Fall of Light Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

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  This is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Copyright © 2009 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hoffman, Nina Kiriki.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-05066-8

  1. Makeup artists—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558.O34624F35 2009

  813’.54—dc22

  2009001833

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To my sister. Thanks.

  Acknowledgments

  I am eternally grateful to E. Larry Day, special effects makeup artist of Chimera Studios (www.chimerastudios.com), who let me ghost him for a day on a movie set and was nice in every other way. My thanks to his crew as well, especially Molly, who answered many questions and showed me makeup tools and continuity Polaroids of actors being very silly.

  I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to my sister, Valley Via Reseigne, production manager (among other things), and her husband, Richard Reseigne, construction coordinator (among other things), for help with the technical details of life on a movie set.

  To Valley I am also grateful for introducing me to E. Larry and letting me tell movie people I am related to her. After that, people told me how great she is to work with and answered my questions.

  What I got right, I got right because of these people. The wrong stuff is all mine.

  1

  When Opal LaZelle arrived at the Makeup trailer on the set of Forest of the Night, she found her personal employer, Corvus Weather, asleep at her station. The chair had been specially designed to hold his seven-foot two-inch length and generous, muscular frame. It had to be comfortable for hours at a time, the period it took her to transform him from a strangely stretchy-faced, gentle man into the monster of whatever movie they were working on.

  She and Corvus had one end of the trailer to themselves. Four other makeup chairs stood in a line between the brightly lit mirrored walls and the many-drawered desk cupboards below them where the makeup artists stored their supplies. Doors opened into the trailer at either end. Both doors were propped open; a cool breeze spiced with pine eased through the trailer, accompanied by the hum of generators.

  Opal could have transformed Corvus in minutes using her special skills, but she and Corvus had only worked together on one film so far, and, though she was afraid she loved Corvus, she didn’t trust him yet. Applying the latex prosthetics to turn Corvus into the Dark God of Forest of the Night would take four hours; they were heading into a night shoot, so she had to start now. This was the first day of shooting for her and Corvus; most of the rest of the cast and crew had been on location in backwoods Oregon for a week.

  Girl One and Girl Two were in other chairs in the trailer. Rodrigo Esposito, a dark, shaggy-haired man and the key makeup artist on the shoot, was working on Girl Two, the fair one, and supervising his first assistant, Magenta, as she worked on Girl One, the dark one. Opal knew Rodrigo from Twisted and Deviant, where he had been her boss, and she one of a small pool of makeup artists. He hadn’t worked on Dead Loss, the film where Opal had met and been hired exclusively for Corvus. Corvus had been the ghost of two merged serial killers, an interesting challenge for Opal’s skills as special effects makeup artist and Corvus’s skills as actor. Unfortunately, though they both did worthy work, the writers’ skills hadn’t been up to creating a memorable movie. DVD afterlife was the only thing that saved the movie from being a dead loss itself.

  “Opal,” Rodrigo murmured as she set out her equipment. “Come meet the girls.”

  She glanced at Corvus. He sprawled in his chair, a dark blue fleece blanket over him, with black-jean-clad legs and giant black boots sticking out the bottom. He smiled in his sleep. His breathing was so quiet. It surprised her; most of the big men she’d known snored.

  She slipped down the trailer to where Magenta, a short, stocky woman with short black hair that had broad pink streaks, stood by Girl Two. Opal knew Magenta from Deviant and Twisted.

  “This is Lauren Marcos, our Serena,” Rodrigo said. Lauren had large, dark eyes and a generous mouth, not yet colored; its natural color was dusky pink. She was a character actor with a string of successful comic sidekick roles behind her. In Forest of the Night, she was tackling a different role, a serious, even depressing character, one of the two leads. Her dark, curly hair was pulled back from her face by a stretchy foam band so Magenta could lay the foundation.

  “Hi, Lauren,” Opal said.

  “Hey, doll,” said Lauren in a warm, low voice. “You got the big job, huh?” Her eyebrows twitched, and she glanced toward Corvus, her mouth edging into a small smile.

  “Opal’s a genius,” Rodrigo said. “She has magic hands. She could turn you into a warty old witch your mother wouldn’t recognize and the witch’s mother would.”

  “That so?” The edges of Lauren’s eyes crinkled. “Could we maybe do that sometime, Hon? Like, when my mother’s actually visiting the set?”

  Opal laughed.

  “This is Blaise Penny, our Caitlyn.” Rodrigo nodded toward Girl One in the other chair. “Blaise, Opal LaZelle.”

