Smoke and Mirrors (31 page)

“I never said that.”

“Then shut up.”

“You shut up.”

“Girls . . .” Tina's voice held obvious warning. The phrase “clear and present danger” chased itself around Tony's head.

Amy rolled her eyes and dropped to one knee, lifting the edge of Lee's jacket off Brenda's face with one hand and dropping her rings on the dead woman's eyes with the other. “Anyone else goes,” she murmured, “and we're going to have to hope silver plating works as well.”

Foreshadowing,
Tony thought. And he could see the word on a couple of other faces.
Just what we need.
Movement at the far end of the room caught his eye, and he turned, expecting to see Cassie and Stephen but instead seeing only the faint gray outline of the mirror. He'd managed to be elsewhere when Peter had ordered the hair spray cleaned off after finishing the cocktail party scene. Given the length of the room, he was surprised that the lantern light reached that far. On second thought, he wasn't sure that it did.

Movement in the mirror had nothing to do with movement in the room. Shapes offered other shapes something. Tea. Little cakes. Faces, made indistinct by distance, formed and reformed as cups rose and fell and dropped to the carpet when the convulsions started.

“Is that how we left him?”

Amy's question snapped his head back around so quickly he nearly kinked his neck. Tom's left hand lay by his side, the fingers curled up so that chewed fingernails pointed toward the ceiling. His right rested palm down on his thigh. Under the tarp, his head flopped a little to one side. Tony couldn't remember how they'd left him.

“Who looked that closely?” Adam muttered, more or less voicing Tony's thought.

“I think it would be cool if he walked around,” Brianna sighed. “You guys never did zombies yet.”

“Episode after next,” Amy said without looking up.

“Seriously?” Mason didn't sound thrilled. Tony couldn't blame him. The whole walking undead thing was just too easy to parody. Once Sara Polley took up arms against an army of animated corpses, zombies were done to death—at least on the Canadian side of the border.

“Writers were finishing the final draft when I left the office.”

“Peter . . .”

“Not now, Mason.”

Amy nodded, having come to a decision. “Of course that's how he was. I'm sure.”

She almost sounded sure.

That would have to be good enough.

“You have a safe trip, too.” She lightly touched Tom's shoulder before she stood, then tugged her Hello Kitty T-shirt down and headed for the door. “Let's get back into the circle and this time, let's
all
stay there.”

“Brianna, Ashley, come on.” Zev tugged the girls into motion and everyone else followed behind; walking slowly like mourners leaving a funeral. Which, Tony supposed, was what they were. Amy was right, Tom had taken them by surprise and they hadn't so much mourned him as feared for themselves. Brenda, they grieved for.

He watched Lee's bowed shoulders, found himself wondering just how much the other man grieved, and almost hated himself for it.

“Tony?”

“Right. Sorry.” He hurried to catch up to Peter and Adam.

“Isn't this great,” the 1AD muttered. “We have our own morgue. It's like we're being punished for inflicting yet another gumshoe with fangs on the viewing public.”

“This seems a little extreme for bad television,” Peter sighed.

“Episode nine.”

“Even for that.”

The silence waiting for them in the hall seemed weighted. The people waiting, numbed. Amy knelt by Hartley, everyone else stood around the outside edge of the circle.

Peter pushed past. “What is it?”

Amy's voice had lost most of its highs and lows. “He's dead. It looks like he puked and choked on it.”

“You're sure?”

“I watched a lot of
Da Vinci's Inquest
.” Her lip curled. “And besides, it's pretty obvious.”

“Eww, puke.” Even Brianna seemed to have lost her interest in the ghoulish.

“Right. All right.” Peter visibly pulled fraying bits back together. “Saleen, Pavin, carry him into the drawing room beside the others. Don't even start with me,” he continued as the sound tech opened his mouth to protest. “Half the time it's like you two aren't even here. Amy . . .”

“Earrings.” Her hands rose to the first of four silver hoops in her right ear. “I'm on it.”

Sorge led the way with the lantern, then Amy, then the body. No one said anything. No one followed.

“At least it was his own vomit,” Adam observed thoughtfully as the body passed.

Tony would have laughed, wouldn't have been able to stop himself from laughing, except that the lights came up and Karl started shrieking as he burned.

Some of the moisture beading Graham's forehead was rain. Most of it wasn't. Breathing heavily, he sat back on his heels and shook his head. “Still nothing. They're there. I can feel them, eh, but it's like they don't know where I am.”

“The house.” CB made it an accusation, not a question.

