Smoke and Mirrors (28 page)

Her lips twisted into a bad approximation of an apologetic smile. “Sorry.”

Lee's smile was no more sincere. “Sure.”

What the hell is up with those two?
And then Tony realized that no one else had noticed as they were all—like Lee—waiting for him to elaborate on Mason's shouted no. “Uh, it's safe. It's . . .” He glanced at Mason who sucked back half an inch of cigarette. “. . . shadowy, but safe.”

“Who cares!” Pulling Tina along behind her, Brianna headed for the stairs.

“Wait!” Amy came forward with the lantern and swung it three times over the line of salt. “Okay, it's safe to step over now.”

Stephen snickered and wafted back and forth over the line until Tony turned to glare at him. He knew Amy was spouting bullshit, but the section of salt the women were stepping over did look duller than the gleaming line that made up the rest of the circle. “Believing is seeing,” he muttered thoughtfully.

“What?”

“Christmas movie, Walt Disney Pictures, 1999, John Pasquin directed and . . . never mind, long after your time.”

“Brenda?” Amy paused on the outside of the circle. “You coming?”

“I'll stay with Lee.”

“No, you won't,” Tina said from the bottom step. “Get out here.”

“But . . .”

“Now! He won't run off with someone else while you're gone.”

“Why's the guy in the hat looking at you?” Stephen asked as Brenda reluctantly joined the others.

Guy in the what? Oh. Zev. Tony had no idea.

“Cassie?”

She smiled down at her brother from the stairs. “I'll be right back.”

“What is it,” Peter asked as, up on the second floor, the door to Mason's dressing room opened and closed, “about women going to the bathroom in groups?”

Every man in the circle shrugged.

Stephen adjusted his head.

As they reached the end of the lane, Henry could hear the three remaining crew talking inside the craft services truck, their hearts beating just a little more quickly than normal. He was impressed at how well they were continuing to react to some rather extraordinary circumstances. Was it because they were in television and used to thinking of the unusual as normal and the bizarre as something to get on tape? Was it because Arra's spell to erase their memories of the battle at the soundstage had a lingering, dampening effect? Was it because no stronger reaction would be permitted with CB on the scene?

Or because no stronger reaction was necessary with CB on the scene . . .

The executive producer of
Darkest Night
stood by the back porch, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, head sunk low between massive shoulders. If will alone could have forced the door open, his attention would have reduced it to a pile of kindling and a few bits of twisted metal.

He turned his head, and only his head, as Henry and the caretaker emerged into the light. “Well?”

“Graham spoke to an actor named Alistair McCall,” Henry began.

“An
actor?
” CB snorted. “That's just what we need, another damned ego on legs.”

“This one actually seems to
be
damned; at least by one of the looser definitions of the word.” A quick gesture stopped Graham from speaking as Henry met CB's gaze Prince of Man to Prince of Man. “More importantly, he used to go to séances at this house while Creighton Caulfield was still alive.”

The tense line of broad shoulders relaxed slightly. “Go on.”

“He says Caulfield started out collecting grotesqueries—the finger of an alleged witch killed during the Inquisition, the skull of a cat that had supposedly been sacrificed in satanic rituals, a vial of dust and ash said to be the remains of one of the bloodsucking undead.”

CB raised a single brow.

Henry shrugged. “Probably not.”

Both men ignored the strangled choking sounds coming from Graham.

“Anyway, around 1892 Caulfield stopped collecting things and started collecting books. McCall said that some of those books made him very uneasy.”

“He said some of them were warm,” Graham added, shuddering.

CB's brow lifted again.

“It's possible,” Henry told him. “Some books have the kind of contents that require a specific construction.” He had, in his personal collection, a grimoire that recorded twenty-seven demonic names. The names were true—he had no desire to discover how the author had acquired them—and both the vellum pages and the thicker leather they were bound in maintained a constant body temperature. Blood temperature. Skin temperature. He'd taken it from a man who was using it to call demons into the world at about the same time as Caulfield had begun to collect the books that made McCall uneasy. He'd been told his was one of the last three true grimoires remaining. There was no reason Caulfield couldn't have gotten his hands on one of the other two.

“With the books,” he continued, “came the séances. Séances and spiritualism in general were very popular at the time.”

Graham snorted. “Yeah, well, you'd know.”

Again, they ignored him.

“According to McCall, Caulfield was interested in contacting something he called Arogoth.”

“Arogoth?” CB repeated, punctuating the name with a disdainful snort.

Henry shrugged. “Since the name seems to have no power, I suspect it's one that Caulfield made up. That whatever this thing was, it had no name—so he gave it one.”

“Not a very original one. If one of my writers suggested such tripe, I'd take away their Lovecraft.”

“So Caulfield was derivative. So what?” Graham demanded. “He was also more than dabbling in darkness.” Hands fisted on his hips, his gaze flicked between Henry and CB fast enough to dislodge his comb-over. “And stop ignoring me!”

