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Magical Mafias Book 1

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Episode 3: Sleepless Nightmare

Content Notes

Raw Audio for Episode (edited audio coming later!)

Text of Episode

We are at their home, Greta told the illusion when the cab arrived. When they went inside, it was some strange fusion of multiple apartments, the chairs half of green plastic and half of hand-shaped pine, fae carvings in the mixed-material table and gold rimming everything. She supposed faeries didn't have real homes, after all, shifting as they did from lie to lie. Fair enough; this wasn't her real home, either.

"Look," she told him, her voice not her own, but coming out instead with Thea's fae lie of youthful smoothness. "We've got to get ready for you to follow Greta. Do you remember everything?"

He blinked, the illusion bending a bit with his uncertainty. She looked away from those eyes as soon as she noticed, before her mind could twist them again. They were disturbing enough as it was.

"I thought I did already," he said. "But then you were there..."

"You took a nap," she lied. "You must have dreamt it."

"Oh. A nap, of course." His brow furrowed, reality bending once again. "Am I still dreaming?"

What would work better, yes or no? "Yes."

He looked around at the illusory mishmash. "That explains a bit." He sighed, rubbed his face, returned her touch. "Guess it's no surprise that I'm dreaming about you."

"Oh?"

Show me his weakness, she told the dream, and now there was a bookshelf with a picture sticking out of a book. He pulled it out to look at.

"And, of course, I'm dreaming of her."

Greta felt her own face change like a wash of cold water on her skin, prickling as it shifted. She was shorter now, and darker. No wings. A human?

The picture in his hand was of this woman, who had a collar on him and rope around him, and was pulling a leash to force him to look at her. Ah. His weakness.

The collar was on his neck now, and he touched it, looking at her in a way that was hard to read. Fear? Panic? Shame? It involved dilated pupils, a tense pulling back of his body, a grab for the bookshelf for stability. His hand passed through the shelf, because it wasn't really there, and he fell, back striking the cabinet the shelf corresponded to. The bookshelf vanished, at least in her version of the illusion, showed the cabinet as it really was.

She grabbed his hand and, before he could show too much fear at this person, she willed the dream to make him see Thea again.

"I guess I still think of you as the same, in some ways," Ian said. "I'm sorry."

That was interesting. Was he afraid of his companion? He didn't seem to be, usually. But perhaps she recalled this tormentor in some unexplained way.

Greta shook her head, helped him up, and led him back to the table, which had the benefit of corresponding to something real. "Why is it so important, anyway, that you follow Greta?"

"Have to know what she's up to, who she is. Can't believe she's been in the Morley-Holloways for so many decades, and we still don't know what she does for them or what her powers are." Jackpot. "But let's talk about better things, if we're going to be dreaming."

"Ah, but talking about Greta will help you calm down before you have to face her, won't it?" His hand was in hers, and he wasn't trying to move it. Useful.

"If you say so. I guess you're an element of my subconscious; you would know."

"What do you know about Eric?"

"She dropped him fast, didn't she? Almost like it's a..." His hand dropped from hers. "A trap..." He pressed fingers to his forehead. She saw memories like a film reel flicker over his head: His ride to Greta's, his shared drink with her. Quick, what to do so he still thought he was dreaming?

He was widening his eyes, pinching himself, squirming like he thought it would move a sleeping body. "I can't wake up."

Do something that happens in his dreams, she told the magic.

Violent Content, Nonconsensual: Heavy

A pain stabbed into her abdomen, sharp like knives and cold like icicles. She stared down, touched her belly, blood seeping onto her fingers. It wasn't real. Nothing real had happened to her. But it made her feel dizzy, her legs weak. It hurt to breathe. Why did it hurt to breathe?

The room had shifted, kitchen table gone. They were in a living room with white carpet, and where the kitchen table had been, there was now a side table with a phone, curly-corded with a rotary dialer, the kind she hadn't seen in years. The receiver was on the floor, a crimson smear in the shape of a handprint drying on the black plastic.

"Not this again... not here again..." Ian was muttering to himself in a low voice. "This isn't real. This isn't real. This isn't real..."

Her legs gave out. She landed on the floor too hard, blood spilling from her and staining the carpet.

