Phrixos stood there, flushed from the heat, a towel wrapped around his waist. “I’m guessing you don’t own anything in my size.” He had used her deodorant and smelled like hot male mixed with baby powder. He reached for the black robe he had hung on the hook on the back of the door.
“I can at least clean it for you.” She held the robe and sent a Cleaning Spell through it that left it soft, clean, and scented like lemons and wind-washed sunlight. He smiled at her and pulled on the robe.
They went out and sat on the bed, facing Tobias.
Tobias set aside the script. “I believe the nature of your trouble has changed?”
“Yes,” said Opal.
“When I threw the auguries last night, there was urgency implied, and a suggestion to prevent something from happening. My sense now is that I came too late to stop it.”
“What did they say? Was it a dire reading?”
“The reading was muddled and confusing. It wasn’t dire enough to make me hurry. I was worried about you—there was a death threat—but here you are, alive, thank goodness.”
“A death threat!” Opal glared at Phrixos, who smiled and shrugged. She made a fist and tapped his bicep with it. “There was a death threat?”
“It depends on your definition of death,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“There was a death, I think—”
“Who? What else happened while I was out of it? Someone died?”
“You,” he said.
She punched him again. “What? I’m a walking corpse?”
“For a time you were alive with your walls down. A state you thought of as death, and so, for you, a little death.”
“Uncle?” she asked, turning to Tobias.
“Niece, you haven’t introduced us yet,” said Tobias.
“What?” She looked at Phrixos. Tobias had met Corvus on the Dead Loss set. But now he was speaking to a deeper reality. “My apologies, Uncle. This is—I am not sure, exactly. Some parts of him seem to be Corvus. A portion is an entity I call Phrixos, an agent for the local power that possessed Corvus. There’s another part, I think, that is the actual local power speaking for itself through him. Phrixos is capable of deceit, so I don’t know whether to believe him when he pretends to be Corvus. All of you inside the body of my boyfriend, this is my great-uncle Tobias, who has come to help me solve the problem you present.”
“To whom am I speaking?” Tobias said. Opal heard the undertone in his voice; he was asking a question with more than words.
Phrixos straightened, his gaze sharper, more alert, and then a level of character faded from his face, leaving him still sitting up, but different. Opal flattened her hand over his on his thigh. He flashed her a brief glance, then turned to Tobias. “Corvus Weather,” he said.
“Were you really here when Phrixos sounded like he was you?” Opal asked.
“Some of the time. It got complicated. He decided to bribe me instead of continually putting me to sleep.”
“Were you you while we—” She stopped, conscious of Tobias’s regard.
“Bribe you with what?” Tobias asked.
“Presence.”
“Explain,” said Tobias.
“Phrixos tells me I invited him in, but I don’t remember that. I was sleeping through my days while he walked around in my body and did my job. I woke up and time had passed. While I was asleep, he hurt my friends and colleagues, and used me to do it. I don’t understand much about this, except that most of what I’ve believed all my life isn’t true, and I have even less control over myself than I thought I did. Anyway, this visitor in my head figured out that Opal responds better to me than to him, so he lets me wake up for key parts of the day now. Sometimes he even tells me what he wants to do next, and gives me the chance to ask people for their cooperation, instead of him trying to force his plans on people.”
“Do you know what he wants and why?” Tobias asked.
“Sometimes I know a minute before he asks. I don’t have the big picture.”
Opal squeezed his hand. “Not even a little part of the big picture?”
“Some of the outlines. But he’s already told you some of that. They were asleep and they want to be awake, and now they have a bunch of people they can use to help them wake up.”
“Who are they?” Tobias asked. “The auguries—”
Corvus shook his head. “I don’t know enough. He guards himself from me. Also, he’s so different, even when I see some of his thoughts, I don’t understand them. They’re in a different language, or they happen at a different speed, or there’s an extra dimension I don’t grasp.”
“You get nothing at all?” asked Tobias.
