Celebromancy (7 page)

Ree drop-kicked caution out the window, then followed Jane to her bed. There, they shed layers in rapid succession: tops, bras, skirts, and more.

The world fell away, leaving only Ree, Jane, and the ecstatic joy of discovery.

•   •   •

Hours later, Ree woke to the sound of screaming.

Chapter Six

Tinseltown Throwdown

A new flame for Jane Konrad? Star seen partying downtown with
Awakenings
screenwriter Ree Reyes. Ity.bty/3gw0aj

—@WTFStars, 03:17, May 24, 2012

Hawt! I’d love to get in that lez sandwhch. MT @WTFStars Star seen partying downtown. Ity.bty/3gw0aj

—@ZachAttk96, 03:19, May 24, 2012

@WTFStars She’s obv. in no condition to be working. @RealJaneK Sort yr shit out before U fuck this girl’s life up 2.

—@MaddowsWife, 03:18, May 24, 2012

Ree shot up in bed. She looked around in the moonlight-gray room, going from sleeping-off-the-drunk to wide awake in a millisecond. Pawing her way around the nightstand, she found her glasses and put them on the double. Her farther-away-than-her-nose-vision enabled, Ree searched the room for whatever it was that would cause someone to be screaming bloody murder.

Something hit her on the hip, and Ree saw Jane flailing in her sleep, looking like she was trying to wrestle someone who wasn’t there, full-on night-terror-style.

Ree reached out and shook Jane’s shoulder, shouting, “Jane! Wake up! It’s just a dream!” Jane seemed to turn at her voice but continued fighting with the invisible terror.

And then something hit Ree in the shoulder and knocked her off the bed. Something that wasn’t Jane.

Ree’s voice and world wobbled as she conceded the point. “Not a dream! Definitely not a dream!”

A light turned on from the front room of the trailer, and then the bedroom door burst open, showing Danny, lit from behind, wearing boxers and a sleeveless shirt.

“Jane?” Danny called, holding a shotgun in one hand.

Ree righted herself, tried to ignore the fact that she was naked in a room of at least two (three?) people, only one of whom she’d intended to see her that way. Instead, she focused on the invisible thing that had just hit her. She narrowed her eyes and tried to see . . . whatever it was. The light from the living room should have been enough to see the attacker, but all she saw was Jane fighting for her life.

Ree reached down again to find her jacket, pulled out the lightsaber she kept on her always, and lit it. The blade leaped to life, blue light filling the room.

Fuck secret identities.

She still couldn’t see Jane’s attacker, so Ree stepped up and sliced horizontally where the creature should have been. The blade skipped off of an invisible nothing like it was a force field.

“The fuck?” Ree said, spinning the blade around and trying to stab it. The blade bit in, and Ree felt like she was holding a stick dipped in quicksand.

“Duck!” Danny said from behind her. Ree did so and saw that he was maneuvering for a clear shot. But it didn’t seem like he could see the thing any better than she could.

Ree squatted on the floor, shaking Jane’s arm.

“Wake up!” she shouted, but Jane was still locked in a dream, struggling and screaming with her eyes closed.

Ree cut through where the creature should have been again and felt the blade skip off like it was plated in adamantium.

The lightsaber wasn’t working. Maybe some good old Hapkido would fare better. She dropped the blade, which extinguished and returned to being a lifeless plastic prop as soon as it left her grip.

She stayed low.

“All yours!” Ree said, letting Danny have a shot. The gun went off, almost deafeningly loud inside the trailer. She heard the impacts, but Jane still struggled. Danny fired twice more, but it didn’t seem to do anything.

“My turn!” Ree said, waving behind her to get Danny to stop. She re-assessed where the thing should be, and dove forward. She slammed into something that was both heavy and insubstantial, like thick gas in a plastic case. Ree felt around for limbs, trying to use her sense of touch to figure out which way to wrench it to inflict damage. She smelled smoke, but not wood smoke. It had a sharp note to it, like burned plastic.

The thing reared, swinging her around the bedroom like a rag doll as she held on for dear-God-life.

As she struggled, the 50% miss chances and grappling penalties for invisible opponents rules from various RPGs all made a scary amount of sense.

