Christmas Ghosts - Fiction River (20 page)

“We’ll spend Christmas in New York, then I’ll take you there,” I promised. “Merry Christmas, Rebecca.” I grinned. “I’m thinking of Charles Dickens. You’re my ghost of Christmas present.”

She smiled back with deep promise. “And you’re my ghost of Christmas future.”

Introduction to
“Chains”

I seem to have the theater on my mind of late. My upcoming story in the fifth volume of Fiction River,
Hex in the City,
edited by Kerrie L. Hughes, concerns the London stage. “Chains” takes place in a New York theater. As you can probably tell, I love theater. I was a goggle-eyed college-age hanger-on at meetings that led to the establishment of the Tony-Award winning
American Players Theater
in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and I’ve been around the theater’s periphery ever since. Many of my friends went on to careers as playwrights, and one wrote the book and lyrics for a marvelous off-Broadway musical. Every now and then I feel tempted to write a play, and then I remember how many novels I have to write and how much short fiction I’ve promised, and I set that dream aside for a while.

I currently write books in several series under many names. Readers know Kristine Kathryn Rusch mostly for her bestselling sf/f novels, and for award-winning short stories in every genre. I also have one kinda sorta contemporary romance,
The Death of Davy Moss
, published under the Rusch name. I write paranormal romances as the bestselling, award-winning Kristine Grayson, and romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter. My critically acclaimed Smokey Dalton mystery series, which I write as Kris Nelscott, is so dark that I have to write romances next to clear my palate.

I wrote “Chains” just after finishing the upcoming Dalton mystery,
Street Justice
, and some of that darkness remained. That’s why this story is both romantic suspense and dark paranormal.

Chains

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Christmas seemed like the perfect time to be in New York, he had told his agent. Or maybe that was his manager. Or his handler. God, he couldn’t keep track of his people any more.

And when the hell did he get people, anyway?

He had been wrong. It was the loneliest time to be in New York.

Jamison Roth McKendrick, Jaime to his fans, Roth to his friends (what few there were left), sat in his dressing room at the recently renamed Mary Martin Theater and peered into the antique mirror the theater manager had installed especially for him.

***

When Roth had full stage makeup on his face, he looked odd. His skin was half a shade darker and this close, he could see the lines that photographers were so careful to airbrush out. His eyebrows, darkened with pencil, looked like creatures in a Disney nature film, and his mouth was bowed like a girl’s.

Only his blue eyes remained the same. They startled even him, not because they were (as the tabloids said) “a unique shade of blue,” but because they weren’t. His blue eyes were the only thing he had gotten from his father, and Roth hated the reminder.

“Excuse me?”

Roth closed those famous eyes for just a moment. The voice was young, and young meant he had to be somewhat polite. Jamison Roth McKendrick wasn’t known for polite, which was why he was sitting here on December 21
st
after having just performed a successful preview of his one-man show
A Christmas Carol
rather than at home in the bosom of his family.

Not that he had a family, with or without a bosom. The last bosom, in fact, had finalized her divorce from him in September, after much media fanfare. It didn’t matter to
People
or Extra or
Entertainment Tonight
that he and the bosom had been separated for more than a year; only that she had sued for part of his extensive fortune and had, sadly for her, lost.

God Bless Our Prenups, Every One.

“Mr. McKendrick?” the young voice asked.

So, not a fan or a friend, but something other. Not a colleague or a minion either. Too young.

He mentally clothed himself in Jaime McKendrick, and became, for just a moment, a Star—something bright and shining in the firmament, or at least, something Very Famous and worth catering to.

A thin girl sat on top of a pile of coats that Roth had stored in the corner of his dressing room. She was in that intermediate age—she could have been a tween, a teen, or hell, maybe even a young adult; he couldn’t tell at first glance. What he could tell was this: She was too young to be alone with him.

Visions of paparazzi danced in his head.

“Can you help me?” she asked.

He wanted to say a firm and surly no, worthy of Scrooge. After all, he’d just been channeling the man onstage. Of course, he’d also been channeling Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim and was on the verge of channeling the Christmas goose, at least according to his unbelievably favorable review in, of all places,
The New York Times
.

But Roth couldn’t say no. Not in a firm and surly way. Not in any way. Nor could he touch the girl or approach her or do anything untoward. He needed to play this smart, although he had never quite figured out what smart was in this circumstance.

Except he had learned, through hard experience, that everyone—teens in particular—came attached to cell phones, and cell phones had cameras, and the cameras linked to the Internet in less than ten seconds.

One mistake, one wrong word, and he would be the wrong kind of Internet sensation in less than 24 hours.

Apparently, he was silent for too long because the girl stood. Taller than he expected, but painfully thin. A cheap coat though—he always knew coats—and well-worn winter boots beneath blue jeans ironed to a crease.

Who ironed their jeans in the 21
st
century?

“I don’t want to go home,” she said, and, to his credit, he didn’t close his eyes.

How many times had he heard that over the years?
Take me with you
, women said.
I’ll be the best lover you’ve ever had
, other women said.
Can we go to your apartment?
little kids asked, because his TV apartment on the show that had made him famous had been a veritable magical wonderland, a place that was everything to everyone and in reality, nothing at all.

He grabbed his cell phone, keeping his gaze on the girl. With his thumb, he dialed the personal assistant the theater had assigned to him. He couldn’t remember the guy’s name; normally, he would have contacted the stage manager, but this seemed like an assistant thing.

“Please, Mr. McKendrick,” the girl said, sounding desperate. “I don’t want to go home.”