Corvus bent his head. His hand turned upward under Opal’s, and his fingers closed over hers. “There’s a shine to it. It’s too bright for me to look at.”
“Is it something that hurts people?” Opal asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s—it might change people, but I’m not sure it’s supposed to hurt them. I would hope I could stop them from jerking me around if I thought it was going to hurt people, but since it’s unclear to me, I can’t—stand against it.”
“Some part of you understands it on a deeper level,” Opal said.
He shook his head while saying, “Maybe.”
“You’re not frightened of it.”
“I am, a little. But Opal—cliché, I know, but this gives me power beyond my wildest dreams. I had no idea any of this was possible. What you can do, and what they can do. I’ve been playing monsters for fifteen years, and I never believed in any of them except when I was being them. God.”
“What do you want power for?”
He hesitated, staring toward a wall. “I hit my growth spurt when I was around thirteen,” he said. “It didn’t all happen at once, but it came before any of the other kids my age got that tall. By the time I was sixteen, I was seven two, and no one else was my size. Nothing fit—clothes, furniture, doorways, social situations. People didn’t know how to respond to me, and I didn’t know how to get my body to work. I tried basketball, because that was the best typecast I could think of, but back then, I had no coordination. I retreated into quiet, studying too much, exercising on the sly at three A.M., when I could count on being alone. Most of the teasing wasn’t meant to be mean. The only girls interested in me, though, were looking for a freak, and that wasn’t what I wanted to be.”
He frowned. “One of my friends from the nature club decided he wanted to be a moviemaker, and he asked me to be the monster. At first I was really mad at him, but then I thought, why not? I loved being a monster, because I could take off the costume and turn back into myself afterward, pretend I was normal. When I made the jump into real movies, things got much better. Everyone involved in this business is weird one way or another, so they can accept me the way I am, pretty much. There’s still no way for me to step out into the regular world and not be noticed, and I—I can’t help wondering what that would be like. Phrixos says—” His voice trailed off and he stared down at his feet.
“That’s the bribe he offered you? He can make you shorter? I can make you look shorter, if that’s what you want,” Opal said.
“Can you?”
“Illusion is my business,” she said. “I can make you look like whatever you want.”
“But you never would have told me that.”
“True. Probably. I don’t know. If we got involved, I might have told you.”
“He offered first.”
Tobias opened his bag and pulled out a smaller bag, unzipped it to reveal compartments filled with different ingredients. “Maybe the auguries will tell me more, now that I’m in the presence of what’s been warping them.”
Opal stood. “Can we do that after supper? We haven’t eaten in hours.”
Tobias frowned. He opened one compartment, pulled out a pinch of yellow fragments, rubbed them between fingers and thumb, and tossed them into the air with a muttered phrase.
An image formed and faded. “I guess it can wait,” he said.
“If you can make me look like anything,” said Corvus, “make me look like a normal guy now. Let me try having a meal as someone besides me or a monster.”
Opal closed her eyes, so deeply tired she wasn’t sure she could handle anything demanding. She went to her study and checked her power reservoir. It held an assortment of shades of power. She held out a hand toward a streamer of blue that looked friendly and uncomplicated, and it rose from the array, touched her palm, slid into her. The blue power revived her, like three sips of water on a hot day—a temporary but convincing state.
She envisioned a Corvus shorter than the one she knew, shrank his features and his stature until he looked—strangely normal, almost nondescript. She decided to dress him in a brown sports jacket, pale blue shirt, dark slacks, and brown shoes. When she had the vision complete, she flicked it over the tall black-robed man in front of her and opened her eyes.
Corvus reduced: she wouldn’t have looked twice, except he smiled, and his eyes lit up, and then he was present in a way she knew and loved, from the inside. “Done?” he asked.
“Done. I haven’t changed your size, just how you look. You’ll need to be careful moving around; you take up more room than it appears. Or did you want the complete transformation? I’m not sure I have enough energy for that right now.”
