Crown of Whispers

by Isabella August

  Beatrice took a deep breath, and stepped through the doorway.

  Long, wet grass crunched beneath her feet. The wind that stirred the trees caught at her hair—but it was a comfortable breeze, neither too warm nor too cold.

  “Might I suggest instead…” Simon’s voice spoke next, very quietly. “Monseigneur shall consider Detective Basak’s well-being to be just as important as his own. There are fewer ways for him to wiggle free of such an oath.”

  Beatrice started toward them, eating up the distance between them with long strides. She did draw closer—but somehow, the people beneath the tree remained just as dreamy and indistinct, and their voices stayed distant and quiet.

  This is Dorian’s memory, Beatrice realized belatedly. It can only show me whatever level of detail he remembers.

  Beatrice glanced around herself. Dorian was sitting beneath a different tree, much closer to her; he’d leaned his head back against it and closed his eyes. He was surprisingly haggard in appearance—there were dark circles beneath his eyes, and his ever-present tie seemed to have gone missing for the moment. As Dorian’s attentions wandered from exhaustion, the voices beyond them faded in and out.

  “…I swear to hold Jasmine Basak’s well-being to be every bit as important as my own,” Jean Belmont’s voice intoned. “For the space of a year and a day—on my blood and on my power.”

  The memory wavered. Beatrice stepped back toward the door again and drew on her magic, sending a flicker of orange through the doorway to search out the flow of information. On the night that Dorian had unlocked Jean Belmont’s secret for her, he had told her that it was the first time he’d done so since storing the memory. But was that really true?

  Beatrice’s magic curled upon itself, wandering about the door frame. It blinked once—twice. Now three times. She frowned at that.

  Dorian unlocked this memory once at the table with Jean Belmont, Beatrice thought. He did it once just now… and then I unlocked it myself. The electric orange power dissipated slowly, and she let out a heavy breath.

  Dorian was right—he hadn’t accessed this memory before the night at the bistro. No one else had accessed the memory either. Beatrice had discovered a weakness in Dorian’s power… but in the end, he still wasn’t the leak.

  That should have been the end of it; her duty to her employer was done here.

  But the real object of Beatrice’s interest lay somewhere further down the hallway, she knew.

  I own my own secret, she thought. I think it’s time to see how much of that secret Dorian really remembers.

  Beatrice pulled the door closed behind her; a soft click told her that the memory of Jean Belmont’s secret had encoded itself once again. She started down the shadowed hallway, glancing over placards as she passed them. Most of the names were unfamiliar—they could have been people or places or other realms, for all she knew.

  But there was something drawing her on; Beatrice felt it tugging at the bottom of her soul, leading her down the twisting labyrinth of hallways like a tether. The more she focused on it, the more the distances seemed to shorten.

  The moment that Beatrice came into the hallway with her secret, she knew.

  The hallway itself was battered and torn; the carpets curled up in places to reveal dark, glaring holes in the floor. All of the locks had been violently broken. Doors yawned off their hinges, barely clinging to the wall. Beyond each one was a ragged, empty abyss.

  Beatrice stared around herself in awed horror. It had been one thing to hear Dorian describe the feeling of his torn and broken memories… but it was another thing entirely to see it. Everything here had a feeling of instability—just walking deeper into the hallway made her nauseous, confused. The world spun gently around her, wobbling into an uneasy vertigo.

  It was all deeply discomforting; Beatrice almost turned back entirely, uncertain whether she wanted to risk walking into that morass. But more than ten years of desperate confusion urged her onward. Why? she wanted to ask Dorian. Why me, why my secret?

  But Beatrice knew very well that he didn’t have the answers.

  There was one door still closed within that hallway. Unlike the other placards, the one on this door did not have a full, proper name, painstakingly etched upon it. Instead, it just said: Trix.

  Beatrice hesitated in front of that door for a long moment. I need to know, she reminded herself. I won’t forgive myself if I don’t open this door.

