“Was that what I think it was?” Teo said when I hung up.
“If you think I found out Brian Clay is a lying, thieving piece of shit with a fake badge, then yes.”
I called Berenbaum’s mobile, but he wasn’t answering. I tried his office number, but Araceli didn’t answer either, and with so much up in the air, leaving a message seemed pointless.
“Teo, give me Caryl’s number,” I said.
“Only Caryl is authorized to do that.”
“For God’s sake, Teo, this is a disaster of epic proportions. Exceptions can be made.”
“No. She can’t have just anyone calling her when she might not have Elliott out. But more importantly, it’s the rules. Once you sign the contract, you don’t ever break the Project rules, Millie. Instant termination.”
“I hope you mean firing.”
“Usually.”
I let that one slide. “Fine, then, you call her and hand me the phone.”
“I’m driving, Millie. We’ll be at the Residence in, like, ten minutes.”
“Do it, Teo, or I’ll tell her you kissed me. That’s against the rules, right?”
“No, dumbass,” he said. “Remember Phil and Gloria?”
“I keep trying to forget.”
He was already groping in his pocket for his phone, eyes still on the road as he tilted his hips up off the seat. I idly painted a mental picture of myself straddling him—my old self, of course; I doubted I was nimble enough to do that anymore.
He held the phone up in his line of sight, flicking his eyes over to it as he drove. “If a cop drives by and pulls me over right now, you are paying the fucking fine.”
“Just make sure it’s a real cop first.”
He held the phone to his ear and listened. I studied his face, trying to feel something other than embarrassed amusement at what had happened between us at the station. He was sexy in theory, but not really in practice. It wouldn’t take much tweaking to make him dangerously crush-worthy, but I’d been in the dating pool long enough to know that what you see is what you get.
“Caryl,” Teo said, “call Lisa.” A pause as Teo lost a shade of color. “What? I didn’t—did I not say Millie? Sorry. Just call her, all right? Same damn phone.”
I watched the unintentionally erotic display he made trying to put his phone back in his pocket. “Were you and Lisa close?” I said.
“Not really. Learned my lesson after Amir. But she was all right. She and I were both pochos, so there was stuff I didn’t have to explain.”
“What’s a pocho?”
He winced a little, then laughed. “You don’t get to say that. It means spoiled, overripe. A term Mexicans have for people like me who are more American than Mexican, you know? They say it like it’s a bad thing.” He snorted another laugh, but his body was drawn and tense.
“I . . . obviously can’t relate. I never had any culture to begin with.”
“Of course you do,” he snapped. “We’re swimming in your culture every minute. Meanwhile, my culture thinks bipolar disorder’s my fault for not going to church. My culture can go fuck itself.”
“Teo, your mom was an asshole. You can’t judge a culture by its assholes.”
He fumbled for the cigarette pack again, shaky. I laid a hand on his arm, and it seemed to calm him, or at least change his mind about smoking.
“I hope you realize,” I said, “ that I’m not going anywhere. Everything I’ve seen about the aftermath of what I did—” But now my phone was ringing. Of course.
“Hello?”
“What has Teo so upset?” said Caryl’s voice.
“It’s Rivenholt,” I said. “It seems he was abducted from the train station, most likely by this guy who’s been posing as a cop and trying to track him down.”
“I don’t like ‘seems’ and ‘most likely.’ What are the facts?”
“The facts are, it turns out the cop I’d been talking to about Rivenholt is not really a cop, and the train departure info went missing from my bag when I left it with him. Afterward someone flashed a badge at Rivenholt at the station and took him to an isolated area. When we went there, we found a bucketload of spilled fairy blood and nothing else.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
“Spilled fairy blood is bad, right?” I said. “Epically bad, Teo said. What’s the deal with that, anyway?”
“I may need to share that information, despite your tenuous status, but this is not the moment. I am . . . overwhelmed.”
“That prick just got us in deep trouble with Arcadia, didn’t he?”
“Without knowing the full situation, I cannot say if we have a convincing argument against our apparent criminal negligence.”
“If we don’t?”
“Let’s not talk about that just yet. Was there any sign of where they went?”
“They seemed to just vanish into thin air. Could Rivenholt have cast some kind of invisibility spell?”
“No, but an Unseelie fey could have done so.”
“An Unseelie such as Vivian Chandler?”
“For example, yes. There are only four Unseelie fey in Los Angeles at present, and the other three have no connection to Rivenholt whatsoever that I’m aware of.”
“How do you know there are only four?”
“The perimeter ward counts and displays the fey population at any time within its boundaries. Seelie and Unseelie are counted separately.”
“Isn’t that the thing you said was on the fritz or something, though?”
There was a brief silence. “Again, I am impressed by your attention to detail. There have been some odd readings lately, yes.”
“Do you think the odd readings have anything to do with this business with Rivenholt?”
“Correlation does not imply causation, but we should not entirely ignore the fact that Rivenholt’s uncharacteristically lawless behavior is occurring at the same time as the anomaly.”
