“Holy shit,” said Teo. “Steel. That’s what happened with the drawing. All that iron . . . You kill magic.”
The fey, with the exception of Foxfeather, were now backing away from me. I felt a slow sinking inside. So Caryl hadn’t picked me for my leadership skills, or for my creativity. She’d probably lied about seeing my stupid films. She wanted me on her team because I was walking fairy kryptonite.
12
It seemed to take a minute for Teo to grasp the repercussions of this, but when he did, he gave the assembled fey a feral grin. “All right, kids,” he said jauntily. “Unless you want me to sic Ironbones on you, I suggest you start racking your flighty -little brains for some details about when and where you last saw Viscount Rivenholt.”
My anger shifted from cold and dark to bright and hot. I didn’t appreciate Teo’s using me as a threat. I groped for my emotional reins, tried to remember some of my distress tolerance skills, but the calm mediocrity of Dr. Davis’s office seemed like a fading dream in this chaotic atmosphere.
“We ate fish!” blurted the man who had turned into a tree earlier. He cringed when I looked his way. “Next door,” he said. “He was going to eat raw fish, and I was curious, so I went too. It was terrible. I don’t remember when it happened. Not very long ago. Please don’t touch me.”
My anger fled at those last words, leaving nothing but a chill void. I barely felt Teo’s hand on my back as he guided me out the door of the bar, and I didn’t hear a word he said, although there were a lot of them.
Don’t touch me.
The image of John Scott, my UCLA screenwriting professor, tumbled out of my memory like a Polaroid out of a drawer. The sag of the skin under his ribs as he’d rolled away from me, suddenly tired and old, was photograph sharp. I’d reached for him, trying to rewrite what had just happened. He’d flinched away as though I’d wounded him.
Had I? I no longer even knew what was real. I tried to wrench my mind into the present; looking backward was intensely dangerous.
When you’re Borderline, by the time you get a diagnosis you’ve done so many vicious things and blamed so many other people for them that the guilt of facing even one truth sets off a mental landslide. You start to wonder which of the evils done to you were real, and which were just reflections of the evil in you.
I felt sick and sweaty as I followed Teo into the sushi bar, but he wasn’t paying attention to me. My stride turned lopsided and ugly even with the help of the cane; walking normally with prosthetic legs takes conscious, front-of-the-brain thought. The reek of fish and vinegar brought me partially out of my downward spiral—Distract with strong sensations, said Dr. Davis in my mind—and I tried to focus on what Teo was saying.
He showed the viscount’s picture to several employees, and a waitress recognized “John Riven” and remembered seeing the actor there. Her words weren’t really coalescing in my brain, so instead of listening, I reached into Teo’s pocket for his sunglasses and slipped them on.
“Don’t lose those,” he growled at me before turning back to the waitress.
I wasn’t expecting to see anything weird, which was why the faint glimmer of golden light on the bulletin board surprised me enough to pull me out of my funk. It was just a tiny flicker, mostly covered by ads for acting lessons and used furniture: cheap ink-jet printouts with phone number tear-strips at the bottom.
I made a beeline for the board, then realized I shouldn’t touch the paper myself, not unless I wanted to suck all the magic out of it. I limped back over to Teo, still too preoccupied to pay attention to my stride.
“You didn’t hear anything interesting in their conversation?” Teo was asking the waitress. I handed him his glasses and politely waited my turn to speak.
“Not really,” she said. She looked Japanese, but her accent was pure Valley Girl. California roll, my brain unkindly supplied. “Mostly John was explaining sushi to the other guy.”
“Did you get any idea of their relationship?”
“Friends, I guess? Acquaintances?”
A redheaded man stepped out from behind the prep area. “Are you guys talking about John Riven?”
“Yeah,” said Teo. “Did you talk to him?”
“You guys cops?”
“No, just friends,” Teo said. “Why, do we look like cops?”
“Jeff said the police were in here looking for John Riven the other day.”
“Shit,” said the waitress, making a washing-her-hands kind of gesture and getting back to work.
Teo just stood there for a minute, looking as floored as I felt. “What kind of cops?” he asked the redhead when his brain cells reassembled.
“I dunno. Jeff didn’t give loads of detail.”
“Can you give Jeff my number?” said Teo, handing him a card. “I want to know what’s going on.”
“Uh, sure,” said the redhead, and took the card with a skeptical expression before disappearing into the back again.