Phantom Pains

by Mishell Baker

  I turned to face him, pushed myself up on my elbow. “You have an idea?”

  “She can’t be thrilled about having the harp taken off-world. Maybe I could play on that, get her to consider using Brand to trap them.”

  “You think? From what you told me, she’s a crazy tyrannical slave mistress. She’s going to trust an Unseelie commoner?”

  “She might trust me. I have a kind of—influence with her. I don’t use it, because it’s not right, but I maybe could, if I have to.”

  “Have you got dirt on her or something?”

  Claybriar looked away. “Not exactly. I just know some of her—vulnerabilities.”

  “Like what? She have the hots for you?”

  I watched his ears turn slowly red, and I was a little too distracted to appreciate the meticulous detail of his facade.

  “Clay, have you—is she one of your nymphs back home?”

  It sounded ridiculous even as I said it. I almost laughed, but his expression stopped me.

  “You’ve fucked her,” I said.

  “Millie, don’t.”

  I grabbed his arm, forgetting, startled by his sharp intake of breath and the way the air shuddered as his real body snapped back into being. I released him as roughly as I’d grabbed him.

  “You slept with the queen?”

  He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “It’s—not exactly—a past-tense thing,” he said.

  I sat up completely, wrapping the sheet around myself as though I were naked. “You’re the queen’s fuck toy?”

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “A while, Millie. How do you think I got her to listen to me when my sister disappeared? Why do you think she even bothered about it?”

  It took me a minute to work through why my hands were shaking. I’d already known that he slept around. But this . . . even before I’d met the queen, we’d talked about her. He’d had a thousand chances to mention that they were fuck buddies, and he hadn’t brought it up once. Not until he was cornered. He had deliberately withheld the truth, which was the closest fey could come to a lie. Why would he try to mislead his own Echo, unless it mattered?

  It hit me like an ocean wave to the face, cold and stinging. And then I couldn’t get warm again; all the blood seemed to seep out of my body.

  “Well,” I said. “It’s not like you’d have any choice.”

  “Millie,” he said gently. “Seelie don’t—”

  “Don’t tell me you wanted to!”

  He was silent for a moment. “All right,” he said.

  Of course he’d wanted to. She was the most beautiful and powerful creature in existence; she’d allowed it, that was all. And apparently she liked it enough to stick her neck out for his sister. Enough to make him her champion.

  And her lover. He was the Seelie Queen’s lover. And here I’d thought I was doing him such a huge favor by showing him what remained of my tits.

  I came perilously close to throwing up in front of my Echo for the second time in as many weeks. But with effort, I forced my French fries and my feelings down. I found a lockbox somewhere deep in my viscera and crammed everything into it, cauterized the wound with rage, then steeped the smoking brand in ice water.

  “Millie, are you okay?” His voice was soft in the darkness. “I thought—I mean we both—neither of us—”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I just didn’t realize—the goddamned queen. Okay then.”

  “You’re still—”

  “Don’t.” I flopped back down on the bed, curled onto my side, my back to him. “Please just shut the fuck up immediately. Thank you for your honesty, not that you could help it, but we are not going to discuss this anymore.”

  I couldn’t look at him. Everything I would otherwise have been feeling was so impossibly, lethally vast that its absence left an echoing void. Everything around me, even the sheet clutched in my hand, felt distant. I knew there was a name Dr. Davis would have given to what was happening, but I couldn’t remember it, didn’t want to think about it, because that would mean thinking about what had caused it.

  “Should I—go downstairs? Sleep on the couch?” he said.

  “Yeah. I think maybe you should.”

  35

  Claybriar wasn’t at the Residence when I woke up just after dawn. I tried to tell myself that I intended to talk Queen Dawnrowan into calling a halt to the ritual, but that wasn’t the urgency that drove me, the engine that got me dressed and forced a few bites of breakfast down my throat. It wasn’t the reason that David Berenbaum’s old house pulled me as relentlessly as an arcane summons, driving out other thoughts. Before leaving, I nabbed a pair of surgical gloves from the box Claybriar had left in my room, feeling as dirty at the sight of them as I would an ex-boyfriend’s condoms.

