Phantom Eyes

by Scott Tracey

  “No, you’re right,” I said. “I’ll fill you in later. Just … just trust me, okay? We need that,” I said, nodding to the dark brown satchel resting on his side, “safe and sound.”

  “Freaking heavy,” he grunted. “Wouldn’t think they’d be so bad.”

  All burdens are heavier than you think. Maybe not at first, but eventually they’ll break you.

  I just had to keep going long enough to outrun mine. “Come on,” I started down the path into the woods, a path I could have walked in my sleep now. “We’ve got a meeting to get to.”

  It took less time than I remembered to find the gaping chasm in the Lansing backyard. There’d been a chapel here, once, but now the only evidence that it remained were some scraps of foundation, and a section of concrete floor maybe a dozen square feet large. I’d destroyed the rest of it, and every living thing surrounding it.

  Trees were toppled behemoths all around us, splintered and shattered like shipwrecks. The ground had been freshly turned over that night, but over the past few weeks had finally started to settle back down. I was surprised there was still a path. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who’d made the trek out here.

  The chapel hadn’t been in Catherine’s actual backyard—it had been tucked away in the woods somewhere far from the prying eyes of the city’s serfs and vassals. But there was always the worry that tonight would be the night that she’d stumble upon me, sneaking onto her land.

  Elle waited for the pair of us at the bottom of the pit. She was still wearing sunglasses, too.

  “So you’re really going through with this?” Drew asked.

  I focused on my footsteps. The hill down into the pit was still soft and it would be easily to slip. That would be all I’d need. Put an intricate plan for revenge into motion, and then break my neck just before it all started to play out.

  “I have to,” I said quietly. I wished for Drew to stop talking. I didn’t want to talk to him.

  “How do you know you can trust her?”

  “She doesn’t have a choice. We have a contract.” Everyone was signing contracts. Me. Trey. But Elle had managed a way out of hers. So it was possible. Drew huffed behind me, and I headed him off before he could start arguing. I didn’t have it in me to do the back and forth with him. Not tonight. “I can open the way so that Grace can come and go as she pleases. I don’t need my magic for that. But Grace won’t come back to this side without the wellsprings. So she has to train me first, or she’ll never be able to go after Lucien the way she wants.”

  It looked like Elle had woken up on the same sullen side of the bed that I did. “Whoa, you didn’t tell me your girlfriend was that,” Drew said with a low whistle.

  Any other day, I would have had a retort. But I couldn’t do it tonight. Drew stared at me in confusion.

  What I wanted more than anything was to keel over and vomit until there was nothing left inside of me. What I did, though, was to keep walking down to meet with Elle where she waited. Most of the damage to her eyes was hidden by her sunglasses, but now that I knew what they were hiding, I could still see the hints of trauma around the edges.

  “You’re actually here.” She sounded surprised. Almost belligerent.

  In my head, I could still see the room that had been here once, with the altar set up against one side. We were just a few feet away from it, right at the spot where the worlds had split apart at the seams and created a passage between the real world and the blizzardy nightmare that existed outside the lighthouse.

  My hands were shaking.

  “Of course we’re here. Someone has to keep the kid out of trouble,” Drew said.

  His concern was a knife in my gut.

  “Do you even know why you’re here?” Elle asked, looking between us in astonishment. So she didn’t know. Or she didn’t think I could go through with it.

  “Know wh—uck!” The knife slid into Drew’s gut like butter. My arms were literally shaking now, and I barely had the strength to pull the knife back out. I was glad he was facing away from me, that I couldn’t see the look in his eyes. My hands had been cold, but now they were hot. I couldn’t figure out why until I looked down and saw the crimson stain spreading down my skin. This used to be in Drew, I thought hysterically. Like all I would have to do was slip it back inside him and it would be okay.

  The Armstrong line had been Grace’s contingency plan. She was the reason that people said things like “there must always be an Armstrong in Belle Dam” and the families were cautious about tolerating the Armstrongs until the next generation came along, and they were deemed expendable.

  Drew fell to his knees. He gurgled, and I knew if I looked in his eyes I’d see the question there, so I couldn’t. I looked at Elle. Watched her watch me. Watched her see what I was capable of.

  She stepped out of the way as a portal started to form, a bulge in reality that threatened to tear through all things. There were no tears in me, even though one of my best friends was bleeding to death. Bleeding to death because of me.

  The portal began sucking up his blood like it was a vortex, and not a path between worlds. Individual droplets fell into the edges, crackling with quicksilver. The mercury light that spread across Drew as he shifted was engulfing him now as he was dragged into the portal by a mystical kind of gravity, arcing out against the portal like it was lightning.

  Drew had been sprawled along the couch, and Riley was lost in her own world when Matthias continued our conversation. “Do you even know the price that she’s asking of you?”

  “Then tell me,” I’d demanded impatiently.

  “The wellsprings aren’t enough to earn her freedom.” He glanced at Drew, and if I didn’t know better I might have described his sigh as soft or fond. “Something that can pry the doors between worlds open long enough for her freedom to stick. That’s why she created the Armstrong line in the beginning. So that they would be waiting for her at the end.”

