Smoke and Shadows

by Tanya Huff

  Green eyes narrowed and Tony wondered just how much of that had shown on his face.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Henry, I told you, I’m fine.”

  “She attacked you.”

  Subtext: She attacked something of mine.

  Tony rolled his eyes. Jesus, Henry, get an afterlife. “I provoked her. I said some stuff that really pissed her off.”

  “But you said it in order that she reconsider her position.”

  “Bonus if she does it, but no.” As he remembered it, he’d been so angry, he’d been hitting out at the only thing available. “I said it pretty much just to piss her off.”

  “Because you have a death wish?”

  He elbowed the vampire lightly in the side. “Duh. I’m here, aren’t I?” He didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be safe at home, safely oblivious, eating nachos in bed and watching one of Lee’s old movies. He wanted his biggest concern to be about his pointless attraction to a straight boy. He didn’t want to be in charge of saving, if not the world, the immediate area and anyone who might have ever had anything to do with Arra Pelindrake. No one seemed to care what he wanted. “What time is it?”

  They were standing so close, he felt Henry lift his arm to check his watch. Standing in the soundstage with just the emergency lights on, he couldn’t even see his wrist, but Henry had an advantage in the dark. “It’s just turned 11:00.”

  “Do you hear anything? I mean anyone? Here.”

  “Only you. Your heart is racing.”

  No shit. “Just revving up for the fight.”

  “Of course.”

  They had the lamp, and the leftover potion, and a baseball bat picked up on the way home from work, and a certain small amount of experience in kicking metaphysical ass. They didn’t have a wizard—she wasn’t answering her phone or her buzzer—but they were as ready as they’d ever be. If that last shadow made a break for home, they’d stop it and if the Shadowlord sent new minions through the gate, solid minions, impervious to the light, they’d be facing . . .

  Crap.

  They knew they’d be facing a vampire. They knew what he knew. “They’ll come through prepared. Ready to take you out.”

  “I am not so easy to kill.”

  Prince of Darkness voice. Yeah, that’ll impress them. “But you can be killed.”

  “Not easily.”

  “But . . .”

  “You’ll have my back.”

  “Right.” Like that made it better. Tony shifted the bat to his other hand and wiped his sweaty palm against his jeans. “You know, this morning Arra was all ready to rush in and take her bat to the shadow-held. I wonder how she would have explained it, you know, after, while she was standing over the body. I mean, you can’t call smacking a coworker with a Louisville Slugger a special effect.”

  “She probably didn’t even consider that.” He could hear the smile in Henry’s observation. “She thought you were in danger and she rushed in.”

  “Using up her entire stock of helping out.” Tony, on the other hand, wasn’t smiling.

  “Did she tell you she wasn’t going to stand against the Shadowlord?”

  “Well, yeah. Right from the start she said she wouldn’t face him.”

  “And in the beginning she said she wouldn’t help, but she has.”

  “As long as it was at no risk to her; she’s always planned to run.”

  He felt Henry shrug. “Plans change.”

  “I can’t believe you’re defending her. She’s not here, is she?”

  “No. She’s not here.”

  “A minute ago you were all pissed off because she’d attacked me.”

  “The two things are unconnected.”

  Tony opened his mouth and closed it again, sputtering slightly as the dozen or so things he could say to that got tangled on the way out. When it seemed as though he’d been listening to nothing but his own ragged breathing for half an hour he muttered, “What time is it now?”

  “11:17.”

  “Is that all?” And then he realized. “No gate.”

  “Apparently not. I suspect our enemy has things to prepare.”

  That sounded reasonable. Not in the least comforting, or encouraging, but reasonable. “Why face you when he can come through in the morning when you’re out of it.”

  “Why, indeed.”

  “He can come through in the morning when it’s just me.” And as long as they were speculating . . . Tony lined up another couple of points as Henry moved the lamp back by the light board and rolled the cables. “He’s got to have learned that it’s harder for us to stop them when we’re shooting. All those people hanging around trying to create a television show really screws with the hero’s ability to defend against dark wizards invading from another reality.”

