Ghostlight (The Reflected City Book 1) by Rabia Gale (i can read with my eyes shut TXT) 📗

assured her friend. “I trust him.” Right then, she believed the words implicitly. “And then you shall tell me why he calls you Charlie and what other pranks you’ve played on him.”

Miss Price glided past, casting a glance at Charlotte and Viola. She remarked to her partner, rather loudly, “I do not know why some people would come to an assembly if they were going to insist on looking like mourners at a funeral, do you?”

Charlotte’s eyes kindled. “Shrew,” she muttered. Viola shot her a reproving look that failed to quench her, while Arabella choked back a giggle.

She leaned over Charlotte and said, “You are a dear friend, and I hope to have many opportunities to tell you so.” She gently straightened the silk flower tucked behind Charlotte’s ear and floated away.

Behind her, Charlotte exclaimed, “Viola!”

“What is it?”

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

Charlotte’s voice dropped. “A kind whisper on a small, perfumed wind.”

Arabella smiled to herself and whisked into a supper room where, she had been told repeatedly, she would see culinary masterpieces designed to delight the senses.

Her aunt and friends had not exaggerated the gastronomical excesses of the Spring Assembly. Rows of silver chafing dishes, each covered with a silver lid engraved with Merrimack’s name, stood on a sideboard. Pyramids of fruit and statues of pastry reigned in an opposite corner.

Arabella took a pinch of sugared dough from the corner of a detailed model of the Keep. The crumbs fell through her hand, leaving a sweet sticky sensation in her fingers. She stuck them in her mouth.

Her incorporeal tongue tingled, and the sensation spread through her in an odd kind of shock, like pins and needles all over her skin. For a moment, she was dizzy with the feeling, lifting dandelion-light into the air.

Get a hold of yourself. Arabella forced her aethereal body to the floor, shaken. She had been so close to spiraling completely out of control, to be blown away wherever the wind took her. She had to remember that her substance no longer obeyed the laws of nature—and that could bring her real trouble.

Arabella backed away from the desserts. The taste of human food was too strong for her. Out of her skin, she was too susceptible to what she encountered. If she wasn’t careful, she might implode from the crystalline wonder of sugar.

Gnomes, short and swarthy, entered the room, carrying platters of stuffed mushrooms and fish rolls. Arabella shrank into a corner, but even the gnomes’ sharp eyes couldn’t make her out. While they arranged food, she slipped from the chamber and into a narrow corridor.

Servants’ way, she thought as she glided through a spice-scented gloom. In the distance, strings wailed, footsteps pattered, voices bubbled. The noise was an ocean murmur in her ear, distant, removed.

The corridor stretched impossibly long ahead of her. Arabella frowned at the lack of light—the way from kitchen to supper rooms seemed like the worst place to economize.

The air took on a chilly bite, but glimmers of light, in tints of blue, illuminated the passageway. The floor underfoot changed from wooden boards to stone slabs; they struck Arabella’s feet in splinters of cold. She glanced down and gasped.

Faces twisted in agony and malice slid under the surface. Their mouths opened in soundless screams. Arabella sprang back and saw that the walls, too, were no longer paneled. Instead, they were formed of half-melted stone, solidified into ripples and drips and strange curves and protrusions.

An icy shiver ran through her. The odd shapes were people, half-melted into the wall, the ripples the folds of their clothing, the curves an arched back or a bent limb.

The light sharpened, banishing some of the fuzziness, showing Arabella more detail than she wanted to see. An obsidian point of darkness lay at the end of the passageway, drawing her on.

Into the Shadow Lands.

Arabella resisted, digging in her heels. Her feet could find no purchase on the slippery floor, so she grabbed the solidified robes of a woman whose eyes held no hope. A gust of wind at her back shoved her onward.

No! It’s not my time! Arabella thought fiercely of life, of hot summer days and fresh-cut hay and warm milk straight from the cow and gamboling kittens. The red chimney pots of Lumen, the reek of horse dung, the clatter of wheels on cobbled streets. Flower girls hawking their wares in thin, piercing cries; street sweepers with their long-handled brooms; ladies taking a promenade in Queens Park; elegant gentlemen riding their hacks.

She thought of Uncle Henry’s mild kindliness and his old smoking jacket with the patched elbows that he wouldn’t let Aunt Cecilia replace. Her aunt reclining in her morning gown, avidly devouring a romance and weeping real tears over the trials of improbably beautiful and virtuous heroines. Harry showing off fashionable clothing from a Bell Street tailor with a careless air that couldn’t quite hide his excited pride.

The silk rose in Charlotte’s brown hair. The curve of Viola’s alabaster cheek with curls of her ash-blond hair lying against it.

Trey Shield, with narrowed eyes and distracted air, lecturing her while she secretly admired the fine figure Briggs had made of him. Really, he was quite handsome when he bothered. The long-tailed coat, grey knee-breeches, and white stockings made him look elegant—and far above her touch.

Her own body, still alive in Crescent Circle.

The alien wind, stinking of grave dirt and burning coal, buffeted her ever more fiercely. Arabella planted herself in her life, in her present joys and future hopes, and refused to give in.

She was anchored, she was weighty.

She wouldn’t be blown willy-nilly into the Shadow Lands.

The wind lashed at her once more, like a tantrum-throwing child slamming the door, and died down. The stone around her misted and dissolved, leaving Arabella back in a mean corridor made of wood, smelling of old dinners and lit with oil lamps.

That dark point grew smaller, but didn’t wink out. It stayed at the edge of her vision, a reminder that her victory was only temporary.

Arabella