“What’s important about this choice?”
Other Opal looked off toward the trees. An owl flapped out of the forest, crossed the clearing where they stood, and was gone. “We left home, and none of the rest of them has,” she said slowly.
“Yes,” said Opal.
“Since we left, have we ever asked for help before?”
“No. Well, just with Flint.”
“If we accept his help now,” said Other Opal, “we’re binding ourselves back to the family.”
“I never left all the way,” Opal said.
“From their perspective, it looks as though you’ve left.”
“I come back every year.”
“You’re the only one Mama doesn’t have bound to her with all those strings she laid on the other kids. We really got away from her.”
“Do you remember if Tobias was bound up in that web?”
Other Opal looked at her and they both thought. No, Tobias had not been tied to Mama with the network of threads she’d laced into the siblings.
“There are other ways of being bound,” said Other Opal. “That vision only showed one surface. Gyp was checking for what she needed to know. She wasn’t looking at the whole constellation. She most needed to know how Mama was controlling them all. Look now.”
Opal opened her eyes and studied Tobias, but he just looked like himself, waiting, maybe a bit exasperated, or maybe that was just his normal expression. His white hair still bushed up in an untidy bunch, and his face, though weary, was almost more familiar to her than her own, after all the hours of lessons and training he had put her and the other kids through. She had relied on him in many ways to be her compass while she navigated the world of her powers. She had used her skills and strength to care for her siblings when their mother hadn’t had the attention to pay them, and Tobias had been one of the powers who supported her in that. A surge of love and gratitude warmed her as she studied her great-uncle. She smiled, and he smiled back.
“Look again,” whispered Other Opal inside her. “Widen your eyes. Here. I’ll help you.”
Other Opal settled into Opal like a dream self coming home, blinked her eyes, and then Opal saw the world draped in webs and colors. Tobias was wrapped in ragged threads of silver and gold, the way he had looked under Gyp’s reveal spell, but beneath that lay a soft cashmere-looking layer of blue green, with strings that led away, including one that led from Tobias’s chest to Opal’s.
“Family ties,” Other Opal murmured, using Opal’s voice. Tobias, dimly seen through his wrappings, frowned and leaned toward her.
Other Opal pulled back from Opal’s edges and retreated to the forest, where they could talk without being overheard. “So the question is, do you want to lean on your family now, or stand on your own feet? You’ve been standing on your own feet for years. Do you want to slide back?”
“It’s not a final decision, is it? If I ask for help once, I don’t become dependent again. Or do I?” Opal had structured her life so she didn’t have to depend on anyone. She didn’t remember when that had become her goal. But even before she had seen an enmeshed vision of her family, she had felt that their mother was strangling them. She had burned herself out making sure that her younger brothers and sisters were okay, and then they had grown into their powers and gotten snotty. They didn’t want or need her help.
So fine, she had left and found other communities where she was necessary and appreciated. They were temporary communities, lasting the length of a shoot, but once one was gone, she could always find another. She had more job offers than she could accept.
Other Opal answered her: “I don’t know if it’s a final decision, but Tobias is making it seem extra important. You could tell him to go fuck himself.”
“Great way to ask for help,” said Opal.
“Look at the question he really asked. Do you need help, Opal?”
Opal thought about everything that had happened. The gradual shift toward what Phrixos and the thing under the ground wanted, and then the not-so-gradual shift. Everyone blinking and waking up after the orgy—a change that they had yet to process. Could she grasp the various forces at play and turn them back? Could she send the underground thing, the no-longer-dormant god power, to sleep, and make the world safe for moviekind?
She hadn’t bested Phrixos in most of their encounters. Had she truly tried? Did she have the power to control him, make him let go of the other people he’d laid claim to, Lauren, the girls, Erika, Magenta, others she might not know about?
“Do you like it when Tobias says you’ve spent your life preparing to be a handmaiden?”
“Not a lot,” said Opal.
“Who do you really want to be?”
All her life, she had built skills that made her a consummate helper, except those times in her teen years when she experimented with being a user, like many people in her extended family. Helper had felt better, and the fallout was pleasure rather than regrets and pain. She took care of people. She stepped in when a job needed doing and did it. She made people look better, or worse, or whatever way they wanted to look, and in Hollywood, that was a significant power.
“Who else could I be?” she asked.
“Mother. Builder. Witch. Fortune-teller. Wife. Sanitation worker. Wizard, baker, actress, seamstress, director, writer, musician, retail worker, teacher, nurse, president, cook, accountant, whore. Soldier. Folklore collector. What do you want? You could spend the rest of your life being lazy, or you could be a drudge, or you could turn into an animal and ditch all human responsibilities.”
“Huh.”
“It’s taking you a long time to make a simple choice,” said Tobias in her ear.
“There’s nothing simple about this choice, is there?”
“Do you want my help?” he asked. “Yes or no?”
“I don’t know if I can handle this on my own,” she said slowly. “What if I need your help, whether I want it or not? Is there something wrong with wanting to be safe and sure?”
“Set those questions aside and answer: do you want my help?”
