Phantom Pains

by Mishell Baker

  There were about two and a half seconds of shock and almost deafening silence; then I groaned and tried to move through the pain and adrenaline that turned my muscles to water. I felt Claybriar’s hands on me, but shrank away from them. I squinted, my eyes swimming with spots from the flash, and that was when I saw her, weakly pushing herself up onto her elbows where the harp had been standing moments before.

  Her parchment-yellow face suggested a human woman’s only vaguely; instead of eyes there were shallow indentations, and beneath a sharp nose and hollow cheekbones an impossibly large, toothless mouth gaped in a silent scream. Black-feathered wings shimmered sickly, like gasoline on water, as they feebly unfolded; each stretched twice the length of her body. Instead of hands and feet, her limbs ended in rubbery talons.

  This creature, this siren, this stomach-turning abomination, turned her head from side to side like a snake scenting the air. The awful wrongness of her poured over our senses, icy and howling.

  I didn’t need to ask who she was; none of us did.

  “What have you done?” said Winterglass in a strained half whisper.

  “Well,” I said breathlessly, “I guess we all just found out where the Beast Queen’s been hiding.”

  “She’ll kill us all!” Winterglass cried.

  “How?” I watched as the siren’s taloned arms buckled, sending her collapsing onto her chest. “She can’t even sit up!”

  But then Shiverlash pushed herself weakly onto her arms again, and she began to sing.

  It was barely audible, a broken, breathless hum like a fleeing mother trying to soothe her child. But as soon as I heard the song I fell still, listening—my world narrowed to a pinpoint. There was the song, and nothing else.

  We all waited, watching her, except for Winterglass, who paced helplessly, pulling at his hair. I was too busy idling in a soothing mental limbo to even try to work out why he was free, or why he was doing nothing more than pace.

  To all appearances, the siren was occupied with trying to remember how her limbs worked. She was figuring it out with a rapidity that would probably have alarmed me if I’d had room in my brain for anything but song.

  With a great cry of frustration, Winterglass crossed the room to her and seized her head between his hands.

  “My queen!” he said, and then something in the Unseelie tongue.

  She stopped singing, her alien face almost seeming to register shock. For a long moment she looked at Winterglass, and then began to make a strange, chittering, coughing sound that was almost certainly a laugh.

  The pause in the song returned me enough brain cells to realize that we were in serious trouble, but I was too terrified, disoriented, and sore from my fall to do much more than panic.

  Shiverlash said something I didn’t even need to translate to hear its contempt, then gave the utterly unprepared Winterglass a shove that sent him toppling onto his ass.

  “Goddamn it, Millie!” It was Tjuan’s voice. I looked at him; his eyes were wild with panic and rage. “What did you do?”

  “How was I supposed to know that harp was the goddamned Beast Queen?”

  Beside me I heard Brand growl. He started to advance on Shiverlash; I felt a jolt of fear for him and tried to snag his collar as he went by. I missed, but my flailing hand brushed his flank, reverting him for just a moment to his true form.

  The Beast Queen’s eyeless head snapped up, nostrils flaring. She let out a raptorish cry, and Brand, back in dog form now, stopped in his tracks. Then he hung his head and padded to her side.

  “Brand!” Naderi cried. She was crouched on the floor not far away; I’d never seen her look so helpless.

  “I’m sorry,” said Brand. His tail drooped. “She recognized me as Unseelie. She’s old, Parisa, older than I am. I have to—”

  The queen let out another cry, and Brand fell silent. He kept his sad brown eyes on Naderi, a caricature of canine apology.

  “Shit,” I said.

  Shiverlash ran her talons over the dog’s fur, learning him by touch. Apparently she was as blind as she appeared. They seemed to be in some form of silent communication, judging by the intense focus they had on each other. Something in her posture shifted, as though she had just shouldered a new weight, and Brand slowly turned his head to look all around the room. The siren’s head echoed his movements. When Brand turned to face the door, the siren smiled.

  “She’s going to leave,” I said. Then, again, desperately trying to get to my feet, “She’s going to leave!”