  In the cab on the way I texted Inaya to tell her that due to an emergency I wouldn’t be in until after lunch. What was she going to do, fire me? I put my phone on silent after that, because I really didn’t want to hear her reply.

  I wasn’t sure what, exactly, I intended. I hadn’t thought it through particularly well. Whatever demon was riding me dug in its spurs until the very moment Queen Dawnrowan answered the door, looking almost comically human. Her hair was intricately braided, and I recognized her long knit dress from the Anthropologie website. Cocking her head like a bird, she backed away from the door, leaving it open.

  “Where’s your translator?” I said. “Still upstairs in bed?”

  She looked bewildered and tense, clearly picking up on my mood even as my words sailed right over her head.

  “Upstairs,” I said, pointing. “Is he there? Is he in your bedroom?”

  A light of understanding went on in her eyes, and she murmured something in the Seelie tongue, turning to climb the illusory slope. She paused and glanced over her shoulder; she wanted me to follow. I made my way carefully up the hidden steps behind her, my eyes raking over the elegant curve of her lower back and ass, trying not to imagine Claybriar’s hands doing the same. We reached the second story and ducked through the space between the two close-growing trees into the room I’d ruined on my last visit. Claybriar wasn’t there.

  The remains of what must have been breakfast were spread out on a blanket on the floor: the green ends of strawberries, grape stems, and a bowl half full of sugar cubes. Blesskin was on the unmade bed, burrowing around under the quilt and singing tunelessly to herself. Queen Dawnrowan gestured to her eloquently.

  Oh crap. I’d promised to babysit.

  “That’s—not what I came for,” I said. “I need to talk to you. Can you—get inside my head or whatever? So we can understand each other?”

  But of course she didn’t know what I was asking. Maybe didn’t want to know, since it had to be obvious I was balking at fulfilling my promise. Blithely ignorant, Dawnrowan went to the closet and started putting on shoes. Blesskin tumbled out of bed and crawled giggling over toward the blanket on the floor, hair shredded loose from her pigtails.

  “You’re going for a walk right now?” I said to the queen. “You’re going to leave me here alone with the rug rat who’s supposed to play the harp? You realize, under the circumstances, how strongly tempted I am to stuff her in a box and mail her to Hong Kong?”

  Queen Dawnrowan smiled vaguely at me, then barked a single quelling syllable at Blesskin, who was licking the discarded end of a strawberry. The queen spotted the half-full bowl of sugar cubes still sitting on the floor nearby and snatched it up out of Blesskin’s reach, placing it on top of the dresser. She said something imperious to me in the Seelie tongue, accompanied by an easily-understood gesture: Stay here. I’ll be back. And then she waltzed out of the room.

  Crap, crap, crap. I pulled out my phone, tried hard not to read the all-caps text message that I knew was from Inaya, and glanced at the time: just after eight. I had five hours to stop the ritual. I stuffed the phone back in my pocket, looked at Blesskin, and ignored the urge to just g
rab her and flee, lock her in a closet somewhere. It was tempting, but it wasn’t as though I had a snowball’s chance in L.A. of getting away with it.

  “I don’t suppose you would listen to reason?” I said.

  As though in answer, she lifted one of her chubby feet to her mouth and began licking her own toes. Apparently it tickled, judging by her cascade of impish giggles. Yeah, no help there.

  The queen had left a few of her possessions in the room, so I kept anxiety at bay by going through them, pretending I was conducting some sort of helpful investigation and not just snooping. Her closet was somehow full of clothes and shoes in her facade’s size; how she’d acquired them in the scant hours she’d been here was a baffling-enough mystery to occupy me for a few minutes, but then I was distracted by Blesskin’s attempts to climb the heavy curtain at the side of the bedroom window.

  “Quit it,” I said, and my tone must have conveyed authority even if she couldn’t understand the words. She skipped clumsily back to the blanket to examine some grape stems.

