Chapter 9

As we walked to the parking garage where Falin had left his car, I wondered if the queen or any of her council members owned a car and if it was parked in Nekros. Maybe she’ll just conjure a minivan from glamour. Because seven people and a body in a knapsack were not fitting in Falin’s car. I was almost disappointed to learn the FIB kept a small fleet of cars in the garage for instances when fae who didn’t spend much time in mortal reality decided to pass into Nekros for a visit. We split up with the queen, Ryese, and me riding with Falin, while Lyell, Blayne, and Maeve followed in a loaner. I tried to arrange for the skeleton to go with the councilors, but the queen wouldn’t let it or me out of her sight. Which meant I was stuck with it, and now that we were out of Faerie, I could feel the body, my grave magic having to be held in careful check to keep it from slipping into it.

The car ride was uncomfortable, in more ways than one. I hadn’t bothered trying to call shotgun, and wasn’t the least bit surprised when the queen slid into the front passenger seat. That left Ryese and me in what there was of a backseat. When I’d first met Falin, he’d driven a flashy red sports car that had gotten totaled during our first case together.

This car could have been that one’s twin.

Unfortunately, when it had been designed, the backseat had clearly been an afterthought, with absolutely no consideration for legroom in the event someone actually wanted to sit there. So, I ended up with my legs practically pressed to my chest and the knapsack of gruesome remains wedged between Ryese and me. Even the arrogant fae couldn’t make the seating arrangement look comfortable, and he scowled at the back of Falin’s head for the extent of the ride. At least Falin left the top down and the wind roaring by pretty much prevented any extended conversations.

The house would have been the most private place to conduct the ritual, but I refused to have a body lugged into my bedroom so we were headed for the forest just out of town. The drive wasn’t long—the Quarter gave way to the suburbs and then out into the wilds. I’d hoped that the trip would give me time to form an argument that would force the queen to grant me independent status, but no brilliant revelations had hit me while crammed in the backseat with a bagged body pressed against my thigh.

We found a small clearing far enough off the road that we couldn’t be seen, and I used my dagger to draw a circle for my ritual. The huge skirt made the task difficult, and I used several colorful curses as I tripped on the hem for the third time. If the gown hadn’t been ruined before, it likely was now, though Falin’s glamour still hid the damage. By the time I completed the circle, I was breathing hard, mostly from fighting with the damn layers of tulle in the skirt.

The queen frowned at me. “Do you have the energy to complete this task?”

“Today? Yeah, but I apparently need a tie to Faerie sooner rather than later. I request independent status in exchange for this ritual.” Okay, I’d been turned down once, but if I refused to ask for anything else maybe I’d wear her down, right? Probably not.

“I could offer you a place of honor in my court. Riches. Power. A place on my council. A union with my beloved nephew.” She motioned to Ryese.

I resisted a groan, but it was a near thing. The council members began chittering at the queen’s words, likely at the idea of adding me to their lot or perhaps about the proposed marriage to Ryese. I didn’t care which. I wasn’t interested in either, but especially not the latter. I pointedly avoided looking at Ryese. Still, I could imagine the haughty look on his face that was part a dare to accept the offer and part anger already guessing I wouldn’t.

“I will accept nothing less for the ritual than independent status.”

The queen frowned at me and we stood in silence for several minutes, glaring at each other. She took a step closer. I had the urge to back away, but I held my ground.

“Find out who killed my subject and created that monstrous display in my throne room, and I will grant you independent status for a year and a day,” she said, and I nearly laughed in a mix of relief and surprise—I’d demanded it three times, but I guess I hadn’t really expected her to grant the request. She wasn’t quite done yet. “During that year and a day, you will agree to continue to reside in my territory and at the end of it, you will inform me before swearing allegiances with any other court.”

I almost blurted out “deal,” but bargains with fae are binding, so I forced myself to examine the conditions she’d laid out. A year and a day wasn’t much time in the grand scheme of things, but it was more time than I had now and I was unlikely to get another Faerie monarch in the position of needing a favor from me before Rianna and I had faded out of existence. The extension would give me time to arrange something more permanent. And while she’d stipulated that I inform her if I’d be joining a court other than hers, she hadn’t said I’d need her consent. Of course, if she learned I was leaving her sphere of control, she might just have me killed when I told her, but what was my choice? Die now or die later? At least I’d have time to try to come up with a better plan.

I nodded and held out my hand. “I agree to your terms.”

“It is settled then.”

“Witnessed,” Falin said from where he stood. Each council member also repeated the phrase. It was a formality, as I could already feel the small binding our agreement had created. The queen pressed her palm against mine in a surprisingly firm but not crushing handshake. I realized it was the first time I’d ever touched her and her skin was cold, even to my low body temperature.

