Smoke and Mirrors (21 page)

Amy looked in the same direction and frowned. “What?” she demanded, repeating the question again, significantly louder, when Tony didn't immediately respond.

With Brianna happily submitting to Zev's hairdressing, everyone now snapped their attention around to Amy.

“We're just talking,” she sighed. “Get a collective life.”

“Not entirely a bad idea.” Peter pushed himself away from the wall under the stairs and walked out to the center of the hall, visibly becoming “the director” as he moved. “Listen up, people, it's going to be a long night if we just sit here, so let's try and come up with something a little more proactive.”

No one spoke.

“You could kill yourselves now. Then you wouldn't have to wait for bad stuff to happen.”

No one except Stephen. Tony decided not to pass his observation on.

“Anyone?” Peter pivoted on one heel. “Adam? Tina? Sorge?” With two shrugs and a nontranslatable mumble as a response, he threw up his arms. “Oh, for God's sake, we create this kind of crap. If this was an episode of
Darkest Night
, how would we resolve it?”

“If this was an episode of
Darkest Night
,” Amy snorted, “we'd all be red-shirts. Well, except for Mason and Lee—because they've got to be back next week and probably the kids since the last one of us standing sacrificed him or herself to save them. The only sure thing about this many people trapped in a haunted house is that the body count is going to be high.” She swept a disdainful gaze around at her silent audience. “What? You know that's the way it would go down.”

“All right, fine. Maybe,” Peter snapped, over the chorus of muttered acknowledgments. “And now you've made your point, let's rewrite the script in such a way that we all survive.”

“Oh, a
rewrite
. You should've said. I think . . .” Black-and-magenta-tipped fingers tapped her chest somewhere around Hello Kitty's left ear. “. . . that if there's a thing in the house attempting to collect us, we should destroy it, thus freeing the ghosts and ourselves.”

New silence. Speculative this time. Tony was amazed that no one said anything about the
thus
. He, personally, was standing too close to comment safely.

“That sounds . . . simple enough,” Adam admitted after a long moment.

“Too simple,” Saleen scoffed.

“What? It can't be simple?”

The grip pointedly folded muscular arms. “If it's been around since before the house was built, how do we destroy it? And how do we even find it?”

“It's in the basement,” Tony and Stephen said simultaneously. “The caretaker warned me away from the stairs,” Tony continued on his own as Stephen made “fine, go ahead if you're so smart” faces. “And when I touched the doorknob, it gave me a shock.”

“Oooo, a shock.” Saleen recoiled in mock horror.

Tony ignored him; so far there'd been plenty of real horror to pay attention to. “The shock made a weird mark on my hand.”

“So let's see it,” Amy demanded, grabbing his wrist.

“Other hand. And it's gone now.”

“Convenient.” Saleen again. He was rapidly working through the goodwill he'd built up by waiting in the drawing room with the candle. Not that it much mattered, given he was almost as big as Mouse.

“What kind of mark, Tony?” Peter asked, brow furrowed.

“I don't know.”

“Big surprise.” And a change in the chorus as Saleen handed off to Kate.

“So.” Ashley moved out of Mason's shadow, stepped to Peter's side and folded her arms, sweeping the group with an expression eerily reminiscent of her father. “Let's go to the basement and kick ass!”

Adam joined her. “Works for me.”

“No.” Kate shook her head as she stood. “Do you really want to go face-to-face . . .”

“It has a face?” Amy asked him. Tony shrugged.

“. . . with something that makes people kill each other from a distance? You don't know what it's capable of up close!”

Saleen moved to stand by Adam. “Only one way to find out.”

“Fine.” Tina took Ashley's hand and pulled her away from the two men. “But the girls aren't going.”

Ashley's struggles only proved what almost everyone else in the room already knew. When Tina made up her mind, she couldn't be moved. Figuratively. Physically. “But it was my idea!”

“I don't care.” Tina's tone challenged and went unopposed. “The girls and I are staying here. I don't want to leave Everett alone again.”

Brianna seemed to be considering making a run for it but settled as Zev's hand closed on her shoulder. “Okay, fine, but if I have to stay with Ashes, Zev has to stay with me.”

“Then Mason's staying with me.” Still held securely by Tina's side, Ashley reached out her other hand and grabbed Mason's jacket.

“Mason's . . .”

“No, that's all right.” Mason twitched his jacket free but moved close enough so that Ashley could tuck her hand in his elbow. “If she needs me, I'll stay.”

Tony could almost hear responses to that considered and discarded.

“All right, then,” Adam declared, squaring his shoulders. “Who else is coming?”

“I'm not going near the basement.” Brenda's hands were back to performing a full-out Lady Macbeth as Sorge joined the other two men.

“Too obvious,” Mouse muttered.

“He's right.” Kate moved closer to her cameraman. “Why would it let us know where it is?”

“Why would it care?” Saleen demanded.

“Maybe it doesn't care if we know where it is because it wants us to face it,” Pavin said, getting to his feet. Tony wondered if the sound tech had always had that slight twitch. Was it endemic to the sound department? Although Hartley's twitch wasn't exactly slight . . . “It wants us down there in the wet with the wires,” Pavin continued. “Old, frayed, cloth-wrapped wires. And then, when we're all standing knee-deep in the flood, it'll turn the power back on and drop a wire in the water because if it can close the doors it can surely do that, and we'll all be electrocuted. Or one of us'll snap and pull the wire into the water, and we'll all be electrocuted. You know how you die when that happens? Soup.”