  Henry’s smile flashed white in the dim light. “A television hero would manage.”

  “Fucking television hero’s got fifty people behind the camera making him look good. I’m going to get fired. You know that, right?”

  “It’s not a given.”

  “Yeah, it is.” They fell into step, heading for the rear door. “Even if we save the world, I’m going to lose my job, lose my apartment, and end up turning tricks in Gastown. All of a sudden, I’m feeling a lot more sympathy toward season six Buffy.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “Twenty-first century, Henry; try to keep up.”

  At 9:30, Tony had vetoed the idea of breaking into the wizard’s apartment.

  “Look, if she doesn’t want to come, you can’t force her.”

  “You can’t force her,” Henry had corrected. “I can.”

  “And can you force her to fight when she gets there?”

  “You’d be surprised how many people fight when cornered.”

  “Yeah, like rats. She’s cornered now.” Frowning, Tony’d rubbed at his chest. “If we go in there, and if she’s home, she’ll fight us. If she wins, there’s no one to block the gate.”

  “Alone stood brave Horatius, but constant still in mind; thrice thirty thousand foes before and the broad flood behind.”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Horatius at the Bridge.’ Lord Macaulay.”

  “Fuck that. Just drive, would you.”

  So Henry had pulled away from the wizard’s co-op wondering what had happened to change Tony’s attitude toward her from acceptance to sullen resentment. Immortal patience was a godsend as bit by bit the events of the morning emerged. As he pulled into the studio parking lot, he’d learned about the new circular bruise in the center of Tony’s chest, purple and angry amidst the not-yet-faded leftovers of the earlier beating.

  With the gate unopened and battle delayed, he’d dropped Tony at his apartment and waited outside, out of sight, until he’d heard his heartbeat—too familiar to him to mistake—slow in the cadences of sleep. Henry could see from the street that all the lights were on and he’d snarled, frustrated by a battle that dealt in terror and left him nothing to fight.

  At 2:15, after a quick drive into downtown Vancouver, he followed another of the co-op’s members into Arra’s building.

  If the wizard had warded her door, she hadn’t warded it against brute strength. With the sleeves of his sweater pulled down to mask fingerprints, one hand on the door handle and the other up by the dead bolt, Henry gave a short, sharp push. The sound of steel flanges punching out of the wooden frame sounded like a gun going off, but he was in the apartment with the door closed behind him before any of the wizard’s neighbors had roused. From the hall, there would be no sign of forced entry.

  The wizard was not in the apartment; he couldn’t feel her life. He searched every room regardless. Who could say what a wizard’s abilities encompassed?

  The laptop was gone from the dining room table. In its place a stamped envelope addressed to Anthony Foster. On the envelope a Post-It Note that read, Vera, please drop this in the mail after feeding the cats.

  Henry set the note aside an
d carefully ran his thumbnail under the seal of the envelope. The cheap glue parted with a minimum of protest.

  A steady regard turned him toward the living room. Both cats sat on the sofa and stared disdainfully at him. Dogs always insisted on playing pack politics with his kind. Cats were smarter.

  “I need to know what she’s told him.”

  Zazu snorted.

  “If you expect me to believe that you’ve never made a morally ambiguous choice, think again. Cats are all about morally ambiguous.”

  Whitby yawned.

  He’d half expected the letter to be handwritten in flowing black script on thick linen paper, instead it was Times New Roman, 12pt, on 20lb white bond. There was no salutation or signature.

  I saw him win. As he advanced on the city, I cast the crystals and I saw he would win. I cast again, and again, and every time the Shadowlord was victorious. I tried to convince Kiril and Sarn to leave with me, but they refused. They refused to understand that there was nothing they could do—that they could not win. Fight for us, the people of the city screamed. Die for us. They walked out to their deaths and I opened the gate.