  The drawers in the bureau were empty, but I found a small bag about the size of a laptop case leaning against it. Inside it was some expensive makeup, a ridiculous amount of candy, and . . . a bunch of Claybriar’s drawings.

  My stomach flipped when I saw them. The queen carried them around with her? I was at the same time ravenously curious and terrified of what I might find. Some ugly sketch of me, to reassure her? The queen herself, wearing only a fancy necklace?

  My thoughts were interrupted as Blesskin quite suddenly grabbed me around the legs, nearly toppling me over. I looked down and saw a knee-high, genderless little brown manikin with vacant, slitted eyes.

  “Stop that!” I said. “Let go!”

  She did, turning back into a pigtailed preschooler, but now that she had my attention she pointed to the out-of-reach bowl of sugar cubes with one fat little finger.

  “I think you’ve had enough of those,” I said.

  She read my refusal in my body language and expression, and gave me what I’m sure she hoped was a ferocious mad face, spoiled by her impossibly long lashes.

  “All right, what do I care about your health?” I said. “If you will sit down on that blanket I will give you one. Sit.” I pointed emphatically to a spot on the corner of the blanket and repeated the word several times until she got my gist and tried it, clearly curious to see what would happen. What happened is that I gave her a sugar cube, then slipped on the gloves I’d brought and pulled out Claybriar’s drawings, finally getting up the courage to look at them.

  Mostly it was sketch after sketch of Los Angeles. A few were scenic, but most were details of everyday things: crosswalks, cars, escalators. Keep-away warnings, laced with his genuine affection for the city and its wonders. This should have comforted me, but I actually felt sicker and sicker as I paged through them. I’d been afraid of finding pornography, but somehow these artifacts of his protective instinct were worse. It was a glimpse into a relationship that predated not only his relationship with me, but my very existence.

  Blesskin grabbed me around the legs again, her facade dropping.

  “Goddamn it, kid,” I said. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

  The creature only laughed, a chittering, spiderlike sound that made the hair on my neck stand on end.

  “Go sit,” I said. “Sit, and I’ll give you more sugar.”

  She just looked at me blankly with eyes like chisel scars. I physically pried her hands off me, and once it was only my gloved hands touching her, she was a three-year-old human again. I picked her up under the arms, grunting as my back protested, and placed her on the blanket. “Sit,” I repeated firmly, pointing downward. When she complied, I gave her another sugar cube. The distraction served to remind me, though, that I wasn’t likely to stop the ritual by mooning over Claybriar.

  Blesskin turned out to be relatively trainable; I was able to finish my search of the room just by periodically saying sit and gradually stretching out the time she had to remain still before I’d reward her with a sugar cube. But even after I’d combed every inch of the room, there was nothing there that gave me any ideas about how to get Dawnrowan on my side, and I couldn’t leave the little lackey-monster unsupervised, for the sake of the house if nothing else.

  Eventually I realized I was trapped, practiced some radical acceptance, and went back to the drawings. I thought I’d steeled myself against the feeling of grief that looking through them gave me, but when I came across the one of Winterglass, the one I’d watched Claybriar making, I lost it. I remembered his hair falling over his eyes as he bent over the table. I remembered the way he hadn’t even noticed me standing there.

  I stared at the picture through tear-misted eyes and tried not to think about the artist. Turn the mind, as Dr. Davis would say, but it was like trying to make a U-turn with a semi. Focusing on the subject of the drawing made me sad in a different way, which was as close as I could come to relief. I tried to reconcile the horrible creature Claybriar had drawn with the tormented man who had tried to save the tsar, who had loved a novelist, who had carried a human child in his arms from Saint Petersburg to Helsinki.

  And as though touched by my Echo, I was suddenly bowled over by an inspiration. I laughed out loud.

  “Hey, Blesskin,” I said. “Do you want to learn a new trick?”

  • • •

  The queen returned in about half an hour, which was good, because aside from the one I’d smuggled into my pocket for later, we’d long since run out of sugar cubes. I left the house to avoid further royal commands and called Tjuan, begging him sweetly to come and pick me up. He sounded icier than I’d heard in months but said he’d do it.

