Phantom Pains

by Mishell Baker

  Perhaps because I’d invoked the horrifying specter of hairpins, King Winterglass deigned to let Song use the scrunchie to twist up his silken locks under an LAFD cap. He refused to leave his walking stick behind, since it had been fashioned from his all-important royal scepter, but he was able to put a charm on it that diverted eyes away.

  Claybriar looked way more at home in his uniform despite the goatee; he had an honest working-man’s vibe. Sadly, we didn’t have an appropriate vehicle. Since none of us could drive, I had to call a cab.

  Valiant was by no means deserted on a Saturday, even though I was personally off the hook; Inaya made do with just Araceli on weekends. Inaya was clued in to our little ruse, so she’d given security the names Clay and Morozov and their fake reason for being on the premises. Just to be safe, I waited for a moment when no one was watching the soundstage entrance to unlock it and usher the boys inside.

  Because I was terrified of receiving another visit from “Teo,” I’d come armed with every tool Dr. Davis had given me for controlling my emotions—distress tolerance techniques, she called them. Even so, as I smelled the dust of the place and switched on the quavering floodlights, every muscle of my body tensed from trying so hard not to fear the thing that fear would make me see.

  I led the two fey toward the center of the cavernous space. “We were standing by the well when I first saw the—whatever it was. You all right, Clay?” My voice sounded small in the emptiness.

  “I’m fine,” he said, but didn’t look it. I could have kicked myself for not at least walking him through distress tolerance in the cab. He’d been beaten half-dead and imprisoned in the well with his sister; my PTSD was probably nothing compared to his.

  “I promise no one will push you down the hole this time,” I said weakly. “Morozov, do you see any arcane energy floating around?”

  “That is the difficulty, is it not?” said Winterglass, his eyes roaming the farthest shadowed corners of the stage. His cheekbones were breathtaking in the dim light. “Energy cannot be seen with the naked eye,” he said. “Unless it is moved to action, we have no way of knowing it is here.”

  “Moved to action?” I stared at his delicate profile as Claybriar wandered away toward the hole in the floor. “Are you suggesting that I should deliberately freak myself out so that I can suck that creepy stuff back into my brain?”

  “I have only the dimmest notion what you have just said, but if I understand you correctly, then yes.”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “I’m supposed to be tolerating distress, not swimming in it. You want someone to have a horrible vision, do it yourself.”

  “I am not afraid,” he said. “I have no weakness that the creature can exploit.”

  “Oh, I’m weak now?”

  Winterglass gave an eloquent shrug.

  “Millie!” Claybriar’s panic sliced through the silence like a hot knife. He was kneeling by the edge of the well.

  “Never mind,” I said to Winterglass, moving toward my Echo. “Looks like we have a volunteer.”

  12

  Claybriar knelt, calling hoarsely down the well in the Seelie tongue, then looked up over his shoulder at me as I approached.

  “We need rope,” he said.

  “Your sister?” I guessed.

  “Yes. Find some rope!”

  “It’s the haunting,” I said. “It’s in your head now.”

  He shook his head irritably. “No, she’s down there in the well. She must have fallen in from the Arcadian side. Listen!”

  I listened; Winterglass approached to stand just behind me and listen too. The only sound was Claybriar’s rapid breathing.

  “Aren’t you going to do something?” Clay swiveled on his knees to face us; he was clearly starting to panic.

  “We can’t hear it. Only you’re hearing it. Cover your ears.”

  Claybriar put his hands over his ears—futilely, I watched him realize, just as I’d realized when I’d closed my eyes to block out Teo’s apparition. Claybriar’s whole body contracted with dismay. Meanwhile Winterglass got that strange unfocused look that Clay had worn when looking for the tower door in the Residence Four hallway.

  “The faun is enchanted,” the king said. “I see the spellwork.”

  “Make it stop!” Claybriar cried, hands clutching his ears, head bent almost to his knees.

