“That you have.”
“But you’re dodging my question. How are you holding up?” She cranes her head up to meet my eyes.
“I am frustrated, and on edge, and wish I could do more,” I admit. “I wish I had more power. Wish I could drag the bastard out into the light and slit his throat.”
Pip swallows hard. I can’t tell if it’s fear, or anger, or arousal that makes her pupils expand. But she leans up and places a chaste kiss on my mouth, more a reassurance than a gesture of lust.
“Soon,” she echoes back to me.
I am about to chide her in return, but the lights around us suddenly dim, and music is piped over the sound system. Ah, that same fiddle-and-fife tune from my ringtone. I cannot help but roll my eyes at Elgar’s vanity. Even when he is scared for his life, and knows he is the target of a madman of his own invention, he cannot help but brag.
My wife shivers as the music begins, her whole body shaking for a brief second. Pip sucks a startled breath in through her teeth.
“Pip?” I ask softly, squeezing her fingers.
“Oh, but there is magic here,” Pip says. “I feel it in my bones.”
“Then be prepared,” I whisper. “We are about to get our wish.”
Elgar
Whatever it is that Forsyth did to the back of his neck sits like a cold ball on the knob of Elgar’s spine. And yet, the cool chill of the . . . the spell? Yeah, a spell, he decides, is actually comforting. He’s sweating, nervous, the fingers of his right hand flexing as he reminds himself, over and over, not to reach for the knife. Not now. Not yet. And especially not while Kashif is getting him outfitted with a lav mic.
It takes a bit of quick talking to get them to thread the wire up the front of his shirt, and put the battery transmission pack in his front pocket instead of clipping it to the back of his belt, like folks normally do. Kashif vanishes behind a bank of computer monitors, and returns without the briefcase, looking much more relaxed. He checks the lav mic, and lets Elgar know the order of the presentation—introduction by a moderator, walk out onto the stage, sit in the free chair, chat with the mod for a moment, and then the screen will start to descend on the verbal cue word. Both he and the mod are supposed to act surprised and confused, and then the lights will suddenly cut out, and the short film will start playing.
It’s all a clever and dramatic ploy, of course—Elgar knows it’s coming, and so does everyone else on this side of the curtain—and when they’d first come up with it, he’d been delighted with the little show of dramatics. Now, the idea of being up on that stage in the dark, for even a second, out of Forsyth and Pip’s line of sight, is terrifying.
But the moderator is already pushing his way across the stage, smiling and waving to the screaming crowd once he reaches the center. Elgar can’t change the plan now. It’s too late.
Too late.
He swallows hard as he hears the young man shout his name. The crowd roars. Nothing else happens. Nothing blows up; no one screams in horror. They just chant his name like he’s some sort of sports hero: “El-gar, El-gar, El-gar!”
Envisioning himself as a professional storyteller when he was a teenager, receiving his New York Times Best Sellers congratulatory phone call, accepting his first award, deciding what to do with his first six-figure check—none of that was as fluster-inducing and sweat-evoking as this. It’s everything Elgar has ever wanted out of his writing career, and simultaneously abominable.
He wants to step out on that stage so badly. He wants to hear them cheer, see them shoot to their feet and clap, watch their faces glow in the reflection of the stage lights and his own star-shine.
But he doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t want to be bait. And yet, if he doesn’t . . . if he doesn’t . . .
Maddie, he tells himself. Juan. Linux. Forsyth and Lucy and Alis. Think of them. Think of what he’ll do, what he has done, what he could do, if he isn’t stopped. This is it. This is the moment.
“You’ve written about heroes your whole life,” he whispers to himself. “Go on. Go be one.”
With that push, he lifts his left foot, takes a deep breath, swallows hard against the bitter fear pooling on the back of his tongue, and steps out onto the stage. The crowd hoots and hollers with glee, and he just barely manages to turn the flinch away from the wall of sound and the wave of aggressive motion toward him into an awkward pat along his hair and a waggle of his fingers toward the crowd.
“And there he is!” the moderator—Randy? Ryan?—says, wheeling gracefully back and diagonal in a way that Elgar thought wheelchairs couldn’t move. He looks like a cross between Vana White and a Vegas showgirl, and next to him, Elgar feels like a turkey that’s been plucked and set on its hind legs to shuffle on a marionette’s string.
“Hi,” Elgar chokes, and waits as the crowd screams some more before he takes a seat in the black leather club chair that’s been set up on the far side of the stage.
The moderator—Russ? Dammit, why didn’t Elgar listen when they told him this guy’s name?—shakes his hand and gestures for the audience to simmer down. As they take their seats, Elgar scans the crowd for anything . . . well, anything unusual. But there are no golden eyes piercing him, no ominous green watercolor glow, nobody staring at him in stillness while surrounded by the fidgeting crowd, nobody wearing a telltale bad-guy hood.
He does catch Lucy and Forsyth in the front row, though. Lucy looks up at him, her free
