Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(14)

Teo visibly clenched his jaw, then turned to the housekeeper. “Can you give us a few minutes alone?” he asked her.

She said something else to him in Spanish.

Teo shook his head irritably again. “Do you not speak English?”

“I speak it fine,” she said, her eyes cold.

“Okay then,” he said. “I need to have a private conversation with my friend here.” He pulled out a wad of bills and held them out to her.

She made a sound of disgust and walked away without taking his money. She muttered something in Spanish as she went, and I know Teo understood her, because his slouchy posture went ramrod straight before he came in and shut the door behind him.

“I was getting along with her just fine,” I snapped. “Would it have killed you to be polite? Now she’ll report us.”

“To who? Anyone important knows I do business with the viscount. Now relax. Since we’re here, we may as well get something out of it. Go through the trash.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re the one who decided to trespass, so you get to be the one to touch his snotty tissues or whatever.”

“Don’t these sort of people use handkerchiefs?” I went to the bathroom and found a shower cap to put over my hand.

“Lady, you have no idea what sort of person you’re talking about.”

“A vampire?” I guessed. I picked up the trash can—which held a frankly absurd number of Reese’s cup wrappers—and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Nope,” said Teo, casually, like it had been a decent guess.

“I was kidding,” I said, taking out the wrappers carefully, one at a time, using the shower cap as an ill-fitting glove.

“You weren’t kidding,” said Teo. “Not really. I bet you believe all kinds of crazy shit, or Caryl wouldn’t have recruited you.”

I found something near the top that wasn’t a candy wrapper: a folded piece of white paper. I clumsily eased it open with my shower-capped hand, hoping to find a scribbled address or phone number like you always do in the movies, but instead it was just a little sketch made with a ballpoint on hotel stationery. I stared at it.

Teo chattered on, poking around the room. “So apparently instead of checking out, the viscount extended his stay by a whole month. Either he completely forgot when his visa expires, or—Millie, you okay?”

The sketch was of the view out the window, the one I had just dismissed, but somehow in a few spare lines the artist had captured L.A.’s restless energy. DREAMLAND was written at the bottom in a bold, masculine hand. I stared at the paper and remembered, on a primal level, the thrill I’d felt when I first saw the city from the freeway eight years ago: sun low and heavy in the sky, downtown’s high-rises glittering in the vermilion light. I felt a stinging at the back of my eyes and let the drawing slip to the floor.

“What is that?” said Teo.

“Nothing. Just a sketch of the city.”

He bent and picked it up as I continued sifting through candy wrappers, and then he did something odd. He pulled a pair of nineties-retro mirror shades out of his pocket and put them on, peering at the paper through them. He hadn’t worn them the whole ride over, even when we were driving into the sun, but now he put them on in a fashionably dim hotel room?

“He drew this,” he said. “The viscount.”

“Or maybe some lady friend who got bored waiting for him to come out of the shower.”

“Nope,” he said. “There’s fey magic on this.”

“What’s fey magic?”

“You can look through my glasses,” he said, “but give them back when you’re done. At this rate you’ll have your own pair before long.”

I took the glasses from him and slipped them on, looking at the paper in his hand. My breath caught, and I felt every hair on my body lift away from my skin.

Everything else in the room looked normal through the shades, only darker. The drawing, on the other hand, lit up like the Fourth of July. Radiant curving strands like flowering vines danced and shimmered from its surface.

“What the f*ck is that?” I breathed.

“Magic,” said Teo. And this time, I was pretty sure it wasn’t sarcasm.





8


I stared at the shimmering swirls on the paper; they moved as though they were alive. I’d misplaced the speech center of my brain again. When I found it, I said a little drunkenly, “What kind of glasses are these?”

“It’s like an advanced version of the fairy ointment from the stories,” he said. “One side of the lens shows you what kind of magic a thing has; the other side shows you things as they really are.”

I waited for my rational mind to put up a fight, but it rolled over and showed its belly. I gave the glasses back to Teo, my hand shaking slightly. He slipped them into his coat pocket, along with the drawing itself.

“You need a minute?” he said, watching me closely.

I shook my head. “I’m fine. What was that? I mean, I get that you’re saying it’s a spell or something. But what does it do?”

“It’s a type of charm. Basically he draws something and sort of . . . weaves his magic into the paper, so that whoever looks at it feels exactly what he was feeling when he drew it.”