Grave Visions (Alex Craft #4)(31)

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.”