“Gemma,” Frederica said, her voice a healing balm on my soul rubbed raw. “She’s all right,” she says to the room. “We need to be alone. Enjoy the rest of your evening, be together. We’ll all meet again soon.”
She helped me to my feet, feet I could see again. My body was intact, and my mind felt like my own. She wrapped an arm around me and I leaned on her. I should have collapsed her willowy frame with my weight but she was my brick house for the moment.
She led me to the door, and the soccer mom fae gave Frederica a cup of water. There were murmurs of soft goodbyes behind me. I thought I heard one man’s voice say gently, “We love you” before we were in the blank hallway and I slid to the ground.
She handed me the water and sat beside me, tucking her legs under her. She smoothed her thick hair behind each of her tiny ears. “I take it,” she said, “that you weren’t with us, Gemma. You were somewhere else.”
I downed the water in three gulps and gasped with the last swallow. I was sweating like I’d just gone four rounds. I guessed I’d really gone about two—two rounds in time. Was it real?
“Warriors,” I said. “I saw them.”
Frederica’s placid barely-there smile didn’t waver. “I didn’t know that would happen. I didn’t know it could. I’ve never worked directly with … someone like you. Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I mean, I think so.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I know—I think I know what I saw. Did you ever see them?”
“See the warriors?”
“Did you ever communicate with them? Feel what it was like to be them? Be there when they…” My voice trailed off.
“No, Gemma,” she said. “We have great reverence for the warriors and we try to keep their stories alive the best we can, but that’s all. They spoke to you?”
“No, not really. But I was there when they—I saw them but I didn’t just see them. I was them. I was in their fight.”
“Our energy brought you there, it seems,” she murmured. “We went to our past, and you went to yours.”
I brought my knees up to my chin and dropped my head in my crossed arms. “I saw the midnight fae,” I said, muffled. “I saw them split, leave the morning fae. I was the warrior who had to choose one side.”
Frederica said nothing for a long moment. Then, “You were at the summit. The summit we only know about from oral tradition. The fae split that day into light and dark.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, and mercifully, no pictures or colors invaded my space. Just black.
“Some of the fae wanted to focus our existence on the Olde Way, bringing it back to Earth, sharing it with humans. The rest of the fae didn’t want to share. They were bitter, thought the fae had been shoved aside, and they wanted to focus our goal on replacing humans completely. Then the warrior had to choose one side, and that would become the dominant fae, the fae with power on its side, and the warrior chose us. At the stroke of midnight, one half of the fae split into darkness, the midnight fae. The remaining fae joined hands and waited until morning, taking the night to mourn our lost ones before beginning anew with dawn.”
“I was there.”
“You were there,” she said, and her voice echoed my own amazement.
I shook my head and lifted it again, opening my eyes to painful light.
“Let me take you home,” she said. “You have a lot to think about. You are being asked by so many to be so much. But you do have a choice,” she added. “I can’t promise that any other recruiters won’t try to change your mind in the future, but I’ll respect your wishes. I respect you now. You walked right into what you couldn’t believe, faced it head on.” She smoothed a hand over my hair. “That’s the courage of a warrior.”
Take me home, my mind begged. This can be one day in my life and I can try to forget it and just continue to be what I was.
But what I was for thirty years hadn’t been truly me.
How could I know those warriors’ souls and turn away from the destiny they’d embraced, fearless or not, victorious—or not?
The Olde Way shimmered inside me now, and I couldn’t turn my back on it. It was the meaning of life that each ordinary individual searched for. It was nirvana, heaven, enlightenment, the ultimate goal, and after one brief shining moment inside of it, I couldn’t pretend this world was all there was. I needed to bring it here, and give it to Mom, and to Avery.
That was the fae in me, I was sure.
But I had another half. And that half remembered waking up one morning to find my father gone. That human half never stopped hoping he would come home, and that human half recognized now that he’d rejected me. That human half wanted to fight against the force that would take away my happiness, because I could now.
“You’re human,” Dad said. “You’re human.”
I lifted my head.
“I’m in,” I said to Frederica.
She looked deep into my eyes. “You were always in,” she replied. “We never let you go.”
And with that, I slammed the door behind Dad, and returned to my real family.
>=<
Frederica dropped me off at Mom’s, but only for the time it took me to write her a note, letting her know I was going home. Then Frederica drove me home.
I shed my clothes piece by piece from the door to the bedroom, and I slipped into bed in my underwear, wrapping myself around Avery. He sighed and rubbed my arm, then asked sleepily, “I thought you were at your mom’s.”
“I was,” I whispered. “I was a lot of places. Now I’m here.”
“Good.”
“Good,” I repeated.
There, in bed, I remained the Gemma I knew, with the man I loved. I fell asleep wishing I wouldn’t have to wake up, and wondering who I’d be when I did.
CHAPTER 7
It was a door. One I could see. An inch-long iron pair of wings hung above the doorbell I pressed twice.
A woman opened the door—a delicate-boned woman who would rival Frederica in a Thumbelina contest. Her dark hair was braided and roped around her head, and there was so much hair and so little head, I found myself readying to catch her when she toppled like a Jenga pile. She wore a dark purple tank top and khaki cargo pants that she had to have purchased in a children’s department.