“Sorry. Would
you
like to continue?”

“No.” Defiance wilted under CB's attention. “It's okay.” The toe of one scuffed work boot dug a trench in the damp gravel. “Henry here's doing good.”

“Thank you. But Graham's right,” Henry admitted. “Caulfield was more than dabbling. According to McCall, the séances were often violent. The temperature in the drawing room would plummet, the darkness would thicken, and the spiritualists he used were never the same again. One of the more reputable died. The doctors called it a brain hemorrhage, but McCall—possessing a unique hindsight given his current condition—said he thought that something she'd contacted had overloaded the woman's brain. After a while, spiritualists refused to come to the house.”

“And who can blame them, eh? If they were expected to talk to the thing in the basement.” Graham frowned and scratched thoughtfully between the buttons on his overalls. “Except, it might not have been in the basement then.”

“It makes no difference where it was, only where it is. How do we . . .” CB glanced back toward the house. “. . . they defeat it?”

“Caulfield kept a journal of his research. The séances, and the things he found out from books—he was determined to control the dark power found . . . acquired . . . stumbled over . . . who knows.”

“And this journal is where?”

“Probably long gone.”

“But there're ghosts in the house,” Graham added, before Henry could continue, “who were alive when the journal was there. Servants.”

“Servants.” CB turned his attention back to the house, his expression dismissive. “What makes you think they knew anything about what their employer was up to?”

It was Henry's turn to raise a brow. If CB thought his housekeeper remained ignorant about any aspect of his life, he was being deliberately blind—which was, in Henry's long experience, the best way to deal with a good servant, the fiction of ignorance maintained by both halves of the relationship. “I think there's a very good chance they'd be curious about what their employer spent so much time and effort on, but we also have to consider that these ghosts died under . . .” He considered and discarded a number of words. “. . . familiar circumstances. One of the maids pushed one of the male servants down the kitchen stairs and then hanged herself from the third-floor landing. They were the first murder/suicide the house evoked and it may have been able to reach the maid because she'd read the journal. Tony has to talk to her.”

“So now he's a medium, too.”

Henry smiled at the weary lack of surprise in CB's voice. “No. But we know he saw Graham's cousins, so we stopped by his apartment and got this.” He tugged at the strap hanging from his shoulder and swung Tony's laptop case into view.

“Is that . . . Arra's?”

“It is.”

“And she left something on there that will help?”

“I have no idea, but there's eighty gig of magic instruction on here, so I'm hoping that there's something he can adapt.”

“Adapt? Why does that not fill me with confidence?”

“He's a smart guy. He'll figure something out.”

“Out. Yes. This may out his abilities to his companions. Have you considered that he may not want that to happen?”

It was Henry's turn to stare at the building. He could hear the five lives in the driveway—CB, Graham, the three crew—but nothing from the house. No life, no death—nothing. This house, this Arogoth, was attempting to poach lives on his territory. His lips curled back off his teeth. “Under the circumstances, what Tony does or doesn't want doesn't much matter. He'll do the right thing.”

The silence pulled him around. Even with the Hunter masked, those who could meet his gaze were few. With the Hunter so close to the surface . . . Henry could think of only two others who would even attempt it. After a long moment, CB nodded and looked away. “What happens now?”

“Graham will call his cousins to the door, then they'll go to Tony and tell him about the servants and the journal.”

“I've pulled them pretty much into the here and now, you know? If this Tony can see them, they can get . . .” Graham frowned. “Unless the house being awake is giving them trouble.” He stepped back as both vampire and executive producer turned on him. “But probably not. You guys can just go back to ignoring me.”

“Tony,” Henry continued, emphatically doing just that, “will pull the laptop into the house, and use the information on it to find a way to talk to the maid. She'll tell him what was in Caulfield's journal, he'll use
that
information to either defeat the darkness in the basement or work around it and get the house open.”

“There are a great many ifs in this plan.”

“Got a better one?”

CB snorted. “I foresee one other problem,” he said, not bothering to answer Henry's question. “Will the laptop work inside the house? According to my people, equipment batteries were draining rapidly all day.”

Henry patted the laptop case. “Ah, but this doesn't run on batteries.”

“Magic?”

“Apparently.”

CB stepped away from the porch and indicated that Graham should approach. “Then let's begin.”

As Graham sidled past him, he paused, and peered up into the taller man's face. “He's a vampire.” The merest hint of a glance back at Henry. “Did you know he's a vampire?”

“Yes.”

“And that doesn't bother you?”

“You speak to the dead.”

“Yeah, but I don't suck blood.”

“I have only your word for that.”

Brianna stepped past the lantern sitting on the threshold—the compromise between all of them crowding into the bathroom and privacy. “Okay, next. And don't worry, the boy's mostly scared about strange people coming in his room.” She glanced around at the half circle of silent faces. “What?”