Borderline (7 page)

“Nice work,” I said. I meant it, but it came out sarcastic somehow.

The cat made a sound like a rusty door hinge, and Teo grabbed him to set him down on the desk. “We'll have to get Caryl's approval to go up there,” he said as he scratched behind
the cat's missing ear. “She's not answering right now, but I'll keep trying.”

“Where is this place?”

“Santa Barbara, just inside the Project's perimeter. Couple hours' drive.”

Fantastic. A four-hour round trip in the tobacco-mobile with Mr. Grouchy.

“What's the deal with the cat?” I asked. “Caryl told me not to touch him, but he seems nice enough.”

“Monty belonged to our last boss, and that . . . bugs Caryl. Long story. But he likes me. He's attracted to angst.”

I guess I was angsty enough for Monty too, because he let me run a hand down his back. His fur was softer than it looked, but I could feel his ribs under it.

Downstairs, I heard a cascade of spiraling eighth notes from the piano. I thought of my father for a moment, his straight back at the baby grand in our foyer. The pain wasn't as fresh as it ought to have been; we'd been distant for years before his suicide.

“You know,” I said, “since we have time to kill anyway while you keep trying Caryl, why don't we look into why Rivenholt ran off? If we know what made him run, we might have better luck getting him to come back.”

Teo looked annoyed, but he did seem to think it over. “We could snoop around some of his hangouts, see if anyone heard anything. Maybe the Seelie bar.”

“The what now?”

“Oh. Um, so to go along with the fairy theme, London HQ calls the rival fey kingdoms the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. It breaks down to ‘pretty' versus ‘scary.' Mostly it's the pretty
Seelie that come to this part of the country looking for their Echoes, and they have their own little watering hole out in West Hollywood.”

I opened my mouth.

“Don't even think of making a fairy joke; it wasn't funny the first dozen times somebody said it.”

“I wouldn't dream of it, boss.”

11

There's a saying that somebody tilted this country on its end, and everything that wasn't securely attached fell into California. I think it's the main reason I feel at home here. But when Teo and I started hoofing it through the very gayest part of West Hollywood late that afternoon, I discovered that even in Los Angeles it is possible to feel like a freak.

I think some of the more hostile stares were rooted in jealousy. Teo was a nice piece of ass, and the fading light suited him, making him look brooding and mysterious.

“Are you gay?” I asked him.

“I dunno,” he said.

“What do you mean, you don't know? Do you like guys or not?”

“Shut up a second,” said Teo, slipping on his mirror shades. He looked ridiculous; there was barely a blush of sunset left in the western sky. “There it is.” He stopped at an intersection and pointed across the street.

“The sushi place next to the bookstore?” I blinked. What was a Christian bookstore doing half a block from a drag show anyway? The thought had barely entered my head before it
fluttered away and I found myself looking at the sushi place again. I don't even like sushi. I looked back at the bookstore, only to find my attention wandering across the street to a coffee shop.

“Look at my glasses.”

I turned and looked at him. “Very nineties, Neo.”

“Not what I meant.”

“You want me to look through them?”

“No, look
at
them. Look at what they're reflecting.”

Teo leaned down a bit. I reached to turn his face to the proper angle, and when I saw what he was talking about, I got goose bumps. I could just barely make out the reflection of what was really next to the sushi place: a pink stucco building with a neon martini glass in one window and a winged neon female in the other.

“Holy shit,” I said, looking back and forth from the glasses to the street over and over. Seeing isn't always a straight shot to believing.

I yanked the glasses off Teo's face and put them on, looking back across the street. Now I could still see the fake bookstore, but it was covered in shadowy mesh and snaky gold figures that reminded me of Arabic writing.

“Why don't they make it so that the glasses look through the illusion when you're wearing them?” I said.

Teo wrapped an arm around me, pulling me close and ­nuzzling my ear. What the hell?

“Cállate,”
he murmured as people gathered behind us waiting for the
WALK
sign. “Look, if I'm wearing these and don't even know that bar is supposed to be hidden, I might say something to give it away.”

