Darkest Night - Smoke And Mirrors Part 29

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?"

Ca.s.sie 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.

"Ca.s.sie, 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 ba.s.s 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 s.h.i.t 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.

"We'll be in the craft services truck if you need us, Boss." And much more quietly as they moved away, voice barely touching innuendo, "You think they want to be alone?"

CB, Henry realized as the other man shifted beneath him, hadn't heard. Probably for the best. He was comfortable, recovering in this position that parodied pa.s.sion, and had no wish to be tossed aside as smart-a.s.s employees were summarily dealt with.

"Old Arogoth," he said after a moment, "is really starting to annoy me."

"You've felt its power. Can Tony defeat it?"

Henry could lie and make CB believe him, but they'd moved past that back in the spring. "I hope so."

"If he gets my daughters out. . ."

Carefully pulling himself up into a sitting position, Henry watched the other man's face as he stared up into the night sky, rain beading against mahogany skin. Conscious of the scrutiny, the ex-linebacker lowered his head and met the vampire's gaze. Henry could read no promises in his dark eyes, none of the futile bargains with death he'd heard made a thousand times.

"If he gets your daughters out?" he asked softly. Curious.

Broad shoulders shrugged. "I'll thank him."

"Okay . . ."

Both men turned toward the caretaker, the contact between them stretching to fill the new s.p.a.ce.

". . . Ca.s.sie and Stephen'll tell your friend Tony to come to the door and get his laptop, but they won't be able to do it right away. They got dragged back to the bathroom and they'll have to wait until the replay is over."

"Replay?" Henry asked as he got carefully to his feet. When he swayed, a warm hand closed around his elbow and steadied him.

Graham shrugged. "Yeah, well, replay's what Tony calls it. The deaths the house has collected are running over and over-they're powering the malevolence . . ."

"Arogoth."

"Yeah, whoever." Another shrug. "These replays, they're throwing off enough dark energy to drive even the most stable person nuts. It's how the malevolence does it; throws all kinds of dark and spooky c.r.a.p at you until you break.

Just, usually, it does it slower because it has more time."

"And my girls are in the midst of that?" CB's grip tightened. Had Henry been a mortal man, it would have done damage. "Of violent death replaying over and over?"

"Kind of. But not really. So far, only Tony is experiencing it."

"So far?"

Sitting splay-legged on the porch, sagging back against the lower part of the railing, Graham shrugged a third and final time.

When Tony opened his eyes, he could still see Charles' broken body superimposed over Zev. He reached out and gently tugged the music director a little to the left.

"What?"

"You don't want to know."

Zev thought about it for a moment then nodded. "All right."

Things had settled after Hartley's body had been taken away. Tina had split up the basket of food she'd brought down from Mason's dressing room after the bathroom break and everyone sat quietly eating. With everyone holding tightly to the normalcy of food, Tony doubted they'd even noticed he'd been gone.

"Tony! You have to go to the back door!"

He jumped as Stephen and Ca.s.sie appeared directly in front of him. Jumped again as Ca.s.sie grabbed for his arm and the cold raised gooseflesh from the edge of his T-shirt to his wrist. As they began to talk, overlapping each other's sentences, it spread.

". . . and if Lucy read the journal, she might be able to tell you how to deal with the malevolence."

The lights came up with a scream, and from the conservatory came the wet crunch of limbs being hacked off.

Tony wrapped his arms around his torso, shivered, and waited. And waited.

As he recalled, the old woman did a thorough job. Dismembered. Buried. Was that the sound of a shovel? Finally, rat poison.

This time, when the entryway reappeared, lantern lit and smelling ever so faintly of sweat and vomit, Amy's hand came out of nowhere and impacted with his face.

"Ow!"

"Sorry." Except she didn't look sorry; she looked disturbingly disappointed that she wasn't going to be able to hit him again. At least the numbness she'd been wrapped in since Hartley's death had disappeared. "We thought you'd been possessed."

His cheek throbbed. "I was waiting out another replay!"

"Well, yeah. We know that now."

"I mentioned it at the time," Zev pointed out.

"I wanted to stick you with pins." Brianna smiled at him over the edge of her m.u.f.fin. "But Zev said no. The p.o.o.py head."

Just Zev? Given the evening so far, stupid question.

"Well, what did they say?"

"Say?" If the second replay was identical to the first, the gardener had been quickly unconscious and the old woman had said nothing as she methodically hacked him to pieces.

Amy rolled her eyes and her arm twitched. "The ghosts you were obviously listening to before you went away."

"Oh, them!"

"Oh, them," she repeated sarcastically. "Messages from beyond the grave should never be taken lightly! Share!"

"I need to go to the back door."

Kate snorted. "The h.e.l.l you do."

"A friend of mine-Henry," he added to Zev who nodded, "has my laptop there."

Kate snorted again, this time adding a sneer. "And this is exactly the situation that needs a game of spider solitaire."

Arra used to tell the future with spider solitaire. This didn't seem to be the time to bring that up.

Tony stepped to one side so that Amy no longer stood between him and the bulk of their companions. "Graham Brummel, the caretaker, is a medium." When everyone accepted that without throwing things, he continued. "He told Ca.s.sie and Stephen that one of the ghosts who died while Creighton Caulfield was still alive may know how we can deal with the thing in the bas.e.m.e.nt. I need my laptop so I can figure out how to talk to that ghost."

"Why?" Peter asked, crossing his arms. "You've been talking to the brother and sister all along."

"Because the caretaker is their cousin and he redefined them as individuals, pulled them away from . . . uh . . ."

"Death?" Amy offered.

"Yeah, death."

"So your laptop came with software for talking to the dead." Peter used the tone he saved for dealing with unfinished sets, unlearned lines, and extras in general. "You got lucky, Tony. All I got on mine was a copy of Jukebox."

They were clearly not going to let him leave until he explained. No point in making a run for it since the light faded to total and complete darkness just past the curved line of salt. Granted, he could just wait for the next replay and move through the lit halls of that earlier time, but given the varying edges the group seemed balanced on, he couldn't guarantee he'd survive the experience. He really didn't want to be the headliner in the next murder/suicide.