With that settled, I focused on the matter at hand again, namely the ritual I had to perform to finish this deal. I motioned for Falin to place the knapsack in my circle. He was frowning, but he said nothing as he placed the bag where I’d indicated. He opened it, clearly intending to lay the skeletal corpse out.

“Just leave her in there,” I said, glancing away before I caught sight of the ghastly bones again.

“Her?” The queen asked.

I nodded. Now that we were back in mortal reality and I was once again in touch with the land of the dead, the corpse sang soft lullabies just outside my range of hearing, as if tempting me to listen in and learn all her secrets. Without even thinking about it, I could feel that she had in fact been female. Usually I could guesstimate the age a corpse had died at as well, but not with fae. The body felt old, very old. But what did that mean for a fae? Two hundred years? Two thousand years? I didn’t have the experience to gauge how long she’d lived before someone had done . . . Well, whatever had happened to her.

Falin retreated, leaving me alone beside the bag. I glanced around, ensuring the thin line of the circle hadn’t gotten scuffed or broken. It looked complete, and I tapped into the raw magic stored in my ring, channeling it into the line in the grass.

The magical circle sprang up around me, strong and solid. Satisfied, I removed the shields on my charm bracelet and opened my mind. I kept my eyes closed—while touching the grave I tended to see the world slightly rotted away, and I didn’t want to catch a glimpse of the bones crammed into a decaying bag. Besides, I didn’t need my eyes to reach with my magic.

I could feel the corpse in my circle, but the grave didn’t claw at me as viciously as expected. Cold wind danced across my skin, but it didn’t rip at me, didn’t try to crawl under my flesh. I’d never raised a fae before. A couple of feykin, but no full-blooded fae. So at first I thought that might be the difference.

Then my magic touched the corpse and I knew I was mistaken.

My eyes popped open, and through the rotted material of the bag, I could see what I already knew I’d find: a silver shimmering soul clinging to the now-dismembered bones. A shiver crawled down my flesh, making my hair stand on end. Her soul was still in there, trapped in the bones. Aware.

I swallowed around the sick taste that crawled up the back of my throat. I knew nothing about this fae, but I ached for her. I’d never considered the full ramifications of the fact the collectors couldn’t enter Faerie. How long had a living soul been stuck inside a dead body? How much of what happened to that shell had she been aware of? I cringed again, catching sight of how very small the bag was where her bones had been shoved.

But guilt and sympathy were not the only issues I had to deal with. Her soul presented a very big complication.

I couldn’t raise a shade while the soul was still inside the body—my magic just didn’t work that way.

As long as the soul was inside the body, it was somewhat alive and protected. I could eject the soul, but it would become a ghost and be stuck inside my circle until I broke the barrier. Ghosts couldn’t interact with the mortal world, but I was a crossover point for realities, and they were very physical to me. I didn’t know what kind of fae I was dealing with, or how well she’d cope with being dead. But even if she didn’t go all poltergeist on me, to eject her, trap her in a circle with her desecrated body, and then raise her shade in front of her would be a type of torture.

I turned to where the others waited outside my circle. “We have a problem. She’s still . . . in there,” I said and the queen raised one dark eyebrow, not understanding. “Meaning her soul hasn’t been collected and moved on yet.”

“So?”

“I can’t raise her shade unless I eject her soul and force her to become a ghost.”

Ryese scoffed under his breath. “See. I told you this would be more trouble than it’s worth.”

Lyell nodded in agreement, but the queen ignored both men. She looked more harassed than concerned. “Ghost. Shade. I don’t care what you have to raise as long as I get my answers.”

Right. I wasn’t actually suggesting questioning the ghost. “Ghosts aren’t reliable witnesses. Unlike a shade, they have an ego, their own motivations, and they can—” I cut off because I’d been about to say a ghost could lie, but fae couldn’t lie during life so it was unlikely being dead would change that fact. Besides, while a shade might be an ideal witness, a ghost was basically a person minus the fleshy bits, and most eyewitness accounts came from the living. I might value the blunt honesty of a shade, but most people were accustomed to dealing with the living, and aside from the obvious corporeal limitations, ghosts weren’t all that different personality-wise from a live witness.

So maybe questioning the ghost wouldn’t be the worst thing, if she cooperated. The problem was, I had no idea what kind of ghost would emerge from that bag. How long had she been dead? Nothing decayed in Faerie, so she might have been a savaged skeleton for centuries—and aware of it the entire time. She clearly hadn’t died of natural causes. What tortures might have been inflicted on her premortem? And speaking of torture, Falin had disassembled her skeleton and shoved her in a bag. This ghost might emerge insane.

