Phantom Pains

by Mishell Baker

  For some reason I’d assumed he’d been involved with Tamika; I guess I didn’t have a lot of experience with close bonds that didn’t involve sex. I tried to think of something comforting to say, but I got the strong vibe from Alvin that he was tired of talking to me, so I mumbled “sorry” and went back downstairs.

  Claybriar wasn’t in the living room where I’d left him; he was sitting at the dining room table drawing. All of my irritation vanished as a warm blanket of awe and lust settled over me. I had never actually seen him at work before, only the finished products.

  A few strands of hair had fallen over his eyes, but I could still see his intent, transported expression as the tip of his pen flicked across the paper with effortless precision. The undone top buttons of his shirt revealed a tempting wedge of skin, but honestly, his complete inattention to my existence was the most erotic thing about the whole scene.

  I edged closer, trying to muffle the sound of my shoes against the floor, a harder task than it would have been in the days when my body was a single coordinated machine. I didn’t want to disturb Claybriar, but I was desperate to see what he was drawing.

  It turned out to be a tall, skeletal figure clothed in shreds of black, great antlers curving from its hook-beaked skull. Malevolence burned in its eyes, and power—power beyond anything I’d experienced.

  No doubt about it; this was Winterglass, king of the Unseelie Court.

  And I had just asked my Echo to deliver that guy some really bad news.

  10

  I wanted to say something to Claybriar, but I wasn’t sure it was safe. He was casting an actual spell as I stood there; Teo had explained to me how empathy charms worked. Claybriar was binding his emotions into the drawing even as he was making it. From the expression on his face, I believed it; his look of concentration went beyond what you might expect even from an artist. There was something almost prayerful in it.

  I watched him as he filled in the last shadows under the king’s feet: jagged, slanting shapes that made it look as though the light source were low on the horizon behind him. There is something humbling about the presence of genius; I felt vulnerable and a little sick at myself for the way I’d dismissed him mere minutes before.

  At last he finished the drawing, shuddered, and pushed it away like a plate he’d cleaned too fast.

  “You okay?” I asked him softly.

  He lifted his eyes to look at me, his expression unfocused. It reminded me disturbingly of the way Tjuan had looked at me when he was hearing voices.

  “Yeah,” he said roughly. “Just not used to— I’ve never used Unseelie magic before.”

  “Wait, what?” I went to the table and sat with him. “You can do that?”

  “Yeah. I’m not great with the Unseelie tongue, but I guess I managed.” He surveyed the drawing and shuddered again.

  “Where did you learn to speak Unseelie?”

  “It’s not like human languages. It just sort of comes to you, if you’re attuned.”

  “But you’re Seelie.”

  “Seelie and Unseelie aren’t nationalities; they’re different kinds of magic. Most types of fey have potential to do one or the other. But if you use too much Unseelie magic it twists you, turns you ugly, so different species tend to have different preferences. It gets political, though, because of the king and queen. They serve as . . . the embodiment of each power, I guess you’d say, and you can’t serve both. You have to choose.”

  I looked at the drawing again. He’d written REIGN OF SHARDS beneath it. The paper seemed almost saturated with fear and hatred.

  “Why did you draw him?” I asked him.

  “It’s for the queen,” he said. “When I ask to go and see Her Majesty’s rival, she’ll fear betrayal. I’m bound to her by choice. If I swear loyalty to him instead, she’ll lose her power to command me.”

  “Do you even speak enough Unseelie to swear loyalty?”

  “Wouldn’t have to. All I have to do is prostrate myself before the king in a certain ritualistic way and boom, I’m Unseelie. They made it easy, so whole armies can do it at once.”

  “I can see why she’d be worried.”

  He looked down at his work, traced the edge of the paper with a fingertip. “That’s why I need her to know how I feel about him.”

  “Just tell her. Fey can’t lie, right?”

