Tooth and Nail

by Jennifer Safrey

  But in my heart, I knew there was more to it than that. The fae remained separate and secret, but not angry or hostile. That was not the way of the morning fae.

  I turned away and tried not to think about the big picture for the moment. I needed to sort out my thoughts.

  I sighed.

  I loved Smiley and I knew he had his reasons for making his decisions, but I was angry all the same. I wouldn’t have wanted to hear about my father back then, but he still should have said something. Maybe something would have shifted in me, maybe my resentment would have faded a bit more or changed shape. Or maybe I would have been more bitter, and developed a bigger chip on my shoulder.

  He’s proud of you, Smiley had said.

  Well, my father didn’t know me anymore, but if he did, what was there to be proud of? I spoke without thinking, easily flew off the handle, and hated to compromise. And now I was lying to my boyfriend, breaking laws, manipulating people I didn’t know with glamour and picking fights with the people I did know. I was running after a dentist, running from a journalist, and running out of reasons to do all of it. I was alternately ignoring and acting on my attraction to Svein, which, if I was being honest for a change, amounted to nearly cheating on the only man I’d ever loved.

  Not much to be proud of, eh, Dad?

  But really, why did I give a damn what he would have thought? He didn’t know me anymore.

  I was the one who had to live with myself the rest of my life. What should have mattered most was what I thought.

  I sipped my chai, keeping my damaged upper lip from touching the cardboard cup, but the drink stung me anyway.

  What would make me proud of myself? What would I have to do to become the person I thought I should be?

  The fae instinctively trusted me. They didn’t know me personally. They only knew who I was—the legendary half-breed, the warrior born to defend the Olde Way. They didn’t look at me and see Gemma Cross, mixed-up basket case. They looked at me and saw Gemma Fae Cross, the one who would fight for them, the descendant of the warriors I saw—became—in my dream journey, and all the warriors whose pasts I hadn’t seen.

  The morning fae trusted me.

  Earning that trust—that was what would make me proud of me. Fulfilling that destiny I was born for, despite my mother’s efforts to hide me from it.

  If I stayed on this path I chose, I knew full well that I was going to screw things up. The D.C. Digger would find me out, or Avery would, or both. Or Dr. Riley Clayton would kill me with his rubber-gloved hands. But this was what I was now, and no matter how often Svein insisted on standing by my side, I was in this alone. I needed to stick it out so I could live with myself, or die with self-absolution.

  I would make myself proud. I would do this on my own, the way my worthy ancestors did. And if I ever saw my unworthy father again, I wouldn’t be the one looking for approval. It would be him. And he wouldn’t get it from me.

  I drained my chai and stood, half-expecting to draw the kind of attention a hero should, but I was only a would-be hero right now, and the few customers in the room didn’t glance up from their newspapers or conversations to acknowledge me.

  Except for the senator from New Jersey.

  He looked at me, and I looked at him.

  I hoped I’d wiped all the blood off my face. But I had a feeling that he recognized me as the warrior, and that bruises and bleeding were part of what I was.

  He smiled a faint smile. A smile that said, we both have work to do.

  I wanted to smile back, to acknowledge my fellow creature. But I backed out the door and clung to it as I tore myself away from our eye lock. I tried not to run down the street.

  >=<

  I pushed the door open and walked into the waiting room of Dr. Clayton. I hadn’t called ahead because I didn’t want the receptionist to insist on an appointment at a different day and time. I needed to be there when I knew little Brian would be there, and so I walked in off the street as a tooth-chip emergency case.

  Svein didn’t know I was here. I had expected I would be as frightened as the first time but I was strangely calm. Maybe I was counting on Dr. Clayton not executing me during business hours. I hoped I’d get away with this today, especially with my very real tooth problem, but I knew if I entered this office after today, it would be to carry out whatever plan Svein and I would come up with to foil the toothpaste scam.

  I checked my watch. 3:27.

