“How could I get lost?” he asked. “I can always ask you for directions. You know exactly where we’re going.”
In my memory, Svein trailed his finger down my face again, pushed me up against a building again. And deeper down in the same stack of memories, Avery kissed me for the first time.
“We’d better get back to your adoring constituents,” I said.
>=<
I rose from bed and stumbled into the carpeted hallway. I looked down and saw them, tiny and white, scattered all over the ground. My hands flew to my face and I pushed against the skin around my mouth. Then I clamped my jaws shut and heard a click. My own teeth were intact.
I didn’t know whose teeth were on the ground but the whispers had started, laughing and musical: Get them, grab them all, don’t lose them…
Dropping to my knees, I pushed along the rug, gathering two handfuls of teeth, but when I lifted my hands to examine them, they slid between my fingers like sugar and fell away. No! I had to get them, keep them. Each was a gem, containing a fragment of the whole, and I couldn’t lose even one. I clutched at the teeth again and closed my fists around them, but a flare of pain in my mouth made me cry out. I sealed my lips shut and tried to hold it in, but it throbbed and ached. I pressed my fists into my face, but the pain pulsed stronger and I opened my hands, releasing all the teeth again as my own teeth dropped from my gums, falling in a mess onto my tongue.
I felt them all sitting there, rattling against each other, and I couldn’t, wouldn’t open my mouth and lose them. But the pressure against my lips was unbearable, so I cupped my hands in front of my mouth and prepared to catch them. But as I opened my fingers, they were sticky and crimson with blood. I looked up to see Svein at the end of the hall, standing calm, watching me. Whose blood? I tried to ask him, but I didn’t want to open my mouth. Whose blood? I projected the thought at him. He still didn’t move, didn’t speak, didn’t blink. I opened my mouth and my teeth fell out in a gush and I screamed, I can’t do this…
I jerked awake, sweating and breathing hard.
>=<
I dragged myself to the table where Avery was already eating an English muffin, his mug of black coffee steaming beside his humming laptop. I collapsed into a chair.
Avery looked up and did a double-take. “Are you okay?”
Choosing to go for the understatement, I said, “I didn’t sleep all that well.”
“Yeah, you don’t look too good.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, smirking. “You’ve got another admirer besides me.”
“Can we not be cryptic so early in the morning? I can hardly see straight.”
He swiveled his laptop around. “Take a read.”
I squinted at the screen. The D.C. Digger’s site featured a little cartoon of a guy in thick glasses with a shovel, pushing deep into the ground in front of the Capitol. His top blog entry was dated this morning at 2:23 a.m., and detailed Avery’s fundraiser.
“Guess he was there last night,” Avery said. “But he must have had a good time, because he didn’t have it out for me.”
He was right about that. The blog copy was complimentary for the most part, and the few catty digs were not at Avery himself but at several mucky-muck guests in attendance.
But it was the last item in the entry that woke me up: “McCormack’s sweetheart, ex-pollster and local amateur boxer Gemma Cross, enraptured guests with her witty banter and bright smile. She was nothing short of radiant.”
Might I say, you look radiant tonight, Gemma…
My eyes darted again to the little cartoon man and his black-rimmed glasses. Then I let out a long, quiet sigh.
Mahoney, that little shit, was the D.C. Digger.
CHAPTER 14
I evaded a flailing jab and countered with a hook that didn’t land.
Mat laughed.
Mat considered laughing and taunting to be his brilliant key strategy. His form had improved considerably and he was in far better physical shape than the day he’d first arrived at Smiley’s, but he still had the patience of a child. Convinced he had the psychological game down, however, he continued to laugh at and taunt every opponent he faced.
Everyone in the gym was biding time. Mat was a clown, but we weren’t going to teach him his most important lesson until he was ready. In the meantime, he didn’t throw any of the rest of us off, but he was very, very annoying.
Especially to me, especially today, because I had a plan, and it involved Mat emerging superior.
