by Tanya Huff
Stepping back, Tony indicated that Lee should precede him down the hall. He’d learned early on that expecting actors to follow was like expecting cats to follow and after the whole “quickie in the broom closet” incident with Mason and the previous wardrobe assistant, he never let them out of his sight. When Lee continued to merely stand and stare, he stepped forward again, suddenly concerned. “Hey, are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Tony wasn’t so sure. “You look . . .”
“I’m fine.” Lee gave himself a little shake and slowly moved out into the hall. It seemed that rather a lot of the shadows moved with him. The dressing room visibly lightened as he left.
And that’s just wrong. Tony stood where he was for a moment, eyes narrowed. Not to mention, well, wrong! He’d have asked himself if he were imagining things except that he had no idea what he thought he might be imagining. Finally, when it became obvious that nothing was out of place, he hurried after Lee, careful not to step on the actor’s shadow.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, it’s one goddamned line and I’ve already said it seventeen fucking times!”
The crew suddenly became very busy, looking anywhere but at Lee and Peter.
“It’s not about your performance, Lee,” the director said calmly, “it’s a technical glitch. There’s a shadow . . .”
“So get rid of it!”
“That’s what we’ve been trying to do.” Peter’s genial voice picked up an edge. “We’ve been trying to do it all afternoon.” As one, they turned toward the lighting crew clustered around the director of photography, who continued describing his latest concept in an exasperated mix of English and French.
Although over the course of the afternoon the lighting layout had practically been rebuilt, the shadow continued to reappear in take after take. Scene 22B, take one: it had covered Lee entirely as he’d leaned forward and flipped over the body. Scene 22B, take seventeen: it was a dark bar across his eyes.
Watching from the sidelines, Tony found himself wondering where the shadow was going. And then wondering when he’d started thinking in cheap horror clichés. Actually, he knew the answer to the second question: right after he’d met Henry.
“Get rid of it in post!” Lee snapped. “And why is it so fucking cold in here?” Usually someone who took the inevitable technical delays of television in stride, his temper had frayed a little more with every take. Hartley Skenski, the boom operator, had tried to make book on whether or not he’d stomp off the set before they were finished, but no one had taken him up on it.
“We’ll do it just once more. I promise,” Peter added as Lee’s lip curled. “If it’s still there, I’ll let the guys in post deal with it.” He opened his mouth and closed it again, clearly deciding to leave the temperature question unanswered.
Green eyes glittered during a long pause. “One more.”
While another five hundred milliliters of blood were applied to the latex gash in the actress’ throat, Lee dropped back onto one knee.
Tony moved quietly around behind the video village and checked out the monitor showing the close-up of the actor’s face. The bar of shadow was still in place. He stepped hurriedly out of the DP’s way and winced as Sorge began to swear.
The shadow quivered.
And disappeared.
The torrent of French profanity stopped between one word and the next. “Go now.”
Peter dropped into his chair and jammed on his headphones. “Quiet!”
No need for anyone to repeat. The soundstage was so quiet, Tony reminded himself to breathe as he crossed his fingers.
“Roll cameras! Slate!”
“Scene 22B, take 18!”
Lee didn’t wait for action. Reaching down, he grabbed the corpse’s shoulder, flipped her over onto her back, and snarled, “Well, it looks like Raymond’s secret is safe.”
“Cut! Print.”
“It looked good,” Sorge murmured.
“It sounded like shit,” Peter snapped. “But we can fix that in post. Tina, I want the sound from take one.”
“Sound from one, got it.” As she noted it on her lined script, everyone else turned to watch Lee stomp off the set.
Peter pulled off his headphones as the corpse sat up and rubbed her shoulder. The crew moved about their usual post-print routine strangely subdued, as though they weren’t entirely certain how to react. “I don’t need a second prima donna around here,” the director sighed as the distant sound of a slamming door marked Lee’s passage from the soundstage.
“Maybe he’s still upset about the body. The real body,” Tony elaborated as everyone now turned to look at him. “You know . . .” He added a shrug to the explanation. “. . . Nikki.”
After a long moment, during which Tony mentally rewrote his résumé, Peter sighed again and gestured wearily in Lee’s wake. “Go make sure he’s all right.”
“I told CB we should have taken at least one day off,” he added as Tony hurried away.
Sorge snorted, the sound remarkably French. “And CB said the show must go on?”
“No, he told me to get the fuck out of his office.”
Lee’s dressing room door was open when Tony reached it. He paused, wiped sweaty hands against his thighs, and leaned forward just enough to see inside. Still in costume, Lee stood in the center of the room, slowly turning in place. It looked almost as though he was seeing the room for the first time.
“Uh, Lee?”
He continued turning until he faced the door, then stopped and frowned.
Tony had no idea why he was suddenly thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
And The Terminator thing fell into place. Lee was staring just slightly beyond him, like he was accessing an internal filing system. “Can I, uh, get you anything?”
Focus snapped onto his face and a long finger beckoned Tony forward. “Come in and close the door.”
“The door?”
He’d never seen Lee smile like that before. It was almost . . . mocking. “Yes. The door. Come into the room and close it behind you.”