  Even after seven years, my sight is not so clear in this world, but every time I look, I see him win. What point in trying when loss is foreseen—although I no more expect to convince you of this than I could convince Kiril and Sarn.

  I can only hope that on some new world this will change.

  Now you know what I know.

  For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.

  “It’s not worth much,” Henry snarled, folding the letter back along its original lines. Then he stood for a long moment with his hand above the phone.

  Tony, it’s Henry. Don’t go into work tomorrow.

  Don’t be among the first to die.

  Wait until sunset when I am there to fight beside you.

  Their tie was strong enough that even at a distance he could make it a command, not a request.

  But he’d neither asked nor commanded it in the car as they drove away from the studio, both of them well aware of what the morning could bring.

  As much as Henry wanted to, he would not take Tony’s choice from him. He stepped away from the phone, hand dropping to his side. “The choices we make, make us,” he told the cats.

  Zazu snorted. Whitby yawned.

  Arra’s letter to Tony back in its envelope, back on the table, Henry slipped out into the night.

  Sixteen

  THE CARPENTERS had been called in at 6:00, Peter and Sorge together having decided that the location they’d intended to use for the streets-of-London-circa-1870 flashback was unsuitable owing to half a dozen junkies who flat out refused to move. A set, therefore, had to be built. By the time Tony arrived at 7:30, the scream of saws and the pounding of hammers could be heard all the way out to the craft services truck.

  As he came in through the open back doors, Charlie Harris, one of the painters, handed him a paint roller duct-taped to a broomstick and pointed him at five meters of plywood wall saying, “Get a layer of the medium gray down. I want to start airbrushing the stone on by 9:00.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “We’ve got time constraints here, bucko, and Peter said to use anyone who wasn’t either directly in front of or directly behind a camera.”

  “Bucko?”

  Hazel eyes blinked myopically at him through paint-flecked glasses. “You’re the production assistant, right? You got something more important to do?”

  More important? Still a little thrown by bucko, Tony glanced toward the set under the gate and realized with horror that the nervous bray of laughter still echoing around the soundstage had come from him. “I’ve got to save the world at 11:15,” he announced. Well, why not? At least when the shit hit the fan, one guy might know enough to duck.

  “Christ, you’ve got hours yet, you’ll be long done by . . . Hey! Shit for brains! I told you to paint those doors matte black, not gloss!”

  As Charlie hurried off, Tony looked down at the roller and stepped up to the paint tray. It wasn’t like he had anything to prepare. The world’s last line of defense pretty much consisted of him declaiming, “You shall not pass,” and everyone knew how well that had worked out the last time. Oh, sure, eventually, it was happily ever after and all that, but first there was the whole falling through fire and dying thing. And if I die, I don’t come back.

  If I die . . .

  Die . . .

  “Hey, Foster! You want to get some of that paint on the wall instead of the floor?”

  Paint dribbled off the roller to puddle by his foot. Wet, it didn’t look much like medium gray. It looked like liquid shadow.

  “Foster!”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  Painting left him far too much time to think. Thoughts of the gate, thoughts of what might come through the gate, thoughts of what he might do to stop it, thoughts of whether Arra might or might not have screwed off and left him alone—mights and maybes and what ifs chased themselves around in his head, but he couldn’t get a grip on any of them. By the time he covered the last bit of plywood, he was so frustrated at the complete and total lack of substance that he was starting to look forward to the possibility of the Shadowlord’s army charging through the gate after Arra with swords drawn. One thing about an army, it made it easy to convince people that something was going on.

  Drop an army through the gate and at least I won’t be facing it alone.

  *Alone.*

  Fucking great. He knew that almost voice. There was still a shadow here on the soundstage! Whirling around, Tony tried to get a good look at his own shadow as it danced with his heels over the concrete floor.

  “Foster, what the hell are you doing?” Charlie glared at him over an armload of Styrofoam capstones. “If you’re done, get out of my way.”

  “I’m, uh . . .” Did his shadow look darker? Occupied?

