Tanya Huff - Smoke and Shadows

SMOKE AND SHADOWS

TANYA HUFF

DAW BOOKS, INC.

DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, FOUNDER

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

ELIZABETH R. WOLLHEIM

SHEILA E. GILBERT

PUBLISHERS

http://www.dawbooks.com

Copyright 2004 by Tanya Huff

All Rights Reserved.

Jacket Art by John Jude Palencar.

DAW Books Collectors No. 1289.

DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Book designed by Elizabeth M. Glover.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

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First Printing, April 2004

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DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

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MARCA REGISTRADA

HECHO EN U.S.A.

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

CONTENTS

For Karen Lahey because until I met her I never made the connection that "people" write books. (Where I thought they came from, I have no idea.) Essentially, Karen's responsible for my being a writer so if you've enjoyed any of my books, you should thank her. Thank you, Karen.

I'd like to thank Blanche McDermaid and the cast and crew of A&E's Nero WolfeMysteries, who graciously allowed me to hang about the set. I'd especially like to thank Matt and PJ, the PAs, who were more than patient with two solid days of stupid questions. Anything I got right, I owe to them. Mistakes are all my own.

Chapter One

LEANING forward, brushing red-gold hair back off his face, he locked eyes with the cowering young woman and smiled, teeth too white within the sardonic curve of his mouth.

"There's no need to be frightened," he told her, his voice holding menace and comfort equally mixed. "You have my word that nothing will happen to you; unless-and I did warn you about this-unless you've been holding out on me, Melissa."

A full lower lip trembled as her fingers clutched the edge of the park bench. "I swear I've told you everything I know!"

"I hope so." He leaned just a little closer, his smile broadening as she trembled. "I truly hope so."

"Cut! Mason, the girl's name isn't Melissa. It's Catherine."

Mason Reed, star of Darkest Night, straightened as the director moved out from behind his pair of monitors. "Catherine?"

"That's right."

"Why does it matter, Peter? She'll be dead by the end of the episode."

Safely out of Mason's line of sight, the actress rolled her eyes.

"It matters because everyone else is calling her Catherine," Peter told him calmly, wondering, and not for the first time that morning, what the hell was taking the tech guys so long to come up with believable CGI actors. Or, conversely, what was taking the genetics guys so long to breed the ego out of the ones they had. Years of practice kept either thought from showing. "It matters because Raymond Dark called her Catherine the last time he spoke to her. And it matters because that's her name; if we start calling her by a different name, the audience will get confused. Let's do it one more time and then we'll rig for close-ups."

"What was wrong with the last take?" Mason demanded, fiddling with his left fang. " I liked the last take."

"Sorge didn't like the shadows."

"They changed?"

"Apparently. He said they made you look livide."

Mason turned toward the director of photography who was deep in conversation with the gaffer and ignoring him completely. His expression suggested he was less than impressed with being ignored. "Livid?"

"Not livid, livide," Peter told him, tone and expression completely nonconfrontational.

They had no time to deal with one of Mason's detours into ego. "It's French. Translates more or less as ghastly."

"I'm playing a vampire, for Christ's sake! I'm supposed to look ghastly."

"You're supposed to look undead and sexy. That's not the same thing." Flashing their star a reassuring smile, Peter returned to the director's chair. "Come on, Mason, you know what the ladies like."

The pause while he considered it could have been scripted. Right on cue: "Yes, I do.

Don't I?"

As the visibly soothed actor returned to his place on the park bench, Peter sent a prayer of thanks to whatever gods were listening, settled back behind his monitors, and yelled,

"Tony!"

A young man standing just off the edge of the set, ear jack and harried expression marking him as one of the crew, jerked as the sound of his name cut through the ambient noise. He stepped around a five gallon jug of stage blood and hurried over, picking his way carefully through the hydra snarl of cables covering the floor.

"We're not going to need Lee until after lunch." Peter tore the wrapper from a granola bar with enough force that the bar itself jerked out of his hands, bounced off his thigh, and was heading for the floor when Tony caught it. "Thank you. Is he here yet?"

"Not yet."

"Fucking great." An emphatic first bite. "Have someone in the office call his cell and find out where the hell he is."

"Do they tell him that you won't need him until after lunch?"

"They remind him that according to the call sheets, his ass was supposed to be in makeup by 11:00 ... Tina, was what's-her-name wearing that color nail polish in scene sixteen? She looks like her fingertips have been dipped in blood."

The script supervisor glanced up from lining her pages. "Yes." Looking past Peter's shoulder, she indicated that Tony should get going. "I think dipped in blood is what they were trying for."

Shooting Tina a grateful smile-it wasn't always easy to tell when Peter's abrupt subject changes were, in fact, a dismissal-Tony headed for the office. A muffled shriek from the actress playing Catherine stopped him at the edge of the park.

It seemed that Mason was getting playful. Testing out his teeth.

As the gaffer's crew adjusted two of the lights, shadows danced against the back wall of the set, looking on their own regard if not ghastly then strange. Forming shapes that refused to be defined, they moved in weirdly sinuous patterns, their edges overlapping in ways normal shadows did not.

But this is television, Tony reminded himself as he left the park, cut across Raymond Dark's office, and hurried past the huge mahogany coffin on his way to the production office. There's nothing normal about it.

The studio where CB Productions shot Darkest Night had been a box warehouse in its previous incarnation and much of it still looked the part. Chester Bane, creator and executive producer of Darkest Night, as well as half a dozen other even less successful straight to syndication series, had gone on record as saying that he refused to spend money the viewer wouldn't see on the screen. His comments off the record had been more along the line of, "I'm not spending another cent until I start seeing some return on my fucking investment!" Since CB had only one actual volume and that volume had been known to send the sound mixer running for his board to slap the levels down,