Portraits of the Forsaken

by E. E. Holmes

  Tia turned bright red, and started mumbling something, under cover of which I explained through the connection, “They’re attracted to him for some reason. They haven’t even noticed me. And he has no idea. I can’t figure it out.”

  I had to hand it to Hannah. She pulled herself together more quickly than I ever would have thought possible. She smoothed out her face, relaxed it into a smile and strolled forward as though she couldn’t clearly see a horde of spirits crowding the space.

  “I just meant the Charlie that Tia mentioned from class,” Hannah said, smiling and holding out her hand to Charlie. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything. I’m Hannah, I’m one of Tia’s flatmates.”

  Charlie took her hand and wrung it delightedly. “Charlie Wright, and please don’t apologize. I’d never consider it anything but a compliment to be associated with Tia.”

  Tia blushed, if possible, still redder. I decided to change the subject before she reached full traffic light-status.

  “Charlie invited us to stop by the museum for a tour,” I said, gesturing to the sign on the wagon’s striped awning. “Doesn’t that sound fun?”

  Hannah nodded vigorously. “Yes, absolutely!” I could see she was trying to steal glances at the crowd of spirits without drawing attention to herself.

  “Great!” Tia said, grabbing my arm. “Well, it was nice seeing you, Charlie. Good luck with the stall. I’ll see you in lecture on Monday?”

  “I look forward to it,” Charlie said with another disarming smile. “Brilliant meeting you both. I’ll be at the museum Tuesdays, Thursdays, and most weekends, so do stop by.”

  “Sounds great! See you later, Charlie!” Tia called, actually shoving Hannah and me along in front of her.

  As we passed the wagon, the spirit of a small girl in ragged clothing peered out from behind her mother’s skirts to gawk at us. As I glanced toward the spirit crowd, I caught her gaze by accident, and the girl’s eyes went as wide and round as coins.

  “Mummy, she can see us,” the little girl whispered. “Look, Mummy, there goes another one!”

  But before the girl could get her mother’s attention, Tia had pulled and yanked and prodded us down the road until the curve of the street swallowed Charlie and the Pickwick stall from view.

  “I’m sorry,” Tia said, and she was almost breathless, though we’d only been walking a few yards. “I had to get out of there. I was totally freaking out.”

  “I’m sorry I said that, about Charlie being your Charlie,” Hannah said fretfully. “I really didn’t mean to. It just came out.”

  “I know, I know,” Tia said. “It’s fine, it’s just… let’s go home, okay?”

  “Sure,” I told her, throwing one last look over my shoulder. “Sure, let’s go home.”

  4

  Making Mistakes

  WE ARRIVED BACK AT THE FLAT. Tia, murmuring that she needed to keep studying, scurried back into her bedroom, and shut the door. I knew I needed to check on her, to make sure she was okay, but there was a more pressing issue to deal with.

  I followed Hannah into her room and shut the door.

  “So, Tia’s new boyfriend is hella haunted, huh?” I announced, sitting down on her bed beside her.

  “That is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen,” Hannah said. “And you know I can’t say something like that lightly. I contacted Milo on our way up here and told him to go check it out, see if he could discover anything.”

  “Good idea,” I said, sighing with relief. “I tried to assess the situation as best I could, but I could hardly start questioning spirits with Charlie and Tia standing right there!”

  “I know,” Hannah said, biting at the fingernail on her pinky finger.

  “They were drawn to him, but… I couldn’t feel anything. Nothing unusual about him at all.”

  Hannah shook her head. “Me neither. I don’t even think he was a sensitive.”

  “If he knew those spirits were there, he was doing a very good job of hiding it,” I agreed, nodding. “Although, I suppose he could just be a really good actor.”

  “And did you hear what that child spirit said as we walked away?” Hannah asked.

  “Yeah, I did,” I said slowly. “I think she said, ‘Look Mummy, there goes another one’.”

  Hannah bit her lip. “That’s what I heard, too.”

