Smoke and Mirrors (50 page)

Tony went upstairs while Lucy Lewis killed her coworker and waited by the second-floor bathroom while she hanged herself. When the only light on the floor came from the lantern in his hand and Karl started crying again, he went into the room.

“Cassie? Stephen?”

He didn't know where they'd been for the last—impossible to tell exactly how long since he'd seen them, without a watch and only the very subjective replays to determine the passage of time, but it had been a while.

“Guys? I need to talk to you. It's important.”

Nothing. Big white empty bathroom.

He sighed and crossed to the mirror. Not so empty anymore. Not so white. The mirror showed Cassie and Stephen sitting on the edge of the tub and the walls covered in splashes and sprays and dribbles of blood. Too much blood for a double murder? Even considering that head wounds bled like crazy? Maybe every replay left its mark. And wasn't that depressing.

“Guys, I can see your reflection. I know you're there.” They were looking at him. But only in the mirror. Cassie looked sad. Stephen stubborn.

Fine.

“The thing in the basement wants me to join it, and it's holding Lee hostage to make me. I think we can beat it if one of you two helps me to save Lee.”

Cassie glanced away. Stephen lifted his sister's hand off his leg and wound their fingers together. He couldn't have said
“Mine.”
more obviously if he'd said it out loud.

Tony counted time by his heartbeat. He had to convince them before the next replay started. Before their replay started.

“If I can't save Lee . . .” Try again. “If Lee dies, I die with him. You guys are dead. You have to admit that alive is better. Together and alive. Because, him and me, we won't be together if we're dead.” Yeah. That was articulate—not! Entirely possible all that sugar water had been a bad idea as he couldn't seem to maintain a coherent thought. Time to pull the big guns. Time to use the magic word . . .

“Please.”

“If we help you, it'll know we have more than the existence it allows us.”

He turned. Cassie sat alone on the tub, the fingers of her right hand, the fingers wrapped around her brother's hand, fading into nothing. Her single eye locked on his face, willing him to understand.

“If it knows we're awake and aware . . .”

“It'll kill us again.” Stephen was there now. “It'll take away the little bit of life we have. Is that what you want? Because we're dead, we don't count for as much as the living?”

Yes.

No.

Damn.

“If you're dead, then what you have isn't life, is it?”

Stephen's eyes narrowed and when he rose, he looked menacing for the first time that night. “Get out.”

Remembering what a glancing touch against his shoulder had felt like, Tony backed toward the door both hands raised. “I'm sorry!”

“Not good enough.” Then he jerked to a stop, his head dislodging.

Cassie stood, still holding her brother's hand, his arm stretched tautly between them. “He's right, Stephen. What we have isn't life.”

“All right, not life.” He settled his head. “But we have each other and we can't risk losing that.
I
can't risk losing that! Can you?”

“We don't know that we will. But if we don't help, we know that Lee will die?”

She'd made it a question. Tony answered with a nod. “It hasn't noticed you yet, right?”

“Because we've been staying in our place.” Stephen spat the words at him. “Here. Together.”

“You were walking around earlier and it didn't notice you.”

“Before it was awake!”

“And after.”

“We were lucky. We can feel it. We can tell that it's awake. It has to be able to do the same.”

“Why?”

Stephen frowned. “What?”

“Why does it have to be able to do what you can do? It can't move around, you can. It can't communicate without possessing someone's ass, you can.”

“How does it communicate with someone's ass?”

Tony's turn to frown. “That's not what I meant, I meant . . .”

“What do you want us to do?” Cassie interrupted.

Free hand holding his head in place, Stephen whirled to face her. “Cassie!”

She shrugged, broken sundress strap swaying with the motion. “I'm just asking.”

“I need you to draw this symbol . . .” Tony held up his left hand, palm out, and both ghosts leaned away. “Oh, shit, you can't, can you?”

“I don't think . . .” Her single brow drew in. “It pushes at us. What is it?”

“It's complicated. It's kind of a protection. A protection against the thing's power, but you're a part of that power.”

“Only while we're dying.” She studied the symbol. “But
this
it would definitely notice. And if we had anything to do with it, it would notice us.”

“Told you,” Stephen grunted.

Cassie glanced over at him, her expression unreadable, then turned back to Tony. “The symbol would protect Lee from the thing? Keep it from hurting him?”

“It should.”

“Should?”

“Should. No chance of a rehearsal. We have to go live and hope it works, but that doesn't matter because you can't.” He slammed his fist into his thigh. “Shit! Fuck! Damn it!”

“You want this done with the paint, like before? Right?” When Tony nodded, the sudden rush of hope making it impossible to speak, Cassie nodded with him.

“I like Lee. He's cute.”

“It's dangerous.” Stephen almost wailed the word, and the skin on Tony's arms pebbled into goose bumps.

“It's a little paint,” Cassie argued. “It's no more than what I did this morning. Where is Lee?”

“In the basement.”

“Are you insane!”

