After the exhausting climb to the third floor, I arrived only to realize that there was nothing there at all—the important business all took place on the lower floors. I turned and bumped into Caryl, who was climbing the stairs behind me. As I tried to push past her, she snaked out a gloved hand to catch my wrist.
Startled, I turned to look at her. The sly half smile I could see on her face in the darkness was just enough to distract me from my intense desire to return downstairs.
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Another ward?”
“This one is clearly meant to keep out anyone who does not work in this office.”
“I guess I didn’t get to check this floor, since the meeting was below.” Then I tried to go downstairs again. Once again she grabbed my wrist.
“Have you truly not developed the slightest resistance to psychic spellwork after all this time?” Caryl said. Her amusement seemed to have dialed her stress down to a level 6, maybe even 5. Good that my incompetence could serve a constructive purpose.
“So what now?” I said. “Am I going to have to destroy and recreate another spell? Caveat’s a little busy.”
“Just ignore the ward,” Caryl said. “Now that you know it’s there.”
I gave her what I hoped was a withering look, then sighed and turned to climb the stairs, even though there was nothing up there.
Of course there was. The Gate, and the Medial Vessel, among other things. I had all the intellectual knowledge of the floor’s contents, but the parts of me that usually drove my decisions were screaming at me that this entire floor was a dead end, that I had important things to do and limited time.
I forced my legs to do the opposite of what instinct was telling them to do; I continued from the top landing, turned left down the hallway. There were no doors in the hallway, but I kept walking anyway, because the door that I knew should have been there was at the end, on the right.
“Allow me,” said Caryl, her eyes taking on a subtle greenish luminescence in the dark as she shifted her perception to the arcane spectrum. I found this strangely, unaccountably hot.
After a moment she reached toward the wall and drew a door out of it as though the wall had been a thin layer of mud, the door lying just beneath its surface.
“Damn,” I whispered.
She gave a modest little shrug and preceded me through the dark doorway.
I let my eyes adjust to an even deeper level of darkness. The room had a deceptively dull office-style layout and the same monochromatic color scheme as the rest of the interior, but even with virtually no light I could tell that many of the “everyday” objects were not what they seemed. I recognized the disc-shaped “tablet” that was actually a dish of arcane liquid, used in various scrying procedures. A two-handled coffee mug, on closer inspection, was not quite touching the desk it appeared to rest on. One shelf was lined with small glass vials and flasks whose nefarious purposes I could only imagine. I tried not to touch anything.
Caryl scoped out the room with her eerie, otherworldly gaze, carefully peering in drawers and opening sleek black cabinets above desks. At last, drawing out the bottom file drawer on the far wall, she made a soft sound of discovery.
“Here,” she said.
“Found it?” I moved toward her but stopped a few feet away as a precaution.
“The spellwork on this box,” she murmured in a tone of sudden dread. “I don’t know if it’s right to destroy it.”
“Uh . . . except that it’s the whole reason I’m here?”
“I know,” she said. Her voice shook, barely perceptible. “I just—I feel conflicted.”
“Ignore it,” I said. “Pretend it’s a ward.” I edged carefully closer, peeking into the drawer she’d opened. All I saw was an old battered cardboard box that had once contained copy paper. It gave off a vague impression of fetid neglect that suggested its current contents were more likely roaches or maggots.
“I hadn’t thought of treating emotions as hostile spellwork,” said Caryl. “For the most part I—I have been trying to condition myself gradually, calling upon the construct when—”
“Caryl,” I said. “Focus. Tell me about the ward on the box. What’s freaking you out about it?”
She was tense; her hands clenched and unclenched. I laid a hand on her shoulder, just a ghost of a touch, and she seemed to relax.
“First,” she said, “it’s a charm, not a ward. But an extraordinary one. From what I can read of the charm’s structure, it is designed to exude a sense of unimportance and uncleanliness. More importantly, anyone who pushes past this impression to touch the box must be protected by a certain enchantment, or the charm will trigger a curse of its own. Paralysis, I think.”
“Leaving the thief stuck here, red-handed.”
“A charm that casts a curse.” She looked at me, clearly upset, clearly waiting for me to understand something.
“So do I touch the box or not? Is it going to curse me?”
Caryl exhaled with frustration, stress level rising. “Vivian’s metaspell on—on soundstage 13. It was constructed in a similar fashion. Your touch simply dispelled it; you were not cursed. Somatic enchantments have no effect on you.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“It’s a metaspell, Millie. One spirit nestled within another, working voluntarily in harmony. This was not cast by a warlock, or a sidhe.”
Suddenly I understood. “It was cast by a spirit,” I said. “Fuck. Still alive.” I turned, addressed empty air in a whisper. “Elliott, are the spirits in it alive? Can you confirm?”
Elliott popped into view. “They are,” he said. “But they are too dazed to cast any spells in their own defense, so do not let that concern you.”
“Why so callous?” I said. “If the spirits are in this spell voluntarily, and they’re alive, then what we’re planning to do here is torture and eventually murder them, right? How is that okay?”
“You’ve met them,” said Elliott. “The wraith that possessed Tjuan for months, and the one that possessed Claybriar.”
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.