“You all have your orders,” the missionary said. “When we’re done here, you’ll go to your assigned gin house, start drinking, and start bragging. Spread the word and point the finger of blame.”
He had a slender box in his hands. He slid it open and produced a wooden match. Longer than a modern one, thick and squared wood with a fat head. It sparked as he struck it alight.
I want to wake up now, Seelie thought, desperate. I don’t want to see this. She took hold of her forearm and gave herself a vicious pinch until her eyes watered. She slapped herself across the face. Then again. The nightmare wouldn’t let her go.
The men shoved Patience down onto her straw mattress and stepped back. The missionary flicked his lit match, sending it flying in a slow and glittering arc.
* * *
There was bright light, and furnace heat, and a scream that went on forever. Then the world wrenched sideways and there was nothing but darkness and cold, still air.
Seelie’s eyelids opened.
She stood on the edge of a ballroom. Mirrored walls, spaced between gilded arches, captured the green-veined marble floors and her own reflection, infinite Seelies staring perplexed beneath a dangling crystal chandelier. Faint chamber music, soft and lilting, echoed from an empty stage.
She wasn’t alone here. A woman danced alone at the heart of the ballroom. Olive skin, a pale blue gown, her dark hair worn in a waist-length braid. She had her eyes closed, and she whirled and strutted like she was cradling an invisible dance partner in her arms.
“Help her.” Patience’s voice came from the air, echoing off the mirrored walls. “Please. You have to help her. She can’t hear me anymore.”
The woman’s eyes snapped open. They were big, deep but radiant, her irises like stained-glass windows with a lamp shining behind them. She smiled at Seelie as she danced.
“Oh. Are you the new musician?” she asked, whirling by.
“I…don’t think so. You know you’re dancing by yourself, right?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said.
“If you don’t help her,” Patience’s voice whispered, “she’s going to do something terrible. She won’t mean to, but she will.”
Wake up, Seelie thought. Wake up, wake up, wake up—
“If you’re not a musician, then you shouldn’t be here,” the woman called from the far side of the ballroom. “I need you to do something for me.”
“What’s that?” Seelie asked.
“Look up.”
She looked up.
The ceiling of the ballroom, beyond the glinting lights of the crystal chandelier, was a curtain of spiders.
They began to descend on silken tethers. Vast huntsman spiders, bigger than Seelie’s fists. Glistening black widows with scarlet hourglasses and grasping, furry legs. Brown recluses, pregnant with venom. Eight thousand glittering eyes fixed hungrily on her.
WAKE UP, Seelie’s mind screamed.
* * *
Seelie shot upright, flailing, punching at her blanket and sending it billowing to the floor and slapping at herself like she was knocking invisible spiders away. She ran fingers through her tangled hair, flinching at anything that might be a bug.
She froze. Her chest heaved and she gulped down air, her skin caked in ice-cold sweat. She was back. Tyler’s apartment, Tyler’s couch, the first glow of dawn pressing soft against the windows.
“Fucking nightmares,” she hissed. She grabbed her clothes and her backpack and stomped to the bathroom. They’d been a regular feature of her childhood, including the inevitable creepy-crawlies, as far back as she could remember. She eventually learned how to master them. She thought she had, at least.
She checked her token. She looked away, then checked it twice. The Monopoly car held its form, telling her she was awake now, awake for real. Seelie looked to her reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“Stress,” she told herself. “You are under an unprecedented amount of stress. And you know what? This is good. This is good because now you know what you have to do. Thank you, nightmare.”
Seelie was accustomed to a certain lack of control, living day to day without a home. Where she’d rest her head, when she’d eat or even if she’d eat, what she’d do to make ends meet—none of that was something she could plan in advance. She coped with that. But she’d been a pinball since the missionary knocked on Arthur’s door, careening from moment to moment, fear to fear, her chest too tight to breathe.
This particular nightmare, the one hounding her in the real world, wasn’t going to fix itself. If she ever wanted to sleep soundly again, she needed to go out