“Yeah, sure, probably. So what? There's nothing I can do. I need a beer.” He started to stand but Henry's hand came down on his shoulder and held him in place.

“When we're done, you can drink yourself into a stupor if you need to.” Henry reached past the medium with his other hand. “Try again while I'm in contact with the house.”

“And that'll do what?”

“Like calls to like.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Graham watched the pale fingers approach the closest point the house allowed. “It'll just throw you off.”

Hazel eyes darkened. “Let it try.”

“At least Karl doesn't take too long.” Cassie rubbed her arms, hands ghosting over the rivulets of blood without disturbing them. “I need to get out of this bathroom.”

Stephen snorted. “It's not Karl that takes the time, it's his mother. And what a way to go; poking her eyes out with knitting needles might not have even killed her.”

“I think
it
made sure she was dead.”

“Well, yeah.” He sat down on the edge of the tub, the blood splatters from their deaths evident on porcelain and paint. “Did it seem faster this time?”

“Karl?”

“The time between us and Karl.”

“I don't know.” Cassie reached out and lightly touched her reflection in the mirror. Her face was whole and she never tired of looking at it.

“It seemed faster to me. I think
it's
speeding things up, putting more pressure on them now that they've started to crack. I mean, we barely pulled ourselves back together after dying when we were back in here again. And there's two more dead.”

“I know.” Her eyes were . . . were . . . “Stephen, what color were my eyes?”

Her brother shrugged and fixed his head in one practiced motion. “I don't know.”

“Blue?”

“Sure.”

“Gray?”

“If you want.”

“Stephen!”

“Karl's stop . . .” Stephen didn't so much stand as he was suddenly on his feet. “Can you feel that?”

Cassie frowned and turned from the mirror. “It's Graham. He wants us.”

“It's more than Graham!” Eyes wide, he reached for her and was still reaching an instant later in the kitchen. “How did we get here?”

A young man, his head lying in a spreading puddle of blood, appeared and disappeared by the corner of the table.

“Cassie, look! Colin's being pulled out of sequence!”

“Graham's never done that . . .” Only their lack of substance kept them from slamming into the wall by the back door. “. . . before.” She spun around to face the door, parts of her moving faster than others, legs swirling unsubstantially in an effort to catch up. “All right, we're here. Stop shouting!”

Power surged up his arm, locking his muscles into agonizing rigidity. The house fought to force him away. He fought to remain in contact. The flesh between suffered.

It burned.

And it froze.

And it melted off his bones.

“I've got them.”

Henry heard the voice, couldn't quite comprehend the words. Knew they were important, couldn't remember why.

Then warm points of contact on each arm. Warm and painfully tight.

The slow and steady beating of a mortal heart beneath his cheek brought him back to himself. He could hear blood moving purposefully. Feel the gentle rhythm of mortal breathing. Feel solid muscle, below, beside, almost all the way around him. Smell expensive cologne over meat. He opened his eyes.

He was lying across CB's lap, cradled in the big man's arms. It was an unexpected position, but it felt surprisingly safe—which was a good thing since leaving it seemed to be temporarily out of the question. “What happened?”

CB smiled, dark eyes crinkling at the corners, but before he could speak, another voice broke in.

“You were kind of vibrating inside this red light, not making any noise, but it looked like you were screaming. The boss grabbed your arms, and when the red light tossed him away, you came too.”

Chris. Henry managed to turn his head and saw the three members of the production crew standing and staring down at him. Teeth clenched, feeling more like throwing up than he had in four-hundred-odd years—a remarkably effective way of keeping the Hunter at bay—he flopped his head back around until he could see CB again. “You knew the house would push you away.”

“And I figured I'd take you with me.” This close, his voice was a bass rumble in the depths of a broad chest.

“That explains why my arms hurt.”

“Indeed.”

“I wouldn't have been able to get loose on my own.” No point in lying about it.

“So I surmised.”

“Are
you
all right?”

“He put a dent in the side of the generator truck.”

“I own the generator truck, Mr. Singh; I can dent it if I choose.”

“Sure, Boss.”

“Why are you three still here? There's nothing you can do.”

After a long moment, Henry heard feet shuffling in damp gravel. Chris cleared his throat. “Well, there's weird shit going down and we wanted to see how it ends.”

“Besides,” Karen added, “those are our friends trapped inside that house. Just because we can't do anything now doesn't mean we can't do something later.”

“Commendable. For now, I suggest you get out of the rain.”

Ah. Right. Rain. After a while it became such a normal part of life on the West Coast it was easy to ignore. Henry rubbed a dribble of water off his cheek against the smooth fabric of CB's trench coat.