Fall of Light (23 page)

She wondered if she wanted to do a postmortem on their first actual night together anyway. Maybe she should just let it lie.

She was ready for Corvus's transition into Phrixos, she thought, but this time it happened while she was shaving him, before she had applied any of his face. The glow grew in his eyes, and his smile widened. She hesitated, then finished the stroke she had started. Blaise glanced up, but she was behind Corvus's head and couldn't see his eyes.

Phrixos closed his eyes and relaxed under her hands. Only once did he break her concentration, when she had leafed over his nose and let one hand rest on his leafy cheek while she thought about her next step. He pulled her hand toward his mouth. She sighed and drew the shield away from her smallest finger, let him feed from her. The Sifter Chant had been running in the background; her reservoir felt pleasantly full. She narrowed the channel, though, so he could not draw too quickly or too much. She shut down the feed before he released her, testing the limits of their boundaries.

“Unfair,” he muttered.

“Live with it.” She wiped her hand on her jeans and finished matching his face with yesterday's Polaroids. “Arms, please.”

Gemma, Bettina, their guardians, Magenta, and Rod all arrived at the trailer at the same time, as Opal was finishing Phrixos's chest leaves. Another actress Opal hadn't met yet arrived as well, a dark-haired woman who displaced Blaise. Blaise hopped up on a counter near Corvus's chair, still clutching her magazine. Magenta went to work on Gemma, while Rod started with the strange woman.

When Opal finished turning Phrixos into the Dark God, Rod called her over. “This is Ariadne, the mom who gets to die in today's scene. Day player—she's only got the two scenes, this one and one with the kids we're shooting on a different set tomorrow. Today we have a call in for all the other coveners, but they'll be wearing hooded robes, so not much makeup on them. Ariadne, Opal LaZelle, special effects makeup.”

“Hi,” said Ariadne. “You doing my blood?”

“If I am, nobody told me,” said Opal.

“She's special to the Dark God. Fake blood is not her department,” Rod said.

“Oh. Well, hi,” said Ariadne.

“Hi.” Opal smiled and went back to Phrixos, who was drowsing.

The mist had lightened by the time they came out of Makeup and headed for the stones. The clearing was silent, the air cold. Opal felt again the undertone of hum, an anticipatory sensation. Something waited.

She walked with Phrixos over to the altar stones as the stand-ins came off the set. Then, suddenly, he lifted her and set her on the altar. She felt a vibration all through her. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Lie down,” he whispered. He gripped her shoulders and pushed down on them. “Just for a second.”

“What? No!” She tried to wrench free, but he didn't let go.

Lightning flashed. Or, no, it was a camera flash. Erika stood just outside the circle of stones, taking pictures one after another.

“Hey,” said George, the first assistant director and Neil's shadow. “What's going on here? No horseplay, Corvus! You're going to knock something out of alignment if you're not careful.”

“Lie still,” Phrixos said, his voice soft and fierce.

She couldn't break his grip. Furious, she lay on the stone and glared up at him.

He spoke a phrase in a language she didn't recognize. Something burned and buzzed against her back. She felt the flare of Flint's shield along her skin as something tried to enter her and failed.

“Corvus!” said Neil.

“Let go!” she said. Finally he released her and she sat up, shoved off the altar stone, and ran from the set to the cast corral behind the backdrop. Shuddering, she curled up in Corvus's chair.

Erika ambled over, camera still in hand. Opal hid her face in her hands and Erika strode past.

“What was
that
?” Magenta asked.

“Things getting worse,” Opal whispered. “He stopped playing nice.”

“Oh, God.” Magenta touched her shoulder, glanced toward the set. They were behind the backdrop and couldn't actually see what was happening at the altar directly. “Did he hurt you?”

“He tried to get something to—possess me. I mean, I'm not sure about that, but he—” Opal shuddered again, pulled arms and legs tight to her center, hugged her knees to her.