Smiley leaned into the ring from the floor, one hand gripping the rope above him. “Easy,” he said to Mat. “Take it easy.”
“I’m takin’ it easy,” Mat said. “This ain’t nothin’. Why’m I sparring Bricks, anyway? She’s too little for me.”
“’Cause I don’t want you just swinging useless. I want you to pay attention to your opponent’s mind game, and Gemma plays a good one.”
Ironic he should say that.
“All right, stop a minute,” Smiley said, and climbed into the ring. I backed into the corner and let them confer. It was Mat’s time with Smiley, after all, and I had been volunteered for the lesson. I squeezed my plastic water bottle and only half the water made it into my mouth, with the rest splashing my cheeks and dribbling down my chin. I glanced over my shoulder and saw the two of them in deep discussion. I crouched and spit my mouth guard onto the wooden stool. With my gloved fists, I pushed my sweatshirt over it, then walked back to the center of the ring just as Smiley slid back down to the floor.
While his back was still to us, Mat laid a sharp jab into my chest, despite Smiley’s instructing us earlier to engage in light contact only. I exhaled hard and Mat chuckled with glee.
I hoped with all my heart that when it came time to wipe that cocky grin off Mat’s face permanently, the guys would let me be the one to do it.
I stared him in the eye, and let him try to figure out my next move. When I knew he didn’t expect it, I caught him sharp on the chin.
“Easy!” Smiley reprimanded me.
I snorted, barely containing a contemptuous smile, and Mat, taking the bait, scowled at my arrogance. Back and forth, back and forth, and I laid another one on him. Same spot. Just a hair harder.
“Bricks!” Smiley warned.
Openly smirking, I barely had time to recover when Mat retaliated with a cross that caught me square in the mouth. And I didn’t duck.
His hit lacked in style, and was only a fraction of his full force, but he’d made his point. Blood oozed from my split upper lip.
I backed off and covered my face with my gloves. I outlined my front tooth with the tip of my tongue, and felt a piece of it had chipped away. Good. This had worked out well. The only hope I’d had of getting back into Clayton’s office so soon under minimal suspicion was with a dental emergency, and this was as minor an incident as I could have orchestrated.
“Who’s laughin’ now?” Mat taunted. “That’s right, that’s right. Not Bricks.”
“Shut up!” Smiley yelled, and his voice was near me.
He pulled my gloves away from my face and tilted my head back to look at my messy mouth in the glare of the bare light bulb overhead. “Nice job,” he said, low into my ear. “Get your sorry ass out of this ring. Now. You,” he said, louder, to Mat. “Shut your stupid mouth. Only reason you got to her is because she was crazy enough to let you. Get out of my sight.”
“What about my lesson?” Mat asked.
“Lesson over.”
I went to retrieve my shirt and water bottle. I pulled the sweatshirt over my head and pushed my mouth guard into the kangaroo pocket. I climbed through the ropes and hopped onto the floor, and Not-Rocky was by my side in an instant. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Why you playing games with Mat? He’s an idiot.”
“I know. I don’t know.”
“You okay?”
Before I could respond, Smiley pushed past both of us. “You and I are having a ta
lk,” he said, and I nodded wearily.
“You’re in trouble,” Not-Rocky said as Smiley stormed into his office ahead of me.
“Yeah, well, must be a day ending in ‘Y’.” I followed Smiley at a safe distance and entered the office after him.
“Close the door.”
I obeyed, and squeezed into the tiny folding chair across from his desk. He handed me a ragged but clean white towel wrapped around a handful of ice. I pressed the towel to my upper lip, which throbbed against the cold.
The room wasn’t designed for two people. I didn’t actually think it was designed for one—I had a feeling that in the original floor plans, this was a janitor’s closet. But here I was, close enough to Smiley to feel the waves of anger evaporating off him. I began to pull the towel away from my lip but the sticky, clotting blood resisted my effort. I winced.
