As he came in through the open back doors, Charlie Harris, one of the painters, handed him a paint roller duct-taped to a broomstick and pointed him at five meters of plywood wall saying, “Get a layer of the medium gray down. I want to start airbrushing the stone on by 9:00.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“We’ve got time constraints here, bucko, and Peter said to use anyone who wasn’t either directly in front of or directly behind a camera.”

“Bucko?”

Hazel eyes blinked myopically at him through paint-flecked glasses. “You’re the production assistant, right? You got something more important to do?”

More important? Still a little thrown by bucko, Tony glanced toward the set under the gate and realized with horror that the nervous bray of laughter still echoing around the soundstage had come from him. “I’ve got to save the world at 11:15,” he announced. Well, why not? At least when the shit hit the fan, one guy might know enough to duck.

“Christ, you’ve got hours yet, you’ll be long done by . . . Hey! Shit for brains! I told you to paint those doors matte black, not gloss!”

As Charlie hurried off, Tony looked down at the roller and stepped up to the paint tray. It wasn’t like he had anything to prepare. The world’s last line of defense pretty much consisted of him declaiming, “You shall not pass,” and everyone knew how well that had worked out the last time. Oh, sure, eventually, it was happily ever after and all that, but first there was the whole falling through fire and dying thing. And if I die, I don’t come back.

If I die . . .

Die . . .

“Hey, Foster! You want to get some of that paint on the wall instead of the floor?”

Paint dribbled off the roller to puddle by his foot. Wet, it didn’t look much like medium gray. It looked like liquid shadow.

“Foster!”

“Right. Sorry.”

Painting left him far too much time to think. Thoughts of the gate, thoughts of what might come through the gate, thoughts of what he might do to stop it, thoughts of whether Arra might or might not have screwed off and left him alone—mights and maybes and what ifs chased themselves around in his head, but he couldn’t get a grip on any of them. By the time he covered the last bit of plywood, he was so frustrated at the complete and total lack of substance that he was starting to look forward to the possibility of the Shadowlord’s army charging through the gate after Arra with swords drawn. One thing about an army, it made it easy to convince people that something was going on.

Drop an army through the gate and at least I won’t be facing it alone.

*Alone.*