“And this is all a big secret.” I slipped an arm around him too, because why not?

“There's a Code of Silence written into the Accord,” he whispered, his breath giving me goose bumps. “The Accord's like a treaty; it keeps the Unseelie from invading and fucking up the planet for kicks.” Then he nabbed the shades off my face the way I'd done to him and pulled away, slipping them back on.

I adjusted the valve on my prosthetic knee so I could move at a better speed for street crossing. When the light changed, Teo grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the hidden bar. I trundled awkwardly along, cane thumping in the street.

“Your hair smells girly,” I said.

“Your opinion means so much to me.”

The closer we got to the bookstore, the less worthy it seemed of my attention. It gave off a faint odor suggesting moths and mildew. As Teo stepped toward the doorway, I grabbed his arm.

“Wait,” I said. “We need to double back; I dropped my—” I stopped. I hadn't brought anything besides my clothes and my cane, and the latter was still clutched firmly in my hand.

Teo just grinned at me. “It's so cute watching the noobs get glamoured.”

“That's creepy,” I said, staring at the bookstore. “I mean, it's creepy because it doesn't even feel like magic.”

“Uh-huh. Keep moving.”

“Sorry,” I said, and obliged him.

“Millie.”

“Yeah?”

“You're moving
away
from the bookstore.”

“Damn it!” This time I let Teo take my arm and escort me. Stupid fairies.

The moment we passed through the doorway, the spell dropped like a sheet from a birdcage, and the world burst into song.

Not just song, but deep, pulsing rhythm and color, so much color. Fuchsia and lime and orange and forest green and robin's-egg blue, splashes and streaks and spatters and stars. There was no rhyme or reason to it; the colors seemed to have blossomed spontaneously from the walls. I don't know why it was beautiful, but it was. Unlike most nightclubs, it was as bright as a movie set. Great feathered ceiling fans rotated slowly, sending iridescent bubbles drifting through the space.

The little venue wasn't highly populated, but everyone in it looked as though they'd just stepped off a fashion shoot.

“Wow,” I said. “Who
are
these guys?”

“
Sidhe
. Nobility of the Seelie Court, like Rivenholt. If you think they look good now, check the reflection in the glasses.” He took them off and handed them to me.

I tilted the shades toward the woman behind the bar. Even distorted by the shape of the lens, what I saw in the reflection made my one good knee turn to Jell-O. Huge, luminous laven­der eyes, hair gleaming and writhing as though in its own private wind. Her skin shimmered like liquid opal.

I handed the glasses back to Teo. When looked at directly, the bartender was just an ordinary supermodel: strawberry blond and lightly tanned, with glitter-dusted eyes and a rack to die for.

“Baroness Foxfeather,” said Teo as he approached her. She flashed him a smile, then looked at me. Her expression changed immediately to an equally bewitching pout.

“What is that,” she said, pointing at me, “and why did you bring it in here?”

Teo stopped short, looking as surprised as I felt. “This is my new partner,” he said. “Millie.”

“Lisa is still dead?” the fey said sadly.

“Yes.”

She stabbed a manicured finger at me. “It's half metal.”

“I'm just a regular person,” I reassured her awkwardly. “I got hurt really badly, and they had to, uh, repair me with metal bits.”

“Like, surgery?” said Foxfeather, her suspicion turning to fascination as quickly as the lamp over the bar shifted from pink to periwinkle.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding like a bobblehead doll. “Lots and lots of surgery. Well, the legs weren't surgically attached; they can come off. But some of my bones needed to be held together with—”

“What do you need, Teo?” Foxfeather had already lost interest in me. “Is it another inspection?” She tossed her hair over her shoulder; even the mundane facade was enough to make me rotten with jealousy.

“No, nothing like that.” Teo didn't seem in the least distracted by the lightly freckled cleavage on display. Yup, definitely gay. “We were just wondering if you'd seen Viscount Rivenholt recently.”