  He might suspect me as fae by now, but he had to have fae patients who were completely innocent and had no business with him except tooth care. He’d caught me leaving his lab, but I was pretty sure I’d succeeded in looking stupid enough that he wouldn’t suspect I was really on to anything. And if he didn’t want anyone to know he was making evil toothpaste, he should have locked the door.

  What would stop Dr. Clayton from coming for me after hours? Nothing, except I really hoped he wouldn’t. Every time I thought this through and attempted to visualize the eventual outcome, I tried to fool myself that this was going to be easy, that I could smash the villain’s evil plans and walk away victorious and unscathed. I had to believe that, because I’d never be able to do this if I didn’t. And I had to do this.

  Rebecca was parked behind the reception desk, and I approached her. “Hi, um, any chance I could get in to see Dr. Clayton today? I chipped my front tooth.”

  She looked up at me. I smiled, and she took in my chipped tooth. “Are you a regular patient?”

  “I was just here last week.”

  No sign that I’d jogged her memory at all. “Oh,” she said. “Name?”

  As she searched in a drawer for my file, I asked, “What happened to Brenda, by the way?”

  “Who?”

  “Brenda, the receptionist who used to be here.”

  She pulled my file and glanced at it. “She retired when Dr. Gold did.”

  It was what I had originally surmised, but now I wondered if Rebecca was the midnight fae with whom Dr. Clayton might be working. It would be a pretty good disguise for a demon—an inattentive, humorless woman with hair so short and pale she seemed bald.

  No, I remembered, Clayton had had her under his glamour spell last time. She was merely a replacement receptionist. And anyway, she wasn’t physically alerting me in any way that she was fae.

  The door opened behind me and Brian’s family walked in, much to my relief. The little girl, Jamie, barreled through and plopped in front of the dollhouse. Brian came next, more sedate than his sister, and far more sedate than the last time I saw him. Their father brought up the rear, nudging a plodding Brian along. They took seats in the waiting room.

  “Gemma?”

  I turned back to Rebecca. “Is this an emergency?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “It was such a nice day outside that I thought I’d come by for a visit.”

  She blinked. “Huh?”

  I smiled widely at her. “Have a seat,” she said. “I’ll see if the doctor can fit you in.”

  I thanked her and sat in the closest chair, where I could watch the family—the only people in the waiting room besides me.

  The kids’ father went to speak to Rebecca. Jamie, who looked about four, sat engrossed with the dollhouse, her legs sprawled in careless-kid fashion. She floated a doll up the dollhouse stairs and placed her facedown in the tiny bed. She hummed a little song that could have been a lullaby, or just her mind working out loud.

  Brian watched her, uninterested. He blew out an annoyed breath and slumped further into his chair. Last week, he’d been eager to keep playing here. Today, he looked like a sullen, world-weary teenager. In a six-year-old’s body.

  It was the toothpaste. It had to be.

  His sulky face hypnotized me until I realized with a start where I’d seen it before—the boy who’d shot up his school the other week, the one I saw on television in the gym. His picture had made every newscast, the front page of every paper.

  Brian’s expression was only a weak, hollow echo
of the now-dead teenager’s, but it was well on its way to belying a mind that was dark, dull. Dead.

  I heard Dr. Clayton behind me, giving instructions to a woman who’d just had some kind of procedure.

  “Brian,” Jamie said from the floor. Rather than answering, he rolled his eyes and stared at the ceiling. “Briiiii-aaaaaan,” she sang, pulling herself up into a crouch and rocking with impatience. She arched her neck back and projected her voice into the air as though her brother were on the opposite side of a mountain. “Briiii-aaan!”

  “Brian,” their father said. “Your sister’s talking to you.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Brian answered.

  My eyes widened and my mouth dropped open.

  “Gemma?” Dr. Clayton called.

  Standing quickly, I glanced at Brian’s father. The expression on his face was a combination of angry and completely baffled at this child’s nonchalant and unexpected swearing. Then I looked at Brian.

