Portraits of the Forsaken

by E. E. Holmes

  “Yep,” I said. “You sure you don’t want to join us? You’ll have company for the journey.”

  Reginald threw his head back and laughed. I could see the gold fillings in all of his molars. “Are you mad? I can play all day and night, and ain’t no one trying to stop me. I ain’t giving up this spot for nothing. Best gig I ever had.”

  “Isn’t it tough, playing for an audience who can’t hear you?” I asked, smiling at him.

  He leaned forward and winked conspiratorially. “Oh, they can’t hear me, duck, but they can feel me, believe you me. A busker should be so lucky.”

  “Suit yourself. See you around,” I said. And, even though I knew that some stranger would just pick it up, I tossed a pound onto the ground into the specter of his instrument case before I walked away.

  “Him, too?” the spirit of the young woman asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “If you stuck around among the living for a bit longer, you’d see that the world is full of spirits who have stayed behind, especially in a city like this. So old. So much painful history.”

  “But… why do they stay? Don’t they realize…” She gestured to me, lacking the words to express what she sensed within me.

  “Some of them do, like Reginald. Others can’t accept what has happened to them. There are so many reasons to stay, but don’t be fooled. None of them are as important as the reason to go.”

  “And what is the reason to go?” the girl asked me, a little desperately.

  “You felt it, didn’t you?” I asked her.

  She nodded.

  “That’s the reason,” I said. “What you felt… that sense of… home. Peace. Belonging. You will never have that here, no matter how long you stay.”

  She sniffed. She was crying again.

  “Everything will be okay,” I told her, regretting that I could not give her the hug she needed. “I’m probably the only person alive who can tell you that with certainty.”

  “How do you know? How can you be so sure about where I’m going now?”

  “Because,” I said, smiling gently. “I’ve been there.”

  2

  Spotlight

  “TÉIGH ANONN. TÉIGH ANONN. TÉIGH ANONN.”

  Hannah’s hand was clutched tightly in mine. In a vibrant, speeding barrage of images, the young woman’s life flashed through our connected consciousness. It used to be disorientating, this aspect of Crossings, but I’d learned to detach myself from my senses, to usher the memories onward instead of getting caught up in their details. They slipped smoothly past, like water through cupped hands.

  A line of uniformed young girls marching into a brick building, tripping on a stone and scattering my books everywhere as the others giggled.

  A stolen kiss under a footbridge, a hand that wandered deliciously along my back.

  A spotlight blinding me, a trembling page of Shakespearean verse clutched in my sweaty hand.

  A drunken young man rampaging through my flat, shouting and throwing things as I desperately tried to barricade a door.

  And then a feeling like sighing—a release—and finally, the familiar and satisfying closing of the Gateway, like a door deep inside my mind.

  Hannah gave my hand a little squeeze and then let it go. I sighed deeply and opened my eyes. She was already leaning across the summoning circle to blow out the candles.

  “Well. That went more smoothly than I would have thought,” she said, smiling in a contented sort of way, as though a shared feeling of peace with the young woman still lingered. “You thought she was going to take longer to convince, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I was just going to wait, but… well, she spotted me sooner than expected.” Because I chased a stranger through the streets of London like an unhinged paparazzo without a camera, I added silently.

  Hannah turned to our Caomhnóir who stood hulking in the doorway. “Thank you, Ambrose. We’re finished now.”

  “I’ll be next door. How many guests you expecting, then?” he grunted.

  “Two. Savannah Todd and her mother. And Tia will be home around the same time as well,” Hannah told him.

  “And could you hold on to this, please,” I added, pulling a folded-up letter from my back pocket and handing it to Ambrose. “Someone from the Trackers’ office will be coming by to pick it up.”

  “What is it?” Ambrose asked, turning it over suspiciously in his hands, as though he had never seen an envelope before.

  “It’s a letter from the spirit we just Crossed. We need to get it into her possessions somewhere her parents will find it. I called in the request and Catriona said one of the other Trackers could take care of it for us,” I said.

