Smoke and Ashes

by Tanya Huff

Tony nearly choked on his mouthful of fries and gravy and cheese curd. “You’re serious?”

  “It’s a…” Groves stared into his coffee as though he could find the missing word. Finally, he raised his head and met Tony’s eyes. “…curse.”

  “You know when you’re being lied to?”

  “I do.”

  He did. And more, he expected Tony to believe him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked as Tony frowned at the scuffed wood beside his bowl.

  “I’m trying to decide if beating my head against the table will be worth it.”

  “Why?”

  Because like drew to like. The Demonic Convergence was in Vancouver because Leah was there and the gate was there and he was there and—oh, yeah—Henry was there. Since he’d first met Henry, there’d been ghosts and werewolves and walking mummies….

  It was like murders always happening around Jessica Fletcher. Who the hell would want to live in the same town as a little old lady who solved crimes?

  Or never noticing a white van until you owned one and then they were all over the goddamned place.

  There was a gate to another world in the studio where he worked.

  The house they used for a location shoot just happened to be haunted.

  When Darkest Night needed a stuntwoman, they hired an immortal Demongate.

  It was like eight o’clock on the WB.

  And Kevin Groves, who knew when he was being lied to, was still waiting for an answer. Tony sighed. “I’m having one of those days.” Absolutely not a lie. “So let me guess…” He took a swallow of the milk. “…you went to work for the tabs because they’re the only ones who dare to print the truth?”

  “That’s right.” After a long moment, Groves rolled his eyes. “Now what?”

  “Sorry.” Tony blinked and started eating again. “Just having an MiB moment. You’d like the regular papers to print the truth?”

  “Who wouldn’t?”

  Good point. “Under your byline.”

  “I don’t do what I do for the good of my health, Mr. Foster. I’m a journalist.”

  Or he wanted to be seen as one, which, for all intents and purposes, amounted to the same thing. “So, are you saying Mason lied to you?”

  “Mason Reed believes everything he says.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  Groves only shrugged and took a long drink of his coffee. Waiting.

  He knows I have something to say or we wouldn’t be here together.

  He believes that I have metaphysical powers, that weird metaphysical shit is happening around the studio, and he’s looking for proof.

  Let’s not be too impressed by him sharing his lie detecting ability since I’m guessing he tells everyone. Of course he probably doesn’t expect everyone to believe him.

  Probably.

  “Yesterday, you said the words ‘Demonic Convergence’ like you expected me to know what they meant. Why?”

  Groves smiled. “Because I expected you to know what they meant.”

  “Why?”

  “Nope. You asked a question, now I ask a question. That’s how these things work.”

  Maybe it was. Almost able to feel the calories in the poutine winging off to various body parts, Tony pushed his empty bowl aside, laid his forearms on the table, and leaned forward, deliberately mirroring the reporter’s earlier position. “Not this time,” he said quietly. “I ask the questions, you answer them, and if I’m happy with the answers, maybe I’ll tell you some of what you want to know.”

  Groves started at him for a long moment, then he sneered and stood. “I don’t have to…”

  “Yeah, you do. This is your only chance, Kevin. Screw it up and you spend the rest of your life on the outside looking in. Knowing things are happening but never being a part of it.”

  Groves’ lips drew back off coffee-stained teeth. “Idiot. I want to expose it, not be a part of it.”

  Tony locked their gazes and refused to let the other man look away. “Bullshit.”

  “Everything okay here, gentlemen?”

  “Fine, Brenda. I could use a coffee now if you wouldn’t mind. And Mr. Groves could use a refill.”

  “He’s not leaving?”

  “No.” He sat down, hands shoved under the edge of the table a little too late to hide the trembling. “I’m not leaving. Refill would be good. Please.”

  Tony sat back feeling powerful. Feeling like a wizard in control. Feeling like he’d just kicked a puppy. A mangy, annoying, nippy puppy that no one liked but a puppy nevertheless. He shot what he hoped was a reassuring smile at Brenda, who frowned at them both as she set a clean mug on the table and then filled it before refilling Kevin’s. She frowned once more, just at him, before she walked away.

