Met by Midnight: Shadow World Stories and Scenes, Vol. 1 (The Shadow World)

by Dianne Sylvan

  “And…cut! Reset!”

  I could see her through the throng of crew members, sitting on the piano bench waiting patiently while they flitted around putting things back the way they’d started so they could film it again. Her hair hung in dripping tendrils around her face and down her shoulders. One of the makeup guys approached her to touch something up—whatever they were using was doing a damn good job of staying on.

  I couldn’t help it. I had to pause and watch for a minute. It’s rare enough to see a woman that beautiful who actually exists in the real world—seeing her still looking beautiful even though she was basically in drowned rat mode was even better. All that wet leather had to be uncomfortable.

  There wasn’t really any harm in admiring from afar, I told myself, trying not to be seen staring and labeled a creeper, or worse, have it leak out into the press that there was something going on. Miranda was married, after all, to a guy, and while the tabloids would fall all over themselves to invent a lesbian affair, I knew damn well how hard it was to shake a supposed romance on page 6 of the paper.

  Besides, I was outed against my will, and just the thought of it happening to someone else whether they actually were gay or not made my blood boil. In a world like this, yeah, it’s important to be visible, but you know, it is my life and I do have the right to decide for myself when I’m ready.

  So, if you ever want to get a reputation as a scary bull dyke, punch out a reporter who asks if you’ve fucked Melissa Etheridge. Bonus points if you look like Joan Jett with PMS.

  The answer’s no, by the way. I’m not into blondes.

  Redheads, now…

  Dammit. Don’t start.

  I shook my head and kept walking, though I almost stopped mid-stride when I heard a clear, ringing laugh from the vicinity of the piano. It was the kind of sound that makes the world stop spinning for just a split-second because the Earth’s axis was so surprised by its loveliness, it nearly tripped over itself.

  I finally made the back doors and left the building’s noise, heat, and bright lights, groping in my coat pockets for the silver-plated case where there waited a tidy line of six hand-rolled cigarettes I’d made on the flight from LA. Switching to hand-rolled had helped me cut back, actually—it was hard to blow through them when you took the time to make each one yourself. They’re like little works of carcinogenic art.

  There wasn’t really anything to look at in the alley, but I stayed out there for a long time anyway; April had seen me pass, so if they needed me I wouldn’t be hard to find. I leaned on the rail that lined the concrete steps down from the door, sighing, flicking ash onto the ground.

  For some reason I thought of Jill, my ex. She’d be sitting down to dinner right about now back on the West Coast, presumably with the Bobblehead…what was her name? Sherry? Sheila? All I really remember about her is walking on her standing naked in our bathroom flossing her teeth. The only thing that came to mind as I gaped at her in utter shock was that she had an enormous head and should be on someone’s dashboard…not sleeping with my girlfriend of four years and using my goddamned dental floss.

  It’s possible that whole scary bull dyke thing also arose from me throwing the Bobblehead out the front door stark naked and then chunking the dental floss at her head. It left a scar. I was proud.

  “You look lost in thought,” came a warm, feminine voice from behind me that made my nether regions stand up and salute.

  I blew out a lungful of smoke and turned around slowly to face the petite redhead who had emerged from the studio doors without making a sound.

  She had changed out of her drowned rat ensemble into something a little more casual, but still black, and still showing off that magnificent cleavage and the bizarre ruby pendant she never seemed to take off. She’d also added a long black leather coat, a little much for the weather but, hey, some people were just cold-natured like that. Her hair was still wet but pulled back from her face. She had even washed off the makeup.

  Her skin was still flawless without it. That’s just not fair. She had to be bathing in the blood of virgins to keep her complexion that smooth. The minute I hit 30 I started sprouting random hairs and spots.

  “Sorry to interrupt. You must be Jane,” she said, holding out her hand. “Miranda Grey.”

  “Yeah…Jane Cassidy,” I said, taking the hand. She had a surprisingly firm grip. “Nice to actually meet you.”

  “You too,” she said. “We’ve done all this work together in different states—I had to at least meet you once. You know, before we end up performing the song together on the Grammy stage.” She grinned.

  I had to laugh at that. “You’re pretty confident.”

  “I didn’t just spend four hours shivering in soggy leather for this not to bring in Song of the Year at the very least.”

  I offered the cigarette, and she frowned at it for a second before taking it and taking an experimental drag. I could tell she never smoked, but to her credit she didn’t cough and choke; she just handed it back, making a face that was both faintly disgusted and disgustingly cute.

  “Do you really think the song’s that good?” I asked.

  She looked around suddenly, as if something had caught her attention, but a second later returned her gaze to me and asked, “Do you want to get out of here?”

  My eyebrows shot up. “Sure. Where?”

  “There’s a bar a block over. It won’t be crowded.”

  “You don’t think we’ll be recognized?”

  “I might be, but I don’t think the clientele will know who you are.”

  Having no idea what to make of that statement, I followed her down the steps and to the end of the alley. Before I could say anything about our respective managers freaking the fuck out, she lifted her wrist to her mouth and said, “Faith, we’re going over to Anodyne for a drink.”