  Ambrose narrowed his eyes at me, as though he didn’t believe a word of what I was saying.

  “Look, if you want to steam the damn thing open and check, be my guest,” I snapped at him. “But you’ll have to figure out how to seal it back up and forge the handwriting on the envelope, because the spirit has Crossed and I can’t write it over again without her.”

  Ambrose pulled his eyebrows together in a single, furry, judgmental clump. He snorted at me, stuffed the letter in his pocket, and shuffled out the door, closing it behind him.

  “He’s a laugh a minute, isn’t he?” I said to Hannah. “What a charmer.”

  Together, Hannah and I gathered up the smoking candle stubs, removed them from their holders, and returned them to the wooden box on the mantelpiece where we kept them in pride of place, the way other people might display family photographs. Then we unrolled the area rug back over the summoning circle we had painted onto the floorboards. It was so much easier than drawing a new one every time we needed to perform a Crossing, particularly because they sometimes needed to be performed in a hurry, depending on the mental state of the spirit in question. We straightened out the rug and stepped back to admire our handiwork. All hint of Durupinen ceremony gone.

  “There. It almost looks like normal people live here,” I said.

  The words still hung in the air between us as Milo Chang, our Spirit Guide, came sailing through the wall and began swooping around the room like an oversized, agitated bat.

  “Almost,” Hannah said with a laugh.

  “Yeah, spoke too soon on that one,” I agreed.

  Milo was making a constant, high-pitched squealing noise that sounded something like, “Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod.”

  “Milo, you have got to calm down,” Hannah said soothingly to him as he zoomed past. “If you keep expending energy like this, you’ll have nothing left to manifest by the time the show comes on.”

  Milo continued his panicked circling, a spirit aircraft unable to land due to chronic malfunction.

  Normally, I would rag on Milo for acting so erratically, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it this time, since it was basically my fault he was in this state. Nearly five months ago, we’d launched a style blog for him as a surprise Christmas gift. We wanted to give him a place to show the world all of his brilliant fashion designs, and he’d leapt at the chance. Using my Muse talents to sketch the designs, and Savvy’s mother’s seamstress skills to create them, Milo had shared his vision and quickly amassed a small but ardent internet following of his work. The pièce de résistance of the gift, however, was far better than a little social media buzz. The previous year, I’d helped a world-famous actress find closure with her deceased fiancée, and I’d called in a little favor. I’d hoped she might just wear one of his accessories to a minor event, but she took one look at Milo’s work and fell in love with it. So tonight, Talia Simms was going to wear a Milo Chang original down the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of her newest film, and hence Milo was in imminent danger of exploding.

  “Has he been like this all day?” I asked Hannah quietly.

  “And night, I expect,” Hannah said, rolling her eyes. “Savvy couldn’t take it anymore. I thought she was going lose her shit and Cage him. I convinced her to go for a walk and h
ave a cigarette instead.”

  “At least she could go have a cigarette!” Milo hissed, coming to a stop beside us, but still vibrating so intensely that his entire outline was blurred. “If I had a body, at least I could use it to harness some of this in! I could have a cigarette, or a drink. I could go for a run, or scream into a pillow or punch something! I don’t have an outlet! I have no tools! I can’t cope! I’M A BASKETCASE WITHOUT THE BASKET!!!!”

  “We could still try that containment Casting, if you want,” Hannah said gently. “It might help.”

  “Or it might leave me too zoned out to focus on the television!” Milo snapped. “I already told you no! I can’t risk it!” He ran both of his hands through the specter of his shaggy black hair and then took several long, deep breaths. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I keep yelling, I just…”

  “You don’t need to apologize, Milo,” Hannah said. “We get it. This is a big deal. We’re all excited, too.”

  “Big deal? Only the biggest deal of my life!” Milo babbled.

  “Well, afterlife,” I pointed out.

  He glared at me, and I mimed zipping my lips.

