I should have just agreed, promised to keep an eye out for him, promised to cooperate. But I hesitated, because I was terrible at this.
“Who do you think you’re protecting?” said Bad Cop. “My job is to protect people like John LaMantia, who showed up at work one day and got shot by a stranger in cold blood, and now has hospital bills to pay. If you lie to us, if this man gets away and hurts someone else? Kills someone? That’s on you. You might as well be holding that gun.”
That was about when my dysphoria decided to grab the wheel and swerve this whole conversation into the river.
“Leave me alone!” I blurted. “I’ve done nothing! Tjuan isn’t a criminal, he’s a fucking screenwriter, and he didn’t do anything wrong, and neither did I, and . . . I don’t even have to talk to you!”
In the long run that was probably the wrong thing to say, but in the short run, it was a magic incantation. They ushered me back into the living room and found someone else to torture. I was shaking and sobbing by that point, and Song’s arms were full of Sterling, and so Caryl, to my surprise, sat next to me and held me for a while. I was too dazed to fully appreciate the slow, soothing strokes of gloved hands down my spine.
When the police finally left, she drew away from me and stood to address the assembled household.
“This will not be the last of the interest they take in us,” she said. “We must assume they are watching our movements from this point forward.”
Wonderful. Because things didn’t suck enough already.
• • •
While Caryl told the rest of the household a bunch of scary stuff I already knew, I went upstairs and renewed my attempts to summon Shock.
No more subtlety; I was going to have to go full Internet stalker. As it turned out, not only did the presumed heir of the Unseelie Court have a Snapchat account, he had Instagram, too, as well as Tumblr, DeviantArt, and some stuff I’d never even heard of. You make yourself pretty easy to find when you use the same dumb username everywhere.
His Tumblr account was open to random asks, so I made an account there and sent him a message that got right to the point:
Brand’s facade blew up but he is not dead and seems to be stuck in the body of a crow. PLEASE ADVISE ASAP.
Like everyone his age, Shock was plugged in pretty much 24/7 and answered my message almost immediately.
SHIT, he said.
Since that was all, I sent him another ask.
Dude, the crow is hanging out in our front yard. What should we do?
This time the response came even faster.
OMW
On his way? From Hong Kong? There were at least fourteen reasons I had not been expecting that response. High on the list being that he’d just blocked me on Snapchat less than twelve hours ago.
Kids these days.
I looked up flights and things to try to get a vague idea of his soonest ETA. What I did not take into account was that there were apparently “portals” between the High Courts over on the flip side, as well as a “portal” (I still had no idea what those even were) between the Seelie High Court and the nearby estate of Duke Skyhollow. Being royal, Prince Fettershock didn’t even have to fill out any paperwork; he could just pop on over whenever he felt like it.
All of this meant that just over two hours later, poor Stevie experienced her second trauma of the day when the crown prince came swaggering through the LA4 Gate in red sneakers and a leather jacket.
9
Stevie was not at all cool with Prince Fettershock’s unscheduled arrival; it sent her into a fit of moaning and rocking that even Song couldn’t calm. Caryl and I guided Shock to a couch in the living room, partially to make him comfortable and partially to get him out of Stevie’s sight.
“I am so sorry,” he said, looking up through a navy blue fringe of bangs. His English, as always, was fast and fluid, but accented enough that the speed occasionally rendered it incomprehensible to me.
“She’ll be fine,” Caryl said.
“I would have given more notice,” Shock said, “but I do not have permission to be here, and so when I saw a chance to leave, I had to do it right away. I am not supposed to be talking to you at all.”
“Is that why you blocked me?”
He looked sheepish. “I am not angry with you, but Father is, and you have met him, so nothing more needs to be said about that.”
I was a little bit confused. Winterglass was claiming to be on Belinda’s side because Shock was; now Shock was implying that he was on Belinda’s side because Winterglass was? Who was holding whom hostage, here?
“So about Brand,” I said.
“I feel terrible about that,” he said.