If you died in a Sleepless Dream, did you die in truth?

Make me stop dying, she told the dream. Nothing happened, just more searing pain. Turn this off. Make this dream stop. Make it stop. Make it--

"Thairn, Thairn, in real life you lived, please just be like real life this time, please--" Ian kneeled next to her, holding pressure on her abdomen, making the pain sear. She looked down to see black and white and green coated in a layer of blood. Her intestines?

Make it stop. Make it stop. Make it stop.

He ripped off his shirt, wrapped it around her body, applied more pressure. The room was going black now, everything dimming around the edges. If she passed out, would she wake again later? Or would this potion trick her body into self-destruction?

Her will wasn't enough to stop the dream. There was a loose feeling to the world, and she didn't have time for second guesses. She had to get Ian to stop having this dream, or she was going to die.

She grabbed the collar of his undershirt. "Ian, listen to me."

His brow furrowed in confusion. He mouthed, "Ian," staring.

Make me look like myself, she ordered the dream. Nothing happened. Her skin did not darken, her hair did not gray, her guts did not close. She had a moment of darkness, as if she'd fallen asleep for a second or been thrown into the black void of death for a second, one of those, and she didn't know which.

"Ian, this isn't a dream. You've taken a potion. It's making you hallucinate."

"Light your path."

"What?" What was he talking about? "Look, you're having a hallucination, but it's magic, and it will kill me if you don't stop having it. Tell the dream to make me stop dying. Tell the dream to be different. Just think it in your head, push it with your will. I'm sure you can feel the magic."

"Flight or fall?"

Were these codes? Was she supposed to respond in some particular way? She didn't even want to convince him she was Thairn anymore, just get him to fix the dream.

"I'm not your companion. It's part of the hallucination. Please, just dream something different for me. Don't--"

Another dive into the black. Coming to the surface was harder this time, like she was trying to swim with her legs tangled in weeds.

"Greta?"

"Yes."

Her hair shortened and grayed, her skin darkened, her voice returned to normal. The pain in her abdomen refused to lessen, the blood still flowing between her fingers.

"What did you do to us?" Ian asked.

"It's called Sleepless Dream. I wanted to know why you were following me." The world was becoming disconnected, as if the ligaments of it were dissolving in boiling water. "Please, make this stop."

He shook his head. "I don't even know if I can. What is Sleepless Dream?"

"It's a potion. It has hyssop, anise, moon tears..." She named the other ingredients, but he just shook his head.

"I don't know any of that. Are both of us unconscious?"

"No, we're awake and in my home, just seeing and feeling things that aren't really here."

"If I pull out my phone, will it really be my phone?"

"Yes." She hadn't taken it from him.

He dialed. "One five, five five." A code? "The front home, with her. One five, one five, come quick."

A knock came to the door far faster than Greta would have expected. Ian rushed for it, found the correct, real one.

"Thea, in here!"

A golden figure strode in. Thairn, with her glamour gone, stripped away by the dream hallucination, the Sleepless Dream seeing her as Ian knew her.

"Ian, what--?"

"Thea, do you know the potion called Sleepless Dream?"

"What's in it?"

Greta recited the ingredients: hyssop, anise, moon tears, moth wings, the breath of a black and white cat, crystallized starlight and more. Or she thought she did, for partway through the list, the darkness came again, and she tried to pick up where she'd left off, stumbling.

"What is it the two of you are seeing?" Thairn asked.

"Greta has been stabbed in the guts with icicles, and she's dying."

A hesitation, a softened voice. "You still dream of that, do you?"

He tensed. Nodded. And did not look at Thairn.

"Healing?" he asked.

"It's not a real wound, and I can't do much for poisons." Thairn turned to Greta. "You've dosed yourself with a potion, and you don't have an antidote?"

"It doesn't have one." She could feel the sting of being foolish later. For now, instead, the blackness took her again. She woke to breath being pushed into her mouth to fill her lungs from the lips of that faerie.

"Ian," Thairn said, once Greta could breathe again, "I survived, why can't you--"

"Because you don't in the nightmare."

Thairn's face went very still for one, lingering moment. The flexing of her throat as she swallowed was her only sign of emotion.

Then Thairn turned to Greta. "How were you intending the potion to work?"