  I started to reach down and touch his hair, but at the last minute pulled my hand back and turned to Winterglass. “What do we do?”

  “Something is very wrong.” The king’s tone was flat, cold. “What I am seeing makes no sense. This spell has been crafted. By an Unseelie fey.”

  “How do you know?” I turned a full, slow circle, my eyes scanning the soundstage, looking for somewhere, anywhere that a person could hide.

  “It is a sort of ‘handwriting,’ simply put. A spell caster leaves traces of his essence in his work.”

  “Signed in blood?” I said with a shiver. I’d heard Arcadia Project members use the word “essence” to describe what ran through fey veins.

  “That’s not entirely inaccurate,” the king conceded.

  “Is it anyone you know?”

  “No.”

  I turned my back to the well. “Is someone here?” I called out.

  Silence.

  Winterglass lifted the scepter that I’d forgotten he carried. I was as susceptible to the charm he’d placed on it as anyone else.

  “Author of this spellwork,” he called out in a ringing voice, “by your essence I know and command you. Reveal yourself, and kneel before your king!”

  Nothing happened except that Claybriar gave a terrible, convulsive shudder and looked up at us. A strange, cold hunger twisted his face, made it wrong. When I met his eyes, there was no hint of recognition in them.

  “Morozov . . . ,” I said, backing slowly away from Claybriar. “What the hell is happening right now?”

  “I—do not know,” said Winterglass.

  “Really not what I want to hear.”

  “I no longer see any sign of spellwork upon him.”

  “Well clearly something’s wrong!” I studied Claybriar from a safe distance; he had gone still, his eyes fixed on Winterglass. “And the mystery spell caster doesn’t seem in the mood to obey you.”

  Winterglass shook his head with a touch of contempt. “So long as the scepter is mine, my command over Unseelie fey is absolute. Unless—no.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing relevant in this case,” he insisted with the air of a man who had no intention of elaborating.

  “Are you sure? Because something is clearly up. Maybe your scepter doesn’t work on Earth? Maybe the caster isn’t Unseelie?”

  “Or,” said Winterglass thoughtfully, “perhaps he is already kneeling.” With a dramatic sweep of his arm, he indicated Claybriar.

  “What?” I blurted. “He’s not Unseelie! He’s the queen’s champion for fuck’s sake. Unless—he’s on his knees; does that count as prostrating himself to you? Did he just switch teams?”

  Winterglass looked at me in alarm. “You know far more about fey rituals than any outsider has a right. But no. The gesture you describe is quite specific, kneeling directly to a sovereign with forehead to the ground. Your faun has not pledged himself to my Court. But is that your faun? Are you certain?” We both turned to look at the man kneeling by the well.

  “It—yes,” I said. “Claybriar, it’s you, right?”

  Claybriar’s eyes were still on Winterglass. “I am and I’m not,” he rasped. “Is coffee a cup? Is light a lamp?”

  “What the hell are you even—”

  A savage smile split his face. “Ah, it feels so good to talk to someone. Too quiet for too long. Go on, ask me something else! If you’re good, maybe I’ll even give him back to you.”

  Goose bumps rose on my arms. “Oh my God. Someone’s using him as a puppet.”

  “Someone is speaking through him? How?”

  “I don’t know! You’re the expert.”<
br />
  “There is no expertise in this situation, Lady Roper. I have never seen its like. Even I cannot command speech.”

  “Who are you?” I asked Claybriar, or whatever was looking out of his eyes. “Puppet-master-person. Where is your body?”

  “Which one? I’ve used a few.” Claybriar smiled. Or his face did, anyway.

  “Your body,” I insisted. “The one you don’t have to steal. Where is it?”

  “I borrow bodies when I need them. I don’t have one of my own.”

  Winterglass took a half step back, and his expression, for lack of a better word, was lost. If the king of the Unseelie Court was lost, I was decidedly fucked.

  “Clay, are you still in there?” I asked. “Can you hear me?”

