“Usually.”
I let that one slide. “Fine, then, you call her and hand me the phone.”
“I’m driving, Millie. We’ll be at the Residence in, like, ten minutes.”
“Do it, Teo, or I’ll tell her you kissed me. That’s against the rules, right?”
“No, dumbass,” he said. “Remember Phil and Gloria?”
“I keep trying to forget.”
He was already groping in his pocket for his phone, eyes still on the road as he tilted his hips up off the seat. I idly painted a mental picture of myself straddling him—my old self, of course; I doubted I was nimble enough to do that anymore.
He held the phone up in his line of sight, flicking his eyes over to it as he drove. “If a cop drives by and pulls me over right now, you are paying the fucking fine.”
“Just make sure it’s a real cop first.”
He held the phone to his ear and listened. I studied his face, trying to feel something other than embarrassed amusement at what had happened between us at the station. He was sexy in theory, but not really in practice. It wouldn’t take much tweaking to make him dangerously crush-worthy, but I’d been in the dating pool long enough to know that what you see is what you get.
“Caryl,” Teo said, “call Lisa.” A pause as Teo lost a shade of color. “What? I didn’t—did I not say Millie? Sorry. Just call her, all right? Same damn phone.”
I watched the unintentionally erotic display he made trying to put his phone back in his pocket. “Were you and Lisa close?” I said.
“Not really. Learned my lesson after Amir. But she was all right. She and I were both pochos, so there was stuff I didn’t have to explain.”
“What’s a pocho?”
He winced a little, then laughed. “You don’t get to say that. It means spoiled, overripe. A term Mexicans have for people like me who are more American than Mexican, you know? They say it like it’s a bad thing.” He snorted another laugh, but his body was drawn and tense.
“I . . . obviously can’t relate. I never had any culture to begin with.”
“Of course you do,” he snapped. “We’re swimming in your culture every minute. Meanwhile, my culture thinks bipolar disorder’s my fault for not going to church. My culture can go fuck itself.”
“Teo, your mom was an asshole. You can’t judge a culture by its assholes.”
He fumbled for the cigarette pack again, shaky. I laid a hand on his arm, and it seemed to calm him, or at least change his mind about smoking.
“I hope you realize,” I said, “ that I’m not going anywhere. Everything I’ve seen about the aftermath of what I did—” But now my phone was ringing. Of course.
“Hello?”
“What has Teo so upset?” said Caryl’s voice.
“It’s Rivenholt,” I said. “It seems he was abducted from the train station, most likely by this guy who’s been posing as a cop and trying to track him down.”
“I don’t like ‘seems’ and ‘most likely.’ What are the facts?”
“The facts are, it turns out the cop I’d been talking to about Rivenholt is not really a cop, and the train departure info went missing from my bag when I left it with him. Afterward someone flashed a badge at Rivenholt at the station and took him to an isolated area. When we went there, we found a bucketload of spilled fairy blood and nothing else.”
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
“Spilled fairy blood is bad, right?” I said. “Epically bad, Teo said. What’s the deal with that, anyway?”
“I may need to share that information, despite your tenuous status, but this is not the moment. I am . . . overwhelmed.”
“That prick just got us in deep trouble with Arcadia, didn’t he?”
“Without knowing the full situation, I cannot say if we have a convincing argument against our apparent criminal negligence.”
“If we don’t?”
“Let’s not talk about that just yet. Was there any sign of where they went?”
“They seemed to just vanish into thin air. Could Rivenholt have cast some kind of invisibility spell?”
“No, but an Unseelie fey could have done so.”
“An Unseelie such as Vivian Chandler?”
“For example, yes. There are only four Unseelie fey in Los Angeles at present, and the other three have no connection to Rivenholt whatsoever that I’m aware of.”
“How do you know there are only four?”
“The perimeter ward counts and displays the fey population at any time within its boundaries. Seelie and Unseelie are counted separately.”
“Isn’t that the thing you said was on the fritz or something, though?”
There was a brief silence. “Again, I am impressed by your attention to detail. There have been some odd readings lately, yes.”
“Do you think the odd readings have anything to do with this business with Rivenholt?”
“Correlation does not imply causation, but we should not entirely ignore the fact that Rivenholt’s uncharacteristically lawless behavior is occurring at the same time as the anomaly.”