Smoke and Ashes

by Tanya Huff

  “Come on, Tony. Into the car.”

  Leah’s voice seemed to come from very far away and she seemed taller. Or he had gotten shorter. And that would suck.

  “God fucking damn it!” Cracking his head on the edge of the car roof helped him focus. He collapsed into the seat and whimpered a little as Leah buckled him in. You know what needs seat belts? Fucking window ledges, that’s what.

  “This isn’t good.”

  She was sitting beside him in the driver’s seat and, since he couldn’t remember her going around the car, it seemed he’d lost a few minutes somewhere. She was looking at a dark stain on the palm of her hand.

  “Shit. You’re bleeding!”

  “No, Tony. You’re bleeding. It’s soaking into your jacket. That’s why I didn’t see it before. How badly are you hurt?”

  “I can’t feel the fingers of my left hand.” When he lifted them up into the light of the streetlamp, they looked kind of like sausages. “But that’s good I can’t feel them,” he added. “Because when I could feel them, they hurt like fuck.”

  “Let me see where you’re bleeding.”

  “I’m bleeding? Oh that’s just great. Henry’s going to kill me. He hates it when I waste…Um…” The word just wasn’t there. And then a good chunk of the world wasn’t there. Then what was left started beeping.

  Henry pulled up behind Tony’s car and was out of his own almost before the engine stopped.

  “The supplies you asked for are in the backseat,” he snarled, pushing past the Demongate and yanking open the passenger side door. The blood scent, no longer confined but spilling out to almost overwhelm the night, would have been dangerous had his anger at the circumstances not been so great.

  Scooping Tony up into his arms, he led the way into the apartment building.

  “Hey, Henry. I was just thinking about you.”

  “Were you?” Henry sat on the edge of the bed, his cool fingers gently gripping Tony’s jaw.

  “Yeah. I was thinking you’d…uh…” Interesting that it hurt so much to frown. “I don’t remember. But you were there.” His gaze flicked up over Henry’s shoulder to Leah and he snorted. “And you were there. And there was a wizard. Oh, wait. That was me.”

  Smiling, Henry released him. “Don’t frighten me like that again.”

  “You’re frightened of me misquoting The Wizard of Oz?”

  “You’ve been in and out of delirium for the last two hours. We were just discussing whether or not we should take you to a hospital.”

  “What happened?”

  “Apparently, you fell out a window.”

  It all came rushing painfully back. The window. The bush. The bleeding.

  And now?

  He was in his own bed, in his own apartment. His left arm was on top of the covers, forearm wrapped in a tensor bandage, the fingers an ugly shade of grayish purple and still sausagelike. With his right hand, he explored the gauze corset wrapped around his torso. If he hadn’t been to a hospital…

  “Leah does a decent field dressing,” Henry said, reading the question off his face. “We don’t think the wrist is broken, but you won’t be able to use the hand for a few days. What happened?”

  Duh. “I fell out a window.”

  “He got careless,” Leah muttered, stomping to the kitchen.

  “I didn’t.” Was her bad mood because she cared, or was that just lingering delirium talking? “The world tilted.”

  “I thought as much.”

  A little surprised, Tony turned his attention back to Henry. “You expected a tilted world? What? It was part of the whole Demonic Convergence thing? Next time, warn a guy.”

  “I expected something like this to happen. Not this specifically.”

  “Cryptic much. I thought you’d be more pissed.”

  “Oh, he was.” Leah reappeared holding a mug. “The anger and the yelling and the accusing me of trying to kill you went on for a while. Henry, lift him into a sitting position.”

  Tony wasn’t given a chance to protest, and it didn’t hurt as much as he expected it to.

  “Now, drink this.”

  Henry had to help him get his working arm out from under the covers, but once he had his fingers wrapped around the mug, they seemed to be holding. His mouth filled with saliva as he breathed in the meaty scent of the soup and he had to swallow spit before he could get to the good stuff. Since he didn’t think he’d survive another alphabet noodle out the nose, he drank slowly without being told.