  “He can hear you,” Claybriar’s mouth said, “but I’m not letting him talk.”

  “Rise,” said Winterglass, and Claybriar did. “Miss Roper, tell it to kneel.”

  “Kneel,” I said. Claybriar ignored me.

  “Kneel,” said Winterglass, and Claybriar did.

  The king began to pace. “The creature we are addressing,” he said, “is an Unseelie fey bound to the Accord. Otherwise it would not respond to my commands. A consciousness with no physical form? A ‘spirit’? That is the stuff of myth.”

  “And yet we’re interviewing one.”

  The king stopped his pacing to glare at me.

  “Think about it!” I said. “Three people died on this soundstage in horrible ways, and now some . . . incorporeal thing has possessed my Echo. Classic ghost story. Not to parrot my shrink, but would it be too much to ask for you to practice some radical acceptance, dump the denial, and start looking for solutions?”

  Winterglass turned to Claybriar. “What manner of creature are you, when you are not possessing someone else’s body?” he demanded.

  “I never had a word for it.” The creature used something very like Claybriar’s casual cadence, as though it were filtering its thoughts through his brain. “But she called me a wraith.”

  “Who called you a wraith?”

  “The exiled countess.”

  “Vivian Chandler?” I blurted.

  “That’s the name you gave her, yes.”

  My fists clenched. “You were working with Vivian.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now that she’s dead?”

  “Now we’re working without her.”

  Every word in that sentence sat poorly with me, “we” making the top of the list. Claybriar gave me another chilling smile.

  Meanwhile, Winterglass seemed to regain some of his composure. “How did you get inside the faun?” he asked.

  “I opened him.”

  “How did you ‘open’ him?”

  “I found his deepest sorrow.”

  “Let me in,” I murmured, half to myself. “This fucker was trying to possess me before.”

  Something seemed to shift inside Winterglass; his eyes lit with understanding. “This thing,” he said, “this wraith, is constructed of arcane energy, just as we are constructed of flesh. It travels on currents of emotion, just as arcane energy does, and is invisible to human and Arcadian eyes, just as arcane energy is. But where did it come from? In all of Arcadian history no one has ever reported an encounter with such a creature.”

  “I’m less concerned with where it came from and more concerned with how to get it out of Claybriar.”

  “I have no answer for that, either. I learned of wraiths mere seconds ago; it is too soon for me to have worked out the mechanics of their possession.”

  I reached out and prodded Claybriar’s chest with three fingers. His facade flickered away during the brief moment of contact, then returned, with no change in his expression.

  “Pretty sure that didn’t work,” I said. I shifted my weight onto my AK since my knee was starting to go wobbly. “Which means I may not be safe either. I suppose this is where we panic?”

  “No need,” said Winterglass with a sly smile. “If this creature is subject to energy’s natural laws, then the solution is the same as for a haunting. When the Seelie Court performs the drawing ritual, this creature should be pulled back to our world.”

  “Even though it’s inside a person? How exactly does this drawing ritual work?”

  “That information is privileged to the High Courts.”

  “Privileged my ass. If something’s supposed to help Clay, I need the details.”

  “You are entitled to nothing.”

  “Didn’t you have an Echo once? Surely you can imagine what this feels like for me.”

  Something flickered over the king’s face: not softness exactly, but a kind of sad uncertainty. At last he spoke, with the air of someone who knows he is Breaking the Rules.

  “Not in front of this . . . creature,” he said. I couldn’t be sure if he meant Claybriar or the thing possessing him, but he was already stalking across the soundstage. I glanced worriedly back at Claybriar before following Winterglass at my own slower pace.

  Once I’d caught up to the king in what he seemed to consider a distant enough corner of the room, he leaned in and whispered to me, his eyes still on Claybriar. He smelled strange this close, like old stone and peppermint.

  “At the Seelie Court,” he said, “there exists a relic from the Time of Beasts, from before civilization in Arcadia. Its name translates roughly as the Bone Harp.”