  Everything came to a halt. “She wants me to kill him?”

  “No,” Matthias said gravely. “She doesn’t want him dead. Dead won’t do her any good. To keep the portals open, he must be alive.” He steepled his fingers together and regarded me from across the room. “Now tell me again how much you want your revenge upon them.”

  I caught one last glimpse of the satchel at his side, and I lowered my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, as he disappeared between the worlds.

  It only took Elle a few seconds to recuperate. She blinked a few times, then summoned up the vestiges of her enigmatic smile, though now it looked forced and nervous. “Congratulations,” she said, biting down on her lower lip, “your visa has been approved.” She stepped to one side, now more a cruise director than a gatekeeper. I stepped through the portal without looking back, without thinking of what I’d sacrificed for make this happen. She followed me inside the room of solid white stone. Behind us, the curtain between the worlds fell, and the portal closed.

  I was gone for twenty-one days.

  twenty-four

  There weren’t any pleasantries exchanged on the other side of the world. I walked through the portal straight into the lantern room where Grace had attacked me once upon a time. The moment Elle stepped through behind me, I felt the portal close up like a zipper being pulled.

  The next second I was on the floor, screaming.

  Fire burning churning heated words dance like blackberry bushes and accosted gold accents. Screaming, always screaming, and there’s a body that won’t stop bleeding. Blood teases candy against ravenous maws that could swallow the world but for her standing guard. Blood flows and she keeps bleeding because it’s the worlds blood one world seeping into the other like rotten bandages fragrant and raw as it catches fire and burns me and the looking glass cannot save me now. My body screams and veils fall over my face like arrogance, greed, and melancholy. This place is holy. This place is profane. There are seven devils and I might be one.

  “Get up.”

  My head cleared, and inside o
f me there was a coiled fire where the gnawing void had been. Just like that, my powers were back. It felt good, like the first moment underneath a hot shower, or a warm blanket. But there was still the emptiness to contend with, the feeling that I still wasn’t complete. That there was something missing that had once been there.

  I killed Drew. I can’t believe I killed Drew.

  “If you want to learn, get up.”

  I hadn’t even seen Grace yet, but her voice vibrated against my skin like the lashings of a stun gun. My body already felt like it had run a marathon—I was out of practice in handling the visions. This one had come out of the gate swinging, and I hadn’t had time to prepare. Every muscle I had was sore, and all of my limbs trembled. Getting to my feet was like being a fawn standing on four legs for the first time. I made it as far as my knees before my body refused to move any more. I laid my head back on the ground, using it like a fifth limb to keep me at least somewhat upright.

  “Very well. The hard way it shall be.”

  Fire scoured the skin from my bones. Pain tore at my limbs, and I collapsed back on the ground into a sea of amaranthine agony. I could feel the heat melting my face, the way that my hair caught fire and burned right down to the root. I burned until I was ashes.

  “We have near on to eternity,” the voice continued. “I can do this for decades before it grows tedious. Get up.”

  It took me a few seconds less this time, to get my feet underneath me. But I still couldn’t make it up higher than my knees before the next attack came. Blisters erupted across my skin, and my vocal cords melted beyond the ability to function. My agony couldn’t make a sound, but still I tried. I tried to scream more than I’d ever tried for anything in my life.

  Again, relief. Again, the voice. “Get. Up.”

  This time, I made it to my feet. This time, I got a look at the woman who was torturing me, and the hellfire lights swarming around her like fireflies. “Fight back,” she said calmly.

  By the time I’d even managed to process her words, I was back on the floor. Dying. Being torn apart and charred from existence. But again, the pain relinquished its hold on me. Again I made it to my feet. Again she taunted me.

  “What sort of warrior are you? Fight back.”

  This time I made it to my feet before the pain had even stopped. My body grew stronger, reforged a little more with each deluge of pain. Fighting back. This time, when she challenged me, I could feel the light at my back. The spilling, quenching blue that I’d almost forgotten. The light that had come from inside me before, when my life was threatened. When I was in danger. I’d attributed it to the winter voice inside my mind, the insidious part of Lucien that had remained attached to the wellspring power. Corrupting anyone who would touch it.

  Even with the blue light, I fell again. But again I rose up. And this time, the light was stronger still, until I was bathed in healing blue, and the rage in Grace’s eyes slid over me and around me. Until she was impotent against me, and I was shielded from her.

  It felt like a dormant muscle being stretched. With every passing second, I started to understand it better, deepening the light around me and strengthening the shield. Flexing my power to test myself the same way Grace was testing me.

  With this victory, small as it might have been, the pattern stopped. There was a curve to her lips, what would have been a smile in anyone else. Anyone that might have had a sense of humor, or even a soul. But Grace was too serious, and too empty, to possess either of those things.

  “The first thing you must master is pain,” Grace said.

  A moment later, a new attack. A new pain. An assault of everything, like the world around me had finally grown weary of me and thrown everything it had forward like a psychic shoe bomb.