  But then she started singing again, and whatever I’d been thinking of trying didn’t seem relevant anymore. I relaxed into the ecstatic simplicity of single-mindedness, a kind of Zen peace I hadn’t known since the last time I’d worked on a film. I hardly noticed the grotesque, stiff, zombielike shuffling of her gait, or the way she blundered through the side door, shedding feathers. Her voice was all that mattered; everything else was excess weight, and I let it all go.

  Until the door shut behind her and I couldn’t hear her anymore.

  Her magic lingered like a bad smell; it was hard to shake off completely. Even when I remembered that we needed to stop her, I couldn’t quite recapture my sense of urgency. My limbs felt sluggish, and without Alvin’s help I probably wouldn’t have gotten to my feet at all. I turned to thank him, but his euphoria must have worn off faster than mine; he looked like he wanted to murder me.

  Oh, right. Escaped siren, totally my fault.

  38

  “No one open that door yet,” I said. “Here, at least, we have our wits about us.”

  I whipped my phone from my pocket and used voice recognition to send a text to Inaya: evil zombie bird woman loose near stage 13 make sure studio gate locked down before she gets there don’t approach she will hypnotize you. And then I called security. I may have left out some of the details, but I said the word “emergency” enough times that I think I got through.

  “Even if we trap her here, so what?” said Tjuan. “What are we supposed to do? When she stopped singing the first time, I told myself I’d fight if she tried again, but fighting it is the first thing you forget.”

  “I don’t have a plan right this second,” I said. “But I’ve bought us some time to think of one. Even if Brand manages to lead her to the gate now, it should be locked down.”

  “Can’t she just hypnotize someone into opening it?” said Alvin. “And what about the people inside the studio lot? We have a massive containment crisis here; there’s a wild fey wandering around in plain sight.”

  “We’ll come up with an explanation later,” I said. “Special-effects prank? I don’t know. Inaya will back up whatever lie we come up with. Right now we just have to keep that thing from getting loose in the city.”

  “I am the only one who can stop her,” said Winterglass. “I am the Unseelie King; she can neither destroy nor command me.”

  “Are you certain?” spoke up Dame Belinda. “Every version of the story I ever heard says that she could silence even the king.”

  “She will not try her song of silence,” said Winterglass. “Not here. The brief glimpse I had into her mind assures me of this.”

  “Please explain,” said Dame Belinda.

  “Quickly?” I added, earning a glare from every royal in the room.

  “She cannot see the physical world, only hear it—but she can sense the spirit realm just as the spirits themselves do. The first thing she ‘saw’ was the book, and the ward on the soundstage door. She knows that she is in another world, where spirits are prisoners. She would not call them to her and trap them where they are helpless.”

  “What the hell did she just do to us?” I asked.

  “Anything with ears, she can render inert,” said Winterglass, “but unless you are an Unseelie fey, she cannot command you specifically. So no, Mr. Lamb, she could not order a guard to open the studio’s gate.”

  “And Brand doesn’t have opposable thumbs,” I said.

  “Brand,” said Naderi miserably. S
he hadn’t moved.

  “Our priority,” said Dame Belinda, “must be to contain the situation. King Winterglass, might I make a suggestion, so that we might accompany you and aid you as you attempt to communicate with this creature?”

  “Of course,” said Winterglass with a slight bow.

  “You will have to—temporarily—deafen everyone in this room except yourself.”

  “Excellent idea,” said Winterglass. “If you cannot hear her song, she cannot ensorcel you.”

  I opened my mouth to object—had we not just finished talking about how spell casting was slavery?—but somehow the words didn’t materialize. I tried to convince myself that it was because I knew it was futile, that I had no power to effect that radical a change. I tried to ignore the part of me that was simply desperate enough not to care whether it was right or wrong.

  “I consent,” said Dame Belinda, “so long as the spell can be reversed once the danger is past.”

  “I’m cool with it,” said Tjuan.

  Claybriar stared at the floor and said nothing.