  No one said anything until he finished.

  “There’s more.”

  “Good.” He passed Leah the mug. “I’m starving.”

  “Literally.”

  And back to Henry again. “What?”

  “You are literally starving. Your body is not up to the demands you’ve been making on it. That we’ve all been making on it.”

  “You haven’t been…” Cool fingers brushed the scar on his throat. “Yeah, okay, maybe a couple.”

  “We’ve been forcing a couch potato to run a marathon,” Leah told him handing him the refilled mug. “For the last four days, you’ve been using your power almost constantly. You’re not in good enough shape for this.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m serious. The world didn’t tilt, Tony. You fainted. Well, almost fainted,” she qualified, stepping back from the bed and folding her arms. “That’s why you fell.”

  “I almost fainted?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was remarkably unbutch of me.”

  “This isn’t something to joke about, Tony.” Henry pressed his palm against the gauze. “You need to rest, regain your strength, heal.”

  Tony glanced down at Henry’s hand. The gentle pressure remained just this side of pain. He was either saying, I don’t want you getting hurt. Or I’ll hurt you if you try to get up. Tony wasn’t sure which. “How long do you want me to rest?”

  “For as long as it takes.”

  “I can’t…”

  “You don’t have a choice,” Leah pointed out, sounding no happier about it than Tony felt. “Your body is setting the agenda now.”

  “Yeah, but there’s still two dozen demons coming through.”

  “Tomorrow,” Henry told him in a tone that suggested he not bother arguing, “Leah and Jack will go out and get detailed information on as many of the weak points as they can.”

  “Doesn’t Jack have a job?”

  “He has Sunday off. Amy will be here, sitting with you. Making sure you sleep and eat and don’t do anything stupid.”

  “Amy will be making sure I don’t do anything stupid? She attacked a demon with a candle.”

  Henry smiled. “Which is why we assume she can handle you. As soon as you can use your left hand again, you’ll be driven to the easier points. You’ll leave those in more difficult positions until you’re in better shape and, hopefully, by then they’ll be less difficult. CB thought using a location search to gain access to private property was a good idea. When we find out where the weak spots are, exactly, he’ll call in some favors if he has to. Lee’s willing to use his celebrity as a distraction when there’s no stairs for Leah to fall down.”

  “You’ve got everything planned.” Didn’t mention Kevin Groves, but Tony wasn’t going to remind him. He could think of a use for a man who knew a lie when he heard it and didn’t want that use to occur to Henry.

  He drank his soup. He slept for a bit. He ate a plate of eggs when he woke up. And he complained just enough to keep Henry from getting suspicious.

  On his way out of the bathroom some hours later, having stumbled out of bed and to the toilet without actually opening his eyes, he realized the apartment smelled like lasagna and patchouli. That gave him enough warning that he didn’t embarrass himself when Amy rose up out of his single armchair like the shark from Jaws rising out of the sea. Except it was a great white and she was all in pink-and-black plaid and…Okay, it wasn’t a very good metaphor, but he’d just woken up so tough.

/>   “Hey.”

  One of the kitchen chairs was closest to hand, so he sat on that before he fell down. “Hey, back.”

  “You look like crap.”

  “Funny, that.” His wrist ached, he had enough bruises he looked like the one hundred and second Dalmatian, and his stomach felt as if it was lying flat against his spine.

  Amy handed him a bunch of bananas and dropped into the other chair. “Henry said I’m supposed to keep feeding you whenever you wake up, but the lasagna isn’t ready so you’ll have to eat something healthy. Should you be sitting?”

  “Instead of?”

  “Lying down.”

  “Up is good for a while.” That was the best banana…best two bananas he’d ever eaten.

  “You’re not chewing.”

  “It’s a banana,” he protested around a third. “You made lasagna?”

