Emma helped Mr. and Mrs. Anderson up the hill. The two had become rickety and fragile in their old age and needed canes to hobble around. Emma thought that seeing their daughter restored to the prime of her life and flushed with health would do their old bones a world of good.

And they would be very, very thankful, of course.

The wind blew cool over the crest of the mountain, but Emma was able to block some of the air from the Andersons with her body. The bustle helped out immensely in this regard.

Down in the valley were the remains of ancient stoneworks. Once, they might have been Roman fortifications. Perhaps they were once towers that loomed over the hills Perhaps they were once roads that stretched to the very sea. But now they were stone outlines, mere suggestions of what once stood on these lands. The rustics called them “fairy forts” for who else would claim ruins but the lords of the dead?

The valley was filled with such fairy forts. Their stones broke through the grass like mushrooms. What better place for fairy magic, real or otherwise?

Emma helped the Andersons sit down at their usual spots on the hill and politely took their walking sticks. Then, she took their hands up in her own as if they were little children and spoke to them with all the softness and sweetness she could muster.

“Tom, Janet, now has come the time to show you what I promised you. Now, because the Kindly Ones have saw fit to increase my power, you shall see Alice not as a vague image pulled from Fairy to the valley below, but as she truly is. You shall see Alice, and Fairy, fully and completely. You will see that she is well, and young, and beautiful, and not at all like that broken, ugly body in the casket.”

Their wrinkled hands trembled in her grasp. Their eyes watered.

“Will we really see her as she was?”Janet Anderson asked. “Will we really see our daughter as she should be?”

Emma smiled. “Yes, Janet, you will.”

Moments like this made Emma feel like a good person and she cherished them. She could never be a good person, she figured that out long ago, but she was happy to settle for feeling like what she would never be. Pretending had always felt very real to her.

“Now, it shall begin!” Emma squeezed the Anderson’s hands then turned to face the valley. She stretched her arms out wide. She spread her fingers.

“Heed my call! Display the location of the dearly departed! Show us…Alice Anderson!”

Emma stood in stunned silence.

Before, with the kitchen floor and the glass of beer, summoning her visions had been like making paintings--vivid, life-like paintings, but still things that seemed contained by the borders of their frame.

Not so here.

Corbenic loomed over the valley, over the hills even. A vertical garden towered over Emma and stretched from horizon to horizon like a verdant wall. The ghosts reclined in marble alcovers on richly embroidered couches and if they noticed Emma and the Andersons they gave no indication that they did.

That they either couldn’t see or ignored Emma gave her confidence. If they had stopped to stare at her, she wasn’t sure what she would have done. But their inattention reminded Emma that this was nothing more than a vision.

Once she had calmed down, she turned her attention to the trembling parents behind her. She turned and smiled down at them.

“Don’t be afraid! This is just like I told you it would be.”

“They’re all so beautiful!” Janet gasped. “Are they angels?”

“Some are kin to angels.” and if Emma cared more about truth than appearing wise, she would have added “I think, but I’m not quite sure how that works, actually.”

“Which one is our Alice?” Tom asked.

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“She is there!” Emma pointed with a flourish. “Do you see her? With the long, blonde hair?”

“Oh! That’s her! That’s our Alice!” Janet cried and clung to her husband. “Oh, Tom! If only she could see us!”

‘It’s good enough to know that she is well and that the Kindly Ones take care of her.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you two so happy…” Emma said, preparing to plant the suggestion that tea, bread, and sweetmeats might not be the appropriate payment for summoning a fairy castle.

Then a strapping young man, perhaps a ghost, perhaps a fairy, walked up to Alice and sat next to her on the couch. He put his arm around her in a very familiar way.

“Who is that?” Janet asked.

Emma didn’t have a clue.

Then, the man kissed Alice, full on the lips.

The Andersons gasped.

Janet pulled on Emma’s sleeve. “Please, Ms. Quinn, who is that man? We don’t know that man!”

“Are you…sure?” Emma asked. If they could provide an answer, she wouldn’t have to provide one.

“That’s not her David! He doesn’t look a thing like David!” Tom exclaimed.

Emma stifled a sigh.

So she had “a David,” a boyfriend or a husband. She didn’t bother to

And whoever Alice was kissing in Corbenic wasn’t David.

