Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  “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?”r />
  “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.

  13

  The little dragon, Caryl’s familiar, turned its head to look at me. Its beady gaze was friendly.

  “You’re a witch or something?” I asked.

  “A warlock,” said Caryl.

  I took off the glasses and turned them so I could look at Teo’s reflection in them. Nothing sat on his shoulder in the reflection.

  “If you strip away the magic,” said Caryl, “there is nothing to see. Elliott is itself a spell, albeit a very complicated one.”

  “So I can’t touch him.”

  “You have, numerous times.”

  Even as she spoke, I got a crawling feeling on my right shoulder. I put the glasses back on to find Elliott sitting there. My yelp made Teo laugh, and even Elliott seemed to grin as I tried futilely to swat him away. My fingers sank right through him, tingling as they did.

  “Why doesn’t he vanish when I touch him?” I said. When I turned to look at Caryl, I saw a weird, smoky aura around her, so I took the glasses off again.

  “Human magic is not identical to the fey’s,” she said. “Human spell casters have certain limitations that fey do not, but on the plus side, since iron is native to human physiology, the spells humans cast have no weakness to it. Your touch would only disrupt fey magic.”

  “Do humans cast the fey’s facades?”

  “We have to design them, since fey seem unable to grasp the rules of what humans can and can’t look like. But the spellwork is their own. Why do you ask?”

  “When I let go of the fey at the bar, her facade came back. I didn’t destroy it.”

  “That’s ’cause it’s an enchantment,” said Teo.

  “The fey,” said Caryl, “can bind magical energy into a place, person, or thing.”

  Teo ticked off three fingers. “Ward, enchantment, ch
arm.”

  “Think of magic as paint,” Caryl said. “For a charm, the paint is applied and left there. It can stay a long time because it’s on an inert substance, such as paper. But flesh is alive and constantly changing, shedding cells; you must keep reapplying the paint. So enchantments, or spells on people, draw continuously on the caster’s essence.”

  “They’re plugged into the fey who cast them,” clarified Teo.

  “Because of that connection, enchantments can only be dispelled by the caster, or by the caster’s death. Thus the mythology around curses, which are actually a type of Unseelie enchantment.”

  “So when I touched the fey, I just sort of, uh, interrupted the circuit?”

  “If that helps you understand.”

  “What about the other one? Wards?”

  “Wards are the most complex; humans cannot cast them. They are bound to the earth, or to structures that are themselves bound to the earth, such as trees or buildings.”

  I thought of the Seelie bar. “Would I destroy wards if I touched them? Or just interrupt them?”

  “Some wards are . . . ‘plugged in’ and some are not, depending on their purpose. Just try not to touch any wards unless told otherwise.”

  I felt a weird tingling on my left ear and didn’t dare look through the glasses. “Which of those things is Elliott?”

  “None of the above. Elliott is a construct: a recursive arcano-­linguistic lie bound to itself by pure logic. Only wizards and warlocks create them; nothing could be more foreign to a fey than a construct.”

  “And I can’t hurt a construct.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Teo shifted restlessly. “Speaking of Millie’s phenomenal powers of destruction,” he said, “we found another of the viscount’s drawings.”

  Teo handed it to her, and she scanned it briefly, not visibly affected by its magic. “I’d like the other one, too, for comparison, when you have a chance.”

  I hardly noticed as Teo took his glasses back and started upstairs. I felt a slight pang as I stared at the back of the drawing. “You’ll need to be gentle with him,” I said.