“Can you explain what the anomaly is?”
“I’m not sure you’d understand. I will show you later.”
“This is the thing you’ve been preoccupied with, though?”
“Yes. It’s why I brought you on when I did. Once I began to spend time on this, it became apparent that we had too few people with leadership experience to keep things in order while I was distracted. You were a director; you have experience with executive-level decision making. But then Rivenholt’s disappearance complicated things, and your training has suffered accordingly.”
“I’m doing everything I can to help,” I said. “But mostly I’m stumbling around in the dark. No one tells me the rules until I break them, which seems like a horrible way to run an organization.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But now we have multiple crises on our hands. A fey abducted by a human is a serious matter for the Code of Silence, but we can contain the problem if we find the abductor. The spilled blood, on the other hand—well, no matter, it is done.”
“I’ll keep trying to contact the fake cop,” I said. “For now I’ll pretend I still think he’s legit.”
“Meet me back at the Residence,” Caryl said, “and let’s start combing through files. Perhaps we’ll find some connections that will help.”
• • •
By the time I got there, Caryl had turned the living room into a war room. Everyone I’d seen at breakfast was sitting on a couch or a piano bench or a chair dragged in from the dining room, looking through folders and entire drawers that had simply been yanked out of their cabinets and brought to the room in their entirety. Monty was having a field day with unattended stacks of paper. There were at least three different arguments going on, but the only one I could hear was Gloria’s with Caryl on the sofa, and only Gloria’s side of it.
“I’m just concerned, that’s all,” Glo
ria was saying. “She hasn’t been through the whole training; she doesn’t know what all they can and can’t do.”
Caryl said something calmly that I couldn’t hear, and at the same time I felt Elliott settle onto my shoulder. When Caryl spotted me, she grabbed some photographs and rose from the couch, moving to me without even formally breaking off her discussion with Gloria. As if Gloria really needed another reason to be annoyed with me.
“Do you recognize any of these people, aside from Vivian?” Caryl asked me.
I glanced over the photos and shook my head. “Not in the least.” I pointed at a lumpy-nosed old woman. “That’s a weird facade for a fey to choose.”
“Thus far you’ve only seen the sidhe; they share our standards of beauty, for the most part. Commoners, especially Unseelie commoners, have a different aesthetic.”
“Who are these people?”
“These are the only four Unseelie fey who are currently in Los Angeles. Seelie magic is designed to attract attention, not divert it, so these four and myself are the only beings in the city who might have cast spells to assist in removing Rivenholt from the train station.”
“Is it safe to assume that our fake cop knows about Arcadia?”
“Not necessarily. For example, he could be conspiring with Vivian in some mundane criminal capacity and unaware of exactly how she managed to get them all safely out of the station. A spell caster of Vivian’s skill can be subtle.”
“But given the amount of blood loss, Teo said Rivenholt’s facade would have dropped.”
Caryl nodded. “It does seem likely that if the man was unaware of the existence of fey before, he has just had a very shocking introduction to the concept.”
For a moment I almost felt bad for Clay, but then I remembered that he was a lying sack of crap who was probably in cahoots with the queen of the damned.
“Is there any reason that Vivian would want to harm her business partner’s Echo?” I asked Caryl, perplexed.
“Leverage, possibly?” she mused. “You say she promised not to hurt Berenbaum, but if she didn’t extend that promise to Rivenholt, she could still use him to ensure Berenbaum’s cooperation with something.”
“That means Rivenholt is almost certainly still alive, then, because if she killed him, she’d lose the leverage.”
Caryl gave me a long look. “If he is in Vivian’s custody, you had best hope she has already killed him.”
“Caryl!” scolded Gloria, approaching the two of us. “Look at her face. This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talkin’ about.”
I eyed Gloria, suspicious of this sudden defense of me.
“I appreciate your concerns,” Caryl said, “and I share them to some extent. But Millie and Teo have done a tremendous job of getting information thus far.”
I made an incoherent sound of disbelief. “She wants to take the assignment from us, doesn’t she.”
“Aw, don’t take it personal, honey,” said Gloria, and gave me a sugary smile.
26
I looked down at Gloria’s smug, pretty face and felt equal parts panic and fury. She wore sweetness like armor; I could fight, too little too late, and it would only make me look petty and threatened. I’d done this dance a thousand times with a thousand saccharine Southern girls, and I always ended up getting danced right out the door.
“What’s in this for you?” I asked Gloria, making no apology for towering over her.
“It’s not about me, hon,” she said with an expression of tender concern. “It’s just, you haven’t been here a week, and already Caryl’s got you interviewing Unseelie bloodsuckers and mopping up at crime scenes?”
She actually sort of had a point, which made me more furious. “You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “Is there money in it for you or something?”
Gloria looked like someone had dropped a worm down the back of her shirt. I looked at Caryl, who only gave a weary sigh.
“Because fey blood was shed,” Caryl explained, “I had to alert my contact at the Department of Homeland Security to the possibility of Arcadian retribution.”
