Phantom Pains Page 6

  “Clay?”

  It took him a moment to drag his gaze back to me, and when he did, he looked pained. “Damn it,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The queen just summoned me.”

  “She what?” I forgot the apple on the counter. “How? Why? You’ve been here, like, five minutes!”

  “She isn’t great at remembering my schedule.” He looked sheepish. “I’m so sorry. I’ll stay as long as I can, but . . .” He trailed off with a shrug.

  “Screw her. She can wait a couple of weeks.”

  “I’m sure she can,” he said, “but I can’t. She spoke my name in the Seelie tongue; that’s an arcane summons. I’m stubborn enough to put it off awhile, but it’s going to needle me worse and worse until I’m standing in front of her.”

  “Wow,” I said bitterly. “It’s good to be the queen.”

  “Anyone who knows my true name could do it,” he said. “Luckily, the English translation doesn’t have that power, or I’d be crippled, the way you people throw names around.”

  His choice of the word “crippled” rubbed me the wrong way, but I let it slide. “Who else knows your true name?” I asked.

  “Just the queen and my mom, really. And even my mom has probably forgotten it.”

  “Are you going to tell it to me?”

  “I know better than to give you that kind of control.” His smile was lopsided.

  “But Queen Fairypants gets to know?”

  “That’s part of the whole champion gig, unfortunately. She can’t give me orders unless I’m in earshot, so she has to have a way to order me into earshot.”

  “What bullshit! You said you were going to stay two weeks! Are they at least going to let you come ba—”

  I broke off, because apparently our bickering had attracted an audience.

  A tall black man was standing in the kitchen doorway, one hand braced on either side of the frame as though it were all that held him up.

  “Tjuan,” I exhaled in shock. I almost hadn’t recognized him. He looked horrible: unshaven, ashy skin, unkempt hair. Because he tended to dress casually, I’d never realized how immaculately put together he’d been last summer until I saw the absence of it.

  “You,” he said to me by way of greeting.

  “Millie. And this is Claybriar, remember him? The fake cop?”

  “Hey,” said Claybriar sheepishly. Belatedly I handed him the apple, and he looked at it almost reverently before taking a bite.

  “Why are you here?” said Tjuan.

  There was something disturbing about his manner. He’d always been laconic, but this time it was more than that. His eyes were intent, his head tipped to one side as though he were straining to hear me in a crowded bar.

  “I’m meeting with some people from National about a—There’s a situation at Valiant Studios. They needed my report.”

  “So you’re not working here.” I couldn’t tell if he was relieved, disappointed, or confused.

  “No, luckily for all of us,” I said. “How—how have you been?” His stare got about fifteen degrees colder, but I pressed on. “Caryl says you’ve been ill?”

  He had that look again, as though someone were talking over me, drowning me out. It occurred to me with a chill that maybe somebody was. I’d seen that kind of thing at the Leishman Center when I did my time there after my suicide attempt.

  “Hearing voices?” I said sympathetically.

  He looked startled. “You hear it too?” The hope in his eyes was so desperate that a lump formed in my throat.

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  It was as though he saw the sympathy and realized how much he’d given away. I watched him retreat into himself, working the strings of his face until they all went slack again. Then after a moment, he looked directly into my eyes and smiled with one corner of his mouth.

  “It gets tedious,” he said. “Why can’t the voice ever say, You’re all right, Tjuan, or Beautiful day, or Let’s go volunteer at the soup kitchen? You know, just for a change.”

  His attempt at humor, of all things, made the tears rush to my eyes. He looked away as though I’d had a sudden nosebleed.

  “Tjuan,” I said, “if you ever want to talk to anybody, somebody you don’t work with—”

  By way of answer, he turned around and left. I looked at Claybriar, and his face looked the way mine must have.

  “Poor bastard,” I said.

  “I’ll admit I’m not always the best at reading humans,” said Claybriar with a mouthful of apple, “but he really does not look well.”

