Darkest Night - Smoke and Shadows Part 27

"She's not answering her phone."

Good news or bad? He had no idea. "Then I guess I'll go home."

Elson's lip curled. "Not to your party?"

"Not at 3:20 in the afternoon, no." It had been a long day. Tony figured he was ent.i.tled to the att.i.tude. Fine upstanding members of the community would be screaming for their lawyers by now. Only people who had history with the cops played nice.

Both RCMP officers knew it, too.

"Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Foster. If we need you, we'll be in touch."

"Yeah. Well, you're welcome."

He was almost at the door when Elson growled, "Don't leave town."

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Jack, get off his case. He's a witness- not a suspect."

Since Constable Danvers seemed to have his defense well in hand, Tony just kept walking. Out the door. Into the hall. It was weird that squad rooms all smelled the same. Past the front desk. He ignored the speculative stares. Tried not to care that another three cops could pick him out of a lineup. Out the front doors.

It was raining again.

Nikki Waugh was dead. Alan Wu was dead. Arra was . . . who the f.u.c.k knew.

He was in way, way over his head.

Man, this place had better be on a f.u.c.king bus route.

Arra wasn't at the studio. She wasn't at her condo. She wasn't in either of the two churches he'd gone to just because he had to go somewhere.

The sunset over English Bay was a brilliant display of reds and oranges that made it look as though sea and sky were on fire. With any luck, it wasn't an omen.

Although, given the way his luck had been running . . .

Bouncing the keys to Henry's condo in the palm of one hand, he admitted he didn't have a hope in h.e.l.l of finding her without help.

"It's like she's totally disappeared!" Henry nodded thoughtfully. "She's good at running."

"Yeah, I thought that, too, except that if the shadow took her, she's not running-she's investigating. Checking out the light. Or not." Unable to remain still, Tony paced back and forth in front of the wall of windows in Henry's living room. "Maybe she'd just hang around out of sight, waiting to go back through the gate. The one that was in me, it said that the important news was that she was alive, so a shadow in her, well, it's going to want to get that information back to the boss. Right? So all we have to do is destroy the shadow in her just like we destroyed Lee's shadow."

"I doubt it will be that easy. Obviously, these things can protect themselves and with the wizard's knowledge it'll be able to set up protections we won't be able to break."

"So we get there early and when she arrives, we sneak up behind her and hit her over the head." He punched his right fist into his left palm.

"And then we're stuck with an unconscious wizard and no way to remove the shadow in order to destroy it-the shadow can't separate from an unconscious host or the one in Mouse would have gone for me last night."

Last night. Tony slid past the memory. "Fine, then while she's unconscious, we tie her up and we gag her. When she wakes up, we stick her under the gate, let it suck the shadow out, and then we hit it with the light."

"Again, I doubt it will be that easy."

"That sounds easy to you?" He turned and laid his forehead against the cool gla.s.s and wondered if the lights across False Creek looked like the campfires of an advancing army. Probably not; too much neon. "She'd better have been grabbed by that shadow.

She ditched me, man. Just tossed me to the cops."

"Perhaps she thought you'd do better on your own and she didn't want to cramp your style."

Tony snorted, his breath misting the window. "Yeah. Perhaps you were right when you said she was good at running."

"Perhaps I was right?"

He pivoted his head around just far enough to grin at Henry. Realized he was doing it when it pulled on the swollen edge of his lip. Stopped. Watched Henry's expression change. He'd walked in and started talking-about finding Alan Wu, about the cops, about Arra. Until now, there hadn't been a big enough opening for an awkward silence to slip through. Oh, f.u.c.k; here it comes.

"Tony, about last night ..."

"Hey, you were hungry, I understand. You had to feed. No big."

"What?" Realization dawned before Tony had to explain. "No, not when we parted.

Earlier, when ..."

"When you called and I came running? Like I said; no big. I've found my happy place with it, Henry. I'm living with it, just like I have been since we met. And you know what else? I'm bored with it. You own my a.s.s-it's old news. I have a life because you allow it?

Well, thanks. Let's move on. We don't need to keep revisiting the ..." He sketched the most sarcastic set of air quotes he could manage, knowing full well that Henry could hear the pounding of his heart. "... underpinnings of our ..." And a second set, air quotes Amy would have been proud to display. ". . . relations.h.i.+p. This isn't one of your romance novels, this is real life and no one talks about this kind of thing in real life. Okay?"

Now he could hear the pounding of his heart-mostly because it was the only noise in the room.

Finally, after what felt like a year or two, Henry sighed. "Never underestimate the North American male's capacity for denial."

Tony's lip curled. "Bite me."

Red-gold brows rose.

One of the two dozen or so tiny lights in the chandelier over the dining room table flickered. The refrigerator compressor kicked on, the noise spilling out of the kitchen. A gust of wind off False Creek blew rain against the window, the drops. .h.i.tting the gla.s.s in a sudden staccato rhythm.

Henry snorted.

Snickered.

Started to laugh.

Tony blinked, stared, and actually felt his jaw drop. Had he ever seen Henry totally lose it like that? The vampire had collapsed back into the couch cus.h.i.+ons. Was, in fact, bouncing himself against the padded green leather, eyes closed, arms wrapped around his stomach. Just as he started to calm, the hazel eyes opened, he looked up at Tony, and lost it again.

"Hey, it wasn't that funny!"

Henry managed a fairly coherent, "Bite me?"

And then again, maybe it was.

It took a while before they stopped setting each other off. His ribs were aching as they walked together to the elevator.

