The Emperor's New Clothes (Royce Ree #1) (8 page)

"You still do sir, but as with all our services, there is a
fee associated with reference generation. You were set up with a
no-limit credit account on May 30
^th
, but as
there have been no payments posted in that time, and there is no
employment of record on your file, your borrowing privileges have
been suspended."

"And when was I going
to be informed of this? And how the hell am I going to get a job?"
The light turned green, a horde of humanity moving me along with it
across the road.

"The notification
will go out with the July statement. And I'm sorry sir, I cannot
answer your second question."

"Is there nothing you
can do? I need the references to get a job to pay you back. It
seems rather ridiculous to cut me off now."

"I'm sorry sir, the
system won't allow me to add any further purchases," she
said.

The couple in front
of me decided that the sidewalk was an ideal location to taste each
other’s breakfasts. The smooth flow of people became a jumble of
Brownian particles, each trying to find the path of least
resistance, bumping into one another. And apologizing. This was
Canada, after all.

"Is there anything
else I can help you with?" asked Ms. DePetra.

"You can escalate this call to a manager." And you two can
just move along, thank you, to the other
side of the street.

"I'm sorry sir, you are always granted top priority.
I
am
the manager."

"So I get VIP
treatment but no references?" If that was the case, my habitual
support of Lord Petra's cockamamie schemes was at an
end.

"That is correct sir.
Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

"No."

"Then have a nice day, sir. This
call will now be disconnected."

CHAPTER TWO

Linked In

Toronto attracts
exiles like no other place on Earth. But she also embraces our
fallen, the ones that become trapped within the webs of human
interaction. In this city, resources other than Petra's could be
called upon.

At the library a
block south of Yonge and Church, I stooped to the ground for a
moment, brushing my finger lightly over the pulse in the concrete.
A decades old memory rose to reply.

Four more blocks
south, a quick left.

I found myself before
a porn shop. The windows were tinted black, and a garish neon sign
flickered overhead.

Calling for the
Symbiot to announce my presence, I pushed open the door. A bank of
cool air rushed to greet me, redolent with the scent of hibiscus
and nectarines.

Instead of magazine
racks and questionable latex products, I found before me a large
and mostly empty warehouse. Upside-down owls, some stuffed, some
live, hung from the rafters overhead. The live ones swayed gently
in the air, their heartbeats slow and steady. The dead ones clacked
out pre-Bolshevik Russian poetry in Morse code.

A figure sat behind a
desk at the far end of the space, casually buffing its
nails.

"Welcome to the
Unseelie Consulate. How may I help you?" Its tones were dulcet and
carrion.

"I need a number," I
said, hoping to avoid the long drawn-out pleasantries the denizens
of this House partake in as precursor to work. "The Ambassador,
please."

The Faerie seemed
rather shocked at my abruptness - it took some time to recover its
aplomb, hand on breast to calm its fluttering breaths.

"I'm so sorry Ser
Mage," it said, finally, "but we cannot hand out personal
information without appropriate authorization. Would you like to
fill out a form, and wait for the interested party to contact
you?"

The
Unseelie
were doing corporate-speak now? Or
had Petra managed to sell them those "Customer Service for the new
age: All Species, All Dimensions, ONE COURSE 50% Off Today Only"
DVDs after all?

"No, I want a
phone-number," I said. "If he isn't here, any Ruler of the House
will do...actually, anybody except cousin Amelia."

"Oh! You're family!
Why didn't you say so?" The Faerie was excited now - it had put
down its nail kit, and was about to clap its hands
together.

"Not of your House,"
I said, quickly.

Family-yet-not, which narrows the field down to exactly
one. And my flashes of temper, at inappropriate excitement
for
every goddamn little
thing,
are well known to the
Unseelie.

Sniffing, the Faerie
plucked out a feather from the owl sleeping directly above it. The
bird woke, squawking indignantly. Then its heart stopped, and its
beak started clacking out Pushkin's Dead Princess.

The Faerie giggled.
"We're totally binary now!"

"I see that.
Wonderful." What else could I say?

"Ah! Here it is!
You're in luck! Lord Tom is in town." The Faerie smoothed out the
feather. "You ready for it? It's..."

With a quick
thank-you, I escaped the consulate just the Faerie reinserted the
feather into one of the clacking owls in the far corner of the
room. The owl returned to life, and went to sleep.

A few steps away from
the consulate doors, I started coughing violently. Fortuitously,
there was nobody in the alley to offer me a Heimlich, and a good
thirty seconds of hacking yielded the small scrap of paper that had
managed to make it almost halfway to my stomach. Its markings
spelled out two numbers, one of them of the 416-289
variety.

What the hell was Tom
doing in Scarborough?

Apparently, Tom was
doing Natalia – "Just the most fantastic little whore of a
marketing director I met at this Halloween party" - in
Scarborough.

The process of
cornering the Unseelie Lord to commit to a meeting at a specific
time and place other than 'when I feel like it, somewhere nice',
made it quite clear that Tom had not heard of the specifics of The
Incident. And was rather disgruntled at being kept out of the loop,
as indicated by the barbed hints he kept dropping between
descriptions of Natalia's choice attributes.

Even a Hefner-ish
degree of heterosexuality couldn't have kept me from strangling the
woman after the twelfth mention of her perfectly peaked nipples had
he not, right at the edge of my patience, mentioned a bar at Albert
and Bay he would very much like to meet at tonight, and would I
buy?

My fervent agreement
must have shocked him, because he ended the call shortly after. The
drinking could be expensed; Tom would give me a
reference.

A native of Toronto, Aldous Mercer
enjoys martinis and relaxing on the beac-ha! No.

Aldous Mercer is a workaholic with a
penchant for numerical mind games and caffeinated beverages. He
uses his degree in Engineering to ensure that none of the
spaceships in his books have cubic pressure-vessels. In real life
he always annotates Engineering Drawings in Iambic Tetrameter.

You can visit him at
www.technomance.com
or
email him: [email protected]