Smoke and Ashes

by Tanya Huff

  “He’s not still your lord! He’s trying to kill you!”

  “Sure, now, but he’s been my lord for thirty-five hundred years. It’s not going to be an easy habit to break.”

  “And you like using his power.”

  “Well, duh.”

  Kind of a hard response to argue with. Tony wasn’t sure if he admired her honesty or was appalled by it. Bit of both, probably. He dropped his head into his hands and scrubbed at his face. “I took out demon-with-the-arm last night and red-and-toothy this morning, that’s barely twelve hours apart.”

  “No, it’s closer to twenty-four. Demon-with-the-arm acquired the arm the night before he attacked us,” she reminded him. “And look at the bright side, when you’re not sending demons back to hell, you can do your job and, more importantly, collect a paycheck. You couldn’t work or get paid if you were still following me around.”

  He didn’t really have an argument for that either. “My laundry is at your place.”

  Sensing the win, she smiled. “I’ll deal with your laundry.”

  “Yeah.” The edge of the Styrofoam cup flaked apart under his fingernails. “Look, the only way I can see ruling out that probably—as in probably the demons will come here first—is if you’re here with me. Then the demons will definitely come here first.”

  Her hand dropped to her side, and the smile disappeared. “Tony, I bled.”

  “So?” When he moved, the adhesive tape holding the gauze pad over the hole in his shoulder pulled at sensitive skin.

  “The demons can hurt me.”

  “Yeah, well, big scary killing machines, remember? You got off easy.” There were three deep scratches under his polyester pant leg. “We both did.”

  Leah’s eyes narrowed. “Are you being deliberately stupid, or did you hit your head harder than I thought? They’re the only thing in the world that can hurt me!”

  Ah. “So, given the chance, you’d rather they weren’t given the chance?”

  “And a second brain cell comes online!”

  He supposed he could understand her reaction. Except…“You came to me so that I could help you deal with the Demonic Convergence, and now you’re putting other people in danger.”

  “Oh, no!” Both hands went up, palms toward him. “Don’t put that on me. I came to you so we could spackle the weak spots and maybe deal with a few long-legged beasties that’d scuttled in from the closest hells. I never intended to face down demons. And people? People are in danger every time they step into the shower. Do you know how many household accidents happen in the bathroom? Should they stop showering? Or what about the chance of choking and dying? Should everyone stop eating? These demons are the only things that can hurt me, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable that I should avoid them!”

  “But they can’t only hurt you! You’ve lived for thirty-five hundred years; don’t you think shorter lives should be protected because they are shorter?”

  She sat back and frowned. “No.”

  Actually, he should’ve seen that coming.

  “Look, let’s forget about me for the moment and talk about you. You’re a wizard, and wizards pretty much have three options.” She flipped up a finger. “An ascetic life of learning.” A second finger. “World domination.” A third finger. “Or supporting the greater good. What’s it going to be?”

  “World domination.”

  All three fingers snapped down. “Wrong answer.”

  Was it fair that she could go for so long without blinking? Finally, he looked away and sighed. “Do I get a big red W on my chest?”

  “Why would I know about your skin problems?”

  “Just asking.”

  Her expression bordered on triumphant as she patted his arm and stood. “You really shouldn’t waste any time learning those runes. CB says you can stay here and use his office.”

  “Me? Where are you going?”

  “To get your laundry.” Tone and expression together suggested that if he was all that stood between the world and demonic domination, the world was doomed.

  “Right. Laundry.” He watched her walk to the door. “Leah?”

  She paused, holding the door handle.

  “What if you’re wrong? What if the next guy doesn’t come here first? What if it goes after you?”

  She chewed the corner of her lower lip, looking a lot younger than someone who’d seen her entire village slaughtered thirty-five hundred years ago. Then she tossed her hair back over her shoulder and smiled. It wasn’t a particularly believable smile, not when one hand dropped to rest against the curve of her belly. “Then I race back here and you get to be my hero again.”

  “But if…”

  “Tony, relax, we drove right past that demon this morning and it still came here first. Since I seem to have another option, I’m not going to spend the rest of the Demonic Convergence, however long it lasts, cowering behind you. Nor will I let this latest plan of Ryne Cyratane’s control my life any more than I let his first plan control me. You’ll deal with the demons; I’ll get on with living.”

  “And my life?”

  “Do you have a life that doesn’t involve your job?” Her wave gathered in the studio beyond CB’s office. “And, hey, here you are.”

  The door closed behind her. Tony stared at it a moment longer. He felt like he should have argued harder. If Leah stayed at the studio, then the demons would head here guaranteed, and he had a feeling there weren’t many guarantees in demonology. But even on short acquaintance it was obvious that Leah was all about having things happen for her, her way. It’d likely become habit after the first couple of millennia—right about the time she’d got out of the habit of relying on other people who inconveniently died just when they were needed.

  Still, at least she wasn’t cowering behind him. That was a good thing, right?

  The four sketches he’d made in the car were spread out on CB’s blotter. His weight on the edge of the desk, Tony picked up the least complicated and stared at it for a long moment, his thumb leaving a vegetable-soup-colored print on the paper. He raised his other hand. He focused. He picked his spot. He drew the pattern.