"It creates a shared hallucination based on dreams. People who are aware of the potion can control the dream, usually."

"Can I join your dream, take it over?"

"You should be able to."

"You will owe me," came Thairn's threat to Greta.

"I accept the debt," she hissed, fending off another dive into blackness. She held out the bottle to Thairn. "Mix it with alcohol. Three drops to a shot." No, she didn't have shots here. "No, ah, three drops to a cup of wine. There's some in the fridge. Then touch us, so we stay in the same dream."

Thairn went to mix it, even as the blackness came for Greta once more. But then a strong hand gripped hers, brought back her vision of the illusion. The room tilted headlong, until they were sitting not in a white-carpeted living room or her own house or the mishmash of Ian's apartments, but in a field of bones as far as the eye could see. The cold water of appearance change washed over Greta again, and though she couldn't see what had happened well, she could feel wings against her back. Her guts were healed, as if they'd never been injured. She looked at her hands. They looked like Ian's? And not all of the corpses around them were skeletonized. Some were in the form of dead humans. One in particular held the form of a picture she'd seen in the white-carpeted room where she'd first begun to die: a man with broad features and a brown beard.

A whisper from Thairn, who seemed lost in the dream. "In the end, you're going to be the only one left, you know."

But then it was Thairn's abdomen that stained red, Ian's dream reasserting itself on a new target. It evoked little more than a bitter smile from Thairn, who turned her focus to Ian.

The collar around his throat from his earlier dream shifted to a golden torc laced with autumn leaves, enough to shock an inward breath from him. Thairn stared directly into his eyes, those blurred irises Greta could not stand, and suddenly it was Greta's dream that asserted itself, twisting those eyes again to compound, mandibles and gossamer wings and that horrible buzzing.

Thairn scrambled back, breaking contact with them both. But then halted. Breathed. And grabbed their hands once again.

"None of that." Her voice snapped with command, struck them both. Ian blinked his eyes back to normal, Thairn's mind even breaking the glamour blur, letting Greta finally see them for what they really were, blood red. Not far less disturbing than the blur had been. His true wings were visible, too, the upper set black and the lower set looking as if they'd been half-dipped in the same blood as his eyes.

"Illa," Thairn said, first meeting those eyes, then leaning in to his ear, making Ian--Illa?--tense in the same way Greta had seen before, after that photograph. "You will stop dreaming this nonsense. Dream me whole. I order it."

He shuddered, closed his eyes. The blood faded, the wound with it, as if it had never been. Thairn's shoulders sagged, relief betraying the tension Greta had been unable to read. But then it opened again, red and dripping, viscera emerging. Thairn pushed it back in, then took that bloodied hand to grasp Illa's chin, her own jaw tight as if with fury.

"Very well, then. Have a different nightmare, instead. I'm sure you have one of the tridem, or the wedding, or more."

"I don't."

But he did. It showed in the layered robes to which her clothes shifted, the ceremonial makeup that covered his own face. Thairn was no longer bleeding, again whole in body. But no less furious, no less taut with anger. She let go his chin and ceased to look at him.

"Let us sit here until this potion wears off," she said. "We can speak after, and not a damned one of you had better dream anything else."

So there they sat, amidst the corpses of Thairn's dream, Greta trying not to let her eyes stray too far, lest they induce some new nightmare in her. What was this creature, that terrified Illa, that dreamt of death without being touched by it? A wedding? She felt a pang of sympathy for him, but she pushed it down. He'd come here to trick Greta, to pry into her life and all the business that was hers alone to know. And he was a faerie, and they were murderous creatures who could never be trusted, insects infesting the world, stealing faces and passing lies. That one insect lived in terror of another could mean only so much to Greta.

It was hard not to let her thoughts stray too far as the potion slowly wore off. The skeletons faded, one by one. The corpses, too. Even that monster Thairn, who had herself summoned them, would not look at them. Illa did, and the light of recognition flickered too frequently in those crimson irises. But he obeyed orders and did not dream again of evisceration for either of them.