  “I’m assuming it’s not an actual harp.”

  “But it is. Legend says it belonged to the Beast Queen and was given to the Seelie Court as part of the First Accord, ending the war between the Courts. When played, the harp draws arcane energy to its location—even energy that has escaped to your world, which is why its use after convergences was written into the Second Accord.”

  “What about energy that’s inside people, though?”

  “I have never faced that precise phenomenon, but any energy not bound in spellwork is always drawn back to Arcadia by the harp’s song.”

  “Isn’t possession a spell?”

  “It would seem not. Notice that your touch did not disrupt it. I saw spellwork when the wraith was enchanting the faun to hear a voice from the well, but now there is none. The faun has simply become . . . the wraith’s location, as the soundstage was before.”

  “And once the harp stops playing?”

  “The energy it drew is freed.”

  “But it’ll be in Arcadia, where the harp is. So it would have no easy way back over here.”

  “Correct. In time, rare events may once again pull wisps across to your world and strand them here, but since the ritual is performed twice a year by your calendar, the losses are always recouped.”

  “But you said you don’t know when the next ritual is. In the meantime, what the hell are we supposed to do with a possessed faun?”

  “The Arcadia Project has a prison, does it not?” said Winterglass with sudden bitterness. “It should confine him as well as it does Miss Vallo.”

  I gave a little snort of outrage. “I’m not throwing everyone I care about in the same basement. Furthermore, I can’t imagine the queen is going to be fine with you locking up her champion. Can’t you just order this wraith-thing to leave Claybriar alone?”

  The king gave a deliberate, patient sigh that made it strangely easy to picture him raising a kid. “If it leaves,” he said slowly, “we can neither see it nor communicate with it. We’ll have no way of knowing for certain if it has been drawn back to Arcadia once the ritual is performed.”

  “So you’re completely comfortable using my Echo as a storage device for an evil spirit.”

  “So it would seem.”

  I felt fury rising and groped for body awareness, tried to force my muscles to relax. Pissing off the Unseelie King was not going to help anyone. I took a couple of slow, deep breaths and then, once I had enough of my brain back to control my prosthetics, crossed the room to address the wraith again.

  “How long have you been here on this soundstage?” I asked.

>   The wraith had been staring at Winterglass, who followed close behind me; now it shifted its gaze back to mine. “I don’t know,” it said.

  “How did you get here?”

  “Wasn’t my idea. I was in Arcadia, waiting for orders.”

  “What kind of a thing are you when you’re in Arcadia?” I asked.

  “Same as I am here. I was waiting, watching. Then some goddamned human took a knife to himself.”

  My emotional preparation had been eroded by the most recent series of shocks; I flashed back to Teo staring at his own hand in horror because of Vivian’s spell, driving his pocket knife into it as though it were something alien that needed killing.

  “His desperation when he died,” the wraith went on. “It grabbed me, and suddenly—I was here. But he was dead. I had nowhere to go. Please, I need to move. If you want your friend back, help me get out of here.”

  “You’ll leave his body? What exactly are you asking us to do in exchange?”

  “No,” said Winterglass. He held up a hand toward the wraith, palm out, as though telling a dog to stay. “So long as it has a body, it can be questioned, can be studied.”

  “That ‘body’ happens to be my Echo!”

  “I understand that it is painful to watch him suffer, but sometimes we all must endure pain for the greater good. The wraith’s control of the faun’s body is all that allows us to hold this conversation, and so long as I can converse with the creature I can give it orders.”

  “Please,” said the wraith, sounding almost frantic. “I can’t stay in this room another minute. If you let me out, I can help you find another one.”

  “Another room?” I said.

  “Another wraith. It was here with me that night, and it got out. I can help you find it, if you’ll help me leave.”

  I turned to look at Winterglass; his eyes were positively sparkling. I looked back at the wraith uneasily.

  “If you’ll give Claybriar back control of his body,” I said, “I’ll find a way to get you out of here, I promise.”