Smoke and Shadows

by Tanya Huff

  Her sigh was deep enough to lightly mist the inside of the windshield. “Whistler. I had a foolish idea of finding CB and telling him everything.”

  Again an interesting emphasis. Everything? He had a suspicion Arra’s everything included a few somethings he didn’t yet know about, but before he could ask, she continued.

  “I saw him with his daughters and I realized that a man who has no idea he’s being played by an eight year old and an eleven year old couldn’t help me.”

  “Harsh.”

  “Perhaps. There’s always the chance I just chickened out at the last minute and ran.”

  Given her history, Tony found the latter more likely. “Uh, you know that if the police stop you, you’ll be a lot later getting home.”

  “The police don’t see this car.”

  “Damn.”

  “I move from world to world and this is what impresses you?”

  “This, I understand. And . . .” Another light changed after only a moment of red. “. . . I was also impressed by the maggots.”

  The corner of her mouth he could see twisted up into a close approximation of a smile. “Fair enough. What happened to the girl?”

  “What girl?”

  “Kate.”

  “You know about Kate?”

  “I was there. I saw. I needed to see.” Her tone lengthened the list of questions even further—although the new ones hadn’t quite acquired actual words.

  “Henry took her home.” At least he assumed Henry took her home. He’d been dropped off first and although Kate was sprawled across pristine upholstery in the back seat of the BMW still totally out of it, she was smiling. He’d reminded himself he trusted Henry, had stripped and fallen into bed. Sleep hadn’t been long in coming and he really wished he hadn’t thought about sleeping. Images from the dream played out like a slide show in his head.

  Arra’s voice disrupted the show. “You found a way without me.”

  “It’s easier with you.”

  “Not always.”

  Okay. Enough was enough. “Stop doing that!”

  “Doing what?”

  “Adding another layer. Talking to you is like opening one of those nested doll things. You open one and there’s another. I get that you’re thinking things through, working out old shit—really I do get that—but every time you open your mouth, you’re saying six or seven things besides the stuff you’re saying out loud, but you’re leaving me to figure out what those things are! How come I have to be the hero and figure all this shit out?” Whoa. Where had that come from? He didn’t even feel better having said it.

  “Maybe I should just drive.”

  “Yeah. Maybe you should.”

  Arra screeched into her parking place at the co-op, turned off the car, tossed Tony her keys, and disappeared. Damp air rushed in through the open window to fill the empty space.

  He swallowed as his ears popped. “Guess I’m taking the scenic route.”

  It took him a while to lock up the car and figure out which key went where. By the time he got to the apartment, Whitby had his head buried in a bowl of food, but Zazu was nowhere in sight. Dropping his backpack by the door, Tony followed Arra’s voice into the living room to find her with her butt in the air and her head nearly under the couch. Wincing, he looked away.

  “Look, I said I was sorry. What more do you want?” The wizard was sounding increasingly desperate with every word.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “She’s making me pay.”

  “Pay?”

  “For abandoning her.” Shuffling backward on her knees, Arra straightened. “No one does guilt like a cat.”

  “And you were only gone one night.”

  From the way Arra narrowed her eyes she’d picked up the subtext. Just think of how she’ll feel if you abandon her for good. But all she said was, “Grab that catnip lizard out of the basket. It’s her favorite toy.”

  Tony grabbed the stuffed animal that looked the most like a lizard and tossed it across the room.

  “This isn’t a lizard, it’s a platypus!”

  Say what? “Who the hell makes catnip platypuses?”

  “Platypi. I get them at a local craft fair.” She ducked back under the couch. “Zazu, sweetie, see what I’ve got for you.”

  “It’s almost quarter to ten. We don’t have time for this.”

  Arra shuffled backward again. “Don’t tell me, tell her.”

  Tony snagged the platypus out of the air as she tossed it back to him. As Arra stood and headed for the kitchen, he suddenly realized she expected him to coax the cat out from under the couch. “I don’t know anything about cats!”

  “Good. Maybe a fresh approach will work.”

  He thought about refusing, decided there was no percentage in it, and took up the position. Zazu glared at him from what was clearly just out of reach. Wait a minute. Just out of Arra’s reach . . . He wasn’t tall but he had a good four inches on her.

  Grabbing the cat by a foreleg he started to slide her across the hardwood floor and nearly lost his hand at the wrist.

  Ow! God damn it! Bad idea!

  Except that it seemed to have worked. Whether she was satisfied now that she’d drawn blood or whether she was so mortally insulted she wasn’t staying under the couch for another moment, Tony couldn’t tell—nor, he supposed, did it matter. Point was, as he nursed his injuries, Zazu swaggered toward the kitchen, tail in the air.

  Tony followed with a little less swagger, sucking his wrist.

  “That Nightwalker of yours teaching you bad habits?”

  “What? Oh.” A final lick and he let his arm fall to his side. “No. And he’s not mine.”

  She tested the temperature of the alcohol in the pot and began adding herbs. “Does he come when you call?”

  “Well, yeah, but . . .”

  “That’s more than you can say about cats and most people would tell you that these two are mine.”

  “Most people?”