When the last corpse had faded into the darkness and the room was recognizable again and reality felt real once more, Thairn let go of their hands. The wedding robes dissolved into streetwear, the wings returned to a blur against her back, though her amber eyes were yet piercing. Illa's eyes had returned to their earlier blur, as had his wings. The marital makeup was gone, and the collar, too. He wouldn't look at Thairn, and that spoke volumes. Greta's hands were her own again, no longer the color and shape of Illa's.

"You will answer our questions," Thairn said.

Greta nearly argued, but she could remember what she herself had said. I accept the debt. "Very well."

"What is your role in the Holloway-Morleys?"

The twin bonds of vow and debt snapped around her, leaving her feeling even worse than she had under the influence of the Sleepless Dream, as if her soul were being drawn and quartered. Oaths were tied to magic, for wizards. They could not be given lightly.

"Please don't ask that."

"Are you already sworn?"

"Please, unask it."

"Answer. Are you already sworn?"

"Please."

"Very well. I withdraw my question. I ask instead: What can you tell us of your role in the Holloway-Morleys?"

"I see things for them."

"See things."

"I can--" the vow snapped tight again, like a choke chain around her throat. She shook her head, unable to continue.

"Then you can see through glamour, I imagine."

Greta could not answer.

"That you can't speak of it is interesting. I suppose that's why we hadn't heard it before. Why have you been looking at real estate?"

"Education."

"Is that it? Tell me."

"The Morleys want to train students in magic. Particularly those from notable wizarding families. If we become the way those families learn magic..."

"You'll retain influence on them all their lives."

Greta nodded. "And get a record of their strengths, weaknesses..."

"...until you have sway with and advantage over everyone." Putting a family that despised and attacked fae at the peak of power. "How ever did you get the other families to agree?"

"It was a hard-fought negotiation. But we have family scions with exceptional skill, and the connections to find outside hires that others can't."

"And is Eric Wilkinson one of your hires?"

"He has no role in the Morleys."

"He's just an affair you're having?"

"I don't have affairs." She was as interested in Eric as she'd ever been in anyone--not at all.

"Then what?"

"Sometimes the Morleys need people gone, and I don't want to see them stay dead."

"Then you're a traitor?"

"They've never been all that loyal to themselves."

"What do you mean?"

"I can't say."

"Then tell me about the Wingless." The gang that Eric belonged to.

"They have a necromancer. They give out a 'new lease on life.' And then it's a debt to be paid. Like this debt I find myself in."

"Surprised you didn't just rely on them to bring you back."

"There's only so much of a success rate with necromancy. And, besides, trust faeries not to dispose of a corpse in a way that can't be brought back? I'd sooner cut off my own fingers and trust them to regrow."

"So, you do have some wits about you. Where is their headquarters?"

"An old tenement building." Greta gave them the location. She leaned back against a table leg, feeling more resigned than despairing. "How far does this debt to you extend?"

"I don't know," Thairn said, "how much is your life worth to you?"

"And you risked yourself for it, too." Even as a waking dream, that blood of Thairn's when she'd been eviscerated would have sealed the debt far more firmly than words could manage. "Are you sure you didn't set this up?"

"You'd bear no debt if I had."

And Greta felt the chains, clear enough. On top of this mess, it was five o'clock in the morning, if her stove was accurate.

"I'll happily--well, willingly--tell you more later," Greta said, "but for right now, I need to leave. The Morleys have a family meeting soon, and I need to be there."

"This early?"

"I'm expected before setup even begins, to keep an eye on who and what comes in."

"I'm sure you'll tell us what transpires? And not tell them of this."

"What I can, which like as not isn't much. And no I won't tell them of this."

"Then wear a wire for us, would you?"

"It would be detected right away, magical or mundane."

"Then introduce one of us as an ally."

Greta wanted to acquiesce, just to let the fae be their own downfall, but the debt wouldn't allow it. "This isn't for new family. Two others with the Sight are flying in for it. And that shoddy glamour you're wearing won't deceive either of them." Not even Greta's niece Noraline, whose Sight was weaker than Greta's sister Ava's. "And if they know you're fae, they're like as not to kill you on sight or catch and question you."

"Flying in? Sounds important."

"Our leader is choosing a successor." Both chains pulled Greta tight--one demanding the truth, and one demanding silence. "Or so it's been announced."

"Interesting. Tell me what you can do, within the limits of your existing oaths."