  Or not.

  The blue lines sputtered and broke apart, tumbling out of the air like fireworks.

  Tony braced himself and somehow managed to neither slide to the floor nor end up sprawling and drooling across CB’s desk.

  Afterimages floated across his vision. Blue sparks tumbling and falling. Tumbling and falling. Tumbling and…

  He swallowed hard, belched vegetable soup, and didn’t throw up.

  “Go me,” he muttered, staggering forward to stomp out a bit of smoldering carpet. Going actually sounded like a good idea. He needed food. Lots and lots of food.

  Who the hell had moved CB’s door so far from his desk?

  Since Amy’d never let him live down a little heavy breathing, he clutched at the door handle and tried to stop panting before he went out into the office. It was quiet. Too quiet. The hair lifted off the back of Tony’s neck…

  …and settled down again as he realized that Amy wasn’t at her desk. That always lowered the noise level. She’d probably sent Krista out to the soundstage to find someone and then, with the office PA still gone, had to deliver the next urgent message herself. Given the belt of red lights blinking across the bottom of her phone, she’d been gone for a while.

  Even though there seemed to be a perfectly mundane reason for the unnatural calm, Tony walked carefully out into the middle of the room, his heels barely touching the floor. Caution, yes, but also he had a suspicion that the wrong step would cause his head to fall off his shoulders. After the year he’d had, rhetorical statements became frighteningly possible, and he much preferred his head where it was.

  He could hear voices raised in the bull pen as the writers bashed the last rough edges off the season’s final script. It didn’t take much concentration to make out the actual words.

  “Because we need a little physical action here! It’s a
classic bit and it always gets laughs. We can’t lose!”

  It sounded like Mason was going to get nailed in the nuts again. The writers never got tired of slipping physical humor into the script. So far, Peter and the other directors had managed to keep this particular piece of physical humor from actually happening to their temperamental star, mollifying the writers with guest stars and bit players curled around their crotches and moaning. The writers had some issues.

  He could hear Rachel Chou, the office manager, talking quietly to someone in the small kitchen.

  “And just what, exactly, do you mean by that?”

  Mason’s voice boomed out of his small office on the other side of the main doors. Was he still with the press? And, if so, shouldn’t he be back on set by now? Tony tried to remember Raymond Dark’s call sheet for the day and drew a blank.

  He shuffled a couple of steps forward but still missed the reporter’s reply.

  Mason, however, had done Bard on the Beach and knew how to project above the sound of flapping canvas and not so distant traffic crossing the Burrard Bridge. One hollow-core door was nothing to him. “How dare you insinuate that about my fans!”

  Mason’s fans were predominantly middle-aged women with Web sites and frighteningly explicit imaginations. Less common were those who believed that vampires truly lurked in the darkness—beyond that, they couldn’t seem to agree on the particulars. Tony was fairly certain he’d never seen Henry actually lurk. Rarest of all were the fans who admired Mason’s acting.

  “My fans are the salt of the earth!”

  Who really talked like that? Tony wondered, moving closer still. Although, in all fairness, some of those Web sites had some pretty salty language, not to mention an interesting concept of male anatomy. Or at least of Mason’s anatomy. And, while he was hardly one to complain about hot man-on-man action, he was a little confused by all the Raymond Dark/James Taylor Grant stuff out there. Leaving the actors’ preferences out of it entirely, Raymond Dark was a tomcat with a new conquest every week and half a hundred tragic love affairs in his past. Even James Taylor Grant had buried one true love and staked another.

  Lee’d dated the second actress for a while until a chance to star in a remake of Time Tunnel had drawn her to Toronto.

  The door of Mason’s office flew open, snapping Tony’s attention back to the matter at hand. He barely had enough time to look like he hadn’t been eavesdropping when the star of Darkest Night made a dramatic exit—or entrance, depending on point of view—announcing, “This interview is over!”

  “Mr. Reed, you have to be aware that this show has been attracting an unhealthy amount of paranormal attention.”

  Tony knew that voice.

  “I don’t have to be aware of anything,” Mason snapped as Kevin Groves followed him out of the office. “And I very much dislike what you’re implying!”

  “Which is?”

  Lip curled, Mason turned on his heel and headed for the exit. “My assistant will deal with any further questions.”

  Groves blanched—which wasn’t surprising given his last encounter with Jennifer—and allowed Mason to leave unimpeded. Physically unimpeded. “I will discover the truth, Mr. Reed!”

  Even from across the room, Tony could tell Mason was considering whether or not he should respond.

  Please, not the Nicholson!

  After a long moment, Mason snorted and walked out of the production office.

  Tony released a breath he didn’t remember holding, then looked up to see Kevin Groves heading his way.

  “We need to talk.”

  About to suggest a biological impossibility, Tony suddenly remembered just what exactly it was about the reporter he’d wanted to pass on to Leah. Kevin Groves knew about the Demonic Convergence. Tony had to find out how much. “Okay.”

  Groves opened his mouth and then closed it again, looking confused. “Okay?”

