Impostor Syndrome

by Mishell Baker

  Flashes, as though they were yesterday. Claybriar’s hands wrapped around my throat. Tjuan vaulting over the kitchen island toward me, something else’s murderous rage in his eyes.

  “Here we go then,” I said, reaching for the box.

  “Wait,” said Caryl, grabbing my wrist.

  My pulse picked up a notch. “Caryl, I’m going to need you to stop grabbing me all the time.”

  “Sorry.” She withdrew her hand.

  “These are two of the wraiths we were going to imprison anyway,” I said. “The only reason they’re not decorating Valiant Studios or a Residence somewhere is that we let Belinda get away with the book Brand put them in.”

  “I know.” Caryl shifted her weight, wringing her hands. “But I—it’s still—now that we know—”

  “Elliott,” I said. “Can you take away her feelings for a second?”

  He neither appeared nor answered me, but the line between her brows and the tremor in her hands disappeared.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said flatly. “Proceed.”

  I reached into the open drawer and touched the box. Nothing happened that I could feel: spellwork always died without even a whimper.

  “How ya like them apples, assholes?” I said to the empty air. “Remember me? Enjoy whatever spell you’re about to be put in.”

  I lifted off the cardboard cover and saw the most decrepit, discolored, feeble little drawstring cloth sack I’d ever seen in my life. It might have been red once, about a thousand years ago, but now?

  “Uh . . . ,” I said. “It kinda looks like . . .”

  “A waxed scrotum?” supplied Caryl.

  “How would you know?”

  “You realize,” she said dryly, “that I have worked closely with the fey for the past eleven years.”

  I wasn’t going to touch that one. “Okay, you pick it up. I don’t want to break it.”

  “Millie, as we’ve established, the spellwork is inaccessible.”

  “If you’re wrong?”

  “Millie, time is short. Pick up the bag or I’ll have Elliott give you hellish waking nightmares.”

  I grabbed the priceless scrotum from its shabby box, rolled it up, and shoved it into the pocket of my jeans.

  “Well,” I said. “That was less epic than I’d hoped. What now?”

  “Elliott and I will get to work rebinding the wraiths. You are no longer needed.”

  “You sure know how to make a girl feel special. But I’m not leaving without you.”

  “I will be fine.”

  “No, you misunderstand me. I’m not walking the fucking streets of London in the middle of the night by myself.”

  “Then wait with Claybriar,” she said. “I am about to knowingly torture a sentient creature, and so I would rather not have you nearby once Elliott returns my emotions to me.”

  Ouch.

  What could I do but go downstairs? I found Claybriar gazing out the front window, still holding our coats like a damned servant, and something about that rankled.

  “Hey, Hurricane,” he said softly when he turned and spotted me. “Everything go okay up there?”

  “Clockwork,” I lied.

  “Anything I can do to help? I’ve already gone through the files, pocketed some papers.”

  “What was in there that’s so damning about me?”

  “Just your mental health history, and a timeline of various events, supposedly showing that I started disobeying the Queen’s orders immediately after meeting you.”

  “Correlation doesn’t imply causation,” I said. “That’s weak.”

  “Not when Dawnrowan already wants someone to blame other than herself.”

  “Somehow I’m starting to feel less guilty about planning to rob her place. You’ve been there a lot, right?”

  “The White Rose?” He hugged the coats closer, returned to gazing out into the night. “Yeah. You’re going to have your work cut out for you.”

  “Well, it’ll be Shock doing the work, if we can get him. He goes there all the time. He has access to the area we need.”

  “The whole place is watched, though,” said Claybriar.

  “Watched by who? And how many? Anybody can be distracted. Or bribed.” I glanced pointedly upward.

  “Not these guards,” said Clay. “There’s only about half a dozen, but what one sees, they all see; they’re mentally linked by an enslaved spirit. It’s not dead like the ones in these wards, because it keeps busy; it can see the whole place at once, never sleeps. Anything weird goes down, anywhere, and it flashes the image to all the guards.”