  “You know what I mean. I’ve been waiting my entire li—existence for this,” Milo corrected himself before I could tease him again. “If this doesn’t go well… If they don’t like it…”

  “Everyone is going to love it,” I said. “You’re brilliant. We know it, and now the world will know it.”

  Milo squealed in horror, threw his arms up over his face and started rocketing around the room again.

  “Did I say the world?” I amended myself quickly as Hannah glared at me. “I meant only the five or six people who even bother to watch this kind of thing. I mean, honestly, I’m surprised they’re even bothering to put it on television. Lowest ratings ever.” I gave him two enthusiastic thumbs down, but Milo was not even pretending to listen to me.

  “It’s not about who watches, it’s about who’s there. And everyone who matters will be there! Everyone!” He dissolved into incomprehensible squeaking.

  I gave up and turned back to Hannah. “Tia knows what time it starts, right?”

  Hannah nodded. “Yes. Milo reminded her five times before she left. She promised she’d be back in plenty of time.”

  “And did I hear you tell Ambrose that Alice is coming, too?”

  Hannah grinned. “She’ll be here. And she’s bringing enough food to feed a small army, according to Savvy.” Evidently, Savvy’s mom was incapable of cooking for fewer than ten people on any given occasion.

  I flopped onto the couch and stared out the window. The intermittent spring sunshine of only an hour before was already losing its battle with a rolling bank of gray clouds. It would be drizzling again before long. I was finding London weather to be an excellent meteorological metaphor for my state of mind these days.

  As Milo continued to flit around over our heads like a trapped bird, Hannah sat down beside me.

  “Are you okay, Jess? You seem… I don’t know… troubled.”

  “I’m good,” I said, pulling out my phone and pretending to check notifications.

  I avoided her gaze, but I could feel her eyes on me, burrowing through my defenses, revealing all the things I’d prefer to keep hidden.

  “You’re doing it again. You’re giving me that look,” I told her.

  “What look?” she asked, a little too innocently.

  “That look that says you’re calling my bluff. The look that leaves no stone unturned until I’ve spilled my guts,” I told her, tossing the phone aside with a sigh of resignation.

  Her mouth puckered defensively. “I just asked if you were okay. You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

  I laughed. “What’s the point? Whether I talk now or later, you’ll weasel it out of me eventually. Might as well get it over with.”

  Hannah scowled. “I don’t weasel things—”

  “I thought I saw Finn today.”

  The words stopped her like a slap in the face. She clapped a hand over her mouth with a gasp, and when she spoke it was in a whisper from between her fingers. “You saw him? Where? When?”

  “No, I said, I thought I saw him,” I corrected her, and then watched as her face fell.

  “It wasn’t him?”

  “Nope. In fact, once I got up close to him, it didn’t even remotely look like him. But that didn’t stop me from dodging cabs across the street, man-handling pedestrians for several blocks, and then almost tackling him before he got on the Tube,” I replied with a sardonic smile.

  “Oh, Jess.”

  “I know. This is a whole new level of pathetic, even for me,” I said.

  The sudden absence of hysterical muttering made me glance up to the ceiling. Milo had stopped his frantic circling and was staring down at me with a face full of pity, leaving me feeling even more ashamed than I had a moment before.

  Damn it, floors never just opened up and swallowed you whole when you wanted them to, did they?

  “Who was it?” Milo asked in a soft voice.

  “Nobody. Just some guy who took advantage of my momentary confusion to hit on me, and then went on his merry way,” I said with a casual shrug that fooled no one. “It’s okay, you can say it. I’m pitiful.”

