitchenette, someone knocked on the trailer door. Ree walked over and opened the door a creak.

  It was Danny, holding two coffee cups.

  “Bless your heart,” Ree said, channeling her mom’s Midwestern family. “Coffee?”

  Danny held one cup up, then the other. “One’s a cappuccino, the other is black, for Jane,” Danny said. “Is she up?”