by Rabia Gale
He didn’t rise to the bait. “Do you remember anything from last night?”
Arabella tried, but there was a horrible blank stretch where her memories of yesterday evening should be. “I remember the dressmaker bringing my ball gown in the morning. We had stewed rabbit for luncheon. I visited with Charlotte and Viola and we talked of our excursion to Shrine Park. But after that…?” She screwed up her eyes, trying to force something to come to her.
“No need to try so hard. You’ll sprain something,” Trey advised her.
Arabella frowned. “If I was hit last evening, how come I was at Shrine Park this morning?” Her friends’ silence this morning made sense. She’d thought it was because they weren’t used to early hours. In actuality, they hadn’t been able to see her at all.
Still, they had gone on an excursion that she had wanted, most likely for her sake. The thought touched her.
“Your spirit knew where it was supposed to be this morning. With or without your body, it went.”
“If only I could remember what happened in the gap.” Arabella pressed her hands over her eyes. The gesture felt strange, cool and jelly-like. Arabella hastily removed them.
“It’s not uncommon for spirits to lose the memories surrounding their violent deaths. Or, in your case, disembodiment.”
“But my body is alive. Does that mean I can return to it?” She had clasped her hands together without realizing it.
“With a little help, I don’t see why not.”
A rush of relief swept over Arabella. “Thank you! Shall we go right now?” She was on her feet.
Trey waved a hand in a sit-down gesture. “Not so fast, Arabella. It’s not late enough—your family and servants will still be awake. We’ll leave after midnight.”
“Why the secrecy?” demanded Arabella. “My aunt and uncle will not eschew your help. I know they must be anxious and concerned.”
“We’ll keep this secret because I’m not supposed to be doing this.” Trey’s face lacked expression, and she saw, for the first time, the tired lines etched into it. “By the laws of the land and the rules of the Phantasm Bureau, I should’ve sent you on your way to the afterlife already.”
“But I’m still alive!” cried Arabella, appalled.
“Only because your aunt and uncle hired a sorcerer to put your barely-breathing self into stasis. That, by the way, comes very close to flirting with necromancy. Some would say that it crosses the line.” Trey paused. “Like, for instance, my supervisor.”
It all felt like a bad dream. “Will they get into trouble?” Arabella whispered.
“Only if they’re caught. Right now, all they’ve put out is that you’re unconscious after a bad accident. There’s precious few people who can tell your spirit’s gone wandering. And as long as any of them besides me don’t peek into your bedchamber, you’re safe.”
Arabella stiffened. “Are you saying, sir, that you were in my bedchamber?”
“Of course. I had to see for myself if your body was worth returning to. And your nightclothes are very fetching, as well.”
She eyed him, suspecting he was laughing at her again. Yes, that crook of his mouth and those lines around his eyes all indicated mirth. “I cannot believe that my aunt allowed you into my bedchamber.”
“Of course not. Charlie Blake distracted her while I went up to check.”
“Charlie Blake? Do you mean Charlotte?”
“She’s going by her Christian name now, eh?” He shook his head. “Well, I’ve known her as Charlie for years. Her older brother was up at Holyrood with me and I spent some of my holidays at the Blakes’.”
Holyrood University was where people with magical gifts were educated. “I have met Mr. Blake on occasion,” Arabella owned. “He’s a pyromentalist, isn’t he? I’ve never seen his salamander, though.”
“He works two stories below me now,” said Trey.
“Did you tell Charlotte about this?” Arabella made an eloquent gesture toward herself.
Trey shook his head. “No. The fewer people who know, the better. All I told Charlie was that I sensed something wrong and tracked it to your house. She didn’t ask any questions, just demanded I do my utmost to help.”
Arabella gave a laugh that was almost a sob. “That’s Charlotte all over.”
A frown deepened between Trey’s brows as he looked at her. “Jonathan Blake’s a reliable chap, and I gave him the details about you. If anything happens and I’m not there, go to the Blakes’ house. He won’t be able to see you, but his salamander will. Ember’s clever; she’ll help you out.”
