Celebromancy (27 page)

Ree found her balance again, then strafed forward and to the right, copying a page from
Skyrim
and attacking at the dragon’s flank. When playing the game, she’d found it best to keep far enough forward to avoid the tail and far enough back to avoid the bite. It was the Scylla and Charybdis of dragon-slaying, and far easier said than done.

Ree slashed into the dragon with the lightsaber, leaving glowing gashes in its scaly flank. The dragon lashed out in pain, slamming her with its wings. Ree hit the deck, then jammed the lightsaber into the dragon’s belly.

As it moaned a death knell, the dragon collapsed on top of her, its neck falling across her chest like a tree.

The air went out of her lungs like a bellows. Her arms were pinned, the lightsaber pressed to the pavement. But the dragon wasn’t moving, so it seemed like the only danger was having her lungs cave in.

Small victories?

Ree wheezed, trying to speak. But since her lungs were desperately trying to exist in the same space as a burned corpse, nothing came out. She kicked her legs, trying to work herself free. And if someone noticed the flailing and came to help, that wouldn’t hurt, either. But if they were sane, most everyone should be blocks away already.

Her already-foggy head got foggier as she failed to get new air into her lungs. She flailed harder, trying to get the lightsaber to cut through dragon, concrete, or something to help her get free.

She saw a shadow pass through her vision, then heard metal hitting concrete. There was a grunt, and then the weight lifted from her chest. It took several more wheezes for her to get her lungs to remember how to accept oxygen, but they did fill. Ree sat up, her vision covered with scattered white lighting.

Danny stood above her, backlit by the few remaining flood-lights. He set down the spear, which he’d just used to lever the dragon’s neck off of her. The bodyguard held a hand down to her, which she took.

Back on her feet, Ree evaluated the desolation. The trailer campus looked like it had been hit by a fire-nado.

She smelled burned metal, roasted concrete, accented by charred kindling. People emerged from their hiding places, some faces ash-white with fear, others soot-stained by the fires.

As she took a step toward the crowd, she heard a deep popping sound and felt a wave of ichor wash over her legs, sending chills up her whole body.
Eeeugh.

The dragon’s remains covered the concrete, spreading out all the way to the street.

And now my pants are ruined, too.

Yancy emerged from one of the trailers and took charge. “The fire department is on the way! Everyone stay calm, and we’ll be fine. If you inhaled smoke, go to the props tent. If you were burned, head for the street if you can move on your own. If you can’t move on your own, wave for help.”

Ree joined the triage efforts, helping cast and crew cluster into the appropriate groups for care once the firefighters and EMTs arrived. Ree didn’t relish the idea of trying to explain a dragon attack in normal-people terms, but arson would probably have to suffice. That was, of course, assuming the Doubt could cover up something this big.

And the ichor would be dissolved by the time the emergency responders arrived. Hopefully. Except for the stuff that had gotten on her. That tended to stick around until she air-blasted it off. The universe seemed to have a vindictive streak that way.

When the responders arrived, Ree let them take charge and found her way to Jane’s trailer. If she let the EMTs look at her, she’d spend the whole night in the hospital, and she had better things to do. Plus, this might have just been the first wave, as terrifying as it was to consider.

Danny had taken the post outside the trailer, his armpit holster showing. The shotgun, however, had apparantly gone back inside. The trailer had several rents along the side and a yard-wide dent in the living room corner.

“You okay?” Ree asked.

Danny nodded, his eyes wide. “Hell of a thing. When I heard that dragons were real, I never imagined I’d actually see one, let alone fight it.”

Ree smiled. “And lived to tell the tale. How cool is that?” Danny returned the grin for a moment, being polite, then resumed his post, scanning the charred filming campus. Shooting would be indefinitely postponed, if not canceled entirely. The insurance claim would get held up for years, if it even went through.

Ree climbed the steps and opened the door. The inside of the trailer looked like it had been through an earthquake, dishes shattered on the floor, table upturned, papers and Blu-Ray cases strewn across the floor.

“Jane?” she called out as she leaned into the hallway to see down the hallway to a closed door. Ree went to the door and knocked. “It’s me. Are you okay?”

The moment of stillness sideswiped Ree, her equilibrium skipping like a laggy video game. She leaned against one wall and focused on her breathing. Her after-action sleep tally had to be up to about thirty hours by now.
But if the production was scrubbed . . .

