by Rabia Gale
“What would you have done then?” she persisted.
He leveled his grey gaze at her. “Not much left to do if that happens.”
Arabella crossed her arms and hugged herself. Her substance was chilly, but she couldn’t help fidgeting, as if to make up for the unnatural stillness of her body.
Her gaze ran over the rest of the chamber, a pretty room for a young girl, with its pale golden floor, apple-green and milk-white striped wallpaper, and simple furniture. She had thought it the loveliest room when she’d first come to live with the Elliots, and still did, despite her growing experience of finer apartments. For it had been set aside, scrubbed and cleaned, and made over with love—just for her.
An ache constricted Arabella’s throat. Her elegant orange and cream ball gown was draped on a chair pushed to one corner. The clothes press stood next to it in solemn dignity. Silver-backed brushes and glass jars lay scattered in merry confusion on her delicate marble-topped dressing table. Across the room, near the window, was her writing desk, a half-written letter to her cousin Beatrice peeking out from underneath the latest volume of a romance Aunt Cecilia had said she must read. The prayer niche, a narrow recess in the wall by her bed, was full of slips of paper.
Prayer notes, only some of which were hers. Her eyes stung to see them. Her family and friends had placed them there, begging the God-Father for her healing.
Could a ghost cry? Arabella would rather not find out with the Shade Hunter, cold and frowning, standing nearby.
Runes flared as Trey worked in silence. Arabella found herself listening to the small sounds of a house settling at night in the city—the tiny creaks, the sharp cracks, the rustle of little creatures and the muffled noises from outside.
Somewhere in the distance a bell rang. Was it three o’ clock already? But no, the bell tolled on past the count, each distant ring hanging in the air with an otherworldly clarity.
Arabella started.
The sounds came from the Shadow Lands.
Her fingers shaped a sign of protection. Saint Margrethe, she begged, help me.
Trey looked up sharply, brows drawn together. Arabella instantly dropped her hand.
If he suspected, if he’d seen, he didn’t say so.
He beckoned. “Come.”
Arabella glided around the bed and stood next to him, hesitant.
Trey turned to her. “This might sting, but hold still.” He placed his hands just above her shoulders.
He was uncomfortably close, his wards hissing a warning at her. Arabella didn’t know where to look, so she settled for a vague stare over his shoulder and tried not to squirm.
Her shoulders twitched as a tingle ran through her. Trey turned and leaned over her body again. More runes glowed in the air, then spun into three fiery points that sank into the motionless girl’s head, chest, and lower abdomen.
Arabella pitched forward as three invisible lines tugged at her. With a gasp, she braced herself, difficult to do without the traction of her feet against the floor.
“Anchor points to help you settle right in,” Trey explained. “Go on, then.”
“That’s it?” asked Arabella suspiciously. “No burning candles or eerie chants?”
“Should’ve called a necromancer if you wanted that,” he said tersely. “Let’s get it over with.”
Of course, he was looking forward to being nodding acquaintances with her once again. Well, so was she.
“I’ll see you with my own eyes in a moment,” she said and let herself fall forward.
Arabella had expected to drift down and sink into her body, letting her spirit flow out to the tips of her fingers and the soles of her feet.
Instead, she slammed into what felt like rock.
Arabella bounced off her body and spun crazily, misting through her bed, a chest, and finally, halfway through the floor. Her mouth was full of the taste and texture of wood shavings and her skin felt sticky with pine sap. With a groan, she pulled herself out of the floor and righted herself.
“What happened?” she demanded, feeling disheveled and bruised and put upon.
Trey stared at her, mouth open.
“That was,” he said, with wholly inappropriate awe, “the least graceful thing I’ve ever seen a ghost do.”
Arabella scowled at him. “Never mind that! Why didn’t it work?” She gestured crossly at the bed.
“At a guess? There’s something you need to do before you can return to your body.”
“Such as?” Arabella hovered a few inches above the floor, too agitated to align herself with the proper plane of existence.