  “Fey language isn’t for—conversation,” he said haltingly. “Our language shapes reality. Look what saying my name can do. We have other ways of communicating besides speech. The ones you call the sidhe, our rulers? They can get right into your head, share thoughts directly. I have my drawings, and I can also make other objects communicate in different ways. Nothing too powerful.”

  “That’s very powerful,” I said, gesturing to the drawing. “Remember, your drawings are what brought me to you.”

  He gave an awkward shrug. “The fact that they last awhile is useful. Her Majesty can hold on to it while I’m gone. Her memory isn’t great, which is part of the reason she needs me.” I thought I saw something like tenderness in his expression, which made me unaccountably jealous, but before I could have another mood swing he picked up the paper and folded it, putting it into his pocket.

  I stared at it. “Uh, what did you just put that drawing into if your pants aren’t real?”

  He burst into laughter. I loved his laugh; it always sounded like some caged thing breaking out.

  “My clothes are real enough,” he said. “I bought them at Old Navy. I mean, the body under them’s pretty real too. It does—most of the body stuff.”

  “If that’s a real body, where does it go when I touch you?”

  “It goes wherever my real one is right now. I mean, I guess it does? I just wear the stuff.”

  “You’re honestly not even curious?”

  “Yeah, but it’s over my head. All I know is that they adapted the spell from creatures that naturally shape-shift. So now I’ve got more than one body, and they just rotate into place as directed by the spell. Except one of my bodies isn’t natural to me since I wasn’t born a shifter, so the spell’s required to make me change to it.”

  “But where did the body come from?”

  “There’s specialists at the Courts who make ’em.”

  “People who create entire functioning humans?”

  “The bodies at least, if they have the right blueprint. But they can’t animate them. Even the sidhe can’t manufacture sentience. So you don’t need to worry about some soulless army of artificial humans marching against you.”

  “I—really wasn’t until right this second.”

  “I guess my work here is done.”

  I sighed. “Your work here probably is just about done, right? Thanks to Her Majesty’s short leash. And I’ve got to get to therapy or I’ve flushed two hundred bucks.”

  “I’ll see if I can convince Duke Skyhollow to let me come back once I’ve reported to Her Majesty and delivered your message to the Unseelie High Court.”

  “But I want you now.”

  I’d chosen my words poorly; his eyes flared with a sudden naked lust that made me all too aware of what he really was.

  “It would be worth it,” he said quietly.

  I looked away. “Pfft. I’d kill you or something.”

  “Nah,” he said. “It’d just hurt me like hell. And I might be human by the time we were done. And probably in a coma. I’d be stuck in Arcadia for, I don’t know, decades, recovering.”

  “So, not worth it.”

  “Not for you, since you’ve only got eighty years to live.” His grin this time was decidedly feral.

  I fanned myself dramatically, trying to cover my discomfort. If he could have held his current form, I’d have been all over it. But the thought of—no, just no. I was not touching the goat half of him, not like that, not ever. The realization was pretty depressing.

  “Walk me back up to the Gate?” he said.

  His surgical gloves were lying crumpled on the table; he started to
put them back on. I liked his hands—long fingers, strong knuckles. Ideas started to come to me and sent the blood rushing to my cheeks. But no. I couldn’t very well ask him to do things for me that I wasn’t willing to do for him. Even though I knew he would. Especially because I knew he would.

  “Come on.” He held out his hand and I took it, lacing my fingers between his.

  He was patient with me on the stairs, letting me lean on our joined hands a bit.

  “I don’t actually know how to get into the tower,” I said. “The door is warded so I can’t see it.”

  “I can,” he said. “Just have to shift my focus a little. Hold on.”

  He stood for a moment in the second-floor hallway and stared at the wall as though it were a stereogram.

  “Aha,” he said. He stopped right before room 6 and opened a door that absolutely wasn’t there, a door behind which was a spiral staircase. I let out a little grunt of astonishment; I’d walked by it dozens of times and never had the faintest clue.

  More stairs, more leaning. He smelled so good I got a little light-headed.