Ree was saved from thinking through those consequences by the door opening to show a visibly shaken Jane, clutching a baseball bat like a three-year-old hanging on to her binkie.

At the sight of Ree, Jane’s whole body relaxed. The bat drooped to hanging by her leg, and the star wrapped Ree up with her fee arm. “Me? Are you all right? It looks like you’ve just been to war.”

“I killed a dragon. A for-realz dragon. How cool is that?”

The two of them walked over to the bed. Ree flopped onto the lush sheets and was out before she could say
comfy
.

Chapter Twenty

Schrödinger’s Disappointment

WTF RT @PearsonPatriot Large explosion reported at Douglas and 2nd. Emergency responders are on site.

—@Fugu__Ken, Twitter, May 26, 1:17 AM

@Fugu__Ken I heard it was arson. Something to do with J-Rad’s crappy new show.

—@MaddowsWife, Twitter, May 26, 1:21 AM

@Fugu__Ken @MaddowsWife Three people were DOA at Pearson Heart. Not time 4 snippiness.

—@BaliAli, Twitter, May 26, 2:13 AM

When she woke, Ree was sore in her everywhere. She popped and groaned as she stretched, and felt a warm presence beside her. There was light from somewhere, and she cracked open her eyelids like ancient vaults.

“How are you feeling?” Jane asked from beside Ree.

“Like death left out overnight during a blizzard.”

A hand ran through Ree’s hair. “You’ve been running pretty much nonstop since what, last week?”

Having found a comfortable position and not ready to face the world again, Ree dug in where she was. “Mmm-hmm.”

“We’ve got everything except the mirror, and that should arrive by courier today. We’re going to shoot for tonight for the ritual.”

Ree grumbled at the talk of real things, flipping over from facing Jane to facing the wall. “So I can keep sleeping, right?”

“Yancy wants a word about the production.” She waited a beat. “I’m pretty sure he’s going to call it. We can’t recover from this kind of damage, not right now. If the insurance claim comes through, we might be able to recoup costs, but we’ll miss this pitch season.”

“Fuuuuck,” Ree said, feeling her professional ambitions go up in smoke. She pulled herself upright, seeing that she’d been undressed and cleaned. Holding a sheet up to her chest, she asked. “Clothes?”

Jane nodded across the room to a folded pile on a chair. “I had them cleaned. They still smelled horrible. So I picked these out for you.” Jane handed her another stack of clothes, including a pair of dark-wash jeans, a vintage-design
Galaga
shirt, and a baby-blue sweater. “I wanted to have those burned, but I figure that’s your call, not mine.”

Ree creaked and stretched her way to standing, then dressed, already starting to mourn her poor close-but-no-cigar-it’s-already-burned-because-dragon TV show.

“Can we get coffee before we hear about how screwed we are?” Ree asked.

Jane smiled a weak smile of sympathy. “Of course, hon. And for you, I won’t add Bailey’s to mine.”

“Friends don’t let friends drink and thaumaturge,” Ree said, picking herself up.

Since the craft services tent had been melted and then impaled during the fight, Danny accompanied them to a nearby café to get a triple cappuccino (for Ree) and a skinny half-calf latte (for Jane). Danny had water.

Ree walked slowly on the way back, savoring the drink. Her senses unfolded with the caffeine, the mothballs-in-the-mouth flavor and the fuzz around her vision receeding as she made the proper obeisance to her Caffeine Overlord.

Until she went to talk to Yancy, she still had a pilot in production, in the same way that Schrödinger’s cat was alive until you looked. There would be other scripts to sell, and maybe she could even find a way to resell this one once the rights reverted or whatever. But what was supposed to have been her big chance would become, as soon as reality hit, a hellaciously inauspicious start for her writing career.

Eventually, Ree gave in and they got to the tent Yancy had taken up as his new office, given that his trailer was in two pieces and upside down at the moment. The mood on the shooting campus felt like what Ree imagined it would in a battlefield, the kind where a day later the losers dragged away the bodies of the dead while trying to deny the fact that they’d just lost the campaign.

Yancy was unshaven, with a tie loose around a soot-stained shirt and pants. He managed a weak smile as Ree and Jane approached.

Ree’s hands shook, and her voice caught in her throat as she tried to get directly to the point. The words died in her throat.

“Good morning,” Yancy said. He lifted a pair of foldout metal chairs and handed them to Jane and Ree. “Will you sit?”

They sat, and Ree found her voice again. “Are we screwed?”