"I can relay to you what happens. I can ignore you if I spot you following. But I warn you, the others won't. I can use what power I have to help hide you, but my power is to see, not to make unseen. And I can give you advice, later, on how to be introduced to the family. If that is what you really want. The other Sighted won't be in town long. We're too useful to keep in one place."

Illa and Thairn conversed with one another in strings of a foreign tongue.

"Go to your meeting, then," Thairn said, "and tell us what you can of it. Ian will give you the number to call. Later, I'll ask you more."

Greta found paper for Illa to write on, wondered if the looping touch to the handwriting was because he was fae. So many too-subtle signs to watch for. Better to use her view of glamour.

"And Greta, dear, if you think to get out of your debt to me," Thairn said, "I'm not above taking you home and giving you my own drink."

Illa finished writing, and Thairn strode from the room in a wave of blonde hair and a shimmer of glamour.

Thairn let her hand drift back, twitched a gesture with two fingers. "Ian, come."

He snapped to attention like an obedient dog, following in her wake.

Thairn took one of the copies of Greta's keys from where it hung by the door and left without another word, her faithful Illa ranged behind her.

Poor boy.

#

Thairn was quivering by the time they reached the studio apartment they rented as the Falsons, so much so that she barely got the key in the lock. Illa's presence behind her was all that made her keep it together. The dream-image of the collar was gone from his neck, but there was something about the way he moved and looked at her and spoke to her that whispered of submission. It helped. It made her feel in control. A good way to lie to herself. She let him in behind her, waited for him to lock the door.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She shook her head. Walked into the kitchenette instead, putt on the water for the tea. She'd prefer a strong drink, but after that drugged wine, the thought of more alcohol made her stomach clench.

"We got what we needed," she said, instead of what she'd really rather. "Better, even. I never thought we'd wrest a life debt out of this."

"Thairn."

"You've never been one for talking things out before, Illa. Don't start now."

"I can't..." He rubbed his forehead, wincing. "I wish we had space to be alone in this apartment."

She was glad they didn't. The thought of being alone right now chilled her guts much like the dream icicles had. But she let herself analyze the emotions involved, unspooled the chaos tangled inside her. Illa was in submissive mode, and she was being angry, giving him orders not to talk about things, knocking him about in his own head, after all that happened. She knew better than to do that, or so she hoped.

"Go--" No, it couldn't be an order. "You might want to go shower for a cooldown. The shower walls are fogged, they're almost like privacy." She pressed fingers into her own forehead, watched the water begin to bubble for the tea. "And you have no orders, Illa. I revoke any I've left standing."

"Thank you."

"Of course, dear." It hurt to release him, to let go that one scrap of control before everything in her head came crashing down around her.

Illa could probably tell her if her dream had re-created Don's corpse correctly. The two men had never met, would never meet, but Illa had spent weeks there in the apartment with her after it was all over, as she recovered from wounds that still, it seemed, gave him nightmares. With those photographs and every other piece of what had once meant home turned to memento.

She poured the hot water into an empty mug before remembering to seek a tea bag, looked for it while trying to make all the noise in her head quiet. There had been more corpses than her actual count of lovers fallen to the dangers of her life and their own mortality. Then again, the nightmare always went that way. Projecting out into the future, to the end of her widow's trail. Where Illa would be the only one left, because he always was.

And Illa wanted to speak of it? There were so many landmines here, so many things she didn't even want to consider touching, and his shower was not going to last nearly long enough for her to put any of it in order.

What if it had been a different drug? A different nightmare? What if he'd dreamt himself dead? What if he hadn't been able to call her? What had gone on that she hadn't seen? What information had he slipped to Greta? Enough, likely. Too much, likely.

Perhaps she should be angry. Part of her felt like being angry. But the way he'd flinched at her anger hadn't been pretty before, and it certainly wouldn't be pretty now.

Illa came out of the shower, stripped of glamour. Dressed himself in clothes that Thairn had not picked, a gray pullover and black jeans. Enough to belong to himself for right now, she supposed.

She poured a second cup for him. Wanted not to think. Had to think. A new mission to plan, now that they'd made their objectives. Heavens, they'd have to report, wouldn't they? Get a full missive to the local changeling, include a special segment on Sleepless Dream. She had to get a sample from Greta. Get the alchemists on an antidote, a detector, something to counter it.