  A terse, somewhat irritated voice issued from the bracelet on her wrist, “My Lady, you really shouldn’t be haring off alone—”

  “Send the guards, then,” Miranda cut her off.

  Now, the other woman—Faith—sighed. I could hear her resignation across whatever distance the funky little communicator covered. “He’s not going to like it.”

  “Yes, well, he can get happy in the same pants he got mad in,” Miranda said. “I’ll call for the car when I’m ready.”

  I gave her a quizzical look after the pants comment, and she laughed. “My mother used to say that,” she said.

  “Was she talking about your husband?” I asked.

  “Yes. He’s…a little overprotective sometimes, but he’s been right often enough that I try to be conscious of my own safety. Where we’re going, though, it’s our turf.” She knew exactly what route to take to avoid the crowds; I guessed these must be her usual stomping grounds. We took a slightly circuitous route down, then around the block, but arrived at the bar without incident.

  The neighborhood was kind of strange; there were people out, but something about them…I couldn’t put my finger on it, and something in the back of my mind told me I was much happier not trying.

  The bartender knew her. “The usual, my Lady?”

  Miranda nodded, then looked at me. “You?”

  “Um…a vodka martini, please. Pornographically dirty.”

  We sat down in a booth back in the corner, where the handful of customers wouldn’t be able to pay any attention to us, but as we passed I could feel eyes on me. When you grow up gay in a scary small town you learn to recognize that feeling of being watched; you learn to analyze where it’s coming from, whether it’s hostile, whether you have enough time to run or if there’s a weapon nearby if they give chase.

  “Don’t worry,” Miranda said, settling across from me. “You’re in no danger here.”

  “Do I want to know why people keep calling you My Lady?” I asked. “That’s kind of weird.”

  She smiled. “I could tell you I’m descended from a long line of noblewomen—would that work?”

  “People already
think you’re batty,” I pointed out. “Stuff like that doesn’t really help.”

  Someone brought our drinks, and I tasted mine; it was excellent, top shelf. She was having a Bloody Mary; I hadn’t seen anyone but my grandma drink one of those in years.

  “To answer your question,” she said, “Yes, I really do think the song’s that good. I have a good feeling about it. The biggest hits I’ve ever had have been the ones that were born out of painful emotions.”

  “Most good music is,” I said. “So you were trying to transform something nasty when you wrote it?”

  “Nasty is our bread and butter, isn’t it? When our lives hurt, our music draws blood, and it takes the pressure off.”

  “No kidding. My last big single came from my ex screwing some woman she met at the gym—in my house, no less, while I was across the country doing the Hall of Fame concert and dreaming up names for the baby we were talking about having.”

  “That sounds a lot like where I was coming from on this one,” Miranda said with a smile that held a number of emotions ranging from amusement to bitterness.

  True-life events, then. From all reports she and her mystery husband were practically joined at the crotch—what could possibly have happened? “Well, at least you got something out of it—your prize from the Love is Bullshit Carnival.”

  Miranda chuckled. “Oh, like, ‘my husband fucked a guy, and all I got was this lousy award-winning number one hit single?’”

  I blinked at her. “Damn. I hope you got a whole album out of that.”

  “Not yet, but I will. When all the drama went down I was already recording Bleed, so I’ve had to save most of the material I wrote then for the next CD. It’s funny—a lot of what was breaking my heart back then doesn’t hurt as much anymore, but going back through the material is like time travel. Some of it’s so raw I wanted to throw it out, but like I said, it’s my best stuff. When I do get ready to go into the studio I’ll already have ¾ of an album written. ‘Hell Like This’ was only about half done, so it seemed like a good one to collaborate on.”

  “Well, I think it’s pretty amazing. Not to mention when people get a load of you in the video soaking wet sales will go through the roof.”

  Again, that bell-like laugh, and several other patrons looked up to see where it had come from before going back to their drinks. “Oh, come on,” she said. “What about you? I was watching you and the band do your scenes—you’ve got that rock star thing down. I don’t have a whole lot of natural charisma onstage, and I’ve never been comfortable relating to the audience. I have to let the music speak for me.”

  I raised an eyebrow and said wryly, “Somehow I doubt you have a problem getting people to pay attention to you whether you’re on stage or at the grocery store.”

  That earned another grin.

  I didn’t want to pry, but at the same time I really, really did. “So…this husband of yours…did he switch teams and the two of you are just sticking with it for publicity’s sake? I’ve known a lot of Hollywood couples who do that. It always sounded horrible to me but at least some of them seem pretty happy—appearing in public together, then doing what, or who, they want on the down low.”

  “Oh, no…we’re still together.”

  “So he’s not gay?”

  “No, more like opportunistically slutty.” She took another drink, considering her words. “It was an ex of his from way back—you know how it is. Nobody ever really gets over anyone—you just put enough time and distance between each other that you can breathe again, and then eventually fall for someone new and make the distance too wide to cross.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been there,” I said, staring at the pair of olives in my glass.

  “You mean the girl you threw out on the lawn naked?” Miranda asked impishly.

  I laughed. “You read about that. Of course you did.”

