He replied with his signature ok, and I congratulated myself on putting out at least one of the fires currently licking away at the edges of my life.
But the rest of the evening was a misery. I ended up using the prepaid phone to call Tjuan back and tell him the whole story of the London trip in excruciating detail until he literally begged me to leave him alone and let him watch a movie. Then I called Gary and demanded a full list of what Tjuan had been eating, then made a few suggestions for Gary’s next trip to the store, until he, too, told me to bug off. And then I was pretty much out of minutes, so I tucked the Vessel into my pillowcase and tried to sleep.
• • •
On Saturday morning Glitterbell finally came back with a letter, likely dictated by Dawnrowan to one of her Echo-enhanced servants. I knew for a fact she couldn’t muster up a word of English without drinking blood and using a translator.
You must think me mad, the letter began. I do not wish to believe that you are collaborating with the manticore Throebrand to destroy my palace, but it is well known that you are friendly with the beast, and the timing of your invitation is suspicious. I am afraid that I will have to decline the meeting.
I had expected this, and so I had the response already written to give to Glitterbell.
Your Majesty, I know nothing about an attack on your palace. I asked Brand, and he denies even being involved in, much less leading, such a conspiracy. As we all know, he can’t lie. I suspect these rumors are Dame Belinda’s clever attempt to keep you from allying with me. She needs to keep you penned up in your palace until the war is over so you don’t have a chance to see our side of things.
Making such a specific and persuasive argument was a risk, but I was banking on either her or her advisors being smart enough to see the obvious hole. Sure enough, after spending the rest of the day in my room working out the remaining details of the plan, I received a lengthy, emotionally charged reply first thing Sunday morning.
I have no way of knowing whether I can trust the content of this letter. Brand cannot lie, but you can.
If you truly had my interests at heart, you would understand. The White Rose is not just my home. It is my people’s collective memory, our long history and transcendent vision made real. After what you did to the Bone Harp, imagine my lack of surprise that you are unconcerned about the risk to the palace, should I, its rightful resident, leave while it is threatened. And do not feign ignorance of the way protective wards work, when Baroness Foxfeather, a refugee of Throebrand’s last trickery, is still living in Skyhollow.
If you were truly sincere in your desire to parley with me, you would be willing to come here. Despite your unusual handicap I have it on good authority that you have visited Arcadia before. I see no reason why I should come to Los Angeles, unless my leaving the palace is in fact at the heart of your intention.
I refrained from doing an air-punching victory dance when I got this letter; it wouldn’t have been classy.
Instead I calmly wrote her back and let her know that while it was difficult for me to dress properly to protect spellwork in Arcadia, peace was important enough to me that I would meet on her terms. She had only to name the time and place, and I would come. I would bring Caryl, my partner Tjuan, and, of course, Claybriar.
Slam dunk. Her reply came so swiftly it seemed she must have bent time itself; it was in my hands just after lunch on Sunday.
I was not aware that Claybriar also intended to be present at this meeting. Please come as soon as your limitations make possible.
So that was it. All we had to do was get that facade finished, get Elliott into it, and go pick up the real Tjuan. And then we were going to either win the war, or I was going to end up rotting in a Seelie prison for eternity. Or dead.
I suddenly remembered Zach’s text: i worry that one day you’ll just be dead and i wont even know why
Nobody deserved that. I texted him a coffee shop for us to meet at and took a cab there.
• • •
“I have a weird job,” I said once we’d gotten drinks and a decent table. “And I can’t tell you about it.”
Zach considered me with his heavy-lidded green eyes. “I thought you worked in entertainment.”
“I did,” I said. “I quit, and I work somewhere else now. It’s dangerous, so yes, there’s a slim possibility I might die.”
He leaned onto his elbows, lowered his voice. “Are you, like . . . CIA or something?”
