Darkest Night - Smoke And Ashes Part 3

Might be Conner, that friend of Everett's he'd met while visiting the makeup artist in the hospital. They'd gone for coffee but hadn't been able to hook up since-Conner worked in the props shop at one of the other Burnaby studios, and his hours were as insane as Tony's. Maybe their schedules had finally matched up.

Of course, Conner'd have no way of knowing that.

Unless Everett had told him.

h.e.l.l, if he was going to imagine hot guys, why not drop all the way into fairy-tale land and a.s.sume it was Lee, no longer conflicted and unable to deny the blistering pa.s.sion between them. Okay, for pa.s.sion subst.i.tute a couple of possessed kisses-but they'd been pretty d.a.m.ned hot.

Another knock.

Of course, I could just get off my a.s.s, walk a few meters, and find out. Dropping the spray cheese down in a pile of blankets by the jerky, Tony headed for the door.

There was a spell on the laptop called "Spy Hole" that allowed the wizard to see through solid objects. The first time Tony'd tried it, he'd given it a little too much juice and gotten way too good a look at Mr. Chansky across the hall in apartment eleven. Talk about being scared straight. The experience had convinced him that sometimes the old ways were the best. Leaning forward, he peered through the security peephole.

Leah Burnett.

And the translucent overlay of the big guy with antlers.

She grinned up at the lens and lifted a bag of Chinese food into Tony's field of vision.

All right. She had his attention.Stepping back, he opened the door.

"Hey." She waved the bag. "I thought we should talk."

"All three of us?"

"Three? If you have company..."

"No." He just moved enough to stay solidly in her line of sight, blocking her view of the apartment. "You, me, and the guy sharing your s.p.a.ce."

Dark eyes widened. "Guy?"

"Big guy." He held his hand about half a meter over her head.

"Really? What does this guy look like?"

"Hard to say, he's a little fuzzy. Got a rack on him like Bambi's dad, though."

"And you can see him right now?"

"Not right now. He kind of comes and goes."

"Uh-huh." A quick glance up and down the hall. "Maybe we should discuss this inside."

"Got something to hide?"

"Just trying to keep you out of trouble with your neighbors."

That seemed fair. Besides, there were precautions in place in case he was actually in any danger from her. Them. Although, given the Chinese food and all, he doubted it. Opening the door all the way, Tony tucked himself up against the wall and beckoned the stuntwoman in.

The glyphs painted across the threshold were supposed to flare red and create an impenetrable barrier if danger approached-it had taken days of fine-tuning to stop them from going off for the pizza girl, Mr. Chansky, and the elderly cat who lived at the end of the hall. As Leah stepped into the apartment, they flared white then orange then green then a couple of colors Tony suspected the human eye shouldn't actually be able to see. The pattern slammed out to fill the doorway, turned gray, and fluttered to the floor.

Leah brushed at the shoulder of her jacket, the pale ash smearing across the damp fabric. "Sorry about that." Her nose wrinkled as the smell of burned cherries momentarily overwhelmed the smell of the Chinese food. "What did you paint those on with, cherry cough syrup?"

"Yeah." When she stared up at him in astonishment, he shrugged. Carefully. His head felt like he'd just been hit repeatedly with a rubber mallet. "Cherry was the only flavor that worked. And," he added, hoping he sounded like he believed it was possible, "I will fireball your a.s.s if you try anything."

"Like what?"

"Sorry?"

She pulled the door out of his hand and closed it. "What are you expecting me to try?"

He had no idea, so he followed her farther into the apartment.

"I suppose I should be impressed that a guy your age actually sorts his laundry," she muttered stepping over a pile of jeans and up to the kitchen counter where she set the bag down, shrugged out of her jacket, and started opening cupboards. "Ah. Plates." And a moment later. "Cutlery?"

"In the drawer by the fridge."

"Right. It's mostly plastic."

"They were free."

"Fair enough." She handed him a full plate and stepped over socks and underwear and stood staring at the rest of the apartment.

"Daniel told me you were gay."

"Yeah."

"Way to work against the stereotype."

"What?"

Her gesture took in the walls, the floor, and most of his furniture. "It's beige."

"It was beige when I got here."

"You have a flag tacked up over the window."

"I'm a patriotic kind of guy."

"The only thing on the wall is a poster for Darkest Night."

"It was free."

"I figured. You seem to have spent everything you've made in the last year on that entertainment center."

"Look..." Tony pushed the laptop to one side and set his plate down on the small square table. "... if you're here on some weird makeover thing, I don't want my apartment redecorated or my life rearranged."

"You sure?"

Her smile changed the whole shape of her face. Made her look years younger. Made her eyes sparkle. Made her look like someone he'd like to get to know. Really well. Made him want to slide the sweater off her shoulders, push back the dark curls and...

... he suddenly noticed that the translucent antlered guy looked a lot solider. Except for the horns, and the weird way his eyes had no whites, he seemed to be human. His skin tone was a little deeper than Leah's-a regular coffee instead of a double double-he had a lot of long dark hair twisted into dreads, and he was naked. And, although it was difficult to tell for certain, given that he and Leah were still sharing the same s.p.a.ce, remarkably well hung.

What the f.u.c.k?

Tony shook his head and Leah was once again just a not very tall stuntwoman eating chow mein in his living room. Alone. No overlay of antlered guy. Eyes narrowed, he took a step back and raised the plastic fork. "What was that?"

"A test." She caught a bean sprout before it fell off the edge of her plate. "Ninety percent of men fail it."

