by Dixie Lyle
Yemane still stood at the threshold to the graveyard. He took a deep breath, exhaled, then slowly took a step inside and stopped. Nothing dramatic occurred, but he looked around as if seeing the place for the first time. “Far out,” he murmured.
I couldn’t help myself; I looked around, too. Ghosts had this brilliance to them, the colors of their coats or feathers or scales so sharp and vivid they looked like a special effect. Even black or brown seemed to shine.
What my eyes took in was this: a slow, stately line of brilliant green iguanas, trundling along; a tightly scrunched-together herd of hamsters flowing over the crest of a hill like some sort of ever-shifting white, orange, brown, and black quilt; a huge Great Dane with a coat of black chrome, bounding over (and through) headstones with glee, tongue lolling out of his mouth like a gleaming pink neon slug; and a single blue-and-green parrot perched on a headstone, feathers glowing as if lit from within, seemingly amused by all the activity.
Rainbow Bridge, nothing. It should be called the Rainbow Turnpike.
“Foxtrot,” Yemane said softly. “Before you go—I wanted to ask you something.”
“Sure. What is it?”
“I saw a cat when I got here. A black-and-white one.”
“Oh, that’s Tango. Yeah, she lives here, has the run of the place. Though actually, at the moment, we’re trying to keep her indoors so she doesn’t screw up any of the filming.”
“Yeah?” Yemane said. “I thought saw her run into the graveyard just a minute ago.”
“Really?” said Keene. “Funny, I completely missed that.”
“What’s your question?” I asked.
“Uh—just wanted to know if she lived here, that’s all. I love cats. But she seemed kinda skittish.”
Which is when I finally spotted a feline form, peering out from behind a headstone just beyond Keene and Fikru. Aha, I thought. Gotcha, kitty!
And then I realized it wasn’t Tango at all.
The resemblance was remarkable, right down to the white almost-question-mark on her face, but after the first shocked second I realized I was looking at an entirely different tuxedo cat.
A dead one.
None of the animal spirits are actually bound to the graveyard, but the regulars rarely venture beyond its boundaries. It wasn’t unheard of for a ghost to show up near or even in the mansion, but it wasn’t something that happened often.
And I’d never seen it happen with a cat.
I suppose I’d always assumed it was a territorial thing, with Tango claiming the grounds for her own; while she’s still among the living, she could see animal spirits as well as Whiskey or I could.
By skittish Fikru clearly meant not-among-the-living, because obviously he’d seen the ghost kitty and not Tango. Which he really shouldn’t have been able to do—but at least he wasn’t seeing the daily parade of spectral animals I was. Or if he was, he was doing an awfully good job of hiding it.
“Well, thanks for letting me know,” I said. “I’ll keep an eye out and try to herd her back inside. Have you been up to your rooms yet?”
“We’ll head up presently,” Keene said. “Going to have a bit of a wander around here first. All right?”
“Sure. Anytime you’re ready.” I performed Standard Professional Exit Number 2, the Nod and Smile While Turning, and walked briskly away.
Tango’s ghostly twin was probably just another deceased feline, one who decided to investigate the nearest house while between portals. Sure. If my middle names were Foxtrot and Responsibility, then your average cat’s was Curiosity and Impulse. It all made perfect sense.
But why had Yemane been able to see it?
I went into the house via a back door, the one that opens into the kitchen. Ben wasn’t around, and neither was Tango. I decided to make myself another mug of tea while I was there.
The door opened and a woman strode in, cursing under her breath. She was short, stocky, and dressed entirely in black. Her makeup was more restrained than gothic, and her hair was long, black, and braided. She had a huge steel coffee mug in one hand, a backpack in the other, and murder in her eyes.
“Hey, Catree,” I said. “How goes the war?”
“I’m gonna nuke the site from orbit,” Catree snarled. She headed straight for the espresso maker. “It’s the only way to be sure.”
Catriona Christie was my counterpart. What I did for ZZ, she did for the director. Normally, that would give her the title of production assistant—but that wouldn’t be fair or accurate. Catree was also their special-effects guru, in charge of everything from pyrotechnics to prosthetics. She was the one who made the fog roll in, the guns bark, and the zombies’ heads explode. Right now she looked like her own was about to do the same.
“I hear you,” I said. “You don’t actually have nukes, right? Because that would require massive amounts of paperwork, and I really don’t have time for that.”
She grinned at me as she dropped her pack on the floor and set about expertly assembling an espresso. “Nah, that stuff’s a pain to work with. Give me good old-fashioned high explosives, any day. Or concentrated acid. Or maybe just cyanide.”
I dunked the tea bag in my mug of steaming water. “Sounds like you have someone specific in mind. Or are you just feeling slaughtery in general?”
“Little of both. Yes, there’s someone I’d cheerfully give a grenade without a pin right about now, but there’s no guarantee it’d be the same person in an hour.”
“You like to spread the mayhem around. Give everyone a chance.”
