by A. R. Kahler
“Interesting,” Eli says. His voice sounds like he finds it anything but as he makes his way around the lower level. The only other things moving are the mice scurrying to get out of his light.
“Do you sense that?” Eli asks. He pauses at the foot of the stairs.
“Sense what?”
He’s a veritable bloodhound for feeling anything supernatural, which is partly why I keep him around. He even picks up things my charms would miss.
“We’re in a crossroads.”
“How many lines?” I ask.
He bites the inside of his lip, the only outward sign that he’s concentrating.
“Five.”
“Jesus.”
A crossroads is where two ley lines overlap, like where I summoned Eli. But there are places where more might cross, and with every crossing, the nexus becomes more powerful. And the more powerful the nexus, the thinner the veil between worlds and the stronger the magic you can wield.
“I’m surprised you can’t feel it,” he says, looking to me. “I honestly think if you stepped in the wrong spot you’d go right into Faerie.”
“Maybe she did.”
“Potentially. Though I think we would have just teleported there instead.”
He has a point. This makes zero sense, and it’s starting to set my nerves on edge. The name led us here. Names always lead to a person. And yet there is no one here. He heads up the stairs, and I follow close behind, his light making our shadows dance like demons on the wall.
There are only a few rooms at the top: some bedrooms, judging from the abandoned bed frames and wardrobes in two of them; an old bathroom with way too many spiders in the bathtub for my liking; and, in the third room, the reason we were brought here.
A body.
At least, I think it’s a body. It’s lying prone on the floor beside a fairly elaborate altar, a ring of blood circling both. I can’t tell the sex at first, as it’s on its stomach and covered in robes. Eli goes over to it and stares down at the blood circle.
“A few weeks old,” he says, touching the ring with his toe. “Shoddy craftsmanship. Yours are much better.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Still live?” I’m not talking about the body, which is clearly not alive. I’m talking about the magic laced through the room like a snare. How did we not sense it from outside? It must be from the nexus.
He shakes his head. “The power’s gone.” Then, to prove his point, he steps over the line and nudges the body. It makes an oddly hollow noise. “For fuck’s sake,” he whispers, and kicks it over.
Not a body after all. It’s a mannequin.
“Seriously?” I ask.
“Someone knew we’d be looking for them,” he mutters.
I walk over and kneel beside the plastic body. The blue eyes are wide, and runes are scratched into the irises. From forehead down, the thing is covered in wards and words and sigils, many of which I’ve not seen before. Which is saying something. I trace a few of them I recognize. Symbols of misdirection mostly. And a few that I’ve only seen on the golems haunting the Winter wilds or in William’s workshop.
“Why go to all this trouble, though?” I ask.
He kneels beside me and examines the mannequin. And by that, I mean he rips off all the clothing very unceremoniously and makes a lot of grumbling noises.
“Because,” he says finally, “she gave this thing her name.”
“What?”
He shrugs and looks back down to the dummy. “These markings here, across the heart? They’re for transference. She transferred her name to this doll. And gave up a fair amount of her soul to do it, too.”
“Why, though? I didn’t even realize that was possible.”
“It shouldn’t be. Not for a human.” He points to more of the symbols, those scratched into the plastic and filled with congealed blood. “No mortal should know these words, let alone use them without losing their mind. Whoever this girl was, she was friends with greater powers. This . . . this thing, it is Heather now. Which means the girl we’re looking for—the girl who knits and gets drunk on Tuesdays—is still out there, and she’s no longer herself.”
I glance around at the room. Everything derelict, everything covered in dust. We are out in the middle of nowhere, and there’s no reason anyone would have just been hanging out here, trying to transfer a name.
“She knew we’d be coming for her,” I say.
“Or that someone would. With this much magical knowledge, there’s no telling what sort of trouble this girl got herself into. This sort of learning doesn’t come cheap. And woe betide anyone who tries to steal it.”
I shake my head. “So can we reverse it?” I ask, looking back to the mannequin. I can’t make heads nor tails of most of it, but maybe Eli can. He’s been around a lot longer. “You know, give the name back to the original holder?”
“I don’t think so,” he says. “I mean, maybe if I’d been watching what she did, heard what she said. But even then, that’s only a maybe. This was a powerful blood pact. Those are tricky to undo.”
“Can’t you at least try?”
He gives me a look, one that clearly tells me he already is trying, thank you, and if I could please shut up it would be most appreciated. I roll my eyes and walk away toward the window.
This just doesn’t make sense. I was supposedly flying under the radar. If this girl took all this time and effort to divert us, she was definitely neck-deep in this, and she definitely knew I was coming. Which means her buyer must have known as well. But how did she know? Did she have some sort of gift of prophecy? Or did someone else tip her off? The only person who might have done that was Roxie, and she’s in quarantine. No magic can get in or out of her room—it was part of the ward. And I enchanted every form of communication she has. She hasn’t accepted or sent out a call, hasn’t sent any e-mails or tweets or whatever. She’s been silent.
