Phantom Pains Read online

  “How very . . .” I couldn’t think of an adjective.

  “Indeed,” she said dryly. “Now, about the soundstage.”

  “Right, that.”

  “What just happened is, as far as I can tell, impossible. The fabric of psychic spellwork is unmistakable; it shows in the eyes of the person being enchanted.”

  “If I was enchanted, who did the enchanting?”

  “That is the puzzle. We were alone in the soundstage, and there were no wards left upon it. No fabric in which Vivian or anyone else might have hidden a metaspell.”

  “We were standing by the well, though, and couldn’t see all the way down. Could someone have been down there?”

  “You remember what it was like down there for the fey we rescued. You’ve touched a Gate yourself. I can’t imagine that anything would be capable of casting a spell while in contact with it. I suppose it’s possible that there could be a ward hidden inside the Gate that is casting metaspells. But I have never heard of anyone anchoring a spell to a Gate. I suppose of all the theories it’s the most plausible.”

  “In any case,” I said, “it looks like Naderi’s stuck in stage 8 for the foreseeable future.”

  Caryl gave me a look. “Is that truly your priority?”

  “It’s the job I haven’t been fired from yet.”

  She gave a little sigh of concession. “Once we destroy the Gate, it should take care of the problem, but that will require approval from London. Could you get free of work tomorrow to come and meet Lamb? His plane gets in at around eleven a.m., so he should be ready to meet with you by the afternoon.”

  “Who’s Lamb exactly?”

  “Alvin Lamb; he runs National Headquarters in New Orleans. My boss, I suppose you’d say. He’s bringing one of his senior agents, Tamika Durand by name. I don’t know her. I imagine they are mostly coming to look for excuses to fire me, but I hope they will see stage 13 as the more pressing issue if you can explain to them what you experienced.”

  “This could be a good chance to show them how capable you are,” I said.

  Caryl looked at me flatly. “That is precisely what I am afraid of.”

  • • •

  I didn’t get home until after eight, thanks to some idiot who T-boned some other idiot right on the bus route. When I finally got back, my next-door neighbor Zach must have recognized my lopsided rhythm on the stairs that zigzagged up the outside of the apartment building, because his front door opened as I passed it on the way to mine.

  “Hey,” he said.

  The smell of pot smoke wafted from his apartment, and I wrinkled my nose. That was how we’d met, actually; I’d come over to tell him to knock that shit off before I puked up my actual guts.

  “Sorry,” he said when he saw my face. “I thought maybe you weren’t coming home tonight. Don’t worry—it’s already put out.”

  “Put out?” I echoed with a smirk. He grinned sheepishly, smoothing his thinning hair in an almost endearing display of false shyness.

  “You must be tired,” he said, still lingering in his open doorway. I couldn’t help but think how weirdly domestic it was that he’d hurried to snuff out his evening’s indulgence at the sound of my footsteps.

  “Shut up and come on,” I said. “If a girl ever needed her mind off a day’s work it’s today.”

  “You want to talk?”

  “Not even a little.”

  Zach didn’t say good out loud, but I inferred it heavily. Our relationship, such as it was, revolved around convenience and giving a complete mutual lack of shits.

  It had been going on since two weeks after I moved in, and over the last few months it had settled into an absurdly comfortable routine. Lights off, clothes off, minds elsewhere. He’d do the kind of fabulous tongue tricks a guy learns when girls aren’t likely to stick around on account of his charm, and then I’d zone out sleepily while he slipped on a condom and knocked himself out. Literally—the man was comatose afterward every time, so sending him home was never an option until the next morning. I was lucky he lived next door, or I’d have had to feed him breakfast, and then conversations would have been needed.

  I normally go off like a 1911 pistol at the least opportunity, but that night something just wasn’t working right. Teo would keep popping into my head and killing the moment, or I’d think of Caryl and feel sick about it.

