Phantom Pains

by Mishell Baker

  My gut dropped to my knees. Apparently the ace I’d thought I had up my sleeve was actually a poisonous snake.

  14

  “What are you doing?” I snapped at Winterglass. “Just tell Alvin what happened. You were the one who figured half of it out.”

  Winterglass gave me an incredulous look. “What madness is this? You know I am a poor accomplice in fiction.”

  My heart started to hammer in my chest. “What the fuck is going on? Claybriar, what is he doing?”

  “Millie,” said Claybriar gently, “you know I’d help if I could, but I was out like a light for most of it.”

  “But you were wide awake!” I said to Winterglass, hearing my voice start to rise in both pitch and volume. “You were right there! Just tell him!”

  “Please do,” said Alvin. “I would like to hear your version of events.”

  “We entered the soundstage,” said Winterglass. “There was, in fact, a haunting; I witnessed its effect on Claybriar. He thought he heard his sister in the well. Millie attempted to pull him away, and he attacked her, pushing her down onto the floor.”

  “I did what?” Claybriar protested, rising to his feet.

  “You were possessed!” I said. “The wraith did it! And before it attacked me it gave that whole damned speech through you, about Vivian, about Tjuan being possessed, a speech that Winterglass is really fucking inconveniently leaving out!”

  “There was no speech,” said Winterglass. “And this ‘wraith’ idea is absurd.”

  Had the wraith somehow taken control of Winterglass? No, that didn’t make sense; it couldn’t lie any more than he could.

  “The events happened exactly as I relate them,” the king went on. “When Claybriar assaulted Millie, I believe it somehow broke the spell the haunting had placed upon him. After that, Mr. Lamb, Millie asked to return here to speak to you, and we complied.”

  I felt a twinge of horror at the expression on Alvin’s face, because a significant slice of it was pity.

  “I can understand,” he said to me, “why you might enhance the story a little, since the actual events don’t clear Caryl’s name. I could forgive it as an act of desperation—if you hadn’t just shoved Tjuan under a bus. Because that’s what you’re trying to imply, isn’t it? You’re taking advantage of the fact that he’s ill to shift the blame onto him. I’m going to have to ask you not to interfere further in this investigation.”

  “I’m not making this up!” I said. “I swear to God, Alvin!”

  Unexpectedly, Winterglass stepped in. “She’s confused,” he said. “Panicked. Her emotions suggest this was not a calculated act of deception.”

  Alvin studied me, seemingly unwilling to argue with Winterglass on any point.

  “You do seem sincere,” he said at last, in a careful tone I’d heard a lot when I was ranting at the Leishman Center. “Maybe when your Echo attacked, it was traumatic enough that your mind created an alternate narrative that excused his actions.”

  “You think I’m crazy,” I said, hearing my voice quaver with the threat of tears. Damn it.

  “If this is honestly how you remember it,” he said, “then you’re not to blame.”

  “I didn’t hallucinate this! I’m Borderline, not—whatever it is you’re telling me I am!”

  “Millie,” said Alvin, “listen to me for a moment. This isn’t an attack; this is a discussion.”

  I bit down on my lip to keep from talking, nodded stiffly, let him continue.

  “I don’t talk about this very much, but I went through a rough time before my transition. I attempted suicide twice; it was my second attempt that brought me to the Project’s attention, when I was nineteen. My family had disowned me, so I had nowhere to go.”

  I wavered between pity and a profound unease. No family, nowhere to go seemed to be a distressingly common thread among Arcadia Project employees.

  “Between the stress of that,” he said, “and of having to face all this new information about magic and parallel worlds—there was a period of time when my perceptions and my memories got . . . weird. I started thinking I’d woken up and started my day when I was still dreaming, or worrying that I was dreaming when I was awake. It passed after a few months, but I still remember how terrifying it was. I—I shouldn’t judge you.”

  Tears slipped down my cheeks; I was a hot mess of gratitude and fury and humiliation. Alvin was being incredibly nice for all the wrong fucking reasons.