“I literally can’t tell you, Zach. Do you still want to do this with me?” Half of me was hoping he’d break up with me so that I didn’t have to be the asshole here. But there was another, weird, rebellious half of me that panicked at the idea that I might never again just sit and have coffee with a well-adjusted human being who didn’t know about Arcadia. Even as we sat there on the edge of a breakup, his aura of normality soothed me in a way few things had lately.
Also, he was pretty good at getting me off. There was that.
He leaned back again, picked up his coffee, and took a long sip, thinking it over. “It’s possible you’re bullshitting me,” he said without rancor. “But if so, you get points for creativity.”
“I wish I were bullshitting you,” I said. “I’m about to go on another trip, and this one . . . if it goes well, then I’ll be around for a long time, and everything’s going to be great. If not, you might not see me again.”
“Oh come on, that sounds—” He turned to me with a peevish look, but then his expression fell. “Hey,” he said. “Look at your face. You’re really scared, aren’t you? Why do I feel like this isn’t bullshit?”
“It isn’t,” I said.
“Fuck.” He reached out to give my forearm a little squeeze. “Shit, I’m sorry.”
I looked away. “So, yeah. Maybe we should hold off on any big Relationship Decisions until I get back, huh?”
“That’s fair,” he said. “Okay.”
I saw it in my head as ok
that’s fair
ok
Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t I be reading his text messages and hearing his voice in them?
We sat there, drinking our coffee, and I tried not to look at the clock.
24
On Monday morning in Arcadia, the sky was a bright tangerine, its western reaches violet tinged and spangled with pink and blue stars. The sun hung low and silver in the east. I sat on a warm rock and waited until Shock stepped off the enchanted path to Skyhollow, dragging behind him a long wooden cart.
“I am so sorry this took forever,” he said as he approached. In the cart was something covered with a silken sheet.
“It’s been what, three days?” I said, feigning calm. “Four maybe? Hardly forever.”
He drew the cart to a stop near me and turned toward it. “Mostly it was the research,” he said. “What sort of screws and pins were best, how surgeons clamp off arteries, and so on. I played sick at school today so that I could finish, but with Claybriar’s help the actual operation took less than an hour.”
“Show me,” I said, pushing myself to my feet and approaching the cart.
He whipped off the sheet with a flourish, and my heart stuttered.
Gray T-shirt, jeans, asymmetrical eyebrows. My partner lay on the cart with his dead eyes staring up at the sky.
Second partner.
The first, I’d found with his dead eyes staring up at the sky. His blood had been spread beneath him like a cloak. I’d come back to find him lying on his back, eyes staring up. Just the shell of him, vacant. He’d died, alone, while I was looking the other way.
“Millie?” I heard Shock say from what sounded like a great distance. “Are you all right?”
I stepped forward, laid a hand on the facade’s chest.
It was warm.
No heartbeat, still as dirt, but warm. It tripped me into a merciful uncanny valley. This was no person. Too still, too warm. The things didn’t go together. Touching it broke the illusion.
I tried to breathe, to get air back into my lungs, but that just started the tears going.
“Oh no,” Shock said. “What did I do?”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Only . . . it looks so much like him.”
“We want that, right?”
“Yes. Absolutely. It just . . . it made me realize how worried I am for him.” I wiped my eyes, smiled for Shock, made the muscles of my face do the thing my heart couldn’t even remember the meaning of right now. It wasn’t the kid’s fault he’d triggered my PTSD about the same night twice in a row.
“Your friend will be fine,” said Shock.
“Absolutely,” I said. “The suits are supposed to come this afternoon, so all that’s left to do is call back Elliott and hope he’s still speaking to us.”
• • •
We had to wait until around dinnertime, even though it was risky for Shock, so we could be sure that old Fred would be sound asleep in London. According to Caryl, if the memory was returned while he was sleeping, there was a chance he’d mistake it for a dream. Worst case scenario, he at least wouldn’t have his attention called to it the minute it returned and might not think of it unless something triggered it later.