“What awful things do you expect will happen?” said Arabella. The sinking feeling was back.
“None at all,” said Trey promptly. “It’s just a precaution. Chin up, Arabella. By tomorrow morning you’ll be waking up with a bad headache. You’ll be back to extorting money for Lady Holmstead’s orphans in no time.”
His matter-of-fact tone was surprisingly bracing. Arabella lifted her chin. “I won’t forget those hundred pounds, my lord.”
Trey cracked a smile. “Good girl.” He stood up, stretched his arms above his head, and yawned. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m in need of a few hours of rest.”
“What about me?” squeaked Arabella.
“This house is well-warded. No phantasmists will be able to sniff you out nor any necromancers summon you.” She knew he was pretending to misunderstand. “Just stay here.” He added kindly, “I’ll leave the lights on for you.”
And before Arabella could object to remaining confined in the pentagram, he was gone.
At least he’d left her the chair.
Chapter Three
At a quarter to one in the morning, Trey stamped his feet into his boots and summoned Miss Trent.
There was the merest flicker in the air, and Arabella appeared in his front hallway. By the light of a rune-embedded magical lantern, she glimmered a faint green and floated three inches from the floor boards.
She looked first astonished, then reproachful. “You could’ve come down to fetch me.”
Trey shrugged into his top coat. “This was faster.”
Arabella looked around with interest at the wooden paneling and floral wall paper. Trey wondered why she bothered; the hallway was narrow and low-ceilinged, and both paneling and wall paper showed signs of wear. It was good enough for a bachelor’s lodgings, but dingy compared to what she was used to.
“Don’t you have a valet?” asked Arabella, her gaze returning to him. She came gently back to the ground.
It wasn’t fashionable for gentlemen to own clothing they could get into without help. Trey, on the other hand, rated practicality higher than fashion. His relatives didn’t agree; thanks to a well-meaning but meddling cousin he did actually own coats that clung to his shoulders and boots that made assistance necessary. “I have a Nat,” he said. “My manservant. He’s away for his grandmother’s funeral in Grenwoodshire right now.” He paused, counting. “Man’s an oddity. This is the fifth grandmother he’s buried in five years.”
Arabella gurgled. “What an interesting character! I should like to meet him.”
“Well, you won’t get to,” said Trey dampeningly. He tugged on worn leather gloves and surveyed the debutante, who looked just as charming and ghostly as she had this morning. His brows drew together.
Darn those dimples. And was it really fair for a spirit to have such long, curling eyelashes?
“Pay attention,” he said tersely. “Before, it was daytime and you were protected by your obliviousness. It’s altogether different at night and you’ve been out of your body for longer. So—Arabella, are you listening?”
His guest had plunged one incorporeal arm through his wall. She looked dispassionately at the limb, then withdrew it. Her lips pursed. “Tastes like pepper,” she muttered. She stuck a toe into the oak paneling on the bottom half. “Mmm, more like home-brewed ale.”
“Don’t get used to it. You’ll be back in your body soon enough.” He wound a woolen scarf aroun
d his neck and jammed a sadly misshapen beaver hat on his head.
Several of his relations would’ve disowned him on the spot, had they been present.
“I’m sorry.” Arabella put her finger to her lips. “You were saying?”
“Just stay close.” Trey opened his front door to chilly darkness, lit only by widely-spaced gas lamps.
He felt the nearness of the Shadow Lands as soon as he stepped off his front stairs and onto the pavement, away from the safety of his wards. They hissed unhappily as he and Arabella left. The other realm had moved in and it was hungry.
The boundary between worlds was thin tonight.
Arabella seemed to feel something of the same for she moved in closer, pressing up to his arm.
White sparks flashed between them. Arabella jumped like a scalded cat, landing atop the iron railing that stretched in front of the row houses. She looked down at him in amazement.
“Stop playing,” said Trey, “and come down.”