  “But not here.” He had to work here and the last thing he needed was for someone to see them together. Where someone meant Amy. He’d never live it down, especially since his breathing was decidedly still on the heavy side. “I need to eat. We’ll go across the road.”

  Still clearly taken aback, Groves shrugged. “Sure.”

  “So let’s move!” Before Amy got back. Tony led the way out to the street and almost didn’t make it. Had that outside door always been so heavy? Groves reached past him, laid a surprisingly large hand against the glass, and shoved. “Thanks.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” If anyone saw them, he could just say he was doing a bit of follow-up damage control. It never hurt to know what Mason had told the press before the headlines made it onto CB’s desk.

  The green light barely lasted long enough for him to shuffle across Boundary.

  “We’re not heading to the Duke’s?” Groves asked as Tony turned and walked past the damp and deserted patio.

  “Man, you really are an investigative reporter, aren’t you? You don’t miss a thing.”

  “I thought all you guys always went to the Duke’s.”

  “Thought wrong.”

  The Duke’s was a gathering place for the various actors who made the Burnaby area their home, or at least their place of employment—actors, directors, producers, but seldom crew. Crew had their own place cut from the front of an old warehouse, three quarters of the building still used by one of the bigger studios for storage.

  “Okay, here’s the deal.” If he concentrated, he could talk without panting. “You only talk to me, and you keep your voice down.”

  “Or?”

  “Or you’ll never know what’s going on.”

  “You don’t look so good.”

  “Who asked you?”

  “I’m just saying,” Groves muttered as Tony led the way into the Window Shot, adding as they paused to allow their eyes to adjust to the gloom, “You’d think there’d be more windows.”

  “That’s not what it means.” He could feel Groves waiting for an explanation. Why not give him a freebie? “Crews used to get paid daily. They’d get what they were owed in cash from a payroll window after shooting ended, so the last shot of the day was called the window shot.”

  “And now you come here after the last shot of the day for the first shot of the day.”

  “You’re smarter than you look.” Bigger, too, Tony realized as they made their way across the scuffed tile floor to the empty booths under the single window. Tony was five ten; Groves was a couple of inches taller and broader through the shoulders. Not much meat on him, though, and the cheap gray suit did a lot to hide what size he had, as did the way he curled in on himself as though he expected to be hit. All things considered, not an unreasonable expectation.

  The booth smelled like beer and fries and damp clothes, but Tony felt a lot more secure with the dark wood supporting him. If he craned his head just right, and the traffic on Boundary cooperated, he could see the main entrance to the studio parking lot through the streaked glass. Leah seemed pretty sure that nothing would happen for a while, but he felt better being able to keep an eye on things. Even a minimal eye.

  “Tony!” The owner of the bar approached, drying her hands on a green apron. “What can I get for you?”

  “Large poutine and a glass of milk, please, Brenda.” Milk was like food. He’d seen a PBS program about it.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s healthy. And your friend.”

  “He’s not my friend,” Tony put in quickly before Groves could speak. “He’s a reporter for the Western Star.”

  “Ah.” One steel-gray brow rose as she turned and gave the reporter the once over. “That cover picture last week, the creature of the night? It looked like a raccoon in a Dumpster. You guys aren’t even trying.”

  Groves’ lip curled. “I have nothing to do with the cover photos.”

  “Yeah, I bet I’d have a little trouble finding someone who admits they do. What do you want?”

  “Coffee’s fine.”

  “M
y coffee’s better than fine,” she snorted and headed toward the kitchen.

  “Why did you tell her who I was like that?” Lacing long fingers together, Groves braced his forearms on the table and leaned forward.

  “So she’ll watch what she says around you.”

  “You think she knows things?”

  Tony shrugged and sucked air in through his teeth as the claw holes in his shoulder pulled with the motion.

  “What is it?”

  Pointless to lie about the obvious. Lies should be held against need when they could be camouflaged by bits of the truth. “I hurt my shoulder.”

  Behind the glasses, dark eyes narrowed at the straight answer. “How?”

  Tony’s turn to snort. “You were talking to Mason, how do you think?”

  “I can say you were hurt in the attack?”

  “Go ahead. I’m a TAD…” He remembered pain in time to cut off the shrug. “…no one will give a shit.”

  “You saw this deranged fan?”

  “Duh. You know it’s funny. You believe in all sorts of paranormal crap, yet you don’t believe that one of Mason’s fans could go bugfuck.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe…” He paused and leaned closer still. Tony got a whiff of mint and wondered, since there seemed to be no gum chewing going on, if it was a default odor. “I’ve met some of Mason Reed’s fans,” he said, “and it’s a short trip to bugfuck. But there’s more going on.”

  “More?”

  “Why are we here?”

  “I wanted some poutine,” Tony told him as the food arrived.

  Groves waited until they were alone again, until he’d emptied three creamers into his coffee, and said, “Why are we here together?”

  “You said we needed to talk.”

  “You agreed with me.”

  “You’ve been stalking us since August.”

  “Because I know when I’m being lied to.”

  “About what?”

  “Anything.”

  “Like creatures of the night?” Tony asked. His tone implied he couldn’t believe they were talking about stuff no one in their right mind believed in.

  “Yes.”