“Hell, yes. An equal-opportunity maniac, that’s me.”
I liked Catree. She understood the pressures of doing a job like mine, juggling a million different variables, dozens of volatile personalities, and every possible way they could intersect to produce a crisis. None of her current crankiness would be on display while she was actually working; it was a sign of respect and camaraderie that she felt comfortable enough with me to show how she was really feeling. Over the last few days we’d become more than friends—we’d become allies. I could go to her for just about any information about the film production, and she could come to me for just about any resource I could lay my hands on. Between us, we kept two intricate, unstable organizations functioning, and most of the people who belonged to those groups were blissfully unaware of that fact.
“This production is doing its best to kill me,” she announced cheerfully as she poured the first shot into her mug and started making another. “But it’s gonna have to work harder. Three days in and I can still form coherent sentences. That’s some kind of ribbity-dibbity-doodad, gazunga?”
I leaned back against the steel counter and took a sip of my tea. “Oh, you’ve hit gazunga? Haven’t gone there in a while. Not since that time on tour with Slotterhaus, probably.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You toured with Slotterhaus? Man, that’s hard-core. I’m assuming you weren’t a groupie.”
I shuddered. “Definitely not. More like a groupie wrangler, which meant trying to deflect the ones that were underaged, likely to overdose, or actually psychotic.”
“So, just about all of them.”
“Pretty much. Mostly I handed out room keys to hotels from our previous stop, along with directions that made no sense. ‘Yeah, the Hotel Pompadour, just off the interstate. Tell the concierge Becky sent you.’ They’d wander off with stars in their extremely dilated eyes, and I’d never see them again.”
She considered this as she pulled and poured another shot of espresso. “Hmm. I’d say that was cruel, but the souvenir—and the tale—they wound up with was probably better than anything Slotterhaus could have given them. If half the stories I’ve heard are true.”
“Depends. Which stories have you heard?”
“The swimming pool, the motorcycle, and the bungee cords?”
“True.”
“The twenty-three strippers?”
I rolled my eyes. “That one always gets exaggerated. It was seventeen.”
“Unfortunately. Had to work pretty hard to keep that one out of the papers.”
I eyed the enormous metal mug she kept adding shots to. “Uh, just exactly how much espresso are you planning on drinking? Because I think you’ve already got enough to make a three-toed sloth do gymnastics.”
“That reminds me of a joke. Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Coffee.”
“Coffee who?”
“Who cares? COFFEE.”
“That’s pretty—”
“COFFFFFFFEEEEEEEE.” She made her eyes go wide and turned her grin up to full lunatic.
I studied her for a second and said, “That’s part of the punch line, right?”
“Punch line? I know no punch line. I am gonna need an IV drip, though—got one handy?”
I shook my head. “I specialize in logistics, not technical support. And we both know you could build one in about two minutes, anyway—probably with what’s in the magic backpack.” I motioned with my mug toward the pack on the floor. It seemed to be composed entirely of duct tape and bumper stickers, though Catree claimed there was actual canvas some unknown number of layers deep. It was festooned with carabiner clips in various bright colors and sizes, and had numerous zippered pouches zap-strapped to it, too.
“Right!” said Catree. “That reminds me—I brought some cool stuff to show you.” She picked the bag off the floor, unzipped a pouch, and pulled out—a hand. A very life-like one, with bits of gory redness at one end and cracked, dirty fingernails on the other. “Check it out,” Catree said, offering it to me as proudly as a toddler with a frog.
I took it. It was heavier than I expected, but the level of detail was remarkable—it even had fingerprints.
And then it grabbed me.
Yes, I shrieked. And yes, I instinctively flung it away in some random direction. Then I glared at Catree, who was giggling maniacally. “Oh, man … the look on your face. That one’s an evergreen, it never gets old.”
I laughed despite myself. “Okay, you got me. Remote control?”
She showed me a keyfob-sized device she’d palmed when she opened the pack. “Servos powered by lithium-ion, activation via Bluetooth. Fully—ahem—digital.”
“And—ahem—handcrafted, too?”
“Absolutely. Ahem. My handiwork, of course.”
“Okay, the puns are bad, but you know what’s really getting out of hand? Saying ahem every time.”
“Yeah, I think you put your finger on it.”
“Can we stop now?”
“Oh, get a grip. Ahem.”
I made a mental note to work out some sort of devious, clever revenge—hey, I do have access to a shape-shifting dog and a bunch of ghosts—and then changed the subject. “Okay, you win the pundit award. Got anything else to show me?”
“Sure.” She retrieved the hand, stuck it in her pack, and then rummaged around and pulled out a Tupperware container. “Here we go.”
“I’m no fool,” I said. “You open it.”
“I intend to.” She pulled the lid off, then reached in and used her thumb and one finger to gently pull out …
A cube-shaped cloud.