Ree pulled on a maybe-arm, trying to catch her feet somewhere to give her more leverage. Danny made a calculated swing that produced a
thump
sound and stopped in the middle of the air. The invisithing recoiled, and Ree hauled harder, trying to tighten the circle of her move to maximize the effect on the joints. The thing lurched to the side, and Ree broke through the closet door with the invisithing crushing her.

The air in her lungs quit in a huff, leaving Ree clawing for breath without losing her grip.

The invisithing broke free of her grasp, and Ree took a vicious right hook on the cheek.

The pain let her gasp in air, and as soon as she had breath to use, she shouted, “Fucking A!” at the compounding pain. She kicked out at the thing as Danny jumped over the bed with an overhand swing of the bat. The thing caught Danny in the air and knocked him back into the doorway, then tore down the curtain covering the window in the corner, broke the window, and then, presumably, disappeared out into the alley.

Ree clambered over to the window, careful to keep her hands off the broken glass but not so careful she didn’t step on it, and stared out into the night, looking for traces of the invisithing.

She took a half-step back and looked to Danny, who had picked himself off the floor and was at the bedside, hand on Jane’s shoulder.

The star was awake again, eyes wide as a cartoon character’s, filled with terror.

“Is it gone?” she asked, breathless.

“It’s gone,” Ree said as Danny said, “Yes.”

Ree grabbed an errant sheet and wrapped it around her chest, stepping gingerly off of the shards of glass. Once again, she hoped the decade of callusing from Taekwondo had protected her. She sat on the bed, leaning into Jane. “It’s gone. You’re safe now.”

Jane turned away from Danny and Ree and vomited on the headboard.

Yikes.

Ree looked to Danny and asked softly, “Has this happened before?”

Danny furrowed his eyebrows. “Of course not.”
I smell something extra-fishy here.

Ree pressed the topic, asking louder, to both of them. “Has something else happened before?”

Jane leaned into Ree and curled up into a ball, breathing inconsistently and sobbing.

Fucking hell.
Ree’s protective instincts dropped her onto the bed, and she wrapped her arms around the star before she realized what she was doing.

“We need to take her to the hospital,” Ree said.

Danny shook his head. “No. She told me not to.”

The hell?
“She told you? She knew this would happen?”

Ree looked down to the terrified star, the woman who just hours ago had captivated an entire club, who’d had a whole room of fans and reporters eating out of the palm of her hand.

“What the hell is going on here, Danny?” she asked, point-blank, locking him in her gaze.

The bodyguard considered for a moment, looking at Jane, then Ree, then the broken window. “I’m going to go get Yancy. Stay with her, okay?”

Ree nodded, one hand caressing the star’s sweat-slicked hair.

Danny stood, grabbed his gun, then nodded and left the bedroom. He closed the door behind him, leaving Ree with a sobbing superstar, the fading smells of sex and fear, and her own troubled thoughts.

•   •   •

Yancy showed up wearing a blue robe that screamed
anniversary present
, with his initials monogrammed in gold. He’d clearly just been asleep. Ree saw other lights on in the trailer camp, and far more activity than normal at whatever o’ clock in the morning it was. It was too dark out to be anything later than four.

“How is she?” Yancy asked, his face drawn with worry.

Ree looked down to Jane by way of illustration. The star looked to be catatonic, occasionally twitching and sobbing.

“Are you going to explain what the hell is going on here?” she asked. Jane had become unresponsive, though she seemed conscious. Ree had no intention of leaving Jane unless it was at a hospital. This had happened on her watch, even if she didn’t know she was on duty.

Yancy stood at the base of the bed, looking at Jane with patently paternal worry. “She’d talked about nightmares, had for months. I told her to take it easy, to get help, but it wasn’t just withdrawal—at least, not normal withdrawal, from the drugs. This is something else.”

“No fucking duh,” Ree said, pointing to the broken window. She paused for a moment, considering how many of her cards she should lay on the table. But subtlety had never been her strong suit.

Fuck it.

“Last time I checked, normal withdrawal doesn’t include your actual demons appearing to carry out the night terrors, at least not in any cases I’ve ever heard of. She obviously does magic, and it sounds like you know that. I don’t have a magician badge or anything, but I’m in the know, so it’d be great if you could spill the beans now.”

