Smoke and Mirrors (3 page)

“Those were accidents.” His voice hovered between sulky and miserable. “I didn't even know those hikers were there and I don't care what Graham says, I hate hiding.”

Comforting now. “I know.”

“And besides, I never take the kind of chances you do. Truth, Cassie, what were you thinking, marking him a second time?”

She smiled and glanced down at the smudge of paint on one finger. “I was thinking that since I'd gotten him to take off his jacket, maybe I could get him to take off his pants. Come on.” Taking his hand, she pulled him toward the door. “I want to see what they're doing now.”

“Raymond, I think you'd better have a look at this.”

“Cut and print! That was excellent work, gentlemen.” Tossing his headphones onto the shelf under the monitor, Peter turned to his director of photography. “How much time do you need to reset for scene eight?”

Sorge popped a throat lozenge into his mouth and shrugged. “Shooting from down here . . . fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. No more. When we move to the top of the stairs . . .”

“Don't borrow trouble.” He raised his voice enough to attract the attention of his 1AD . . . “Adam, tell them they've got twenty minutes to kill.” . . . and lowered it again as he pivoted a hundred and eighty degrees to face his script supervisor. “Tina, let's you and I go over that next scene. There'll be a bitch of a continuity problem if we're not careful and I don't need a repeat of episode twelve.”

“At least we know there's ninety-one people watching the show,” she pointed out as she stood.

Peter snorted. “I still think it was one geek with ninety-one e-mail addresses.”

As they moved off into the dining room and the techs moved in to shove the video village out into the actual entryway where it wouldn't be in the shot, Adam stepped out into the middle of the foyer and looked up at the two actors. “You've got fifteen, guys.”

“I'll be in my dressing room.” Turning on one heel, Mason headed back up the stairs.

“If anyone needs me, I'll be in my dressing room as well.” Lee grimaced, reached back, and yanked at his pants. “These may dry faster off my ass.”

Mouse, his gray hair more a rattail down his back and physically the complete opposite of his namesake—no one had ever referred to him as meek and lived to speak of it—stepped out from behind his camera and whistled. “You want to drop trou, don't let us stop you.”

Someone giggled.

Tony missed Lee's response as he realized the highly unlikely sound could only have come from Kate, Mouse's camera assistant. He wouldn't have bet money on Kate knowing
how
to giggle. He wasn't entirely certain she knew how to laugh.

“Tony,” Adam's hand closed over his shoulder as Lee followed Mason up the stairs and both actors disappeared down the second-floor hall. “I saw Mason talking with Karen from craft services earlier. Go make sure she didn't add any bagels to his muffin basket.”

“And if she did?”

“Haul ass upstairs and make sure he doesn't eat one.”

“You want me to wrestle the bagel out of Mason's hand?”

“If that's where it is.” Adam grinned and patted him manfully on the shoulder—where manfully could be defined as
better you than me, buddy
. “If he's actually taken a bite, I want you to wrestle it out of his mouth.”

Mason loved bagels, but the dental adhesive attaching Raymond Dark's fangs to his teeth just wasn't up to the required chewing. After a couple of forty-minute delays while Everett replaced the teeth, and one significantly longer delay after the right fang had been accidentally swallowed, CB had instituted the no-bagels-in-Mason's-dressing-room rule. Since Mason hadn't had to ultimately retrieve the tooth—that job had fallen to Jennifer, his personal assistant who, in Tony's opinion, couldn't possibly be paid enough—he'd chosen to see it as a suggestion rather than a rule and did what he could to get around it.

As a result Karen from craft services found herself under a determined assault by a man who combined good looks and charm with all the ethical consideration of a cat. No one blamed her on those rare occasions she'd been unable to resist.

Today, no one knew where she was.

She wasn't at the table or the truck and there wasn't time enough to search further. Grabbing a pot of black currant jam off the table, Tony headed up the stairs two steps at a time, hoping Mason's midmorning nosh hadn't already brought the day to a complete stop.

As the star of
Darkest Night,
Mason had taken the master suite as his dressing room. Renovated in the fifties, it took up half the front of the second floor and included a bedroom, a closet/dressing room, and a small bathroom. Provided he kept flushing to a minimum, Mr. Brummel had cleared this bathroom for Mason's personal use. Lee had to use the honey wagon like every one else.

All the doors that led off the second-floor hall were made of the same Douglas fir that dominated the rest of the house, but they—and the trim surrounding them—had been stained to look like mahogany. Tony, who in a pinch could tell the difference between plywood and MDF, had been forced to endure a long lecture on the fir-as-mahogany issue from the gaffer who carved themed chess sets in his spare time. The half finished knight in WWF regalia that he'd pulled from his pocket
had
been impressive.

Hand raised to knock on the door to Mason's room, Tony noticed that both the upper panels had been patched. In the dim light of the second-floor hall, the patches were all but invisible, but up close he could see the faint difference in the color of the stain. There was something familiar about their shape, but he couldn't . . .

Hand still raised, he jumped back as the door jerked open.

Mason stared out at him, wide-eyed. “There's something in my bathroom!”

“Something?” Tony asked, trying to see if both fangs were still in place.

“Something!”

“Okay.” About to suggest plumbing problems were way outside his job description and that he should go get Mr. Brummel, Tony changed his mind at Mason's next words.