  Or were the reasons wrong after all?

  No, Millie. Stop it. Remember what Dr. Davis says. Others can’t change the truth just by denying it. Your thoughts and feelings are valid.

  Except when they weren’t.

  I tried to stay calm. “I—can see why this looks bad,” I said. “But what I’ve told you, it explains everything.”

  “It explains what you desperately want explained, at the expense of everything we know. Sentient creatures without bodies? King Winterglass, is that even possible?”

  “It’s folk tale nonsense in either world,” said Winterglass. “Everything attributed to ‘ghosts’ and ‘spirits’ has consistently been proven to have more rational causes.”

  But you fucking spoke to one, I didn’t say. Because that would make Winterglass a liar, something else that was supposedly impossible by all the laws we knew.

  Unless.

  If this is honestly how you remember it, Alvin had said, then you’re not to blame.

  Either I or Winterglass clearly had a fucked-up memory of what had happened—and only one of us had a wraith hitching a ride in our head. Unseelie magic could mess with memories; I’d heard people talking about Vivian using this power. And Claybriar had supposedly been aware while the wraith was talking through him, but remembered nothing of it later. While my own memory was a little patchy at times, I had no precedent for inventing memory whole cloth. It made much more sense for a wily wraith to snip and edit things to protect itself. It wasn’t a command, or technically even harm, so the scepter could conceivably have allowed it.

  But it was my word against a king’s. Alvin didn’t trust me and was heavily invested in good relations with Winterglass. Caryl would believe me, but her hands were tied. I was going to have to find some way out of this other than continuing to argue for what sounded like delusion.

  “I’m sorry,” I said at last. “What you’re saying makes sense, and I’m not trying to cause trouble. Just—I got hurt pretty badly trying to help. Don’t make it worse by booting me off the case. Give me one more chance.”

  “If you didn’t lie on purpose . . .”

  “I didn’t. I think you can see now that I honestly remember it that way. But if Winterglass remembers it differently, we need to go with his story.”

  Alvin let out a long exhale; I hadn’t realized until that moment how upsetting this whole confrontation had been for him. “Thank you,” he said. “I know how hard it must be not to defend yourself, and that makes me want to give you another shot. I won’t mention this at the London summit, but please, please be more careful.”

  “What we do know,” I said, “is that there is some misplaced arcane energy causing trouble, and that Queen Dawnrowan can do a ritual that will pull it back to Arcadia where it belongs. I don’t think we should wait; I think we should send word to the Seelie Court to do it as soon as possible.”

  That would likely fix Tjuan and stage 13. Caryl, however, was still up a creek, and I had no idea how to help her.

  • • •

  After our meeting, Alvin declared his intention to take the two fey to Residence One to fill out some paperwork and then drop them off at their hotel. So much for a private attempt to straighten things out with Winterglass.

  It became obvious the minute I tried to stand up from the couch that I was going to need some heavy-duty pain medication, but I was pretty sure those sorts of substances weren’t allowed in an Arcadia Project Residence, so I asked Alvin about it on his way out.

  “The Residence manager should have s
ome locked away,” he said as he held the front door open for Winterglass and Claybriar. “Unless Caryl’s been slacking on that, too.”

  Residence manager meant Song. She was a gentle creature, seemingly incapable of anger, and I had a feeling she’d lived through far worse abuse than I’d dished out back in June. But the guilt and self-loathing I felt in her presence were suffocating, and it ironically made me even more prone to treating her callously.

  At the moment my back pain trumped my guilt, and so I went to knock on her door on the east side of the lower floor. Softly, in case her baby was asleep.

  As it turned out, he was. The two of them apparently shared a double bed, because he was still sacked out on it, and Song looked as though she’d just peeled herself away. She had a freckled, pixie-ish nose and narrow, dark eyes; her pillow-mussed hair was not quite black. She’d thrown on a T-shirt, but quickly and half asleep, to judge by the tag sticking out at the front of the collar.