  “Hi, Opal,” said Blaise. She was a gorgeous green-eyed woman with high cheekbones and a mass
of crinkled silver blond hair. Blaise and Lauren played sisters in the film, but no effort had been made to cast for family resemblance. Lauren looked Hispanic; Blaise, Caucasian. They were different body types, too—Lauren solid without being fat, Blaise ethereal, the sort of person you expected to see tripping through the woods in a filmy gown and fairy wings. In Forest, Blaise was playing against type as the evil sister, which Opal thought promising.

  Blaise had just come off two hit films. Opal wondered why she’d chosen a monster movie for her next project; she could have easily been cast in another big budget movie.

  “Why aren’t you in one of these chairs yourself?” Blaise asked.

  Opal glanced at the nearest mirror, wondering if she’d made herself too pretty today. Sometimes she did that inadvertently, since she’d done it on purpose every morning for several years while she was a teenager. But no, she looked like her birth self, clean-faced, violet-eyed, her hair brown with gold highlights, cut even with her jaw so as not to get in her way. She had the same distinctive good looks that made her mother a successful newscaster, but mostly she didn’t inhabit her face the way a star would.

  Blaise was probably just being polite. “I could never do what you do,” Opal said, and smiled.

  Blaise tilted her head. Something edged the air between them, a recognition, or perhaps just an electric prickle. “I don’t quite believe you,” Blaise murmured. “I guess we all tell ourselves the lies we need to believe. Nice to meet you, Opal.”

  Disconcerted, Opal nodded. She glanced toward Corvus. “I better get to work. Excuse me.”

  “Later,” said Lauren.

  Opal returned to her workstation. She got out the full-sized head of Corvus she had made when she built his Dark God; it held all the pieces of his facial prosthetics. She had made stacks of each piece, enough for him to have a new mask every day he was shooting, and a few extra in case things went wrong. “Hey, big guy,” she murmured, and Corvus opened his deep brown eyes.

  He smiled. “You smell like apples.”

  “Shampoo. How long have you been awake?”

  “Since the others got here,” he murmured. His voice was deep and velvety, one of the things she loved about him. He had a career in audiobooks most of his coworkers didn’t know about; he was especially popular as a reader of children’s books, since he could do so many different voices. His voice had been wasted in Dead Loss, which had been about the menace of appearance, not about lines. Corvus’s character had a lot to say in Forest of the Night. The Dark God had the ability to seduce, a welcome challenge for Corvus after years of playing unspeakable and unspeaking menaces. “Didn’t feel like talking.”

  She smiled at him, folded back the blanket to expose his neck and bare shoulders, and got out her razor and shaving cream. She shaved him, even though he had shaved himself earlier. She talked to his hair follicles while she did it, asked them to lie dormant for a while. She cleaned his face and neck carefully, then applied a long-lasting moisturizer that would keep his skin safe under the adhesives she was about to use.

  “Hang on,” said a shadow against the afternoon sun in the doorway at their end of the trailer.

  Opal’s back stiffened. Erika Dennis.

  The film’s publicist swept in in a cloud of musky perfume and lifted one of her cameras from the interlaced straps of them around her neck. “First transformation,” she said. “Gotta document it for the DVD.”

  “No,” said Corvus. His voice held so much menace Opal would have run if it were directed at her.

  Erika was oblivious, or maybe just strong-willed. “Yes.” She aimed the video camera at Corvus’s face and pressed the record button. “It’s in your contract.”

  “No.”

  “Erika, get out,” Opal said. She hadn’t started making Corvus into the Dark God yet. They had done all the prep work during preproduction—studied the script, the story-boards, the costumer’s concept of the character. They’d talked to the art director, exchanged sketches. She and Corvus had discussed what Corvus wanted to bring to the role, and what he hoped Opal would do to augment it. They had made Corvus’s life-mask, the armature on which Opal built her monster. He had built the character inside himself. She felt it rising in him now as she prepared for his transformation.

  She didn’t think Corvus had magical abilities—he’d never exhibited anything overt—but something about the chemistry of interaction in the trailer charged the air. Opal felt a surge under her skin, her own power readying for a fight. It frightened her. She never had this kind of fight away from her gifted family. People said there were others with powers out in the world, but Opal hadn’t yet met many.

  Rodrigo took Erika by the shoulders and pushed her out of the trailer. “Not this time,” he said. “Film it some other day and say it’s the first time. This time they need to focus. Get out of our workspace, Ere. You’re upsetting the talent.” He closed the door in her face.