  “Just us,” said Alvin. “It won’t hurt the bystanders to be hypnotized, right? So I’m not down with making people deaf without their consent, even temporarily.”

  “As you will,” said Winterglass. Dame Belinda’s gaze on Alvin was decidedly chilly, but he ignored it.

  Winterglass directed us all to stand close together, then murmured the words of a spell that made me wish I were deaf already. Bile rose in my throat, and from the expressions on the faces of those around me, I wasn’t alone.

  “I really hate Unseelie magic,” I said. But no one seemed to hear me.

  “I THINK IT’S WORKING,” Alvin bellowed. “OH WOW, THAT’S WEIRD.”

  I was still a little rattled from my last hypnosis, so it took me a moment to figure out what was wrong with the picture.

  “Uh . . . Morozov?” I said. “Slight problem.”

  Winterglass turned to give me a look of profound disgust. “Oh, of course,” he said. “Well I suppose you’d best stay in the soundstage.”

  “Not a damned chance,” I said. “Just find me some earplugs or something.”

  “Even if there were such a thing lying about, there is not a chance it would create deafness profound enough to protect you from her song.”

  “I DON’T THINK THE SPELL WILL WORK ON MILLIE,” Alvin shouted helpfully. “WE SHOULD LEAVE HER HERE.”

  “I’m Ironbones!” I said. “If she needs killing, I might be the best person to do it.”

  “You cannot inherit her throne,” said Winterglass, “and therefore you have no power to slay her. She is subject only to the old laws.”

  “What happens if I decapitate her or something?”

  “Your blade would not reach her. This is an ancient, powerful magic.”

  I took a moment to recover from that dismaying bit of information. “Still,” I said. “I’d rather risk getting hypnotized than stay in here with no clue what’s going on.”

  “We waste time,” said Winterglass. “Come with us, if you are so foolish, but do not get in the way.”

  Shiverlash had already managed to stagger a good distance across the studio lot, but finding her was going to be easy enough. A couple dozen nearby crows seemed to have become curious about her and were flapping about like a mobile signal flare as she made her way between the soundstages.

  I was unlikely to make good time on foot, and the fey were leery of the golf carts, so without much need for conversation (thankfully) we split into two groups. Tjuan loaded me, Alvin, Naderi, and Belinda onto a cart, while the king and queen followed us on foot, Claybriar right behind them with Blesskin making wild shrieks and whoops on his back, apparently fascinated that she could no longer hear herself. I gave Tjuan directions by pointing, as the shortest way around the buildings wasn’t always obvious.

  We caught up to Shiverlash just as she’d spotted the studio gate. Thanks to Inaya’s swift understanding of the nature of the emergency, the gate was already locked down, and Shiverlash was studying it, one taloned hand resting on Brand’s head. All that iron must have been making her bones ache.

  At our approach, she turned and began to sing.

  Winterglass said something to her in the Unseelie tongue, or maybe even in English, for all I was paying attention with that song shivering through my soul. But he must have been telling her he’d deafened us all, because she stopped singing and let out a hiss of frustration. Tjuan hopped out of the golf cart and beckoned to us. Without a word we advanced on the siren. She started to back toward the gate, but it was as though the iron pushed against her like the wrong pole of a magnet. She found herself trapped and reacted accordingly.

  With another hiss, she spread her oily black wings.

  “Hey, guys?” I said, futilely. “Do you suppose she can fly?”

  Not very well, it seemed. Her wings expanded beyond all physical logic and beat the air until it turned cold and foul, but she couldn’t seem to find the right rhythm to gain momentum. A thousand years as a harp and you forget a few things, I guess. All she could manage to do was wobble around a couple feet in the air and crash back down.

  Tjuan, Alvin, Claybriar, and—to my shock—Naderi closed in on her, grabbing at whatever limbs they could reach. Shiverlash hissed and lashed out, knocking Tjuan to the ground, slicing open Naderi’s cheek with her talons.

