Smoke and Mirrors (45 page)

“I know.”

“He likes girls.”

“Yeah,
live
girls.”

“Tony!”

The good of the many,
he reminded himself and fought his way back to focus. The lantern slapped into his hand and he almost dropped it. “Son of a . . . !”

“Was it hot?” For a dead wardrobe assistant, all Brenda's sarcasm facilities seemed intact. “Did you burn yourself?”

Strange; still a third full. “Nearly. Thanks for asking.”

Hard to tell for sure, given that she was a gray sketch against the darkness, but she looked confused by his response. “I win in the end, you know. Me.”

“You're dead. Not my definition of winning.”

“He'll be dead with me. Dancing. Forever.”

“What? Lee dies after the thing's destroyed me? Not so easy as that.”

“Easier. You'd let Lee slit your throat or cave in your skull or rip out your heart and never lift a hand to defend yourself because it's him.”

The third option, maybe.

“But that's not what it waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaa . . .”

Hartley spun her away from the door. Danced her howling across the ballroom until she faded in the darkness, the ballroom door slamming shut in Tony's face. Slamming shut. He hadn't shut it. Maybe Brenda'd been about to tell him the secret weakness of the thing in the basement. Maybe she'd been about to taunt him with Lee's breakfast preferences. Either was as likely in Tony's opinion. Dead or not, Lee was still between them.

The same way Brenda would always be between him and Lee.

Except that there
was
no him and Lee, for fuck's sake, because Lee was straight—random kissage aside—and possessed by the thing in the basement. There'd be no Lee at all if he didn't get the lantern back to the butler's pantry and figure out a way to get him back.

Glaring down at the lantern—responsible for the delayed rescue—he realized the wick was almost burned away. Two turns of the wheel on the side and he was rewarded by a sudden increase in light. Eyes watering, he made his way back to the pantry.

Kissage.

Lee possessed by the thing in the basement.

Aspects of this were becoming frighteningly familiar.

As he entered the dining room, he caught a glimpse of something moving by the bottom of the door leading to the butler's pantry door.

Gray. Translucent. And rolling!

The gardener's head came out from under the table into the circle of light and rolled, wobbling, toward the entrance hall.

Eyes and ears for the thing in the basement. The only possible reason for it to be there—where the word reason was stretched to the limit. The head had been eavesdropping on the plan to free Lee .

Tony got between it and the door.

It smiled and kept coming.

It? He? Did a ghost head have gender?

Not that he had a choice.

He relicked the pattern onto his left palm and grabbed the head as it went to roll through his legs.

“Zev! Dump your backpack and bring it to me!” Yelling helped the pain. “Amy! Quick, another lipstick!” Although not significantly.

The pantry door slammed open.

“Tony? What the . . .”

“Your backpack . . .” Fingers pressing into the gardener's skull, he set the lantern on the dining room table and ran toward Zev. “. . . is it empty?”

Zev glanced down at the pack dangling from one hand. “Yeah, I ditched . . .”

“Tony, here!” Amy shoved Zev farther into the dining room and thrust another tube into Tony's free hand. “It's Tina's!”

“Zip the backpack shut and hold it up!” This lipstick was pale pink—easy to see the symbol against the black fabric and over the black plastic zipper. Easy to tell why Amy had disavowed it. With both Amy and Zev holding the pack steady, he finished the last curve. “Open it!” Slam-dunked the head into the pack. “Close it!”

The sides of the pack bulged, but the symbol held.

“More of the gardener?” Amy asked, breathing a little heavily.

“Yeah.” Tendrils of pain extended from his hand to his shoulder. “I think . . . I think it was spying on you.”

“On us?”

Peter's question drew Tony's attention to the doorway. It seemed that everyone but Mason, Mouse, and Kate were crammed into the narrow space, watching.

“Yeah, on you.” When expressions remained mostly skeptical, he added, “Can you think of another reason a head would be hanging around outside the door?”

No one could.

No surprise.

“Me, I seen better heads,” Sorge remarked thoughtfully. “More realistic.”

Tony stared at him in astonishment. “This head
is
real!”

The DP shrugged as he turned to go back into the pantry. “Maybe it's the lighting.”

“Weird that there's no weight,” Zev murmured as he held the backpack out an arm's length from his body.

“It's captured energy, not substance,” Amy snorted. She poked the bag with one finger. “You know, if people weren't dying, this would be so cool.”

“You'd think so. Can I put it down?”

Curled around his left arm, Tony nodded more or less toward the table. “Sure. Whatever.”

“Are you all right?”

“Uh . . .”

“Let me look.” Zev gently pushed Tony up into a more vertical position. His eyes narrowed. “That can't be good.”

Tony's hand had curled back in on itself and his lower arm was tight against his upper, tight in turn against his torso.

“How does it feel?” Amy asked.

“Like frozen flames are lapping at my skin.”

“Ow. Mixed metaphors. That's gotta hurt.”

Zev laid two fingers against Tony's forearm and snatched them back again almost immediately. Two red marks remained behind for a heartbeat. “This is just a suggestion, but I don't think you should grab anything else. This kind of cold is going to do some serious nerve damage if it hasn't already.”

“Just tell me it was worth it and that you have a plan.”

Amy picked up the lantern and led the way to the pantry. “We have a plan.”

“Really?”

“No. We've got nothing. But,” she continued as they stepped over the lipstick line and closed the door behind them, “I did find out that the thing in the basement has a name. It's A . . .”

Tony slapped his good hand over her mouth. “Don't! Names have power. We don't want to . . .”

“Attract its attention?” she snarled, dragging his hand away. “Because I think it knows we're here. I mean, ignoring the story thus far with us locked in and three people dead, it's sending body parts to spy on us!”