  “Oh.” I scratched at my hair for a second. “Enslaved means spellwork, though.” I made a grabby-hands gesture. “What if I sneak in there and free the thing? That seems like a win-win scenario.”

  “Sneak in?” Claybriar looked at me and let out a soft snort.

  “Invisibility spell or something.”

  “Has no one described the White Rose to you?”

  “Uh . . . no, actually.”

  “It is literally a gigantic rose, made out of stone, standing on its stem. The palace is the flower part. The stem is . . . well, it’s a stem. No handholds, no stairs, nothing.”

  “Uh, how is that architecturally possible?”

  “It’s not, Millie. It’s Arcadia. Upshot is, the only way to get in is from the air.”

  “You don’t have wings.”

  “They send horses down. Winged horses. They pull a sort of litter.”

  “This sounds fucking insane.”

  “Again. Arcadia. My point is, you can’t just sneak in there invisible. They have to let you in.”

  “Okay, so we set up a meeting, like we did here. Same Trojan-horse deal.”

  Claybriar turned his gaze back out the front window. “I can’t think of any reason why the—oh shit.”

  “What—”

  “Get away from the window. Dame Belinda is approaching from down the street.”

  I backed away as though the window were on fire. “In the middle of the night? Why?”

  “No idea, but she’s clearly headed this way, which means you can’t leave through the front door.” He shoved our coats at me.

  “I’ll hide upstairs until she’s gone,” I said, clutching the coats.

  “No,” said Claybriar urgently. “Use the Gate. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come back.”

  “But Fred—”

  “If he wakes up, I’ll deal with him. And I’ll deal with her. Go!”

  I fled up the staircase.

  16

  I hurried upstairs as fast as I could push my titanium legs, extra careful not to touch anything this time. I thought about Fred and came to the slow, sinking conclusion that we were boned.

  Caryl was still in the artifact room, admiring Elliott’s work on the newly charmed desk drawer.

  “Don’t get too close,” she whispered when I walked in. She moved quickly to meet me. “Anyone who approaches the drawer will now simultaneously forget why he came and remember the second most urgent—”

  I handed Caryl her coat. “We have to get out of here,” I said, struggling into my own jacket in my idiosyncratic way, compensating for my bad shoulder. “Dame Belinda is coming!”

  Caryl drew in a sharp breath; her whole body went stiff with panic. At least an 8; not good. I grabbed her by the arm and steered her down the hall before she could completely flip out, mentally cursing the way the arthritic old building announced our every step. I unlocked the door to the Gate room and pushed a stiff-legged Caryl in ahead of me.

  Fred Winstanley was an elderly white man who looked like he might have been scraped off a street corner somewhere and dressed in a suit from a donation box. Unfortunately, he was also wide awake and on his feet, having heard our approach.

  Before he could even quite finish letting out an interrogative squawk, Caryl crossed to him and trapped his head between her shaking hands as though she were about to give him an ardent kiss.

  He had just
enough time to get confused and a little excited before she began a droning incantation in the Unseelie tongue that made his eyes go as dead and blank as wax.

  I slapped my hand over my own mouth to keep from screaming; I wasn’t sure what happened if spellwork got interrupted in the middle, and I didn’t think this was the prime moment to find out. By the time she was finished, the room reeked like a slaughterhouse. The old man stared at nothing, and Caryl gently eased him back into his chair.

  “What the hell did you do?” I asked her.

  The effort of casting the spell had tired her, easing her back a few steps on the stress scale.

  “I removed his memory of seeing us,” she said. “He’ll be fine, but we don’t have long. In less than a minute he’ll wake as though from a light doze and have no idea we were here.”

  “Caryl, you—”

  “We have to move,” she said, nostrils flaring, fists clenched. “Lecture me on the other side.”

  She grabbed my arm for about the fourth time that evening. This time I was too off-kilter to deflect a sharp needle of desire.

  She dragged me through the Gate, and at that, I did start screaming.

