31. Tommy
thirty-one
Tommy
T he Malum had retreated from the city’s wards by the time we returned and the High King tucked me into bed, which I had to think was an incredibly creepy coincidence.
It was a relief for both the High King and the people of Caeludor, though, because it meant the faelight would be back up and running in the city automatically, and Lucais could get some rest. At least one of us had to—and after what I’d seen, it certainly was not going to be me.
Initially, I did try to get some sleep, but as soon as I shut my eyes, I was plagued with visions from the Court of Darkness. They came back to me in fragments, and I wasn’t sure if I should feel relieved that I couldn’t seem to remember them with clarity—or concerned.
The bits and pieces I was able to put together painted a picture that aligned with all of our darkest fears combined.
The Court of Darkness was, in fact, being controlled by the Malum.
There was not a sliver of doubt in my mind after experiencing the feeling of its magic—the feeling that had been so like the magic fuelling Raella’s portal—and even if that wasn’t enough to convince me, I had a mountain of evidence piling up in the very back corners of my brain.
From the unique colour of the maze’s interior shadows to the low visibility in my mind when I tried to recall my mental pictures of things that had once been so clear.
It was like my dreams of the man in the dungeon—of Lucais in the dungeon, bathed in shadows so dark they made a moonless night look like a rainy afternoon, as flickering images of a body covered in burn marks and tattoos came rising to the surface before new waves of darkness dispelled the illusion and washed everything away.
I was swimming underwater in a murky river without the faintest idea of which way was up, and my recollection of the dream—and my time inside of the Court of Darkness’s wards—was a bull shark I didn’t see until it was right in front of me, its jaws spread wide open, coming for me at high speed.
It swallowed me whole, and we began anew.
I never stood a chance.
So, instead of sleeping, I went into the bathroom and sat in the shower until I lost track of time. Even though I knew it didn’t work the way I wanted it to, I couldn’t bear to do anything else until I’d tried to soak off the lingering touch of wrongness that had been left upon my skin.
I sat there, staring at the steam fogging up the glass until my back became so numb I had to turn off the cold tap completely just to feel something again.
Eventually, the hot water ran out because the palace was not the House, and there was nobody—and no one—looking over me. I stayed beneath the stream of water as its temperature rapidly dropped from scalding to freezing, and I didn’t move until the shower head started to sputter.
When I turned the tap off and crawled out of there at long last, I didn’t have the energy to dress. Exhaustion clawed at my eyes, begging them to close.
Barely wrapping a soft black towel around my chest, I stumbled back into the main bedroom and fell onto the enormous trunk sitting at the foot of the bed.
The room was mostly dark, save for a single faelight orb Lucais had left on my bedside table, and I shuddered to see the shadows dancing on the walls from the sparse trees well beyond my window.
The fog concealed most of the moonlight trying to be witnessed in the night sky, and I was once again alone with my thoughts in a bedroom that never truly belonged to me.
I didn’t know when I fell asleep or for how long I was unconscious, but I woke with a start during daylight hours, lying sprawled out on the lower half of the bed.
I’d kicked at the towel on top of me until it went flying onto the floor nearby because I’d been dreaming of the lapsus and the towel had felt like its sticky magic.
Groaning, I leaned over the edge of the bed and pried the trunk open just far enough that I could yank an item of clothing out of it to cover myself.
A wrinkled grey shirt fought me every step of the way, but eventually slipped out of the gap. As I buttoned it, I thought back to my dilemma with my memories and everything else in my life that was wrong, damaged, or outright broken.
The dreams. The lapsus. The darkness in my veins.
My father, a prisoner of the dungeon. My other father, trapped inside the Court of Darkness.
My mother and sister, living their lives in the human world, the former oblivious to everything that had happened to me since the day the caenim crashed through the front window of our little downtrodden townhouse, and the latter oddly suspicious.
The magic that had abandoned me. The magic that had destroyed me. The bond with Lucais, and the pull to Wrenlock, and—
“Fuck, it’s crowded in here. No wonder you don’t sleep well.”