“Yeah,” said Foxfeather. She then wandered off to the other end of the bar and pulled a slim knife from her pocket, absently digging its point into the wood.

“Milady,” said Teo in the patient tone people use with small children. He moved around to the end of the bar so he was ­facing her again. “How recently, would you say?”

I followed and saw that Foxfeather was adding details to an
impressive rendition of a goat-legged man. It was captivating—something I might have expected to see in a museum—and she was just carving it right into the bar. “I don't know,” she said, intent on her work.

Teo gave me an
I hate fairies
look.

“I love that,” I said, pointing to her art. “Is that a satyr?”

“I don't know what it's called,” she said with a vague smile. “I can't keep all the commoners straight. They're not allowed in here. But they have such interesting faces, don't they?”

“What about Rivenholt?” I ventured. “Does he have an interesting face?”

For a moment Foxfeather looked scandalized, and I was afraid I'd made some unforgivable fey faux pas. But then she giggled. “I'm only a baroness,” she said. “He's a
viscount
.”

“I didn't ask if you were dating him; I just wondered if you thought he was handsome. He seems very handsome to me.”

She giggled again nervously. “I like his facade better than his real face,” she said. “But I think I'm just starting to like the way humans look.”

“You look really pretty both ways,” I said.

“Thanks!” she said. “Hey, why don't you have a facade? You don't have to look like that.”

Teo opened his mouth as though to intervene, but I put up a hand. Gloria had said damn near the same that morning, and with less excuse. “I don't know much about facades,” I said. “You're actually the first fey I've talked to.”

“Ohmigod!” she squealed.

Several of the other patrons turned to see what had her so excited. They all seemed to find me offensive at first sight, as she had.

“We have a dry-eye in the bar!” Foxfeather shouted.

Whatever a dry-eye was, it seemed exciting enough to overcome the patrons' disgust. Some of them rose from their seats and approached; the rest went back to their drinks. I glanced at Teo; he looked uneasy but not panicked, so I tried to calm my suddenly racing heart as the curious fey closed in.

One of the interested patrons, a tanned hunk of beefcake, flexed a bicep at me and then turned abruptly into a lemon tree. I started, nearly knocking over the bar stool I'd been leaning on and setting off a chorus of giddy laughter.

“Now you've done it,” said Teo. “They'll never leave you alone.”

“Rivenholt,” I stammered at them. “Do any of you know Rivenholt?”

“Rivenholt,” said a slender brown man in a three-piece suit, using my exact voice and inflection. “Do any of you know Rivenholt?”

“You smell horrible,” said a brunette who had sidled up next to me. “You stink of death.” She reached out to do something to me, change my scent perhaps, but the moment her hand touched me, her facade dropped.

It was only for a second—a flash of autumn wings and blowtorch hair. The moment she let go of me she looked like a leggy brunette again.

“What the hell?” she and I said simultaneously.

“She has iron inside of her,” Foxfeather supplied helpfully, leaning forward on the bar behind us.

Teo blinked at me. “What is she talking about? The leg?”

“I have a steel plate in my head,” I said slowly. “Also various nails and pins and things holding my bones together.”

“Holy shit,” said Teo. “Steel. That's what happened with the drawing. All that iron . . . You kill magic.”

The fey, with the exception of Foxfeather, were now backing away from me. I felt a slow sinking inside. So Caryl hadn't picked me for my leadership skills, or for my creativity. She'd probably lied about seeing my stupid films. She wanted me on her team because I was walking fairy kryptonite.

12

It seemed to take a minute for Teo to grasp the repercussions of this, but when he did, he gave the assembled fey a feral grin. “All right, kids,” he said jauntily. “Unless you want me to sic Ironbones on you, I suggest you start racking your flighty ­little brains for some details about when and where you last saw Viscount Rivenholt.”

My anger shifted from cold and dark to bright and hot. I didn't appreciate Teo's using me as a threat. I groped for my emotional reins, tried to remember some of my distress tolerance skills, but the calm mediocrity of Dr. Davis's office seemed like a fading dream in this chaotic atmosphere.