Yancy and Jane shared a look, and let the words sit heavy in the air. Every millisecond that passed let more hope out of Ree’s lungs. She’d pulled open the box, collapsed the waveform.
Fucking dragons. When I find Alex Walters, I’m going to shove my collector’s edition of Skyrim down his throat and Fus Ro Dah him off of Mount Rainier.

Another moment later, Yancy sighed. “We can’t finish. There just isn’t the money. We might be able to get insurance to recoup some of the costs, but by the time that comes through, we’d have to set up a whole new production for the remainder of the shoot, do ADR, and even with that, we’d be behind a season for pitches. Shooting this on spec was the only way we could do it, and without an order, we’re dead on arrival.”

“How much do we have? Could we splice together a half episode, maybe run some of it as a webseries to drum up support?” Ree said, knowing that she was reaching but not giving a fuck. She’d put months of her life into this; it was supposed to be her big break. “Even a sizzle reel to go to companies? You’ve got more than most companies have when they pitch, right?”

Yancy nodded. “Sure. But with the curse, Jane’s reputation was a liability rather than a blessing.”

Jane’s already somber look dropped even more at Yancy’s words.

“What if we take my name off of it?” Jane asked. Ree did a double take.

Jane continued, “It’s a good concept and a damn fine script. You cobble together what we have, and we go in with the concept and a proof of concept on the scenes we’ve got. We don’t have to go to square one, and you get a fair chance at launching the show.” Jane was looking directly at Ree, tearing up.

“That’s crap!” Ree said. “You’re awesome in this. And we’re going to kick the curse’s ass anyway. After today, it’s just you. No magic bullshit, no Smokey, just Jane Konrad and the Comeback Express.”

Jane shook her head. “The curse isn’t the problem. It’s me. No network is going to take a risk on me until I’ve done something and seen it through. Even spinning this,” Jane said, indicating the destroyed set, “as an accident doesn’t change the fact that I’m baggage right now. And it doesn’t make any sense to just toss the whole thing out.”

Jane looked to Yancy. “We knew this was a Hail Mary. It was the only way I could manage my own comeback without my agent sorting through hundreds of scripts to find the one we could spin right to be my way back in. I’m more than an actress, and One Tough Mama is more than just my vehicle. Cut what you can, and we’ll start reaching out for pitch chances.”

Ree’s stomach roiled, and not at the coffee. She stood up and kicked her chair over. “Motherfucker. I’m going to kick Walters’s ass so hard he ends up in a parallel timeline where smear journalists are drawn and quartered on sight.”

Jane reached out to touch Ree’s arm. “We’ll get him later. And I can help you do it once we’ve broken this curse.”

Ree stopped, considered Jane’s words, but decided to keep fuming instead. “Yes, but I’d like the record to show that step two of that plan should happen as soon as fucking possible.”

Yancy said, “So noted. For right now, we get ready for the ritual and hope that nothing else explodes before tonight. But before that,” Yancy held up a hand to say
wait
, then pulled something out from underneath a table. It was a director’s chair. Scratch that, it was her chair. Yancy unfolded it enough to show her the
REE REYES, WRITER
printing on the back.

“A souvenir of your first show. I’m sorry that this might be all you get to take away from it.”

Ree took the chair and laughed, something inside her cracking. And somehow, something got in her eye. That was it, definitely not tears. “Thanks.” Ree looked at the chair, then surveyed the wrecked set campus.
This is really it. The dream’s over, now it’s all cleanup.

But she wasn’t at all convinced that the monster attacks were actually done. She saw no reason to be anything but paranoid, especially while the curse was still active and her career anxieties had exploded beyond her wildest nightmares. She set the chair down and looked for something to do. (Ideally, someone to punch, but no reasonable targets presented themselves.)

She checked her phone and weighed whether it was too early to call Drake. Or if maybe she could get more sleep. Not that the latter was likely, considering the zebra mocha of caffeine and adrenaline coursing through her system.

Ree started to head off-set to make with the preparations. Jane caught her on the edge of the campus.

“Before you go, before the magic goes down, I just wanted to say . . .” Jane caught herself blushing, then tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “I wanted to thank you. For believing in me.”

Ree cocked her head, a bit blindsided.

“Yancy has always believed in me, and the crew here. But you saw me as who I should be, not who I was letting myself be under the curse. It would have been easy for you to give up or walk away, but you didn’t. So thanks.”