  “Please,” she snorted. “I bought lasagna; family-sized and frozen. You fell out a window?”

  By the time he finished telling her the adventures of Wizardman and Stuntwoman, the food was ready. By the time he finished eating, he could barely keep his eyes open.

  “Hey, have Lee send Donna a signed picture, care of Seanix Tech, okay?”

  “For the third and final time,” she sighed as she lowered him onto the sofa bed, “okay.”

  The next time he woke up, his apartment smelled like chicken, and Amy was watching The Princess Diaries III. He must have made some kind of noise because without turning she said, “Yes, I enjoy movies made for teenage girls. Before you make something of it, remember that in your weakened state I can kick your ass.”

  Figuring he had enough going on with two dozen demons, he staggered silently to the bathroom.

  “How long was I out?” he asked, returning to his kitchen chair.

  “Almost three hours. I was just going to take the chicken out of the oven. Leah said this time you’d need food more than sleep.”

  “You cooked a chicken?”

  “Like it’s hard. The oven does all the work. You didn’t have a roasting pan, though, so I had to make one out of three aluminum pie plates, half a roll of aluminum foil and the lid off the jar of pickles.”

  He didn’t really want to know.

  “Jack called,” she told him while he ate. “They—not him but you know, they the cops—found the leg of that guard from out on Eastlake Drive halfway to the studio.”

  “The whole leg?”

  “Most of it.” She plopped another spoonful of instant mashed potatoes onto his plate. “I guess the demon got tired of carrying it. What do you figure; snack or weapon?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “Yeah. So you’re not going to have time to close all those new weak spots, are you?”

  “Not if I have to lie around here much longer.” Since he couldn’t walk to the can and back without holding the walls, lying around seemed like the best bet.

  “If you don’t take time to recover, Henry says you’ll die and then where will we be? At least with you alive when they come through, we have a chance. What do you think they’ll look like?”

  “Who?”

  She rolled her eyes. “The new demons, dipshit.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I’m curious, okay?”

  “Leah says the more human evil looks the more dangerous it is.”

  “More dangerous than that one we chased from the coffee shop? Damned thing had tentacles and claws and spikes and mouths in weird places and…”

  He held up a hand to cut short the litany. “Maybe it works better as a metaphor in this case.”

  “Ooooo, metaphors.” Burgundy lips pursed. “Someone doesn’t want to be a TAD all his life.”

  “I want to direct.”

  “You and half the lower mainland. Come on, sleepyhead, back to bed.”

  Next time he woke up, he definitely felt stronger. Still punctured, bruised, and unable to use his left hand, but stronger. There was a bit of blood soaked through the dressing on his side, but he could walk without holding the walls and he remembered to chew his food—at least as much as he ever did. He was back in control of his body instead of the other way around. But what would it hurt to give Jack and Leah the day to detail the weak spots? It would probably speed things up when he got back out there wizarding.

  While Amy spooned red Jell-O into bowls, Tony phoned Zev because he wanted to talk about something that wasn’t demonic, something normal. Too soon, he found he had almost nothing to say.

  Depressing?

  No shit, Sherlock.

  As the apartment grew dark, he realized he was running out of time.

  “I know that look.”

  “What look?”

  She cocked her head and snorted. “The ‘I’m about to do something stupid’ look. Henry said I’m not to give you your laptop.”

  It didn’t matter; he could call it to his hand no matter where it was.

  It didn’t matter; he didn’t want it.

  “I’m just going to lie down again.”

  “And sleep.”

  “Sure.”

  He closed his eyes. Concentrated. Twenty-four soon-to-be-arriving demons had a way of focusing the mind.

  He needed to find the square hole to his square peg.

  Or was he a round peg in a round hole?

  He couldn’t remember and wasn’t sure it mattered.

  If pain was a compulsory part of defining his place in the universe, he had it to spare. His wrist ached. Add it to the definition. His side hurt. Add it to the definition. His nose itched. What the hell…

  The universe began to take shape around him.