The door opened and the girl startled backwards, tripping not only on her coat, but on the big pile. The assistant leaned in and didn’t see her.

“Mr. McKendrick?” the assistant asked. “What can I—”

The girl shot Roth a look of sheer betrayal and then bolted out of the dressing room.

Roth leaned back in his chair. “You might want to let the stage manager know that a civilian managed to cross the Rubicon.”

“What?” the assistant asked, clearly not understanding. How could someone work in a theater and not understand classical references? Roth did, and he never even went to college.

He sighed. “Please let someone in charge know that an unauthorized person is loose backstage.”

“Oh,” the assistant said and left without bothering to shut the door.

Roth stood, and walked past the expensive sofa (that he didn’t need), the table with a computer (that he also didn’t need), the pile of coats (which he certainly didn’t need), and pushed the door closed. It latched quietly.

He glanced at those coats. Buying them had been a compulsion. He knew that, but he had allowed himself a few days of insanity after the year he’d had. Thanks to a parade of therapists, he even knew what the coats represented.

Warmth, security, protection, all those things he’d never had. All those things he had to learn to provide for himself.

“Nicely done, kiddo,” said the ghost lurking in the shadows by the costumes.

“Shut the hell up, Dad,” Roth said. “And kindly go away.”

***

Erika Brandis stood in the lobby of the hotel, surrounded by fourteen teenage girls, all dressed to what they considered to be the nines, all holding white plastic bags that stated
I [heart] New York
but which actually meant
I Am An Idiot Tourist! Mug Me!,
all chattering incessantly. They had shut up for the play, partly because they saw the infamous Jaime McKendrick in the flesh, even if that flesh was wearing 19
th
century clothing and mostly pretending to be an elderly man. It was hard to make those thighs look elderly, and the biceps weren’t bad either. The famous Hollywood abs were hidden by a long coat and vest, but nothing could hide that face.

Men shouldn’t be called pretty, and Jaime McKendrick never had been, not really. He had a masculine jawline, what used to be called a Roman nose, and cheekbones that could cut glass. But there was something arresting about him, even when he was in the character of Ebenezer Scrooge.

There was nothing sexy in
A Christmas Carol
, except Jaime McKendrick, of course. And girls who had just come into puberty, whose hormones were trying to take over the world, noticed.

When the Elizabeth Cady Stanton School For Girls in God-Knows-Where Ohio had contacted Erika to run a near-Christmas tour of New York, she had thought the job would be easy. After all, there wouldn’t be boys. In the past, when she’d hosted high school groups, boys had tried to swing from building to building like Spider-man. Boys had had fights in the hotel hallways. Boys had smuggled in beer, and consumed it in the hallways. Boys had rollerbladed down staircases and commandeered elevators with fake guns.

She had decided never to host boys again. Men, yes. Boys, no. And somehow—she had no idea how now that she was standing in the midst of these girls on penultimate day of the worst tour of her life—she had forgotten what it was like to be a teenage girl. Raging hormones didn’t cut it. Raging insanity plus hormones, boy craziness, giggles, and nonstop talking.

Maybe she would disband Brandis Tours. Maybe she would have to, given the upcoming insurance and legal problems if she didn’t find Hannah Adams. The girl went missing at the Mary Martin Theater, and the stupid teacher in charge of the headcount didn’t notice.

Insurance and legal, hell. Erika really didn’t want to think about the human side of a pretty, underage girl lost in Manhattan. A girl Erika was theoretically responsible for although, technically, the school was responsible for her. Not that it mattered; if they didn’t find Hannah, Erika would always blame herself.

Not in the least because she had confiscated all cell phones before the girls left for the theater. Somewhere in this building, Hannah Adams’ cell phone gathered dust, while Hannah herself was lost in the bowels of the city. Or at least, lost in its tourist mecca.

Erika grabbed the elbow of Miss Sargent, the twenty-something teacher who had lost Hannah, and dragged her away from the noise, kinda. The other teacher, Mrs. Markovich, a middle-aged woman who had taken the afternoon off thinking that nothing could go wrong in the thea-tah, was glaring at both of them for leaving her alone with the excited girls.

“Let me make sure I actually heard you,” Erika said to Miss Sargent. “You only counted the girls when you got back.”

“I haven’t counted them at all,” the idiot teacher said. “The girls told me she was missing.”

Erika bit back the comment she was going to make because it involved words not acceptable to teachers and other delicate organisms. Instead, she stood on the nearest chair and clapped her hands.

Miraculously, the girls shut up.

“Count off,” Erika said.

They had done this all during the trip, and even though a few of them rolled their eyes, they always emitted a number in the right sequence when she pointed at them.

Nineteen. She needed twenty.

“Who is Hannah Adams’ travel partner?” she asked. They were supposed to buddy up. She learned from dealing with boys that two usually worked in keeping track of each other, but three was a mess. And not having someone keep track resulted in—well, resulted in this.

“I am.” The prettiest girl in the group stepped forward. “I forgot I was supposed to watch her.”

Her little friends—an even number of little friends, dammit—tittered. Erika had hated cliques. She wondered if they had deliberately dumped Hannah Adams.

“You
forgot
,” Erika said mockingly, letting the group know she didn’t believe the girl. “Well, then. You get to stay in the hotel tonight with Mrs. Markovich while everyone else goes out to a fancy dinner. Clearly you’re too tired to enjoy yourself.”

“Hey!” the girl said. “Do you know who my parents are?”