“The answer is probably locked in your own memory.” Trey looked as tired of this whole affair as Arabella felt.
Arabella held back an exasperated growl, along with the words, Some help you turned out to be. “I spent most of the evening trying to remember, but nothing came back.”
Trey rumpled his hair. “There are ways to help you, but I’m afraid it’s beyond my ability.”
Her conscience pricked her. She knew he hadn’t had much sleep and with the Procession and Viewing on Saturday, all of the Foreign Office must be busy.
He’s taken his own time to help you, against the rules. Be grateful, Arabella.
She tried to be, but it was hard.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked, trying not to sound defeated.
“See if we can find any signs to indicate what went wrong.” Without warning, Trey flipped the covers back from her body.
Arabella stiffened in instinctive outrage. She opened her mouth to reprimand him, then stopped. There was something wrong with the pale hands modestly crossed over her breast, making her mortal form look like something that belonged in a crypt.
“My ring,” she whispered. “My ring is missing.”
“Tell me about it.” Trey’s eyes gleamed suddenly, weariness banished from his face.
Arabella brushed the bare place on her body’s right ring finger with a spectral hand. A pressure mark encircled the base of it. “It’s a sapphire, in a silver setting. I always wear it. It belonged to my mother.”
“Do you think your aunt removed it?”
“No, she wouldn’t have. She knows how much it means to me.”
“Stolen, then.” Trey gave a slow nod. “It makes sense, in an upside-down kind of way. It’s almost an extension of you. Without it, your body doesn’t fit right.”
Arabella looked down, her ghostly hair falling down like a curtain, her field of vision narrowed to those white hands and that thin face on the bed. The fingernails of her body were tinged slightly blue, and the skin stretched over her hands had taken on a fine translucent quality.
She didn’t need Trey to tell her she was dying
“How long?” she whispered. “How long do I have?”
She felt him assess her, to see how she would take the news, if she would transform into the hag he half-expected. She would’ve laughed at the thought if she weren’t so numbed already. It wasn’t worth it to prolong her own life or get vengeance by attacking him.
“Two days, I’d say. Maybe three. It’s hard to judge these things.”
A chill wind seemed to cut through her soul, raising a mournful howl. So it was already too late.
“It’s not too late.” Trey echoed her thoughts. “Come, Arabella. Let’s go back and see if we can prod your memory into giving us any further hints.”
Shadows crept around her, muffling his voice.
“Leave me,” she whispered. “Let me be with my body.” All she could think of was this barely-breathing girl, so small and waxen, like a goblin death doll. She couldn’t bring herself to leave her. Possessiveness took over her—the body was hers.
And he wanted to drag her away from it.
“Arabella,” Trey said, voice tight, stern. “You’re letting yourself be influenced by the other realm. Come with me.”
Through the fall of her hair, she saw him reach for her.
She flung herself away, crossing the
room in less than an eye-blink. “No! You just want to throw me back into that pentagram!”
Trey went into a crouch, his left hand reaching for an unseen weapon. The pressure changed around Arabella, and the very air felt different, greasy and tingling.
“Arabella, I don’t want to—”
“Liar!” Her voice rose to a shriek. “Just leave me alone!” She saw him spring, but she was faster.
She whirled and dived for the wall. The green and white stripes, poison and bone, loomed large in front of her.
Trey’s fingers snagged the edge of her substance. A shock rippled through her, like lightning sparking in water. Arabella threw herself forward, tearing out of his reach. Her mouth tasted of glue and chalk as she fell through the wall and tumbled into the night.
Trevelyan Shield was a phantasmist, a magic user who could handle both aether and the more potent phantasmia. He was also the only Border Walker in Vaeland, a phantasmist who could roam the Shadow Lands in his corporeal body.
But he had not yet figured out how to walk through walls.
Arabella Trent slipped through his fingers, her ghostly substance stinging along his palms. An instant later, he crashed shoulder-first into the wall.