  “You thought I’d know about the Demonic Convergence because of what you believe I did last summer at that location shoot, right?”

  “Witnesses said you spoke with the dead. Witnesses agree you…”

  “Yeah.” Tony raised his hand. His right hand. No point in flashing the rune burned into his left at this point in the game. “I don’t need to know what you believe I did. Just answer the question.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Sullen but cooperating. Wanting desperately to be on the inside. With the cool kids.

  “How do you know about it?”

  “I was researching you, what you might be involved in…” Black masses and deals with the devil were strongly implied by his tone. “…and I found an old book in a used bookstore. It was written in German. I could read just enough to recognize that it was about talking to the dead, so I bought it figuring I could get it translated.” The sullen started falling away. Tony had a feeling that being taken seriously was a new and exciting sensation for Kevin Groves. “There was a piece of folded paper in it…except it wasn’t paper. It was vellum. You know what that is?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It’s a piece of calf hide tanned really fine for writing on. Point is, it’s old. Really old. On the vellum was a chart drawn up by some astrologer. He wrote that the powers would align to create a Demonic Convergence and the walls between the world and hell would thin. I took his calculations to the astrologer at the paper and she worked out the dates.”

  “Is she the real thing?”

  Groves snorted. “Not hardly. She’s got a Ph.D. in math, but she hates teaching.”

  Damn. Tony scrapped his idea of a metaphysical Justice League.

  “It’s happening now, isn’t it? The Demonic Convergence?”

  Why not? He’d already done the math. Or had the math done for him. Mouth open to admit that yes, the Demonic Convergence was in fact happening now, Tony got distracted by the sight of his own car driving by and turning into the studio lot. Then he realized that if Leah had gone back to her place for his laundry, of course she had to take his car.

  Then he noticed that there was a spot by the entrance to the parking lot where the rain wasn’t quite falling.

  Seven

  “WHAT THE HELL IS UP with you?”

  Tony ignored Kevin Groves yelling behind him, concentrating on getting through the traffic on Boundary without being killed. Wizardry wouldn’t keep him from dying under the oversized wheels of some guy’s SUV—or under the wheels of one of the new hybrids for that matter. He might be more environmentally dead, but he’d be just as dead. Horns blared, tires skidded sideways on the wet pavement, creative profanity blasted out of half a dozen open windows, but he made it to the other side alive. From the continuing sound of horns, tires, and profanity, Kevin was right behind him.

  Great.

  In about thirty seconds, deciding how much to tell him would no longer be a problem.

  Tony could see the headlines now: IMMORTAL STUNTWOMAN SLAUGHTERED IN BURNABY; DEMONGATE OPENS AND THE WORLD ENDS! Bright side—he’d be dead and someone else would be cleaning up the mess.

  He could see his car at the far end of the lot and thought he could see Leah twisted around, rumma
ging in the back seat. Then the driver’s side door opened and an enormous white-and-red umbrella emerged, tipped down to keep the rain from blowing up under the outer edge. Unfortunately, tipped down, it was also keeping Leah from spotting the anomaly moving across the parking lot toward her.

  Lifting his left hand, Tony called the umbrella. The demon appeared as nylon and wire and wood passed through the same space it was occupying, and Leah, mouth open to demand answers, had just enough time to fling herself back inside the car as claws struck sparks off the closing door. For a heartbeat the car filled with a translucent, naked, and very pissed-off Demonlord; then it was only Leah.

  Yeah, well, I’d be pissed, too, if my way back into the world kept ducking at the last minute.

  “That’s a…”

  “No shit.” Tony thrust Leah’s umbrella into Kevin’s arms. “You might want to get behind something solid.”

  “I don’t…”

  “Or not. Just stay out of my way.”

