Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(55)

“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 f*ck itself.”

“Teo, your mom was an *. You can’t judge a culture by its *s.”

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 organi-zation.”

“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,” Gloria 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.