Phantom Pains

by Mishell Baker

  “Claybriar?” My heart kicked against my chest.

  “I wish. No, Millie, you have the indescribable and non-negotiable honor of explaining yourself in person to King Winterglass of the Unseelie Court.”

  11

  The cab driver managed to get me to Residence Four just before five p.m., but already the October sky was looking wan and sunsettish. As I got out of the cab, a great flock of rasping crows wheeled across a patch of leaden cloud, as though I weren’t quite creeped out enough. The looming Victorian residence had never looked more haunted; it seemed to grow taller as I approached. The leaves in the yard were piled high enough in some places to tickle the remaining nerve endings just below my right knee as I trudged through in my work slacks.

  I knocked on the front door, half expecting the porter from Macbeth, but Alvin answered, of course. He looked grim.

  “Come in,” he said. There was something subdued in his manner, almost as though he were slightly afraid of me. He stepped back to let me in, and as he did so, he gestured to the couch that faced the door.

  I didn’t have to ask if I was looking at a king. I was so struck by the man on the sofa that it took me a moment to even process that Claybriar was in the room as well, leaning against a far wall.

  The king’s facade was that of an Asian man around my age, certainly not past thirty. The top section of his hair was pulled back from a pale, sorrowful face and held with a wooden clasp. The rest of his hair fell over his shoulders like satin. He wore a long black jacket over a poet’s shirt and slim charcoal-colored trousers; his hand rested lightly on a walking stick with a translucent blue sphere at the top.

  “King W— Your Majesty?” I had no idea how to address him, and Claybriar looked faintly disgusted by my choice.

  Winterglass took a long moment to study me. When he spoke, his voice was as cold and soft as fresh snow.

  “You are no subject of mine,” he said. His accent was hard to place; he sounded like a foreigner making an almost-flawless attempt at British Received Pronunciation.

  “What do I call you?”

  “For this time and place I have been given the unlikely name of Feng Morozov,” he said. “I suppose Mr. Morozov will do.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Morozov,” I said. “You can call me Millie.”

  “You are a friend of Caryl Vallo,” he said. “I would give you my hand in greeting, but the iron in you sings like a struck bell.”

  “Touching me would be unpleasant for both of us,” I agreed, remembering Claybriar’s drawing of the king’s true form.

  The artist in question was leaning on the wall, looking resentfully at his subject; when he caught my eye, I smiled uncertainly. “I’m glad you came back,” I said.

  Claybriar grunted, softening a little. “I’ve been given leave by Her Majesty to help your investigation until I’ve healed well enough to hunt again.”

  “Healed? You’re hurt?” I went to him instinctively, as though there were anything I could do.

  “That manticore waylaid us on the way to the Gate,” he said. “I managed to heal the worst of it with magic, but my back’s still clawed up pretty good. Was mostly occupied with keeping my organs inside me, so I saved the back for last, and then it was too late.”

  “But it was your fey body that was injured, right? This one’s okay?”

  “They’re linked. What happens to one happens to both.”

  “Oh no! Did you kill the manticore, at least?”

  “Nah. I dazzled it with a flash of light so I’d have the advantage, but the damn thing just bolted away, blind. I couldn’t have kept up even if I hadn’t been bleeding everywhere.”

  “He saved my life,” said Winterglass, his eyes distant.

  “Not on purpose,” said Clay. “His life just happened to be near mine at the time.”

  The king gave a single sharp laugh, like ice cracking in a thaw.

  “Mr. . . . Morozov,” I said. “I’m sorry for keeping you waiting. I wasn’t expecting you to show up here. To be honest, I’m not sure of the protocol.” I looked back at Alvin, but he gave me a you made your bed, you lie in it kind of look.

  “Some matters cannot be left to lesser hands,” said Winterglass. “My purpose here is to help Miss Vallo and ensure that the true”—he hesitated for a moment, shrewd black eyes searching mine as though they were a database—“perpetrator of these crimes is found.”

  This marked the second time this man—or whatever you’d call him—had spontaneously abandoned his kingdom for Caryl’s sake. Worth noting.