  • • •

  I could only hope that I was already in the interdimensional void by the time the scream escaped me. Everything in my body and mind seemed to turn inside out like a discarded sock, and then my voice came unstuck from my throat in a place where it didn’t belong, violating the moonlit hush of a vast, snowy forest.

  It would be an understatement to say that Daystrike was as different from Skyhollow as London was from Los Angeles. It was more as though London and Los Angeles both reflected, faintly, the differences in the soul that lay beneath them.

  Here, everything was black and white and silver, still and cold and grand.

  We stood in a wild wood whose vaulted canopy of intertwined white branches was dizzyingly far above our heads, clothed in shreds of luminous mist. Here and there, like fragments glimpsed through crocheted lace, I could see a coal-black sky and a huge moon, terrifying in its nearness. The air smelled of cream and peppermint; snow blanketed the forest floor at our feet. As I watched, that strange, fitful mist flowed and flickered among the branches like a visible wind.

  They must have built the L1 Gate on the third floor on Earth to mirror a higher altitude of land here; in Arcadia the structure stood atop a modest cairn on the forest floor. On closer examination, the cairn’s rocks seemed to be held together with glittering mortar. The Gate was a visual insult, a foreign invader, a massive black half ring with the horror of nothingness inside it, surrounded by wintry sylvan perfection.

  I shivered and turned my back on it. Caryl still had her hand around my wrist. She looked at me with those dark colorless eyes of hers and—I blame Arcadia—the small twin flames of anger and desire I’d carried with me from the real world erupted into one raging bonfire. I took her by the shoulders and backed her into a white-barked tree, held her there.

  “You enslaved another spirit,” I said.

  “Just for a little while,” she said breathlessly. Her words condensed into white mist in the air. “I’ll—I’ll undo the spell, once we’re safe.” Her eyes lowered to my mouth.

  My grip on her shoulders relaxed, then somehow became a caress, trailing down her upper arms. She tipped her head back against the tree, closed her eyes. The space between us was unbearable, like ice on bare skin. I melted it away. Kissed her. Her hands were shaking as they found my hair.

  I tried to stop kissing her, but it was so cold in that forest, and she was so warm. She made desperately pleased sounds as I coaxed her mouth open, sounds I felt against my tongue and down every nerve.

  I was drunk on minty Arcadian air as her gloved fingertips found purchase on the back of my jacket. I bit the side of her throat, just below her ear, and she made a deeper, more animal sound, slipping one hand under my jacket, under the back of my shirt. Through the silk of her glove, I felt the bite of her nails. I shuddered.

  “One of us has to come to our senses,” I whispered against her throat before lifting my head to kiss her again. She made a noise that I can only assume was a dissenting opinion, judging by how deeply her tongue was in my mouth.

  I think the only thing that stopped us was that it was too damned cold to start taking clothes off. I held her against me for a while. She was a shivering mess in my arms, and her frailty filled me with a fierce, overwhelming love that almost split me in half at the sternum. I stupidly told her so, three white-hot syllables misting in the frozen air. She pulled back to look at me.

  “I know,” she said. She fucking Han Soloed me. But her eyes were stars, her cheeks red roses. So gorgeous. I remembered the first time we were in Skyhollow, how close I’d come to kissing her then.

  “Arcadia’s messing with us,” I said, stroking my fingertips over her flushed cheek. She sank back against the tree, heavy lidded.

  “Not really,” she said.

  “We should stop.” I was insistent, even as my hand fit itself gently to the curve of her breast. “I’m not sure what Zach and I are exactly, but I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be doing this. We’re not thinking straight; this is some . . . passing spirit making us feel things. Like you said the first time we went to Skyhollow. Emotion just . . . flows through the air like water, right? Hits you randomly.”

  “Not randomly,” she said. “Like is drawn to like. The spirits leave you alone unless you draw them.” She smiled at me, slow and wicked, then leaned forward as though whispering a Big Secret. “You already wanted me.”

