Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  “What else have I got?” I said, trying not to sound too drunk. “But it’s interesting. Berenbaum thinks Inaya and Vivian are plotting against him, and Inaya thinks Vivian and Berenbaum are plotting against her. By my math, that suggests that Vivian is plotting against both of them. How Rivenholt and an abduction are involved, I still don’t know.”

  “I just want to boot him back to Arcadia. I don’t need to know all the drama.”

  “Want to drive me to the train station at three so we can nab him?”

  Teo’s hands stilled. “Wait, what?”

  “Weren’t you there when I was talking to Berenbaum?” I slipped the paper clip off Rivenholt’s folder and picked up the photo, staring at those breathtaking eyes.

  “Listening to your phone call would’ve required more of a shit than I actually give about any of this,” he said, starting up the massage again. “Are you sure he’s going to be there?”

  “Tell you what,” I said, admiring Rivenholt’s cheekbones and trying to ignore the way Teo’s hands were encroaching on side-boob. “If we go and he’s not there, I’ll do your laundry for a month.”

  “You just want to rifle through my underwear.”

  “Says the guy copping a feel.”

  Teo retracted his hands, but it was worth it to score the point. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll drive you.”

  I slipped Rivenholt’s photo into my pocket. “Don’t get me wrong,” I said. “I’m all for fooling around, but I think we skipped first base.”

  “Excuse me for not knowing the rules.”

  “What are you, a virgin?”

  His spine stiffened, and he headed for the door. “You’re not even allowed to ask me that.”

  “Oh my God, you are.”

  He stood there holding the door open and not looking at me.

  “Aw, hey,” I said. “Don’t feel weird. It’s kind of awesome, actually. Good on you. I just—well, now I get the mixed-signals thing. I thought you were just being a dick.”

  “Can’t I be a virgin and a dick?”

  “If you ever have any questions about anything—”

  “You know what would be awesome? If we talked about something that wasn’t this.”

  “Fine. To the train station.”

  24

  By the time we got on the road, traffic had mysteriously quadrupled in the way that it often does in L.A. I glanced at the clock—2:13—and tried to take calming breaths. Teo, on the other hand, was not even trying for calm and was driving like an asshole.

  “Teo, if we get pulled over, we are going to miss the train. The Mythbusters proved that weaving in and out of lanes doesn’t get you there any faster.”

  “You’re welcome to walk.”

  “Right. Sorry, I keep thinking I’m talking to an adult.”

  To minimize suffering, according to Dr. Davis, you must apply something called “radical acceptance.” Basically, this means ceasing to fight things that are beyond your control. As both Teo and Los Angeles traffic fell firmly into that category, I did my breathing exercises and pulled my face into an imitation of a serene smile. Strangely, it helped. It was possible, my Wise Mind reasoned, that I had guessed wrong about the three o’clock train, in which case all this stress and hurry would be for nothing.

  We pulled up to Union Station at 2:43. “Get out and I’ll find a place to park,” said Teo.

  There were about eight things wrong with that plan, but I had no time to argue. I got out of the car as fast as I could and shut the shrieking passenger door behind me.

  Union Station is the sort of place that looks like it ought to have ghosts. And it does, if you count the dead-eyed ­people shuffling through the cavernous main terminal or perched in uncomfortable chairs, watching rows of demonic red ­numbers. I checked the boards to remind myself which track the viscount’s train was leaving from and then started down the fluorescent-­lit tunnel of doom.

  Picture one of those endless corridors in an airport, but take out any windows, moving sidewalks, ads, artwork, or other relief. Make it all concrete and aging tile instead of carpet and plaster. Now add in creepy dungeonlike stairways every twenty feet or so that lead tantalizingly upward, teasing promises of sunlight and air that only make the endless slog to your platform all the more unbearable.