And I’d be trapped in a circle with her.

I eyed the bag with the glowing soul trapped inside. Whether the ghost could be questioned or if I’d eject her from the body and then have to try to get her out of my circle quickly so she could wander until a collector found her, was uncertain, but I had to get the answers for the queen if I was going to get my independent status. I palmed my dagger again. If the ghost emerged enraged, the dagger was not the best of weapons, but it was better than nothing.

Taking a deep breath, I reached with my magic. I didn’t usually use magic to manipulate souls, but honestly, I was surprised it hadn’t self-ejected yet. A soul clinging to a fairly well-preserved corpse was one thing, but this one was barely a body anymore. I lifted my empty hand, and gave a small shove with my magic.

The soul moved under my magic’s touch, and it felt kind of like tugging saltwater taffy apart, as though the soul clutched to the bones with every bit of strength it had left, unwilling to give up the body that had sustained it. But it did move. I drew on more magic, and shoved harder. A shimmering shape sprang out of the bag, the glow fading as it transitioned to the land of the dead, until a pale figure stood in the grass before me.

The fae woman was shorter than I expected, at least a foot and a half smaller than me, and her frame was thin, delicate. I hadn’t noticed those details when she’d been just a skeleton sitting on the throne, but then I hadn’t been looking too hard. Her eyes were dark, with no distinction between pupil and iris, and no white areas. They were her largest feature, dominating her face and overshadowing a very small pointed nose and a thin slit of a mouth. Her hair, if you wanted to call it that, swept back from her head in long crystalline projections, like icicles exploding from her scalp. From my angle, I could just barely catch sight of wings growing from her back, but I had no idea if they’d actually carried her in life because what I could see of them had dozens of holes in the gauzy flesh, like lace. Or a snowflake.

Now that the body was empty, the grave tugged on me hard, trying to draw my magic and heat to it. I closed my shields, blocking it out as best I could. I didn’t need the distraction right now.

The fae ghost hadn’t moved, and she looked more shocked than anything I’d categorize as angry or enraged, so I took a chance. “Hi, I’m Alex. What’s your name?”

Her enormous, dark eyes moved to me, rounding out as she studied me. I kept the dagger pressed by my side, hidden in the folds of the gown where I hoped she didn’t notice. I didn’t know if it was her small stature or huge eyes, but she looked very childlike and more than a little scared. I didn’t want to come off as threatening. But I wasn’t going to put the dagger away. Looks could be deceiving.

She wrapped her twig-thin arms around her chest like she was hugging herself, and her bottom eyelids quivered. I thought for a moment she might start crying.

“What happened?” she asked, her voice high-pitched and clear as a bell. She looked down, where the knapsack slumped by her ankles. She didn’t have eyebrows, but her forehead creased, and now I was sure she’d start crying any second. “What is that?”

“Give me your hand,” I said, holding mine toward her.

She didn’t. She wasn’t even looking at me. She was staring at the bag. I didn’t know exactly what she was seeing—it really depended on how close to the chasm between the land of the dead and the living she was, but I guessed she could see her bones through the bag. That couldn’t be good. I was pretty sure if I were in her shoes, the last thing I’d want to focus on would be my own desecrated body. I had to get her attention.

Besides, she seemed rational so it was quite possible she could answer the queen’s questions. Making the ghost manifest in reality would be a whole lot simpler than raising a shade from mere bones—and take a lot less energy. As exhausted as I already was, expending less magic definitely sounded like a plus. I wasn’t sure if questioning her would be kinder or crueler than questioning her shade, but the horrified way she stared at her own bones made me think seeing her shade would not be good for her mental health—not that I thought it would be for anyone. I took a step toward her, my hand still extended, and she pushed off the ground, her snowflake wings fluttering into motion behind her as she lifted three feet in the air.

Well, I guess the wings aren’t just decoration.

She shot upward, but the circle I’d drawn wasn’t very large, so she hit the ceiling and bounced off. My teeth chattered with the impact, the magical vibration jolting through me.

I doubted she could see the magical barrier as it was Aetheric energy and most fae couldn’t reach that plane, but she definitely felt it because she turned and beat both small fists against the barrier. Each pound of her fist made me cringe. I squeezed my eyes closed and channeled more magic into the circle to reinforce it.

“Stop,” I yelled at the phantom. If she’d been a shade she would have had to obey me. But she wasn’t, and she took no notice of my command.