  Slowly, she pulled the golden coin from her pocket and pressed it to the door. It swung inward, silent and ominous.

  The room beyond was black. Much like the others here, it had an extra feeling of emptiness. Whatever had once been here, Beatrice knew, it had been torn away.

  But something was still here—Dorian wouldn’t have bothered to close the door, otherwise. Sure enough, a small, tattered memory still flickered at the center of the darkness.

  “Don’t ever take my picture,” Beatrice heard herself whisper. “Please.”

  The memory came with a surge of genuine worry. Protectiveness. Anger.

  “No pictures,” Dorian replied. “That’s simple enough.”

  The memory didn’t blur at the edges. It simply… cut off, abrupt. Beatrice felt the edges with her mind. They were sharp and precise—as though someone had surgically removed everything surrounding that one moment.

  Beatrice chewed on her lip. Someone unlocked this memory at some point, she thought. They had to, if they were going to cut it to pieces like this. She brought up the orange glow of her magic again, searching for a sense of when the memory had been decoded.

  Old, worn patches of orange showed where Dorian had worried at this particular memory, coding and decoding it with regularity. At some point about a decade ago, however, he’d stopped touching it entirely.

  There was a fresh orange smear on the door, however, where someone else had unlocked the memory. At most, it was only a few days old.

  Beatrice reached out to touch that smear, with her heart in her throat. There was a kind of taste to Dorian’s magic—like the scent of hot chocolate, it brought him instantly to mind. The signature on the door was similar to Dorian’s—it whispered at the edges of Beatrice’s thoughts like his did—but that was the end of the correlations. The power there was deeper, darker, and far more insidious.

  Someone else—maybe something else—had seen this shred of Dorian’s memory.

  The person in my room, Beatrice thought with a chill. This is how they knew I didn’t want my picture taken.

  It was, in some respects, a kind of relief—whoever had unlocked that secret, they didn’t know the worst of Beatrice’s past. But the realization came with a brand new, nauseous worry. Something else had access to Dorian’s mind. It had gotten into his head, decoded one of his secrets, and left again... and Dorian hadn’t noticed a thing.

  Beatrice swallowed hard. Panic had started beating at the inside of her chest, but she forced herself to ignore it. She’d discovered something of terrible magnitude… but there was no telling just yet how deep the rabbit hole went.

  Beatrice focused on the taste of that foreign presence, committing it to memory. She turned down the hallway and gathered up her power, sending it cascading down the corridor. Her spell arced and hissed, searching for other traces of that darker presence. The magic left a ghostly orange trail behind itself where that other creature had dabbled in memories.

  The hallway glowed a bright, radioactive orange in front of her.

  Beatrice pressed a hand over her mouth. For just a moment, she stood there silently, taking in the enormity of the infiltration. Something had walked Dorian’s mind frequently… and for a very long time.

  Since when? Beatrice wondered dully. This is so old. It would have to have been since… since before I ever met him. She followed after the electric arc of her magic, shaking her head in horror.

  That presence wasn’t everywhere—it hadn’t opened every door, as evidenced by the fact that Jean Belmont’s door remained untouche
d. But it had lingered over certain doors very recently indeed. Several times, it had unlocked a door labeled Lord Blackfrost; its signature was also fresh and clear upon one labeled Lady of Briars. Beatrice shuddered more violently with every step, thinking of all the powerful creatures whose secrets had been quietly exfiltrated out the back door of Dorian’s mind.

  A back door, she thought. That’s what this is, isn’t it? Someone built a back door into Dorian’s head.

  Beatrice followed the streaks of orange to one particular dead end. She nearly turned around, convinced that she’d reached the end of the line—but her magic grabbed at her mind, demanding that she take a closer look.

  There was one more door at the end of the hallway. It was hard to see—mainly because it was shrouded in black whispers. That shroud fought Beatrice viciously as she tried to perceive it directly; like the gray cloud in Dorian’s office, it tried to divert her attention, to make her forget its presence. But Beatrice shoved that black, insubstantial curtain aside… and swallowed hard.

