Charlaine Harris

by Night's Edge

  The string that stretched down the stairway was burning already, a thin line of fire through opaque black billows of smoke. The air burned in Maddie’s lungs, grit blinded her eyes. Somewhere she heard the sound Phil had described, the wild, despairing hammering of fists against a locked metal door. Screaming, a dim and far-off echo, like the wailing of storm winds above the guttural roar of the flames.

  They plunged down the stairs, through the holocaust of burning walls, flame-wreathed corridors below, desperately running for the next set of stairs. Swirling energies tore at Maddie’s mind, wild spirits of panic and terror, eternally trapped in the darkness and the flame. Maddie clung grimly to Tessa’s wrist, dragged her forward, following the burning streak of the string. She saw the flame race along the string ahead of them, as it plunged down the next flight of stairs; saw flame burst out of the walls, roar up in grabbing hands from the floor. The stairwell vomited smoke, hot wind pouring up it like a chimney, and in the smoke she saw him….

  The shadow she’d seen, whispering to her at the foot of the stairs.

  He blocked the stair below them, massive arms spread across it from wall to wall. His eyes were red, like the glaring eyes of the phantom rats. Nothing else of him could she see, but it seemed to Maddie, as she plunged down the stairwell toward him, that his whole body was formed of smoke, and of the writhing energies that he held twisted around his core. Beyond him lay the doorway to the real world, to the real Glendower Building as it existed in the twenty-first century, and the dingy glare of cheap electric bulbs, far off around the corners, framed him, illuminating the billow of the smoke.

  She flung herself at that ghastly shape of smoke and hatred, swinging the flashlight like a club. Instead of the solid impact of flesh she felt a burning jolt of energy, like an electrical shock that numbed her arm. Yet his hands were solid as they seized her, shoved her against the wall as Phil had shoved her, with a force that knocked the breath out of her. She felt his weight buffet her, twist her, felt his teeth tear at her flesh.

  Then Tessa dragged her free, and she heard the crackle and roar of energies as Phil slashed through the shadow of the ghost with the iron of the pry bar and hammer. Phil cried out, doubling over with shock and pain, but Glendower’s shadow had broken up. The next instant it re-formed in the burning air, even as Maddie and Tessa turned back, caught Phil as he staggered, dragged him down toward the lights of the sixth floor.

  I’ll get you! Glendower screamed. I’ll show you…. No one takes from me what’s mine!

  Phil stumbled, collapsed on the battered brown linoleum of the sixth-floor hall, and as Maddie bent down to drag him to his feet Tessa cried, “Look out!” Maddie raised her head and saw the glass windows of a nearby office door shatter, as if kicked by some monstrous energy within. Smoke poured out, red-stained by the flame that licked up close behind.

  Maddie turned back, horrified. Smoke and fire belched from the stairway to the haunted realm above, the flames spraying, burning on the many-times-painted wallpaper, the wood of wainscots and doors. Against the flame the dark shape of Lucius Glendower rose, fists upraised, shouting incomprehensible curses, and fire poured forth around him and into the remainder of the building that had been his.

  Maddie dragged Phil to his feet, thrust her shoulder under his arm on one side, Tessa supporting him on the other. His hand flailed, but Maddie felt the whole of his weight on them—smoke inhalation? The shock of breaking through the black energies of Glendower’s spirit? She gasped, trying to breathe and choking on the smoke. Somehow she dragged them on through the tangle of hallways toward where she knew the stairway down had to lie. In the smoke and darkness she could barely see the white line of the string, except where the blaze raced along the walls, seared in frames of fire around burning doors.

  I’ll show you! Glendower’s voice screamed behind them. I’ll get you!

  Tessa gasped, staggered, coughed, and when she fell the whole of her weight and Phil’s nearly pulled Maddie to the floor. Her eyes burning, her vision blurred, Maddie fell to her knees beside them. “Get up! Please, get up!”

  A dark shape emerged from the smoke beside her, reached down to drag Phil to his feet. Gasping, beyond speech, Maddie pulled Tessa up, hauled the younger girl’s arm around her shoulders, as a voice shouted something to her. She thought it was This way …but couldn’t be sure. Through the flaring horror of glare and smoke she could see the dark shapes of Phil and his rescuer following the line of the string, and she staggered after them.