She remembered one of her high school boyfriends. Once she had come into her powers, she had experimented with boys, changing her appearance in little ways to see which features attracted which boys, then trying some of the nastier spells in her repertoire, the ones Great-Uncle Tobias had scolded her for studying, to see how much she could bend people to her will. She had had no idea back then what kind of boyfriend she really wanted.

Somebody sweet like her father, the only one in the house who could actually make her mother slow down and think before she acted? Opal could force boys to be sweet, but she couldn't make them sweet and strong enough to stop her from doing anything she wanted to them. She didn't know what Dad's secret was.

Somebody who could resist her? No, she got enough of that with her younger brother Jasper and the rest of the kids. Even when she was just trying to help them, they fought back. It wasn't fair. She wasn't really their mom, just the one who took care of them. Mom was gone most of the time, and even when she was home, she was absorbed in her own affairs. The kids had minded Opal when they were little, and she loved them so much it hurt. Now they were teenagers and didn't mind much anymore.

And then she met Keith. At first he behaved like the other boys she'd experimented on, falling under her spell, responding to her smaller manipulations. Her friends thought he was so agreeable. Her most recent ex-boyfriend, still obsessing about her, wilted and faded away: Keith was stronger, better-looking, smarter. Plus, Opal suspected, but never confirmed, that Keith had beat up the previous boyfriend at one point. That sort of thing could drum even enchanting girlfriends out of people's brains, and a good thing, too, because Opal hadn't yet learned other, cleaner ways of dumping boys.

Keith behaved like all her previous boyfriends . . . up to a point. They'd been on the beach at night when she realized he wasn't like the others. They were alone on a blanket, the repeating hush of waves not far from them, faint fog rising to mask the stars. He had given her the kind of sexual experience that was all she knew, a gentle, prolonged session she had orchestrated with subtle precision, culminating in a small orgasm for her and a release and collapse for him. They lay silent. She stared sleepily up at stars. He sat up and said, “This is your idea of a good time? Let me show you something, babe.”

None of her spells affected him. Nothing she did even slowed him down. He took her hard. He hurt her. The things he whispered to her hurt, too, almost worse than the physical experience.

Afterward, when she curled up and cried, he sat beside her and said, “You have no right to complain, babe. That's what you've been doing to all those boys. They were okay before they met you. Think about it.”

She couldn't get herself to go back to school for a week, though she knew she was setting a bad example for the other kids in the family. When she did go back, she practiced a new way of altering her appearance: she made herself invisible. She watched the boys she had messed with and saw that some of them hadn't recovered particularly well. Keith would meet her gaze if he caught her looking at him, but he never smiled at her. Every time she felt herself drawn to someone new, though, she'd glance around and realize Keith was watching her.

She finally went to Uncle Tobias and forced herself to tell him everything. He set her new studies, strict lessons about how to unspell people and free them. She worked hard.

Her final assignment was to find as many of her old boyfriends as she could and take whatever spell threads she had left on them off. Tobias helped supervise. Afterward, most of them were mad at her, if they had memories at all. Tobias gave her permission to protect herself with illusion when necessary.

But it was uncomfortable living in a place where so many people had the wrong kind of history with her. She reengi-neered herself: moved to Los Angeles, ninety miles from home, got a real job—in the movies, like many in her family, but not with any of her cousins or aunts or uncles. Not with anybody she'd ever met before. She started at the bottom, assisting a makeup artist on a low-budget horror movie, and kept her talents under wraps while she learned how normal people worked. Anonymity and distance gave her the strength to examine everything she'd done so far, think about it, make different decisions.

Now
she
was like one of those ineffectual boyfriends she'd mistreated in her teens, at the mercy of a power greater than her own. She hadn't even tried to resist yet. She needed to resurrect Evil Opal.

“He tried to get something to possess you?” Magenta whispered, her grip on Opal's shoulder tightening.

“Keep away from him if you can,” Opal said. She took a deep breath. Evil Opal. Her shadow self. Somewhere in her memory house, probably behind a closed door in the basement or the attic, Opal had locked her away. Time to dig her out.