I found myself wondering if my new role as fae warrior had more to do with my weight class than with my breeding.
“I’m Reese,” she said. “You’re Gemma.”
That was easy.
“We’re so excited you’re here,” she said. “We’ve heard just everything about you. And about fae like you who came before you, and—well, just come in!”
Far from flattered, I instead felt uncomfortable that my legend had preceded me. Especially since I was informed of that legend only yesterday.
Oblivious to my hesitation, Reese took my hand and tugged me inside, closing the door behind me. “I asked especially to be the one to show you around.”
Although she appeared as ageless as Frederica—and, I realized last night as I couldn’t sleep, my mother, who hadn’t really significantly aged all that much over the years—Reese’s demeanor was that of an overly eager office intern. I relaxed just a bit, managing a thin smile.
Reese didn’t seem to mind my lesser enthusiasm. Still holding my hand, she led me down a long hallway.
I wasn’t sure what I expected at the D.C. Collections Headquarters on the H Street Corridor. Well, that’s not true, actually. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I pictured it as looking a bit like the Soho apartment of one of my NYU college friends: nag champa incense burning, long bead curtains separating each room, a marble Buddha sitting in one corner like an unobtrusive roommate, posters depicting yoga asanas and rainbow chakra centers, groovy tunes heavy with tabla drums and sitar emanating from an invisible sound system. Maybe I was hoping for that somewhat familiar feeling here, or a more generic but similar atmosphere, like a touristy New Age
store.
I confess that at the very least, I did expect sparkles.
This place, with its bare walls, utilitarian track lighting and carpets that smelled fresh from the factory, seemed anything but magical. It could have been any office in America. My polling office was smaller and cluttered, but otherwise retained the same 9-to-5 feel.
“What does the landlord think it is that you—we do here?” I couldn’t help asking.
Reese blasted a ray of that bright cheerleader smile over her bony shoulder. “The landlord is fae,” she said.
Right. I did wish Reese would let go of my hand but it wasn’t hard to guess that her feelings would be super-hurt if I made that request.
We turned a corner and she slid the ID card on a lanyard around her neck into a slot next to a windowless door. “You’ll get your own card soon,” she said, and I pretended to be reassured. She dropped my hand so she could push the heavy door open with both of hers.
I stepped into the room after her, and my jaw dropped at what this average office façade had kept hidden.
The room was enormous, much like the NASA mission control rooms I’d seen on late-night cable TV. I was technology challenged, so I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but I was at least fairly confident that even the most advanced ordinary humans generally didn’t work on holographic screens. Seriously, holograms. A few dozen people—well, fae—stood between desks and sat on rolling chairs monitoring the hovering images in front of them, occasionally poking a finger in the air to pull up different iridescent images or change screens. It freaked me out.
The entire room around them was sleek and spotless and silent, with silver gleaming desks and high-polished floor. Each fae had wore a small earpiece though none seemed to be talking to anyone. They just listened.
Every fae in the complicated, intimidating room turned to stare at me, ID tags dangling from lanyards around their necks.
“Uh, hi,” I mumbled, though no one but Reese could have heard me. They watched me for a moment, turning around to glance at screens every few seconds before their work consumed them again and they turned away. Reluctantly.
The air was charged here with something I couldn’t identify. Urgency, certainly. But there was a sense of pride, as if the workers weren’t just toiling for a paycheck. They worked as one efficient machine with age-old coordinates set to one common goal.
The common goal was the Olde Way, I understood, and I suddenly itched to take my part.
“Welcome to The Root,” Reese said with that pride. “Our monitoring center. I work at that pod over there, and my job is routine confirmation of the location of all the tracking bugs, and to intercept signals. It’s a big city, and it’s important to keep track of what’s going on in all the homes.”
I couldn’t be hearing that correctly. “Hold up,” I said. “You have bugging devices in every house in D.C.?”
“Not every house,” Reese said. “Just the houses with one or more child between 6 and 11, the age range for exfoliation of primary teeth.”
She must have confused my stunned expression for lack of basic understanding, because she clarified, “Baby teeth falling out. Kids grow and lose 20 primary teeth, and we can’t catch them all, but I still say we have a pretty good track record. Approximately 87 percent. Well,” she faltered, “more like 70 percent right now. But you’ll be working on that.”
“Sorry,” I cut in, “I’m still stuck on the bug thing. How do you know what houses to bug?”
“Public records like birth certificates,” she said. “School records, Registry of Deeds. Information is pretty easy to find.”
“What is it you’re tracking, exactly?”
“Innocence.”
“I don’t follow.”
“When a tooth falls out, it exposes the innocence essence we need. The bug can sense it, and emits a signal. We intercept the signal, but we have to do it fast, because the bug has a time limit. It can only sense it when it’s strongest, when the tooth first falls out. We lose the signal quickly, so The Root is staffed around the clock.”
Despite my amazement at what I was hearing, I was impressed with Reese. I usually considered perkiness a personality flaw, but in her element, she knew her stuff. “How do people not find tracking devices in their own homes?” I asked.