  Winter vengeance and demands of the dead. Marigold melancholy in the veins and deep rose vigils. The house of lights, the waystone, the guide; bright sky potential keening need and frankincense arias worlds where angels flee and demons tread. My word is balance and the law is mine to wield. Do as I say or burn in sunlight the way to the hidden places at the table. Thousands of entrances invasive brigands but only one exit and the hole in the sky. Dark magic lingers like snapdragons in anarchy striking down ancient compacts. Oh how she seethes, and there will be a reckoning. She is not done paying not yet, not until the balance is restored.

  The visions stopped just as quickly as they’d begun.

  “You don’t even know the first thing about yourself,” Grace said. By the time my eyes cleared and I could see again, she was circling around me. Like a predator. Exactly like a predator. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Elle standing near the staircase, head bowed down and hands clasped in front of her. Praying for me? Or maybe praying for Drew?

  “It isn’t your fault,” Grace continued, still circling me. “It isn’t an accident that the powers we possess are lost to the chafing sands of time. The demons call us sorcerers, laughing all the while. We are the demon’s hands in the world, the demon’s heart. They tie us with strings and expect their will done. And without fail, each generation destroys any information on their predecessors that they can unearth. Because the less you know, the faster you die, and the faster you die, the fewer pawns the demons have in this world.”

  “No wonder you nearly died.” She laughed. “You were trained by idiots.”

  John wasn’t an idiot. Not by a long shot. I snarled, but it only made her laugh harder. “Say another word about him and I’ll kill you.” Rage and the remembrance of grief surged in my gut, and it took me everything I had to restrain myself. This was what I’d asked for. This was more than I deserved.

  Grace turned and struck me down again. The explosive red light carrying waves of visions that shoved fifteen thousand hours of memory into my brain at once. All the muscles in my body spasmed, giving out like I’d been hit with a stun gun, and the process started all over again.

  ¤ ¤ ¤

  Time lacked meaning in the lighthouse. The sky outside was always winter-storm dark, and I never felt hunger pangs or the need to go to the bathroom. I didn’t even get that gross feeling on my teeth when they hadn’t been brushed in a while. Every time I lay down and closed my eyes, only a second passed before I bolted back upright, fully refreshed. There were no dreams. There was no peace.

  Grace thought that torture and teaching were the same. Every session was war waged only between the two of us. It took a lot of rounds before I could summon up the blue light of my power at will and use it to deflect against her. It took even more repetitions before my power could defend me on instinct alone. Even still, with everything I learned, I held something back. I studied her, thought about the way she attacked, the way she thought.

  From session to session, I could feel my power changing shapes inside of me, but it was an agonizing growth filled with pains and failures. It happened day by day, but it was a slow progression. I was metal on the blacksmith’s anvil, but I was also the blacksmith controlling how and why I was being shaped. My power became something I could control, rather than the thing that controlled me.

  “Who do you hate?” she asked me randomly one day.

  I wiped my face off with the bottom of my shirt. I didn’t sweat, and there was no dirt, but I still felt unclean. In need of a shower. “I don’t know. You?”

  Her lips hinted at humor. “Hatred is what keeps you in control. You can do anything so long as your hatred can rationalize it. Men become monsters with the easiest of justifications. Control your hatred, sharpen it, and you will have a weapon that will last you all of your days.”

  All three of them? I was tempted to ask.

  “Hatred is a whetstone that can sharpen your mind, but hold your grief tight as well. The losses we suffer teach us the control we need. All strong emotions, the ones that scar the world, are the way we find our power.”

  I spat blood and stepped away from the wall she’d thrown me into only minutes before. “And have you been grieving ever since you came here? I thought time
healed all wounds.”

  Her lips thinned. I realized she’d stopped scaring me a while ago. Grace was a monster, but she was a monster who needed me more than I needed her. “Time heals only what you allow it to. Master yourself and you can suppress the visions, seeing only what you want to see. Be the victor, not the victim.” I squirmed, it was too close to the advice Matthias had given me weeks ago. Be the villain, not the victim.

  I tried not to stare into the furious storm raging outside of the lighthouse. It was like seven kinds of natural disasters rolled up into one chaotic world of destruction. The clouds roiled as though stirred by tornadoes that were thousands of miles across, and blizzards raged at the corners, blanketing the sky in shawls of white. Streaks of glooming black and red light stood out from time to time, volcanic destruction so far from here that it was little more than a splash of color on the horizon.

  But it was the lightning I hated the most, because when the lightning struck—a thousand bolts careening out from a single origin—the clouds lit up so much I could see things. Faces and hands and slithering pieces that rolled with purpose, so vast that their movements were the cause of the shrieking winds that howled around the lighthouse precipice.

  “Again,” Grace said, as her onslaught started anew.

  “What’s out there?” I’d fallen over and collapsed, drained. This time, my eyes didn’t close, and the passage of time was slow and steady, measured in heartbeats. Hours passed before I finally let my eyes drift closed, only to bolt upright again a moment later. The aches and pains in my body were washed away as usual. Grace stood near the broken wall at her usual vigil. This time, I went to stand next to her, searching the clouds for what it was she saw. Or didn’t see.