  Fortunately, the demon was intent on peeling his quarry out of her strange new shell. Where fortunately didn’t refer to the damage being done to his car. As he started focusing energy, Tony realized he’d pretty much run out of options. Another Powershot would use all the energy he’d regained and then some—the “and then some” was the worrying bit. He’d done a little gaming in his day and he knew what happened when stats fell into negative numbers. Leah’s runes were his best chance. He was pretty sure he could remember the first one and then, with any luck, the others would fall into line behind it.

  Except he couldn’t quite remember the first rune.

  Curves here. Crosses back. And there’s sort of a circle thing…

  Crap!

  The demon shot him a disdainful sneer over one shoulder—given the excessive teeth and the glowing yellow eyes, it was a pretty damned effective sneer—and then slammed its palm down on the window. The window cracked.

  He could hear Leah screaming.

  Fuck!

  No time to get this wrong!

  He wiped out half the glowing symbol, realized it now looked sort of like the word go…

  Palm against glass. A louder crack. More screaming…. and went with plan B. The rune on his left hand grabbed ghosts. Ghosts were energy left over when flesh rotted. Therefore, the rune should allow him to grab this energy.

  Grab it and throw it.

  The glowing blue go hit the demon between the shoulder blades and sucked into the scaled skin with a disconcerting sizzle.

  The demon spun around…

  H…shifted its weight onto two different legs…

  O…and charged.

  M

  Tony didn’t have to keep throwing the letters. The demon charged through them, no longer sneering, clearly intent on ripping apart this puny mortal who dared to interfere.

  Puny mortal? Where the hell had that come from?

  Sizzle.

  Sizzle.

  Sizzle.

  Too close!

  The world had not gone into slow motion. Too bad because he could have used a bit more time. Eyes locked on the charging demon, his breath coming fast and shallow; he was only going to get one chance. Panic lending speed, more focused than he’d ever been in his life, he scrawled the last letter in the air.

  E

  Not so much a sizzle as a ZAP. Like the world’s biggest bug hitting the world’s biggest bug zapper.

  The impact threw Tony backward as the demon flared a brilliant lime green and disappeared, leaving nothing behind him but a piece of smoking pavement and the smell of charred fish. It was over before his ass hit the parking lot, a large, deep puddle absorbing most of the impact.

  “What was that all about?”

  He could feel power racing over his skin as he peered up through the afterimages at Leah. “You’re welcome.”

  “It was kind of hard to see what you were doing…” Her voice grew shriller with every word. “…but those weren’t the right runes!”

  “They worked.”

  “They shouldn’t have!”

  Tony would have shrugged, but his shoulder hurt way too much and, from the line of warmth dribbling down his chest, he had a feeling the bandage had come loose. He should have felt like crap, but he didn’t. He felt invincible. It was like the way he knew where things were when he reached for them except…more. He knew where the whole world was. He knew where he was in the world. No. More still. He was the world. Just him, no backup singers.

  It was the most incredible feeling. There was nothing he couldn’t do, and no one could stop him. Without really thinking about what he was doing, he healed the puncture wounds in his shoulder.

  And was amazed by the new and exciting levels of pain.

  “SonofafuckingBITCH!”

  Then world was a big ball of rock again, and his place in it involved a puddle and a parking lot.

  “Tony!” Leah was right in his face. “What did you do to the demon?”

  “I told it to go home.”

  Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times. She took a step away. “Go home?”

  “Yeah.” Even on the lower mainland, October rain was cold. As the water soaked through the cheap polyester, his balls tried to climb up and sit on his lap. “You said it yourself, the demons don’t belong here. I sent it back where it belonged.”

  “It’s not that easy!”

  “It is if I want it to be.” Teeth clenched, he checked to make sure his arm still worked, then he got to his feet. “This is my world, not his.” No need to define the pronoun. “He may need to slaughter whole villages and draw complicated esoteric symbols, I don’t.” Rain ran under his collar and down his back. “Intent is nine tenths of the law.”

  “No, it isn’t!”