“The door will be open,” he told them quickly before Stephen could continue. “So you'll be able to go downstairs. There's an open can of paint in the kitchen and you can suck energy out of Amy to use it. You don't need much right? Just for a little symbol like this. She says it's okay. Actually, she's looking forward to it.” He was almost babbling but couldn't seem to stop. “And the shit won't hit the fan until the next replay after yours, so first you get the paint then you wait until Karl stops crying then you flick the symbol onto Lee just before Karl starts screaming and then, as Karl's replay starts, you get sucked back here . . .” He tapped the wall. “. . . to safety.”

“No.” Releasing Cassie's hand, Stephen folded his arms. “Not in the basement. No way.”

“But . . .”

“I said, no!”

“Tony . . .”

He looked past Stephen to Cassie.

“. . . go away. I need to talk to my brother.”

Yeah. That would work. Cassie wanted to help, he could see that, and Cassie was the only person, living or dead, Stephen would be willing to listen to. Except . . . He paused in the doorway. “How will I know?”

Her expression said,
trust me
. The shrug that went with it, not so confident.

“Stephen . . .”

“No.”

“If we don't help, Lee will die.”

“And if we do help, what happens to us?”

“If we each stroke on half of the symbol, maybe nothing. But maybe something. And that's good because nothing has happened to us since we died. We're as trapped now as we were before Graham woke us. Except now we know it.”

“But . . .” He started to shake his head, remembered, and caught her hands in his instead. “I can't lose you. I can't.” When she sat back on the edge of the tub, he sank to the floor and buried his face in her skirt. “I can't. I won't. And there's more!”

She freed a hand and stroked his cheek. “More?”

“Have you thought of what happens to us if Tony destroys it? What happens to us if we're not trapped here anymore?”

“We move on.”

He lifted his head then. “Where? Because, you know, there was sinning.”

The corners of her mouth trembled up into a smile. “I remember.”

“So, I'm thinking we're better off here.” His smile suggested he'd found definitive reasoning.

“Maybe if we save Lee, the sinning won't count for as much. And if we don't save him . . .” Her fingers remembered the soft silk of Stephen's hair. “If we don't save him and Tony still destroys the malevolence, well, that won't look good for us if we move on. Given the sinning and all.”

“No.”

She sighed. Or she thought she sighed; her fingers, it seemed, had a better memory than her lungs. “I'm going to help Tony. So if we do move on . . .”

“No.”

But that “no” was less definite. And he'd stopped smiling.

Waiting outside the bathroom door, Tony flicked open his pocketknife. His left hand had only just regained enough strength to grip it while he poked the point of the blade into the tip of his right index finger.

Caulfield seemed to think the answers Tony needed in order to understand the metaphysics of the situation were in the journal. The journal told them that Caulfield had used his own blood to trap the accumulated power against the basement wall. After folding the knife and slipping it back into his pocket, Tony pressed his thumb against the ball of his finger, just under the cut, and squeezed out a steady supply of blood as he painted over the symbol on his left palm.

He'd only just finished, cut finger in his mouth, when Karl stopped crying.

MR. MILLS STAGGERED
back as the ax came free and screamed, “You can't hide from me!”

Tony didn't watch as Cassie and Stephen came out into the hall and then ran, hand in hand, for the bathroom. He knew he wasn't seeing them alive, that their reality was a nearly severed neck and three-quarters of a head, but to see them appear alive, to see their last few moments and to know they'd be trapped replaying those moments over and over—well, it was fucking tragic, that's what it was.

It was supposed to stop with death. Maybe there was a judgment, maybe there wasn't—Tony had seen enough weird shit he was unwilling to commit—but the point was: end of something, start of something else. Cassie and Stephen didn't end, didn't start, didn't do anything but sort of exist. And maybe that
sort of
was better than risking the alternative, but Tony didn't think so.

Maybe he should just stop thinking about it. He'd had his chance to convince them.

He winced. Twice. Ax into flesh. Ax into bone. Funny that the impact of the ax—an impact that wasn't particularly loud—made more of an impression than the screaming. Actually, Karl had pretty much desensitized him to screaming. Karl, and before Karl, Aerosmith.

Splattered with the blood of his children, Mr. Mills turned and walked out of the bathroom. Once in the hall, he looked down at the bloody ax as though he'd never seen it before, as though he had no idea whose brains and hair were stuck along its length, then he adjusted his grip and slammed the blade down between his own eyes.

Tony took a step forward as the body fell, held out his left hand, his own blood glistening on his palm, and he reached. Energy never went away and bottom line, the ghosts were captured energy.

Line below the bottom line, this was really going to hurt.

But he couldn't think of another way.

It was all a matter of manipulating energy. Any and all types of energy if Arra's notes could be trusted. It was, in the end, what separated the wizards from the boys. Or maybe, more accurately, those who were willing to risk losing the use of an arm from those who'd come up with a less debilitating solution. And, man, he'd sure like to talk to that other guy . . .