  The tired-looking kid trying to sell me candy was probably the least depressing thing in the place, and that’s saying something. I would have stopped and bought some off-brand peanut butter cups for Rivenholt if it hadn’t already been 2:49. I climbed the stairs to track twelve, ignoring aches and pains and a stitch in my side that made me wonder if I hadn’t torn a brand-new hole in something.

  Passengers were boarding. Shit, I could have already missed him. I scanned the crowd frantically for blonds, then addressed a friendly looking conductor lady with overprocessed hair. “I’m looking for my friend. He might be on this train.”

  “Do you have a ticket?”

  “I don’t.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t let you on board.”

  “Could you at least check around, see if you see him? It’s important.”

  “What’s his name?”

  I pulled the photo from my pocket and showed her.

  One of her brows lifted. “He’s an actor, right? You looking for an autograph?”

  “No! There’s kind of a family emergency.”

  She looked at me skeptically. “If he were on the train,” she said, “I’d have noticed him.”

  “Can you please just check? And if you find him, tell him Aaron put David in the hospital.” Even if that didn’t make sense, it seemed a fair bet he’d want to know what the hell had gotten lost in translation.

  She gave me a once-over, and her face softened. “Okay, hon. Calm down, and I’ll try and find him for you.”

  From 2:51 to 2:56, I repeatedly wiped clammy palms on my jeans and rehearsed a dozen different things to say. I tried to figure out how to work “don’t touch me” into my greeting without seeming unfriendly. But then the conductor came back out, shouting at people to hurry and board. She spotted me and gave a sad little shrug.

  “I don’t think your man is on this train,” she said.

  I swallowed a bitter lump of disappointment. How was it that nobody ever managed to see him at any of the places he was expected to be? Was he going to a lot of trouble to lead people astray? Or was he somehow here all along, invisible, pressing his hands against a barrier that only his drawings could cross?

  I thanked the lady and made my way carefully back down the stairs to the Corridor of Broken Dreams. Now that my adrenaline was easing off, I could feel every ache and pain in my patchwork body.

  Teo came jogging up, looking out of breath and displeased. “I take it we missed him,” he said.

  “I got there in time to ask a conductor to search the train, but she said he wasn’t on it. I have no way of knowing for sure if that’s true.”

  “No biggie,” said Teo. “If he came through here, I’m sure someone noticed him. And if he got on that train, we can still beat him to the next stop.”

  “Right,” I said, feeling both relieved and foolish.

  It didn’t take long flashing Rivenholt’s picture around before we found an old man with a charming Slavic accent who remembered him. “I think this is the man who is arrested here in the terminal,” he said.

  “Arrested?” said Teo.

  A sudden dread seized me, and I tore open my bag, rifling through it. The e-mail I’d printed out, the one telling Berenbaum what train Rivenholt was boarding, was gone.

  “Work emergency, huh?” I muttered bitterly as Teo continued questioning the old man. I pulled out my phone and the napkin from the coffee shop and dialed Clay’s number. No one answered. He could forget about a date.

  The old man stroked a thumb thoughtfully over his moustache as he
regarded Teo. “The blond man is standing over there, looking around,” he was saying. “Then the policeman, darker, comes to him and shows a badge,” he was saying. “They have serious conversation which I do not hear. Then they walk together to track two. As they pass me, I try to tell them that train has left already, but I get a little afraid. Policeman has his hand on the back of the other’s neck, tight, like holding a dog.”

  Before I could even respond, Teo had bolted toward the stairway in question. I thanked the old guy, slipped him a twenty, and went after Teo with a sigh.

  When I finally limped my way to the top of the platform, I found Teo standing with his hands buried in his hair, looking down at the deserted train tracks. His sunglasses served to partially hide his expression, but the way he’d squished his mouth into a tiny line strongly suggested he was freaking out. I moved closer to his side and looked down.

  “What is that?” I said, looking at the dark splash marks and streaks on the tracks.

  “Blood,” said Teo. “Fey blood.”

  I did a double take. The stains and the track were both too dark for me to be sure, and any telltale scent was covered by other metallic odors.