  It went on so long Zach actually stopped to ask what was up, and I told him my mind was wandering. He told me to fucking focus, which made me laugh, and then I solved the problem by remembering the way Inaya had touched my hair at work and imagining it escalating into a hot make-out session on my desk. Off I went, and then Zach was on top of me thinking about whatever he thought about while he finished up. About a minute and a half later I was drifting off to the gentle, oceanic sound of his snores.

  I still didn’t know his last name.

  • • •

  “I need to take off after lunch,” I told Inaya the next morning as she swept by my desk on the way to her office.

  “I beg your pardon?” Inaya wasn’t wearing sunglasses, but she looked at me as though she were peering over the top of a pair. “You did not just say that. You know Araceli and I are in meetings from two thirty straight through four. Who’s going to take Mason’s call?”

  I felt a hint of shame, not for staring into the eyes of the person I’d fantasized about the night before—I was used to that—but for the swooping thrill of relief I felt when I realized I would not have to pretend cordiality toward Australia’s most misogynistic talent agent. It occurred to me yet again that I was terrible at my job.

  “I’ll figure it out,” I said. “But I’m not asking leave to get my teeth cleaned or something; I have to go to an urgent meeting at Residence Four.”

  Inaya hesitated, from what I presumed was unease. She’d been to Residence Four once—the time she’d let us onto this very lot in the dead of night to free the captive fey from soundstage 13—and she had not left with the best impression of the Arcadia Project’s operations. Residence Four was basically a loony bin-slash-interdimensional portal disguised as a crumbling Victorian house in the North University Park district near USC. Inaya was staunchly Christian, and despite her love for her Echo, the whole magical-parallel-world thing still gave her the screaming creeps.

  “Some people are flying in from National Headquarters,” I explained. “Residence Four had bedrooms open for them to stay in, what with two of the residents dying and one getting fired. So that’s where they’re headed once they fly in. I’m supposed to meet them there.”

  “You don’t think it’ll—mess you up?”

  I stared at her for a second. That was not what I’d thought her hesitation was about. “I’m pretty sure the worst is over,” I said. “If I were going to fall apart, I’d have fallen apart after seeing my ex-partner’s ghost.”

  “Do you really think it was his ghost?” Her voice was hushed, her eyes soft. I didn’t like playing the pity card, but pity looked good on her.

  “Caryl says ghosts aren’t real,” I said. “Given the amount of stuff she insists is real, I find it hard to believe she’d be needlessly skeptical. She said it was a spell that made me think I was seeing him. We just couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.”

  “And that’s what this meeting’s about. It’ll lead to us getting the soundstage back?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But it also means you’re not here when Mason calls, and that contract is already on thin ice.”

  “Look. Javier owes me one; I’ll have him take the call.” Javier was Parisa Naderi’s assistant, and Inaya had cheerfully forced me to become buddies with him over the past couple months. “There’s no guarantee Mason will even call this afternoon, and if he does, he’ll be happier talking to a man anyway.”

  “Javier doesn’t know the whole situation.”

  “I’ll fill him in. It’ll be fine.”

  Inaya made a sound of frustrated acquiescence. “On o
ne condition,” she said. “You’re going to treat Javier to lunch today, and while you’re over there picking him up you’re going to figure out what to tell Parisa about the soundstage. In person.”

  4

  When I was finally released for lunch, I made my way down the stairs and out of the gleaming glass-fronted office building, grumbling curses under my breath. There was a golf cart parked waiting for me at the curb, one of the few concessions I’d allowed for my disability. I didn’t have the money or the guts to have a regular car altered so I could drive it, but I was pretty handy with a golf cart. I started it up and waved at security guards as I passed them heading west; it served me well to be on friendly terms with security, since I knew I might have to ask them to overlook some weird-ass stuff.

  Valiant Studios was a constant work in progress; the idea was eventually to replace all the old 1940s and ’50s buildings with sleek new construction like the building I’d just left, all glass and open courtyards to take advantage of the climate in Manhattan Beach. But for the time being, people like Naderi were working out of cramped little bungalows with prisonlike windows and touchy plumbing. It didn’t do a lot to improve anyone’s mood.

