Smoke and Shadows (30 page)

He manipulated the snarl on a stuffed badger and frowned; he'd been with the show since the first episode and he couldn't remember them ever needing badgers. There'd been an episode with wolves once and an inadvertent raccoon on a night shoot but never badgers. It smelled funny, too—although that might have been the jar of rubber eyeballs propping it up. “It never looks this fake on the screen.”

“It's television, Tony. You've been in the business long enough to know that nothing is what is seems, it's all smoke and mirrors.”

“It
was
all smoke and mirrors,” he muttered, walking over to her desk. “Now it's smoke and shadows.”

“Very profound if a little obvious.” As he stopped behind her, Arra placed a six of diamonds on a seven of clubs. Four of the monitors showed games in progress.

“Don't you ever get tired of that?”

She shrugged. “When it happens, I switch to a mah-jongg for a while.”

“Don't you ever work?”

A snarl cut off her response and he whirled around to see the badger charge toward him—the force of its leap having knocked over the jar of eyeballs which hit the floor and shattered. Dodging away from tooth and claw, Tony's foot came down on something round that popped wetly. When he glanced at the floor, an eyeball rolled to face him, pupil dilating in the midst of familiar blue. Then he felt claws catch the back of his jeans . . .

“Yes.”

Badger and jar were back on the shelf. He supposed they'd never actually left it. Heart pounding, he clutched at the back of Arra's chair. “Yes, what?”

“Yes, on occasion, I work.”

“Right.” Straightening, he forced his voice back down to its usual register. “That wasn't funny.”

“It wasn't supposed to be.” She spun her chair around to face him, her expression serious. “If you're going to fight the Shadowlord, you'll have to know what's real.”

“You took me by surprise.”

“And he won't be e-mailing you his intentions. Your ability to see has cost him the element of surprise. It is your greatest weapon.” Gray brows drew in. “It's pretty much your only weapon,” she added thoughtfully.

“Great.”

“Probably not.” Reaching into her desk drawer, she pulled out a light meter and tossed it to him. “Here, gird yourself with this and get going or you'll miss the gate.”

“Right.” He bent and pulled a set of sides out of his backpack. “These are from yesterday. They'll have most of the names we need, you'll just have to pull the addresses out of the files.”

Arra snorted as her fingers closed around the papers. “Who put you in charge?”

Tony's snort answered hers. “You did.”

“Any particular reason she can't keep her knees together until we go to lunch?”

“She didn't give me one, Les.” Tony rolled the carbon lamp into position and picked up the coil of cable. “She just said she wants it done now.”

The head carpenter scratched at an armpit and sighed. “Whatever. You going to be long enough for me to do a little research?”

“I doubt it.” He flipped the cover off the light board. “How's the dissertation going?”

“Not good. ‘Pastoral Imagery in Late Eighteenth Century Amateur Poetics' just isn't enthralling me like it used to.”

“Hard to imagine.”

“Yeah. And the thought of teaching freshman English gives me hives.”

“You could always commit to a career in show business.”

Les snorted. “At the rates CB pays, it's not a career, it's a job. So, Sorge know you're using the board?”

“I have no idea.” Tony checked that the big lamp was the only thing plugged in, then stepped away, casting a critical eye over his work. With only one connection to get right there were limits on how badly he could screw it up. On the other hand, if he did screw up, he'd not only blow all the power to the building and destroy a very expensive piece of equipment he shouldn't be touching, not to mention an equally expensive light—resulting in him being unemployed at the very least—but also grant the Shadowlord unopposed use of the gate.
So, no pressure.
Without a clear line of sight, he squatted to peer under the loops of cable to check that the board was plugged into the grid and that this particular junction was live. When he straightened, Les was still standing there, clearly waiting for him to expand on his answer. “Look, if Sorge has a problem, he can talk to Arra. I'm just doing what I'm told; it's safer that way.”

“You getting paid for this?”

“No.” 11:07. Eight minutes, give or take, until the gate opened.
Les, go the fuck away!
“Just a little free on the job training. You know, learning the business.”

Les rolled his eyes. “Because some day you want to be a director.”

That pulled Tony's gaze up off his watch. “How did you know that?” He didn't think he'd ever mentioned it.

“Jesus, Tony, I'm hardly psychic; everyone from the meat on up wants to be a director. I got three guys in my crew working on scripts as a means to that end. Although one of them isn't looking past being a writer, God knows why.”

“Says the guy working on ‘Pastoral Imagery in Late Eighteenth Century Amateur Poetics.' ”

“Yeah, well . . .”

Les' voice got lost amid the rising vibrations in Tony's head. A dribble of sweat ran cold down his side. As his muscles began to tense, he reached out and, with his hand poised over the switch, paused. If something happened and Les saw it, there'd be another voice to cry warning. Enough voices and people would have to listen!

But if something happened and he didn't stop it, what then?