“We ate fish!” blurted the man who had turned into a tree earlier. He cringed when I looked his way. “Next door,” he said. “He was going to eat raw fish, and I was curious, so I went too. It was terrible. I don't remember when it happened. Not very long ago. Please don't touch me.”

My anger fled at those last words, leaving nothing but a chill void. I barely felt Teo's hand on my back as he guided me out the door of the bar, and I didn't hear a word he said, although there were a lot of them.

Don't touch me.

The image of John Scott, my UCLA screenwriting professor, tumbled out of my memory like a Polaroid out of a drawer. The sag of the skin under his ribs as he'd rolled away from me, suddenly tired and old, was photograph sharp. I'd reached for him, trying to rewrite what had just happened. He'd flinched away as though I'd wounded him.

Had I? I no longer even knew what was real. I tried to wrench my mind into the present; looking backward was intensely dangerous.

When you're Borderline, by the time you get a diagnosis you've done so many vicious things and blamed so many other people for them that the guilt of facing even one truth sets off a mental landslide. You start to wonder which of the evils done to you were real, and which were just reflections of the evil in you.

I felt sick and sweaty as I followed Teo into the sushi bar, but he wasn't paying attention to me. My stride turned lopsided and ugly even with the help of the cane; walking normally with prosthetic legs takes conscious, front-of-the-brain thought. The reek of fish and vinegar brought me partially out of my downward spiral—
Distract with strong sensations
, said Dr. Davis in my mind—and I tried to focus on what Teo was saying.

He showed the viscount's picture to several employees, and a waitress recognized “John Riven” and remembered seeing the actor there. Her words weren't really coalescing in my brain, so instead of listening, I reached into Teo's pocket for his sunglasses and slipped them on.

“Don't lose those,” he growled at me before turning back to the waitress.

I wasn't expecting to see anything weird, which was why the faint glimmer of golden light on the bulletin board surprised me enough to pull me out of my funk. It was just a tiny flicker, mostly covered by ads for acting lessons and used furniture: cheap ink-jet printouts with phone number tear-strips at the bottom.

I made a beeline for the board, then realized I shouldn't touch the paper myself, not unless I wanted to suck all the magic out of it. I limped back over to Teo, still too preoccupied to pay attention to my stride.

“You didn't hear anything interesting in their conversation?” Teo was asking the waitress. I handed him his glasses and politely waited my turn to speak.

“Not really,” she said. She looked Japanese, but her accent was pure Valley Girl.
California roll
, my brain unkindly supplied. “Mostly John was explaining sushi to the other guy.”

“Did you get any idea of their relationship?”

“Friends, I guess? Acquaintances?”

A redheaded man stepped out from behind the prep area. “Are you guys talking about John Riven?”

“Yeah,” said Teo. “Did you talk to him?”

“You guys cops?”

“No, just friends,” Teo said. “Why, do we look like cops?”

“Jeff said the police were in here looking for John Riven the other day.”

“Shit,” said the waitress, making a washing-her-hands kind of gesture and getting back to work.

Teo just stood there for a minute, looking as floored as I felt. “What kind of cops?” he asked the redhead when his brain cells reassembled.

“I dunno. Jeff didn't give loads of detail.”

“Can you give Jeff my number?” said Teo, handing him a card. “I want to know what's going on.”

“Uh, sure,” said the redhead, and took the card with a skeptical expression before disappearing into the back again.

“Teo,” I said quietly, “I think there's another drawing on the bulletin board.”

Teo crossed back toward the entrance, slipping on his shades as he went, and had no trouble spotting the page in question. He gave it a tug, detaching it.

It was a sketch of two young men I didn't recognize, one leaning his head on the other's shoulder in a booth just like the one in the back corner. The pose was casual, intimate, and as I looked at the nested figures, my surge of affection for them was bittersweet. The two were so young. I was glad they had each other and dared to hope that one day I, too, would no longer be alone.