  There were, thankfully, no stairs. The sidewalk led right up to the dun-colored door, and behind that was the cramped reception area and Javier, the wry thirtysomething I was here to see.

  “Hey, Millie,” he said when I entered. “You’re early.” I couldn’t blame him for looking a little disconcerted; since I represented Inaya, I usually brought drama.

  “I’m supposed to talk to Naderi before we go,” I said, confirming his suspicions.

  Javier gave me a stern look, narrowing his kohl-rimmed eyes. “She’s writing.”

  “The sooner I’m done with her, the sooner we can go to lunch.”

  Javier arched a brow at me, then sat back at his desk with an exaggerated show of ignoring my presence. I just stood there checking my text messages, because I knew it would drive him crazy.

  One from Caryl: 3pm please was all it said.

  I texted her back Can CB visit and fourteen smiley faces. If I was going to be getting mixed up in Arcadia Project stuff again, Caryl might as well allow my Echo to see me while I was at the Residence. It didn’t do me any good in the arcane sense, but he was a good guy and cared about me, and I hadn’t seen him since I’d pulled him out of that pit in stage 13 four months ago. I needed to know he was okay.

  Javier let out a stormy exhale and picked up his desk phone, stabbing some buttons. “Parisa, Millie wants to talk to you,” he said. Then, “I have no idea. But she’s not taking me to lunch until you do. She’s just standing here.”

  A door to his left opened and Parisa Naderi appeared. Her wildly curly mane of lead-and-sable hair was piled atop her head in a sort of exploded ponytail, and a pair of red cat’s-eye glasses sat perched atop her regal nose. She looked pissed off, but I’d never seen her look any other way.

  “Hi,” I said. “Let’s talk about stage 13.”

  “Not unless you’re about to hand me the keys,” she said. She’d learned English at age ten; her speech had a flavor too subtle to be associated with her native Farsi unless you knew what you were listening for.

  “There’s nothing I’d love more, believe me,” I said. “Does ‘progress’ count as good news?”

  “Come back to my office,” she said. “Javier gets cranky when I yell at people in front of him.”

  Fantastic. I followed her to her office, which was at the far end of the bungalow. It was littered with pillows and stained-glass baubles and weird lion-themed art that showed a peculiar lack of taste for a two-time Oscar nominee. The tablet she wrote the show on had been left sitting facedown on a pile of pillows; apparently she’d sent it to the corner to think about what it had done.

  “Just exactly how successful does this show need to become,” she said to me between clenched teeth, “before Inaya stops treating it like Fredo fucking Corleone?”

  I lifted my hands in the universal gesture of surrender and declined to remind Naderi that a month ago she had made everyone at the studio promise to enforce her vow to avoid foul language. Like Inaya, Naderi was religious; she just wasn’t very good at it.

  “This situation sucks,” I agreed. “I know it does. But what do you expect Inaya to do, exactly? She can’t get the stage up to code herself, and it’s taken us this long just to get an inspector to come and look at the place. There’s a problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “A huge hole in the floor, for one.”

  “So fix it.”

  “It’s not that simple,” I improvised. “There’s all kinds of crap stored in the basement that has to be sorted through, and now we think there might be something living down there.”

  “What?” Naderi made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Like what? Rats? The Loch Ness Monster?”

  “I didn’t hang around to make friends.”

  “So call an exterminator.”

  The word made me cringe a little, because it made me think of Vivian, the woman I’d killed. Among other things, her human alter ego had apparently left behind an international pest control empire, and what little I knew about the Arcadia Project’s recent activities seemed to involve fruitless attempts to sniff out her conspirators at the company.

  “I’m going to meet with some specialists this afternoon,” I told Naderi, “to find out the safest way to go about getting down there and cleaning it all out.”

  “Ugh!” Naderi paced the floor, scratching viciously at the back of her hair and pulling loose a few more ringleted strands. “Can you please keep this out of the press? If my actors hear about this—”

  “There is nothing I want less.”

  “PR aside, if we can’t get in there within about two weeks, I’m going to have to pull the show off the air.”