Tony did the math. "Well, good for me. I'm really most sincerely gay."

"And yet you still can't afford a gallon of periwinkle paint?" "Yeah, well here's a thought..." He moved a pile of old sides-the half-size sheets with all the background information for each day's shoot as well as the necessary script pages-and sat on the steadier of his two folding chairs. "... unless that guy is your inner interior decorator, how about you let the beige thing go and tell me what the h.e.l.l is going on?"

She thought about it for a moment, then nodded and sat on the edge of his bed. "You're a wizard."

Tony just barely managed to resist coming back with, I know I am, but what are you? It was just past three in the morning, for f.u.c.ksake. He was a little punchy. He swallowed a mouthful of beef fried rice and said: "You're... ?"

"Not." A wave of her fork, dangling a piece of overcooked bok choi, cut off his reply. "It's complicated. Maybe you should call your teacher, and I'll only have to go through it once."

"My teacher?"

"Mentor. Whatever you call the senior wizard in charge of your education." Dark eyes sparkled again. "I'm a.s.suming that in this brave new millennium you don't use the word master."

"What makes you think I have a teacher?"

Leah sighed. "You're young. Far too young to be on your own."

"Surprise." He spread his hands.

Brows rose. "What happened to your teacher?"

He pushed chow mein around his plate. "I thought we were going to talk about the naked h.o.r.n.y dude."

Fortunately, only a little rice went up her nose. When she finished laughing and snorting and blowing her nose on the crumpled handful of toilet paper Tony'd brought from the bathroom, she said, "His name is Ryne Cyratane. It means: He Who Brings Desire and Destruction. He's a Demonlord."

"Oh, man." The fork bounced as he dropped it on the table. "Not again."

"Excuse me?"

"A few years ago, some friends of mine stopped a Demonlord from coming through in Toronto."

"Coming through?"

"Yeah, there was this lesser demon writing the Demonlord's name on the city in blood and..." He frowned, trying unsuccessfully to remember the specifics Henry had told him about how they'd finally defeated it. "It got complicated, but he didn't make it."

"Obviously." Her tone went beyond dry to desiccated. "Well, there's no need for you to worry about this one. I've got him contained." She stood and pulled up her sweater.

"Nice tat."

"Thank you." It circled her navel, row after row of black glyphs spreading almost up to the edge of her ribs like ripples moving out from the point of impact. "It's a Demongate. As long as I live, the gate stays closed and my lord is denied reentry to this world."

"Your lord?"

"Long story." "Okay. Reentry?"

"He was here about four thousand years ago. For almost five hundred years, worshiped as a G.o.d, he ruled a territory in what's now Lebanon. Ish. Same general geography anyway, near as I can figure. He had a temple, he had handmaidens, he had a lot of s.e.x."

That would be the desire part, Tony figured.

"Then something came up-he's never said what-and he created a gate to return to the h.e.l.l he came from. It took a lot of power.

To get it, he killed everyone in the village and, with their blood, anch.o.r.ed the gate in his sole surviving handmaiden."

And that would be the destruction. Tony leaned closer. The tat wasn't black. Not exactly. It was a very, very dark red-brown.

"You're the handmaiden."

"Handmaiden, priestess, lover; I was his..."

"Girlfriend?" He winced at her expression. "Sorry. I was just channeling Young Frankenstein, you know when Frau Blucher is explaining and... Never mind. Sorry. Totally inappropriate interruption. I'll just, uh, be quiet now."

She waited a moment longer.

Tony picked up his fork and ate some more rice and tried to look like there was some other idiot in his apartment who couldn't keep his mouth shut.

"I was his most beloved." Leah continued at last. Her fingertips lightly stroked the edges of the pattern, raising goose b.u.mps on her skin. "He cut the gate into my flesh, glyphs written in the blood of my people, because he intended to return but would be unable to open the gate from the other side. Gates from the h.e.l.ls have to be opened from our side or we'd be overrun by demons in a heartbeat."

"And they have to be asked in?" Then he remembered that he'd said he'd be quiet and he shrugged apologetically, but she seemed resigned to the interruption.

"You're confused, that's vampires."

It didn't seem like the right time to correct her. Henry went where he wanted. "Why didn't this Ryne Citation..."

"Ryne Cyratane."

"Right. Why didn't he just leave the gate open?"

"Because that would have been just asking for another Demonlord to come along and try to take it over. And, before you ask, the wizard who had opened the original gate was long dead."

"Dead wizard." Yeah, that sounded encouraging. "Nice."

"Probably not. Anyway, Ryne Cyratane figured that I'd be able to stand what he'd done to my people for just long enough for him to finish up his business at home and then grief and guilt would cause me to take my own life. Should I be stronger than my grief, it wouldn't much matter because time was on his side and a human life is pitifully short to the demon kin-and, back then, pitifully short was even shorter. Unfortunately for his plans, he made a small error-although, to be fair, I was squirming a bit while he incised the protection runes." She traced the outer ring. "He intended to protect the gate from me, to keep me from defacing the pattern, thus destroying the gate and preventing him from returning, but he ended up writing in a much more powerful and general protection.

"The gate protects itself and, in protecting itself, protects me. I can't be injured because that would affect the gate. I can't age because that would affect the gate. I am held as I was the day he left this world."

"Four thousand years ago?" And that would make her... "You're four thousand years old?" She shrugged and sat back down on the end of the bed, retrieving her plate and looking mid-twenties at the absolute outside.

Jeans. Sweater. High-tops. "More or less. Probably closer to thirty-five hundred. You lose track after a while."