Jim Butcher - Songs of Love & Death

“To our playwright! To the genius!” Otto raised a glass.

Marta, at her own table with a dozen fawning admirers, took up her own glass. “To the genius!”

And everyone raised glasses and cheered and applauded all over again. This was more than Charlotte had expected, more than she had imagined. She could only bask, silent. The playwright, wordless.

Beside her, Dorian looked at her and smiled. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

“Congratulations,” he whispered, posing for pictures with her, making sure the reporter spelled his name right.

The party went until dawn, but they left early. He brought her home to his place this time and made love to her more attentively than he had since their first weeks together.

BY MORNING, TEN different people had e-mailed Charlotte a photo going around the news Web sites of the masked hero on surveillance footage thwarting a convenience store robbery yesterday evening, the same time she’d been pacing backstage. The photo was black-and-white, grainy, and showed him standing with one foot on a guy who sprawled in front of the checkout counter. A gun could be seen nearby, as if it had fallen and skittered away from the would-be robber’s gloved hand.

Is this the same guy? everyone wanted to know, and how would she know because all she saw was the mask. But she thought it was the same guy. He kept himself busy. She tried to put him out of her mind.

But she recognized the convenience store, on a corner a few blocks away from the theater. He’d been right there, almost.

The reviews of the play were all right, which was more than she’d hoped for, and while they didn’t sell out again after the opening, the house was mostly full every night. Maybe that first night had sold out because of the novelty of her instant fame, if people were just coming to see the play written by that woman who was rescued by that Blue Collar vigilante. But if that was all the play offered, ticket sales would have bombed soon after. Which meant that maybe she knew what she was doing, and maybe everything was going to be all right. Weeks passed, and the play continued its respectable run.

Then people starting asking, “How is the next play coming along?”

And it wasn’t. She stared at her laptop for hours, took her notepad to the park, the coffee shop, the library. She thought she had characters—another woman, another hero, another subversion of traditional gothic narratives, etcetera. But every line she wrote sounded just like what she’d already done, and the words didn’t fit anymore.

She’d sit in her chair by the window all night—even the nights she spent at Dorian’s—make notes in her notebook, and watch the sky grow light. If she was at Dorian’s, he’d wake up, see her sitting wrapped in a blanket, staring instead of writing, and try to be helpful.

“You’ll get there,” he said. “You did it before, you can do it again.” Like it was just a matter of arguing a case.

One morning at Dorian’s, she’d made it to bed and was still there when he was nearly ready for his day.

“The DA wants to come see your show. I told him I could get him tickets.” Looking in the mirror, he straightened his tie. “You can get tickets, right?”

“Sure,” she said, emerging from blankets. “For when?”

“For tonight.”

“That might be kind of tough.”

“Come on, honey, surely you have some pull. You guys always hold a few tickets back, right?”

Maybe, but she didn’t run the box office. She still had some of her comp tickets left for the run, but there might not be anything for tonight. “I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not a superhero.”

“Great. Text me when you get them, all right? Don’t forget to lock up on your way out.”

“Have a good day, Dorian.” He gave her the appropriate kiss on her forehead and then was gone.

THE BOX OFFICE did have a pair of tickets for that evening. They were even decent seats. Charlotte was very apologetic, promising she’d have more notice next time, and that this was an emergency, and she was very grateful. On the other hand, the box office manager outdid herself apologizing in return, making sure the tickets were the best ones possible, and thanking her for the opportunity to be of service.

Dorian would have known what to do in this situation. The problem wasn’t that Charlotte didn’t have pull. The problem was she didn’t know what to do with it.

The manager filed the tickets with Will Call, she texted Dorian, and went to her favorite coffee shop to write.

Then she saw him.

She was at a sidewalk table, chin resting on her hand, staring at the traffic moving along the tree-lined street, because staring somewhere else wasn’t any less productive than staring at a blank page. She caught movement. It might have been the flickering of a set of leaves at the top of one of the trees, but it wasn’t. It was a person on the roof across the way. Jeans, dark T-shirt, and a mask.

He seemed to realize that she saw him. He stood and ran, disappearing to the back of the roof.

She stood, jostling the table and tipping over her coffee, which streamed to the edge and dripped to the sidewalk. Grabbing her notebook and satchel, she ran across the street, dodging cars like a creature in a video game. At the first alley she came to, she ran to the back of the building to look, but of course he wasn’t there. Just trash that hadn’t made it into the Dumpsters and puddles from the last rain filling cracks in the asphalt. The back doors of various businesses, shut and blank.

Maybe if she waited here until after dark, she’d get caught by muggers, and the masked man would come to rescue her. She didn’t want to leave, she didn’t want to pretend that he was a ghost, that it hadn’t happened, that she could move on.

“Hello?” she called. Her voice rattled in the empty space and no one answered.

DORIAN WAS WORKING late again and asked her to bring dinner—Thai takeout—to his office.

“He’s a crazy superhuman vigilante. You know what they’re like,” he said when she told him the story.

She felt the need to defend the superhero. While not offending Dorian. “You’re both working so hard to catch these guys, maybe you should work together. Pool your resources. Collaborate.” That was a theater word. She should have used another.

He gave her a look, appalled and amused at once. A “yeah, right” and “don’t be ridiculous.”

That night, back at her own apartment, she tried to sleep, couldn’t. She collected her notebook and sat by the window. Still didn’t write a word, but sitting with a pen in hand at least made her feel productive. The moon was full; she could see every detail of the street, the apartment blocks, the row of shops and Laundromats with steel grates pulled over the doors; at night, all the colors washed out to various degrees of half-tone shading.

On the roof of a row of shops, a figure moved. Monochrome, like the rest of the scene. Black T-shirt. Charlotte couldn’t see his face.

He was watching her. He was. And her heart fluttered at the thought.

SHE HAD SEEN him at all hours. Mostly on rooftops. She couldn’t predict where he’d be, unless maybe she staged a convenience store robbery. But the odds of that ending badly were very, very high, so she didn’t.

Instead, she went to the top of a parking garage on the fringes of downtown with a set of binoculars and scanned the surrounding rooftops. She might have become a vigilante herself, searching for crime, because if she found crime, she’d find him. She didn’t see anything.

For another night, she sat at her bedroom window, wrapped in a blanket, waiting for a shadow to race across rooftops and strike a dramatic pose.