She had spun webs of control around everything she touched.
A vision from Christmas vacation came to her.
Mother might not remember the strings she had threaded through everything and everyone around her, but the image of it was clear in Opal’s memory, a horrifying truth revealed by her sister’s magic during a family meeting: their mother had bound her children, husband, relatives up in magic threads that trapped them in the family home; only Opal had escaped. She had moved out into the world and spun threads of her own.
Opal opened her hands and let go of all those controls.
She opened her heart, let it lie revealed, unprotected. Corvus’s whispers as he embraced her nudged her heart, as he drove into her, nested inside her. The edge of pain and yearning that rode him bumped into her heart, touched her own longing for something she had never yet found, wove into it. She found herself up against his heart as well, a large mass of all the colors of amber spiderwebbed in silver and gold, pulsing, with many chambers, slivers of secrets and wonders, memories and wounds, slender syllables of bliss and tiny grains of pain.
She slipped her hand inside his heart, let things flow across her palms and along her fingers. She tasted loneliness, longing, tenderness, fear. Solitude: long stretches of solitude.
“What are you doing?” he whispered. He had stilled above her and within her. His forehead rested on her cheek.
“I don’t know,” she said. Why had she thought it was his heart she touched? It wasn’t shaped like any heart she had ever seen in an anatomy chart, or even in horror movies where people ripped the hearts out of each other’s chests. She turned her inward vision toward what she had been thinking of as her own heart, and saw a landscape of walls. She went toward the first wall, looking for a door, but she couldn’t find one, so she climbed up the wall—it had things sticking out of it, sharp things, but she found a way up them without cutting her feet.
Why did she have feet, she wondered, when she was shifting across impossible landscapes? There was no reason she should be one form or another. She paused, standing on a wall in her own heart, and thought, usually I work with surfaces; but I have practiced greater shifts. I have turned my siblings into objects of convenience on occasion, though not often, and not after they got their own powers. I have changed myself in all kinds of ways, sometimes so much that I had trouble remembering what my previous form was. Now I want to be something that can fly above walls and see beyond them.
She stared down at hands that looked like the hands she wore in waking life, then glanced down at her breasts, her front, her legs beyond the slope of her stomach. She was naked now, three steps away from the coverall-dressed self she had been and still another step from the physical body she wore in the waking world. How many layers down was she? She had left Corvus in midquestion, but it was Corvus in memory, not in real life; she could pause a memory without upsetting anybody, surely.
Shift, she thought, and she turned into winged mist, a thin and less connected-to-itself creature. Eyes, she thought after a moment’s blind confusion, and she grew several eyes. She looked up, down, forward, backward, inward at the same time. It took a while to integrate all the visions into a coherent picture. The color of the sky had changed from standard blue to scarves of varied colors, blue, green, shades and nuances. Seeing many directions at once, vision was a three-dimensional experience. She was enveloped in sight the way she would be embraced by warm water in a hot spring.
She hovered above the courtyard protected by the first wall and saw a pale statue of a child in the center. The child had blind white eyes and short curls. It gazed toward the ground, its mouth in a faint frown, brows drawn together above its nose. The cloud that Opal was drifted closer to the child, saw her own features on the statue. Another younger, frozen self. She rose again and headed inward across the landscape toward another walled fortress. This one had a roof over it, but when she flew closer, she found that there were chinks in its armor; she flowed in through one of them and found herself in a chamber. Light shone in through the stained-glass walls, a mosaic of many different colors of red and dark orange, ruby, crimson, rust, coral, salmon, sunset colors. In the center of the chamber, on mounded velvet cloth, nestled a red jewel—or if it were a paler color, she couldn’t tell, because the colored light coming through the walls and striking gleams off its faceted surface stained everything it touched.
She drifted down to the jewel. How vulnerable it was to anything in mist form. She had built all these walls, but did they really protect her? In this landscape, people could be so many other ways than merely human-shaped. She had protected herself so far, though—or had she? She and her shadow had still not found out where Phrixos had gone or what he had done while she held him inside, and now she was layers deep into herself and didn’t know how to navigate.
She touched the red jewel. Passion flared through her, washed her up out of the walled landscape, back into Corvus’s arms.
“Stop slipping away,” he whispered. He braced her and pumped into her, and it sent her spasming over the edge into complete loss of control.
He smiled when she came back to herself. “How was that?”
“Terrifying.”
He kissed her, his lips soft. “Was anything about it good?”
“Are you fishing for compliments?” she asked, strangely detached from what had happened, but not outside of it anymore.
“No. I’m trying to learn you. Maybe next time I’ll do better.”
“Corr. This isn’t even real. I don’t think you’re real. I don’t know where we are, but look at these trees . . .” She lifted her head and looked, then gasped. She was back out in the real world, on the altar, with people and cameras all around them, and some of the people were waking up.
“I don’t claim to be an authority on reality,” he murmured, “but—”
15
“What the hell has happened to my production?” screamed the director, rising from a tangle of bodies in various states of clothed and unclothed just beyond the trees that ringed the clearing on the far side of the altar. “You! Put your pants on! Oh my gawd. Where are my pants? Oh my gawd. Where’s the damned publicist? Someone lock her up before any of this gets out! What—”
“Say, boss,” said George. “Is this a classic case of dope in the water or what?”
