Free Celebromancy by Michael R. Underwood Page B

looked down to Jane by way of illustration. The star looked to be catatonic, occasionally twitching and sobbing.
    “Are you going to explain what the hell is going on here?” she asked. Jane had become unresponsive, though she seemed conscious. Ree had no intention of leaving Jane unless it was at a hospital. This had happened on her watch, even if she didn’t know she was on duty.
    Yancy stood at the base of the bed, looking at Jane with patently paternal worry. “She’d talked about nightmares, had for months. I told her to take it easy, to get help, but it wasn’t just withdrawal—at least, not normal withdrawal, from the drugs. This is something else.”
    “No fucking duh,” Ree said, pointing to the broken window. She paused for a moment, considering how many of her cards she should lay on the table. But subtlety had never been her strong suit.
    Fuck it.
    “Last time I checked, normal withdrawal doesn’t include your actual demons appearing to carry out the night terrors, at least not in any cases I’ve ever heard of. She obviously does magic, and it sounds like you know that. I don’t have a magician badge or anything, but I’m in the know, so it’d be great if you could spill the beans now.”
    Yancy raised an eyebrow. She imagined he didn’t get challenged like that very often. But she didn’t exactly have a lot of time to dance around the issue, since there might still be an invisible monster prowling around the neighborhood. He walked over to the window side of the bed and leaned in to push aside a stray strand of Jane’s hair, a tender and familiar touch. He stood and stepped back, fear crossing his face.
    He sighed and said, “I need some coffee.”
    “Me, too,” Ree said.
    Danny brought over a chair, and Yancy sat. “How much do you know about Celebromancy?” the director asked.
    Ree did a double take. “Say what?”
    “Celebromancy.”
    “I saw the lightsaber, Ree,” Danny said, pointing to the discarded prop. “You’re not just anybody.”
    Fair enough. Not like it did me much good. What kind of monster shrugs off a lightsaber?
    Not the point , she reminded herself.
    She’d heard of the style, but only in passing. She’d seen Geekomancy, Bromancy, and Atavism (aka Furrymancy) up close, as well as whatever it was that the vindictive Rorikon Strega Lady Lucretia did. But she had only been in the game for six months and didn’t know everything.
    “Almost nothing,” Ree said finally. “It has something to do with fame. So that thing with the crowds last night was Celebromancy?”
    Danny nodded. “When the fans spotted her, she started to lap up the attention.”
    “I knew it!” Ree said, thinking back through the previous day, how quickly Jane had gotten her makeover before the press conference, and the way she reached epic levels of magnetism at the club, glowing like a gigawatt bulb.
    Yancy continued. “When she gets that charge, she can enhance her looks, use some energy to get more attention to get more energy. It creates a feedback loop. But now she can’t control it. Once she gets going, she becomes erratic, uncontrolled. That’s not how it normally works, not how it used to work.”
    Yancy took a breath of imminent exposition, and Danny turned to walk out of the trailer. Please let him be getting coffee , Ree thought.
    “Celebromancy has been around for as long as I have, and probably long before that. It might even date back to the time of the Shakespeare, troubadours, or even the geisha, for all I know. But some people, the born performers in the world, can tap into the attention they’re given, use it like fuel, then weave it into spells to look more beautiful, act more powerfully, hold a crowd’s attention, or crush a rival.”
    Yancy took a breath. “It’s that last one that got Jane in the situation she’s in now.”
    If she can charm people, then how much of last night was real? Ree asked herself, a churning in her stomach as she considered the