Written at the bottom were the words
Hold on
.

“Weird,” said Teo blandly. “I wonder if he and Berenbaum have had some kind of falling-out.”

It took me a moment to realize what Teo was talking about. As with the other drawing, the viscount's emotions felt so native to me that I hadn't realized I was subject to an empathy charm.

I pondered for a moment. “You can be in a relationship and still feel alone, you know.”

“Having an Echo isn't like having a boyfriend,” Teo said with a puzzling level of condescension for one who apparently had neither. “It's like finding the other half of your soul. You never really know another human the way you know your Echo.”

“Well, obviously Berenbaum and Rivenholt are anything but intimate right now. Berenbaum doesn't even know why he ran off. So your perfect-soul-mate theory isn't really holding water.”

“Or it means that something has happened to Rivenholt that's so bad he doesn't want Berenbaum involved. In other words, this is
definitely
above my pay grade. Let's just report to Caryl and let her handle it.”

I stared at the drawing a moment longer, a little unnerved by the strong compulsion I had to grab it, hold it, inhale the scent of the paper. Even knowing that my touch would destroy it, it was hard to resist. I put both my hands on top of my cane and gripped it tightly as Teo put the paper away.

•   •   •

When we returned to Residence Four, Caryl was already sitting on a couch in the living room. For a moment I was surprised to see her in the same pantsuit she'd worn at our last meeting, but then I remembered it had only been this morning. Wow.

“There is a pizza in the kitchen,” Caryl said by way of greeting.

“You didn't tell me I could cancel magic by touching it,” I replied.

Teo made an
ouch
face and tiptoed melodramatically past the two of us toward the kitchen. Food was the last thing on my mind.

“Can you?” said Caryl.

“Don't act like you don't know. Fifty bucks says it's the whole reason you recruited me.”

“I have no reason to deceive you,” she said. “But then, I suppose you have no reason to trust me, either.” Her expression strongly suggested that she didn't give a damn either way. “I
had considered that the abnormally high iron content of your body might afford you more protection than most, but if I had known you could actively disrupt spellwork, I'd have been more careful where I sent you.”

“Whatever,” I said. “Teo wants us to hand this assignment back to you anyway. It looks as though it's way more complicated than you thought.”

“How so?”

“The cops are asking about Rivenholt in West Hollywood, and he seems to have fled to a resort in Santa Barbara. Berenbaum is completely out of the loop.”

“I'll find something else for Teo to work on,” she said. “You, on the other hand, are suspended from all duties for twenty-­four hours.”

“What?”

“You may continue to stay here at the Residence during your probation if you refrain from further violence.”

“Violence?” Shit. Teo had ratted me out. I didn't bother defending myself; I suspected it was pointless. “What am I supposed to
do
?”

“Something that doesn't involve assaulting people, I should hope. You are very lucky I didn't reject your application outright. If it happens again, I will.”

I waited to get angry, but I just felt defeated and miserable. I sank down onto the other couch, staring at the floor.

Teo returned from the kitchen with a mouthful of pizza, the remaining half of the slice still in his hand. “I hope I didn't miss a good catfight,” he said, flopping down on the couch near Caryl. He immediately tensed, and then laughed. “Dammit, Elliott, not the ear.”

I stared suspiciously at Teo. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Teo tossed me his sunglasses. I fumbled the catch, and the glasses bounced off my knee onto the rug. With a muffled groan, I bent my stiff back to retrieve them.

“Teo,” said Caryl firmly. “If you break those, you are not getting another pair.”

Righting myself, I slipped the glasses on and immediately blurted out an obscenity, recoiling back against the couch.

Perched on Teo's shoulder, as seen through the glasses, was a small dragon. Or at least that's what my brain decided to call it. It was a black creature about the size of a falcon, with bat wings and an iguana face and a scorpion tail. It looked as though it couldn't decide whether to nuzzle Teo or tear out his jugular. I sympathized.

“What . . . is that thing?” I said.

“My familiar,” said Caryl.