  The scent and feel of threat faded.

  Rodrigo said, “It probably is in your contract, Corvus. She’ll have to film it sometime.”

  “It’s not in my contract.” Corvus had his eyes closed. “I specifically struck that clause. I always do. I’m going to play monsters all my life. I decided early in my career that I wanted to do it mysteriously. Nobody outside of cast and crew gets to see me transform.”

  “Yikes. That raises the stakes for National Enquirer opportunists.”

  Corvus sighed. “I know. Could you help me, Rodrigo? No cameras in the Makeup trailer.”

  “That’s already the rule, except for my continuity cameras.”

  “Finished work is okay. It’s the process I want to guard.”

  “You got it. I can’t police the area all the time, though. If someone’s determined to plant a camera in here and has the tech, I don’t know that I can stop them. Cameras can be so small now. You can get spytech at Sharper Image, for God’s sake, and this is not a secure shoot; lots of holes.”

  “Noted.”

  “I’ll guard the workspace,” Opal said. She could add a level of awareness every time she entered the trailer, check for hidden things. She was hypersensitive to anything that watched; it would be simple. She opened one of her extra senses and glanced around. “Who put that there?” She moved to the mirror and plucked a suction-cup-backed rubber eye from it. It had been staring down at Corvus.

  The back of her neck prickled. No one else should touch her things or invade her space. She had proprietary processes. She realized she needed to set traps.

  Rodrigo’s eyes widened. “I vaguely remember somebody coming in and sticking that up. They said it was a joke.”

  Opal closed her hand into a fist. The eye looked like rubber, but things inside it crunched. She opened her hand again, revealed a crushed mess of machinery. “Man or woman?”

  “Male,” said Rodrigo. “Not somebody I know yet, but someone whose presence here didn’t surprise me. One of the electricians, I think.” He closed his eyes. “Seal brown hair, olive tan skin, shadowed eyes. Rangy frame. White T-shirt, jeans. Toolbelt with the requisite rolls of tape. I don’t think I noticed him before or since, but I don’t pay a lot of attention to them.”

  “May I see that?” Corvus asked. He held out a hand and Opal dropped the mashed electronics into it. His hand could have closed around both of hers and hidden them completely.

  “God. I hate this. I guess we’ll need to set watch here, or lock up when we’re not in. I better check for others,” said Rodrigo. He went down the trailer, looking everywhere. Opal expanded her awareness the length of the trailer. No sense of any more invading eyes.

  Opal shrugged and went to work on Corvus. They sank into collaboration then, all her focus on his face as she applied the adhesive and then attached the different prosthetics that would alter him but leave him with the ability to govern his expressions. His deep, shadowed eyes watched her face most of the time. It was unnerving. Other actors she’d worked with fell asleep while she was applying their prosthetic
s and makeup, or listened to music with their eyes closed. It made them much easier to deal with.

  She didn’t notice when others entered or left the trailer, though she was half-conscious of surrounding murmurs, and then, finally, silence.

  Corvus sighed.

  Opal wanted his head to belong to her, to be the armature for her artwork. She wasn’t ready to let him be a person yet. You are mine, she thought as she narrowed her eyes and stared into his. You are calm and receptive. You wait without complaint. He became very still then, but his gaze never left hers. She worked with adhesive and latex, and after she had applied all the pieces (some of her magic slipped out her fingertips, she couldn’t stop herself; but only she would take off the mask, so she should be able to undo it), she painted on the colors. Last of all, she put in his monster contact lenses, glittery metallic green with no whites or pupils except for clear spots in the centers so he could see through them.

  At last she stood straight and stretched, her shoulders creaking from her working stoop. She glanced at the clock. Their call time was for 6 P.M., and it was 5:30 now. Not much time to dress him! But he looked perfect, and the costume for his role was simple, an enveloping black robe. In the scene scheduled to film tomorrow, she’d need to put on the upper body and hand appliances, and that would take more time.

  She flexed her fingers, stepped back, and studied the overall effect; she had been too lost in the details to notice the whole before.

  She was looking at someone new.

  Working off images of the Green Man and legends of the Bogeyman, she had crafted someone leafy and scary, overhanging brow, jutting chin, details of oak leaves and maple leaves starting at his nose and raying out across his cheeks, forehead, and chin; his skin was light brown, layered in leaf veins with green highlights and scatterings of powdered gold, intermittent gleams that would catch the firelight of the night filming. The strange eyes almost frightened her as they stared into hers. He looked like something from a dream.