Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(68)

“She has to pretend she does, or they band together and loot and murder and it gets so ugly. Orange?”

I held up my hand in a sharp no thank you gesture, fighting the surge of fury that clenched my jaw. When dealing with the unknown, it’s important not to assume that it parallels the known. I was 80 percent sure Foxfeather was full of shit about commoners, but 80 percent wasn’t enough to justify choking the magic out of her right there in her kitchen.

“Anything else you remember?”

“It used your language well,” she said, “so it obviously comes here a lot.”

I watch too much TV, I suddenly remembered him saying at the coffee shop. I felt a weird twist in my gut. I should have known he was fey by the ridiculous amount of sugar in his drink.

“Did he say anything about when these commoners went missing? Was it all at once, or one at a time? How many are missing? Anything you can remember will be a huge help to the Arcadia Project, and to your Queen.”

To her credit, she really did seem to be trying hard to remember. She frowned, and her eyes crossed slightly. “It came in, looking not very pretty, but nice dark hair. It ordered cherry--pomegranate juice. Talking, talking, talking, missing commoners, it held up its paw like this”— here she splayed her hand out in my face, sticky with orange juice—“then it said bad things about the viscount, so I peeked at its real face. Then I kicked it out. I was mad. I carved it into the bar, but then I forgot to set the bar on fire. It’s still a very nice carving.”

I turned to Teo, splaying my hand in the same gesture Foxfeather had made. “The hand might mean five missing. He only mentioned one girl when he was pretending to be a cop, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that five is the same number of fey that have been half counted on the census for weeks. I think the Queen’s trying to figure out where they’ve gone.”

Teo studied Foxfeather for a moment. “My lady,” he said, “do you know of any way, or any place, where a fey could be both here and in Arcadia at the same time? Like, stuck in transit?”

Foxfeather laughed. “No, silly. That would be like falling halfway down a hole. Sideways.” She tilted her body charmingly at a near right angle and smiled. “One time, I held on to the edge of the Gate just for fun, but it stopped being fun very fast.”

“No arguments here,” I mumbled.

Teo caught my eye and gestured with his head toward the door, then looked back at Foxfeather. “If you hear or remember anything else, do you know how to contact our office?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “Are you leaving?”

“For now,” said Teo.

“Come back if you want sex later.”

I looked at Teo.

“Not a word from you,” he said, and left.

I followed. “How do you know Foxfeather isn’t your Echo?”

“I shook her hand the first time we met; I’d have felt it.”

“What does it feel like?”

“I don’t know, because it wasn’t her. Come on, let’s stop by the bar while we’re on this side of town.”

The Seelie bar wasn’t quite open for business yet, but neither was it locked. I supposed the ward removed worries about people wandering in and looting the place.

Even without all the lights on, the colors of the paint and fabric and glass were breathtaking. The wooden bar, as Foxfeather had suggested, was embellished with new carvings, all of them masterpieces. I’m not sure what Teo expected to find there, though. Foxfeather’s homage to the Very Bad Faun was an impressive work of art, but there were no clues to be found in it. The figure was carved from memory by a woman who admitted to a bad memory, and who had only glimpsed Claybriar’s true face for a moment.

The portrait reminded me of Mr. Tumnus in my childhood copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, minus the umbrella and parcels. Hadn’t Tumnus been a traitor too? Despite an elongated jaw, the face in the carving could have passed for human. Foxfeather had carved him with a vapid expression, but I didn’t read much into that. Was he awkward? Yes. Stupid? Not that I could tell.

I snapped a photo of the carving with my phone, for what it was worth, and then we stopped by the sushi place. Jeff, the guy who’d supposedly spoken to the “cop” about John Riven, wasn’t working that day, but I left my number for him and stressed that it was very important. I wasn’t holding my breath for a call back, though. I was not the kind of girl whose number guys wanted.

? ? ?

When I arrived back at the Residence, Tjuan was pacing the living room. “Did you see him?” he greeted us.

“See who?” said Teo.

“Black guy sitting in a car about half a block down,” said Tjuan. “Been there an hour at least.”

“You think he’s staking us out or something?” said Teo dubiously.

“He doesn’t live around here. I went for a run an hour ago, heard his door locks click when I went by. He’s still there.”

“What kind of car?” Teo asked.

“Old Taurus. But I looked in when I heard the locks, and he was dressed like some Beverly Hills bullshit.”

I didn’t get why a nicely dressed black man sitting in a car was a big deal, honestly, but I wasn’t about to tell Mr. Hostility that he was being paranoid, especially since that might be part of his actual diagnosis. I went into the kitchen for a snack while he and Teo hashed it out. I was on my way back to the living room, banana in hand, when a knock sounded on the front door. Tjuan and Teo and I all looked at one another, me with a mouthful of banana.