She hopped off and drifted gently down to the ground. “What happened?”
“You got too close to my personal wards. They were keeping you from possessing me.”
Arabella lifted her chin. “I have no desire whatsoever to possess an unfashionable, rude person such as yourself, sir.”
“You forgot disagreeable. You really have no craving to suck my blood? Or tear off my face?”
She shuddered. “Not in the least.”
“Good.” He had seen her run through a gamut of emotions from fear to exasperation to anger, but not a single one of them had corrupted her, in spite of his testing provocations. “But if you should change your mind—”
“I won’t,” she said firmly.
They walked in silence down the street of darkened two-story townhouses, older, darker, and smaller than the gentry’s Lumen homes. Most of Trey’s neighbors were middle class: lawyers, bankers, merchants, and other government employees like himself. The neighborhood itself was unfashionable, but it was quiet and near the Quadrangle. Trey had no desire to keep a town coach for the long trip from Shield House to the city proper every day, and he could live with his relatives’ disapproval over his choice of lodgings.
He considered it an advantage that they were less likely to visit him here.
Arabella glided close to him, looking around with wide, dark eyes. She seemed to be straining for something.
“Don’t,” said Trey quietly. Arabella started. “Don’t look for signs of the other realm. Sometimes, just bending your thoughts on it brings it closer.”
She nodded. Her clothes had changed again, he noted. She now wore a dark cloak and a nondescript gown beneath it. No gloves, interestingly. She’d not worn any with the shrine cloak, either.
Trey’s breath misted in front of his face. He thrust his hands into his pockets, his fingers crooked to shape aether to his will. A heavy presence hung over them, breathing down his neck. The pools of yellow lamplight were faint and far away.
His own muffled footsteps and soft breaths were the only sounds in the world. Arabella was a pale glimmer next to him. Consciously or not, she had dimmed, making herself smaller and harder to see.
As she should. An innocent spirit like her was defenseless against the greater haunts who clung to this world and the demons who prowled the boundaries, hungering to get in.
The thin wail of a small child was like a vapor in the vast night, swallowed into silence. A small light skittered across their path and tumbled into the road with a whimper. It gleamed once, then vanished on the far side.
“A wisp,” breathed Trey. “Not a spirit, but created when strong emotions touch the boundaries. Most dissipate within a day or two.”
Arabella nodded.
A wisp wouldn’t be much trouble, but just in case he’d send Morgan and his new apprentice after it tomorrow. It’d be good practice for the boy.
What worried him more was that palpable sense of being watched. The back of Trey’s neck prickled. He wanted to track it, chase it down, face it head on, but… He glanced at Arabella’s huge eyes. He had to get her safely back into her body first.
Despite his verbal assurances, time was running out for her.
They turned a corner and the pressure lifted with a sudden pop. Arabella gasped. Sound rushed in to fill their ears—the clatter of hoofs and wheels on cobbles, the yowl of an alley cat, the snatch of a song as drunkards staggered home from an evening of dissipation. Even the gas lamps burned all the brighter, sylphs fluttering like moths around them.
Something stirred near a heap of stone, slow and dark. A low grumble tickled the edge of Trey’s hearing. A stana, an earth elemental, that had probably been hauled in from the countryside along with the building materials.
This was normal night time in Lumen.
Arabella relaxed, drifting further away from him. “This isn’t so bad,” she remarked.
“No.” The Shadow Lands had retreated, but Trey remained watchful. Something had marked their presence. Something intelligent and malicious and quite likely powerful.
Something he’d have to fight and defeat.
Soon, he promised it. I’ll be your opponent soon.
Their progress to Bottleham was swifter now. Arabella had lost her sickly pallor; she chattered all the way to her home. Trey listened with one ear, making noncommittal noises at the appropriate times. He suspected she was trying to relieve her own anxiety.
When they turned onto Crescent Circle, Arabella tilted her head toward the mews in the back. “There’s a chestnut tree behind the house, right in front of my chamber window. You could climb that.”