“Saint Bastien on a stick!” he snarled, staring at the place she’d vanished.
What the blazes was that bird-witted girl thinking, rushing out on a night like this?
They’d eat her alive.
Trey commanded his lights to follow him and flung open the chamber door.
A dark-haired youth stood in the oblong of yellow light, fully dressed but rumpled looking, lines etched in a harrowed face. His bloodshot eyes widened in comic dismay. “L-Lord St. Ash!” he stammered.
“Out of the way,” said Trey through gritted teeth. “Your fool of a cousin—” He brushed past Harry Elliot.
“Wait!” Elliot seized Trey’s sleeve. “There’s something I think you should see.”
Trey turned. Elliot mutely held out something small and grey.
It was a lady’s reticule.
“I think you’ll find an answer in there,” said Elliot.
Chapter Four
Arabella fled through the streets of Lumen as if the Wild Hunt was at her heels. She raced through Bottleham and into the confusing tangle of the old shopping district. Streets wound, dark and serpentine, in front of her. Shadows pooled in the corners. Sometimes she waded knee-deep in the thick porridge of the street, cobblestones grinding through her. At other times, she skimmed several feet above the road. Once, she threw herself through a lamp post. It left a smear of rust on her soul.
Her back felt exposed and unprotected. At any moment, she expected a shout and a jerk back into the pentagram, to be bottled up again.
No and no and no.
Never again. She wouldn’t be locked up ever again.
Her panic grew the further she lost herself in among the shops. Windows gleamed like eyes at her; doorways were shadowed entrances to unnamed horrors. Wooden signs showed symbols she could only half make out—they might’ve been runes written in maidens’ blood and knife strokes for all she knew.
The buildings leaned over her head, blotting out the open sky.
Something scuttled in the thick gloom.
Blood pounded in Arabella’s ears. How can that be? she thought, half-hysterical. I have no body to carry blood around in!
She looked up at the faint wash of stars beyond the looming structures.
Of course! Why am I hugging the ground? I’m a ghost. I can fly!
No sooner had she thought this, than a great lightness came over Arabella. She rose into the air, burst out from among the roof tops, gables, and chimney pots.
Lumen spread out like a light-dotted carpet beneath her. Arabella laughed and ascended, arms wide out to embrace the whole city. The air was sharp and clear and thin, like a glass shard. The stars pinpricked it in bright points, far above the city’s smoke and lights.
Arabella drifted. To her left were Rosemary Street and Bond Place and Lyndon Square, filled with the marble mansions of the peerage. On her right, All Saints’ Cathedral reared its square bulk to the sky. Ahead of her was the dark, wet back of the River Teme.
Arabella flew over its heaving waters, swollen with spring thaw. Black wavelets lapped and sucked at the crumbling banks. They churned around the posts of the bridges that spanned the river. Dirty ice chunks floated on the surface.
Then Arabella was over to the other side and amidst the pleasure gardens, closed and quiet in the early spring. The wooden structures that hosted restaurants, concerts, plays, and other entertainment in the summer were boarded up. Leafless trees slumbered still, and flower beds with nary a sprout or blade lay like thick scars. The fields were bare and empty, the gas lamps dark.
In the summer, this place would be filled with curiosities and thronged with people. Aunt Cecilia had regaled Arabella at length with descriptions of the delights in store for her: supper parties, circuses, inventions, mimes, masquerades, promenades.
All the things she would never get to experience.
Arabella drifted down to a wrought-iron bench. She didn’t need its cold support and the metal tang of it was heavy on her tongue, but the habits of life persisted. She sat with her hands clenched in her lap and looked out at the raw emptiness. It looked blighted, just like the promise of her own future.
It isn’t fair! I just started to live!
Church hadn’t prepared her for this. Her previous life, with its series of dark days stretching endlessly into misery, hadn’t either.
So what was left? To go willingly into the Shadow Lands and the afterlife beyond where the God-Father, the God-Son, and the saints awaited? Or to cling to a half-life here on earth, always watching, never to share in its changes and joys and heartaches?