  “Some people know better. Pass me the bay leaves.”

  As he handed them over, Tony wondered just how disturbed he should be about finding the smell of warm vodka and catnip comforting. A sharp pain in his right calf drew his attention down to an imperious black and white face. “What!”

  Arra snickered and, stirring with her right hand, tossed him the paper bag of catnip with her left. “Try this. Why so jumpy when I showed up at your place this morning?” she continued as he tossed a handful of the dried leaves on the kitchen floor.

  “Why was I so jumpy?” He stared at her in disbelief. “I don’t know, maybe because I’m in the middle of breakfast and this wizard who might have been taken over by shadow—based on the whole ditching and disappearing thing—suddenly appears in my apartment! Not to mention being caught with my dick waving around.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  At first he thought she was laughing at him, but what he could see of her expression looked serious.

  “Still have my thermoses?”

  “In my backpack.”

  “Get them.”

  If anyone had reason to be jumpy . . . He set the pair of thermoses on the counter by the stove. “You know, I’ve got to say, this morning, even after I knew you weren’t shadow-held, I was concerned about you.”

  “Why?”

  “You looked bummed.”

  “Bummed?” The first soup ladle of potion splashed into the first thermos with a hollow sound. “I suppose that’s as good a word as any.” The sound grew higher pitched and less hollow as the thermos filled. “The shadow from Alan Wu touched me before I destroyed it. Only for an instant, but in that instant I knew what the shadow knew.” She set the first thermos to one side and began filling the second. “It is one thing to extrapolate the probable fate of your home; it’s another entirely to see it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “About what?”

  He shrugged, made uncomfortable by the question. “I’m not sure. It’s a Canadian thing.” />
  Her snort sounded more like the Arra he’d started to know. Setting down the ladle, she wrapped her hand around each thermos in turn, singing out the vowels she’d used to make the first potion sparkle. After the whole beam-me-up-Scotty, now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t it seemed unnecessarily . . . twee. She snorted again when he mentioned it.

  “All magic involves the manipulation of energy. Lesser magics like this are, as you say, unnecessarily twee because lesser wizards need their cue cards to get the desired result. Doing it their way is, therefore, easier.”

  Tony didn’t see the “therefore.” “So what’s the cost?”

  “Cost?” She paused, the second lid half tightened.

  “Yeah, there’s always a cost.”

  “You’re really a very remarkable young man.”

  Pointing out that flattery didn’t answer the question seemed rude, so he waited. He was still waiting when she screwed the cup back on over the lid and passed the first thermos back to him. He was good at waiting. By the time the second thermos was ready, Arra’d realized that.

  She sighed. “The more energy manipulated, the more it takes of the wizard’s personal strength.”

  Tony nodded. That sounded reasonable. As he tucked the potion into his backpack, he decided not to make the obvious “you’re so strong” declaration. In the last twenty-four hours, Arra had destroyed a shadow, driven to Whistler and back, snuck onto the soundstage to watch him and Henry deal with the gate, spent the night away from home wrestling with personal demons—probably not literally, but he wasn’t ruling it out—popped into Tony’s apartment, shielded her speeding car from the cops, popped into her own apartment, and zapped two liters of potion. Energy manipulation levels: high. Wizard’s personal strength . . .

  “Give me a minute to change.”

  “Change?”

  “Clothes.” She tossed the word over her shoulder on the way to the bedroom, adding, just before she closed the door behind her: “You won’t make it out to the studio by 11:15 unless I drive, and I reek.”

  She was right. Not about the reeking—not by guy standards anyway although he had no idea how women her age defined reek—but about the driving. Sunday transit schedules sucked as far as hitting the burbs in a hurry.

  So, wizard’s personal strength: energizer bunny levels.

  In fact, ever since he’d reminded her about the cats it had been like he’d pulled a plug and the momentum of that initial “oh, my God” was keeping her moving. The faster she moved, the more she did, the less she had to deal with the crap the shadow had called up when it touched her.

  Memo to self. Prepare for the crash and burn.

  And hope it didn’t happen at 80K.

  Or at 120K, for that matter . . .

  Both hands white-knuckled around the shoulder strap, Tony couldn’t decide whether he preferred eyes open or eyes closed. Eyes open, he could see his imminent death in a fiery car crash approaching and prepare. Eyes closed, he could pretend he wasn’t in a hatchback whipping diagonally through westbound traffic and occasionally, when things were tight, into the oncoming lane.

  He liked taunting death as much as the next guy, but since the next guy was a middle-aged and possibly old wizard from another world and there were still four shadows unaccounted for, all bets were off. She was worse than Henry and Mouse combined.

  “So do you always drive like this?”

  “Scared?”

  “No.”

  “Lying?”

  Like he’d tell her. “No.”

  “Good. To answer your question, almost never. But we’re in a hurry.”

  There were high spots of color on her cheeks—technically cheek since he could only see one. On the bright side: at this speed they’d be there soon. On the other side, the less bright side: any idiot knew that the more energy burned, the faster it ran out.

  He had to distract her or at least slow her down. “The other reason I was so jumpy . . .”

  “Jumpy?”