  “You’re, uh, nothing. Haul ass over to the workshop and bring the box of sticks for this glue gun.”

  “I have to . . . I mean, there’s someone . . .”

  The capstones hit the floor; sticky hands closed around Tony’s shoulders and turned him away from the wall. “Workshop. Glue sticks. Now. And, Foster, if you’re having a nervous breakdown, I suggest you raise your caffeine levels and get over yourself. Today’s a bad day!”

  Tell me about it. It wasn’t in his shadow, he decided—the voice wasn’t clear enough for that or maybe it wasn’t enough in his head. Any kind of accurate description took a beating around this sort of shit. Relief mixed with apprehension as he hurried toward the workshop. If not in his shadow, where? Or, more specifically, who?

  Peter and Lee were running through phone dialogue as he passed the office set, Lee sitting with one thigh propped on the edge of the desk in what had become one of James Grant’s signature positions.

  “. . . is still good and evil is still evil and good people continue to do what they can to negate the effects of evil people. But it’s your choice, Raymond; I won’t make it for you. After all, you’re the one with the centuries of experience.” Moving the phone away from his ear, Lee shook his head. “Did that last bit sound as over the top listening to it as it did saying it?”

  Peter shrugged. “You’re talking to a vampire detective freaking out about a coven of aristocratic witches he’s just discovered he didn’t destroy back a hundred odd years ago; does it get more over the top than that?”

  Tony walked on as the actor acknowledged the point.

  “Three minute warning, people!”

  Across the soundstage, other voices took up the cry and construction noises began to drop off. With no time to either stop shooting or stop building, the day would be a patchwork of both, carpenters and painters playing statue as the bell sounded, and bursting into antlike frenzy the second after “Cut.”

  Glue sticks in hand, Tony got back to the office in time to see the first take of the scene.

  “. . . won’t make it for you. After all, you’re the one wi
th the centuries of experience.”

  “Cut!” As hammers and saws started up again, Peter stepped out from behind the monitor and walked as far onto the set as his headphones would allow. “Let’s do it again, only this time, put the emphasis on centuries instead of you’re and then put a little sharpness into the way you hang up.”

  “I’m mad at him?”

  “You’re not happy.”

  “Go from the top of the scene?”

  “Not this time. Start in at ‘morality hasn’t changed.’ ” Heading back, the director caught sight of Tony and beckoned him in. “Where’s your headset, Tony? Get it on and get to work.”

  “Charlie had me painting.”

  “London?”

  He thought about it for a minute. It certainly hadn’t looked like London, but this was television so who the hell knew? “I guess.”

  “You guess? Wonderful.” Stepping behind the monitors, Peter moved out of Tony’s line of sight. About to continue on his glue sticks delivery, Tony froze like a deer in the headlights as he realized that Lee had been watching him the entire time. Was, in fact, staring at him wearing the kind of speculative expression he’d been seeing on Arra of late.

  Honesty, or something more visceral, forced Tony to admit the expression looked better on Lee.

  But it did remind him that he couldn’t put off the Arra problem any longer.

  “. . . cowled robes, how hard is that? No, not bathrobes. Kind of a black caftan with hoods. Yes, they have to be black. Because it’s an evil coven, for chrissakes, not a freakin’ pajama party!” Amy hung up with a studied lack of emphasis and smiled tightly up at Tony. “That was Kemel. He’s in town trying to pick up our rental of a dozen cowled robes. But they can’t find them. And the six they can find are pink.”

  “Pink cowled robes?” Tony quickly ran through everything that had shot in Vancouver over the last couple of years and came up with zip. “Doesn’t wardrobe usually make that kind of stuff?”

  “Wardrobe is busy trying to make our one Victorian walking dress look like it’s not the same dress we used back in episode four. And, yes, we could rent, buy, or make another one, but since we already have one, CB wouldn’t approve the budget. Isn’t it amazing what you can do with trim. Did you actually want something or are you just out here hanging around?”