  “Wait, what?” Now she had my attention.

  “I can’t keep making the show in 8. I’m carrying this whole damned studio, and I’m in the smallest stage on the lot.”

  “That’s not Inaya’s fault. The pickup came so late—”

  “It’s not a threat; it’s a fact. Every week we have to tear down old standing sets to make room for new ones, then tear down the new ones to put the old ones back up. We’re losing time. Directors aren’t making their days; everything gets pushed back and back and back. We’re going to have to take a hiatus just to catch back up.”

  “I know you don’t like green screens, but at this point—”

  “If I’d known from the beginning I’d be stuck in 8, maybe that would be an option, but she kept promising 13, and now it’s too late. There are no effects people available.”

  “Maybe I can swing something. McGarry’s already got a meeting coming up with MDE about Quantum 8, and MDE’s in the process of buying Wendigo. Maybe I can waylay them, talk them into sending someone from Wendigo about Maneaters.”

  “I don’t want Wendigo; I want stage 13.”

  “Then I’ll get it for you. Just please, not another word about hiatus. Inaya will fire me and burn down the studio. Trust me when I say there is nothing I want more than a cleaned-up stage 13. I will make it happen.”

  “See that you do,” said Naderi. Her tone was frosty, but some of the murder had gone out of her eyes, so I counted it as a win.

  With that visit out of the way, my dread of it was replaced by dread of returning to Residence Four.

  I had only lived there for a week, but like summer camp, the time had a strange, dilated quality that made it feel like its own era. I’d made friends and enemies, and then made enemies of my friends, and then I’d seen three people die.

  Mostly I’d buried the trauma in some kind of mental tar pit, but thinking about the house I’d stayed in during that time brought it bubbling back up. At lunch I could hardly summon an appetite, and the way I picked at my chicken Caesar salad started Javier on a rant about body issues that I mostly tuned out. As soon as I’d gotten him prepared to handle
Mason’s call, I excused myself, called a cab, and had a security guy drop me off at the studio entrance.

  At this time of day it was a forty-five-minute drive from Manhattan Beach to the North University Park historic district, and I ended up feeling a little carsick in the back of the cab. I leaned my forehead against the window, letting the cool glass soothe me, and closed my eyes.

  When we arrived, I paid and got out but waited until the cab had driven away to actually turn and look at the place.

  It was pretty much as I remembered it, though I could swear that the deep bluish-green of its paint had faded half a shade. Something about the autumn air and the leaves that choked the rain gutters made it look even more as though the huge Queen Anne–style house might be haunted. I knew now what I hadn’t known the first time I’d seen it: that at the very top of that peculiar tower on the right side was a portal to another world.

  Teo’s battered bronze Honda Civic was still parked in the driveway; it looked clean, and there were only a few leaves resting on the roof. Someone had been driving it, caring for it. I averted my eyes.

  There was no easy way across the weed-infested lawn, but I’d gotten pretty good with my prosthetic legs in the last four months, and I had only the briefest fleeting wish for the cane I’d used in the summer. I hoped Caryl would answer the door, because Tjuan and I weren’t exactly the best of friends, the Residence manager was (perhaps justifiably) afraid of me, and I didn’t know the other two residents at all. I knocked on the door and waited.

  When it opened, I found myself looking down ever so slightly at a man with a silver goatee and mischievous peaked eyebrows. I’d never seen him before in my life.

  “You must be Millie,” he said. “I’m Alvin Lamb, head of the United States Arcadia Project.”

  “Caryl mentioned that you were coming,” I said a bit numbly as Alvin stepped aside to let me enter the house. “This must be serious business.”

  The battered grand piano was in the same spot in the two-story living room, but someone had rearranged the couches, and I didn’t recognize any of the other stuff littering the room other than Manager Song’s hydroponic herb garden. It always looked like some sort of bizarre garage sale in there. Monty, the gaunt one-eared tortoiseshell cat, was on the piano bench with his paws tucked under him and his tail wrapped around himself. He greeted me with a slow blink of his eyes, and I blinked back.