No one spoke. Neil found his clothes and hurried into them, as did anybody else who could locate what they or someone else had been wearing before the big meltdown. “All right,” Neil said at last. “Dope in the water supply.
That could work. Might even be true. Sabotage! Damage control . . . Loaders, I’m confiscating all the film we shot since—Juanita, when did you stop taking notes?” he asked the script supervisor, who was struggling to tie her hair back into a knot at the nape of her neck. It turned out she had a wealth of sleek dark hair, long enough to reach her hips. Opal had never seen her disarrayed before; she was in charge of keeping track of everything about the script—what was written before they filmed, what lines and angles changed in the course of filming, what time everything happened, and which take it happened on. She always wore her hair wadded at the back of her neck, with a baseball cap on top of her head.
Juanita buttoned her pants, tracked down her clipboard and a couple of pens from a scatter of things in the grass, then checked her watch. “Um,” she said. “We had just finished take nine, scene twelve C, reaction shots to Mom’s death. Another splatter misfire. One forty-five point thirty seconds. Three hours ago, boss. God.”
“Everyone? Everyone, listen to me absolutely. You are gagged about this. Talk about it and risk being blacklisted. We have to figure out what happened. We have to . . . we have to examine the film for clues. No one who wasn’t here is to know what happened. Understand?”
“But boss—”
“What did happen?”
“Who’s going to pay for it?”
“Some of us are working overtime now,” said one of the teamsters with satisfa
ction.
“If you call what just happened work!” Neil cried.
“Are you gonna?” asked someone else.
Neil growled, and then said, “That’s enough for tonight! To your scattered domiciles go, you wretches! Where’s my call sheet? Where’s my A.D.s? We’re going to have to redo the schedule for tomorrow, and you’ve got to let everyone know once we finalize it. The rest of you, clean up and clear out. Get off the damned clock!”
Continuity came by the set and shot pictures of everything there. Opal closed her eyes; Corvus lay quietly over her, shielding her from sight while keeping himself up on his elbows enough not to crush her. Her hand had settled just above his hip, and she left it there. The skin of leaves over him covered him everywhere. As Magenta had said, that wasn’t something Opal had ever put on him. Phrixos must have arranged it. Where was he?
People moved, shutting down equipment, turning off lights, wrapping set pieces in waterproof protection for the night. Still, Opal and Corvus lay entwined, the center of the scene as lights shut off, generators powered down, and people moved around them, eyes lowered. People still surreptitiously searched for lost articles of clothing and equipment.
“Hey,” said someone nearby. Opal opened her eyes and found Kelsi standing beside the altar. “Brought you some wardrobe.” She held up a big black robe, one of Dark God’s standard outfits, and a white covener’s robe.
“Thanks, hon,” said Corvus. “Could you drape the black thing over me? Maybe I can get up and wrap it around both of us. Not the first time I’ve been glad I have such loose robes for this role.”
Opal tried to remember what she had been wearing before the forest took over. Before she let it take over.
One of her green denim coveralls with lots of pockets, and those black boots. She could not remember getting out of her clothes again, but she’d been walking between several worlds. She wondered who she had left in charge of the body. She rolled her head and looked around as much as she could. No sign of her clothes.
Corvus rose, draped in black, pulled her up with him, edged awkwardly around until they were both sitting on the altar with scarves of black lapped around them from behind. Opal glanced down at her body and saw stone scrapes, bruising, bite marks she didn’t remember from the sex she had just had, awake, with Corvus, where everything had been a kind of gentle she wasn’t used to in sexual encounters. The marks must have happened during the earlier sex, when Other Opal was running things, and maybe Phrixos was around. If they got all that on tape—
She rubbed her face, reached inside for the healing she used to apply to scrapes and bruises on her siblings until they came into their own powers, and later, something she had practiced on the sly on various movie shoots. Usually on other people, not so much on herself. She didn’t take these kinds of risks.
Kelsi stretched up and handed her the white robe, and she shrugged out of Corvus’s embrace and slid it on, even as her skin repaired itself and bruised flesh healed. Power came easily. What had just happened hadn’t drained her. She wanted to go back to her study and check how much Flintfire she had left, how much power her Sifter Chants had stored for her, but then she decided maybe she better come into the world for now and see what needed doing.
She wanted to figure out what had happened in the clearing, not just to her, but to everyone. What had the thing under the ground accomplished, and why? Had they fulfilled its desire, or was this just the beginning? It must have wanted all that energy for some reason, all that procreative power. She didn’t know much about major ritual workings—that was not magic as her family practiced magic—but she had heard stories.
“Thanks, Kelsi,” Opal said as she belted the white robe. “What happened to you?”
Kelsi’s gaze dropped. Her head drooped. “I, uh,” she said, and red flushed across her forehead and cheeks.
“Sorry,” said Opal. “Shouldn’t have asked. I guess everybody knows what happened to me and Corr, huh?”