  “It probably says something about me that I thought it was pretty awesome.”

  Still laughing, I held up my glass. “To love,” I said. “Because it blows goats, but it also pays our bills.”

  “To love,” she agreed, and we clinked.

  For a while, we just sat and talked, mostly about music and our experiences in show business. We had met some of the same divas and drug-addled rockers and had plenty of stories, the sort of thing that normal people wouldn’t really appreciate. We eventually got around to discussing our favorite instruments.

  “That wasn’t your piano on the set, was it? Getting rained on can’t be good for it.”

  “No, it was a stunt piano. They took a broken down grand they got from an estate sale somewhere and gutted it, sealed it shut, and set it up for the video. I’d never let anyone touch my baby.”

  My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I checked it and sighed. “April’s looking for me,” I said. “I think our plane’s supposed to leave in a few hours.”

  Miranda knocked back the rest of her drink and closed her eyes, smiling slightly. There was a smudge of red on her lip, and while normally I’d have found that attractive, for some reason it made me uneasy.

  “All right,” she said, wiping her mouth with her napkin. “Let’s go. I guess we’ve caused enough coronaries for one night.”

  “You know,” I observed, “You’re nothing like I expected.”

  A smile. “Is that a compliment?”

  “I guess—there wasn’t anything wrong with what I was expecting, just…like I said, the going theory is you’re a bit touched in the head, so I guess I thought you’d be flakier.”

  Her smile turned a little sly. “I’m a lot of things that surprise people.”

  She paid for our drinks before I could even get my wallet out. Apparently she had a pretty limitless tab here. We walked back out into the cool Austin night, where April—the month, not my manager—was getting good and underway and I could smell rain in the air.

  Before we even made the end of the block, however, I heard a weird whistling sound and, without warning or ceremony, Miranda shoved me hard sideways.

  I fell over, disoriented, and looked up in time to see something wood strike the wall of the nearest building. It splintered, but I could still tell what it was, and my brain turned in circles trying to understand. “Is that—”

  “One night,” Miranda muttered, turning to face where the projectile had come from. “Can’t I have one night without these idiots?”

  “What the hell—”

  “Stay down,” Miranda said firmly. It was not a tone of voice to be disobeyed. “I’ll deal with this nonsense.”

  I watched, openmouthed, as she opened the long coat she was wearing and pulled out…

  Oh, hell no. Clearly I was hallucinating. What was in that martini?

  Miranda stood calmly in front of me, and though I couldn’t see her face, I could see the shift in her demeanor—she had claimed not to have charisma, but all it took was a tiny adjustment in her posture, a straightening of the spine, shoulders moving back, arm down by her side holding a motherfucking sword…she’d gone from alluring to dangerous in a matter of seconds. It was as if the real Miranda had come out from behind a cloud and was now lighting up the entire block.

  I have no idea why they didn’t run.

  Big, big mistake.

  There were three of them, and one, as I’d suspected in bewilderment, was armed with a crossbow. The other two had weapons similar to Miranda’s. All three had murder in their eyes, and moved with a strange serpentine grace that made my heartbeat fly into orbit, utterly and mindlessly panicked.

  “It’s all right,” Miranda said, casting a glance over her shoulder at me. “There’s nothing to fear.”

  I stared from her sword to theirs. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Now she addressed the others. “Are you sure you want to take this any further?” she asked. “You—you have acted against your Signet and are hereby sentenced to death. Your two friends still have a chance to walk away.”

  None of them moved, and Miranda sighed. “I figu
red as much.”

  I pressed my back into the wall as hard as I could, wishing I could disappear into it—I had no idea what the hell was going on, but I had a pretty good idea what was about to happen, and I wanted to be anywhere else but where I was. Preferably heavily drugged. And with a cigarette in each hand.

  Miranda took a single step forward, and the three men dove toward her, snarling. My mind refused to accept what I was seeing in their faces, and I forced myself to stay calm, digging in my pocket for my phone—I had to call 911. Someone was going to get killed—

  —but it wasn’t going to be Miranda.

  She spun, bringing up her sword as she did, and met the first assailant’s weapon with a crash of metal on metal. The second was already coming at her, but she twisted halfway around toward him and, her sword’s blade sliding up the first man’s, her fist rammed into the second’s head so hard that he flew backwards, his own weapon clattering away on the ground.

  The guy with the crossbow tossed his weapon aside and pulled out a pair of knives, attacking Miranda while she was occupied kicking the first man in the stomach. I started to cry out a warning, but she was already on it; she dropped flat on the ground, and the knives hit only air, the guy falling forward without anything to impact. As he tried to catch his balance Miranda rolled away, coming back up onto her feet in one fluid motion, and seized the other guy who was about to jump her, throwing him forward over her head to body-slam him on the ground. I heard something crack.

  The first guy she’d knocked down was back up by now, but Miranda didn’t even spare him a glance; as the crossbow guy came at her again with the knives, she backflipped over the other guy and, before he could turn around, swung her sword and cut his head off.

  My hands were on my mouth, bile rising at the sight of all the blood that rained out from the body as it hit the ground. I dropped my phone and heard it clunk onto the pavement.