“You can do that?”
She smiled, shrugged with shoulders and eyebrows.
“Let me see.” He rose, stared into the mirror over the dresser. His eyes widened. “Heavens. Do you see what I see?” He turned to Tobias, eyebrows up.
“Opal is very good at what she does. You look like someone I would pass on the street without a second thought.”
His eyes danced. “Let’s go out. I want to walk this one around. Possibly the most peculiar part I’ve ever played.”
In the elevator down, Opal tried to make sense of her impressions of Corvus. She was aware of the space he took up. He hovered over her, even though she looked at him and saw someone only an inch taller than she was, smiling at her. She refined the illusion to damp the space-taking vibes he was giving off. By the time the door opened on the lobby, she had made the transformed Corvus so convincing she believed his apparent size herself.
Tobias bumped into Corvus’s elbow as they got off; he had tried to occupy space Corvus was already using.
“Sorry,” they both said simultaneously. Corvus made his first frown in his new face. “I see what you mean,” he said to Opal.
“This might not be the best idea I ever had,” she said. “I should do the whole thing. I’m too tired, and it might hurt you, though. I was never big on total transformations, so I’m out of practice. My brother could do a better job.”
“Your whole family has skills?” Corvus asked as they exited the hotel.
“Opal,” said Tobias.
“Sorry, Uncle. Corr, we don’t talk about that.”
“I met a bunch of siblings,” he said thoughtfully as they crossed the parking lot. “I—” His eyes glowed green for a second. She would have missed it, but she was still studying the effect of her magic, still trying to reconcile what she knew and what she saw. “Oh, yes. There were three more of you, and two parents, yes?” he said. Though his voice hadn’t changed much, she knew Phrixos was the one asking.
She smiled and didn’t answer. She had four siblings; one hadn’t made the meeting. No need to correct Phrixos’s impressions. The less he knew, the better.
Corvus strode ahead to open the door to the IHOP for them. She brushed his arm without intending to. He shifted so there was no more contact.
It took a while for the waitress to notice them. Corvus smiled the whole time. The waitress was Jenny again, and she looked very frazzled. “You movie people?” she asked.
“Not right now,” said Corvus.
“Booth or table?”
“Booth,” said Opal. Less chance of someone bumping into the invisible parts of Corvus if he was in a booth.
Jenny waved toward a booth. It was next to the corner booth where Travis and Bethany were sitting, again, their laptops out, scripts scattered around. They both had headphones on and gave off an aura of not knowing the other existed. They frowned ferociously at their screens, unconsciously mimicking each other.
Opal wondered if they had been on location that evening. Maybe her party should sit farther away from people they knew. The waitress hadn’t recognized Opal from earlier—what casual acquaintance would notice Opal when Corvus was with her?—but surely Bethany and Travis would know her . . .
Corvus took her arm gently and steered her toward the booth beside Bethany and Travis’s. Tobias followed. Corvus moved in first, pushing the table out with what appeared to be air in front of his stomach. Tobias and Opal slid in on either side of him.
Bethany took off her headphones and tapped Opal’s shoulder. Opal turned to look at her over the back of the booth. “Hey, hon,” said Bethany, “whatcha doing here?”
“Need food,” said Opal.
“Were you on location tonight?”
Opal relaxed. “Yeah. You miss the whole thing?”
“Yep. We were right here, reworking some of the kid scenes. What the hell happened? No one answers their phones! But Neil came along and dropped a bunch of changes on us. He wouldn’t say anything, either, except the whole script is scrapped, practically!”
“Let me eat, and then I’ll try to explain it,” Opal said.