  “That’s bad, right?”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Because no one will tell me. Are you sure it’s blood?”

  “Put on your glasses.”

  Feeling a qualm, I did as he asked—and made a strangled sound. The faint stains shimmered with golden light. It was brightest on the track where the liquid looked to have pooled; then the stains made a wide, smeary trail from the tracks to the platform.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. I remembered the coldly simmering anger in Brian Clay’s eyes and shuddered.

  Teo nodded grimly. “The cop must have held him down on the tracks and—I don’t know, shot him? Bashed his head in? Then I guess dragged him over there—” Teo looked blankly at where the blood trail disappeared. “Picked him up, maybe?”

  “How did no one see this?” I hated how high-pitched my voice suddenly sounded. “I get that the platform was empty, but Clay had to take him somewhere after he— How is this place not swarming with cops and EMTs right now?”

  “I don’t know,” said Teo, hands in his hair again. “I don’t know. This is fucked.”

  While Teo panicked, I kept my glasses on and tried to see if there was more blood anywhere. I noticed a few drips near the top of the stairs.

  “Teo, is it possible that Rivenholt is still alive?”

  “Could be. Fey anatomy is different from ours, so blood loss doesn’t stop them. Fey essence isn’t even really blood, it’s . . . more a kind of liquid energy, like fuel, for their spells.”

  “So maybe he just walked out?”

  Teo considered it, then shook his head grimly. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “Being held against iron like that, plus having essence literally pouring out of him, it would drain his fuel tank, right? He can’t refill without going back to Arcadia. He wouldn’t be able to hold his facade anymore. That means there’s no way he’s just walking out of here.”

  “So why is there more blood at the bottom of the steps?” I pointed to a faint glimmer, barely visible from where I was standing. Teo moved past me jackrabbit quick, bounding down the stairs in a way that made me green with envy. He knelt to look.

  “This isn’t blood,” he said. He bent down, picking up a piece of paper and unfolding it. He stood there for a long moment, then slowly took off his glasses. He turned his head and looked up at me with the kind of look people give you when the burning house on the news is yours.

  “What?” I said, when he didn’t speak. “Is it another of Rivenholt’s drawings?” I pushed my own glasses up to the top of my head and made my way down the stairs.

  Teo nodded and turned the paper around toward me. When I was close enough, I laced my hands together behind my back and looked. The air collapsed out of me with a whoosh.

  The woman in the drawing wasn’t beautiful in the way Hollywood stars are beautiful. More like a rock face worn away by wind and water. Her short hair left every scarred line of her face exposed, a lean face dominated by intelligent eyes. She stood with the careful straightness of someone who took pain for granted. Her cane gleamed like wet ice, as did the sleek mechanical construction that stood in for her left leg.

  She had flesh, somewhere, past the metal and the loosely draped clothes that had once flattered a less gaunt frame. I wondered if her skin was warm, if by reaching it, by fitting the curve of a naked hip into the hollow of my palm, I could change the grim expression in her eyes. But she was as off limits as though she were surrounded by barbed wire. Written at the bottom of the paper were two words: COLD IRON.

  Rivenholt had drawn me.

  After a moment Teo folded up the drawing, leaving me staring blankly at his T-shirt, and tucked the paper into his back pocket. I didn’t notice there were tears on my cheeks until he wiped them away with the back of his hand.

  And then he was holding me and murmuring in my ear—no llores, mija—and I wanted to explain that I wasn’t sad, I was happy. But then I couldn’t explain because he was kissing me.

  He was terrible at it and tasted like cigarettes (the bastard had sneaked a smoke while parking the car, maybe while Rivenholt was bleeding out on a railroad track), but I kissed him back anyway because I couldn’t kiss the man who had drawn me. We stood clinging to each other like a soldier and his wife at the bottom of the stairs, and I shook like a cheap washing machine and he shhh-shhhh-ed me between kisses. His hands were careful, but mine were reckless; they found soft cotton T-shirt and rough jeans and then—paper, because while I was groping him I accidentally touched the drawing, goddamn it.