  But neither of them would say something like that, even if they were thinking it. They’d been nothing but supportive since the day this past January when I’d stepped into Celeste’s chamber and learned that Ileana, High Priestess of the Traveler Clans, had betrayed evidence of Finn’s and my illicit relationship to the new High Priestess of the Northern Clans, Celeste. Celeste would have been well within her rights to drag both Finn and me before the Council for a hearing, exposing us both to public ridicule and shame. But instead, she’d quietly had Finn reassigned somewhere far from Fairhaven, so that our transgression could be swept surreptitiously under the rug, saving Clan Sassanaigh from yet another scandal. I knew that, somewhere inside me, I was supposed to be grateful that Celeste had spared us in this manner, but the only feeling I could summon when I thought of her was a sense of deep, bitter anger. In fact, I hadn’t set foot back in Fairhaven since we had moved out because I was afraid of what I might say or do if I saw her.

  Finn.

  We hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye to each other, and now I had no idea where he was. The only thing I could be sure of was that, wherever he had been stationed, it was far enough from me that there was no chance of ever running into him by accident in my own city. No, wherever Celeste and the Caomhnóir had sent him, they would be sure it was far beyond my reach. And there was no way to track him down without drawing attention to my search. The only resources I had were Durupinen resources, and anyway, whatever my morning’s actions suggested to the contrary, I wasn’t an idiot. I knew that Seamus and the rest of the Caomhnóir would be watching me closely, on high alert for any sign that I was attempting to find Finn. Celeste had probably given them specific instructions to do so, and politically, it made perfect sense. She had just become High Priestess, and had to establish herself as such. Though Hannah had won with considerable support from lesser clans, the more powerful clans were quietly mutinous about her presence amongst them on the Council, and Celeste did not need to heap another reason to mistrust us onto the already festering pile. Hannah’s struggle to gain respect within the Council itself was already an uphill battle. I didn’t doubt, though, that if I made any attempts to find Finn, Celeste would not hesitate to air this particular dirty laundry in full view of the Northern Clans. She could not show this kind of mercy twice, or she would be viewed as weak. And I knew she thought of it as mercy—a laughable thought really, considering how her actions had seemed to have ripped my heart right out of my chest.

  Distrust of me was one of the reasons, no doubt, that our new Caomhnóir, Ambrose, was so frustratingly, constantly present. It was like having a great, hulking shadow that smelled like beef jerky and whistled through its nose when it breathed. If I strained my ears, I could hear hi
m through the wall in the adjoining flat, where he spent his time skulking and lifting weights while chain-smoking menthol cigarettes.

  The front door banged open, making all three of us jump.

  “Yes, it’s us, you stupid great prat. I practically live here, don’t I? Go drink a protein shake or something and sod all the way off,” Savvy shouted over her shoulder in the direction of Ambrose’s flat. I heard his door slam shut.

  “Oi there, you three. All right?” Savvy asked as she staggered through the door under the weight of three casserole dishes with a paper shopping bag teetering on top. Hannah hurried forward to help her, snatching the paper bag just before it toppled over.

  “Hi, Sav. Hey, Alice,” I said, jogging over to the table and clearing a space so Savvy could put down the food. “Thanks for the spread! It looks incredible.”

  “Just a little something I knocked up, me lovies,” Alice said, grinning broadly. Looking at Alice was like jumping in a time machine and running into Savvy thirty years in the future. Her thick red hair was shot through with gray, and her boisterous voice was hoarse with several more decades of smoking, but the broad nose, freckled face, and toothy smile were all nearly identical. She scanned the room eagerly with her eyes and boomed, “Milo, love, you here?”

  “He’s dead, not deaf, you mad old cow,” Savvy grumbled. “Get your arse over here, so Hannah can do that Melding thing, will you?”

  Alice hurried over to Hannah, who sat her down at the table and quickly performed the Casting that would allow Alice to temporarily see and hear Milo. We’d had to do it several times before so that Alice and Milo could discuss the details of Milo’s designs together.

  “There you are, then!” Alice said, looking up and immediately spotting Milo hovering near the television, staring at a commercial for chocolate biscuits as though it were the most important moment in televised history. She glanced uneasily at Hannah. “Can… can’t he hear me?”

  Hannah smiled reassuringly. “The Casting works fine. He’s just a bit distracted right now. Nerves.”