Smiley sat, and the chair cushion squeaked and hissed underneath him. He crossed his arms over his chest. “What’s up with you?”
“I’m sorry,” I began. “Mat was …“
“Not talking about Mat. Talking about you. What’s up with you?”
I didn’t answer.
“All week you’re coming in here exhausted and half-dead on your feet, a target for anyone with half your speed and a quarter of your concentration. Starting shit with that fool kid just now. Getting in the ring without a mouth guard, for crissakes.”
He slapped his palms on his desk and leaned forward. “You got a death wish? You don’t bring it in here. You leave it at the door. You know that.”
I nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“I got you coming in here day after day since you was a teenager. Always a stubborn pain in my behind. But now, now you’re an old lady.”
I glared at him. “Thank you.”
“Your best boxing years, you can count more of them behind you now than ahead of you. That’s a fact. So if you want to keep coming day after day, you need to be an example around here, and not act worse than when you were a crazy kid.”
Chastised, I cleared my throat. “Yes, sir.”
He leaned back again and scrutinized my face, or what he could see of it over the bloody towel. “You in some kind of trouble?”
I furrowed my brow. “Like what kind of trouble?”
“Don’t answer a question with a question. How should I know what kind? All I know is you’re acting like a mad dog. And suddenly you’ve got strangers coming by to see you.”
Frederica and Svein.
“Don’t know if I can help you,” he said, “but if you got a problem, go ahead and tell me.”
“There’s no problem,” I said around a now-numb pair of lips. “Everything’s fine. I’ve got a few old friends in town to visit me, and we’ve been doing some late nights. The campaign keeps me busy with social things. Look, I’m fine. I don’t need you to keep tabs on me.”
“Don’t tell me that now. I been keeping tabs on you since he left.”
I narrowed my eyes. “No one asked you to.”
“He did.”
I held my breath for several seconds, hoping I misunderstood. “My father asked you to keep tabs on me?”
“Right before he left.”
“I was a kid.”
“You were a kid he knew would grow up to be a fighter, and he wanted you to learn here.”
The cogs in my mind creaked backward, and I remembered. A guy named Jim Paolo had run afoul of me in tenth grade. The offense was too minor to recall the details but, at the time, I rewarded him with an punch that sent him sprawling. I spent unhappy time in the vice principal’s office and, shortly afterward, Mom had re-introduced me to Smiley, the guy who owned the gym where my father used to go. That day, Smiley was quick to tell me that my father didn’t have half the talent he thought he had. After an hour of working with me, Smiley assured me I’d be a far better student. That was all I’d needed to hear to feel like I was rebelling against my dad.
Now I wondered: had my mother been biding her time, knowing she’d eventually bring me to Smiley for years of male influence? Did she bring me here so I could be close to Dad?
“What made him think you could take care of me?” I asked now.
“I think it was more of a hope,” Smiley said.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I’ve been here forever and you never told me?”
“What was the point? You woulda never wanted to hear it. You don’t want to hear it now, even.”
“Why did he go?” The words burst out of me before I could think to stop them. “Why?”
“Don’t know his reasons,” he said. “He didn’t tell me. Wasn’t like I was his best friend. But he saw the way I keep an eye on guys around here. Lonely guys, angry guys, guys with no place else to go. Guess your daddy thought I had enough experience to handle the job.”
I closed my eyes for a few seconds, then reopened them. My lip throbbed hard. “Did you?”
He raised his brows. “You’d try the patience of a saint of God. You had problems, you had talent, and you had brains, and that doesn’t add up to nothing but trouble.”
“Must have been what he thought,” I said with a half-smile to try to mask the bitterness.
“No.”
Smiley rose from his chair, rolled it a few inches away, and opened the tiny freezer box on the floor. He pulled another towel off the clean pile on the wall shelf and filled it with ice chips. He held out his hand and I peeled my towel away from my face and exchanged it for the new one. He sat down and watched while I gingerly pressed it to my face, the fresher cold shocking my nerve endings.