“You bloody fool, you don't go messing with anyone in public,” Neil said to Phrixos, behind her. “Especially you don't manhandle any talent necessary to the successful completion of the picture, not unless it's something she wants, and then you do it in private. I won't have this kind of upset on my set.”

“Just a joke,” Phrixos said.

“Nobody's laughing. Now straighten up and find your character. Time for blocking rehearsal. Ariadne? Where's my mini Caitlyn and Serena?”

Magenta loosened her grip on Opal's shoulder as the other stars went onto the set. Doreen, Gemma's mother, stared at Opal. Perhaps she hadn't seen or heard what had just happened. Maybe she had. Nothing to do about it now.

The actors walked through blocking rehearsal. Neil yelled at them a lot.

“The big boss is grumpier than usual,” Magenta muttered. “Wonder how things went with him last night.”

Neil didn't have a light touch with the actors; instead of getting them to work with him, he made them resentful and defensive. The rehearsal repeated several times.

Blaise drifted over from the trailer that held her dressing room, along with Lauren's and Corvus's. “Trouble in paradise?” she asked.

“Did you kick the boss out of bed last night?” Magenta asked. “What chemistry there is is all bad.”

Blaise raised her eyebrows, but didn't answer.

“Might as well shoot the fucking scene and hope for a miracle,” Neil yelled. “Last looks! Somebody make these people look better than they can act!”

Opal collected her kit, but she waited until Magenta, carrying a different Set2Go bag for each of the teen actors, joined her before she headed for the set.

Opal mentally stroked Flint's shield, made sure it surrounded her completely. She checked her reservoir for power: plenty. She flexed her fingers, remembered ribbons of invisible smoke she had sent out to do her bidding when she was controlling people. A tiny puff of smoke from her index finger reassured her.

As usual, Phrixos didn't need touch-ups. He stood silent, looming above her, his expression unreadable, observing, as she focused on the separate details that made up his character's whole. He touched her face without making any attempt to draw from her. His eyelids flickered. She wondered if Corvus was trying to surface. At least he didn't grab her and lay her on the altar again.

One of the special effects crew was on the set to orchestrate the blood spatter from the mother's horrifying death. He had practiced with a Styrofoam mock-up of the set inside the soundstage building, and thought he knew where all the spray and spatter would go, but when they actually started filming, things kept going wrong with the direction of the blood. Some of the blood spattered across the camera lenses, which entailed an extended cleanup. The altar stone got liberally spattered and needed scrubbing every time, though they couldn't get all the stain off—some of it was original, and old. They decided to leave it, but the continuity shots looked different every time.

The onsite showers in the trailers didn't have strong enough water pressure. The stars were miserable after every take—and wardrobe was running out of copies of the clothes, even though they were pretty generic, white robes for the coveners, including Ariadne, the girls' mother, the black robe for the Dark God, and special ritual dresses for the two girls in honor of their induction into the Dark God coven. The girls weren't supposed to be in range of the blood spatter, though Neil had reserved the right to drench them if he thought it made dramatic sense. Bettina and Gemma had changed out of gory dresses twice already, and there had been big gaps in the filming while their hair was restored. Special Effects was using peppermint-flavored stage blood, so at least everybody would have clean-tasting mouths if they ate any by mistake.

“Break for fucking lunch,” the director finally said. “I don't know if we can salvage anything out of this fucking mess. Come back ready to work.” He wandered off, muttering curses, while people mopped up behind him. Everybody went to the folding tables set up behind the drapes that hid the trucks, trailers, and cast corral from the cameras. Catering had dropped off a big box of mixed sandwiches wrapped in plastic an hour earlier, and a tub full of varied canned beverages buried in ice.

The hum under Opal's feet had grown more insistent during all the mishaps of the afternoon. As everyone else left the ritual rocks, she wandered toward them, hands stretched before her, palms aimed downward. Something under the ground was awake. She'd never felt anything quite like it before. Her family home was full of spirit-haunted things, some of them active, because people with power had been using them for years; but none of them purred like this. The energy didn't get through her shield, yet still she sensed it, a warmth, a summons, almost a song.