  “I’ve got to find Caryl,” I said.

  Claybriar looked at his apple with a conflicted expression.

  “You can bring the apple,” I said.

  Caryl was seated on the larger couch in the living room, going through some papers in a manila folder. Monty the cat had vanished; most likely she’d shooed him away. He’d belonged to her mentor, Martin, and even after four years, her unmanaged grief made it difficult for her to be around the poor animal. I was starting to understand how she felt.

  She looked up when Claybriar and I entered, and a little smile curved the corners of her mouth. She hadn’t quite figured out how to make a smile look genuine, but it was new that she was even trying.

  “I just ran into Tjuan,” I said.

  Her smile vanished. “Ah,” she said.

  “What the hell is the matter with him?”

  Caryl hesitated. There were all kinds of Project rules about confidentiality and personal questions, but so long as Caryl was still in charge in Los Angeles, she got to make the call about volunteering someone else’s information. After a moment, she seemed to decide I had the right.

  “It’s some variety of schizophrenia, as far as we can tell, but it doesn’t respond to medication. He’s been in a kind of remission for years, which appeared to be triggered by electroconvulsive therapy. Unfortunately, his symptoms returned after the trauma on stage 13.”

  “Could it be a curse?”

  She shook her head. “If it were, I would see the spellwork, as I did with you. I think the experience simply—broke him.”

  I thought of his face when Vivian severed the rope and Gloria plummeted screaming down the well.

  “I had no idea he was schizophrenic. He was doing so well when I met him.”

  “Even now, he’s doing his best to hide his symptoms, but I am worried about him.”

  “Shouldn’t he be taking something? I know Project employees aren’t supposed to be on meds, but—”

  “It’s not that simple. Those on active duty have to keep their blood free of controlled substances for arcane reasons, but if I thought medication would help him, I would be the first to make certain he had it, even if it meant he needed to take an indefinite break from active duty. But part of what made his illness so dire when we found him was that he didn’t respond to medications. He suffered the worst of their side effects with no abatement of symptoms. It would be cruel to put him through that again, so we shall simply care for him as best we can.”

  “What if he can never go back to active duty?”

  “Part of our mission statement is that so long as you honor our contract, you are as good as family. We take care of our own.”

  “Unless ‘our own’ happens to be a warlock I guess.”

  Caryl spread her hands in a graceful shrug. “Perhaps. But for the others, the security of knowing they will always be cared for is nothing short of miraculous. Fortunately, we have the gratitude of hundreds of incredibly wealthy people, which means that paying for medical care is rarely a concern.”

  “You can’t tell how well-funded the Project is by looking at the state of this house.”

  “I think you’ve just seen why we don’t waste our money on wallpaper, Millie.”

  I hadn’t known Tjuan as well as I’d known Teo. But the thought of him as an invalid under the protection of the Arcadia Project made me profoundly sad. He’d been a screenw
riter, according to conversations I’d overheard between him and Phil. That was probably shot now too.

  “I feel like I should try harder to talk to him,” I said.

  Caryl stared at me. “And just what do you think that might accomplish?”

  A relevant question, actually. One of the things I was working on in DBT was having goals for personal interactions. Borderlines aren’t great at healthy interpersonal stuff, and having a set of checklists based on goals is useful to keep us from veering off society’s rails. This particular interaction would fall under the heading Relationship Building, though it was odd to think of it that way.

  “I was there that night too,” I said. “And I’m not his boss. I also lost my partner, and I know it’s not the same, but—I don’t know. I never made things right with Teo. If I walk away from Tjuan now, leave stuff unsaid . . .”

  Caryl studied me for a moment, then said, “Be my guest, I suppose. He is in room two, next to the room where you and I spoke privately before. But don’t be disappointed if he isn’t inclined to confide in you.”

  Whatever I was going to say in response was cut off. Somewhere at the back of the house, a woman let out a shrill, harrowing scream.

