by Tanya Huff
“I hoped that being right under the gate would activate the shadow’s primary function—to return home with information—and keep it from remembering that it was heading for me. Seems to have . . .”
“Not real. Not real. Not real!” One hand clamped around Tony’s arm, the other grabbed for the collar of his shirt. Kate’s pupils had contracted down to black pinpricks and her eyes were opened painfully wide. “Not real!”
“Sorry.” Tony wasn’t sure why he was apologizing; it just seemed the thing to do. Then he remembered. “Henry, we don’t have any potion, the cops dumped it. We didn’t even stop to buy vodka!” Dropping his ass to the floor, he dragged her up onto his lap. “You’re going to have to vamp her!”
Kate’s heels began to drum as Henry dropped down by her other side. “To what?”
“You know, touch the primal terror. Convince her you’re real and that’ll help her deal with the rest!”
His mouth slightly open, Henry stared at him, his expression caught halfway between astonishment and amazement. “And if she can’t deal with me?” he asked after a long moment.
“Jesus, Henry, she’s twenty-three years old and you’re . . . you. Just crank up the sex appeal!”
Shaking his head, Henry took hold of the girl’s jaw. “Do you have any idea of what you’re talking about?”
“Hell, no! I’m making it up as I go along. Do you have a better idea?” he asked as Henry stared down into Kate’s face. “Or any other idea?”
“No.”
“Then what can we lose? Damn it, Henry, there’s already two people dead!”
Henry looked up at him then, his eyes dark, and, after a moment, he said, “What’s her name?”
“Kate.” Tony grunted as a plastic clad elbow drove into one of the bruises Mouse had pounded into him.
“Catherine?”
“Could be.”
“Kate, then.” Henry bent his head toward hers and called her name.
Tony stiffened. Literally stiffened. He knew the whole Prince of Darkness thing was going to affect him, no way it couldn’t, not after last night, but this he hadn’t expected. His whole body longed to answer the call. Blood was rushing south fast enough to leave him light-headed and he had an erection he could pound nails with pressed up against Kate’s back. Deal. You’re the one who told him to crank up the sex appeal.
The good news was, it seemed to be working on Kate, too. She’d transferred her grip from his collar to Henry’s and stopped thrashing.
And thank God for that. Friction, even friction of the spine-encased-in-raincoat variety was not helping.
Teeth gritted, he fought to maintain his hold as Henry’s voice caressed them both. It didn’t seem to matter that it wasn’t meant for him. Kate gasped as teeth met through the skin of her wrist. Tony gasped with her. She moved languidly on his lap. He closed his eyes and barely kept from . . .
. . . didn’t quite keep from . . .
Then she was a limp weight against him and cool fingers touched his cheek.
“Tony? Are you all right?”
“Fine. Just a little sticky.” He opened his eyes to see Henry, only Henry, staring into his face. The relief would have left him limp had that not already been taken care of. “You’re not all carried away?”
“I’ve fed twice tonight. The Hunger is replete.”
“I thought too much blood got it going.”
“I didn’t take too much. Hardly any from young Kate.”
“Is she?”
“She’s asleep.”
“Doesn’t like to cuddle, then.”
Henry paused, about to lift Kate into his arms. “What?”
“Never mind.” Tony adjusted his jeans as her weight went off him, saw Henry’s nostrils’ flare and silently dared him to comment. “I’ve got to put the lamp back. Why don’t you put her in the car and see if she’s got her address written in her raincoat or something.”
“Or something,” Henry agreed. He straightened, Kate’s head lolling against his shoulder. “You know, eventually we’re going to miss one. Or they’ll get smarter and all hit the gate at once.”
“Yeah, I thought of that,” Tony said as he got to his feet. Then he frowned. “They could get smarter?”
“The longer they ride their hosts, the more information they absorb.”
“Oh, that’s just fucking great.”
They walked together to the lamp.
“On the bright side,” Henry murmured as he turned toward the exit, “that’s three down and only four to go.”
Tony bent and began coiling cable. “Unless one’s in Arra, in which case we’re just generally screwed.”
“So much for the bright side.”
“Yeah.” He sighed as Henry began walking and said softly as he heard the door open, knowing Henry would hear him even at that distance. “I’m thinking there’s got to be a better way.”
Arra watched the Nightwalker leave with the girl, watched Tony clear away all signs that anyone had been in the soundstage after hours. Although the pull of the gate had been nearly overwhelming, she’d needed to be there as they dealt with the shadow, keeping just enough of her consciousness present to see and hear and not enough to alert the vampire.
It wasn’t enough to know what they did, she had to know how.
And, knowing, what should she do with that knowledge?
Twelve
AT FIRST he thought he was in the east end. The buildings on both sides of the street were long abandoned, their dark windows staring down at him accusingly. There were no people, no traffic. The only sign of life was a small flock of pigeons strutting about the nearest intersection searching for food in the cracks between slabs of buckled asphalt.
Tony walked slowly down the center of the street, flanked on either side by the burned-out remains of cars and trucks and minivans. A glance into one of the cars gave him a pretty good idea of where the people had gone.