“Okay,” Bethany said, but she looked frustrated, and so did Travis, who hadn’t taken off his headphones, but was listening to their conversation. Bethany looked past Opal. “Oh. You’ve got company. I’m sorry. I’m being rude. But it’s like—he’s throwing out everything we did! He wants the movie to be romantic! Maybe with a brand-new female lead, but can he give us any background on the new lead? No! I can’t believe he’s throwing out everything we’ve done. What about all those days of filming? He didn’t seem to care whether he can use any of the stuff he already shot. He can’t have talked to the producers. When do they ever scrap everything? God, Opal, the whole thing’s going to hell!”
Jenny returned. “Have you decided?” she asked, poof-topped pen poised over her order pad.
Corvus ordered a club sandwich. Opal hadn’t thought to disguise his voice; the rich words came from his mouth, making the sandwich sound like luxury.
“Hey!” said Bethany.
He glanced over at her and smiled.
“No way!” Bethany said. “Corvus? How can that be you? What the hell?”
17
Travis tore his headphones off and stared.
“I’m not Corvus,” said Corvus. “I’m his shorter brother.”
“You sound just like him. It’s eerie!” Travis said.
“No, seriously,” said Beth, “how the hell are you doing that?”
Corvus drank coffee and smiled.
“This is my uncle, Tobias.” Opal pointed to Uncle Tobias. “Uncle Tobias, this is Bethany and Travis. They wrote the script for the movie. Dreams came into Beth’s head while she was visiting here, and she wrote from them. She grew up here.”
“Ah,” said Tobias.
Opal turned to Jenny, who was still waiting for their order, though her gaze had settled on Corvus. “Can I get one of those sandwiches, too? Tobias?”
“Just coffee,” he said. “I ate on the way.”
Jenny smiled, nodded, and headed for the kitchen.
“Stop jerking us around,” Travis said, “and tell us what you did to Corr.”
“I didn’t do anything to him,” Opal said. She had only altered the air around him; he remained internally intact.
“Corvus, how is that—what happened?” Bethany asked.
“Nonmovie magic,” Corvus said.
“What?” Bethany asked, her voice almost a whisper.
“It’s just an illusion, Beth. I wanted to see what it was like to look normal for once. So far, it’s very interesting
. I’m not used to being ignored. I rather like it. In the short term, anyway.”
“How could you possibly get that to work?” Bethany asked.
“Opal managed it. You do miss out on a lot, not being on the set,” Corvus said.
Jenny put a coffeepot and plates full of sandwiches on the table, and Corvus said to Bethany and Travis, “Excuse us, please. It’s been too long since we ate, and we really used up a lot of energy today—”
Opal socked the air near where his arm appeared to be, and hit an elbow. He flinched and smiled, so strange with his smaller face, nearer to hers. It made her wonder how the illusion worked; he could still use his face as an actor did, even though it was far from the face he actually lived in. She had worked with light to create his false self, but hadn’t noticed how intimately entwined this atmosphere she had created was with his actual person. She knew what she had done, and still she found him completely convincing.
Bethany and Travis stared at him. Then Bethany waved a hand, and she and Travis put their headphones back on.
“We can’t plan strategy here,” Tobias said.
“We’ll go back to the room afterward.” Opal ate. The first bite was bliss, the second even better. She had eaten half the sandwich before she knew it, and Corvus scarfed his even faster. She watched him eat. It really looked like the sandwich went into his illusion self’s mouth. How on earth was that working? She was a better craftswoman than she knew.
“Why are you staring?” asked Corvus.
“What does it look like from inside?” she asked.
“You’re staring at my chest,” he murmured. “Maybe this is what it’s like for well-endowed women. I’m imagining you’re looking into my eyes, and responding accordingly. Are we making eye contact?”
“Yes. I can’t figure out how the food gets into your mouth.”
“How strange,” he said, and stared at his empty plate. “I guess I’ve had enough.”
“You haven’t,” she said. “You’ve got a lot of self to maintain.” She handed him the other half of her sandwich.
“Thanks. I’ll eat it in the room.” He wrapped it in a napkin and made it disappear somehow. She couldn’t remember if his robe had pockets.
Fall of Light Page 23