  “Another one what?” I asked. “What do you think she was talking about?”

  “Well… it’s obvious, isn’t it? Another Gateway.”

  I gaped at her. “Hannah, that’s not possible.”

  “I know, but what else could she have meant?” Hannah asked, her voice shaking slightly. “The Gateway is what draws spirits to us. It’s like a beacon—they feel it and they follow it. What could that girl have meant, other than the fact that she could sense the same thing in Charlie that she sensed in us?”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense!” I said in a calm, rational voice, as though I could force the situation to make sense just by speaking about it in the right tone. “Durupinen are only ever women. Spirits couldn’t sense a Gateway in a man.”

  Hannah just looked at me.

  I faltered. “Could they?”

  Hannah shrugged. “I have no idea. There’s still a lot about Durupinen culture that we don’t understand.”

  “One aspect I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on is the gender aspect. Durupinen are women. Four years in, I think I’ve managed to grasp that much,” I said.

  “I don’t understand it either,” Hannah said. “But… I don’t know. What about Dormants?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, starting to pace now. I could feel a headache coming on.

  “Well, you know that Dormants exist,” Hannah began.

  I rolled my eyes. “Yes, of course I do.” As our good friend Annabelle was a Dormant—and a powerful one at that—I wasn’t likely to forget this particular tidbit about the Durupinen world.

  “Well, we had no idea the Dormants could have any particular abilities, besides varying levels of sensitivity to spirits,” she said slowly, as though she were writing the words out in the space inside her head so she could analyze the idea as it formed. “But Annabelle turned out to have Walker ability.”

  “So?” I failed to understand the connection.

  “So, abilities in the Durupinen world clearly linger, even when the family is no longer an active Gateway,” Hannah said. “Don’t you think it’s possible that male family members are susceptible to the same phenomenon?”

  I blinked. “Oh.”

  Hannah nodded, seeing the understanding dawn in my eyes. “Maybe Charlie is part of a family with Durupinen or Caomhnóir blood. Maybe the connection to the Gateway is still there?”

  “Do spirits sense the Gateway in Caomhnóir the same way they sense it in Durupinen?” I asked. I’d never considered this before.

  Hannah frowned. “I don’t know. They never really taught us very much about how the Caomhnóir are connected to the spirit world, did they?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s no big surprise, is it? Remember the Sanctity Line? They were much more concerned about keeping us separate than educating us about each other,” I snorted.

  “I wish Finn was here so that we could ask…” Hannah cut herself off abruptly in mid-thought and shot me an apologetic look.

  My whole body had gone stiff at the sound of Finn’s name, as though the word itself were a physical blow rather than just an emotional one. A muscle started jumping in my eyelid in anticipation of tears.

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry, Jess. I wasn’t thinking,” Hannah whispered from behind her hands, which she had thrown up over her mouth in horror.

  I swallowed. “Don’t worry about it. It’s fine. I’m fine,” I said dully. “I can’t just fall apart every time I hear his name, Hannah. We should all just get used to the fact that he’s not here and talk about him normally. Like a Band-Aid, you know? Just rip it off and be done with it.”

  “Right. I mean, if that�
��s what you want. Do… do you think we should just ask Ambrose?” Hannah asked, her voice still very small in her embarrassment.

  I shrugged. “Be my guest. I should go talk to Tia.”

  “Good idea. Please apologize to her again for me,” Hannah said. “Apparently, I’ve decided to just walk around with my foot in my mouth today.”

  I smiled at her. “Don’t sweat it. I’ve been hopping around with my foot in my mouth for years. You’ll get used to it.”

  Hannah returned the smile with a little sigh of relief and hopped up off the bed. “I’ll go talk to Ambrose, then. I’ll be right back.”

  I watched her walk out of the bedroom, across the flat, and out the front door. Then I continued to stare at the place she had vanished, allowing my eyes to go out of focus, my vision to blur with a film of tears, and the pain to wash over me.