  There was a label on this door—but it was in different handwriting. The letters spelled out a single word in spidery, elegant letters:

  Mother.

  Chapter 9

  This particular door had no lock. As far as Beatrice could tell, the memory behind it hadn’t been encrypted at all. It had simply been… hidden. Those black whispers clung to the outside of the door like cobwebs, quietly chipping away at her attention—trying to force her to look away.

  Dorian probably didn’t even know this memory existed. It had been effectively hidden away from him, at the very bottom of his own mind.

  Beatrice eyed those whispers warily. The secret behind this door didn’t belong to her… but then, it wasn’t actually encrypted, was it?

  There was a good chance she might be breaking one of Dorian’s rules to look at this memory. But the person who’d looked at Beatrice’s secret—the same one who’d probably left those photos in her room—had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide this door.

  There were answers behind it, she was sure. Answers for Beatrice and answers for Dorian.

  “Open sesame,” Beatrice muttered. She tried to reach past the veil of black whispers—but they leaned against her, slowing her down like molasses. Beatrice pressed her lips into a line and flared her magic against the black shadows. They flinched away in a hiss, parting at her touch.

  Beatrice shoved the door open… and walked inside.

  She found herself in Dorian’s old apartment. The window was open; the night breeze trickled through it, raising the hairs on her arms. Dorian had settled himself into the couch, with his forehead pressed into his hands.

  Beatrice moved closer to Dorian, tilting her head to get a closer look at him. This was the Dorian she’d known more than a decade ago; his face was smoother, and his clothing was less professional. It was hard to tell in the darkness of the apartment, but Beatrice thought she could see a physical pain etched into his features.

  “Dorian.”

  Beatrice choked as she heard the whisper, just behind her ear. She whirled—but the voice in this memory had not been addressing her.

  The woman behind Beatrice was just a bit taller than she was. Her skin was an ashen gray; her limbs were thin and spindly, though there was a kind of alien elegance to her form all the same. Her long, ghostly hair floated behind her like smoke.

  Her eyes were a pure, undiluted white.

  “Mother,” Dorian murmured. “Can we speak later, perhaps?”

  What the hell is this? Beatrice thought. Dorian never mentioned anything like this woman to me.

  The creature’s gaze tickled uneasily at Beatrice’s skin. The memory of that strange woman was looking through Beatrice, toward Dorian—but her presence was so unnerving that Beatrice found herself stepping back all the same, unable to stand between the two of them.

  “Later?” the strange woman whispered. She sounded dimly puzzled. “I did not create you to disobey me. You should not be capable of such a thing.”

  Dorian closed his eyes. “Perhaps that was a miscalculation on your part,” he said. “I wouldn’t know.”

  The woman moved toward him; her steps flowed like water, eating up more space than they should have. She pressed her palms to either side of Dorian’s face, curling her overly-long fingers against his cheeks so that he was forced to look up at her. She inspected him consideringly, like a craftsman searching for flaws in their work.

  “Your secrets are missing,” the woman said finally. “All of them—they are truly gone. How is that so, Dorian? I gave you rules.” She said the last word as though it should have been the end of the matter—as though it hadn’t even crossed her mind that rules could be broken.

  Dorian took a deep breath. He didn’t flinch back from her touch—but there was an odd resignation in his eyes that suggested it would have done him no good even to try. “I am forbidden from destroying secrets,” he murmured. “But I have destroyed nothing.”

  Beatrice stared at him.

  The ripped-out secrets, she thought. Dorian was the one who did all that damage to his own head. He got rid of my secret… to keep his promise to me.

  The woman—a faerie, Beatrice thought—let her hands drop from Dorian’s face. Understanding dawned behind her eyes.

  “You have cut away your own secrets,” she whispered. “You have hidden them elsewhere. Where, Dorian?”

