Phillipa Bornikova: Box Office Poison

I had a lot of help writing this book: Daniel Abraham, Ty Frank, and Walter Jon Williams, who helped me with the initial plot break, because I can’t do these without a blueprint. My friend and lawyer, Christie Carbon-Gaul, who talked to me about arbitrations and sent me the AAA Commercial Arbitration Rules and Mediation Procedures. Ian Tregillis, for being my beta reader and letting me talk through scenes when I got confused and who offered sage advice on how to fix problems. Thanks to you all.

I looked out the plane’s window at Los Angeles, and it looked like any other airport. No palm trees in evidence. No movie stars strolling across the tarmac toward private jets. No surfboards. The only difference between LAX and LaGuardia was the lack of snow.

It was my first trip to the West Coast and I should have been excited. Instead I slumped in my window seat back in steerage and contemplated my exhaustion. I had gotten up at three a.m. so I could brave a blizzard and reach LaGuardia by four thirty so I could catch a six a.m. flight to California. Six and a half hours in coach, and I didn’t even get to sleep because I’d been pulled into this arbitration at the last minute by one of the partners at my law firm and I had to review the pleadings.

I hated playing last-minute catchup, but since David Sullivan had saved my life last August I figured I owed him, and seriously, the chance to meet Jeffery Montolbano made it a no-brainer.

I found myself remembering the scene in Earth Defense Force where Montolbano, as the heroic Commander Belmanor, had fought his way into the Council Chamber and then, instead of another shootout, had eloquently convinced the Alien Hegemony that Earth should not be destroyed and that humanity was worth saving. The space marine armor left little to the imagination, and sweat had his black hair plastered across his forehead. The negligent way his hands held the large pulse rifle had made more than a few women wish he would caress them just that way. The gossip columns and entertainment shows were filled with rumors about a possible rift with his beautiful actress wife. His charity work got less attention, but such was the world. I wondered if they really were having problems. Then I felt guilty daydreaming about an actor when John O’Shea, the man who had traded his freedom for mine, was trapped in Fey. Then I imagined what John would say and realized I was being stupid. Fantasizing about an actor wasn’t some kind of emotional betrayal. I pushed away thoughts of the private investigator who had entered my life for a brief few days last summer. I didn’t yet have a solution for breaking him free from the grasp of his Álfar mother, and right now I had a job that required me to focus.

Montolbano was the current president of the Screen Actors Guild, and he was trying to keep the organization from tearing itself to pieces as one set of actors sued another set of actors, the studios, the networks, and the producers, charging that Álfar actors had an unfair advantage over mere humans. As the entire mess crept toward litigation, Montolbano had used a clause in the SAG agreement to force the parties into arbitration.

Various law firms were floated to serve as the impartial arbitrator, and my firm, Ishmael, McGillary and Gold, had been selected. It made sense. We had an office in Los Angeles, but we tended to represent the aerospace industry, and Japanese and Chinese business interests, with limited forays into the entertainment industry, and we weren’t strongly affiliated with any one side. Neither talent, as it was euphemistically called, nor the studios and networks. The consensus was that we would be fair, since we didn’t really have a dog in this fight.

There was a ding as the seat-belt sign went off. People jumped to their feet and began hauling bags out of the overhead compartments. I was way back in the tail section and saw no point in joining the bump and wiggle in the narrow aisle of the airplane. We were trapped until the people up front made it off the plane.

The people two rows in front of me began to move, so I tugged my laptop bag from beneath the seat and stood up. I only had one item in the overhead: my ankle-length, fur-lined, leather coat with a dramatic Anna Karenina hood. I dragged it down and joined the shuffling conga line to freedom. To my exhausted imagination it seemed like I was being slowly extruded from a metal canister.

Passing through the now empty first-class section, I gazed longingly at the wide seats and imagined the champagne that had flowed, the meal that had been served, the in-flight movies. David Sullivan, my boss and the senior attorney, had been seated in first class. He hadn’t waited for me; I hadn’t really expected him to. He was a vampire and, while courtesy was important, there were limits.

If I had been in a high-powered all-human law firm I would have been flying on the firm’s private executive jet, and I wouldn’t have had to get up at ugh o’clock to catch a commercial flight. But I was with a white-fang, vampire-owned firm, so we flew commercial.

The reason? Because of all the Powers—vampires, werewolves, and Álfar—that had gone public back in the 1960s the vampires had decided they needed to try the hardest to integrate with the human population. Maybe they were right. They were definitely the scariest of the Powers. Werewolves looked like regular people until they changed, and the Álfar were just gorgeous. I knew from personal experience that that was deceptive, but most people loved the pretty elves. But vampires—the whole dead thing, drinking the blood of living people—gave our little inner monkeys a big shiver. All the Powers were predators; humans just sensed it more viscerally with the vampires.

Running counter to that argument was the fact that it would make much more sense, given a vampire’s aversion to the sun, to fly at night on private jets. So maybe this noblesse oblige argument was just a bogus corporate justification for being cheap.

The focus of all this thought and analysis was waiting just outside the gate. David was tall, slim, pale, with taffy-colored hair and dark brown eyes. Four thick scars gouged his right cheek where a werewolf’s claws had ripped his face. Apparently the windows at the LAX terminals hadn’t been treated with UV-reducing glass because he was frowning while he opened his umbrella. I wasn’t sure if the frown was meant for me or the windows, and I rushed into speech.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said as I juggled purse, coat, and computer bag.

“What are you apologizing for?” he asked in that brusque way he had when dealing with people being codependent.

“You’re right. Sorry.” I cringed.

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

“I mean, not sorry. It’s a habit.”

“Well, break it.”

“I couldn’t get off any faster.”

I was talking to his back because he’d already started moving toward the escalators and the baggage claim. I yanked up the handle on my rolling computer bag, hurried after him, and wished I hadn’t taken off my shoes during the flight because my feet had swelled and now the black pumps were pinching.

At the foot of the escalator there was a scrum of limo drivers in dark suits holding little signs with names on them. SULLIVAN was among them. A tall, ebony-skinned man studied the umbrella that shaded David and stepped forward, smiling, and introduced himself as our driver, Kobe.