  25

  Teo didn’t talk in the car; he just lit a cigarette. I opened my window but didn’t say anything. I let him finish his smoke and stab it out in the ashtray between us before I broke the silence.

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said.

  “It was the drawing.”

  “I know.” I did know. I’d been there.

  He fumbled with his pack of cigarettes but didn’t light another one, setting it aside. “I feel like I cheated on her.”

  “Who?”

  “My Echo.”

  I twisted around to look at him, ignoring the protest from my spine. “That’s who you’re saving yourself for? It’s a she?”

  “I don’t know. I think it is. I don’t care. It isn’t always like that with Echoes, but it is with us. I don’t even know who it is, I just know I don’t want anybody else. And I know that she—or he, or whatever—feels the same way. I don’t know how I know; I just know.”

  “That’s the dumbest and sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.” I looked down at the drawing in my hands. Now that I’d destroyed it, I was allowed to keep it.

  What preoccupied me most about this particular piece was a nagging, inchoate sense of familiarity. Even more than his others, this particular sketch gave me an urgent sense that there was a clue in it I should be able to place, an element that I should recognize—besides myself, of course.

  I should have been disturbed to know that Rivenholt had somehow managed to observe me without my seeing him, but I wasn’t. I had no room to question his motives; I’d felt them. He respected and cared about me on a level that didn’t make any sense, given that I had no memory of meeting him. I put the drawing away and stared at Rivenholt’s photo instead. It was starting to seem familiar too, but was that just because I’d seen Accolade? Or did I have some preexisting relationship with the man that was now lost to my head injury?

  “Is it possible Rivenholt isn’t really Berenbaum’s Echo?” I asked Teo.

  “You’re thinking he’s yours? He doesn’t have to be your Echo to have feelings for you.”

  “But we’ve never met.”

  “I dunno. Maybe his connection to Berenbaum gives
him some way of observing you. Hell, maybe he’s been hiding nearby every time you and Berenbaum talked.”

  I frowned. “Clay said something like that. That he thought Berenbaum knew where Rivenholt was. I just don’t want to think Berenbaum would lie to me.”

  “Who is Clay again?”

  “The cop who just arrested him, I’m pretty sure.” On that note, I dialed Clay’s number for the eighth time. Still nothing. Finally I gave up and dialed ASK-LAPD, choosing dispatch from the menu options.

  “Hey,” I said to the woman who answered the phone. “I’ve been working with Brian Clay on a missing persons thing, and he’s not answering his phone. I wondered if you have some way to get in touch with him? It’s urgent.”

  “Can you give me the name again?” Her tone was crisp and competent, and there was a trace of Mexico in her accent.

  “Brian Clay.” I spelled it for her.

  For a moment I heard nothing but background chatter. Then, “We have no officer by that name. Did this person specifi­cally claim to be with the LAPD?”

  The bottom dropped out of my stomach. “He did.” Too many paradigm shifts in one hour; I was getting queasy.

  “Was he in uniform?”

  “No, but his badge looked legit.”

  “Did he stop your vehicle or act as a police officer in any capacity?”

  “All he did was ask me some questions about a friend of mine, but I’m pretty sure he just, ah, arrested someone at Union Station and hurt the man pretty badly in the process.”

  “We’ll send someone to investigate. If he contacts you again, please call us right away. You can even use 911 for this. Authentic-looking badges are not hard to come by, so in future if you have doubt,s it’s always okay to call us and confirm identity before giving an officer any information.”

  But I hadn’t had doubts. That was the part that bothered me most. I’d been so distracted with magic and fairies that it hadn’t even occurred to me to apply a healthy dose of skepticism to the mundane stuff.

  I described Clay in as much detail as I could and gave the nice lady my contact information in a kind of shame-haze. I’d sent this guy after Rivenholt; I might as well have spilled the blood on the tracks with my own hand.