Yancy raised an eyebrow. She imagined he didn’t get challenged like that very often. But she didn’t exactly have a lot of time to dance around the issue, since there might still be an invisible monster prowling around the neighborhood. He walked over to the window side of the bed and leaned in to push aside a stray strand of Jane’s hair, a tender and familiar touch. He stood and stepped back, fear crossing his face.

He sighed and said, “I need some coffee.”

“Me, too,” Ree said.

Danny brought over a chair, and Yancy sat. “How much do you know about Celebromancy?” the director asked.

Ree did a double take. “Say what?”

“Celebromancy.”

“I saw the lightsaber, Ree,” Danny said, pointing to the discarded prop. “You’re not just anybody.”

Fair enough. Not like it did me much good. What kind of monster shrugs off a lightsaber?

Not the point
, she reminded herself.

She’d heard of the style, but only in passing. She’d seen Geekomancy, Bromancy, and Atavism (aka Furrymancy) up close, as well as whatever it was that the vindictive Rorikon Strega Lady Lucretia did. But she had only been in the game for six months and didn’t know everything.

“Almost nothing,” Ree said finally. “It has something to do with fame. So that thing with the crowds last night was Celebromancy?”

Danny nodded. “When the fans spotted her, she started to lap up the attention.”

“I knew it!” Ree said, thinking back through the previous day, how quickly Jane had gotten her makeover before the press conference, and the way she reached epic levels of magnetism at the club, glowing like a gigawatt bulb.

Yancy continued. “When she gets that charge, she can enhance her looks, use some energy to get more attention to get more energy. It creates a feedback loop. But now she can’t control it. Once she gets going, she becomes erratic, uncontrolled. That’s not how it normally works, not how it used to work.”

Yancy took a breath of imminent exposition, and Danny turned to walk out of the trailer.
Please let him be getting coffee
, Ree thought.

“Celebromancy has been around for as long as I have, and probably long before that. It might even date back to the time of the Shakespeare, troubadours, or even the geisha, for all I know. But some people, the born performers in the world, can tap into the attention they’re given, use it like fuel, then weave it into spells to look more beautiful, act more powerfully, hold a crowd’s attention, or crush a rival.”

Yancy took a breath. “It’s that last one that got Jane in the situation she’s in now.”

If she can charm people, then how much of last night was real?
Ree asked herself, a churning in her stomach as she considered the implications. Some of the night was a blur, but she very clearly remembered Jane stopping and asking her if she wanted to proceed with the sexytimes.
She could have used the mind-whammy, but I don’t think she did.

“Again, more with the explain-y,” Ree said, circling a hand in a
go on
gesture.

Note for those in odd circumstances: When in doubt, get more information.

Yancy continued. “There are mantles in Hollywood, Bollywood, and anywhere with enough of a celebrity culture to have a hierarchy. There’s The Most Handsome Man, The Elder Statesman, Idoru Ichiban, The Grande Dame, and here, we have America’s Sweetheart.” He pronounced the titles with capitalization, giving a clear sense that they each had their own weight.

A chill wind whirled its way into the trailer through the broken window, raising goose bumps on Ree’s shoulders.

“Jane was a child star, but a few years ago, fresh off of her success with
Young Love
, she made a bid to seize the title of America’s Sweetheart. It’s a tremendously powerful mantle, belonging to the actress who transcended fame to become forever enshrined in American hearts, no matter her origin.

“The bid failed epically. As far as I can tell, the reigning Sweetheart, Rachel MacKenzie, got wind of what Jane was doing and cursed the ritual, making the power that Jane had accumulated backfire.”

If there was anyone who could possibly be called America’s Sweetheart, there was no denying that it was Rachel MacKenzie. After her film
Downtown Girl
beat
Pretty Woman
to the modern-Cinderella punch and cinched her an Oscar, she’d gone from one charmed project to another. They were all fairly brainless popcorn flicks, but they made mad bank.

She’d aged gracefully from ingenue to mature beauty, though a magic-is-real world made a lot more sense than plastic surgery to explain why the now-forty-seven-year-old MacKenzie looked even more gorgeous today than she had in her thirties.

Yancy ran a hand through his bed-mussed hair. “Now whenever Jane uses Celebromancy more than a tiny bit, it starts to color her judgment, overwhelms her, makes her seek out more attention.”

“So all of those scandals and arrests were her drunk on magic?” Ree asked. That put Jane’s last year in a way different light.