Then he nearly tripped over a charred a-frame advertising Italian ice cream and he realized he wasn’t in the east end at all. He was on Robson Street. The abandoned buildings had once been rows of trendy boutiques and high-priced restaurants. He stepped from the street into Robson Square to find the trees dead and a body facedown in the six inches of dirty water filling the skating rink.
He was walking through the establishing shot of every post-apocalyptic move ever made. Could it get any more clichéd?
Behind him, a sign creaked ominously in the breeze and the light began to fade.
Apparently, it could.
Then the hair rose on the back of his neck. Off the back of his neck? Well, it was standing, like it knew something he didn’t and he didn’t like that feeling at all.
There was something behind him.
Of course there was.
Screw it. He’d just keep walking and not give in to it. He wouldn’t turn, he wouldn’t look, he wouldn’t play the game. Two steps, three—on four he felt himself begin to pivot. He hadn’t intended to turn, but he wasn’t driving anymore.
Oh, crap.
He’d just become a passenger in his own body.
Been there. Done that. Didn’t want to do it again.
Robson became Boundary and the thing in his body walked him through the front door of the studio. Amy came toward him, asking him a question through lips the exact same fuchsia as her hair. He could see her lips move, but he couldn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear anything but the pounding of his own heart. And the hard/soft melon on concrete crack of her head hitting the floor as he shoved her out of his way.
Lee and Mouse were waiting on the soundstage under the gate. They moved in on either side of him and his world dissolved into hands and mouths and flesh that felt like clammy rubber and wouldn’t let him breathe. When the gate opened, they separated and it drew them up one at a time; first Lee, then Mouse, then him. Through light, through pain, into a room with blackboards covered in patterns that might have been words that might have been illustrations, that might have been mathem
atical notion; it was impossible to tell because two of the three boards had a body crucified against it and the third had clearly been prepared for a body of its own.
Their eyes were open and their expressions suggested they’d been alive for a very long time after they’d been nailed to the walls.
There was a man—he knew there was a man, was as certain of it as he’d ever been of anything in his life— but he could only see a formless shadow stretching out dark and horrible along the floor. He felt his body move toward it, as unable to stop itself as he was to stop it. His heart raced. If he touched the shadow, he’d be absorbed the way Lee and Mouse had been absorbed. He’d lose the self he’d found. Become nothing more than a part of the darkness. He couldn’t let that happen. Not again.
But the compulsion was everything.
Greater than terror.
Greater than the need to be.
Darkness.
The room through different eyes. An instant of being himself and someone else. An instant of cold cruelty. Arrogance. Impatience. Why was such a simple task taking so long?
And a voice. A loud, obnoxious, unignorable voice. “It’s 8:30 on a beautiful Sunday morning and you’re listening to CFUN and another forty-five minutes of commercial free music. Let’s start things off with a little Av . . .”
Tony was out of bed, across the room, and slapping off the radio before he was truly awake—a total aversion to so-called soft rock and Amy’s suggestion of putting the radio where he couldn’t reach it from the bed was the only thing he’d ever found guaranteed to get him up. Eyes squinted nearly shut, he wondered for a moment why it was so bright in the apartment and then remembered that for the second night in a row, he’d gone to sleep with all the lights on.
Not that it had helped much.
His skin prickled under a fine sheen of sweat as the terror returned and a glimpse of his shadow lying on the grubby carpet drove him two stumbling steps back into the wall.
“A dream. It was just a dream.” And fuck but his subconscious was anything but subtle. He swallowed, suddenly felt trapped in the enclosed space of the apartment and staggered around the pull-out couch to the window where he threw back the curtains and squinted up at an overcast sky. It was threatening rain.
And that was normal enough that he managed to get his breathing under control.
A walk to the bathroom to empty his bladder helped and by the time he’d flushed and washed his hands, he walked to the refrigerator feeling almost normal. Well, as normal as he ever felt first thing in the morning.
Opening the fridge, he leaned in, grabbed the bomb bottle of cola off the top shelf, and twisted off the cap. A quick taste determined it was flat but not totally undrinkable. Besides, neither the caffeine nor the sugar was in the bubbles.
Bottle tipped back, feeling more human with every swallow, Tony closed the fridge door and screamed. Unfortunately, that resulted in rather a lot of flat cola going back up his nose. Once he’d finished with the coughing and the choking, he stared across the room with various liquids dripping from every facial orifice.
Arra was still sitting on his only chair.
Suddenly remembering he was naked, he rather belatedly moved the bottle in front of his crotch. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
She stared at him blankly and he realized she was wearing the exact same clothing she’d had on the day before. Not good. Not good at all.
“I don’t know.”
It took him a moment to figure out that she was answering his question. “You don’t know why you’re here?” he asked shuffling forward until he could squat down and grab a pair of jeans off the floor.
“I don’t know why I didn’t just keep going.”
“Right.” Personal modesty had already gone to hell so Tony set the bottle on the counter and shrugged into his jeans, turning around to tuck himself inside. A careful closure—because getting caught in the zipper would make the morning even more special—and he felt a little better prepared to face his uninvited guest. “So . . .” He faced her again with studied nonchalance. “Am I talking to the wizard or the shadow operating the wizard?”