“What a scamp you are,” Trey remarked. “Is that how you snuck out of the house last evening?”
“Maybe.” She dimpled. “Can you climb a tree, though? You can’t get much practice, living in Lumen.”
“I believe I can manage. However, I’m not in the habit of entering the bedchambers of young ladies through the window. We’ll take the back door.”
Arabella followed him through a narrow alley to the back of the row. Trey counted houses until he came to the servants’ entrance of the Elliots’ residence. She peered over his shoulder as he sketched a rune in the air. It winked silver and flowed into the lock.
Trey pressed down on the handle, and the door opened with a click.
“That’s it?” asked Arabella from behind him.
“That’s it.”
“It doesn’t seem at all fair that you can do that,” she said softly. She had no breath, of course, but her presence was a cool tingle on his skin.
Trey soft-stepped into the narrow corridor. “Then it’s a good thing I’m on your side.”
An odd sensation had settled over Arabella as she glided through the house, leading Trey up to her bedchamber via the servants’ stairs. The house was at once familiar and strange, as if slumbering under an enchantment. She moved through it like she was in a dream, making no noise on the steps, stirring no air with her passage.
The steps. Remembering, Arabella stopped at the third stair from the top. She turned to Trey, pointing down at it. Then she raised a finger to her lips.
That step creaked.
Why was she bothering to keep quiet? It wasn’t as if anyone else but Trey could see or hear her, anyway.
The thought was quite lowering.
Arabella flitted through the quiet second story, past the balustrade that overlooked the foyer below. The paintings of Uncle Henry’s ancestors were swathes of darker shadow against walls bleached grey in the moonlight filtering from above.
A loud snore shattered the silence. Arabella froze. She found she was holding her breath.
Uncle Henry.
Trey flashed her a grin and gestured. Go on.
Arabella knew that her uncle slept soundly while her aunt regularly dosed herself with a sleeping draught. But Harry… she cast a doubtful glance at her cousin’s door. No light shone from under it, and she couldn’t quite make herself go through the wall to check if he slept.
The sooner we get this over with, the better.
Arabella hurried to her own chamber, around a corner and tucked to the side of the house, looking out into the branches of a chestnut tree. Aunt Cecilia had shown it to her with an apologetic air, but she had never minded being a little removed from the rest of the family.
She stood at the door as Trey came up. He put his hand on the handle and looked a question at her. Are you ready?
Arabella nodded. “Let’s do this.”
Let’s get my life back.
He opened the door and entered. Arabella slipped in behind him and the door closed again.
The first thing Trey did was to check the window, making sure the curtains were drawn shut. Then he muttered under his breath. Three golden lights floated from his hands to three points around the simple four-poster bed.
Her bed.
Arabella forced herself to look down at her own prone body lying there, so small and stiff under the coverlet.
It was like looking at a stranger—a very young stranger. Her face was pale, her lips bloodless. A dark bruise spread from her left temple and down her cheek. The implied violence of it made Arabella shiver.
In contrast, her dark hair was neatly braided under a pretty lace cap she recognized as one belonging to Aunt Cecilia. A starched white night gown was buttoned up to her neck and the coverlet drawn up chastely to her shoulders.
The whole effect was ghastly, as if she were a corpse laid out for her funeral. Arabella wanted to move away, but her legs had turned to jelly.
Trey bent over the girl on the bed, muttering half under his breath. His grey eyes were narrowed and focused, studying things Arabella couldn’t see.
She squinted and looked closer. Almost, she fancied, she could make out a dark blue glimmer all over her body.
Was that the stasis spell?
“Aha,” Trey said on a soft exhalation. He held up his left hand, index finger and thumb pinched together. “Found a life line. You are not completely disembodied, Miss Trent.”
Arabella couldn’t see that he held anything at all. “If you say so. Did you doubt you’d find one?”
“There’s always the possibility,” said Trey. He moved his hands, as if winding invisible thread.