While everyone in Residence Four knew by now that I’d stolen the Medial Vessel and was leading an expedition to steal blood vials from the palace, Caryl and I had decided that the details of the plan were best shared only with those who needed the information in order to take part. So it was Shock alone who dragged the Tjuan facade through the Gate, staggering backward with his arms locked around its chest.
“Whew!” he said, laying it out carefully on the floor for Caryl’s inspection. She didn’t seem disturbed by it at all, possibly because she’d had more experience with the empty Qualm facade and its disposal a few months back. Also possibly because she was already a stammering nervous wreck about the prospect of calling Elliott back.
Shock seemed to sense her distress, and he gave her a reassuring caress on the shoulder. The expression on her face reminded me of my own every time Zach touched me.
“So what happens,” I said, “if the Gate guard tattles immediately?”
“As we are picking up Tjuan first thing tomorrow morning,” said Caryl, “I suspect that even if the worst occurs, we will be to Arcadia and back before Barker has a chance to put the pieces together.”
“All right,” I said. “Are you ready?”
Caryl took a deep breath, then nodded. She spoke the three warped, guttural syllables of Elliott’s Unseelie name, which dissolved the spell she had bound him into and summoned him, in theory, to her immediate vicinity.
For a moment nothing seemed to happen; then, to my profound startlement, Monty the cat waltzed into the room and addressed us in a rather creaky English accent. His mouth didn’t move, but the voice clearly came from that direction, and the cat’s eyes were fixed on Caryl.
“I thought perhaps you planned to leave me there forever,” said Monty.
“Elliott!” I said.
Caryl’s knees wobbled. Straight to a level 8. “I—I would never! Are you—are you possessing Martin’s cat?”
“No,” said Elliott.
“Uh, guys?” said Shock awkwardly. “I do not see anything.”
“It is an illusion,” said Elliott, apparently only to Caryl and me. “But I find I have suddenly acquired a distaste for my old form.”
Caryl wrapped her arms around herself, then stumbled toward the desk chair. Shock helped her into it, confused and concerned.
The cat was silent. His shredded ear twitched once.
“You’re . . . upset,” Caryl managed, her eyes filling.
“You speak as though I were a child,” said Elliott. The voice he used now was of an old man. Fred, maybe? “As though I held a grudge over something small. You enslaved me and abandoned me in a foreign land. I do not think you understand how thoroughly you have broken the bond between us.”
“Caryl, what’s the matter?” said Shock. “Why can’t I see anything?”
“Shh shh shh,” I said, pulling Shock gently by the arm toward me. I wanted to put an arm around his shoulders, but I was only protected by surgical gloves at the moment, so instead I patted his shoulder.
“I am not your pet,” said Elliott. “I was drawn into your service against my will and had no ability to reason or remember until you gave it to me. I served you because you needed me, and because you were innocent of the suffering you caused me. But you are no longer innocent. With full knowledge, you trapped one sentient being in the mind of another, used me as though I were a cork to keep something in a bottle.”
“What—” Caryl’s voice was choked and strange. “What can I do to—to earn your forgiveness?”
“Nothing,” said Elliott, and then turned toward Shock.
“Ah!” Shock said. “Now I see it. It’s . . . a cat?”
“Greetings, stranger,” said Elliott.
“I’m Shock,” he said. “It’s good to meet you, Elliott. I’m here to help.”
Elliott looked thoughtful for a moment, or as thoughtful as a one-eared cat can look. “I suppose you can still call me that,” he said. “It is as good a name as any.”
Caryl rose and, as carefully as though the floor were strewn with eggshells, crossed the room toward the stairs.
“Should I go after her?” Shock said softly as she descended.
I shook my head. Caryl was about to go into full-on level 10 meltdown, if I knew the signs, and she didn’t usually like for people to be around for that. I clenched my jaw and turned back toward Elliott.