  “Have they hired you back?” she murmured to the floor.

  “No,” I said, and her shoulders lowered a half inch. “Just helping with the Caryl situation. I’m sorry to wake you, but I need some pain medication. I’ve hurt my back pretty badly.”

  Finally she dragged her eyes up to mine; hers were full of suspicion. “There’s Aleve in the kitchen cabinet.”

  “I think this is beyond that,” I said. “I fell down on a hardwood floor, flat onto my back. Was pushed, actually.”

  I saw a shock of sympathy in her face; the thorough swiftness of it confirmed some of my suspicions about her background. “Who pushed you?” she said, taking a half step closer.

  “Someone under an Unseelie spell,” I said. “He feels awful about it now.”

  Without another word, Song went to the back of the room and opened the closet; the safe was in there. She rooted through it and came back with a couple of little white pills. “These should be good for about six hours,” she said. “I’ll come find you before they wear off.”

  “I’m . . . actually not staying here.”

  “You should until your back is better,” she said. “I can take care of you. I’ll put the air mattress in the living room; it’ll be quiet there at night.”

  “Thank you,” I said, warmed and a little shaken by the way she had instantly dilated her protective instincts to include me.

  I went to the kitchen for some water, took my pills, and rested on the couch until they kicked in. As soon as I was able to stand up without wishing for a swift death, I made my way toward the back of the house.

  Even though I was slightly afraid of Tjuan now that I knew what was inside him, and even though I didn’t expect him to believe me, I needed to tell him that he was going to be all right. I had no idea how long it would take to arrange the drawing ritual, but it didn’t seem right for him to have to live in despair in the meantime if he could have the slightest bit of hope.

  His door was closed, which didn’t surprise me in the slightest. I knocked, and after a moment I heard a creak of bedsprings, followed by shuffling footsteps. Tjuan opened the door a couple of inches and stared at me through it. The skin under his eyes looked bruised.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “What?” he replied.

  “Can we talk? I know we’re not exactly best friends, but I’m worried about you.”

  “Get in line,” he said. “I’m at the front.”

  “Can I come in?”

  Instead of answering, he squeezed through the door and shut it behind him as though to keep a tiger in the room. With a quick beckoning jerk of his head, he shuffled to the kitchen, looking exhausted. He placed the island between us, slumping and leaning his elbows on it.

  “I’m sorry you’re having such a hard time,” I said. “I wanted to tell you, I think we might be able to help you. Maybe.”

  “Electroshock?” he said.

  I winced. “That’s what they did to you before.” I’d spent some time in a loony bin myself, but I hadn’t so much as heard about anyone using ECT; the images that came to mind were all from melodramatic movies.

  Hostility sparked through his eyes for a moment, then died, leaving him with a thousand-yard stare.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We won’t talk about that.” I looked at him and tried to figure out how to even raise the subject of possession. I found myself at a loss. “I never thanked you for your help with Vivian,” I said. “The world’s better off without that monster.”

  “We’re all of us monsters of some kind,” he said.

  I was feeling less and less competent to converse with him at every moment. Not that I’d ever been great at it.

  “I guess that’s true,” I said. “I try not to even think about some of the stuff I’ve done.”

  “Ever killed anyone besides her?” he said to the countertop.

  Once again I found myself blindsided. “Myself, I guess, or at least tried pretty hard.”

  His eyes wandered down the length of me, a disinterested cataloging of the damage. “I didn’t know that,” he said.

  “I told you about my fall, but you probably—”

  “You said ‘fell,’ not jumped.”

  My surprise tempted me to find out what else he remembered, but I recognized it as Borderline emptiness, the craving to be filled with someone else’s picture of me. I pushed past it.

  “Besides that, no, I’ve never tried to kill anyone. You?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you ask, then?”

  He lost focus, and I realized that he was probably, as we spoke, trying to keep the thing inside him from taking the wheel. How was he even succeeding at that?