I want to say that I trust her, that I believe she hasn’t spoken to these people in years. But trust is hard to come by in Faerie. It’s usually only gained with a contract. And as much as I want to pretend I can trust and care about her, Roxie’s still a free agent.
“I think . . .” Eli says from behind me. I look away from the rolling woods and roiling clouds to watch him as he pores over the mannequin, thin trails of blue light spiraling down from his fingers as he works. “Yes, I think I might . . .”
Then something goes wrong. So wrong even I can feel it, and I’m not involved with whatever it is he’s doing.
“Shit,” he mutters.
Around us, magic slams into place like a barricade.
“What do you mean, shit?” I yell.
The walls glow with hundreds of thousands of runes and glyphs. All geared at one thing: containment. And like the symbols on the mannequin, most of them are unfamiliar—I’ve only seen a small percentage of them before.
“How are these here?” I ask. “I checked. You checked!”
“Apparently they were part of the effigy.” He stands smoothly, as though we haven’t just been magically locked into a room in the middle of nowhere. I don’t panic—I’ve definitely been in worse spots—but the inconvenience of this is annoying. “And tinkering with that caused them to trigger.”
“Ugh.”
I start walking the perimeter, twisting various rings for magical insight, keen senses, that sort of thing. Everything in my arsenal that would potentially help reverse whatever the hell we just got ourselves into. I smash the window with a fist—the glass shatters out, then implodes back in and reconstructs itself, almost shearing off my arm in the process. The door doesn’t budge from a well-placed kick that could decapitate a rhino. And I know, from the way the runes shift over the floor and walls, that no portals are going to work in here, either to enter or escape.
“So now we’re trapped in here,” I say. “To starve or what
ever. I’m assuming even your personal portals are useless?”
He purses his lips and looks at the wall for a long while.
“It would appear so, yes. I am bound to this plane. How annoying.”
“So how do we break it?”
“You don’t.”
The voice doesn’t come from Eli. It comes from the mannequin.
I pause and turn as goose bumps race up and down my spine. For the longest time, I’ve been creeped out by anything modeled after humans. Dolls, mannequins, whatever. The fact that Mab had a small army of demented dolls she set on me when I’d wandered down the wrong corridor in the castle hadn’t helped any. Their tiny glass eyes all staring, limbs locked out in an eternal inviting embrace . . . ugh.
The mannequin is worse.
Eli steps away as cracks fissure their way across the mannequin’s static joints, pale blue light streaming out, the same color as the runes warding the walls.
“Looks like that wasn’t the right spell,” Eli mutters to himself.
The thing shakily tries to force itself upright, shards of plastic breaking off with every clunky movement. Its body is crisscrossed with cracks and runes, and as it stands, it appears to be held together by magic alone. Perhaps even worse, the eyes don’t glow or give off any semblance of life. They’re just as dead as the rest of it.
“Your search comes to an end, assassin,” comes the voice once more—masculine, middle-aged probably. Smooth. No true twang or accent. “You have already killed one client, and captured another. You will impede my efforts no longer.”
If the fact that the voice is coming from an enchanted mannequin isn’t enough of a clue, the use of the phrase impede my efforts is a dead giveaway that we’re dealing with a faerie. And, unless I’m way off base, I’m willing to bet it’s the same one who roped Roxie into her contract.
“It’s you,” I say. “You’re the one behind all this.”
“In the flesh,” the mannequin says from its unmoving lips. “In a manner of speaking.”
My hand’s already in my pocket, clutching a knife and brushing against the ticket I nabbed in Faerie. I quickly compare the magic in the ticket to the magic in the mannequin—they’re not even close to the same.
“Who are you?” I ask.
The only answer is laughter. “Come now, Claire. You don’t think I’m so stupid as to give you my name. Though you will be dead long before you can use it against me.” The mannequin is staggering toward me now, a slow, skin-crawling shuffle.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Freedom,” the mannequin replies. “Freedom from the constraints of Summer and Winter. Freedom to live and rule in both Faerie and Mortal. When the Pale Queen rises, she will lead us into a new age.”
“Yeah, well, your Pale Queen can suck it.”
In one smooth motion I pull out a knife—it is heavy and thick, and most of that heft is from the enchantments wrapped deep inside it—and flick it toward the mannequin. It embeds itself right in the mannequin’s chest, a small flash of white light exploding when the enchantments unfurl, but that’s it. The thing doesn’t slow or stagger or look down. The only way I know it even registered the attack is the laughter issuing from its hollow lips.
“Eli . . .” I say, not tearing my eyes from the thing. “I’ve seen that dagger bring down full-fledged dragons.” Okay, maybe now the panic is starting to bleed in.
“What would you have me do?” he asks. “It doesn’t appear dangerous.”
“But it also doesn’t die. Do you want to be stuck in here for an eternity with it?”
“Remove its limbs and bind its lips, and at least we won’t have to worry about it breaking free.”
The thing hears this. Or the asshole controlling it hears it. Because at that moment the hands shatter, the plastic rearranging itself into long, wicked blades. Runes swirl through the plastic, runes I know all too well—those are symbols to rend flesh and armor, to bring a slow and painful death. Even the slightest prick and the spell will transfer to the victim. This thing isn’t playing around, and the constant laughter makes it seem even more deranged.