  The floor of the tower room was actually the ceiling of room 6. Unlike room 6, this room had windows on all eight walls and was empty except for the Gate in the center and a single tiny desk at one side. At that desk sat Phil, who had apparently been having a nap; he furtively wiped drool from his salt-and-pepper beard as he sat up.

  I’d seen a Gate once before at Residence One in Santa Monica, and this one was enough like it that I couldn’t identify differences from memory. It was semicircular, with a large enough radius that Claybriar would be able to pass under it without ducking. On the outside, it was made of a staggering number of small, precisely shaped blocks of graphite covered—via some magic or other—in an unbroken veneer of diamond. The interior of the Gate was what you didn’t want to look at; it was a pulsing, roiling, impossible worldless nothingness that would make your brains leak out your eye sockets if you looked too long.

  “Is there a problem?” said Phil, narrowing his eyes at Claybriar. “You’re here for another two weeks, right?”

  “Summons from the queen,” Claybriar said. “I don’t have much choice.”

  Phil cocked a bushy brow. “La dee dah,” he said. “I guess there’s no rules about going back early, but you do understand that once you’re gone you’re gone. You can’t just pop back over here. The grand dame’s watching this area pretty sharp; you gotta get a new exit permit, gotta fill out a new I-LA4—”

  “I understand. Uh—could you give Millie and me a minute? To say good-bye?”

  Phil looked between us, and his air of irritation hardened into something downright resentful. For a moment I thought he was going to object, but instead he just gave a stiff shrug.

  “Fine,” he said. “Just don’t tell Caryl I left the Gate unattended.”

  Did he still think Caryl was in charge? Did he not know his partner had found a dead body? How long had he been up here? I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to break the news. “Thanks” was all I said.

  “After the fey goes through,” said Phil, “write it down in the log here. Should be self-explanatory. I’m gonna see if I can slip past Caryl for some coffee.” With that he trudged out, closing the door behind him.

  “He’s about to be in for a shock,” said Claybriar ruefully.

  “He’s had worse,” I said. “He was Gloria’s boyfriend.”

  “Oh.”

  I looked down at my hands. I was suddenly aware that it was just the two of us in the room and felt the weight of expectation.

  Claybriar took a half step closer to me. I inhaled tensely, then felt his gloved fingertips slide into my hair. He stroked them over my scalp; I exhaled and my eyes closed. This wasn’t the hircine lust I’d seen in him downstairs, but something tender and human that took me completely apart.

  “Is this all right?” he asked.

  “It’s fine,” I said weakly, my eyes still closed. “It’s just—normally—” I felt groggy; I couldn’t find the words.

  “Normally what?”

  “This seems like a kissing moment. But—”

  He leaned in, brushed my lips with his. His exhale of surprised pain was tinged sweetly with apples.

  “How about that?” he whispered, his breath warm against my mouth. “Was that all right?”

  “Yeah,” I whispered back. “But I don’t want to hurt you—”

  He answered by wrapping his other hand around my arm and pressing his lips to mine again. And again. Then just the faintest teasing flick of the tip of his tongue; if I’d had toes, they’d have curled. I opened my mouth, inviting him, but he drew back—likely pausing for relief, but gorgeously tantalizing all the same. He steadied himself for a moment before coming in again.

  “God,” I whispered the next time he drew that half inch back. I had quite literally never felt anything like this in my life. He put both hands under my arms, because I was starting to list to one side. Finally he drew back all the way and looked down at me, smiling a little.

  “You okay?”

  “Today is—not quite what I was expecting,” I said. “On a number of levels.”

  “Was that too far? I’ve been wanting to do that since—well, I guess since I saw you in that resort in Santa Barbara.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s good. It’s great. Just—well, fuck.” I let out a shaky laugh. “Bye, I guess.”

  His smile took on a tinge of sadness. “Take care of yourself, okay? I promise I’ll be back.”

  I was still too high to be sad about how long it might be. Borderlines live in the moment, and in that moment all was right with the world. In truth I’d lived long enough to know that soon the high would wear off and I’d crash hard, but it was easy not to care about that.