  “When you played pop goes the weasel . . .”

  “Wizard.”

  “Whatever. . . . in my apartment was that I’d just had a dream.”

  The eyebrow he could see, waggled.

  “Not that kind of a dream. A bad dream. I dreamed that the shadow was back in control and it took me through the gate.”

  “To Oz?”

  “To a room. It looked like a schoolroom or maybe a lab. There were books and blackboards with, I don’t know, equations covering . . .” When Arra hit the brakes, he realized distraction was relative. He tightened his grip as the car fishtailed across the wet asphalt and into a Timmy’s parking lot.

  When the squealing stopped—and he was 99% sure the squealing had come from the tires—when the only sound was the rain on the roof and the swish/click of the windshield wipers, Arra turned to face him and said, “Were there more than equations on the blackboards?”

  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.

  “Yeah.”

  “People?” The steering wheel creaked under her hands.

  Tony nodded.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them again, he knew he wouldn’t have to describe what he’d seen. She’d seen it, too. “You weren’t dreaming. Those were images the shadow left behind. While it controlled you, you touched its memory.”

  “I touched?”

  “Yes. It explains why the shadow-stain is stronger on you than the others.”

  Shadow-stain. Fucking great. Excuse me while I go home and soak my soul in cold water. And then he realized . . . “So that . . . what I saw, it was real?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who were they?”

  “The last two members of my order who stood to face the Shadowlord.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? You didn’t do anything.”

  “That was . . .” He sighed and sank back against the seat. “Forget it.”

  A light touch on his arm drew his attention back to the other side of the car. “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey.” He shrugged. “They were your friends.”

  “Yes.” A simple acknowledgment carrying an emotional payload that filled the car like smoke.

  Because he couldn’t look at her and because he had to do something, he checked his watch. Crap. 10:40. He’d just wanted to distract her, slow her down, not bring her back to a complete stop. “Arra, we have to get going or we won’t get to the gate in time.”

  “Right.” She fumbled the car into reverse and nearly backed over an elderly man carrying three medium coffees on a cardboard tray.

  “Did you want me to drive?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  A skateboarder flipped her the finger as she cut him off.

  “I’m just saying . . .”

  “Well, don’t!”

  They got to the studio at 11:02, only to find that the code on the soundstage keypad had been changed. Three sets of wrong numbers would set off the alarms. Tony remembered with one number to go and snatched his hand away from the pad. Alarms would bring police and with his luck Constable Elson would ride back into his life. “Can you do something about this?”

  “No.”

  “Can you pop inside and open it?” He knew the answer before she opened her mouth. Reaction had finally kicked in and her cheeks had turned an alarming shade of gray. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “This thing’s been the same since I got here.” The pad was off limits so he kicked the concrete foundation blocks. “Why are they fucking changing it now?”

  “They had to change the front door lock. It probably reminded them about the back.”

  “Fucking great. Hang on; you have a key for the . . . old front door lock. Never mind.” 11:07. This was going to be close. Actually, if he didn’t come up with something, it wasn’t going to be at all. “The carpenter’s door!”

&
nbsp; “The what?”

  “The big door they use for deliveries of lumber and building crap. Three of them smoke and they won’t want to keep locking and unlocking the door every time they want a butt.” He started to run and stopped when he realized Arra wasn’t beside him.

  “Keep going,” she snapped. “I don’t sprint!”

  “You’ll catch up?”

  “If you don’t move your ass, I’ll run you over.”

  Kicking up gravel, Tony raced around the corner and up the west side of the building. As long as she didn’t ditch him again . . .

  The carpenter’s door looked like a corrugated section of the wall. Because the tracks were hidden and the latch had been painted with the same dark brown antirust paint as the door, it was hard to find without knowing where to look. Deliberately so.

  And it looked like it weighed a fucking ton.

  Fortunately, it was already open about an inch. Tony hooked his fingers around the edge and threw all his weight against it. It flew open so fast it dropped him on his ass, the big door sliding soundlessly along its tracks until his dangling weight stopped it.

  Plus ten for maintenance. Minus several thousand for not warning a guy!

  He scrambled to his feet, stepped over the lower track, and left the door open for Arra as he ran toward the gate. At least two hammers were pounding out a staccato rhythm back behind the permanent sets that made up Raymond Dark’s office, but the dining room was finished and deserted. His back teeth beginning to vibrate and his hands sweating so heavily he could barely maintain his grip, he yanked the big lamp into position, threw a cable out of the box, and bent to make the connection.

  “And what the hell do you think you are playing at?”

  Shit! Sorge—no mistaking the DP’s accent. He’s probably here to work out the lighting for tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, knowing that was no help at all.

  “I am waiting.”

  Teeth gritted in an effort to keep his skull from blowing apart, Tony finished making the connection and straightened. The gate was about to open. All he had to do was turn the lamp on; he could lie about what he was playing at just as easily with the gate blocked. Easier. More easily? Bottom line, he could concentrate on the lie if he knew the shadows—incoming, outgoing, pogo-ing—had been stopped. But Sorge was between him and the lighting board and it didn’t look as if he was going to move.