  8

  The scream was like something from a horror movie, long and full throated. We all leaped to our feet a quarter second into it: Caryl and Claybriar running toward the sound, me away. No thought; pure adrenaline. No sooner had the scream ended than it was followed by another, just as long, more ragged. I stopped short of actually fleeing the house, but I cowered, forehead against the front door, the heels of my hands pressed into my ears and my eyes squeezed shut. My body responded to echoes of echoes of echoes.

  Gloria’s scream when Vivian severed the rope.

  Gloria shrieking at Phil: Say it to my face!

  My father shouting into the phone: a deal gone wrong, his voice twisted with hate. The suffocating quiet of the house as he searched for me afterward. What are you doing under there? I wasn’t yelling at you. Get up; you’re too big to act this way.

  Eventually I felt Claybriar’s hands prying mine away from my ears. His fingers were warm, even through the latex.

  I looked up, waiting for a rebuke. Instead he touched my face, the side of his thumb tracing a gentle crescent at my cheekbone.

  “A woman has died,” he said. “Tamika. Do you know her?”

  “She’s from—died?” I started shivering. “Died how?”

  “A spell,” he said. “Someone cast a horrible spell.”

  “What exactly—?”

  He shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “She’s—her body has—dissolved.”

  “What?”

  “Decayed,” said Caryl’s husky voice, its emotionless affect particularly unsettling in context as she entered the living room. “A Seelie wouldn’t recognize decay, I suppose.”

  “Are you sure it’s her?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Caryl. “Same clothes and shoes, same hair. Lying in the room we gave her. The rest of her is nearly unrecognizable.”

  “Was that—” I felt light-headed. “Was that her, screaming?”

  “No. That was Stevie. She found the body.”

  As if on cue, the distant sound of vomiting came from one of the downstairs bathrooms. This was really turning out to be a vomiting kind of day.

  “Where’s Alvin?” I asked.

  “In there with her.”

  “With Stevie?”

  “With Tamika. It would seem his attachment to her overrides his horror at the state of her body.”

  But now he was coming into the living room, and he was no longer the soft-spoken “good cop.” His eyes were savage, and he raised a finger to point directly at Caryl.

  “Lock her in the fucking basement.”

  “Who?” said Claybriar at the same moment I said, “Basement?”

  Caryl lifted her hands in surrender. “I don’t need an escort,” she said. “I will go willingly until we find out what has happened.”

  “Until we—” Alvin’s fists clenched. “How many Unseelie spell casters are there in the house right now? How many?”

  “Caryl was sitting right here when she died!” I protested.

  “No,” Caryl corrected me, like an idiot. “I was sitting here when Stevie found Tamika. I can’t say for certain where I was when Tamika died, because there is no way to ascertain time of death.”

  “You just shut the fuck up right now,” said Alvin, visibly shaking with rage.

  “Right,” said Caryl in a clipped voice. “Basement. The lock combination is three seven zero one. You’ll want to retrieve me when the time comes to see to her remains.”

  “Go,” barked Alvin; I flinched as though an arrow had thwacked into the wall by my head. “Go, before I tear you apart.”

  Caryl went. When I spoke, my voice came out a sort of choked whisper. “What are we supposed to tell the poor woman’s family?”

  “We’re her family,” said Alvin. And as soon as he’d said it, all his anger drained away and left his eyes hollow. I half expected him to implode, so sudden was the absolute vacuum I saw through those windows.

  “There has to be some other explanation for this,” I said. “Caryl is not a murderer.”

  Alvin’s eyes sent up another weak flare of anger, but then he just turned and followed Caryl’s path to the back of the house, presumably toward the basement prison I’d had no idea existed.

  I started to follow him, but Claybriar’s latex-gloved hand closed around my forearm, pulling me back gently. Not against him, but almost.

  “I wouldn’t,” he said. “That man’s a gun looking for a place to go off.”