“Speaking of body parts; where's the head?” Peter asked.

“In the dining room.”

“Is that safe?”

How the hell should I know?
“Sure. It's contained. Look, you don't have a plan to save Lee, so we're going with mine.”

“Which is?”

“I'm charging to the rescue.”

“With a useless wing?” Amy snorted. “Good plan.”

His mouth twisted into something he suspected looked nothing like a smile. “Only one we seem to have.”

“Tony?”

It took him a moment to place the voice—he was getting just a little too used to ignoring people calling his name—and a moment after that to notice Tina holding out a pair of caplets on the palm of her hand.

“For your arm.”

“Thanks.” He swallowed them dry then drank half a bottle of water after, just because. Odds were good, they'd do nothing for the pain in his arm but what the hell, they couldn't hurt.

“There's what?” Adam wondered, frowning. “A crapload of ghosts in this building, right?”

“Given that crapload isn't an exact number, yeah.”

“So why is the thing in the basement sending the gardener to mess with us? He's in friggin' pieces.”

“Well, it's obvious.” Mason looked superior as attention turned to him. “He's a servant.”

Tony shook his head. “Lucy Lewis is a servant.”

“Yes, but she's all tied up.”

“The guy she pushed down the stairs . . .”

“Maybe the pieces take less energy to control than the whole body,” Amy suggested, her eyes gleaming in the lantern light. “If the thing in the basement is feeding off the energy of the dead, it's going to want to give as little back as possible.”

“I was just about to say that.” Mason's lip curled. He was still wearing Raymond Dark's teeth and Tony felt a rush of longing at the sight. If only Henry were here. Inside. Independence be damned, he'd give up control to Henry in a minute.

The heels of Mason's shoes thudded against the floor as he lifted his legs and let them drop. “Why am I tied up again?”

“You're not,” Peter sighed. “You're taped.”

“And I find I'm getting just a little annoyed about it.” He sounded annoyed. He sounded, for the first time in a while, like Mason Reed.

Her hands shoved deep into the pockets of his tuxedo jacket, Ashley padded across the room and crouched beside him, peering into his face.

“Your father is going to hear about this,” he muttered, struggling with the tape around his wrists.

Ashley's smile lit up the room. “He's back!”

“You're sure?”

“She knows,” Brianna sighed before her sister could answer. “She's in love. Makes me want to . . .”

Probably puke, Tony thought as Charles started yelling at the top of the stairs. Hurl, upchuck, and ralph also contenders. He slid down the cupboards and sat cross-legged on the floor trying to work some feeling that wasn't pain into his left arm. He had to believe Lee wasn't in any immediate danger. He had to believe it because Amy was right—in a way. It wasn't that he couldn't use his arm; it was more that until it stopped hurting quite so damned much, he couldn't think of anything else. No way could he maintain enough concentration to pull Lee into his hand.

Inadvertent imagery very nearly made him forget the agony in his arm.

The lights dimmed and the present crowded back into the butler's pantry, just in time for him to see Mason get to his feet.

“There's tape debris on my cuff links.”

“I'll help.” Ashley began picking happily at one sleeve, Mason watching her with an
it's the least I'm entitled to
expression.

A little more disconcerting, considering, was seeing Mouse on his feet, staring through a . . .

“What the hell is Mouse looking through?”

“It's the viewfinder off his camera,” Amy told him dropping down on the floor beside him. “Zev detached it when we were upstairs taking Bri to the can. Isn't it brilliant?”

“Isn't what brilliant?”

“Zev's idea. You know how cameramen are always walking into war zones with this weird idea that nothing they see through the camera can hurt them?”

“Yeah, and then they get shot.”

“Sometimes, but that's not the point. The point is, Mouse is a cameraman and now he has a camera to look through, he's completely stabilized.”

“He has a viewfinder.”

Amy shrugged. “Seems to be enough.”

Since Mouse was coming his way, Tony sure as hell hoped so. Large, bare, hairy knees poked out to either side of him as Mouse squatted.

“We have to talk.”

“Now?”

“No. When we get out.”

“About.”

The big man chewed on a scarred lip. “Shadows,” he said at last.

“Yeah. Sure.” He watched Mouse rise and move away.
And if I'm really lucky, I'll have to sacrifice myself to free everyone else.

“I'm not sure it's just the viewfinder,” Amy murmured. “I think the thing in the basement is pulling back, depossessing. I mean, Mouse seems fine and Mason's his usual arrogant nondancing self.”

“What about Kate?”

Kate was still taped and gagged.

“Well, we tried releasing Kate, but since there seemed to be a good chance she'd try to kill someone, we gave it up as a bad idea.”

“Funny that the thing in the basement's still holding on to her.”

“Yeah . . .” Amy picked at a bit of chipped nail polish. “I'm not so sure we can blame the thing. She's always been a bit . . . prickly.”

“Prickly is hardly homicidal.”

“Yeah, true, but now she's motivated.”

“Tony . . .”

He pushed himself up onto his feet as Peter approached. Had a feeling he needed to be standing.

“. . . we talked it over while you were ghost walking and decided that if you want to go charging down to rescue Lee, we'll charge after you.” Peter's gaze flickered over to Tony's arm and away.

Okay. Hadn't expected that. Apparently, all he needed to have done to be taken seriously from the beginning was cripple himself. A near concussion and a couple of magical brands were apparently no more than par for the course.

“You look all sappy,” Amy sniggered in his ear as Peter continued.

“Not all of us, of course. Tina will stay here to look after the girls . . .”

“And I'll be . . .” Mason trailed off, cleared his throat, and started again. Shoulders squared. Declarative. “I'll be helping her.”

“With these girls, she'll need the help.”