If Trey Shield and his ilk would even let her be.
A chill wind, keen-edged, blew off the river. A shivery moan ran through the gardens, then quieted. In the silence left behind by the wind, the waters chuckled with sinister malice. The bench went from cold to icy, the chill burning through her.
Arabella caught a flicker of movement near a wooden playhouse, the canvas that covered the stage torn and pulling away from the nails tacking it down. A small figure approached: an urchin girl dressed in tattered rags, feet bare and bloodied. She stopped near Arabella and said, in a wistful whisper, “Spare me some bread, miss? I’m so hungry.”
The beseeching dark eyes, over-large in the pinched face, might have been her own from so long ago. That thin frame, shivering in the cold, could’ve belonged to the child she had once been.
Arabella’s heart constricted and she stood up. “Oh, you poor child! It’s so frigid. Come here and I’ll—” She stopped, her fingers still resting on the cloak she’d been trying to take off.
Her spectral cloak. With her incorporeal hands.
For the child who could see her.
The child she’d just invited nearer.
“You’re so pretty, miss.” The girl drifted closer, feet skimming over the short hoary grass without bending a single blade. “So pretty. I’m so hungry.”
Arabella jumped up, hands out. “Stay away! Stay away… please.” Her words ended on a waver.
“Feed me,” murmured the child. “… so hungry…” Her eyes grew larger, sockets stretching, pupils swallowing up the irises and whites. Her face was a flimsy paper mask, with holes torn into it.
And through the holes, Arabella could see…
… a grey city glistening with frost… towers frozen in mid-collapse… domes melted into oozing shadow stuff… a cracked bell with no tongue swinging and tolling, still tolling…
“Pretty lady,” crooned the girl, reaching out. Her thin fingers were overlong, capped with sharp nails. “Pretty lady will feed me.”
Arabella slapped the hands away. She gasped as stinging pain burned up her arms.
The girl stopped, mouth gaping open into a maw as her jaw unhinged like a snake’s. “… lad
y?”
And then her face began to melt.
Her features softened and ran like wax, shriveling away from her eyes and mouth. Darkness, gleaming with red eyes, took their place.
“Lady?” said a chorus of voices, high and low and medium, the whole cacophony of it shredding Arabella’s every nerve. “I’m hungry, lady. Feed me, miss.”
The girl’s form unraveled. For one moment, she stood on one foot, a half-being. For an instant, the person she had been peeped out from the remaining part of her face. “Please, miss?” she whispered.
Then she swayed, tottered, fell forward.
And disintegrated into shadow substance, inky blackness splattering everywhere.
Arabella stood rooted, unable to look away.
Dark blobs showered on to her skirt and stuck. They writhed, leach-like. “Feed me!” came that ragged chorus once more.
“No!” Arabella beat the stuff off her. Blobs stuck to her hand, wriggled, clamping teeth into her.
Arabella pulled them off and threw them away, shuddering at the way they felt, fat and slimy. Her substance burned where they had latched on.
The blobs on the ground wriggled blindly towards each other and her. Whenever they bumped against each other, they merged. Then they turned hungry mouths in her direction.
“I am not your dinner!” Arabella yelled. Something white-hot blazed inside her.
She recognized what it was.
The desire to live.
Once, she had taken her courage in her hands and fought back. Once, she had taken her life back.
She wouldn’t let that go to waste. She wouldn’t let her younger self down.
Arabella forced the heat into her hands. A leech jumped at her, toothed maw aiming for her face.
Arabella snatched it with both hands and squeezed. A flash, and the leech crumbled to ash that blew away in the wind.
“I won’t let you take me,” she promised the blobs.
They took that as a challenge. They charged.
It was like fighting off an army of fast-moving slugs. Arabella flung them off her in scorching handfuls. She stomped on their smoldering comrades, feeling them squish as they burst into pinpoints of white fire.