  “You don’t think your absence will cause problems?”

  “I dare not linger indefinitely,” he conceded, “but as I have brought my scepter with me in the form of this staff, I at least cannot be usurped in my absence. Any matters of state will have to be postponed until my return.”

  “So the staff will work the same way here that it does in Arcadia? Make people obey you?”

  “Only Unseelie fey, but it also prevents Unseelie fey from commanding me or causing me harm.”

  “It was a good idea to bring it with you,” I said. “Caryl mentioned before that you’d left it with . . . your son? Seems like a lot of trust to put in a child.”

  Winterglass looked slightly disconcerted and took a moment to frame his reply. “That was a mistake,” he said, “but not because he is unworthy of trust. It would be my honor to put my realm in the hands of Prince Fettershock again, but he is . . . traveling.” The king gazed for a moment at his own hand where it rested atop the milky-blue orb. “Caryl has told you of her abduction?”

  “A little,” I said. “Have you spoken with her yet?”

  His eyes sharpened, held mine. “Where is she?”

  I looked to Alvin. “You didn’t tell him?”

  “I didn’t even know he was here to see her,” said Alvin. “He wouldn’t say a word to me other than to keep demanding that I produce you. Thanks a heap for that, by the way. You’d better have a plan.”

  I smiled slyly and hoped he’d infer that I did, because I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do next, other than the obvious.

  “If you’ll follow me, Mr. Morozov,” I said, “I can take you to see Caryl.”

  “Three seven zero one,” said Claybriar helpfully.

  I smiled at him. “Are you good to stay for a while?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Once I reported to the queen, the summons was dispelled.”

  “Then you come too. And Alvin? I’m going to need a pair of fey glasses.”

  • • •

  Caryl sat on the basement floor with her arms wrapped around her knees and her forehead resting on them. She didn’t look up as I came down the stairs with fey glasses clutched in one hand; I half wondered if she was asleep.

  Winterglass breathed a single word in the viscous Unseelie tongue, and Caryl sat bolt upright as though she’d been jabbed in the back. She scrambled backward until the wall stopped her, and then she cowered there, looking up at him.

  “Caryl!” I said. “It’s okay—I’m so sorry; he decided to come here himself.”

  “It’s fine,” she rasped, tears overflowing and streaming down her face. She began to shake convulsively. “It’s only that I don’t have Ell—” And then she fainted, hard and fast enough that I couldn’t stop her before her head hit the basement floor with an audible thump.

  Winterglass swept across the room and knelt beside her, sliding his arms beneath her and cradling her against him. He laid a palm against the side of her head where it had struck the floor. It looked as though it might bruise but wasn’t bleeding.

  “Caryl,” said Winterglass, followed by a stream of murmured words in what sounded like Russian. Then he seemed to remember himself and switched back to English. “Caryl, you are safe. Call your familiar.”

  Her eyes fluttered but didn’t quite open. She groaned, then murmured dark words under her breath. Slipping on the Project-issue mirror shades Alvin had let me borrow, I saw Elliott appear. I’d kind of miss
ed the little guy. He gave a stretch of his batlike wings and fluttered to my shoulder, unsurprised to see me, since he was just a facet of Caryl’s mind.

  Caryl sat up and pulled away from Winterglass, who stared at her with a desolate expression. Both, through the fey lenses, were veiled in the green-purple haze of Unseelie magic.

  “I apologize,“ said Caryl. “Thank you for sending the message, Millie, and thank you, Your Majesty, for coming.”

  Winterglass didn’t correct her form of address; perhaps because she used Unseelie magic, he considered her his rightful subject.

  “You’re a grown woman now,” said the king. “All this time in my mind, you remained the same.”

  “The cliché of the estranged parent,” said Caryl dryly. “But let us not dwell on it; you would not be here if there were not urgent matters on the table.”

  “You have only to tell me what you need,” he said, “and it is yours.”

  She looked at him for a moment while Elliott, still perched on my shoulder, blinked a few times in bashful surprise.