Could he risk another Nikki, another death, on the off chance that Les would see what a vampire, a wizard, and he had seen? No.
And why me?
he demanded as the vibrations pushed past the point of pain. He flipped the switch blasting the half demolished set with light.
I'm nothing special. I'm nothing supernatural. And I'm no fucking hero.

“Ah, Tony?” Les' grip on his arm dragged his attention out of his head. “Didn't Arra want you to take readings?”

Right. The flaw in the plan. In order to take any kind of believable reading, he'd have to get a lot closer to the gate. A lot closer to the source of vibrations ripping great jagged holes in his brain.

Unsure if he was holding the light meter believably, and not really caring, Tony followed the cable to the back of the lamp, took a deep breath and, with his eyes squinted nearly shut, stepped forward.

Oh, yeah, just what he needed; portents of doom from inside his own head.

Either the light levels were making his eyes water or his eyeballs had burst and the fluid was now dribbling down his cheeks. Either option seemed equally possible. His vision had gone not so much blurry as fizzy.

Tony thumbed the control to capture and hold the reading, turned, and realized he was directly under the gate. Not at the board, not crouched by Lee's side—directly under the gate. Every hair on his body lifted—not a pleasant feeling—and, unable to stop himself, he looked up. Light. And barely visible through the light, the ceiling. Beyond that, or beside it—there weren't really words to describe how the gate both was and wasn't there—distance. And at the end of that distance, something waiting . . . trying to see . . . trying to decide. Something cold. Calculating. Terrifying.

Then the lamp shut off and a heartbeat later the gate closed.

“Are you trying to blind yourself?” Les' voice boomed out somewhere behind him. “Even pointed up at the ceiling this big bastard's putting out enough lumen to do some damage.”

Tony swiped at the moisture on one cheek, realized his eyeballs were intact, saw that Les was waiting for him to say . . . something. “Uh, I got the reading.”

“Good on you. Now put this fucking thing back where it belongs and get the hell off my set. I got work to do.” The tone of voice suggested a deeper concern than the words.

“Right. Sorry.”

“Dumb ass.”

As Les called his crew back to the job, Tony rolled the lamp back along the path of its cable. With his stomach tying itself in knots, he quickly separated it from the board, secured the wires, and made sure everything was exactly the way he'd found it. Somehow, he managed to keep his hands from shaking too badly.

Outside of his conscious control, his shadow flickered around the edges.

Arra was just hanging up the phone as Tony walked down the stairs into the basement. She turned as he tossed the light meter onto her desk, looking him up and down. Her brows drew in as she completed the inspection. “You okay?”

He wondered what he looked like. Wondered if she could see the fear that had his guts in knots and stuck his shirt to the sweat on his back. “I'm fine.”

“Uh-huh.”

It sounded like she didn't believe him. Tough. He was fine. “No one showed up. Nothing came through. He's sitting up there considering things.”

“He?”

“The Shadowlord.”

Her frown deepened. “You felt that?”

“Not the sitting.” Dragging the second chair out into the middle of the room, out where the arrangement of the overhead fluorescents banished shadow, he dropped onto it. “But the considering, yeah.” He'd never seen anyone's eyebrows actually touch before. “What?”

“You felt the considering.”

“Yeah. I guess.” The noise she made was in no way reassuring. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Something!” he snapped.

“I'm just impressed by your sensitivity.”

She sounded sincere and even if she wasn't, he suspected he didn't want to know the actual answer. Slouching deeper in the chair, he shoved both hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Yeah, well, I'm gay.”

“So I've heard.” Twisting around, she plucked a piece of paper off her desk. “I made a few calls while you were gone.”

“On the phone?”

“There's an alternative I haven't discovered in the last seven years?”

“I just wondered why you don't do a locator spell or something.”

“Because if I locate them using wizardry and we don't stop them and they get back through the gate . . .”

“He'll know you're here,” Tony interjected into the pause. “Does it matter? There's only one of you here and you said that back in the day he wiped out the rest of your order.” Her expression didn't change, but her cheeks paled and Tony realized he might have put his foot in it. “I mean, it's not like he's going to be afraid of you being here.”

The presence he'd felt on the other side of the gate caused fear, it didn't feel it.

After a long moment, when it was quite obvious that Arra was seeing neither him nor the basement workroom, she sighed, blinked, and focused. “No. He won't be.” She held the piece of paper out toward him. “The names underlined in red are the possibles.”

Okay. If that's how she wanted to play it. Tony was just as glad to move on; a little more sitting around wallowing in the terror and he might start joining Arra's chant of
this is it; we're all going to die.
Good thing she'd gone into television because she sucked as a motivational speaker.

Thirteen names on the much longer list were underlined. He tried not to see significance in the number. “What about Alan Wu?” The actor's name wasn't only underlined, it had been circled.

Arra shrugged. “His wife says he didn't come home last night.”