Unable to think of a reason why he shouldn’t, and not sure he wanted to, Tony did as he was told.
“Turn off your radio.”
“But . . .”
“Do it. I don’t want to be interrupted.”
While you’re doing what? Tony wondered as his left hand dropped to the holster on his belt. But Peter had sent him. He was supposed to be here.
“I want you to tell me things.” The actor’s voice stroked over him like wet velvet. “In return, I will give you what you desire.” The requisite vampire-show leather coat slipped off broad shoulders and hit the floor. The burgundy shirt followed a heartbeat later.
Half a dozen heartbeats actually, given how quickly Tony’s heart had started beating. The total weirdness of the situation helped him keep a partial lid on his physical reaction although he was definitely reacting. A dead man would react to a half naked Lee Nicholas and—given a specific dead man—Tony knew that for a fact.
As Lee reached for him, he astounded himself by stepping back.
This was rapidly becoming everything he’d ever dreamed of and a bad soap opera scenario pretty much simultaneously.
No! Another step and his shoulder blades were against the door. This was wrong! It was . . .
It was . . .
He slammed his head back against the door, almost had it, and swore as the memory slipped away.
CB stared down at the sheet of drawing paper on his desk. The lines pressed into the surface had gone gray again, just for an instant. He frowned. He didn’t like mysteries and he had already wasted far too much time on this one.
Still frowning, he opened his desk drawer and pulled out a pencil.
Palm flat against the cool skin of Lee’s chest, Tony struggled to ignore the little voice in his head trying to convince him to shut the fuck up and enjoy the ride. “Lee, this is, uh . . .”
“What you want. I give you what you want; you give me what I want. There are other ways I could gain the information, but since you’re here . . .” His voice trailed off as his hand connected with Tony’s crotch.
“No, you don’t WANT to be doing THIS . . . Fuck! Stop doING that!”
“No.”
“Look, I don’t want to hurt you.” The words emerged kind of jumbled together, but he managed to sound like he meant the threat.
Again, a smile that didn’t look like it belonged on Lee’s face. “Try.”
Damn. Four years on the streets, four years with Henry; he could take care of himself if he had to. A little more difficult when he really didn’t want to hurt the guy feeling him up, but still . . . Tony tensed, and froze. There was something wrong with Lee’s shadow. There was something wrong with shadows in general.
“. . . nothing remained of our defenses save terrified men and women fighting individual losing battles against the shadows.”
CB worked carefully, methodically, quickly; stroking a line of graphite along the imprinted pattern.
“The Shadowlord cannot be defeated. Now he has tasted this world. The next shadow he sends will have more purpose.”
Tony jerked back against the door, partially because of the sudden rush of memory. Partially because of what Lee was doing. Wondering how a guy got selected for sainthood, he twisted away and gasped, “You’re a minion of the Shadowlord!”
Which sounded so incredibly stupid, he regretted the words the moment they left his mouth.
Lee stared at him for a long moment, blinked once, and started to laugh. “I’m a what?”
Oh, crap. Now he was going to have to repeat it because there really wasn’t any variation on this particular theme. “You’re a minion of the Shadowlord.”
“That’s what I thought you said.” Scooping his shirt up off the floor, Lee shrugged into it, still chuckling. “You know, you’re a very weird guy.”
Tony merely pointed.
Lee’s shadow appeared to be investigating a pile of shadow magazines.
It was a cheesy effect on screen and unexpectedly terrifying in real life.
The actor sighed, reached out, and slapped Tony lightly on one cheek. “Who’s going to believe you? You’re nobody. I’m a star.”
Tony cleared his throat. “You’re a costar.”
The second slap was considerably harder and almost seemed to have more of Lee in it than shadow. “Fuck you.”
“You’re not leaving this room.”
“Is this supposed to be where I strike a dramatic pose and tell you that you can’t stop me?” Lee leaned closer, his position a parody of his earlier seduction. “Guess what? You can’t.”
And he couldn’t.
The shadow dropped the magazine and swept across the room, holding him against the wall. Tony couldn’t move, he couldn’t speak, and most importantly, he couldn’t breathe. It was like being trapped under a pliable sheet of cold charcoal-gray rubber that covered him from head to foot like a second skin, curving to fit up each nostril and into his mouth. Obscenely intimate.
As the door closed behind the thing controlling Lee’s body, the shadow flexed, flopped away from him, and slipped through the final millimeter of open space.
Bent over, sucking his lungs full of stale, makeup redolent, slightly moldy, but glorious air, Tony spent a moment or two concentrating on breathing before straightening and staggering toward the door.
He had to stop Lee before he left the building.
He should never have let him leave the dressing room.
He should never have gone into the dressing room.
I should have figured something was up when the straight guy started coming on to me.
And hard on the heels of that thought, came a second.
If that thing’s in Lee’s head, then Lee knows how I . . . what I . . . want.
And a third.
This just keeps getting better . . .