  The taunt irked me, reminded me that I’d been feeling something besides lust when she dragged me through the Gate. I drew away from her, wrapped my arms around myself.

  “I shouldn’t have let you cast that spell on Fred,” I said. “You enslaved another spirit without even thinking about it. Like an addict falling off the wagon.”

  “Please just kiss me again,” she said.

  For fuck’s sake; I almost did. Only sheer force of will kept my arms folded, my feet planted.

  “We need to discuss this,” I said. “Have Elliott take your emotions for a second.”

  From the look of it, I’d dashed her in the face with ice water. “I—cannot,” she said.

  “Caryl—”

  “It was Elliott I put into the spell.”

  The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

  I think even if we’d been on Earth, I’d have been sickened and sad. But here it was suffocating. For the space of five breaths nothing existed except the tragedy of that betrayal. Tears welled in my eyes and flowed freely; there was no consideration of stopping the tide. The air turned grief to ice on my cheeks.

  “How long are you going to leave him trapped in that man’s mind?” I said.

  “I’ll recall him by speaking his Unseelie name,” she said, “once it’s safe to risk Fred’s memory returning.”

  “How could you do that?” I asked, sniveling like a child. “To your best friend? And what if we need him to break into the White Rose? To say nothing of what a goddamned mess you’re going to be all the time now.”

  “Please calm down!” said Caryl, even as she burst into tears herself. “Elliott knows me. He is me. He knows why I did what I did, and he knows that I will call him back. In the meantime, he is not in a ward; he’s bound to a human who will move and think and keep him amused. If I’d asked, I know he would have consented.”

  “If you’d asked,” I said. “You didn’t ask.”

  Caryl looked at me for barely a second and a half before she broke down into sobs. Neither Elliott nor the laws of terrestrial restraint were going to stop her from facing her guilt now. I held her again, but this time my body felt like it was full of wet sand.

  That’s when Claybriar showed up. All things considered, it wasn’t the most awkward time he might have arrived.

  “She’s gone,” he said. A faun in the wintry wood. He belonged here in a way we decidedly did not. “And I guess Fred must have s
lept through your exit or something?”

  Caryl started bawling again.

  “Let’s not talk about that right now,” I said. “Why was Belinda even there?”

  “Fred got up to pee, found himself locked in. He called Belinda and tattled on me, and so she decided to catch me in the act, have a little chat with me.”

  “I wonder if Alvin rattled her, using you as his parting threat.”

  “Maybe. I let her ‘catch’ me with the files, and she and I had a long talk. I gave her back what I’d tried to steal, and I let her think she convinced me to try to bring you ‘back to the fold.’ As if you’ve ever been folded into anything.”

  Caryl stopped crying, at this. “Well done!” she said, and sniffled.

  “So she still thinks she can make friends with me,” I said. “That’s good news. But how’d you manage to make her think you were on board? I mean, you can’t lie, and she’s awfully sharp.”

  He shrugged. “I said stuff like, ‘What you’re saying makes sense,’ and ‘I’ve been a complete idiot,’ and that was all true. People who think they’re infallible are pretty easy to fool, to be honest.”

  “You perfect little pumpkin,” I said. “So what now?” Behind Claybriar’s shoulder, in the distance, I thought I saw a shape moving through the trees. A white stag perhaps, or a horse? But it was gone before I could point it out. “Is it dangerous here?” I thought to ask.

  “You’re deep, deep in Seelie territory,” Claybriar said. “The main danger is that you’ll never want to leave.”

  “I can’t say that I do, not with Fred waiting on the other side of the Gate. Caryl already sacrificed Elliott to make the dude think he didn’t see us.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, please let us not start that conversation anew,” said Caryl, ruining the mature exasperation of her words with more tears.

  “I don’t see that we have much choice but to go back through the Gate,” said Claybriar.

  I turned to Caryl in alarm. “Don’t you dare cast any more spells on that man.”

  “What choice do we have?” she said.

  “Lots of choices!”