“No,” she said.
He smiled. He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “All right,” he said. “Now that I’m away from home, I think I’ll do some exploring. I’ve taken a room in a hotel in Salem. Give me a piece of paper and I’ll write down the phone number. I won’t be in the room during the day, but I will check for messages. I may not be able to respond right away, but I’ll try to come if you need me.”
She dug a scrap of paper out of her messenger bag. Tobias wrote the name and number of a chain hotel on it. “Good luck,” he said, picked up his duffel, and left.
18
She sat alone in her hotel room for the first time in a long time. “What am I going to do?” she asked.
She went into the bathroom. The damp towels from her and Corvus’s impromptu shower were still neatly folded and stacked on the floor under the sink, and she didn’t have any fresh ones left for the next morning, but the steam had cleared off the mirror. She looked at herself, really looked at herself: violet eyes just like her mother’s, the gleam of gold in the soft brown of her hair, her clear features: her birth self, not altered in any of the ways she could have altered herself.
Her reflection doubled. Other Opal stood shoulder to shoulder with her, the nose, cheekbones, mouth the same, hair black with a white streak above her left temple, her eyes golden and softly glowing, lit from within.
“What’s our next move?” Opal asked her second self.
“What do you really want?” Other Opal said.
“I don’t know! I don’t know! You must know if I don’t, right? You’re all the me I don’t let out.”
“Not all of you. There are more of us; we have different jobs. Baby you is one, and—”
“Do I need to know this now?” Opal asked.
“Maybe not.” Other Opal smiled, a little sadly. “I asked you what we really want, and that’s a complicated question, because we want a bu
nch of different things. You’re the one who lives out there in the visible world, though, the one who has the riskiest job. What you really want is to go to sleep.”
“That’s what I want?” Suddenly Opal sagged, feeling the exhaustion of the day catch up to her. The shadows under her eyes darkened.
“Yes, but we can’t do that, can we? There are too many things left hanging. So I’ll help you.” Other Opal laid hands on Opal’s shoulders. Opal felt fire shift through her, burn away fatigue, energize her.
She hunched her shoulders, stared at herself, paused long enough to get a glass of water from the tap and drink it, then straightened again. “All right. Ready for our next move.”
“Do we want to do the job Tobias outlined? Put the god-let back to sleep?”
Get the movie back on track, make everything go back to normal? Wash out whatever memories people had of strange events? Turn back into Opal, shadow-person, attached at the hip to Corvus, with no current role outside of making him look like a forest god?
Sink into that comfort, that invisible existence. That would be okay.
Lose the friendships she had started with Magenta and Lauren.
Force Corvus back into his unmonsterlike self.
Warp a lot of images taken earlier in the day, make the orgy unhappen, quiet the exciting energy under the ground, relieve Bethany’s mind of all the dreams her home place had laid on her to make her write the script. Take the magic out of the movie.
If it had magic. She hadn’t seen any dailies. She wasn’t sure what the end product was going to be. She usually didn’t concern herself much with what the movie looked like when it was finished. She just made sure her work was done well.
This project would have been different if everything had gone according to plan. Corvus was her focus, and he had so much to do in this one. She wanted to see him on the screen in a role that would take him to a level where his talents wouldn’t be wasted anymore.
There was little chance in a movie like this there’d be any award-level recognition—most horror movies never got noticed by the Academy—but producers would see her work and think of her when they needed excellent makeup in films. They would see Corvus act.
Now, who knew.
Other Opal shook her shoulder. “Quit thinking about long-term career goals and get back to the present,” she said.
Someone pounded on her hotel door. Opal sighed and snapped back together, with Other Opal inside again.
She went to the door, wondering if it was Bethany or Corvus knocking. She opened it to find Neil.
“You’re the goddamned special effects makeup artist,” he yelled.
“That would be me, yes.”
“You’re not the producer or the D.P. or the A.D. You’re not anybody important. How come you’re now central to this godforsaken movie we’re stitching together?”
Opal crossed her arms over her chest. The fingers of her left hand tapped her right upper arm. “What do you want?”
He pushed past her into the room, slamming the door behind him. “Violating every order I gave when we started on this shit-spewing project, one of our cameramen took a digital movie of events this afternoon, and he gave it up when I threatened to fire him if he didn’t. Of course there hasn’t been time to process what was in the real cameras, but we took a look at his movie. George and Basil and I have been reviewing every shit-spattered thing that happened today,” he said, still at pretty high volume. Opal glanced at her watch. After three A.M. She wondered if anybody in a neighboring room was going to call the front desk to complain about noise, but then she realized most of her neighbors were probably crew, and would either recognize Neil’s voice or be out cold with exhaustion after the day they’d all had. “And even though we can’t quite figure out how, you have somehow become central to this bleeding project. My first impulse was to kick you off the film, because I don’t like having people around who can screw up my work. I’ve thought twice, because what started out as a nice little money-maker has the potential to turn into something wilder, something that could take off if we figure out how to frame it. So we’ve decided the thing to do is pick your brain.”