It was about the size of a child’s wooden block, perfectly square, and looked exactly as if someone had filled a soap bubble with smoke, convinced it to grow four corners and six flat sides, then popped the bubble without the smoke noticing. Impossibility, cubed.
She set it down on the counter. It didn’t jiggle or shimmy the way gelatin would have, and it was faintly translucent in a very smoky way.
I reached toward it, then stopped. It seemed incredibly delicate, like even looking at it too hard would make it dissolve. “Can I touch it?”
“Sure. It’s stronger than it looks—a lot stronger. Watch this.”
Her giant metal mug was now at least half full of pure espresso. She set it squarely on top of the cube, which took its weight as easily as a coaster. “See?”
“Wow. What is that stuff?”
She lifted the mug and took a sip. “Ah, nectar of the gods … it’s called aerogel. One of the lightest substances on Earth, and incredibly robust structurally. Go ahead, touch it.”
I did, putting one fingertip on the top where the mug had rested. It wasn’t even warm. “It doesn’t feel like a gel. More like Styrofoam.”
“It’s derived from a gel, which is where the name comes from. I like the other terms for it better: frozen smoke, or solid air. Isn’t it great?”
I picked it up carefully the way she had. It weighed almost nothing, like it wasn’t really there. “Wow, again. What do you do with it?”
“All kinds of things, from sports equipment to supercapacitors. NASA used some to collect space dust from a comet. Me? I just like to look at it. Reminds me of why I got into this business in the first place.”
I frowned and put the block down. “To collect space dust from comets?”
“To use science to make magic.” She stared at the block, and for an instant she seemed a little sad. Then she popped it back in its Tupperware container and snapped the lid in place. “Some days I need to look at it longer than others.”
“Ah. Today’s one of those days, huh?”
She stuck the Tupperware back in her pack. “Nah, not really. Natalia Cardoso’s a pain, but I’ve dealt with worse. Of course, most of them were actually talented, as opposed to just sleeping with the producer.”
“Really? I’m shocked. What a shocking piece of shocking news that has totally shocked me. Also, I’m shocked. Shockingly.”
Catree hoisted the backpack over one shoulder. “Yeah, she may as well wear a T-shirt with CASTING COUCH IS COMFY on it. Maybe I’ll get one printed in Japanese and give it to her.”
“I like that. Tell her it says QUEEN OF THE ZOMBIES—I think she’d accept pretty much any title that implies she’s in charge.”
“Hey, Tango,” Catree said. She bent down and stroked Tango’s back, running her hand all the way to the tip of her tail. Tango stretched luxuriantly and began to purr. “On the other hand, I also get to work with Jaxon Nesbitt. Who really shouldn’t even be here.”
“Why not? I thought he had talent to burn.”
“He does. The question is, why is he burning it here? The last indie film he was in got nominated for an Oscar, and when this wraps he’s signed to do a big Hollywood film for megabucks. Honestly, he’s so much better than this flick I’m starting to wonder who he’s sleeping with.”
“I’m guessing that’s not uncommon for Mr. Nesbitt.”
Catree giggled again. “Yeah, he’s easy on the optics, that’s for sure. Too bad he’s not a little more social.”
Jaxon Nesbitt had spent most of his time holed up in his room: He came out for filming and the obligatory dinner gatherings, then vanished again whenever he wasn’t needed.
I shrugged. “He obviously values his privacy. Or maybe he’s conducting satanic rituals in his room. Either way, as long as he doesn’t burn the place down it’s none of my business.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for the go-juice. Gotta run.” Catree was out the door before she even finished her sentence, which is just how people in our line of work say good-bye. It might seem rude but it’s actually a sign of respect, acknowledging how busy we both are by not wasting any time with acknowledgment.
It’s a Zen thing. I’d explain further, but I don’t have the time.
I shook my head. “No can do, kitty. Strict orders from the director that all animals have to stay indoors and away from being underfoot.”
She stared at me in that unblinking feline way that makes you wonder what they’re thinking. In my ca
se, though, I knew.
“No.”
“No.”
“Stop it.”
“That’s not going to—”
“There is no way—”
Ever heard a cat yowl? Yeah. Ever had one yowl in your ear? How about between your ears? It’s just about as annoying as you might think, except you can’t think.
Cut it out! I thought back at her, as loudly as I could. I’m doing this for your own good. There are explosives and big pieces of machinery and all sorts of equipment out there. I don’t want you to get hurt.
I frowned at her. That had almost sounded reasonable. “Well, yes. The guests are my responsibility, so I have to make sure they’re happy—”
“You mean the graveyard? I don’t see your point.”
When did my cat learn how to do math? “Doesn’t matter. You and Whiskey being unavailable for a few days shouldn’t…”
Dammit. She knew exactly which button to push, and right now she was mashing the SENSE OF DUTY one repeatedly with a dainty white paw. “Look, it’s not like there’s been anything unusual happening. The only spirit I’ve seen lately has been a single, very ordinary ghost cat.”