  The lights were gone, the fire spreading below them from floor to floor as they stumbled down the smoke-filled stairwell. Maddie heard, far off, the wail of sirens, New York’s heroes to the rescue again. She could see nothing, only clung to the banister, wondering how she would or could make it down five floors. Now and then a gleam of reflected red light showed her the two shapes descending ahead, and once she heard Phil cough.

  He’s still breathing, she thought. He’s still alive.

  Dear God, don’t let him die.

  She glanced beside her at Tessa but could tell nothing in the superheated smoky black of the stairwell. Only, she could occasionally feel when the girl tried to help her, tried to walk, only to sag against her, gasping for breath. “Hang on,” she panted. “Please, hang on….”

  Light reflected from below, the glare of searchlights from the street pouring into the lobby mingling with the firelight from above. The groan and screech of pry bars in the door frame, the confusion of shouts, sounding far away still at the bottom of that long double flight of final stairs.

  The dark form that led Maddie stopped at the head of those stairs, lowered Phil down with his back to the wall. Maddie let Tessa slip down as well, stood with her hand against the wall, panting, getting her breath for the final descent. She turned her head to gasp something to the man who had helped her….

  It was Sandy.

  Sandy before drink and drugs had eroded him away to a man he himself would have despised. Sandy not as she’d last seen him on that cold metal table in the morgue, but as she’d first seen him, with a wry smile under his mustache and the old elfin gleam sparkling in the darkest eyes Maddie had ever seen. Sandy as he had always wished and hoped and wanted to be.

  He smiled at her, and held out his hand.

  With the amount of power and energy swirling around in the air—with the half-materialized forces Glendower had so long summoned into being—Maddie realized she shouldn’t be surprised. Of course Sandy would figure out a way to mooch some of those energies, to come to her aid—to pay her back for nearly a decade of bailing him out of trouble. To save the life of the man she now loved. In his life, she recalled, Sandy had never been anything but generous.

  She took his hand. Like Lucius Glendower’s, it had solidness and strength to it, and Sandy’s old lightness of touch. She said, “Thank you,” feeling no fear or shock. Only happy to see him…happy that he looked so well.

  He glanced down at Phil, then back at her, and grinned, the old shy Sandy grin. He stepped forward and kissed her, very gently, on the lips, his mustache tickling as it always had.

  Then he turned and stepped off the edge of the final flight down—like the Fool stepping off his cliff—and faded into darkness and smoke.

  DIANA WAS AT THE APARTMENT when Maddie woke up the following afternoon. Maddie’s memories of the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital were confused, due to shock and, she suspected, whatever the paramedics had given her while they were wrapping Phil and Tessa in wet sheets and dousing them with distilled water. She had a handful of sharp, clear images in her mind, like stills from a movie she barely recalled seeing: Phil propping himself up on his elbows on the gurney and saying groggily, “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to take a cab?” and, later, Tessa sitting next to her in the dreary ER waiting room while the triage nurses tried to sort them out from the cases of trauma, OD and gunshot wounds all around them—a typical night in New York.

  While the paramedics had been loading Phil and Tessa int
o an ambulance—Maddie huddled in the doorway of the Owl to stay warm—the Glendower Building had collapsed, like the Falling Tower, in a shower of flaming debris.

  “They kept Phil overnight.” Diana carried a plateful of kebabs and sarigi burma from the refrigerator to Maddie’s bedside. “Tessa’s gone down to help Charmian Dayforth try to talk the fire department into letting her salvage what records she can from the Dance Loft’s offices. I think she’s one of the few students who did. All the rest are evidently scrambling to find practice space to get ready for the ABA auditions tomorrow.” The white witch’s voice was wryly amused at this evidence of artistic dedication. “The building was nearly gutted.”

  Maddie said, “Good. It should have been gutted—and razed—ninety-five years ago. Let’s hope they’ll finish the job this time.”