That elicited a bleak smile. “If I was shadow-held, would I tell you?”
“Yeah, well, so far, shadows . . .” The edge of the counter pressed into his back and his right hand closed around the handle of the silverware drawer. He was pretty sure not everything in it was plastic. “. . . big on the bwahaha.”
“On the what?”
“They gloat.”
“Ah. Yes, they do. They didn’t used to.” She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, her expression was strangely familiar. “They used to stay hidden, doing as much damage as they could for as long as they remained undiscovered.”
“Maybe that was because they knew they had something to stay hidden from.”
“Maybe.”
“And it’s been all television people this time; big egos to deal with.”
“True.”
Releasing the drawer handle, he took two steps forward. He’d known almost immediately that Mouse was shadow-held—one look at his face and he’d seen it wasn’t the cameraman at the controls. He didn’t like to look at Arra’s face because he’d realized why her expression seemed familiar. The last time Tony’d seen it the body it belonged to had been spiked to a blackboard. Bodies, actually. “Arra, what happened yesterday in the church?”
“I destroyed the shadow.”
“Good.” Another step.
“But Alan Wu was dead and I could do nothing more.”
“So you ditched me.”
“I knew there would be authorities to deal with and this is your world.”
“You’re living in it. On it.”
Plastic crinkled as she shrugged. “My history only goes back seven years.”
“So you were afraid the cops would find out you’ve got no past?”
“No past here.”
“Okay.” Sounded reasonable, but reasonable didn’t explain why she’d disappeared, why she was still wearing yesterday’s clothes, and why she was in his apartment. “What else happened?”
The snort was a pale imitation of her usual explosive exhalation. “What makes you think something else happened?”
“I don’t think you’ve been home.”
“Adults don’t stay out all night on this world?”
Tony sighed. “Who fed your cats?”
Her eyes widened and the nailed-to-a-blackboard expression was replaced by the dawning realization that the world hadn’t actually ended—even though it might be better for some concerned if it had. “Oh, shit.”
He grabbed her arm as she tried to rush by him. “Wait. I’m coming with you.”
Her car had been parked a couple of blocks away. After he’d thrown on some clothes, they’d all but run to it. Arra’d burned rubber out of the parking spot before Tony’d barely got his door closed.
Finally buckled in, he sank down in the seat and wondered where he should begin.
“How did you get into my apartment?” The door had been locked, the chain still on when they left.
“I’m a wizard. I have powers.”
Well, duh. “You teleported?”
“I got a demon to carry me through . . . GREEN!” The light obediently changed. “. . . the Netherhells and emerge in your apartment.”
Fucking great. He’d done the demon thing. It was how he’d met Henry—ripped up by said demon and in desperate need of blood. “Seriously?”
“No. I suppose you could call it teleporting. The senior among us could move ourselves from point to point over short distances. It’s what made us start thinking about other worlds.”
“Why?”
“We had to be moving through something, didn’t we?”
“I guess.” He closed his eyes as she inserted the hatchback into a space maybe an inch larger than the car. When he opened them again—after the g-forces had returned to normal—he noticed something on the dash
. “Is it magic that keeps this car going without gas?”
“What?” Her gaze dipped to follow his line of sight. “No. The gauge is broken, so I fill up based on mi . . . Get out of the damned way! I am in no mood to take prisoners!”
Silently urging the SUV in front of them to give it some gas, Tony frowned. “You were a senior?”
The pause lasted long enough he knew the answer had to be important. Or the SUV was about to be moved over a short distance.
“I was.”
He breathed a sigh of relief when the sport vehicle turned. “Like Dumbledore or Gandalf?”
“Less hairy.”
His frown deepened. Arra wasn’t young, but he wouldn’t have said she was old. Kind of in that in-between who-the-hell-can-tell age. If he’d had to guess, he’d have looked at the gray and the lines around her eyes and mouth and said mid-fifties but mostly because it seemed like a safe number—after a certain age it was always safer to guess low. But no matter what she looked like, Arra wasn’t human. Not from this world at all and who knew how they aged where she came from. And she was a wizard—they probably aged differently. “Were you the senior? The head wizard?”
Both of her fists came down on the steering wheel. “These lanes are wide enough for transports and you’re in a fucking GEO! Pick a lane and stay in it!”
The Geo swerved to the right so abruptly it looked as though a giant hand had come down and shoved it to one side. Tony couldn’t be absolutely sure one hadn’t.
“No.”
“No?” One hand clutched at the dash, the other at the side of his seat, his fingers almost a joint deep in the cheap vinyl, and he was still being flung about within the loose confines of the seat belt.
“No, I wasn’t the senior.”
Her emphasis was slightly different than his. Almost bitter. Had she thought she should be? Tony added that new question to the bottom of the list and returned to the top. “Why were you in my apartment?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure. You and your Nightwalker are the only people on this world who know me and the sun was up . . .”
What there was of an answer sounded like truth, so he let it go. “Where did you go yesterday?”