“You should.” Bad Cop seemed like the way to go here, since his obvious shame was the easiest thing to pry a wedge into. “You cut corners with the spell, didn’t you.”
Shock squirmed. He glanced at Caryl, but she just gazed at him tranquilly under the influence of Elliott.
“With everything that was going on,” Shock said, “I thought soon was better than perfect! I put care into the spell where it mattered. I thought that he would be taking a nice tour of Los Angeles, meeting his Echo, that sort of thing. You did not mention that you would be sending him into battle!”
“That wasn’t exactly part of the plan,” I admitted. “But what’s done is done, and now you need to fix it.”
“If such a thing even can be fixed!” Shock said, his eyes wide with dismay. “Where is he now?”
My phone made a sudden splash sound in my pocket, making me jump. But it was just a plaintive text from Zach, which I ignored.
“The bird’s out in the front yard,” I said. “Come have a look.”
“Can I come too?”
I turned at the voice and saw Alondra eavesdropping at the entrance to the dining room, framed by the dark molding as though it were a proscenium arch. She wrung her plump hands with picturesque timidity. Goddamn it, I did not have the patience to deal with her right now.
“You live here, don’t you?” I said to her. “I’m pretty sure you can go anywhere on the property you please.”
“Millie,” said Caryl.
“Am I wrong?”
Caryl gave me a flat look, then turned to Alondra and spoke in a velvety, soothing tone that made Shock look up, startled, as though he’d only really just noticed Caryl’s existence. “Of course you may come with us,” she said. Alondra beamed, winding her dark hair around one hand nervously.
“Get something to feed him,” I told Alondra.
“I’m not sure what crows eat.”
“Song feeds him cat kibble,” I said, “or fruit, or that awful plywood-tasting bread of hers on the top shelf. Take your pick. We’ll need someone to keep him calm.”
“On it!” Alondra said with the intensity of a waitress who’d just been asked to stand in for a starlet with a broken ankle.
The crow was strolling around the front yard as usual, but he began to hop nervously when so many of us crowded around at once. Alondra brought a plastic container of blueberries, which was fancier than that smart-ass bastard deserved.
“Something is odd,” Shock said. “I can see it. Something is definitely off.”
Alondra knelt and began cooing to Brand as though she were Snow White and he were a delicate little dove she yearned to befriend.
“What exactly would you say is ‘off’?” asked Caryl.
Shock glanced at her and hesitated. “There is a faint Unseelie . . . aura? No, not aura. More like a glimmer. It is mostly around the eyes, but sometimes when the bird moves you can see hints of it. Or, I can. You cannot. Well, perhaps you can?” He darted another glance at Caryl. Shy.
His demeanor made sense. Boarding school kid meets cute girl, half-fey, a couple of years older. But he could stop looking at her like that any time, as far as I was concerned.
Caryl stood for a moment with a fixed stare, looking more through the bird than at it. “Ah . . . ,” she said, almost seductiv
ely. “Now I see.”
She had Shock’s undivided attention now. He tipped his head so that the blue fringe slipped all the way clear of his eyes.
“If you had to guess what you’re looking at . . . ,” I prompted.
Shock stopped staring at Caryl and turned to me with guilty alacrity. “It is almost as though my original spellwork . . . rubbed off onto the bird in some way, causing the manticore’s consciousness to root itself in the bird’s body instead.”
“But the dog you made, it . . . exploded. Brand should have been killed instantly, right?”
He fidgeted, wringing his delicate hands. So much like his father’s. He’d designed both of their facades, obviously with much more attention to detail than he had Brand’s.
“If I had linked the bodies properly, then the other body would also have exploded, and yes, that would have been the end. But that is the hardest part of the spell, and it didn’t seem necessary. So Brand’s . . . consciousness, or soul, or whatever you prefer to call it . . . it still had a body. So it didn’t die. But it also couldn’t go to its body.”
“Why not?”