  When the Tower fell, she remembered from some interpretations of the tarot deck, the prisoners within it were freed. Lucius Glendower, and the spirits of all those girls whose souls had fed his greed. Freed to their final crossing, and to whatever, for them, would come next.

  She sat up in bed, rubbed her neck, her arms. There were bandages where Glendower had bitten her, bruises where Phil had seized her by the arms. Her body felt as if she’d fallen down a flight of stairs, and her throat was sore as nobody’s business. “Is Phil all right?”

  “He seems to be.” Diana glanced at the clock in the living room, through the white sheet curtains that had been opened wide. With her gray hair wound into a topknot and the sleeves of her homespun dress rolled over powerful forearms, she looked like a samurai den-mother. “I went down to Roosevelt Hospital this morning and talked to him. He asked several times if you were all right, and Tessa. He said Glendower had ‘gotten into his mind’; he was afraid you would not forgive him.”

  “I hope you told him it was all right.”

  “I told him you had enough experience with the supernatural to understand what had happened. He said, ‘I’m not sure that’s the kind of experience you want to have a lot of, but I’m glad.’ He seemed very shaken up.”

  “Well, he just had it proved to him that the world isn’t put together the way he thought it was,” said Maddie. She picked a fragment of chicken off a skewer, held it out to Baby, who sniffed for a moment, then condescended to taste. “And so did Tessa…and really, so did I. It isn’t that I didn’t believe it was real, but…You can read about this, and hear about it, and even talk to people who’ve had experiences with the Other Side, but…” She shook her head at the memory of flame and darkness and smoke, of the cold brutal clutch of Lucius Glendower’s mind, and of Sandy’s farewell smile.

  She glanced shyly up at her teacher and asked, “Did he say anything else?”

  “To tell you that he loves you.” Diana smiled and wiped the sticky syrup from the Turkish dessert from her fingers with a paper towel. “He said, ‘Tell her I love her to hell and back, which I think is what we just did.’ I don’t know him well, but he seems to be a very remarkable man.”

  “I don’t know him well, either,” said Maddie. Baby climbed into her lap, settled down to washing her paws; there was great comfort in the soft black-and-white fur, the familiar presence. Maddie wondered if Sandy had ever appeared to his cat.

  She wouldn’t have put it past him.

  “I love him—I want him—but…how can you love someone you don’t really know?”

  “Of course you can. You loved Sandy, and there were parts of him that you never knew. And he loved you, enough to return from beyond the grave to help you—you weren’t his dupe, and his words of loving to you were not a lie. We love people differently at different stages of our knowledge of them. As love changes its shape and its nature, we have to decide what we’re going to do about that love on any given day. And on this given day,” added Diana, “your Philip may be out of the hospital already—the doctors said they were going to release him this morning, and it’s past noon now.”

  “They’ll release him,” said Maddie quietly. “But with the Glendower Building burned to the ground, I don’t think he has anywhere to go.”

  PHIL CAME THAT EVENING with Tessa, Tessa filthy with soot and exhausted, but determined to catch an audition prep class being given at one of the other studios. “I mean, like, everybody else in the school has spent the whole day prepping for the audition while I’ve been shoveling out files,” she said, emerging from the bathroom already resplendent in tights and leotard, winding her wet hair into a bun. “I’d like to know who Mrs. Dayforth bribed. Thank God I wasn’t trying to break in my new shoes last night, so the ones I lost were the old ones…. That sounds so cold, when poor Mrs. Dayforth just lost her studio. I mean, it was insured up the wazoo, but there were all her posters of herself, and mementos of when she was dancing…. Will you stay here tonight?”

  She turned to Phil, who was sitting on the end of Maddie’s bed devouring kebabs and couscous as if he were a starving man. He ducked his head a little and said, “I’m lining up a couch at Hobbsie’s place in Queens.” Maddie had thought she recognized the shirt Phil was wearing as belonging to the Dance Loft’s star male pupil.

  Tessa looked a little surprised, and Maddie said shyly, “It would be all right if you stayed here.”

