“Don’t get used to it. You’ll be back in your body soon enough.” He wound a woolen scarf around his neck and jammed a sadly misshapen beaver hat on his head.
Several of his relations would’ve disowned him on the spot, had they been present.
“I’m sorry.” Arabella put her finger to her lips. “You were saying?”
“Just stay close.” Trey opened his front door to chilly darkness, lit only by widely-spaced gas lamps.
He felt the nearness of the Shadow Lands as soon as he stepped off his front stairs and onto the pavement, away from the safety of his wards. They hissed unhappily as he and Arabella left. The other realm had moved in and it was hungry.
The boundary between worlds was thin tonight.
Arabella seemed to feel something of the same for she moved in closer, pressing up to his arm.
White sparks flashed between them. Arabella jumped like a scalded cat, landing atop the iron railing that stretched in front of the row houses. She looked down at him in amazement.
“Stop playing,” said Trey, “and come down.”
She hopped off and drifted gently down to the ground. “What happened?”
“You got too close to my personal wards. They were keeping you from possessing me.”
Arabella lifted her chin. “I have no desire whatsoever to possess an unfashionable, rude person such as yourself, sir.”
“You forgot disagreeable. You really have no craving to suck my blood? Or tear off my face?”
She shuddered. “Not in the least.”
“Good.” He had seen her run through a gamut of emotions from fear to exasperation to anger, but not a single one of them had corrupted her, in spite of his testing provocations. “But if you should change your mind—”
“I won’t,” she said firmly.
They walked in silence down the street of darkened two-story townhouses, older, darker, and smaller than the gentry’s Lumen homes. Most of Trey’s neighbors were middle class: lawyers, bankers, merchants, and other government employees like himself. The neighborhood itself was unfashionable, but it was quiet and near the Quadrangle. Trey had no desire to keep a town coach for the long trip from Shield House to the city proper every day, and he could live with his relatives’ disapproval over his choice of lodgings.
He considered it an advantage that they were less likely to visit him here.
Arabella glided close to him, looking around with wide, dark eyes. She seemed to be straining for something.
“Don’t,” said Trey quietly. Arabella started. “Don’t look for signs of the other realm. Sometimes, just bending your thoughts on it brings it closer.”
She nodded. Her clothes had changed again, he noted. She now wore a dark cloak and a nondescript gown beneath it. No gloves, interestingly. She’d not worn any with the shrine cloak, either.
Trey’s breath misted in front of his face. He thrust his hands into his pockets, his fingers crooked to shape aether to his will. A heavy presence hung over them, breathing down his neck. The pools of yellow lamplight were faint and far away.
His own muffled footsteps and soft breaths were the only sounds in the world. Arabella was a pale glimmer next to him. Consciously or not, she had dimmed, making herself smaller and harder to see.
As she should. An innocent spirit like her was defenseless against the greater haunts who clung to this world and the demons who prowled the boundaries, hungering to get in.
The thin wail of a small child was like a vapor in the vast night, swallowed into silence. A small light skittered across their path and tumbled into the road with a whimper. It gleamed once, then vanished on the far side.
“A wisp,” breathed Trey. “Not a spirit, but created when strong emotions touch the boundaries. Most dissipate within a day or two.”
Arabella nodded.
A wisp wouldn’t be much trouble, but just in case he’d send Morgan and his new apprentice after it tomorrow. It’d be good practice for the boy.
What worried him more was that palpable sense of being watched. The back of Trey’s neck prickled. He wanted to track it, chase it down, face it head on, but… He glanced at Arabella’s huge eyes. He had to get her safely back into her body first.
Despite his verbal assurances, time was running out for her.
They turned a corner and the pressure lifted with a sudden pop. Arabella gasped. Sound rushed in to fill their ears—the clatter of hoofs and wheels on cobbles, the yowl of an alley cat, the snatch of a song as drunkards staggered home from an evening of dissipation. Even the gas lamps burned all the brighter, sylphs fluttering like moths around them.
Something stirred near a heap of stone, slow and dark. A low grumble tickled the edge of Trey’s hearing. A stana, an earth elemental, that had probably been hauled in from the countryside along with the building materials.
This was normal night time in Lumen.
Arabella relaxed, drifting further away from him. “This isn’t so bad,” she remarked.
“No.” The Shadow Lands had retreated, but Trey remained watchful. Something had marked their presence. Something intelligent and malicious and quite likely powerful.
Something he’d have to fight and defeat.
Soon, he promised it. I’ll be your opponent soon.
Their progress to Bottleham was swifter now. Arabella had lost her sickly pallor; she chattered all the way to her home. Trey listened with one ear, making noncommittal noises at the appropriate times. He suspected she was trying to relieve her own anxiety.
When they turned onto Crescent Circle, Arabella tilted her head toward the mews in the back. “There’s a chestnut tree behind the house, right in front of my chamber window. You could climb that.”
“What a scamp you are,” Trey remarked. “Is that how you snuck out of the house last evening?”
“Maybe.” She dimpled. “Can you climb a tree, though? You can’t get much practice, living in Lumen.”
“I believe I can manage. However, I’m