  “I need you to stall the wheels that are grinding toward my execution,” Caryl said. “I stand accused of killing a human agent of the Arcadia Project, and believe myself to be innocent of this crime.”

  “Why do they believe you responsible?”

  “She was killed by Unseelie spellwork, and I was the only practitioner of Unseelie magic in the area.”

  “Well,” I interrupted, “Claybriar can cast Unseelie spells, but he never left my side between the time he arrived and the time her body was found.”

  “What sort of spell killed the woman?” asked Winterglass.

  “A somatic enchantment,” said Caryl. “A lethal one that instantly decayed the flesh.”

  I interrupted. “Somatic means what exactly?”

  “A spell cast on the body,” Caryl explained, “as opposed to a psychic spell. I should mention that I was also the only spell caster present in an abandoned building the day before, when Millie fell under a psychic enchantment.”

  “A dangerous one?”

  “If it was meant to be, it failed. She saw a vision of a man she knew who had died there.”

  Winterglass made a low, thoughtful sound. “A haunting, then.”

  “Haunting?” echoed Caryl. “The Arcadia Project has never found any evidence of the existence of ghosts. The human soul isn’t even—”

  Winterglass made a dismissive gesture. “Hauntings are not caused by human souls but by wisps, charges of arcane energy that have been drawn to your world from ours by miraculous or catastrophic events. The energy becomes”—he paused for a moment, searching Caryl’s eyes just as he’d searched mine earlier, as though finding the word there—“imprinted by the event that drew it. This wisp of energy echoes the event again and again to any mind that carries the appropriate emotion.”

  “So it really wasn’t Teo I saw. Just . . . escaped energy?” I glanced at Claybriar, but he was busy glaring at Winterglass as though taking notes for an even less flattering drawing.

  “Escaped but temporarily bound,” the king said. “Just as light is only seen when reflected, magic cannot be sensed until it is bound in a spell. Oddly enough, a caster is not always required to bind it. As water flows downhill and ah”—he paused again, rubbing his fingers together as though trying to find the metaphor physically in the air—“lightning will leap from earth to sky, arcane energy seeks emotion. You were . . . sad, or fearful perhaps, and so you drew the energy into yourself. Once it was in your mind, it flowed into the structure it found there, forming a spell.”

  “So I cast a spell on myself?”

  Winterglass drew back as though affronted. “If you wish to simplify it to the point of absurdity.”

  “Either way, it lets Caryl off the hook.”

  Winterglass shook his head. “I am still troubled by the death here. Flesh does not have its own awareness, and so a somatic spell would require craft. Someone killed your agent with purpose.”

  “But not Caryl,” I said.

  “Not Caryl,” Winterglass agreed.

  “What do we do?” I asked him. “How do we find out who killed Tamika? The two things have to be related. Could we have let the energy out of there somehow when we opened the door, turned it loose, given it different powers?”

  “No,” said Winterglass firmly. “It was not the door that trapped it. Think of emotion as water. In Arcadia, emotion flows in streams through the very air; living things can be buffeted by fear or joy with no cause, as by a wind.”

  “I can relate.”

  “Yes, it feels like madness to your kind. But wisps of arcane energy use these streams to travel anywhere, fast as thought. Your world, on the other hand, is a dry wasteland. A wisp in your world is as a fish who has been drawn from its stream and deposited onto a beach. Its fins are useless.”

  “So if the metaphorical fish couldn’t pursue me, it must still be flopping around in there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shouldn’t we go toss it back into the Arcadian water?”

  Winterglass rose to his feet and paced thoughtfully toward the wall Caryl had been leaning against, lacing his uncallused fingers behind his back. “Because wisps lost to your world are an ongoing occurrence, the Seelie Court regularly performs a ritual to call them back. This is done twice a year, just after the spring and autumn convergence.”

  “You mean the equinoxes?”

  Again Winterglass gave me that odd searching look, as though his answer could be found in my thoughts somewhere. Given his inexplicable fluency in English and the tidbit I’d learned from Claybriar about sidhe getting inside people’s minds, it occurred to me that he might be using me as a sort of translating device.