“Alex?” Falin said from outside the circle, sounding concerned. He couldn’t see the fae, didn’t know what was happening, but my reactions were enough to tell him something was wrong.

I could have made the ghost visible without touching her, but it would have used a lot more energy. So, forcing my eyes open despite the pounding in my brain that reverberated with each slam of her fists, I rushed across the circle and grabbed her ankle. Power surged out of me, flooding over her through the contact. She screamed, writhing in my grip. I’d pulled this particular trick with multiple ghosts, and only once, when I’d lost control, had I been told it hurt, so I doubted her scream indicated pain.

But scream she did, her voice going shrill and piercing the air. I almost pulled my hand back to cover my ears, but I held on, dragging her close to the mortal realm.

“Be silent,” the queen commanded, and even through my circle, there was power in her words.

The thrashing fae went still. Her head jerked around, and she seemed to become aware of the world beyond the circle—and the people just on the other side of it—for the first time. Her scream died in her throat, and she floated back to the ground. I switched my grasp from her ankle to her elbow as she moved, but I doubt she noticed. Her entire focus centered on the queen.

She sank to her knees in the tall grass, all but dragging me down with her.

“My queen,” she said, her head bowing.

The queen stared at her, studying her wings more than her face. “You are one of my handmaidens, are you not?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“What is your name?”

“Icelynne, my lady,” the little fae said, and the queen nodded.

I didn’t say anything, but I wondered exactly how many handmaidens the queen had that she only vaguely recognized and didn’t even know the name of this fae who had served her. Had she noticed she was missing? By the queen’s frown, I guessed she hadn’t, and just maybe, that fact bothered her.

No one spoke for several minutes. The council members huddled together a small distance from the queen and Falin. They stared at the ghost with naked horror. Ryese shook his head, and Lyell and Maeve kept shooting furtive glances back the way we’d come. Blayne’s mouth moved, but nothing audible escaped from behind his lips. Apparently they didn’t like ghosts. Likely this was the first they’d seen. I remembered something Falin had once told me—Fae don’t like reminders of their own mortality. And Icelynne was undeniably fae and dead.

Finally Falin broke the silence. “What happened, Icelynne?”

His voice was surprisingly gentle. His tone that of a cop who had questioned victims before. I sometimes forgot that while it was true he did a lot of the queen’s dirty work, he was also the head of the local FIB office and dealt with the fae equivalent of what any other cop did.

Icelynne rolled from her knees to rock back on her heels. She drew her legs against her chest, hugging them tight to her. If she’d reminded me of a child before, now she did so doubly.

“I felt it. I felt it all. He . . . He ate me.”

“Who did?” the queen asked, taking a step closer to the outside edge of the circle.

The little frost fae shook her head. “I . . . I don’t know. I couldn’t see him. But I knew. I knew he was eating me.”

“Were you blindfolded or was he glamoured?” Falin asked, his voice gentle but demanding. “And could you tell anything else about him? Did he speak? Could you smell anything?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember. He was eating me. That’s all. I couldn’t see or hear him. I—” She broke off in tears.

“How can you not remember something like that?” the queen asked, balling her hands into fists. “Surely you must have been trying to get a sense of him so you could identify him later.”

The little fae just continued to cry, her ghostly body shuddering. I’d moved my hand to her shoulder and I squeezed it lightly, trying to comfort her. If she noticed, she didn’t show it.

“He ate me,” she said between sobs. “And, and he took me apart.” She shot a tear-filled glance back at the knapsack.

Blayne cleared his throat. “The knight disassembled the skeleton. Are you stating the Winter Knight ate you?”

Her eyes went very large as she looked first at the council member and then focused on Falin. Everyone’s attention followed.

I cleared my throat. “No. She’s not. She’s listing traumatic events that she was able to sense but has no coherent details on,” I said, and then hesitated. I didn’t want to explain in front of the ghost, but they needed to understand why she didn’t remember anything about whomever had eaten her and why she’d lumped the person who’d eaten her and Falin when he’d put her bones in the bag under the same moniker. “I think Icelynne was already dead when that happened. Her soul was present, so she experienced what happened to her, but had no functioning systems like hearing or sight to interpret it through. We need to move on.”

They stared at me in disbelief and Icelynne cried louder, gulping down ragged breaths between her sobs. Normally what happened to a body after death was of little consequence to the soul that had resided in it because death occurred the moment the soul left the body. Oh, sometimes full physical death took another minute or two for all bodily functions to shut down, but if I raised a shade, those minutes would be missing because the record button on life had already been clicked off, and of course, the soul wouldn’t remember them because it was no longer connected to the body. But Icelynne’s body had ceased living and her soul had still been trapped inside. Her brain had shut down, her senses dead, but her soul still experienced what happened to her flesh on some level. She hadn’t been eaten alive, exactly, but it was the next worst thing.