“Oh, they find them,” Reese said. “When a bug gets squooshed, the Research and Retrieval Department has to ask a collector who’s not on assignment to go in and replace it. It’s a real inconvenience but it happens all the time.”
“People squoosh the bugs?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Reese said, then, “oh, you haven’t seen them?”
“I haven’t seen much,” I told her. “I’m about 24 hours into this whole thing.”
“Be right back,” she said and dashed out a different door than the one we entered through. I waited, and I caught several people assessing me. They were obvious but I gave them credit for at least trying to be polite about it by glancing up and down and up again, or smiling.
“We got one!” a man shouted. He put his hand up, and I spotted him two desks away from the door. I edged closer as a woman briskly acknowledged him and joined him at his station. Heads close together, they examined his holographic screen, tapped a few invisible air keys, and a signal screamed out of a speaker. I plugged one ear with my finger. The man pointed to the screen. “Target. Who’s on tonight?”
“Give it to Nilsen,” his supervisor—I guessed—told him, and he nodded. While she made a note on a wall chart, he pulled a phone out of his pocket and awkwardly text-messaged with his thumbs, squinting at the much smaller screen.
“Hold out your hand,” I heard, and almost jumped. I swirled and there was Reese. She raised her brows. “Go on.”
I did, and she placed something small in my palm. Something small with legs. Many legs. It moved.
I yanked my hand away with a shriek. Yes, a shriek. It didn’t often happen that I shrieked, but spiders had a way of bringing out the girl in me.
“What the …“ I yelled, and took two steps back, colliding into a tall, broad someone.
I felt hands take hold of my upper arms. The whisper was like a sweep of silk across my ear. “I can never resist the call of a damsel in distress.”
Ire—and not the warm breath on my neck—made my hair stand on end, the spider momentarily forgotten. Damsel in distress? Someone was about to take a walk on the wild side of me. I set my jaw and turned.
My knees buckled slightly and my balance suffered.
Lamppost guy. The well-built, painfully sexy blond man whom I’d really wanted to forget about. From this short distance, new details hit me: his black, silver-ringed irises; his fresh, warm scent; his flop of naughty hair that hid one cheekbone; his long pale eyelashes.
I longed to feel those lashes brush against my neck, fall into the dark velvet of his gaze, inhale his skin until his scent came out my own pores –
A whoosh filled my ears and I couldn’t hear much. I took a step closer. Just to touch him, just once…
“Knock it off,” I heard, and I tried to shake off the intrusion as I reached out my hand.
But I heard it again. “Svein, I said knock it off. Leave her alone.”
In an instant, something like a light in me snapped on. The blur was gone, like someone had swiped my lenses clean with a dishrag, and my thoughts were my own again. I lowered my hand. The man remained standing before me, but suddenly he was just an incredible-looking man who had called me a damsel.
“What’s the matter with you?” Reese demanded, and I realized she was the one who had cut into my embarrassing reverie. She walked right up to him and jabbed a finger hard into his solar plexus. “Don’t you know who she is?”
Despite the determined little fae getting into his personal space, his eyes never left mine. But now that I had returned to my logical self, I met his even gaze with one of my own. I crossed my arms and arched a brow.
He wore a black T-shirt which stretched entici
ngly over a rock-solid chest, and a pair of jeans that probably stretched enticingly over places I absolutely would not look at.
“Yeah, I know who she is,” he drawled impressively for a man who didn’t have a Southern accent. And when he arched a brow back at me, it became clear that he’d also known who I was yesterday afternoon, from across a busy street. “What’s wrong?” he asked now. “Scared of little creepy-crawlies?”
I glanced down at the ground where I’d dropped the spider. “They’re not my favorites,” I muttered. It was right next to the chunky heel of my boot, but I refused to edge out of its way.
Reese bent and scooped it up. She flipped it over and squeezed it. Its back popped open on a miniscule hinge. “It’s electronic,” she said. “It’s not a real bug. It’s a bug.”
“These are your bugs? These are in people’s houses?”
“Yup,” Reese confirmed as the man with the phone approached us.
“Nilsen,” he said, “I just sent you a dispatch. You’ve got one tonight in Georgetown.”
“Send the address.”
“Already did,” said the man, moving back to his station.
“So, Svein Nilsen,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Is it?”
He laughed at me. Not out loud, but I saw his chest contract.
“No, it really isn’t,” I said. “Why don’t you scamper off now and do your googly magic act on a woman who can’t kick the shit out of you?”
“That’s not very ladylike.”
“Take a step closer and you’ll feel me change your definition of a lady.”
I sensed the room had grown very quiet. Key-tapping ceased, the creak of chairs silenced. Everyone was frozen, leaning forward in anticipation.
“People always want to see a fight,” I remarked.
“No,” Reese said quietly. “They don’t. Fae don’t fight. Svein won’t fight you. He can’t.”
Svein cut her a vicious look but she ignored it. “Fae can’t do conflict,” she said.
“My new pal Svein here seemed pretty bent on raising conflict,” I said.
Tooth and Nail Page 8
