“But there was this huge bird! It was bigger than me! Black like a crow! Wings this big!” He was attempting to show her by spreading his arms. She, however, was prying her camera free. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”
“You break my camera, and we can’t shoot for two months. I break your hand, we can still shoot tomorrow.”
“Letting go!” Hal cried. “Letting go!”
She checked the lens for scratches. Camera parts needed to be ordered from Earth. They’d have to wait until next Shutdown to order replacements and then another month for the lens to arrive. If he’d screwed up her camera, she was so going to kill him.
“I was just sitting here when this freaking huge bird came swooping out of nowhere.” Hal was attempting to use his charisma to talk his way out of trouble, only because he was on drugs, he derailed quickly into incoherence. “At least I think it was a bird. Might have been a superhero. I am Batman! Only more like Hawkman—without the goofy cow.” He meant cowl. He put his fingers to his head to make odd points on Hawkman’s cowl. Obviously he hadn’t seen himself in the mirror yet; he already was masked by deep purple bruises. “Cow. Cow. Mooo.” He noticed Taggart for the first time and he went wide-eyed. He tilted his head, still making horns. “My God! You’re Taggart with the unpronounceable first name.”
“Yes, I am.” Taggart rubbed at his face to cover a smile. “And you’re Hal Rogers from Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden.”
“I am.” Hal slowly frowned as he tried to think through the confusion of the painkillers. He glanced about the familiar hospital room, the Boulevard of the Allies just outside his window with the Monongahela River beyond the steep cliff. “This is Pittsburgh. What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I’m wondering myself,” Taggart said.
Hal suddenly lunged at Jane and wrapped both arms around her. “No. You can’t have her!” He hissed like snake. “Jane is mine!”
Normally she didn’t think of Hal as a small man. His personality could fill a room to claustrophobic level, making him seem seven feet tall. In truth, however, he came right to boob-level on her.
“Hal!” Jane worked at prying him off her. “If you want to get out of here, you better get dressed, because I’m not taking you out of here with your ass flapping in the wind.”
“What’s he doing here?” Hal whispered fiercely.
“Get dressed!” She gave him a shove and turned around so she wouldn’t be flashed as well as mooned. Although after eight years working together—and various plant-assisted disrobing and the subsequent ambulance rides—she’d seen the entire package more times than she could count.
“Does Dmitri know he’s here?” Hal asked and then answered himself. “Of course Dmitri knows. Dmitri knows everything. He’s freaking omniscient. That’s just an act when he calls right in the middle of something amazing and goes ‘what are you doing?’ like he doesn’t damn well know you planned a glorious explosion. Just freaking glorious.”
Hal was rambling on about his recent misadventure with high explosives. If Taggart weren’t standing there, she would take advantage of Hal’s drugged state and quiz him on that, because she still was trying to figure out where he got the C4. More importantly, if the source was going to supply him with more in the future.
The network cameraman was eyeing Hal over her shoulder with open surprise and dismay. “What exactly happened this morning? He looks like he’s been flogged.”
“We were victorious!” Hal shouted. “We looked that thing in all seventy-four eyes and burned out its heart!”
Jane sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. So many things wrong in that sentence, she wasn’t even going to try. God, she prayed that Nigel wasn’t anything like Hal. “Right, let’s get going. I want to get home before dark.”
Technically she lived in Pittsburgh, but barely. The true city’s edge was another mile or so north. Once the township of Coraopolis, the nearly unpopulated neighborhood, however, was one of the points where the Rim had migrated inward via invading Elfhome vegetation. What had been sprawling neighborhoods gathered around Pittsburgh International Airport were now collapsing homes among ironwood forest. The trees were still considered “saplings” but already towered a hundred feet over her driveway. The harsh sun instantly softened in a way that seemed magical.
Chesty jumped out his open window the moment she parked and started a perimeter patrol of the front yard. The cost of living so close to the Rim was that she had to be ever vigilant. Only after he’d made a full sweep of the front yard without signaling danger did she get out and take a deep breath of the green stillness.
Taggart slid out of her SUV and stood taking in her ancestral home in the sun-dappled forest. The massive stone walls. The turrets. The gables. “Wow.”
“Welcome to Hyeholde.”
“This is not what I expected,” he said quietly, as if not to disturb the peace. “A castle? Here?”
“When my great-great-grandfather proposed to my grandmother, he promised her a castle. He never mentioned that they’d have to build it with their own hands. It took them seven years just to finish the West Room.”
He laughed. “So you are a native guide.”
“You can’t get much more native without being an elf.”
“Mine!” Hal cried from the backseat for the zillionth time since leaving the hospital.
“So, you live here alone?” Taggart obviously was asking if Hal lived with her.
“Yes.” She hoped the brusque answer would stop any more questions, but she hoped in vain.
“Your family went back to Earth?”
“Don’t ask personal questions.” Jane added a glare so he’d get the point.
“She’s got lots and lots and lots of family in Pittsburgh,” Hal shouted. “And they all drive her nuts, so she hides out in her Fortress of Solitude.”
“Shush, you.” Jane considered duct tape for Hal’s mouth. God knows what he might tell the New Yorkers. She keyed open her gun safe and took out her assault rifle. “Stay with the SUV until I’ve checked the house.”
Her great-great-grandfather had built the castle to be a restaurant, so it had an industrial-sized kitchen. She’d opened it up into one of the smaller dining rooms to add in a small eating and living room space. She got Hal settled on her big leather couch and assigned Nigel the task of keeping him there, one way or another. For the next hour as she squirreled away her supplies, fed Chesty and made a simple dinner, Hal ranted at hyperactive speed about his time doing network television.
She knew the pain medication was wearing off when Hal grew quiet.
When she paused to check on him, Hal asked, “Why are they here?” in a small miserable voice that sounded nothing like the normal Hal.
She opened her mouth to answer and realized that she really didn’t know why the two were there. She’d been so caught up in trying to wriggle out of responsibility and taking care of Hal that she hadn’t actually found out the details.
He probably hadn’t asked Nigel because, despite the friendly banter, he didn’t trust the man. The common thread of his stories, she realized, was that on Earth he’d been betrayed, and abandoned for more famous stars, by people he thought he could trust. Wives. Producers. And ultimately fans. Had he kept to old Earth stories in order to keep from playing up anything connected to PB&G?
“They’ve got a network show called Chased by Monsters, and Dmitri wants me to keep them out of trouble,” she explained.
Hal frowned and looked at Taggart, who was now slumped in the matching chair, looking exhausted. “You’re not here because Network is betting on a war?”