“Icelynne,” I said, trying to keep my voice soothing, but I usually questioned shades who had no emotions, not traumatized ghosts. Still, I tried. “Can you tell us what happened before that? What is the last thing you remember seeing?”

She sniffled and wiped her nose on her arm. For a moment I didn’t think she’d answer, but then she said, “I was tied to a chair. And I had these tubes coming out of my arm . . . I was bleeding. I mean, the tubes, my blood was being carried away in those tubes.”

I glanced at Falin, but I couldn’t read anything in the dark expression clouding his face. I thought about the skeleton as it had looked in the throne room, but so much had been done to Icelynne after her death, and I didn’t have the experience to know if she’d died of exsanguination. How would you even tell when most of the flesh was gone and only bones were left?

“How did you get there?” Falin asked. “Do you know where you were?”

Icelynne’s face scrunched, though if from deep thought or painful memories, I couldn’t guess. “I was still in the court. The sky was ours. But I don’t know where I was. I remember being in my own rooms. There was a knock on the door. Two people were outside in white cloaks, the hoods pulled down. But I don’t think they were guards. One was very short and almost as wide as tall. The other was too slight to have been wearing armor under the cloak. They . . .” She trailed off, a fresh wave of tears escaping from her. We gave her a moment to collect herself, and after wiping her eyes, she continued. “Everything happened so fast. They grabbed me, and I struggled, and then everything went dark. When I woke up, I was in the chair, the tubes drawing out my blood.”

When she stopped, no one spoke for a long time. Finally I asked, “And the two cloaked figures, you never saw their faces? Did you see anyone else while you were held?”

“I never saw them. I don’t even know if they were male or female or what kind of fae they were.” Her shoulders shook under my hands, but she didn’t stop speaking this time. “There were other fae in the room with me. Also tied down. I could only see two—another handmaiden named Snowlilly, and a rowen fae I didn’t recognize. I don’t think he was a member of our court. There were others too, but they were behind me and I couldn’t see them. I don’t know how many. I only saw the short and the lithe fae one more time. They came and . . . They came and took the rowen’s body and brought a tree nymph to take his place. She wasn’t familiar either.”

Others? It sounded like at least four, most likely more. I glanced at Falin and saw the same thought on his face—this was bigger than just one body staged to scare the queen.

“Did you see anything else? Did you hear anything?” Falin asked. “How long do you think you were held?”

“Days? Weeks? I don’t know. It seemed to go on forever. I was so tired and my whole body hurt. Especially when he’d connect the tubes and drain away my blood.”

“Wait—he?” I asked and the little fae cringed under my hand. She wasn’t telling us everything, and she clearly hadn’t meant to say “he.” This was why I didn’t like questioning ghosts. “Who was he? What did he look like?”

“I don’t know,” she sounded miserable, but evasive. This wasn’t the same desperate cry of ignorance she’d used earlier. She was hiding something.

I wasn’t the only one who heard the difference.

“Tell us what you do know, handmaiden,” the queen said, and there was unmistakable command in her voice. There was also fury, the cold kind that could patiently and with clearheaded calculations drag out horrible torture. I was glad it wasn’t directed at me.

“My queen, I can’t—”

“Now.”

The little fae seemed to collapse further into herself, but she answered. “I never saw his face, and he only whispered when he spoke to me. He told me that my sacrifice was for the good of all and that big changes were coming and I’d be helping.” She paused, but the queen cocked one dark eyebrow and the words stumbled out of her again. “He was, or at least I think he was, Sleagh Maith, my lady.” She drew back with the last, as if she thought the queen would reach out and grab her for accusing one of the noble line of fae of being her captor. Of course, my circle still separated the ghost from the queen, so even if the queen had wanted to throttle the ghost, she couldn’t have.

For her part, the queen rocked back slightly on her heels, as if Icelynne’s words had delivered a physical blow her body had absorbed. She turned, hands clenched at her sides, and paced the edge of my circle.

“Do you have any idea who he was? This captor of yours, was he of my court?”

Icelynne sniffed loudly, her body trembling. “I do not know, my lady. I swear I do not know. He never took off his cloak, and he only spoke to me when he brought food or hooked or unhooked the tubes. Most of the time when he was in the room he was fiddling with an alchemy lab.”

“Alchemy? Like turning lead into gold?” I asked.

The little fae shook her head, making the ice crystals shimmer in the afternoon light. “No. I think he was distilling the glamour from our blood.”