  “It is,” he repeated slowly and deliberately, “if I want it to be.” He could feel the world waiting for him. What was it Leah had said earlier? He was the round peg in the round hole and, here and now, it was a perfect fit.

  She shook her head, rain flinging from the ends of dripping curls. “It isn’t…”

  “Is.”

  “No.”

  “He’s telling the truth.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Leah snarled as Kevin Groves and her umbrella emerged from behind a parked van and joined them.

  Tony smiled. This might be fun. “Leah Burnett, Kevin Groves. Kevin is a reporter for the Western Star.”

  “The press? You brought in the press?” She grabbed a double handful of white and red and yanked the umbrella out of the reporter’s hands. “This is mine! Why does he have it?”

  “So my hands were free and I could save your ass. Again.”

  “Save my ass?” Her eyes widened and her posture changed subtly, her focus shifting from him to Kevin. “From a special effect? Don’t be silly.”

  “It wasn’t a…a special effect.” Kevin scrubbed his palms against his suit. Kind of pointless given that the suit was soaking wet, but Tony had to admire the fact that he was still thinking for himself. No other straight boy had managed as much when Leah turned it on.

  “Of course it was.” She moved a little closer. Tony amused himself by watching Kevin’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as he reacted to Leah’s proximity. “What else could it have been?”

  “D…demon.”

  Speaking of demons, Leah’s Demonlord seemed more present than usual. He noticed Kevin, frowned, and dismissed him—although Tony wasn’t sure how he knew that since Ryne Cyratane hadn’t actually focused on anything in this world. There was just something in the way he stared through the space Kevin was occupying that said, I know you and you mean nothing. Then the antlered head went up and his nostrils flared as he searched for…

  Me.

  He’s searching for the power that sent his demon home.

  But the Demonlord’s—attention?—slid right past him.

  Like I’m not even here…

  And he wasn’t, Tony realized suddenly, not according to the Leah-filter Ryne Cyratane exp
erienced the world through. He wasn’t reacting to Leah’s I’m an enormous metaphysical slut performance, so to the Demonlord he didn’t exist. Except that he obviously did since there was a demon back home blubbering about the big mean wizard who’d kicked demon butt. The Demonlord had come looking for the wizard but wasn’t finding him.

  Two possibilities.

  Straight woman. Gay man. In the far end of both options where there was no attraction at all to what Leah was offering.

  A kind of strangled moan jerked his attention back to the here and now. Offer accepted; lip lock commencing.

  “For crying out loud, get a room, you two!” Rolling his eyes at such blatant and public heterosexuality, Tony took four steps back and yanked open the side door of the van Kevin had been hiding behind. Peter never locked it. He was hoping some lowlife would jack it so that he could replace it with wheels a little less suburban.

  It wouldn’t be comfortable, but it would be private. Privater. More private?

  Leah, in spite of being quite clearly in the midst of giving a fairly thorough tonsillectomy with her tongue, acknowledged the open door, gave Kevin a shove, steered him through half a dozen stumbling steps, pushed him into the van, climbed in after him, and pulled the door closed.

  Let’s hear it for centuries of practice.

  Kevin yelped once, the muffled sound verging on desperate.

  All that adrenaline had to go somewhere, Tony figured, walking away. Leah probably just wanted to forget she’d been attacked by yet another demon and, more importantly, she wanted Kevin to forget the demon entirely. It was a more physical solution than Arra’s memory erase spell, but both parties involved had to be enjoying it more.

  He hadn’t even reached the back door of the soundstage when a shout stopped him in his tracks and he turned to see Leah emerging, adjusting her clothes.

  “That was fast,” he observed when she joined him. Not that he’d been moving particularly quickly or anything since every step sent reminders of extraordinary pain up from his feet to his skull, but still…

  “Tell me about it.” But she looked happier. Grounded. The familiarity of sex erasing the terror evoked by the possibility of death and dismemberment.

  Jesus, that’s profound.