Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(29)

“Overreacted to what exactly?”

“Just something he said. Something I interpreted as . . . an insult about my appearance.”

“Is your appearance important to you?”

I snorted. “This is Los Angeles.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“And you’re not my therapist. Give me a phone and I’ll call her.”

Elliott fluttered from my lap to Caryl’s side of the car. I came within a hairbreadth of apologizing to the creature, then stopped myself.

“Does Elliott have feelings?” I said.

“In a manner of speaking, I suppose it does. The emotions of a child: unschooled and volatile.”

“I’m sorry,” I cooed gently at the creature. “You’re a sweet thing. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Elliott crawled back across the car to me, wings limp. He lay back down in my lap, then rolled over, exposing a fine-scaled belly.

“Aw, I want to pet him,” I said. I stroked my fingers through the air where his belly was, but I had no way of knowing if he could feel it.

“Showing affection to the construct serves no purpose,” Caryl said.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I blurted, sending Elliott skittering away again. “Do you have no feelings at all?”

“Not when I am at work.”

“Wow. Must be nice to be able to just switch them off.”

“It is.”

I ground my teeth and opened up the paper to look at the drawing, pushing my glasses back to the top of my head. The confident, evocative lines of the sketch soothed me, even without the magic. Idly I traced a fingertip over the angular Ds on either end of DREAMLAND.

“I am concerned by the way you are fondling that drawing,” Caryl observed languidly. “I know how easily someone with your disorder can become infatuated.”

I stiffened, folding the drawing back up. “You know just enough about BPD to be really unhelpful.”

“I know how bored and restless you must feel when you have no one on whom to focus your passion. It’s why Teo’s dismissal enraged you; he was your best candidate.”

“Stop it,” I said.

“I need you to understand that you would find no happiness with Rivenholt either. He would always put you second. No romance can approach the bond between a fey and his Echo.”

“I guess it sucks that you don’t have one,” I said acidly.

“My dear Millicent,” she said lazily, “if that were the greatest tragedy of my life, I would be a lucky woman.”

I felt a twisted stab of contrition, mixed with concern and curiosity, but when I opened my mouth, what came out was, “Poor you with your magic powers and your nice clothes and your SUV.”

Most Borderlines are virtually incapable of a sincere apology. Tell a Borderline she has hurt you and she responds with a list of ways you’ve hurt her worse. Why? Because in a “split” world, someone has to wear the black hat, and for a person with suicidal tendencies, avoiding guilt is quite literally a -matter of life and death.

“The difference,” Caryl said to me, “is that virtually everything that has gone wrong in your life, you have done to yourself.”

“Fuck you,” I said, because nothing pisses off a Borderline quite like the truth.





14


The Regazo de Lujo Spa and Retreat was spread over fifty acres of green, sea-kissed land in Santa Barbara, but when we arrived, the sun had yet to rise to paint it in all its splendor. Even in the dark, the sprawling grounds and distant stucco villas looked inviting—but the REGISTERED GUESTS ONLY sign and dour-looking security guard at the end of the long, narrow driveway were decidedly less so. Caryl drove past the entrance as though planning to circle back around, but this place took the word “retreat” seriously; I hadn’t seen any sign of public parking for miles.

“Where are we supposed to put the car?” I said. “Are you expecting us to park five miles away and walk?”

Caryl turned off her headlights and began to slow down, easing her car over to the side of the road. She checked her mirrors, then drove over the curb onto the grass, coming to a lurching stop.

“Get out of the car, quickly,” she said in a crisp tone that brooked no hesitation.

“You’re going to get us towed.” I heaved myself awkwardly out of the passenger-side door, still queasy from my attempts at making sense of Rivenholt’s file. My nausea was not abated in the slightest when Caryl, now standing next to the hood on the driver’s side, rolled her eyes back and began to murmur under her breath in a foreign tongue.

When I say foreign, I don’t mean foreign in the sense of “from another country” but in the sense of “invading virus.” The harsh, wet consonants and dripping diphthongs made the hairs on my arms and neck lift away from my skin. I slipped the fey lenses down over my eyes and saw that the shadows around Caryl’s form had thickened; Elliott had gone as still as a gargoyle on her shoulder.

A sickly webbing the color of an old bruise began to spread across the windshield, then the windows, then the entire SUV. My hair stirred in a breath of wind that stank like an abattoir; I shuddered and pushed my sunglasses back up into my hair.

The car was gone.

No, of course it wasn’t. I stepped forward and touched the window, just to prove myself sane. I could still feel and almost see the cold gleam of glass under my fingers, but all my baser instincts were stubbornly telling me there was nothing there at all.