Fee Kendale might have been a spoiled brat, but why would anyone seriously want to hurt her? The thought stayed with Liz all that night, and kept her from falling asleep, troubling her even more than the coffee did. What if magic was involved? When, in desperation to distract her brain, she turned on the room television, it was no help. Picking her way through the multitudinous channels available, she found herself watching a chat show where the host and the audience seemed more interested in taunting and shouting at the homosexual guests than in listening to what they had to say. When the host actually rose from his seat to punch one of his guests in the face, knocking him sprawling, she turned it off in disgust.
Hugging her pillow, she drifted off to a troubled sleep, haunted by images of shouting faces contorted in hate.
The dour-faced male announcer stared into the camera lens. "SATN-TV, `The Voice of Reason in the Wilderness,' is now concluding its broadcast day. Thank you for watching. And now, the national anthem."
Over the familiar whine of the horns, the control room engineer, Ed Cielinski, began slamming tapes into the machines to cue up for the morning. The nighttime talk show looked like any one of three hundred others produced anywhere else in the country, but with one big difference. All the trappings were there, the host, the comfy chairs, the audience, but on stage there was also an altar in the shape of a pig. On its blood-red back was an upside-down pentacle, broken crosses and stars, a mangled crescent, plus black candles in holders. The aim of the show was to cause bloodthirsty controversy that almost always broke out in violence.
The police had finally dragged that night's combatants off the studio floor. A couple of them wanted to keep the fight going. The defender—designated victim, if anyone had asked Ed for his opinion—was being loaded onto a stretcher by paramedics with his neck in a brace. The host of the live broadcast, Nick Trenton, smug expression back firmly in place, got up, wiped the blood off his chin and straightened his tie. He strode out of the room. All in a day's work, thought the engineer. Trenton would never so much as glance backward at the problems he caused. It was all good for the ratings, Ed thought sourly.
Ed waited until the camera operators and lighting crew were gone, then turned out the spotlights. The last one, at the rear of the stage, over the gigantic enlargement of the rock group led by the lady with green hair, faded slowly to black. The next designated victim, Ed thought, not without a measure of sympathy. He slapped down the audio monitor switch as his employer, Augustus Kingston, the owner and station manager, walked into the room.
"Everything work okay?" he asked Cielinski.
"Yes, sir," said the engineer. "The frequency didn't interfere with the picture a bit. Went out nice and strong."
"How's reception on that special transmission line?"
"Nothing big. We haven't heard from our contact out in New Orleans yet."
"That won't be for a day or two," the old man said, rocking back on his heels in anticipation. "Let 'em get settled. Got to give it all a chance to build." He pulled a cigar out of his pocket. The engineer winced on behalf of his machines as his boss lit up and blew a plume of cloyingly heavy smoke towards the ceiling.
"Yes, sir, it's like casting your bread out on the waters, Ed," he said, laughing heartily. "You get it all back threefold. When we start casting that there bread out there, we're going to collect plenty back again. Them godless, magic-loving pagans won't stand a chance, now, will they?"
The engineer gulped quietly to himself. "No, sir."
The old man stopped for a leisurely puff, and stared into the ember of his cigar with a pleased look on his creased face. "No. No, they won't. And the justice of it is, they'll do it to themselves."
Chapter 7
In the morning, Elizabeth waited with barely veiled impatience while Nigel Peters and Laura Manning went in to drag Fionna out of bed. Her old schoolmate had gone to sleep in her cosmetics, and the ruin of her mask made her look like the end of a horror picture. Boo-Boo appeared at the door in his ratty army coat, but he looked positively pristine compared with Fionna.
"Is she gonna make it?" Boo-Boo asked, with concern.
"With hydraulics or high explosives," Elizabeth said, stepping aside so he could see.
"Come on, ducks," Nigel said coaxingly, helping the makeup artist haul the somnolent singer back and forth from bathroom to bed, where they talked over her head as if she was a child. Fionna sat slack between them, her eyes half closed. "What do you think, Laura, the green sharkskin?"
"Hell, no, she'll sweat herself to death out there," Laura said, flipping through the hangers in the closet. "Have you stuck your nose out the door yet?"
"I'm dreading it," the manager admitted. "All right, the black gauze. It'll look great with your hair, Fionna, love. Lots of jewelry, now." He pointed at the box on the table.
"I'll get it," Elizabeth said, pleased to get her hands on Fionna's personal effects without anyone being the wiser. She turned over various necklaces and bracelets, trying each against the touchstone of her memory for protective characteristics. Not surprisingly, everything was a protective amulet of some kind. Fionna'd been doing a little reading up on her own. Again, not surprising, since as Phoebe she had taken a first-class degree. She understood research, and here was the fruit of it. Based on what was in the box Liz was beginning to feel that Fionna, at least, believed herself in real danger. Intuition was nothing Liz could put in her daily report to Mr. Ringwall, but it satisfied her that Fee was not merely crying wolf. Liz handed over several silver chains, all charmed for safety and peace, one at a time, and Laura arranged them around Fionna's neck. As for a colored piece to set it all off, a bulky carnelian necklace looked the best with the mystical outfit they were shoving Fionna into, but it was a fire magnet. Not the best omen, in Elizabeth's opinion, but it could channel outward as well as inward. She dropped a friendly cantrip of protection into the carved orange pendant just as the piece was snatched from her by Laura Manning.
"Just the thing, love," Nigel said as the necklace was fastened around Fionna's neck over the silver threads on the breast of the dull black tunic. He pulled her arm across his shoulder and stood, forcing her to her feet. She dangled loosely against him. "All right, Fionna, up we get. We'll be meeting the public in twenty minutes."
The magic word "public" was just the kind of impetus Fionna needed. Elizabeth was amused to see the rag doll turned suddenly into a dynamic superheroine on the short drive from the hotel to the broadcast facility. Patrick Jones and Lloyd Preston joined them in the limo. The hulking security man, dressed all in black like Frankenstein's monster, gave Elizabeth a slightly resentful look as he sat down beside Fionna in the rear of the car, but he didn't utter a word through the entire trip. Patrick sat close to Fionna on one side and drilled her on the upcoming interview while Laura sat on the other side and touched up the wild paint job on the star's face. Boo-Boo and Elizabeth sat jammed side by side at one end of the padded bench opposite the manager, who was sharing his seat with a box of equipment and tapes.
"You're meeting a woman called Verona Lambert," Patrick Jones said, reading out of a well-worn binder. "She's been at WBOY ten years, Fee. She's a real fan. I've got a sheaf of photos for you to sign for her and the crew. Be a good girl and do all of them, won't you?" He held out a large manila envelope.