Or was it?

“Tom, Janet, sometimes ghosts adopt a different form than they had in life.” Emma said consolingly to the parents, who couldn’t take their eyes off their daughter as she locked lips with a stranger. “Their hair may change colors, for instance.”

“David is still alive!” Tom exclaimed.

Well damn, there went her luck.

Emma wanted to tell them that wedding vows were “Til’ death do you part” for a reason, but she doubted the Andersons wanted to hear it.

‘Ms. Quinn?” Janet asked, “Are you…absolutely sure that we are looking at Alice? Our Alice?”

Emma’s mind raced.

This was a bad turn.

They never questioned her before.

They never questioned her when she was lying to them and showing them Sam walking around in the misty morning in a dress and wig. But now that she was showing them the truth, now that she was actually showing them Alice and Fairy, they questioned her.

She could not help but see John-a-Door’s knife-like smile in her mind.

“Um…Vision disperse!” Emma made a perfunctory little wave with her hand and the vision of Corbenic evaporated like mists.

She grabbed her head and played up the slight headache she genuinely had. “Ohhhhh…this level of power, it is strange and new to me.”

The Andersons placed their hands supportingly on her. Emma deliberately swayed back and forth.

“Oh, Tom, Janet, please do not worry for me. It is more the chill of the morning than the recoil from my powers,” she pushed their hands away. “...but I must rest now! Perhaps, in my inexperience with these powers, I created images that were misleading.”

Janet smiled weakly and nodded. “Oh, yes. Yes. that does make sense.”

But Emma could tell that doubt was dawning behind the veneer of faith.

“We shall discuss this later.” Emma said as she headed down the hill. “Much has happened and much will be said, but I must rest now. Farewell.”

She needed to get away, she needed to think.

On the carriage ride home, Emma was concerned for the future.

“Okay, Emma girl, you’ve managed to stave off disaster--for today. But what about the next day?” she thought. “You can’t just drop them as clients. If you told them that you couldn’t show them Alice anymore, they’d tell the other clients about it. And worse still, the Kindly Ones might get upset. If you declined to use their gift, that would be a very rude and very ugly thing, and you know how they feel about ugly things…”

Then she had a chilling thought.

They might already be mad at her.

She pushed the thought deep down inside her mind. She refused to entertain a no-win scenario.

“Perhaps the Anderson will decline my services on their own.” she thought. “They didn’t seem to fully believe my lies. They might be too ashamed to ask to see their daughter again. That works for me.”

Then she had a crafty idea.

John-a-Doors said that the faeries were fine with her using her powers to show the living the dead in Fairy, and the unspoken blade hidden in that statement was that it was a gift and it would be rude not to use a gift.

But they never said she had to match the right ghost to the right people.

She could show them a ghost. Any ghost, so long as it looked like Alice.

Emma smiled. She was safe, again. The rabbit had jumped the snare.

These faeries weren’t any harder than people to get an advantage over.

After she got home, got out of her dress, and detached the bustle and placed it against the wall like a basket, she finally allowed her emotions to overtake her. She collapsed on a chair in her kitchen and poured herself a stout mixture of laudanum and whiskey. It successfully dulled her anxiety, but she couldn’t help but wish that John-a-Doors was by her side with a ball of living calmness in his hands to give her.

She looked at the spot on her wall were a door had once been.

There always was a catch, wasn’t there? And damn her for being fool enough to think she had seen all the possible snares.

“So there was a trap,” she thought to herself, “and I’ve fallen into it.”

She quickly dismissed the thought from her head. “No,” she thought to herself, “I’m overthinking this. This was just some bad luck. After all the good luck I’ve been having, the universe owes me a little bad luck, doesn’t it? This has nothing to do with me or the faeries, not really. This is due to them, to the Andersons. They’re rustics, and old rustics at that. The nuance that ghosts were not minds was lost on them, so why wouldn’t the nuance that ghosts could change over time just like humans also be lost on them?

One can never account for fools, she decided.

As Emma got ready for bed and prepared for her mind to once again drift through the wonders of Fairy, she reassured herself that even if the Andersons were lost to her, and she doubted that they truly were, she still had two other families.

She would miss that tea, though…