“Oh, well then,” Eli says, “you’ll have to unbind me.”
“You know I can’t do that.” We back up against the wall. The thing is moving so slow it’s almost laughable. If it weren’t also a surefire way to die.
“It’s the only way to kill this thing. My powers are lacking otherwise.”
I glance to him. “Did you trigger the thing just so I’d do this for you?”
He actually chuckles as the mannequin swipes at him. He ducks easily. “Please. If I wanted you dead, I’d have done it a long time ago. You think you’re the only one who summons me? I won’t kill you. I swear.”
“Your promises mean nothing when the binding’s gone.”
“So you’ll have to trust me. You still owe me a meal, remember?”
I look to the mannequin, which is still laughing and staggering toward us, the blades on its hands growing longer by the second. I’m not an idiot. I’ve already mentally gone through a thousand different ways to destroy or at least dismember the thing, but I know enough of the magic running through it to recognize that getting within arm’s reach is dangerous, and even if I do, my list of possibilities is slim. It’s the magic I don’t know running across that thing that scares me, that tells me I’m way out of my league. This thing is bound with the name of a soul. It’s immortal as immortal can be. And if my heaviest hitter didn’t phase it, I’m out of options.
“Fine,” I say. “For the next thirty seconds, I release you from your bonds, Eli.”
He chuckles again.
“Thirty seconds is all I need.”
I run to the corner and start counting while Eli squares off with the mannequin. He slowly—way too slowly, it seems—removes his glasses and places them in his coat pocket.
“Whoever created you is a genius,” he says calmly. “They did a good job with you. A very good job. But I’m afraid you’re still nothing compared to me.”
Eli’s blue eyes blaze bright, filling the room with blinding white and aquamarine light. I close my eyes. I don’t open them again. I know better than to look at an astral creature head-on. There are reasons they’re confined to other planes; human brains aren’t meant to process that much beauty and terror. I clamp my hands over my ears to keep out the noises Eli’s true form is making—whispers and promises of terrible things, of flesh melting off bone and souls bound to black holes and a thousand other secrets I’m not supposed to know.
. . . fourteen, fifteen, sixteen . . .
Something slams into the wall beside me. I clamp my mouth shut to keep from screaming, slide down, and huddle against the wall. Wait for him to go back on his flimsy word and rip the soul from my body. Why did I say thirty seconds? He’s probably already banished the thing.
. . . twenty, twenty-one . . .
The whole house tilts to the side and something sprays over me, something sharp that I’m mostly sure is glass but might be plastic or bone. The light tries to slip through my eyelids, tries to pry them open to reveal the terror of the room beyond. I squeeze my head to my knees and try to block it out.
. . . twenty-five, twenty-six . . .
“You will not defeat her, assassin.”
The voice cuts through the screaming and storm, slices through my mind with an unearthly stillness. And I know, somehow, that it’s all in my head, that Eli can’t hear a thing.
“She will rise. No matter what you do, the Pale Queen will rise. And when she does, she will make even this seem like a dream.”
. . . twenty-nine, thirty . . .
Like a flipped light switch, the room goes silent and dark. The space between my ears rings. I don’t open my eyes. Not yet.
A hand squeezes my shoulder and I try not to flinch or knock it off.
“Relax,” Eli says. “I took care of it.”
I open my eyes and blink away the worms squiggling in my retinas. Eli stands beside me, back in his purple suit, his glasses once more covering his eyes. Everything in the room is burned away—no altar, no runes, no mannequin. Just charred walls and the scent of burned wood and small piles of ash in the corners. Eli offers me his hand and I take it. His skin is unreasonably warm.
“I told you I wouldn’t kill you,” he says, grinning. “You’re much more fun to me alive.”
“Thanks, I think.” I know that grin, and I know he’s hoping I’ll go all rescued-vixen and fall into his arms with gratitude. Or at least go for a victory romp in the ashes of our enemies, for old times’ sake. But Roxie’s image flashes through my mind right then, so I step away and ignore the pull between us. “What was it?”
“An advanced Construct,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I had to drag it through three levels on the astral plane just to bind it, and four more to banish it. It’s safely tucked away in hell now. Or a suitable equivalent.”
I glance around. My dagger’s nowhere to be seen, which blows. That one took a week to enchant, layer by layer.
“Did it hurt the girl?” I ask. “The one who enchanted it?”
“Afraid not. Once she gave over her true name, it became a completely different entity. She’ll have felt the magic trigger, I’m sure, but it won’t have done any harm to her. There is absolutely zero link between the two. She was smart. Or, whoever told her how to do this was smart.”
I sigh and look around. It’s not like I can expect to find any clues in here—the place is burned to a crisp, save for the tiny spot of wallpaper where I was huddled. The edges of it curl and smoke.
“Then it looks like we’re at a dead end. Whoever this girl is, we don’t have a way of getting to her, not if she’s given over her name.”