  “No,” he said. “Each year, sometime between your equinox and ours, the two worlds draw close enough that tremendous amounts of energy slip over, even without traumatic events. As part of the Second Accord between our worlds, the Seelie Court routinely does a drawing ritual to ‘tidy up’ after each of these convergences. The next ritual should rid your world of any stray arcane energy, including the wisp that haunted this building of yours.”

  “When is that?”

  “I do not know. Fey do not keep calendars; the ritual is a purely reactive event. We sense the convergence, and the Seelie respond. But it cannot be long. It is ‘autumn’ here, yes?”

  “But if it wasn’t an energy wisp that killed Tamika, the ritual won’t help us. You’re sure it wasn’t a wisp? Something invisible that you only see once it casts a spell? It makes sense in both cases.”

  “Again,” said Winterglass, his tone taking on a hint of condescension, “a mind is required to craft a spell. Your emotion drew the nearby energy, and your mind shaped it. But flesh cannot shape a spell; it has no will, and the energy itself has no will or desire, any more than light does.”

  “I need some air,” said Claybriar, heading toward the door, which had been left slightly ajar. He’d gone so quiet I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  Winterglass drew himself up to his full height, clearly taken aback by Claybriar’s rudeness. “Did I offend you, faun, by debunking your quaint superstitions?”

  “We forest types get claustrophobic in basements,” Claybriar said without looking at him. But the way he kicked the door closed behind him suggested he was editing the truth: the fey version of a lie.

  “What faun superstitions were you talking about?” I asked.

  Caryl cut in, her voice sharp and her eyes on Winterglass. “His Majesty was simply reminding the queen’s champion that he comes from common stock, despite the fact that he has proven himself as rational and intelligent as any human or sidhe.”

  Winterglass waved it away. “His origins are a matter of fact and not opinion, but if you desire, Caryl, I will refrain from mentioning them in future. Anyhow, I am certain that no wisp caused the somatic spell you describe. If you require an elegant answer to both mysteries, I suppose any number of sentient beings might have
enchanted you on the soundstage.”

  “There was no one there besides Caryl and me,” I protested.

  “I can attest to this,” said Caryl.

  Winterglass spread his hands. “Then what you are describing is impossible.”

  “If you do not believe me,” said Caryl, “feel free to search the area yourself. I, on the other hand, must stay here so long as I am under suspicion of murder.”

  “I understand,” said Winterglass. “Perhaps I shall investigate, provided the humans can offer safe transport.”

  “I’m in,” I said. “We can go anytime tomorrow; I don’t work Saturdays. But I want to bring Claybriar, too, if you two think you can manage not to get into a slap fight. As for logistics, let’s hope Alvin’s not too mad at me to help with that.”

  • • •

  As if talking Alvin into letting the Unseelie King loose in Manhattan Beach wasn’t hard enough, His Majesty took exception to the entire concept of a scrunchie.

  Caryl had been able to give me the number of a place that was willing to lend us a couple of navy blue fire inspector uniforms, and Winterglass put on the shirt and trousers without complaint. But for some reason, the moment I started to explain to His Majesty what he needed to do with his conspicuously dramatic raven locks, he dug in his heels like a toddler.

  “This cannot possibly be necessary,” he said acidly as Residence Manager Song hovered around him making uniform adjustments. “This is an arbitrary humiliation.”

  Song awkwardly ran a lint roller over the back of His Majesty’s Dickies, and I would have exchanged a sympathetic look with her if she’d been willing to make eye contact.

  “You two are supposed to be city fire inspectors,” I explained, “because that’s what a certain nosy disaster of a showrunner is expecting to see. And city fire inspectors don’t generally walk around looking like they just stepped off the set of a wuxia movie.”

  “I understand almost nothing in that sentence.”

  “Look, no city employee would have hair this long at all, but I’ve been led to understand that your facade’s hair doesn’t actually grow, so we’re not going to cut it all off for the sake of one ruse. And we can’t use hairpins; they’d hurt you. Just let me show you how to twist it up so it’ll stay under your hat and not be flowing everywhere. All right?”