  “SHIT!” Naderi cried, putting a hand to her face and then pulling it away in horror as she felt the blood pouring. It was ugly, stomach-turning ugly. Even if she got to an ER right now, she was going to wear that wound for the rest of her life.

  “Go!” I shouted at Naderi, waving my arms dramatically to catch her attention, then pointing sharply away from the scene, toward the golf cart. “Get out of here! This is not your fight!”

  Naderi couldn’t hear me but seemed to understand. I saw real fear in her eyes for the first time since I’d known her.

  “I’M SORRY, BRAND,” she shouted, backing away. “I’LL BE BACK!” She hopped into the driver’s seat of the golf cart and turned the key.

  Tjuan was already back on his feet, but it was no use. Shiverlash had figured out her rhythm. She launched herself into the air, wobbly but gaining altitude. Still on the ground, in her shadow, Brand let out a bone-chilling howl. Whether because he was being abandoned by his Echo or his queen, it was hard to say.

  Shiverlash hesitated, then landed again. Wrapping all four of her grotesque limbs around him, she heaved him into the air and carried him over the studio wall.

  “Goddamn it!” I shouted to Winterglass, since he was the only one who could hear me. He was holding Blesskin now; her head was nestled on his shoulder. “What do we do now?” I asked him. “How are we supposed to follow a flying fey through the streets of Los Angeles?”

  “We don’t have to follow her,” said Tjuan, apparently free of the king’s spell. “There’s only one place she can be going; we just have to get there before she does.”

  I caught up with his line of thought immediately. “Residence Four,” I said.

  “Why would she be going there?” said Alvin, twisting a finger in one ear as though to clear out lingering traces of magic.

  “It’s the only route home that Brand knows about,” I said. “She’s digging around in his mind, right? And Earth is no place for her; she knows it. She just wants to go home.”

  “To her throne,” added Winterglass in a dark voice. “I will stop her. Miss Roper’s iron may be useful; she must come with me. Viscount Miller as well, since he is familiar with the property. The rest of you, stay here.”

  “I need to call Phil and warn him,” said Tjuan.

  “Have him let Caryl out of the basement and give her back her phone. I need to talk to her.”

  I had never been so happy to hear anything as I was to hear Caryl’s voice, even if it did sound a little panicked. No more Elliott; not unless he volunteered.

  “Please tell me there has been a misunderstanding somewhere in transl
ation,” Caryl said.

  “Turn on the news,” I said. “I imagine pretty soon there will be coverage of the rampaging winged monster in the streets.”

  “We must stop her. There may be no choice but to slay her before she gets too far.”

  “For that we’ll need someone willing to replace her. The Beast Queen is subject to the old laws of succession and, PS, basically invincible.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I need you to accept, Millie, that we may be looking at the end of the Arcadia Project. And by extension, of human progress.”

  “Yes, thanks, I’ve started the next Dark Age, it’s all going to be so fashionably dystopian. Can we move past that part and start figuring out how to fix it? The Beast Queen is headed your way and is going to try to get home through Gate LA4.”

  “The best course of action would be not to stand in her way.”

  “What?”

  “If she is in Arcadia, Millie, she is not here. Not on CNN.”

  “But that means we lose Brand. We’ve got no harp and no Brand. He never got a chance to tell anyone the wraiths’ true names; we only have Tjuan’s translations. That means every wraith that has ever possessed anyone is free to carry on the plan as soon as Brand’s charm wears off. We’ll lose the Arcadia Project.”

  “Now you understand.”

  “No, I don’t understand!” I said. “Just—stay there. I’m not having a conversation about the apocalypse over the phone. We’re coming to you.”

  39

  Clouds gathered ominously as Tjuan raced down the 10.

  “Glad to see you have it in you to drive like this,” I said. “Normally you’re like somebody’s grandma.”

  “Black men don’t get to cry their way out of speeding tickets,” Tjuan said. “But I don’t put high odds on living through today anyway, so I may as well try to get to the house on time.”

  The police must have been occupied with reports of a flying monster, because thanks to the relatively unclogged midday freeways we managed to get all the way to Residence Four in just over twenty minutes.