Ree hrmed internally for a moment, guilt bubbling up as she remembered the times she’d doubted the star. “That sounds a lot like
we’re about to go down with the ship
talk.”

A shadow of thought passed over Jane’s face. “Maybe, maybe not. But I wanted you to know how much I appreciate all you’ve done.”

“It hasn’t been all work,” Ree said, running the back of her hand along Jane’s chin. Jane leaned into Ree’s hand, wrapping Ree up in her arms.

The calm before the storm feeling came back, and Ree held it at arm’s length with the warmth from Jane’s embrace. One way or another, it’d be done after today. Unless the mirror didn’t show up. But how funny would it be for them to make all of the final preparations and then get delayed because of a screwup by UPS? She chuckled, then the chuckle grew into a full-belly laugh. The women disentangled as the laughter spread up and down her body, nervous energy fueling the Alanis-Morissette-ironic thought.

“What’s so funny?”

“Just thinking,” Ree said, trying to get the words out between laughs, “about how screwed we are if the mail doesn’t show today. If we win, the UPS guy or girl will be partial hero of the day.”

Jane joined her for a moment, then said, “Honey, the mirror and reel are on a chartered flight with armed guards. I’m not taking any chances.”

“Except for the giant half-understood ritual we got from the woman who tanked your career.”

Jane snort-choked on her drink. “Other than that, yes.”

“Just trying to stay grounded.”

Jane shifted her weight, cocking out one hip. “Says the woman who gets superpowers from wish fulfillment.”

“
Et tu
, fame-girl?” Ree responded with a grin.

Jane nodded. “Fair enough. Where are you headed?”

“To get the cavalry.”

The cavalry, as it turned out, was pretty much just Drake. She could have called Eastwood and guilted him into coming, and maybe sweet-talked a few folks from the Market, but Ree knew she was already headed for a dangerously unpredictable evening, and she didn’t want to have to herd cats while . . . doing whatever it was that she’d have to do.

She got home around nine and made her rounds to prep for the day. She ignored the growing stack of mail (largely bills) on the front table, labeling them mentally as Tomorrow Ree’s problems. Or more accurately, Ree When She Is Human Again After Sleeping Off This Adventure’s problems.

Shower achieved, Ree pulled open her closet and set about assembling her Battle Gear (™). First, she cued up Two Steps From Hell to have suitably epic music for her Hero Armors Up scene.

Then she put on her base outfit: well-worn jeans (the one pair left not covered in ichor or blood or ripped to hell) and T-shirt over undershirt over bra. She bound her hair back with a hair tie, then added her Wonder Woman clip. She searched her box of contacts, but as she’d suspected, the only ones left were two years out of date and had already been worn several times. The daily ones itched the hell out of her eyes, and anything better was usually too expensive. If she hit it big with a script (which seemed unlikely at this point), she’d promised to get herself LASIK.

Her base outfit in place, Ree pulled out the buff jacket she had on seemingly permanent loan from Drake, which had the tremendously handy property of adjusting to fit her perfectly and the even cooler self-repair property that kept the jacket from quickly becoming an accessory only fit for Steampunk Frankenstein’s monster (since normal Frankenstein’s monster is Electropunk, natch).

Then she assembled her weapons: her Force FX lightsaber, her blaster rifle, the phaser, a pair of arnis canes, the
jian
on loan from Drake, her batarangs, a knife, some Nerf guns, a Ridiculous Fantasy Sword (™), and a boffer sword.

They wouldn’t be in public, so she could pretty well go all out. She set the
jian
, the lightsaber, and the phaser in the probably pile, slid the batarangs in one of the buff jacket’s pockets, and set the knife next to her big, stompy boots.

Weapons decided, she pulled out her card boxes and skimmed for a few minutes to fill up her sideboard, focusing on direct damage spells and a bit of crowd control, in case Walters had another wave of nasty in store. It seemed like his flavor of Cinemancer resembled nothing so much as a Summoner from
Pathfinder
or
Final Fantasy Tactics
.

Ree’s phone chirped with the theme to
Steam Boy
, her ringtone for Drake. She plucked the phone from its rumbling path off of her bed and answered, “Hey, thanks for calling back. How’s tricks?”

A beat. “Rather the same as always?”

Ree chuckled, hearing another
whif
sound in her mind. “You still in for the big shindig today?”

“Of course. Shall I bring weapons, more weapons, or all of the weapons? I have a new hand-cannon I’d rather like to field-test.”

“How likely is it to blow up and kill us all?” Ree asked.