  I met his gaze, having to tilt my head back to do so. “Looks like you picked the worst possible day to show up. I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m glad you’re not alone right now.”

  Much to my irritation, my left eye chose that moment to release a single tear, making Claybriar’s face go all soft and puppy-dog. I wasn’t crying, really; that eye’s corner was pulled out of shape a little by scar tissue, so it did that sometimes when my head was tipped back.

  “Seriously?” I said. “It’s me you’re worried about?”

  “Forgive me for trying to be nice, Roper,” said Claybriar, catching the tear deftly on the side of a gloved finger, then flicking it away. “But you’re kind of a mess.”

  “I’m pretty low on the list of who needs pity at the moment.”

  “Let’s go outside for a second,” said Claybriar. “Get some air. There’s nothing we can do until that man calms down a little.”

  “Right,” I said, moving to the front door and opening it for him. “Fresh air and small talk, I guess. How’s your sister?”

  “She’s fine,” he said stiffly, seating himself on the filthy love seat on the front porch. I stayed standing, closed the door behind us. “She’s gone back to the Grove,” he went on.

  I frowned, his words taking a moment to penetrate my fog of anxiety. “I assume you’re not talking about the shopping center.”

  “It’s an enclave of my people, near where you grew up I think.”

  “North of Atlanta?”

  “I don’t know your cities very well.” His tone was distracted, irritable. “East of here a long ways. I was sort of called there when you were born, I guess. My sister came along.”

  “Called from where?”

  “Like I say, I’ve been serving the Seelie Queen a long time. We were near the Seelie High Court before that. Daystrike Forest, on the flip side of London.”

  “Clay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were working as the queen’s investigator when Rivenholt went missing, right?”

  “Yeah. Kind of my specialty.”

  “Do you think you could investigate now? Help find out what’s going on here?”

  He blew out a frustrated sigh. “I wish. But even right this second, with my Echo s
tanding five feet away from me and a corpse in a back room, it’s taking most of my concentration to do anything other than get up and go home.”

  “That damned summons.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry. I’ll stay as long as I can, but my powers of deduction are hobbled to say the least.”

  I paced back toward the house. “I should see if Alvin’s left Caryl alone yet,” I said.

  “Three seven zero one!” he blurted, like an eight-year-old too excited about knowing the answer to raise his hand.

  I stopped. “Beg your pardon?”

  “I can remember it,” he said. “The code to unlock the basement.”

  “Nice.”

  “I’ve always had a good memory,” he said. “But for a faun, that just meant remembering the names of people I didn’t live with, or having a vague sense of time passing. Since I met you, information just—collects, like rainwater. How do you people cope with it all?”

  I managed a smile. “Your memory’s probably better than mine at this point,” I said. “In fact—you’d better come with me.”

  We went back inside, and I poked around the back hallway until I found a likely-looking door with a combination lock hanging from it. I had Claybriar repeat the combination.

  I rotated the numbers until they lined up, squeezed the lock, pulled it apart. The door opened with a creak, and I held it for Claybriar. Despite everything, my eyes wandered down the back of his gray T-shirt and over his jeans as he passed by. Whoever had designed that ass clearly had it in for me.

  The basement was decently lit, as basements go, and tidy except for some stacked boxes and rolled rugs along one wall. There was a toilet and an austere utility sink in one corner, exposed to the rest of the room. The lightbulbs were bare, and a strong smell of mildew and the appearance of spiderwebs made the air seem unclean. There was no furniture; Caryl sat cross-legged on the floor. When we entered, she didn’t get up.

  “You probably should not be down here,” she said. “Alvin could return at any moment, and I don’t want you in the path of his anger.”

  “What’s he like?” I said, moving to stand in front of her. “How worried should I be?” Claybriar sat on the floor nearby, but since I had no idea how long the conversation was going to last, there was no way I was going to go to the trouble of getting down and back up again.