  After I’d spent nearly an hour leaning against a palm tree admiring the city below me, he finally showed up in his gray Camry with Brand in the backseat. The dog’s presence didn’t surprise me; what surprised me was that Naderi was there too. She had a hectic, sleepless look, but her eyes were bright with joy.

  “Shouldn’t you be working?” I asked her as I got into the passenger’s seat.

  “Tjuan said he had to take Brand with him,” she said. “I’m not letting that dog out of my sight.”

  “I keep telling you,” said Brand, “I’m not a dog.”

  “Anyway,” Naderi went on, “I deserve a break. I’ve finished scripts through the second season, and it’s too soon to write a third.”

  “She never went home last night,” said Tjuan as he drove cautiously down the sloping road. “Normally sleep dep doesn’t make for great writing. But I looked at some of it, and damn.”

  Naderi jerked a thumb enthusiastically at Tjuan, addressing me. “Did you know that’s T. J. Miller? What the hell is he doing chauffeuring dogs around?”

  “A question I often ask myself,” said Tjuan.

  “Still not a dog,” said Brand.

  “I know who Tjuan is,” I said. “And if he says your writing’s brilliant I believe him. So now if you want a place to make all the episodes you just wrote, you’ve got to help us get your soundstage back.”

  “What do you need me to do?” she said. “I have to warn you, at some point I will probably pass out.”

  “Mostly we need Brand,” I said. “We need him to summon as many wraiths as he can, and bind them in the soundstage in a form we can show the others when they arrive. But I think your being there will help him remember the names.”

  “I hate to rain on your picnic,” said Tjuan, “but I just talked to Alvin. Brand and I spent half the night making up English names for all of Vivian’s wraiths so I could make a list for us to check off, and I’m pretty sure they’re planning on doing the ritual anyway.”

  “No they’re not,” I said smugly.

  “Do I even want to ask?”

  “What you don’t know can’t get you in trouble.”

  “You’re not wrong,” he said. “But do not get yourself fired, Roper. I’m not here to lose another partner.”

  “I promise I’m not planni
ng to break any rules,” I said. “I’m probably going to piss some people off, yeah. I’ll get disciplined, maybe. But almost certainly not fired.”

  “Kind of wish you could shave off that ‘almost,’ but I’ll take what I can get. Am I right in assuming you want me to turn right back around and drive to the studio I just got done sleeping at?”

  “You slept there?”

  “I’d like to have seen you pry Naderi off that tablet of hers, or get the dog away from her. Eventually I got tired of her yelling at me and just sacked out in her office.”

  “I love this man,” said Naderi. “He’s got a heart of solid concrete.”

  “So hire him,” I said. “Get him the hell out of that loony bin.”

  “I don’t need a writer. I do all the scripts myself, and he refuses to stoop to any other kind of work. I asked if he wanted Javier’s job.”

  Tjuan scoffed. “After I’d just finished hearing him vent about you for ten solid minutes. Unlikely.”

  “Arrogant bastard,” Naderi said. “You won’t get a better offer.”

  “Get a room, you two,” I said, then raised a brow at Brand. “Or you three.”

  “The dog’s got better chances,” said Tjuan.

  “I’m not a dog!”

  The whole ride was pretty much like that, but once we got to the soundstage and forced ourselves through Brand’s surprisingly potent keep-away ward, we got startled back to business.

  Someone had already delivered the harp.

  36

  I recoiled at the very sight of it. The harp sat on a small wooden platform in the center of the soundstage, not far from the well. What looked like the remains of a large wooden crate lay nearby, as though the sides had been dismantled and the harp left sitting on the bottom.

  Its name made sense now; the thing looked as though it had been crafted from some poor creature’s spinal cord. Something about it spoke of an arrested moment of violence, as though the victim it was made from had been alive at the time and left an echo of its suffering. It was difficult to imagine the instrument producing actual music, much less sitting around somewhere at the Seelie Court.