  He was looking straight at me, no longer indifferent but instead—scary. His lips parted to bare his tiny teeth in miniature fury. His eyes narrowed, barely containing the rage within. He pulled his legs up beneath him, and twisted his little hands into fists, coiling himself up like a snake before a deadly strike.

  He was scary.

  “Gemma?” Dr. Clayton repeated, his voice giving away nothing—not even a normal impatience.

  Despite my undercover mission, I just couldn’t help flashing a disgusted look at Dr. Riley Clayton as he ushered me into his exam room.

  When I realized it, I hastily rearranged my facial features into something more resembling neutral. For his part, Clayton seemed unaffected. “Have a seat, Gemma,” he said, and I sank again into the plastic chair, which was starting to seem too familiar. “I didn’t expect you back here so soon.”

  I pulled back my lips in a toothy grimace.

  He pulled on rubber gloves while he leaned over me and peered into my mouth. “Ah,” he said, “I see. I thought we agreed last time that you were going to duck.”

  I shrugged, my mind racing. The toothpaste was draining the innocence of the kids who used it. What were the permanent repercussions? Was that teen gunman a former patient, a good child who never had to be told to brush his teeth?

  What if the kids just stopped using it? To stop using it, they’d have to no longer have access to it. And I couldn’t exactly firebomb a dentist’s lab and get away with it.

  Open-mouthed, I stared into the face of the fae who was making it his mission to mess up kids, even kill them. Why? Some kind of vendetta against the fae? Was it personal? A political opposition to the Olde Way?

  As Clayton tied a paper bib around my neck, I reminded myself that although these were all legitimate questions to ponder, they could wait until I was safe at home. In the meantime, I had to permit him to treat me with sharp instruments.

  I’ll be okay, I reminded myself. There’s nothing he can do to me here.

  “This is something I can certainly do right now,” he said, “since I have a background in cosmetic dentistry, and the tooth chip is small. I’m going to roughen up that area a little bit, apply a primer, then use a composite that matches your tooth color …”

  He continued but I was distracted with my own thoughts of his nefarious plan and my own hopes that he wasn’t going to kill me in the next half-hour. I wondered how he could live with himself, and what went wrong in his life that turned him into such a hateful bastard.

  “…requires no anesthetic,” I heard him say, but at that moment a thought struck. Maybe he didn’t even know he was doing something wrong. Maybe he was making toothpaste for kids, hoping to make a few bucks or whatever, and maybe he mixed a few lab chemicals wrong and inadvertently created a compound that sucked out innocence essence. Maybe he didn’t even know it was happening. And the fact that he was fae? Well, I didn’t know, but Svein hadn’t provided me any concrete evidence to suggest past or present conflict between him and the rest of the fae community. I’d called Reese this morning and she had told me the spider video feed from Clayton’s office was showing nothing but dental work and lab tinkering. Not so much as a maniacal cackle.

  And Clayton was acting normally with me, as if I were any other patient, which led me to believe I might be right—that he might have smoked me out as fae, but didn’t connect me to any investigation into his activities.

  “If it’s all right with you, we can go ahead and proceed,” he said, and I nodded. I’m okay, I thought. I’m going to be okay. He’ll fix my tooth and I’ll get out of here and I’ll come up with a plan.

  He scrounged around for some instruments, pulled on a pale blue surgical mask and wheeled his stool beside me again. “Open,” he said, “and we’ll get this all squared away. You’ll be just as pretty as when you first woke up this morning.”

  He didn’t know about me. Possibly he didn’t even know about the toothpaste effects. Certainly he hadn’t aligned with a hell minion.

  Before he could touch my tooth, he sat up again and rolled to the countertop next to his sink to check my chart.

  And I saw the spider.

  It was crawling up the edge of the countertop. What the heck? Weren’t these things supposed to be unobtrusive, unnoticeable? It was tiny but obvious. No wonder people squooshed them.

  I looked at the spider, and wondered whether the camera was still working, and if someone was at the Root monitoring the feed and could see me now, paper-bibbed and vulnerable.

  Clayton’s eyes flicked to the bug.

  I held my breath.