I jumped in my skin, my fingers slipping on the second last button and ripping it clean off the garment.
My heart was in my throat, but that was beginning to feel normal, and my throat was still scarring over from all of the screaming I did inside of the lapsus, so I didn’t make a sound as I looked straight into the three eyes of the maroon-skinned faerie I had killed in the palace’s hallway.
Fuck, it’s crowded in here?
I stared at him, then stared at all of the empty space around him as he stood in the middle of the floor at the foot of my bed. He was corporeal, but there was a paleness to his complexion that hadn’t been there when the sword I was wielding went through his chest.
And then it hit me.
“You’re not real,” I deadpanned. “You’re in my head.”
He took a step forward.
In the gloomy daylight, there wasn’t very much of my bedroom that was in a position to lay claim to a shadow, and he certainly didn’t.
Up close, he was strangely handsome and youthful.
If I didn’t know that the odds were stacked against me in Faerie, I would have guessed he was around my age.
His third eye was slightly smaller than the two fairly standard eyes sitting below it and seemed to blink twice as slowly.
He had long, seductive lashes on his two main eyes and none at all on the third.
I thought his irises were black, but it might have been the poor lighting.
Mouth turned up into an iniquitous smirk, his full lips were smooth and a shade or two darker than the rest of his body, and his teeth were alarmingly white and razor-sharp when he parted them to speak.
“Atta girl,” he muttered, his voice husky yet a pitch higher than I was expecting. It was also very familiar, which, like most things in Faerie and the forsaken palace, made me feel exceptionally uncomfortable.
“I killed you.”
One of his thin brows curled upwards. “How considerate of you to remember.”
“I didn’t mean to kill you,” I said slowly.
Part of my head felt like it was being stuffed with cotton candy, and I was growing more and more distrustful of myself and my perception of reality.
Still, it was only polite to err on the side of caution and apologise. “Oh,” I rushed to add, “I’m sorry.”
He pressed his lips together to subdue his smile.
It was amused, but far from friendly. “You’re getting better at apologising.
Props to you for that.” He made a motion to tip his hat to me, though he wasn’t wearing one.
His hair was thick, plentiful, and dark red.
I noticed that his ears were elongated and pointy, but I wasn’t convinced he was High Fae.
I frowned. “Do you accept?”
“No.” His smile flattened, but the deadly charm still danced in his eyes. “That was an apology, not the magic words to undo your careless erasure of my life.”
“Okay.” I blinked up at him, lost for words. If he wasn’t alive, but he was standing in front of me, and he’d spoken into my mind after his death on not one but two separate occasions, that meant he was a—
“Spectre,” he finished for me. “Oh, come now. Don’t look so surprised, Auralie. I told you that I’m in your head—which, by the way, is at capacity and should really have had the vacancy sign turned over long before now.”
Considering he’d died at my hands, I was willing to overlook his commentary on the state of affairs inside my head. Lucais had mentioned Spectres, but in my horror at what had transpired, I hadn’t even thought to ask him what he meant by it.
“I’ve been…Marked?” I asked softly. “Are you—”
“Haunting you?” he interjected, slipping his hands into the pockets of his black trousers.
I studied them, trying to remember if he’d been wearing the same black velvet waistcoat and crisp white shirt when he died—and, hearing me, the Spectre made a disgruntled sound in his throat and removed his hands from his pockets.
Rolling his eyes, he unbuttoned his waistcoat to reveal a bloodstain on the shirt beneath it in approximately the same spot that the sword would have entered his body.
“Ah.” I cleared my throat. “I am sorry about that, too. That’s a…nice shirt.”
He gave me an incredulous look while he buttoned himself up again.
“As I was saying,” he continued, smoothing down the fabric at his front before replacing his hands in his pockets.
