Borderline (The Arcadia Project, #1)(89)

“Christ, Roper,” I said aloud, words coming out drowsy and slurred. “New low.” I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to walk into the street with the kind of stains you usually find on a five-year-old. I didn’t know what to do.

Dazed, I checked my voice mail. Two messages: a man trying to set up an apartment showing, and Inaya asking for a call back. Caryl’s number didn’t appear on my incoming call list, a fact that cut sharply. Pain was good, though; pain was something.

After somewhat drowsy deliberation, I tried Inaya.

“Hey, honey,” she said after two rings. “I’m at Vicki’s place.”

“Inaya, I’ve had a sort of accident.”

“Are you okay?”

“I have a condition. It’s usually not serious, but I had an episode, and I need someone to come get me.”

“Do you need me to call you an ambulance?”

“No, I’m physically fine. But it’s just . . . I fainted, I guess, and I kind of . . . had a bladder mishap, and now I’m hiding in an alley in West Hollywood, too embarrassed to come out.”

“Oh my God, you poor thing. I’m going to send Rosa, okay? She’s really sweet; she’s like your grandma. She’ll take care of everything. Just tell me where you are.”

As it turned out, Rosa was nothing like my late grandmother, which is to say she was not a racist alcoholic with brown teeth. She was not Latina, either, as I had embarrassingly expected. She looked Scandinavian. She didn’t say much beyond hello at first, but she gave me a small blanket to wrap around my waist and escorted me briskly and compassionately to her waiting sedan.

“Thank you so much,” I said miserably.

“Once,” she said after a brief silence, “I got very drunk at a party and got terrible stomach cramps, so I ran to the bathroom and had a bowel movement, but I had forgotten to open up the toilet lid first.”

I have no idea why that made me feel better, but it did.

? ? ?

I’d love go back in time and pay a visit to twenty-four-year-old Millicent Roper, maniacally optimistic UCLA film student, and tell her that in a couple of years she’d be wearing a pair of urine-soaked jeans into a fairy’s apartment to meet Inaya West. She’d probably back slowly away with one hand on her pepper spray.

“I need a washcloth, a sink, a plastic trash bag, and some fresh clothes,” I said in a brisk director voice as soon as I walked in the door, hoping to distract from how thoroughly pathetic I was.

“I’ll take care of it,” said Foxfeather, and scampered to a back room, possibly the same one she and her friends had been having sex in two days ago. She seemed strangely focused; was it her Echo’s influence already?

I hung back near the front door, unwilling to inflict the smell of urine on a woman who had probably not walked her own dogs in decades. Inaya was sitting sideways on a love seat that faced the far window, looking over the back of it at me.

“Sorry if I interrupted anything, uh, intimate,” I said awkwardly.

Inaya frowned. “Is it usually like that with people and their . . .”

“Echoes? I don’t think so. But I figured you two would, what with you being so gorgeous and Foxfeather being so . . . Foxfeather.”

Inaya shook her head slowly. “She sees me as a little girl, someone to protect.”

“What a waste,” I muttered.

“Pardon?”

“Nothing.”

Foxfeather came out from the bedroom then with a washcloth and some sort of unidentifiable garment. She fetched a plastic trash bag from under the sink as well, proving that her short-term memory was functioning at an unprecedented level.

“Do you want me to help you clean up?” she said.

I glanced at Inaya, who raised an eyebrow at me, quelling my train of thought. Probably not a good idea to drag the good Christian’s soul mate into the other room for a little inter-species fondling.

“I’ll be fine on my own,” I said, and awkwardly shuffled my way to the master bathroom.

One careful sponge bath later, I emerged back into the main room draped in a loose-fitting babydoll dress. It would have been stunning on Foxfeather, but it was a little ridiculous on me given the amount of titanium and scar tissue I was showing.

“So let’s talk business,” said Inaya, propping her pedicured bare feet up on the coffee table. Foxfeather, now seated on the love seat next to her, playfully mimicked her pose. I moved around to seat myself in a cushy leather chair that was placed at an angle to the two of them.

“I’ll try to keep this simple,” I said. “Best I can figure out, Vivian and David have a bunch of fey commoners captive somewhere and are draining their blood to work some magic at their new studio. I need your help to figure out where these prisoners are being held.”

“No way,” Inaya said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“David wouldn’t do that.”

I sighed. “I would have thought the same thing, Inaya, but he’s not the man everyone thinks he is.”

Inaya’s spine straightened, and her face took on a haughty expression of bruised loyalty that made me crave better lighting and a camera. “I have known him for thirty years,” she said. “I don’t remember not knowing him. He would not torture innocent people.”