  But he only watched it for a moment. As if aware it had been discovered, the spider scooted down to the floor and into a corner.

  Clayton raised a brow and adjusted the surgical mark elastics behind his ears. He rolled back to his spot beside me and asked me to “open.” His eyes caught mine, and held them.

  He knew exactly why I was there.

  I swallowed. Hard.

  CHAPTER 15

  I thought about bolting. I still could. I could push up the armrest and crash out of this office and run for my life.

  And, I thought, I might very well regret not doing that. Because when I shoved aside my very real fear of being assaulted by his weapons of oral destruction, a small, still-sane part of my brain realized that by continuing to remain cool and calm, I could gain more helpful information that I could use to stop him—if I got out of here alive.

  “Don’t be nervous,” Clayton said, smiling.

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t be nervous,” he repeated. “I see you clenching your jaw. This procedure isn’t painful. At worst, it will just be uncomfortable.”

  I nodded, hoping he was referring only to the tooth bonding.

  He worked, scraping and smoothing, spraying and rinsing, and I began to lose track of time. With each minute, the edge to my alertness became sharper. He hummed as he worked.

  He was biding his time.

  Eventually, he said, “I’m going to apply the composite now,” and I heard Rebecca’s voice behind me. “Dr. Clayton, I’m just going to catch up on some accounts payable. Denise just left and Gemma’s the last. Let me know if you need anything.”

  “Go on home,” Clayton said. “Paperwork can wait. Take a walk. It’s a nice afternoon.”

  “I don’t know. I really should stay. There’s still a lot to do.”

  Clayton looked up at her. “Go on, I insist,” he said, and when Rebecca stammered, “Oh, um, yes, okay,” I knew he’d turned on the glamour.

  “Don’t worry about anything. When I’m done with Gemma,” he said, “I’ll close up shop.”

  Crap. Oh, crap.

  “Bye, doctor,” she said, but her footsteps didn’t retreat, and I knew she was lingering in the doorway, hoping for a smile, a secret wink, anything, but he’d already turned his attention back to my open mouth. The silver rings around his pupils dissolved. “Goodbye, Rebecca.”

  The handle of whatever instrument he used next pressed into my
upper lip, and I tried not to wince as the still bruised and torn skin throbbed.

  “So,” he said conversationally, his voice muffled from behind his mask, “I’m going to be on TV this week.”

  I wasn’t exactly in a position to answer, but I would have said, TV?

  “I created a toothpaste,” he said, and though I couldn’t see his smile, I heard it. “I wanted to come up with a special toothpaste that kids who still have baby teeth would love. I see a lot of kids whose teeth are just not healthy. Parents try to get their kids to brush, but they don’t try hard enough, or kids fake them out by rinsing. They can only do so much, right? They’re human.”

  “Ow,” I said, as metal hit my fragile lip again.

  “I’m sorry, Gemma,” he said. He paused for a moment and squinted at his work on my tooth, but he soon spoke again. “There are a lot of toothpaste brands out there, but I wanted to mix it up a little, see if I could come up with a formula that would make kids look forward to brushing their teeth.” He chuckled. “I’ll tell you, I came up with some duds, but I kept at it because by that time, I realized this was something I had to do. You understand.”

  His voice was even and conversational, as if I were a morning show host and he was telling his success story to a studio audience.

  “And I did it. I came up with this terrific combination of flavors—with a secret ingredient tossed in—and Smile Wide was born. Can I get you to tilt your chin up just a tiny bit?”

  Shifting in my seat, I complied. I was a captive audience, literally and otherwise.

  “After I got FDA approval,” Clayton continued, “I started giving it out to kids in goody bags, and the kids loved it. I mean, they loved it. Parents started asking me for more samples, telling me I should get it in chain stores, or start selling online. I realized they were right. I mean, my patients were having such success with it, so why shouldn’t I think even bigger?”

  My subconscious managed to notice that the hinges of my jaw were starting to ache, but I couldn’t move for fear of interrupting his story. And maybe also for fear that he would jab something in my eye.