  These moments happened when I wasn’t careful, so I tried to succumb to them only when I was alone and, even then, only briefly. The benefit of never dealing with your feelings is that you learn to appear like you are functioning normally. The façade becomes more and more lifelike. And since everyone around you wants you to be functioning normally, they happily buy into the illusion. And everyone wraps themselves in the lie and protects themselves with it.

  Say what you will about lies, but they are damn comfortable sometimes. Downright snuggly, even.

  But they vanish like smoke the moment they are tested, those lies, and then you’re only left with what you have let fester behind them, the intensity of which can take your breath away. So, I sat in that absence of air, of protection, of lies, and let it all wash over me for an endless few moments. And then I stood up, bandaged myself back up in the lies, and went to check on my best friend, because dealing with her pain would help me to avoid my own, and that was totally healthy and absolutely would not bite me in the ass later.

  Clearly, I was nailing this “adult” thing.

  Tia answered my quiet knock right away. “Come in.”

  She was over at her desk now, bent over a stack of notecards, scribbling away on the topmost one.

  “Hey, Jess.”

  “Hey. Just checking on you,” I said. “But I can come back if you’re in the flashcard zone.” This comment might have sounded snarky, but it wasn’t. The flashcard zone was an actual physical plane upon which Tia sometimes claimed to exist.

  Tia sighed and put her pen down. “No, it’s okay. I’m not in the zone.”

  “So… what happened in the market?”

  Tia hoisted an innocent look onto her face. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about you grabbing my arm and dragging Hannah and me away from Charlie as though he were juggling live grenades,” I said.

  Tia’s face sagged. “You noticed, huh?”

  “Noticed? I’m going to have a bruise on my arm for a week.”

  Tia narrowed her eyes at me. “Don’t exaggerate, Jess,” she said sternly, before widening her eyes in alarm. “Do you think Charlie noticed?”

  “It might have caught his attention, yeah,” I said with an incredulous laugh.

  Tia groaned. “This is a disaster. I don’t know what happened. I just… panicked!”

  “Panicked about what?”

  “About the fact that I really, really like this guy, and I don’t think I realized just how much until I had to introduce you to each other today,” Tia said. She was still looking down at the notecard, as though it were a cue card that she was reading her lines off of.

  Uncharacteristically, I kept my mouth shut and waited until she was ready to keep talking. After a minute or so, she finally went on.

  “I wasn’t expecting it. I felt so… impenetrable. So, I don’t think I recognized the warning signs before it was too late. You know me. When I want something, I just make it happen. I make it real. I didn’t want to be susceptible to falling for someone, so I just… wasn’t. So, it felt safe to talk to him, because I was so sure of myself. It felt safe to laugh with him. It felt safe to hang out with him. I should have realized it, Jess, because it’s exactly what happened with Sam. I told myself I had no time or interest in boys because I had school to focus on. So, I let my guard down and then…”

  “Boom,” I said quietly.

  “Boom,” she agreed. “And it’s like in medicine. You don’t consider the ailments that don’t fit the profile. You don’t test for illnesses that don’t match the presented symptoms. It’s illogical.”

  “The problem, of course, being that love defies logic,” I said with a chuckle.

  “Precisely!” Tia said. “And I’m not usually one to make the same mistake twice, but here I am!”

  “Hey,” I said, pulling my chair over closer to her desk. “You know, it’s not necessarily a mistake.”

  Tia made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a stifled sob. She put her head down on her arms. “Of course, it’s a mistake. What else could it be?”

  “I’ll grant you that it could be a mistake. Literally every decision we make in life can be a mistake. But if you think that way, you’ll never make a decision again. You’ll spend the rest of your life standing in front of a coffee shop menu, paralyzed by the implications of mocha instead of vanilla.”

  Tia made a little sound from behind her arms. It might have been a laugh. I took heart from it.