  There.

  No.

  There!

  This is pain. This is me. The part that doesn’t hurt, that isn’t me.

  And this is how those parts fit together.

  Ladies and gentlemen, we are the world.

  He really didn’t have much time, but a quick look around from this vantage point might pick up some useful insights. Allowing his consciousness to move out from his body, he brushed against Amy and smiled to see her spirit as a blazing tower of light. Kind of like six or seven of those big opening night searchlights all shining up at the same point.

  His wards were a gleaming crimson cage around the apartment, promising safety and danger simultaneously. Tony hoped they were supposed to, but what the hell did he know? Way too many of the last few scenes were being shot on the fly.

  Beyond the wards, another tower of light blazed so brilliantly he didn’t need contact to see it.

  Henry.

  Weird that a Nightwalker’s spirit would be so bright.

  Not weird at all considering it was Henry’s.

  Henry.

  Crap.

  No more time to play tourist.

  No more time to be an invalid.

  Sinking back into his own body, he took a calming breath and forced himself to relax into his place in the universe, his square and/or round hole.

  Hesitated.

  Remembered.

  Bad idea.

  Trying not to brace against the anticipated pain, he healed his wrist and the wounds the shrubbery had gouged in his side.

  And then he rode that distilled pain deeper. He could see the contradiction in using magic to heal the damage the use of magic had caused. He could also see how to get around it.

  His back bowed until only his head and his heels were touching the mattress. Just before he lost consciousness, he heard Henry’s voice and was glad Amy wouldn’t have to explain the screaming on her own.

  Fourteen

  TONY WAS HEARING VOICES. All things considered, that hardly seemed worth getting worked up about, so he lay there, drifting just below consciousness, and listened to the rhythmic rise and fall of sound. After a while, he realized there were words involved.

  Loud words.

  “I said he was no use to us injured; that doesn’t mean I told him to heal himself, and it doesn’t mean he’d liste
n to me if I had told him, so just back off.”

  A woman’s voice. He knew that voice.

  Leah.

  “I don’t see the downside, guys.” He knew that voice, too. Knew it better. Trusted it more. Amy. “Okay, he’s gonna have to pig out again and get his strength back, but then he’ll be good to go, and that’ll happen a lot faster than it would have taken for his arm to heal.”

  His point exactly.

  “Thank you,” Leah agreed.

  “This doesn’t mean I’m on your side,” Amy snorted. “I’m just saying.”

  “And what if, in his weakened state, his heart had given out? Or a blood vessel had burst in his brain? You couldn’t hear his body fighting to survive what he’d done to it. I could.” A new voice. A man’s voice. A really, really pissed-off voice. Tony had been thinking about maybe trying to open his eyes, but it suddenly seemed smarter to wait until Henry had calmed down a little.

  Leah sighed. “The point is, Henry, he did survive. He gambled and he won.”

  “He had no idea of what the stakes were.”

  “He’s trying to keep the world from being overrun by demons. He’s trying to prevent a mass slaughter of innocents. He knows how high the stakes are.”

  “And how could he have done that if he killed himself?”

  “But he didn’t kill himself! Have you always been such a pessimist?”

  Oh, yeah. That was going to calm him right down. Realizing that if he waited for Henry he’d be lying here all night, he forced his eyes open. Leah and Henry were facing off by the table. Amy stood a careful distance away, leaning on the counter.

  “Hey.” It came out less like a word and more like a cough, but it was enough to get the attention of everyone in the room. “I smell honey garlic…” He needed a second breath to finish. “…ribs.”

  Amy grinned. “Leah stopped for Chinese. You hungry?”

  “Star…” Catching sight of Henry’s expression, Tony decided that admitting he was starving might not be the best response. “I could eat…a horse.”

  “That’s too bad; she stopped at the good place.” Grabbing a towel off the counter, Amy opened the oven door. “I stuck it in here to keep it warm.”