“I would be haunting you if you were anyone else. You took my life, so the usual recourse is for me to stalk you through the rest of your life in the name of revenge. And don’t get me wrong, Auralie, I’d love to drive you mad, but unfortunately, it seems like someone beat me to it a long time ago.
” His brow creased as he stared down at me with an intensity to make me cringe, and I thought I detected a flicker of genuine concern cross his eyes, but he blinked it away.
I straightened my spine and said, “So you’ve come back to insult me to death instead?”
“That wasn’t an insult, sweetheart.”
“I’d hate to be on the receiving end of a compliment, then.”
“Better than the receiving end of one of your swords.”
My face flushed bright red, and the heat spread all the way down my throat, reminding me that I was dressed in nothing but a grey shirt with two buttons undone.
I balled both hands into fists and used them to shove the excess fabric of the shirt all the way down the gap between my crossed legs. “Sorry.”
He sighed. “Look, my name is Tommy. We’re stuck together until I can figure out a way to claim the repentance I need from you to move on in my afterlife, and I only showed myself to you today because I can’t get what I need from you if you die.
” Tommy pinned me to the spot with a stern look.
“You’ve been through some shit, Auralie, and from the looks of things upstairs, it’s only going to get worse. ”
The corners of my eyes crinkled. “What does that mean?”
Tommy’s shoulders slumped, and he lifted his chin, shaking his head at me. “You know I can’t say.”
I lifted one hand and pinched the bridge of my nose, squeezing my eyes shut. “Right. I didn’t know that, but sure.”
“I’ve come to ask you not to do things like run through fields of locusts or sit at the bottom of the shower until the water gets so cold it could give you hypothermia.
If your death isn’t caused by my haunting, I’ll be trapped here forever, Auralie.
You killed me. You took my life, and I know you didn’t mean to, but that doesn’t matter.
So, I’ve come here to beg you to remember that.
If you don’t want to damn me eternally, you cannot die at anyone’s hands other than mine before I’ve found what I need to move on.
Then, when I have discovered what I need, you’ll help me get it so nobody has to die or be damned. ”
“I…” I shook my head, my mouth hanging open, no words able to come out. I stared at the wall beyond his shoulder, at the shadows lingering in the tiny gap between the bookcase and the stonework. I could have sworn I felt them staring back. “I’m not…suicidal.”
Tommy’s head bobbed dubiously. “So we’re in agreement? Because if we aren’t, I’ll have to reevaluate my options, and those include the people close to you.”
Blinking furiously at the wall and feeling very much like I was being interrogated by my therapist in the human world again, I made a small, uncertain noise on an exhale of breath, and eventually nodded to signal agreement.
“Yeah, we’re…” I peered up at him quizzically. “We’re in agreement.”
“Good.” Tommy stepped up to me, bending down until his face was within two inches of my own.
I could see the flaws in his presentation up so close—the slight wavering of his features as though he wasn’t really there, the way his proximity lacked any warmth or scent, and the way that no breath entered or escaped his lungs when he spoke.
“I’ll hold you to this, sweetheart. I’ll be back when I’ve found what I need. Until then, stay the fuck alive for me please, and say my name three times if you think you’re going to die.”
A thick, painful throb hit my chest. “Why three times?” I asked breathlessly.
“It invokes the power of the bargain between us.”
“What bargain?” I exclaimed. My head reared back so fast that my whole body tilted, and I had to fling a hand out behind me to catch myself before I fell backwards onto the bed.
“The one we just made.” Tommy winked at me and straightened, smoothing down the front of his waistcoat like it was a nervous tic, and my heart dropped from my throat to the floor beneath the bed, where it immediately became coated in dust and cobwebs, and the spiders started to make nests inside the arteries.
“No…”
Tommy tutted at me. “Trust me, it’s a better deal than I would’ve given anyone else.” His dark eyes drifted over the front of my shirt to where I still had one hand holding the fabric in place to cover the space between my legs. “Now, sweetheart, you had better get dressed. I’ll be seeing you.”
The Spectre tipped his invisible hat to me again—
And then he was gone.