  “Tjuan,” I said. “I know why you’re hearing voices and how to make it stop. You’re not crazy.”

  “Explain.”

  “There were . . . some kind of arcane-energy creatures on the soundstage in June. Two of them. The Unseelie King got one of them to talk this morning; it called itself a wraith. It said one of its little friends hitched a ride out of the soundstage in your brain.”

  Tjuan exhaled like I’d punched him in the stomach. “Oh my God.”

  “Alvin doesn’t believe me,” I said, “and I think the one in the king’s head messed with him so he can’t back me up.”

  Tjuan drew in a shaky breath, then let it out. “First thing that’s fucking made sense in four months. So what do we do?”

  “Winterglass talked about a ‘drawing ritual’ he has to get the Seelie Court to do. It should pull any arcane energy back to Arcadia, including these guys. I don’t know how long it will take, though; I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve held out this long,” said Tjuan.

  I stood for a moment a little awkwardly. “You’re a hell of a guy, Tjuan,” I said.

  “Don’t think you know me enough to say.”

  “I know you helped me bring down Vivian, and that you’ve been fighting a wraith for four months now after I saw one take over the Seelie Queen’s champion in seconds. How are you doing that, anyway?”

  “Practice?” he said wanly. “It’s not that different from the shit I dealt with in the hospital.”

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned, you’re a goddamned superhero.”

  “Think whatever you want,” he said, and with that, shuffled wearily back toward his room.

  15

  Caryl sat reading an L. M. Montgomery novel by the light of the bare basement bulb, dressed in comfortable-looking gray sweatpants and a T-shirt. There was even an empty teacup resting on a crate in one corner; Song must have been bringing her things. Caryl lowered the book as she heard my careful steps on the stairs; I was trying not to reawaken the pain in my back. I could tell at a glance that Elliott wasn’t out; Caryl’s face lit up when she saw me.

  “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” I said. “Uh, I think you’re going to want Elliott. I’ve got heavy-duty news.”

  Caryl exhaled a little petulantly, then murmured the words of the spell. I didn’t have fey glasses on, but the way the lig
ht drained out of her eyes told me that she’d transferred all her most inconvenient mental processes into the construct.

  I kept my summary of the situation as brief and nontraumatic as I could, but there was one aspect I couldn’t leave out, and it made my stomach congeal into a cold lump just thinking about it.

  “The worst thing,” I said, “is that even if they manage to get these wraiths back to Arcadia, you’re still on the hook for Tamika.” Realizing this would likely not be a quick meeting, I carefully lowered myself to a sitting position on the chilly basement floor so I could be at Caryl’s eye level.

  “If you think that is the worst thing,” said Caryl, “your priorities are severely misaligned. What concerns me is that allegedly Vivian’s plan is still underway. You do remember what her plan was, don’t you?”

  “Large-scale property damage.” I shrugged. “So warn the nobles, and they can evacuate before their fancy houses blow up.”

  “The estates are not simply houses, and they would not ‘blow up.’ That interdimensional void you see—or rather don’t see—inside a Gate? Arcadia would be riddled with vast tracts of it. Permanently.”

  I took a moment to let the image sink in. “Okay. I’ll admit that sounds a little worse than an explosion, but it’s still kind of an ‘over there’ problem. I’m pretty good at not caring about ‘over there’ problems.”

  “It becomes an ‘over here’ problem very quickly. Without the protection of their estates, the sidhe would be defenseless.”

  “Against what?”

  “In Arcadia, what we diplomatically refer to as ‘commoners’ are a huge and widely varied population that includes manticores, sea serpents, gorgons, any creature that has ever haunted a human nightmare. Even the less monstrous commoners resent the sidhe’s power and knowledge to varying degrees, and far outnumber them. Without their estates to protect them, the primary species we interact with would become extinct, leaving thousands of brilliant human minds severed from their Echoes. Human progress as we know it would grind to a halt.”