“Bricks,” he said. Then, “Gemma. I don’t know why your daddy left, but I know why he didn’t want to leave, and that was you. When he asked me to keep an eye on you, he was desperate, nervous, like something was coming after you and he couldn’t stop it. You were the most important thing to him. He looked at you and saw himself. Hell, I looked at you and saw him. For a while. Now, you’re all you and you’ve gotten this far. He’s proud of you.”
“And how would you know that?”
“I know what I know. Quit asking me questions. There’s nothing else to say.”
My emotions were mashed up together into a hard lump that sat on my chest. “Well, you waited too long to say that much to me,” I said. “Way too long.”
“Go ahead, take it out on me,” he said. “I’ve gotten used to being the punching bag around here. But think about this. Only reason you’re angry now is because you’re finding out you don’t got as much to be angry about as you thought all this time.”
I stood and my knees banged into his desk. “Anything else?”
One corner of his lips tugged upward. “Big, bad Brickhouse,” he said. “But you’ve got a few cracks. Yeah, we’re done.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.” I turned and reached for the doorknob.
“No, you won’t.”
I slumped my shoulders and looked at the ceiling.
“Take your stuff,” he said, “and don’t come back for a week. And when you walk back in, I want to see you awake and alert and able to knock the crap out of the first person you see—but you won’t, because you’ll be under control. Are you hearing me?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool out, Bricks,” he said to my back. “Get some sleep. Send your friends home. Tell your boy no more late nights. Tell him my vote depends on it.”
“Okay.” I walked out of his office without looking back, grabbed my bag off a folding chair, and left the gym with my head down. I didn’t want to make eye contact or start a conversation with anyone just then.
The afternoon was gray with ineffectual raindrops spitting down, just enough to frizz my hair, but not enough to make me regret not having an umbrella. I walked—almost stomped—for about half a block before realizing I didn’t even really have a destination, so I turned back. I planned on crashing Dr. Clayton’s office again and asking for an emergency tooth repair, but I couldn’t do it until tomorrow afternoon, when that little boy Bria
n would hopefully be back and I could get a good look at him.
I’d have to give Svein a call, and—
And what?
This was ridiculous. Svein couldn’t take care of me. I had asked him to be my backup when I went into Clayton’s office the first time, but it was more to soothe his feelings of inadequacies and to keep my own nervousness at bay. If it came right down to it, fae Svein couldn’t do a thing to defend me. He’d only be able to stand around and take notes while Clayton beat the crap out of me or set me on fire. He’d taught me all he could about using my abilities, and even still, it was an effort for me. It was going to take a lot of practice to be able to master them, even with flying out of the picture. I wasn’t having any of that. Point was, Svein couldn’t do anything more for me.
I trotted across the street and into Grounds Floor. I bought a chai from the same barista who Frederica inadvertently charmed last time I was here. He did stare at me now, but it was my bruised and bloody lip that captured his attention. I took my cup and slid into a booth at the window. I watched cars, watched the rain fall heavier, drop by drop.
Turning, I noticed a powwow in the corner—lots of binders and legal pads and papers and general busyness. At the center of the executive circle was a senator—from New Jersey. I had a pretty good memory for faces and I recognized him from my polling office work. He looked very young for the age he probably had to be. He was a pillar of calm within his aides’ chaos.
Fae?
I knew the fae were everywhere, in all walks of life, in all locales exotic and mundane. But this city—I had subconsciously convinced myself that we fae were a very small minority. When I thought of magic, and the Olde Way, and the idealism of the morning fae, the last place I thought of, frankly, was Washington D.C. It was so serious, so corrupt, so real.
But fae governing human society? Making and enforcing and upholding the laws by which we lived? That was power, and if the fae had that kind of power, why not throw humanity under the bus? Humans were the cause of the Olde Way’s demise, after all.
Because they couldn’t perpetrate physical violence.
Tooth and Nail Page 18