“Not all of us were paying attention.”
“Oh. Right.” Opal looked up at Corvus’s face, but he was staring past her toward the trucks. People were striking everything strikable. The security guards had arrived for the night so that they didn’t have to move all the equipment back to the parking lot by the old supermarket. The guards looked confused.
“Better get to the Makeup trailer and take this off,” Corvus said, stroking a cheek leaf.
“Right,” said Opal. She led the way across the battered grass to the trailer, part of her mind wondering if the girls, Gemma and Bettina, had made it back from wherever they had gone when the wave of orgy energy hit. Maybe they had done things that would scar them for life under the influence of it. Opal hadn’t done much memory mending, but she knew there were charms for it.
Uncle Tobias was supposed to arrive tonight. He could help. In fact—she checked her watch, then remembered she didn’t know what time to expect him.
In the Makeup trailer, Rod and Magenta had closed up their stations and were gone. The trailer was dark except for a nightlight by Opal’s station. Corvus settled into the big chair and Opal turned on more lights, snapped Polaroids of his head and shoulders and dropped them haphazard on the counter. “Does it even come off anymore?” she muttered to herself as she approached Corvus with her solvents. She wondered again what had become of Phrixos.
Corvus pulled his arms out of the robe and studied his chest and arms, leaved all over. These leaves weren’t the ones she had applied to him at the start of the workday. They hadn’t come off during the day, despite strenuous contact with other surfaces, including the altar stone and her. A memory of the leaves against her skin, rough, strange, smelling of autumn, abrading her like the scales of a dragon, chased through her mind and vanished.
She loaded a makeup sponge with solvent and lifted it, ready to press it against Corvus’s chest. “Shed, skin,” she whispered. She tugged gently at the edge of a leaf, and the leaf skin split and slid beneath her fingers, baring Corvus’s chest, its halves sliding off him like silk to pool around the chair in heaps. Detached, the leaves looked like net fabric painted with color, dull and dark on the inside. It was like nothing she had ever worked with.
“Wow,” she said. She touched his face. “Shed, skin,” she whispered again, and the mask split down along the middle of his forehead, the spine of his nose, the philtrum beneath, the middle of his mouth, the cleft in his chin. It fell apart in two soft halves and pooled above his shoulders against the back of the chair. She gathered the halves and placed them on her plaster cast of his head, where they welded together and formed the face he had just worn.
She looked back at Corvus, restored to his nonmonster face, his smile steady, his hair rumpled, a few leaves still caught in it. He looked like her Corvus, except for the resident green glow in his eyes.
“Phrixos,” she whispered.
He smiled at her with Corvus’s tenderness, then rose and stretched, settled his robe on his shoulders again. “It’s been an interesting day,” he said, in Corvus’s voice. “A pleasurable day, a profitable day in so many ways.”
“What did you do to us?”
“What did I do? People did what they wanted. I just gave them an atmosphere of permission, maybe a few nudges in the right direction.”
She shook her head. “No, I can’t believe everybody wanted to do that.”
“Why not?”
She flipped through memories, not all of them clear, of people in positions she’d never seen people in in real life, faces taut with pain or pleasure, the chant some of them chanted—nonsense words, or maybe not; words she didn’t understand. Maybe they had all done what they wanted. But if that was the truth, why had they fled, shamefaced, afterward?
“Why did you do it?” she asked.
He looked at her then, and she saw that he was completely Phrixos, though he had all of Corvus in his gaze and look, the parts of Corvus he hadn’t been able to successfully mimic before, tenderness and wry humor, sweetness, a
self-effacing air despite his size.
A shadow self hovered above him, huge, glittering, and beautiful. It radiated power and satisfaction.
The ground? She had thought the ground was quiet, but now she realized it was warm, almost hot, with a long, slow pulse.
“We were starving, sleeping, hibernating with no spring promised,” Phrixos said. “We lay here like husks a long long time, dreaming of waking. The girl came, the one who makes stories, with her promises of bringing others. She let us into her dreams. She listened to our story and took it out into the world. She told others and enlisted them into the service of the story.” He glanced around the trailer, nodded toward the location beyond the walls. He spread his hands, as though to indicate everything about the production. “Many people work to make the story take form. Now we are awake again.”
Opal pulled the covener’s robe tighter around herself and stared at the man in front of her. “You gave Bethany the first draft of the script?” she said.
“She used her own skills to shape it, but we gave her dreams to draw from.”
“The script is full of blood and terror and death.”
Phrixos shrugged. “She seemed to think it needed it.”
“So—no one has to die on the altar to satsify you in real life?”
“You and I have already done the necessary ritual there. Several times.”
“But you used Lauren’s blood, and Erika’s—”
“Blood has its own power. I do seek and treasure it. There are some doors it is a key to unlock.”
“What did you do to the inside of my head?” Other Opal had told her one thing about that—that he had left his own door into her there. Was that all? Maybe it was plenty.
He smiled and climbed to his feet, pulled the black robe up to cover his shoulders. “There are other hungers,” he said, pressing a hand to his stomach. “Let’s get something to eat.”
Fall of Light Page 21