  “Watch out for that minotaur or whatever,” I said with a faint, tipsy smile.

  “Manticore,” he said, and made a face. “Thanks for reminding me. Would have been really awkward to go through the Gate with a massive hard-on.”

  “Oh God!” I said, pulling away from him. “Get the hell out of here.”

  So he did.

  • • •

  After fibbing my way through group therapy and tossing and turning my way through nightmares of rotting corpses, work on Friday was even more excruciating than usual. On top of the standard stress and nuisances, I had the constant awareness in the back of my mind that Caryl was locked in a basement and there was jack-all I could do about it.

  Things at Valiant weren’t exactly lining up to make me feel competent either. Since stage 13 was no closer to ready for Naderi, I managed to arrange an afternoon meeting with some guys from Wendigo Digital about doing green-screen work. Inaya even made a point of showing up personally. But instead of recognizing this as a gesture of respect, Naderi treated it like we’d sprung an intervention.

  It didn’t help that Rahul, the guy doing most of the talking for Wendigo, was the single most arrogant prick I had ever had the privilege of dealing with in years of working in entertainment. He kept staring at Naderi’s cleavage and spoke about television as though it were some poisonous ghetto where Wendigo’s reputation was in danger of being drive-by shot. If Naderi hadn’t made such a name for herself in film, I probably wouldn’t have even gotten Rahul to take the meeting, and as it was, I’m pretty sure he was high as a kite.

  Keeping the peace was like trying to juggle a razor, a bowling ball, and a vibrating dildo, and just as things were teetering on the edge of getting ugly, my phone buzzed against my thigh. I ignored Rahul’s frown and eased the phone just far enough out of my pocket to look at it. I didn’t recognize the number, so I declined the call and pushed the phone back into my pocket.

  “Look, sweetheart,” Rahul said to Inaya while I was too distracted to stop him from addressing her directly.

  “I’m sorry,” Inaya interrupted. “Did you just call me ‘sweetheart’? Are we courting?”

  Rahul laughed. Inaya didn’t.


  “You seem to forget,” Naderi said, “that you’re here to sell me on this half measure, this expensive half measure, when all I really want is space to build actual fucking sets.”

  “And you seem to forget,” he countered, his friendliness evaporating instantly, “that my company doesn’t need a glorified soap opera to make its reputation. I’m here out of respect for your track record, and out of respect for the numbers that your show is pulling in, and because it’s Friday afternoon and the man I wanted to be meeting with decided he’d take off early for his brother’s gay wedding in San Francisco.”

  Before Naderi could respond, I cleared my throat to pull her attention. “I know this is not what you wanted,” I said to her. “That’s on me. And I get that no one here is going to be best friends. But we still have no ETA on getting stage 13 up to code, and this would at least allow you to keep shooting. Wendigo does top-tier work, and consider for a second how improbable it is that we even got a meeting with them today. I think someone up there is trying to tell you something.”

  Playing on Naderi’s religious convictions and Rahul’s vanity in one stroke seemed to ease the tension in the room a notch. I was just starting to consider myself not entirely incompetent when my phone buzzed its quiet little song again.

  “So sorry,” I said, and disabled the ringer entirely. Whoever it was could wait.

  Apparently the caller didn’t agree, because when Rahul and Naderi finally agreed to meet again next week to talk numbers, I returned to my desk and saw that I had seventeen more missed calls from the same person.

  I called back, half angry and half panicked. I didn’t recognize the voice of the guy who picked up.

  “Who is this?” I asked irritably. “And what’s the big goddamned emergency?”

  “Assuming this is Millie,” said the mystery caller, “I would be the person you tried to talk into working with you less than twenty-four hours ago.”

  Oops. Alvin.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I was in a meeting at Valiant, and I don’t have you programmed into my—”

  He brushed right past my apology. “You need to come to Residence Four right away,” he said. “There’s someone here to see you. And only you, apparently.”