Trey went into a crouch, his left hand reaching for an unseen weapon. The pressure changed around Arabella, and the very air felt different, greasy and tingling.
“Arabella, I don’t want to—”
“Liar!” Her voice rose to a shriek. “Just leave me alone!” She saw him spring, but she was faster.
She whirled and dived for the wall. The green and white stripes, poison and bone, loomed large in front of her.
Trey’s fingers snagged the edge of her substance. A shock rippled through her, like lightning sparking in water. Arabella threw herself forward, tearing out of his reach. Her mouth tasted of glue and chalk as she fell through the wall and tumbled into the night.
Trevelyan Shield was a phantasmist, a magic user who could handle both aether and the more potent phantasmia. He was also the only Border Walker in Vaeland, a phantasmist who could roam the Shadow Lands in his corporeal body.
But he had not yet figured out how to walk through walls.
Arabella Trent slipped through his fingers, her ghostly substance stinging along his palms. An instant later, he crashed shoulder-first into the wall.
“Saint Bastien on a stick!” he snarled, staring at the place she’d vanished.
What the blazes was that bird-witted girl thinking, rushing out on a night like this?
They’d eat her alive.
Trey commanded his lights to follow him and flung open the chamber door.
A dark-haired youth stood in the oblong of yellow light, fully dressed but rumpled looking, lines etched in a harrowed face. His bloodshot eyes widened in comic dismay. “L-Lord St. Ash!” he stammered.
“Out of the way,” said Trey through gritted teeth. “Your fool of a cousin—” He brushed past Harry Elliot.
“Wait!” Elliot seized Trey’s sleeve. “There’s something I think you should see.”
Trey turned. Elliot mutely held out something small and grey.
It was a lady’s reticule.
“I think you’ll find an answer in there,” said Elliot.
Chapter Four
Arabella fled through the streets of Lumen as if the Wild Hunt was at her heels. She raced through Bottleham and into the confusing tangle of the old shopping district. Streets wound, dark and serpentine, in front of her. Shadows pooled in the corners. Sometimes she waded knee-deep in the thick porridge of the street, cobblestones grinding through her. At other times, she skimmed several feet above the road. Once, she threw herself through a lamp post. It left a smear of rust on her soul.
Her back felt exposed and unprotected. At any moment, she expected a shout and a jerk back into the pentagram, to be bottled up again.
No and no and no.
Never again. She wouldn’t be locked up ever again.
Her panic grew the further she lost herself in among the shops. Windows gleamed like eyes at her; doorways were shadowed entrances to unnamed horrors. Wooden signs showed symbols she could only half make out—they might’ve been runes written in maidens’ blood and knife strokes for all she knew.
The buildings leaned over her head, blotting out the open sky.
Something scuttled in the thick gloom.
Blood pounded in Arabella’s ears. How can that be? she thought, half-hysterical. I have no body to carry blood around in!
She looked up at the faint wash of stars beyond the looming structures.
Of course! Why am I hugging the ground? I’m a ghost. I can fly!
No sooner had she thought this, than a great lightness came over Arabella. She rose into the air, burst out from among the roof tops, gables, and chimney pots.
Lumen spread out like a light-dotted carpet beneath her. Arabella laughed and ascended, arms wide out to embrace the whole city. The air was sharp and clear and thin, like a glass shard. The stars pinpricked it in bright points, far above the city’s smoke and lights.
Arabella drifted. To her left were Rosemary Street and Bond Place and Lyndon Square, filled with the marble mansions of the peerage. On her right, All Saints’ Cathedral reared its square bulk to the sky. Ahead of her was the dark, wet back of the River Teme.
Arabella flew over its heaving waters, swollen with spring thaw. Black wavelets lapped and sucked at the crumbling banks. They churned around the posts of the bridges that spanned the river. Dirty ice chunks floated on the surface.
Then Arabella was over to the other side and amidst the pleasure gardens, closed and quiet in the early spring. The wooden structures that hosted restaurants, concerts, plays, and other entertainment in the summer were boarded up. Leafless trees slumbered still, and flower beds with nary a sprout or blade lay like thick scars. The fields were bare and empty, the gas lamps dark.
In the summer, this place would be filled with curiosities and thronged with people. Aunt Cecilia had regaled Arabella at length with descriptions of the delights in store for her: supper parties, circuses, inventions, mimes, masquerades, promenades.
All the things she would never get to experience.
Arabella drifted down to a wrought-iron bench. She didn’t need its cold support and the metal tang of it was heavy on her tongue, but the habits of life persisted. She sat with her hands clenched in her lap and looked out at the raw emptiness. It looked blighted, just like the promise of her own future.
It isn’t fair! I just started to live!
Church hadn’t prepared her for this. Her previous life, with its series of dark days stretching endlessly into misery, hadn’t either.
So what was left? To go willingly into the Shadow Lands and the afterlife beyond where the God-Father, the God-Son, and the saints awaited? Or to cling to a half-life here on earth, always watching, never to share in its changes and joys and heartaches?
If Trey Shield and his ilk would even let her be.
A chill wind, keen-edged, blew off the river. A shivery moan ran through the gardens, then quieted. In the silence left behind by the wind, the waters chuckled with sinister malice. The bench went from cold to icy, the chill burning through her.
Arabella