  Phil scooted a last fragment of onion around the plate with an empty kebab skewer, not looking up. “Thank you. I figured you ladies would have enough to worry about, without me sleeping on your carpet.” He glanced sidelong at Maddie as he said it and added, “Right now you don’t need to spend your energy wondering if I’m going to turn into the Thing That Wouldn’t Leave.”

  Maddie smiled. “I trust you.”

  Their eyes met. Phil said, for her ears only, “That’s a scary thing to say. Thank you.”

  “Well, if you ever get tired of Beefcake on Parade over in Hobbsie’s apartment,” said Tessa, stuffing her shoes and a towel into a plastic grocery sack from a Chinese market in lieu of a gym bag, “the door is open here. We’ll even give you your own dish.”

  She and Phil left together—Phil had gotten a job playing for one of the audition classes at a studio in Brooklyn—and Maddie dropped at once into deep sleep untroubled by dreams of either Sandy, Philip or the nightmare that had burned to ashes on Twenty-ninth Street. She dreamed of flying, of dancing wreathed in clouds at the heart of the world.

  She didn’t see Phil until two nights later, at Tessa’s I-Got-Into-the-ABA! party at Al-Medina.

  Abdullah had offered the girls the Big Room, a long chamber two stories tall with a gallery around it that was never used these days. The curtained booths that overlooked the main floor were given over mostly to storage, or served as changing rooms for the dancers. Maddie and Tessa invited everyone they knew—the Dayforths didn’t come, having little use for belly dancers, but Quincy and Diana both did—and Tessa borrowed one of Josi’s pink veils and did the Spirits of Coffee Dance from the Nutcracker, to the music of flute and doumbek and wild applause.

  It was while Maddie was dancing that she saw Phil. He sat on one of the wall divans near the small band, a bottle of Moroccan beer in hand, watching with fascinated delight. Since this was a party and not a gig, Maddie was doing a sword dance, the curved blade balanced across the top of her head, a form of the art that she enjoyed but that was not much in demand. She caught his eye and gave him half a smile, sank to the floor in front of him—long, rippling movements of each arm, of the chest, the hips, the rest of her body still, the weapon on her head never wavering. The band gave her flourishes, to let her show off each isolated motion: her eyes touched Phil’s again.

  Do you understand?

  It’s all dancing. Skill infused with joy. Weaving jewelry out of dreams.

  He returned her smile.

  “YOU’RE GOOD,” SAID HIS VOICE behind her when she’d whirled herself off and climbed the narrow stairs to the curtained gallery booth she was using as a dressing room. She turned, still panting a little from the last frenzied drum solo. Saw him standing framed in the dim light of
the corridor, rumpled and a little tired-looking in jeans and a gray linen shirt.

  It seemed impossible to her that she could ever have mistaken Lucius Glendower’s shadow—or Sandy’s memory—for him.

  “So’re you. I played those CDs on my way back from a gig the other night—I never got a chance to tell you.”

  “I’m glad you like them. Thank God most of my stock, and the master tapes, were in storage. That music down there tonight—the rhythms they use, and the way they use them. I’ll have to try that.”

  “You’ll look great,” promised Maddie with a grin. “I’ll get Josi to lend you that little pink outfit of hers with the valentines on it….”

  The curtain fell over the door behind him and he crossed the booth to where she stood, with her back to a curlicued pillar. Put one hand on the wall on either side of her shoulders. Looked down into her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Do you?” His hand touched her face, slipped beneath the heavy swags of her hair.

  “I think so.”

  His thumb traced her cheekbone, her lips and her chin. Then lower, brushing the bruises on her neck and shoulder that she’d covered with an elaborate necklace of ersatz topaz and diamonds. “I never got a chance to say I’m sorry,” he said. “You know I’d never hurt you.”

  “I know.”

  “I love you.”

  She reached behind her hair and unfastened the necklace, the jewels sliding, glittering, over his hand and down her breasts, where he gathered them like a fistful of stars. She whispered, “It’s hard to say. It’s not something I ever wanted to feel again.”

  “You don’t have to say anything. Or feel anything.” He drew back from her. “It’s what I say. And what I feel. I’m not expecting you to do anything about it.”