“Because the spellwork was still here, for one thing. But for another, Brand’s natural body was in the . . . the in-between space. The void between manifest worlds. The nowhere. That isn’t . . . there’s no time there, no anything. Things can’t live there. Life is subject to time, and space, and . . . the void has neither. No consciousness is possible there.”
Alondra, meanwhile, was squatting on the dead grass, stretching out an arm toward the crow with three plump blueberries in her palm.
“Not like that,” I said. “That’s a good way to lose a hand.” Alondra curled in her fingers with a start.
“Do crows eat meat?” said Shock.
“They’re scavengers,” I said. “They ate the hell out of Brand.”
“Well that’s it!” Shock said, his tone tinged with annoyance, as though I’d been holding out on some very important information. “This crow ate the dog’s ear.”
“His . . . ear.” I suddenly regretted breakfast.
“That is where I anchored the spellwork,” said Shock. “This crow must have found the ear and eaten it. That caused the spellwork to become integrated into its body, and Brand’s consciousness just . . . snapped into the properly enchanted body like a rubber band.”
“But it’s not as though the body were empty,” I said. “The crow already had at least a sort of consciousness. What happened to it?”
We all stared at the bird for a moment.
“They are sharing,” Shock deduced.
“Yeah,” I agreed grimly. “That explains why it still acts like a bird, still shied away when Naderi tried to pick it up. No wonder it’s having trouble flying; there’s two pilots in there. Jesus. We have to fix this.”
I hadn’t forgotten why we’d lured Shock here in the first place, but suddenly the detour was starting to seem like a pretty valid destination in and of itself.
“The good news,” said Shock with another furtive glance at Caryl, “is that it should not be difficult. I did not fully link the bodies to each other, but the spell still has its basic function, which is that it puts Brand’s consciousness in one body here and the other body in Arcadia. If we capture the crow and force it through the Gate, Brand should be returned to his original, unharmed body, and then I can simply unravel the spell completely and start again.”
Alondra spoke then, gloomy. “Stranding the poor bird in the in-between space,” she said.
I was taken aback that she’d even been listening, much less made that logical leap. It occurred to me that I really didn’t know her well at all. I always thought of her as the “new girl,” but I wasn’t sure how long she’d been with the New York office before she’d had to flee; for all I knew she’d been a senior agent and was an expert in all this crap. That would be just the last straw, really.
I looked at Caryl, but she was studying Shock. I wondered if she’d noticed his shy glances too.
“What would be the most humane way to catch him?” Alondra asked, turning her long-lashed eyes to Shock.
He seemed relatively immune to her charms. “Beg pardon,” he said, “but what does humane matter if we are about to toss the creature into an interdimensional void? It apparently cannot fly; I say we surround it and grab it. What do you think?” He addressed this last question to Caryl.
“As you wish,” she said solemnly. And he flushed to the ears.
Okay, she was definitely fucking with him. Which started to piss me off until I realized, no, wait, this was exactly the sort of thing we’d brought him here for. To try to get information out of him. Better honey than vinegar, right? Was that her angle?
Apparently, the part of the crow’s brain that really wanted his real body back couldn’t fully cordon itself off from the part that really didn’t like the idea of being ganged up on and jumped, so the ensuing scene was pretty entertaining. I was not much help, given my inability to match the bird’s agile, erratic changes of direction, but I did a decent job of being a stationary obstacle the others could use to help corner the thing.
As Alondra closed in near enough to grab him, he panicked and tried to fly, which was his worst possible idea. It put him in easy grab range of all three of the others without their having to bend, and it gave them more surface area to catch on to. Shock grabbed one wing, and Caryl nabbed another; they might have pulled him in half like a wishbone if Alondra hadn’t darted in to cradle the panicked bird to her bosom.
“Let go!” she cried in an agony of empathy. “I’ve got him.” Sure enough, as soon as Shock and Caryl released him, he went still, no longer struggling in Alondra’s hands.
“You’re all going to get bird flu or something,” I said, and immediately regretted it, as Alondra looked so alarmed I thought she might drop the damn thing and make us start all over.
