Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(53)

“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.