Opal sighed and sat on the bed. Neil dropped into a chair facing her and leaned forward, his hands gripping his thighs, his face thrust toward hers as though he were about to bite off her nose. “What the hell have you done to my film?” he yelled.
Opal took a breath and felt her Flintfire spark up. Suddenly her shield was back, a second and invisible skin. She laughed, because she hadn’t thought of the fire in terms of shielding her from a normal human assault, but she still felt better than she had without it.
“What are you laughing at?” Neil yelled, even louder.
“What the hell could I do to your film?” she asked.
“Rumor has it you’re some kind of witch,” said Neil, in a more conversational tone of voice. “After what I saw in that flaming handheld playback and what I know about where I’ve spent our special effects budget, I believe it. Of course, I absolutely do not believe in anything supernatural. I know how people get effects. I can debunk anything—one of the reasons I relish making monster films. Gives me a chance to see what fools these mortals really can be. But this afternoon, you—and he—and good Lord, the rest of us—Fran can say anything she likes about spiked water or hallucinogenic mold spores or some kind of hypnotism, but that doesn’t explain what I saw on the handheld.”
“I like the mold spores theory,” Opal said.
“I don’t give a damn what you like. Tell me what happened today, and whether you can make it happen again.”
Tobias had talked about the atmosphere of people believing what they usually wouldn’t. Atmosphere. Hmm. “I’m not making strange things happen. There’s a local power that’s doing it,” she said.
“What does that mean, a local power?” Neil jumped to his feet and paced the narrow aisle between the end of the bed and the dresser. “Politics? I’ve met the mayor in Lapis. Fran told me I had to make nice. Guy couldn’t sell shelter in a blizzard.”
“Do you have a religion?” Opal asked.
“Religion is for idiots. Will you quit stalling and get to the point?”
“All right. A local god wants to use your movie to get famous.”
“What?”
“He gave the writers the idea for the script. He influenced the choice of locations. That altar stone and all that, what did you think when you saw it? Those were naturally occurring rocks?”
“I thought the locals were very odd. I assumed some local lunatic built it for some weird thing they do at a harvest festival or something. Then again, the rocks are very solid, and—right, it was there already, wasn’t it? Even getting permissions from the owner of the site—Fran said it was dead easy.”
“There’s a god in the ground there, and people used to worship him, and he wants them to start up again. If the movie gets distribution, and people see it and feel even the slightest hint of belief, maybe he gets—”
“He wants the movie to succeed. He’s not trying to sabotage it,” Neil said. “Well, what the bloody hell was this afternoon about, then? That footage isn’t going to edit well with everything else we’ve done. What was the point? Was he trying to communicate with us? Are we reduced to hand signals and semaphores? Can’t we just ask him what he wants, and give it to him?”
“Well, we kind of can,” she said, “because he’s been possessing Corvus.”
“The god wants to fuck you! What’s it like being fucked by a god?”
“Do you want to try it?”
“Hell, yes, or the possession—no, cancel that, I don’t know what it means. It could be like a really bad drug and leave me a wreck. I don’t take chances like that anymore. But if he could possess Blaise—”
“Don’t even think it,” Opal said, her voice freezing.
“Why not?”
“Possession is a serious business for everybody concerned.”
“If it makes your boyfriend
more convincing in the part, then it’s a good thing . . . Hmm. The script is about an evil god who makes his followers suffer.” He dropped into the chair again and peered at her. “Are you suffering?”
“I think Bethany came up with the suffering part,” Opal said. “I don’t know for sure what this god wants his followers to do. The jury’s still out on whether he’s evil, though I’ve seen him do some things I thought were questionable.”
“If the god didn’t hurt people, would you support him? I’m pretty sure we can’t use most of what we shot this afternoon without going to a completely other market, but maybe there’s some other way we can salvage this. I mean, even though I resent him like hell, I have to confess Weather is a genius in the part. He could make this film, if we can finish it. I need a success. My last film tanked.”
“I don’t know what the god wants,” Opal said, “or if I’ll ever get Corvus back. Did you see what he did to Erika?”
“Erika? Who’s that? Oh, that p.r. bitch? What happened to her?”
“He laid her on the altar and drank her blood. Hell, you were there. You almost interrupted. But then Phrixos—” Phrixos had pressed Neil’s forehead. Neil had changed from a yelling tyrant to someone calm.
“Phrixos?”
“That’s what I call the entity possessing Corvus.”
“Phrixos. All right. What did Phrixos do? I don’t remember anything about this.”
“I guess he messed with your memory,” said Opal.
Neil looked thoughtful. “That doesn’t sound good. How was the woman afterward?”
“I don’t know. Right afterward, she was mad about it, but then we went back to work. I had other things on my mind, and I haven’t seen her since. When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Can’t remember. Didn’t care enough to pay attention.” Neil shifted in the chair, frowned mightily. “That’s neither here nor there. What I want to know is whether we can get back to work tomorrow.” He heaved himself to his feet, gripped handfuls of hair. “Gawd,” he said. “I can’t believe I’m discussing this with the makeup girl!”
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