And something to copy it, perhaps. It would be damned useful for interrogations, same way Greta had tried to use it. Debriefings, too, if it could be controlled enough to not be dangerous. Psychiatry, recreation, all manner of things. It could relay the subconscious and memory better and stronger than glamour, which had to be carefully crafted by changelings whose magic had been bent towards glamour since childhood. All those uses, and all the wizards had thought was, "this might be handy to use against an enemy." Give it to the faeries for five years, and they'd probably figure out how to teach classes with it and build historical archives and host art shows and heal mental illness and bring designs into being and all kinds of things.

That was the difference between wizards and fae, and that was the problem with wizards. Fae had magic, and they'd used it to change their entire world. Wizards had magic, and they used it to fight amongst themselves and scrape by an underground existence. Even Greta's school, look at that. Playing influence games when they had access to enough power to change the world five times over, as long as they thought about healing and building instead of fighting.

Though Thairn and Illa did plenty of fighting. Someone had to keep the mess over here from reaching home. And bring to home what grew from it. Thairn still remembered unpleasantly those years explaining telephones and radios to the technology developers in the Department of Offworld Relations. They'd been idiots not to understand it. They'd been geniuses to try.

Thairn left Illa's cup on the table, went to the study to fill out the reports. She'd do a special one for the technology office. It would keep her mind on the parts of work that were easy to digest and off... everything else.

Illa didn't interrupt, not in a way that made her have to think about the everything else. Just brought over his tea and looked over her reports after she wrote them, corrected a bit and signed off on a few things. All in code, of course, designed to look like a series of product reviews and quality control memos. They'd mastered the extra step of thinking in it a long time ago. Another foreign language, like English. Illa took a fresh sheet for his own report of the incident, too.

Thairn read it over, afterwards. He'd described every compromised memory and nightmare in detail, because he had to, and it cut a flinch deep into her to read it. He'd even left in the golden torc, Thairn's orders, and his speculations on what Greta might gather from those.

Thairn took a pen and scratched those out. Illa did not protest. There was reasoning, to be sure, all kinds of logic she could claim for that decision. But the truth of it was, she didn't want them to touch it, to know it. This was theirs, and the further apart she could keep it from anything official, from anything that gave Illa those nightmares she'd had to use to keep herself alive, then the better she could keep it theirs, and theirs alone.

She regretted that he'd had to explain to them about Shandra. She didn't know how much he'd been able to keep his tendencies secret from them before; from the way he talked, it was only about as well as she'd been able to keep her own affairs quiet--which was to say, not at all. But if they knew too much, thought too much about it, then they would start to use him the way they used her. She didn't want to see what twisted ideas they'd come up with for that.

No worries about professional disapproval for this incident. They'd caught and tested a hitherto-unknown potion, survived to wring a life debt from their target, and gathered all kinds of new information. Every leak had dripped into the hands of their life debtor, so it was scarcely compromised at all. It helped, of course, that they wrote the reports in a way that made Illa and Thairn sound reasonable and sensible throughout.

The rest didn't take long with Illa to help write. He'd always had a good head for the paperwork, buried as he often was in books. Taking it to the emergency drop took longer, but they went together, standing at a bit of a distance from each other, not caring for an hour that they look happily married. And if, at the end, when they got home well after sunrise, she asked--asked, not ordered--that they not talk about it, not for now, was it anything to blame her for? He let it go and went to read a book, and she sat abed without a thing to do and ached for him to pillow his head in her lap and belong to her for just long enough to make her feel in control and okay. Maybe he'd let her, if she talked to him. But, devils and angels, did she never want to talk to him.

She dared not sleep until he came to bed. She fell asleep to the warmth of his presence, the occasional breeze from restless flutters of his wings, and she felt wrong in every way she could picture. Her dreams were bloodstained and corpse-ridden, and in the end, she and Illa were the only two in the world left alive. He was dressed in wedding robes and fled at the sight of her, and the worst part was that she had a chain she could pull to call him to heel at any time, and she couldn't bring herself to drop it. No matter how much it sickened her to touch and hold.

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