Completely redrawn, the pattern appeared to be a random squiggle. A pointless collection of curves. Nothing had happened when the final line had been retraced. The pencil set aside, a hand laid flat on each side of the paper, CB stared down at the nondesign and wondered exactly what he thought would happen.
How could he recognize the answers when he didn’t know the questions?
“CB?” Rachel’s voice over the intercom broke into his fruitless speculation. “Mark Asquith from the network is here.”
He swept the paper into the trash. “Send him in.”
Tony pounded out into the middle of the production office and realized his quarry was nowhere in sight. Had he guessed wrong? Had the thing gone through the soundstage instead? He took the half-dozen extra steps to Amy’s desk. “Have you seen Lee?”
“Yeah. He’s gone.”
“What do you mean gone?”
“I mean, gone. As in not here.” She snorted derisively. “As in was an ass to Zev and strutted out. As in Elvis has left the building. As in . . .”
“I get it.” Gone. But maybe not too far gone. “He didn’t take his helmet.”
Amy shrugged. “ ’Cause he didn’t go for a ride on his motorcycle. He walked out the front door and grabbed the network guy’s cab.”
“Oh that’s just fucking great.” That thing had Lee’s wallet, Lee’s credit cards; if it got to the airport, it could go anywhere in the world.
“You got a message for him from Peter?” Amy picked up the phone before he could answer. “No problem. I’ll just call his cell.”
“That’s not . . .” He frowned. “Do you hear a phone ringing?”
She glanced down at the flashing light and back up at Tony as the office line rang again. “Duh.”
“No, in the distance.” He turned slowly, trying to make it out. “It’s in the dressing room.” The sound could have been coming from any one of half a dozen small rooms behind the thin interior walls, but Lee’s phone had been in the charger on the coffee table. “He didn’t take it with him.”
“An actor without a phone.” Heavily penciled eyebrows rose dramatically. “Isn’t that against some kind of . . .”
“Amy!” Rachel’s bellow cut her off. “Would you answer that damned thing, I’m on another line!”
As the familiar “CB Productions” sounded behind him, Tony ran for the basement stairs. Arra. The wizard. She’d know how to stop him. It. How to stop the shadow and get Lee back.
Except that Arra wasn’t in the basement.
Tony stared at the empty chair, at the bank of monitors, and fought a sudden urge to smash something. The bitch had screwed with his memories. Made him forget. Made him forget the shadows, and the Shadowlord, and the danger they were all in.
He’d told her he was going to do something and she’d stopped him.
Maybe even stopped him from protecting Lee.
Heart pounding, he took the stairs back up to the production office three at a time, slamming the door behind him hard enough to pull curious glances from the surrounding smaller offices. Even Zev reemerged from post, a set of headphones slung around his neck like a stethoscope.
“If you’ll excuse me a moment.” As his visitor nodded a confused assent, CB surged to his feet and walked over to his open door. He considered himself to be a lenient employer, but petty displays of unnecessary noise were among the few things he refused to put up with. If it was one of the writers overreacting to script changes again, he would not be pleased.
He reached the doorway in time to see Tony Foster race across the production office.
“Where’s Arra?”
Amy slammed a staple through a set of sides and frowned up at him. “What?”
“Arra!”
“I’m not deaf, dipwad. She’s with Daniel, checking out cliffs for a new car-blows-up-in-midair-releases-afire-demon-into-the-world shot.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere along the coast, I guess. She said she was heading home after; that just because we’re ru
nning obscenely late, there was no point in her hauling ass all the way back out here.” The frown became more questioning than accusatory. “Why?”
Tony shook his head. “Where does she live?”
“I’d have to look it up.”
“A co-op on Nelson,” Zev put in unexpectedly, crossing to the desk. “Downtown Vancouver, across from the Coast Plaza Hotel. What’s the problem?”
Already turning, Tony paused. An evil wizard is about to come through a gate between worlds and kick ass. No. Not a good idea. That just wasn’t the kind of news that most people took well. “Let’s just say it’s none of your business.” It came out sharper than he’d intended and he regretted the sudden hurt on the music director’s face, but he didn’t have time to regret it for long. He had to find Lee.
“Man, you’re two for two on assholes today,” he heard Amy murmur as he ran for the door.
Returning to his desk, CB bent down and plucked the piece of drawing paper out of the trash. He slipped it under the edge of his desk blotter and settled back into the large leather chair, smiling across at his network visitor. “You were saying?”
He needed wheels. Riding transit, no matter how environmentally sound, was just not going to cut it. Fortunately, he knew where there were wheels to be had.
Lee’s helmet was in the dressing room. So was his biker jacket. He’d left wearing his costume; gone out into the world as James Taylor Grant. And the only good thing about that was, given their latest numbers, the odds were high no one would recognize him.
Bike keys were in the jacket pocket.
One hand gripping the smooth leather, Tony had a sudden flashback to the feel of smooth skin.
It wasn’t really Lee, he reminded himself, shrugging into the jacket. It doesn’t count.
He hadn’t been on a bike in years and never one so powerful. As he guided the big machine into the city, Tony prayed that the cops were busy busting more deserving heads. If he got pulled over, he was totally screwed.