Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(67)

“I promise she’s safe from my evil groping man-hands.”

“What? That’s not what I— You know what, never mind. I’m just going to let people keep thinking I’m an *. It’s so much less trouble.”

Foxfeather grabbed an orange from a basket on the counter and dug into the peel with her fingers, her eyes hot. “You sure you don’t want some?” she said, as the sharp citrus smell began to waft over to us.

“Orange?” I said. “It’s just a regular orange?”

“No,” she said with wide, serious eyes. “It’s Valencia.”

I glanced at Teo. He slipped on his shades for a moment. “It’s clean,” he said, and slipped them off again.

“Uh, okay,” I said, turning back to her. “So, this guy you carved, was that someone you know?”

Foxfeather tore a long spiral strip of peel from the orange, shivering with anticipation. Her eyes never left the fruit as she answered me in a dreamy tone. “I don’t know the faun personally,” she said. “But yes, it did come into my bar one day, and I had to throw it out.”

“Why?”

Foxfeather looked up at me and gave her thumb a long, slow lick. “It was a bad faun,” she said. “Very, very bad.”





31


“In what way was this faun bad, exactly?” I asked Baroness Foxfeather, watching her peel long white fibers away from the pulp of her orange.

“Mmm, it put on such an interesting human face, I didn’t think to look underneath until we were already talking. And then I had to throw it out of the bar. Filthy thing.”

“So his crime was—being a commoner, basically. Got it. Was his name Claybriar?”

“Probably. That sounds like the sorts of names those things have.” Her fingers savagely tore loose a slippery wedge of orange and pushed the end of it into her mouth. As she bit it in half, her eyes grew fixed and bright with joy. She beckoned me closer with one finger.

I glanced at Teo, who gave me a go on gesture. He himself looked like his feet had grown roots in the floor.

Leaning heavily on my cane, I made my way toward her. The countertop was between us; she leaned her elbows on it and continued to beckon me as though intending to whisper. I leaned over the counter helpfully, but instead of speaking she held out the other half of the orange wedge. When I reached for it, she laughed and moved it behind her back.

I sighed. “Do you remember what Claybriar talked to you about?”

“Not really,” Foxfeather said, holding out the orange wedge again. I didn’t reach for it this time. “It had three drinks very fast and asked me a lot of very boring questions.” She was still holding out the orange and beginning to look both impatient and hurt, so I reached for it, only to have her snatch it away again.

I gritted my teeth and took a deep breath. “Did the faun ask you about Viscount Rivenholt, or mention the Queen?”

“May Her Majesty, Queen Dawnrowan, reign for eternity. Hold still and open your mouth.”

I leaned my elbow on the counter and did as she asked. Foxfeather leaned forward in all her spectacular nakedness. Either she had put on some of that body lotion with glitter in it, or else a bit of fey was bleeding through her human skin. She slipped the orange wedge into my mouth, making no effort to avoid touching my lips with her fingers. At the contact, her facade dissolved like sugar, leaving me struck dumb by her starlight-and-opal beauty. When she withdrew her fingers, the facade snapped back like a rubber band.

“It hurts a little to touch you,” she said. “It feels like ice water pouring under my skin, and now I’m sleepy.”

I had a mouthful of orange and a head full of fairy and could only say “Mm.” I looked over at Teo. He was watching us intently, but more like he wanted to take notes than join in.

I swallowed and turned back to Foxfeather. “It’s very important that you tell us what you remember about Claybriar, and what he said to you.”

“Remembering is hard; I haven’t found my Echo yet. Why is this important?”

“Because Claybriar is missing and so is Viscount Rivenholt.”

“The viscount is missing?”

“Yes, we told you that before.”

“I don’t think you said that. I would have been worried.”

I could feel a headache starting just behind my left eye. “Well, he is missing, and we think Claybriar may have hurt him, so we need to know everything we can about him.”

“I don’t know anything about the viscount.”

“No, I meant Claybriar. I need to know about Claybriar.”

“I’m sorry, I get confused because you keep saying ‘him’ like it’s a person.”

“He seemed like a person when I talked to him.”

“It’s a facade,” she said as though I were the stupidest thing ever to crawl out from under a log.

“Just tell me what Claybriar wanted with you. Why he was in the bar.”

“It had misplaced some commoners or something. That was how I smelled something rotten. Why would anyone care if a few commoners went missing?”

Missing persons again, just like “Officer Clay” had mentioned. This had to relate to his mission for the Queen.

“Apparently the Queen cares about at least one of them.”