“It was crouched down between the shower and the toilet.”

“It?”

“I couldn't see exactly, it was all shadows . . .”

Oh, crap. “Maybe I'd better go have a look.” Before Mason could protest—before he could change his mind and run screaming, he was crossing the bedroom, crossing the dressing room, and opening the bathroom door. The sunlight through the windows did nothing to improve the color scheme, but it did chase away any and all shadows. Tony turned toward the toilet and the corner shower unit and frowned. He couldn't figure out what the actor might have seen since there wasn't room enough between them for . . .

Something.

Rocking in place.

Forward.

Back.

Hands clasped around knees, tear-stained face lifted to the light.

And nothing.

Just a space far too small for the bulky body that hadn't quite been there.

Skin prickling between his shoulder blades, jar of black currant jam held in front of him like a shield, Tony took a step into the room. Shadows flickered across the rear wall, filling the six inches between toilet and shower with writhing shades of gray. Had that been all he'd seen?

Stupid question.

No.

So what now? Was he supposed to do something about it?

Whatever it was, the rocking and crying didn't seem actively dangerous.

“Well, Foster?”

“Fuck!” He leaped forward and spun around. With his heart pounding so loudly he could hardly hear himself think, he gestured out the window at the cedar branches blowing across the glass and lied through his teeth. “There's your shadow.”

Then the wind dropped again and the shadows disappeared.

Mason ran a hand up through his hair and glanced around the room. “Of course. Now you see them, now you don't.”
I wasn't frightened,
his tone added, as his chin rose.
Don't think for a moment I was.
“You're a little jumpy, aren't you?”

“I didn't hear you behind me.” Which was the truth because he hadn't—although the admiring way he said it was pure actor manipulation. Working in Television 101—keep the talent placated.

As expected, Mason preened. “Well, yes, I can move cat quiet when I want to.”

In Tony's admittedly limited experience, the noise cats made thudding through apartments was completely disproportionate to their size, but Mason clearly liked the line, so he nodded a vague agreement.

“It's fucking freezing in here . . .”

Maybe not freezing but damned cold.

“Is that jam for me?”

Jam? He followed Mason's line of sight to his hand. “Oh, yeah.”

“Put it by the basket. And then I'm sure you have things to do.” The actor's lip curled. Both fangs were still in place. “Important production assistant things.”

As it happened, in spite of sarcasm, he did.

There were no bagels in the basket but there was a scattering of poppy seeds on the tray next to a dirty knife. Setting down the jam, Tony turned and spotted a plate half hidden behind the plant that dominated the small table next to the big armchair by the window.
Bagel at twelve o'clock.

Mason had made himself a snack, set it down, then gone to the bathroom and . . .

He reached inside himself for calm, muttered the seven words under his breath, and the first half of the bagel hit his hand with a greasy-slash-sticky impact that suggested Mason had been generous with both the butter and the honey.

“Foster?”

“Just leaving.”

All things considered, the sudden sound of someone crying in the bathroom was not entirely unexpected.

As Mason turned to glare at the sound, Tony snagged the other half of the bagel. “Air in the pipes,” he said, heading for the door. “Old plumbing.”

The actor shot a scathing expression across the room at him. “I knew that.”

“Right.” Except old plumbing seldom sounded either that unhappy or that articulate. The new noises were almost words. Tony found a lot of comfort in that
almost
.

Safely outside the door, he restacked the bagel butter/ honey sides together and headed toward the garbage can at the other end of the hall, rehearsing what he'd say when Mason discovered the bagel was gone.
“I wasn't anywhere near it!”

No nearer than about six feet and Mason knew it.

Although
near
had become relative. These days he could manage to move unbreakable objects almost ten feet. Breakables still had a tendency to explode. Arra's notes hadn't mentioned explosions, but until the shadows, she'd handled FX for CB Productions, so maybe she considered bits of beer bottle flying around the room a minor effect. Fortunately, Zev had shown up early for their date and had been more than willing to drive him to the hospital to get the largest piece of bottle removed from his arm. His opinion of juggling beer bottles had been scathing. Tony hadn't had the guts to find out what his opinion of wizardry would have been.

The phrase special effects wizard had become a cliché in the industry. Arra Pelindrake, who'd been blowing things up and animating corpses for the last seven years, had been the real thing. Given the effects the new guy was coming up with, it turned out she hadn't been that great at the subtleties of twenty-first century FX but she
was
a real wizard. The shadows and the evil that controlled them had followed her through a gate she'd created between their world and this. The battle had gone down to the wire, but Tony had finally convinced her to stand and fight, and when it was all over, she'd been able to go home—but not before dropping the “you could be a wizard, too” bombshell. He'd refused to go with her, so she'd left him her laptop, six gummed-up games of spider solitaire that were supposed to give him insight into the future, and what he'd come to call Wizardshit 101; point form and remarkably obscure instructions on becoming a wizard.

He wasn't a wizard; he was a production assistant, working his way up in the industry until the time when it was his vision on the screen, his vision pulling in the viewers in the prime 19–29 male demographic. He'd had no intention of ever using the laptop.

And there'd been times over the last few months where he'd been able to stay away from it for weeks. Well, one time. For three weeks. Right after he'd had the jagged hunk of beer bottle removed from his arm.

Wizardry, like television, was all about manipulating energy.