“What now?” I said to him. “We needed your help, and now we’re up a creek because Caryl did something awful in a moment’s panic? You weren’t carrying her emotions, and you know better than anyone how messed up that can make her.”
“Do not try to convince me to forgive,” said Elliott. “I am not human, nor Seelie, and I do not share your weaknesses. I also do not wish to discuss Caryl’s transgressions further in front of a stranger. I have, however, pledged myself to the cause of the new Arcadia Project, because I wish to see the end of coercive magic such as the sort that was just used upon me.”
I exhaled slowly. “So you’ll still help us?”
“That depends upon what you wish for me to do.”
“I need you to pilot this facade,” I said, gesturing toward it. “And take it to a meeting at the White Rose with me.”
“To what end?”
“So that we can pretend to assault the queen, get ourselves tossed in prison. Once we’re in the cell, you leave the body and serve as our eyes and ears all over the palace. Voluntarily, though.”
“This will enable you to steal the vials of blood from the vault?”
“That’s my job,” said Shock proudly. “You’re going to be the one to tell me when it’s safe, when Millie has freed the guardian spirit.”
“He also made the facade you’ll be using, and he’s going to help you get into it.”
“There is a trick to it, you see,” Shock explained, all teenage enthusiasm. “Because there is no emotional thread for you to follow into the body, you must allow a spell caster such as myself to create one. Using a complicated bit of spellwork, I shall project my own consciousness temporarily into the facade and open a pathway for you.”
“Wait,” I said. “Shock, are you saying that fey spell casters can possess other bodies?”
“Not just any spell caster,” he said smugly. “And it is not done lightly. While I transmit my consciousness into this new body, I am abandoning my real body—both of them. They are temporarily and quite literally dead. So I can only do it for mere moments, or my real bodies would expire permanently, thus ending the enchantment, thus removing my consciousness from any body whatsoever, which is, as far as we know, the permanent end of any living being, barring some form of heaven or hell or afterlife.”
“Shock!” I grabbed his arm, not even thinking about whether I was gloved or not, which I fortunately was. “N
o, no. That can’t be safe. I don’t even know CPR if this goes wrong.”
“I have done this before, remember?” he said. “I helped Qualm into this very body. There is no need to resuscitate me afterward; so long as I return to my body within a few moments, vital processes begin again on their own. There is no damage; I carry on as though nothing happened.”
“Shock, if I knew you’d be risking your life for this, I would never have asked it of you.”
“That is why I did not tell you. We are all risking our lives, are we not? And I understand the way humans feel about death; it is a predator that stalks you all your lives, and so you fear it. For fey it is different. Our deaths are always either by betrayal or by choice, to make room for others. We see our lives as stories which, at the moment most fitting, must end. I do not think this will be my end, but if it is, it makes a very cool story.”
Elliott spoke up in that dry, old-British-man voice. “What is your stake in this fight?” he asked. “Altruism is very Seelie.”
“The sidhe were all Seelie once,” Shock said. “Either we resign ourselves to that part of our history or we go mad. I do not fight my impulses toward love and beauty the way my father does. But enough of that. Do you agree to this, Elliott? Caryl has taught me your Word of P—your name, but I am only casting spells now with full consent.”
“I consent,” said Elliott. And the cat vanished.
“Very well.” Shock moved to the center of the room and began a low, guttural chant. Immediately the air in the small, close tower room filled with the rotting-garbage smell of Unseelie magic. He lowered himself to the floor, still chanting, closing his eyes and lying back with his hands crossed over his chest.
A coffin pose? Really? This kid had inherited his father’s flair for theater. I bit my nails, waiting on tenterhooks.
I saw the moment when he died. Saw his breath sigh out of him after the last word of the incantation, saw his body make an impossible, indescribable transition: once host to a bright, talkative soul, now a piece of biological garbage. I knelt by him, took his hand from his chest, held it. It felt much too cool through the latex of my glove.
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