  Dorian smiled helplessly. Pain flickered across his face again. “I don’t remember,” he said.

  The faerie woman tilted her head, as though she were working on a particularly vexing puzzle. There was no emotion in her manner—that was by far the worst part. There was a dangerous tension in the air, but all of it came from Dorian’s side; the faerie woman’s face was utterly calm.

  “You are broken,” she said finally. “After all of the work I put into you. Is there anything left to salvage… or must I start all over again?”

  Dorian considered her bleakly. “One assumes that I have no say in the matter,” he observed.

  “What is it that broke you, Dorian?” the faerie woman murmured. “How can I avoid repeating this mistake?”

  Dorian shook his head tiredly. “Je ne sais pas,” he said softly. I don’t know. “I am not the expert.”

  The faerie woman considered him for a long moment.

  Finally, she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I must keep you long enough to learn what caused this error. I will remove some of the remaining variables from your memory. Perhaps the problem shall show itself again.”

  A familiar dread settled into Dorian’s expression. The faerie in front of him didn’t seem to notice. “And what will you do, if you find that problem?” he asked quietly.

  “Naturally,” the faerie woman said softly, “I shall remove the problem.”

  A chill shivered down Beatrice’s spine.

  Me, she thought. I’m the problem.

  Dorian didn’t respond again. He pressed his forehead back into his hands, staring at the floor. Some part of him must have suspected what the problem was, even now—even with so many memories missing.

  “If you do not remove yourself from my vicinity,” he’d told Beatrice. “There is a risk that secret might come out.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Beatrice whispered. “This is my fault. All of this.” The moment she’d told Dorian her secret, she had created this impossible snarl for him. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  The Dorian in the memory, of course, did not answer her.

  Beatrice opened her eyes with a groan.

  Her legs had started to cramp. How long had she been sitting across from Dorian, with her mind someplace else entirely?

  Dorian’s face had that look of indescribable dread once more—openly now, and not hidden beneath his usual blank mask. Beatrice pressed a hand to her eyes.

  “You remember,” she murmured. “Don’t you?”

  Dorian let out a long, shivering breath. “What have you done, Trix?” he asked her
.

  “I tore a great big hole in the spell that was hiding some of your memories,” Beatrice replied quietly. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but… I got a hell of a lot more than I bargained for.” She leaned back, stretching out her legs in front of her with a wince. “Who the hell is that woman, Dorian?”

  Dorian stared at Beatrice in silence. She sighed.

  “She’s a faerie, isn’t she?” Beatrice said. “And, let me guess… there’s a secret rule number four in Dorian’s Rules. You can’t talk about her, can you? That’s why you ran me off.”

  “You need to leave the city, Trix,” Dorian said. He tried to keep his voice calm, but there was a hint of breathless urgency to his tone.

  “Leave the city?” Beatrice said. “I know you’re freaked out, Dorian, but you need to pay attention. She already knows I’m here. She pulled that last shred of my secret from your head and sent something into my room.” Beatrice shook her head slowly. “There’s nowhere in the world I can run that’s far enough to get away from a faerie.”

  “Go elsewhere,” Dorian said. “Buy a home, and stay there until you are forgotten. A proper residence will keep any faerie at bay.” He paused meaningfully. “Even the most powerful faerie lord cannot enter a home uninvited.”

  Beatrice narrowed her eyes at that. “So that thing is a faerie lord,” she observed. “But surely, she didn’t walk into my hotel room herself. That seems… mundane, for something like her.”

  Dorian leaned his head tiredly back into the couch. “Admitting to nothing,” he said. “Faerie lords have many servants. They have warlocks—you have met some now. They have minor faeries, made from the stuff of their realm.” He paused heavily. “…and changelings.”

  Beatrice straightened slowly. Dorian had his eyes on the ceiling now, carefully diverted from her.

  Dorian really is a changeling, then, she thought. He wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise.

  “What are changelings, Dorian?” Beatrice asked him softly. “What are they really?”