"You have no idea how worried I was that you would ..."

He b.u.mped his shoulder against Henry's. "Hate you?"

"At the very least."

"Nah, we're good." Motioning Henry in first, Tony stepped over the threshold and hit the b.u.t.ton for the lobby. "Although I am feeling a rousing chorus of You and Me Against the World' coming on."

"You're twenty-four; how do you even know that song?"

"The woman who runs the craft services truck is a big Helen Reddy fan. Plays the greatest hits tape over and over and over."

Henry winced. "I'm fairly sure the Geneva Convention doesn't cover evil wizards; if you could get your hands on it, we could toss it through the gate."

"And that really bad cover of Big Yellow Taxi.' "

"And polyester bell-bottoms. I went through the sixties once and I don't think I should have to do it again. Platform shoes, big clunky gold chains, hair spray ..."

Leaning against the elevator wall, Tony listened to Henry listing the flotsam and jetsam of modern life he could do without and felt something he thought he'd lost. Hope. And annoyance. Because now he couldn't get that d.a.m.ned song out of his head.

"Has Arra ever said that the gates are one way only?"

Tony ran back over every conversation he'd had with the wizard and shook his head.

"Then it seems to me that a shadow controlling her could take more than mere information back."

That was a possibility he hadn't considered. "You think it'll take her? I mean, physically?"

"It depends on how independent these shadows are. If they're operating on very narrow parameters, like say ..." Henry's voice dropped into a doom and gloom octave.

"... find the light that is capable of destroying the others, then ..." His voice lifted back into normal ranges on the last word. "... no. But if they've been given more autonomy and since they obviously know their master wants the wizard that got away, then I think it's something we need to consider."

"Yeah, that's ..."

"That's what?" Henry asked after the pause lengthened to the point where prodding seemed necessary."I was just thinking of something Amy asked me. About . . . Turn left! Now!"

Henry deftly slid between an SUV and an approaching cla.s.sic VW Beetle and turned left onto Dunsmuir Street.

"That was Tina's van. She's the script supervisor. She was on set when the shadows came through, and if she's heading this way, then she could be heading toward Holy Rosary Cathedral."

"That's a lot of qualifiers. Are you sure it was her van?"

"Yeah, we all chipped in and got her vanity plates for Christmas. There!"

"OURSTAR?".

"Because everything in that place revolves around her," Tony explained as Henry tucked his BMW in behind the van. "Cast, crew-if there's a problem, Tina deals with it. If Peter thinks Dalai-that's the prop guy-isn't taking what he wants seriously, he complains to Tina who talks to him. If Dalai thinks Peter's being unreasonable because he never said how he wanted the potted plant wrapped ..."

"Not a random example?"

"Like I'd make that kind of thing up ... Anyway, Dalai will whiffle to Tina in turn and she'll work the whole thing out without damaging any delicate egos in the process."

"The prop guy has a delicate ego?"

"It's show business, Henry. It's all about ego."

"Good thing you're immune."

"Isn't it. She's parking."

"Good for her." As in any major city, finding parking in downtown Vancouver depended as much on luck as anything. Henry drove another block past the van-slowing to get a good look at Tina as he pa.s.sed-before he found an empty spot almost at the cathedral.

"I'm not sure this spot's legal," Tony pointed out as he parked. "In fact, given that we're under a no parking sign, I'm pretty sure it's not."

"We won't be here long. I'll go back and meet her, find out if she's shadow-held." He tossed Tony the keys. "Here. Move the car if there's a problem."

"Right. Hey, what are you going to do if there is shadow?" The car door slammed and he was sitting alone in the front seat. "Never mind."

Over short distances, Henry could move too fast to be seen if he had to. Tina was barely three meters from the van when he caught up to her, slipping into a triangle of darkness made by the corner of a building before she was aware of his presence. Caution was called for. The world through the gate knew his kind and he had no doubt that he would, like the wizard, be returned to the Shadowlord as a prize were he to be taken.

And that would be the good news.

The damage a shadow could do while in control of his body didn't bear thinking about.

As Tina pa.s.sed him-her stride purposeful, her gaze fixed on the middle distance-he sifted the night air for an otherworldly taint. She was flesh and blood and as much in control of herself as anyone in this day and age.

Flesh and blood. He felt his lips draw up off his teeth. The Hunger flared. It was always harder to put the genie back in the box. "Tina."

She turned at the sound of her name, curiosity taking care of the very little choice Henry's voice had left her. "Yes? h.e.l.lo?"

Stepping out into the circle of illumination cast by the streetlight, he smiled and caught her gaze with his. "Just a moment of your time."

When he stretched out his hand, she frowned slightly, not fighting the compulsion but very nearly questioning it. When he called her name a second time, she c.o.c.ked her head, considered, then smiled and laid her fingers across his palm.

Two steps back and they were both s.h.i.+elded by the darkness. He lifted the hand he held to his mouth, turned it, and touched his lips to the soft skin of her wrist. Her eyes, still locked on his, widened then, as she sighed, half closed. For a change, the emotional component of feeding was more on his side than hers. A chance to stroke the Hunger-a gentle acknowledgment that left it easier to control.

To the casual observer they were now more than just friends. Anyone looking closer would refuse to see what was actually happening.

"f.u.c.k, Henry; you fed off her?"

Half into the driver's seat, Henry paused. "How . . . ?"

"It's all over your face."

Startled, he leaned toward the rearview mirror.

"Not blood," Tony snorted. "It's this whole preternatural calm thing you've got going just after you feed."

"Preternatural?"