And that pretty much killed the charge to the basement.

“Okay,” Amy said after a long moment of soup-filled silence. “Then we protect ourselves here.”

“Wouldn't moving into an actual room make more sense?” Tony asked.

“In there with Tom?” Kate snapped, glaring at him.

Tina's glare was less personal but more potent for all that. “I'm
not
leaving Everett.”

Guess not.

“We need salt. Lots of salt.” Amy drew a vaguely circular shape in the air. “We draw a circle of salt around us and the evil can't get in.”

Tony was about to point out that, first of all, he didn't think the evil wanted in and, secondly, if it was permeating the house, it was kind of a moot point since inside the circle would be as much a part of the house as outside the circle when he realized the salt might calm a few fears and calm was a good thing. He'd be willing to bet that very few people went crazy calmly. “I saw some salt in the kitchen.”

He was starting to get used to the staring.

“You want me to go get it, don't you?”

“Not alone,” Kate muttered, brows drawn into a deep vee. “I don't trust you alone.”

“No one goes anywhere alone,” Peter amended pointedly. “It's not safe. Someone has to go with you.”

And a whole new silence descended.

“Me!”

“Me, too!”

“Neither of you,” Tina informed the sisters, who shuffled and muttered but obeyed.

“Oh, for . . .” Amy rolled her eyes with enough emphasis the gesture was visible even in the candlelight. “I'll go.”

“No.” Peter was as adamant as Tina had been. “You know what's happening . . .”

Hang on. Tony frowned.
He
knew what was happening. Amy just spent a lot of time on Web sites called
creepycrap.com
.

“. . . you have to stay here.”

He didn't much like the implication they could afford to lose him but not Amy. Not that he wanted to lose Amy, but he didn't much like the idea of losing
him
either.

“I'll go with him.”

Lee. It was the first thing he'd said since they'd left the drawing room, and Tony turned to stare at him in surprise.

“Lee, no . . .”

The expected protest from Brenda, but why the hell were Zev's eyebrows up?

“Look, someone's got to go and if Lee's willing, fine.” Peter waved down further protests. “We'll get nothing accomplished if we stand around arguing all night. Tina, lend Lee your flashlight.”

“I don't know.” She pulled it from her pocket and peered down at the purple plastic. “It's looking dimmer . . .”

“That doesn't matter. They can't walk and keep a candle lit.”

A valid point, but if the flashlight's batteries died, they'd be screwed, and given the way other batteries had been lasting . . . or not lasting . . . “Maybe we should take a candle anyway, just in case.”

“NO!”

Multiple voices, all unthrilled about the prospect of a night spent trapped in the dark.

The kitchen seemed farther away than it had been barely hours earlier. The flashlight was definitely dimmer, the circle of light Lee kept pointed at the floor in front of them almost a brownish yellow—like a dirty headlight. They were walking close together—for comfort, for security, Tony had no idea why—and the sleeve of Lee's tuxedo jacket kept brushing against his bare arm, lifting the hair on the back of his neck, then taking a direct route to his groin.

His whole body remembered the feel of the other man sprawled beneath him in the kitchen.

“This reminds me of a job I had in high school,” Lee said quietly, sweeping the flashlight beam up one wall, across the ceiling, and down the other. “I worked with the animal control guy clearing raccoons out of cottages in the spring.”

Tony glanced at the actor and snickered. “You worked in tuxedos?”

“Only if we had a formal complaint.”

That got the groan it deserved.

Back behind them, he could hear another argument starting up in the hall, but although he could tell it was an argument from the volume, he couldn't make out any actual words. They hadn't gone that far. He should have been able to hear words.

Their footsteps sounded strangely muffled, like the hardwood was absorbing the sound.

He felt like he should say something, discuss the situation, maybe bat around a few ideas for getting them the hell out of there, but he couldn't think of a thing to say that hadn't already been said.

“So, you and Zev aren't seeing each other anymore?”

Okay. That was unexpected. “Uh, no. We . . . uh . . . aren't.”

“But you're still friends.”

“Sure.” Not a question, but he answered it anyway.

“How do you guys do that; stay friends? I mean, if a man breaks up with a woman, they don't slide immediately back into friendship afterward.”

Tony snorted. “Are they usually friends before?”

“Not usually, no.” Lee sounded a bit rueful. “But you and Zev; I see you guys together and . . .”

“Is that a problem?” Tony asked when the sentence continued to dangle.

“What? No, of course not. Like you said: two consenting adults, none of my business.”

Had he said that? Oh, right, about Brenda. Who was not Lee's friend.

Ah, but
I'm
not fucking him.

He was still trying to figure out just what he meant by that and whether his answer had any relevance at all to his question when the light went out.

The jacket sleeve stopped stroking his arm as they froze in place.

The muted clicking was less than comforting as Lee turned the flashlight on and off. Finally: “I think the battery's dead.”

The darkness was so complete it had weight and wrapped around them like a heavy blanket. Eyes open, eyes closed, it made no difference.

“This could be a problem.”

“You think?”

“There's a couple of lanterns and some matches in the cupboard in the conservatory.”