“Come,” said Caryl, dusting a black feather off her own shoulder with a gloved hand. “Let us take him through the Gate.”
• • •
They didn’t let me come with them to Arcadia. Alondra was the one holding the bird, and Caryl and Shock had arcane expertise. My steel made me a liability. Still it gnawed at me, watching Alondra climb the stairs with them (step over step, effortless).
I furtively followed them as far as I could. I found Phil and Stevie at the top of the tower, past the door my mind said wasn’t there, up the spiral staircase that made my lower back ache. Stevie was calm, sitting at the desk sorting through paperwork. Phil sprawled on the floor signing things. I ignored the massive semicircle of diamond-veneered graphite that jutted from the center of the floor.
“Need any help?” I asked Phil without enthusiasm. I hadn’t expected them both to be there; I’d figured Stevie wouldn’t acknowledge my presence and I could wait quietly for their return.
“We’ve got it,” said Phil.
“It looks like a lot,” I said, eyeing Stevie’s stack. “Maybe you should teach me the basics?”
“Caryl said to train Alondra on that,” said Phil.
I felt a stab of paranoia. “I’ve been here twice as long,” I said. “Why wouldn’t it be me?”
Phil set his pen on the floor, looked up at me. “You know Alondra’s been with the Project three years, right?”
“I . . . didn’t know that.”
Phil just shook his head and went back to his paperwork, as though he’d been expecting me to say something along those lines.
There was nowhere for me to sit, so I awkwardly went back down the way I’d come. By the time the three travelers got back, I’d unintentionally dozed off on the more comfortable of the two living room couches. I snapped to attention at the sound of feet on the stairs.
“How’s Brand?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.
“Still a crow,” said Shock. He and Caryl sat on the couch opposite me; Alondra headed for the kitchen, where I could faintly hear Sterling’s occasional baby babble. Song must have slipped in there to sta
rt lunch while I dozed off.
“Brand has been on this side for three months,” Caryl said. “His connection to his fey body is weak, and there is no set formula for how long it takes to recover from that sort of fading. Shock knows this problem well.”
Shock straightened as though she’d yanked his strings. “Right,” he said. “I only live in Arcadia during school breaks. Over winter break I didn’t change back at all.”
“Where is Brand now?” I asked.
“At Skyhollow’s court, with Claybriar,” Shock said.
“How is the duke, that crazy bastard?” I’d met Duke Skyhollow in the summer, when he’d visited Residence One to ask where the hell Claybriar had gone. He talked like refrigerator magnet poetry and looked like a supermodel.
“He’s fine,” said Caryl. “But Baroness Foxfeather is still living there, so we did not tell anyone other than King Claybriar who the crow actually was.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Awkward.” Foxfeather, Echo to Inaya West of Valiant Studios, had been homeless ever since Brand had lured her out of her estate and destroyed it last fall, eating some of her family and friends for good measure. Foxfeather and Skyhollow were unlikely to feel sympathy for the manticore’s current plight.
I looked to Shock, who was of course watching Caryl. “Thanks for coming so quickly,” I said to him. “Maybe you can answer a few questions for us while you’re here? About facades?”
“I—” Shock fidgeted. He looked on the point of rising from the couch, but then Alondra returned from the kitchen with a loaded tray, setting it down on the coffee table. I smelled tea, and my stomach flipped over for reasons I didn’t connect at first.
“Yes, do stay awhile,” said Caryl enticingly, gesturing to the tray. “I’ve had Song make some tea for you. It’s an excellent Yunnan black—Dame Belinda herself enjoyed some when last she was here.”
Right.
Shock went white as a sheet. “I should not stay long,” he said, even as Alondra poured him a cup. “I have to return home before things get complicated.”
Caryl leaned forward. Perhaps coincidentally, her silk shirt gaped just a bit, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of youthful décolletage. “We understand,” she said. “We’re seen as dangerous rebels. But we never intended to cause any harm. All we want is to continue business as usual.”
Impostor Syndrome Page 7