“Wait, the government knows about fairies?”
“Not most of the government, no. But we have people at the DHS, and they will be paying us a substantial cash reward if we can keep the Accord intact.”
“To whom would this reward go, exactly?”
“To the Los Angeles Arcadia Project. Generally, when we are paid for resolving a conflict, I give most of the proceeds to the employees involved in the resolution.”
I gave Gloria a hard look. “Oh, is that so.”
“Don’t make it sound like that,” Gloria chided, giving me a disappointed-mom look.
“I don’t have to make it sound like anything,” I said. “This is my assignment. There is no one, not even Teo, who could do it without me at this point. In the few days I’ve been, here not only have I become best buddies with David Berenbaum, but apparently Viscount Rivenholt has fallen in love with me.”
“What?” said a few people at once. Then the room got very quiet.
I pulled the drawing out of my pants pocket and showed it to Caryl. “I already touched this,” I said sheepishly, “but Teo can attest to the feeling that used to be in it.”
“Yup,” said Teo. “He seriously wants to hit that.”
Caryl looked at the drawing for a moment. “I’ll confess this development surprises me,” she said evenly, “but between the viscount’s inexplicable infatuation and your magic-canceling abilites, I will admit you have become valuable. The best solution would be for the four of you to work together.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” someone blurted.
Oh. It was me.
“I think that sounds like a fine idea,” said Gloria, the very picture of humility.
I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths. “Fine,” I said. “But this is a complicated enough situation without everyone just going off and doing their own thing. If you want my help dealing with Berenbaum and Rivenholt, then I want to be in charge.”
“Now you’re just being a silly goose,” said Gloria. “You don’t even work for us yet. Caryl can’t put you in charge of a major crisis response.”
“So hire me,” I said. “Give me a pen and I’ll sign the damned agreement right now. Don’t act like there is any chance you lot could fire me at this point. I could blow your Code of Silence to bits.”
Gloria put a hand to her mouth, a cute little oh my! gesture. “Oh, honey,” she said in tones of deepest pity. “You haven’t figured it out?”
“That’s enough,” said Caryl. Two calm words, but it was as though someone had cut Gloria’s strings. She drooped submissively on the couch, hands in her lap.
“I haven’t figured what out?” I said.
“That is quite enough bickering,” Caryl said. “I am taking all four of you to Residence One so we can find out if Rivenholt is still alive and plan what to do next.”
“Let me just freshen up first,” said Gloria, sliding down off the couch and hurrying to the downstairs bathroom.
I watched her go, ashamed of myself for focusing my loathing on her short-legged gait instead of her scheming mind. Once she was gone, I muttered between clenched teeth, “I thought everyone came here straight out of the loony bin. Does passive-aggressive qualify as a personality disorder these days? What’s her story?”
The room was very quiet. Uncomfortably so.
“Right,” I said. “I’m not supposed to ask. If someone will give me one of those agreements to sign, I’ll follow the rules and shut up about it. But since no one seems to find me worthy of such a document, I wouldn’t mind a damn answer, since I’m stuck working with her.”
To my surprise, it was Tjuan who spoke. “She stabbed two men to death with a steak knife,” he said. “Says she doesn’t remember it, got off on insanity.”
>
Everyone was looking at me in a way that suggested that they already knew about this. I tried to stop the color from draining out of my face, but emotions are slippery things, so everyone got to enjoy my moment of bald horror.
“Maybe think on that,” said Tjuan, “next time you feel like giving her attitude.”
“All right, I get it,” I snapped.
I didn’t like the slow way he smiled. I didn’t like any of this. I didn’t like that I was lower down in the social pecking order than Blondie just because I hadn’t killed a guy. The rewards for kindness and sane behavior seemed to be pretty sparse at Residence Four.
Gloria emerged from the bathroom so glowingly smug that I was almost sure she’d heard Tjuan schooling me.
“I call shotgun,” I said quickly. Gloria stopped in confusion, then frowned. Sometimes you have to savor the small victories.
• • •
The ride to Residence One was awkward and Bach-filled. As always, Caryl had turned the music up to a conversation-killing volume, and her gloved fingertips kept precise time on the steering wheel. I flipped down my sun visor and opened the mirror, angling it so I could check on Teo in the backseat. The seat was made for two adults and a child, but Teo and Tjuan were both such beanpoles that Gloria fit comfortably in between. Teo saw me and made a face. I laughed, and caught my own eyes in the mirror as I did so.
For the first time since my tumble off the roof, I didn’t have to look away. Because I was the girl in the drawing.
There had to be some way Rivenholt could feel me if I just thought at him hard enough. He had to know I was looking for him, that I was on my way, that I was going to make it all right.
We headed west on the 10 to Santa Monica and got off on Lincoln, heading south toward Ocean Park. We took a little zigzag path through some residential streets and ultimately pulled into the driveway of a tiny yellow house on a postage-stamp lot. The tall wooden fence around it overflowed with scarlet bougainvillea.
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