  “But the truth is, that even if it is a mistake—even if taking a chance on Charlie turns out to be a huge mistake—mistakes are important. Mistakes teach us things. They help us grow into the people we’re supposed to be.”

  “So, I’m supposed to be a person who is heart-broken and terrified of relationships? Awesome,” Tia sighed.

  “No, you’re supposed to be someone who makes plans and takes chances. Before this break-up happened to you, you only ever made plans. And you probably missed out on opportunities because you didn’t want to mess with your plans. I’m not saying plans are a bad thing,” I added swiftly, for Tia showed every indication of protesting. “I could stand to make a plan once in a while instead of drifting around aimlessly. But the point is that you grew from this. You took a chance. You changed the plan and look what happened? You’re independent. You’re living abroad. You’re fulfilling your dream of medical school and seeing the world, and you never would have done any of it if you hadn’t had that heartbreak.”

  “That’s true, I guess,” Tia said.

  “You guess? Come on, Tia. You are literally the smartest person I know. Give yourself the credit. You’re not just surviving, you’re thriving here. And once you get a little more distance from this, you’ll realize it was the best thing that ever happened to you.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I’d take it quite that far,” Tia said, wiping a smudge of mascara-stained tears from her cheek. “But I get what you’re saying, Jess, and I appreciate it. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. And don’t worry about Charlie. I don’t think he’ll care how you left today as long as you come back.”

  Tia grinned sheepishly, throwing her hands up in front of her face. “He’s so cute, isn’t he?”

  “Very cute,” I agreed. “And really nice, too. I can see why you like him.”

  “Do you want to come with me to the museum next week?” Tia asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “So… so you really don’t think pursuing this… whatever it is… with Charlie is a mistake?”

  I considered, for the very briefest of moments, telling her that Charlie was probably the most severely haunted person I had ever encountered, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. She looked so hopeful, so happy for the first time in months. How could I ruin that for her? No, whatever was going on with Charlie and the spirits, surely I could handle it without stamping out my best friend’s first spark of romance since getting her heart broken.

  “No. Definitely not a mistake,” I said.

  §

  I left Tia to her studying and found Hannah sitting on the living room sofa, jiggling
her foot impatiently.

  “What’s up?” I asked as she looked up at me.

  “Ambrose was giving a report over the phone to Seamus. He told me to ‘come back later,’” Hannah said, rolling her eyes. “And then he slammed the door in my face.”

  My whole body stiffened. “Come on,” I said, and marched out the door.

  I hammered on Ambrose’s door. I heard a pause in the low murmuring of speech inside, then his heavy, shuffling footsteps crossing the room. He opened the door.

  “We need to talk to you,” I said without preamble. “Now.”

  “I’m giving a report to S—”

  I reached out, pulled the phone out of his hand, and held it up to my ear. “Sorry, Seamus, Ambrose will have to call you back,” I said, and ended the call.

  Ambrose tried to grab the phone back from me, but I pocketed it. “Hey, what do you think you’re—”

  “I think I’m asking you to do your goddamn job and help us with something,” I said, shoving past him into his flat. “You can send your little spy report to Seamus later.”

  “It’s not a spy report,” Ambrose grumbled, but I ignored him, stepping over a pile of magazines and an overflowing trashcan full of Chinese takeout containers toward the couch.

  Honestly, I didn’t understand how anyone could live like this. His apartment looked like the site of a perpetual FBI stake-out, if FBI stakeouts took place in locker rooms. The blinds were always drawn, and so the room was always in semi-darkness, except where light slipped through the bent places in the blinds where he habitually surveyed the comings and goings on the street below. The table was littered with protein bar wrappers and empty soda cans strewn over a bed of disheveled file folders and images of runes. A football match was playing on the television screen, but its sound was muted, so that it merely cast a flickering glow over the entire space. The sofa had been pushed back against the wall and the carpet rolled up to make room for a weight bench and all its bulky, sweat-scented accessories.

  “What is it, then?”