“Can you explain what the anomaly is?”
“I’m not sure you’d understand. I will show you later.”
“This is the thing you’ve been preoccupied with, though?”
“Yes. It’s why I brought you on when I did. Once I began to spend time on this, it became apparent that we had too few people with leadership experience to keep things in order while I was distracted. You were a director; you have experience with executive-level decision making. But then Rivenholt’s disappearance complicated things, and your training has suffered accordingly.”
“I’m doing everything I can to help,” I said. “But mostly I’m stumbling around in the dark. No one tells me the rules until I break them, which seems like a horrible way to run an organi-zation.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But now we have multiple crises on our hands. A fey abducted by a human is a serious matter for the Code of Silence, but we can contain the problem if we find the abductor. The spilled blood, on the other hand—well, no matter, it is done.”
“I’ll keep trying to contact the fake cop,” I said. “For now I’ll pretend I still think he’s legit.”
“Meet me back at the Residence,” Caryl said, “and let’s start combing through files. Perhaps we’ll find some connections that will help.”
? ? ?
By the time I got there, Caryl had turned the living room into a war room. Everyone I’d seen at breakfast was sitting on a couch or a piano bench or a chair dragged in from the dining room, looking through folders and entire drawers that had simply been yanked out of their cabinets and brought to the room in their entirety. Monty was having a field day with unattended stacks of paper. There were at least three different arguments going on, but the only one I could hear was Gloria’s with Caryl on the sofa, and only Gloria’s side of it.
“I’m just concerned, that’s all,” Gloria was saying. “She hasn’t been through the whole training; she doesn’t know what all they can and can’t do.”
Caryl said something calmly that I couldn’t hear, and at the same time I felt Elliott settle onto my shoulder. When Caryl spotted me, she grabbed some photographs and rose from the couch, moving to me without even formally breaking off her discussion with Gloria. As if Gloria really needed another -reason to be annoyed with me.
“Do you recognize any of these people, aside from Vivian?” Caryl asked me.
I glanced over the photos and shook my head. “Not in the least.” I pointed at a lumpy-nosed old woman. “That’s a weird facade for a fey to choose.”
“Thus far you’ve only seen the sidhe; they share our standards of beauty, for the most part. Commoners, especially Unseelie commoners, have a different aesthetic.”
“Who are these people?”
“These are the only four Unseelie fey who are currently in Los Angeles. Seelie magic is designed to attract attention, not divert it, so these four and myself are the only beings in the city who might have cast spells to assist in removing Rivenholt from the train station.”
“Is it safe to assume that our fake cop knows about Arcadia?”
“Not necessarily. For example, he could be conspiring with Vivian in some mundane criminal capacity and unaware of exactly how she managed to get them all safely out of the station. A spell caster of Vivian’s skill can be subtle.”
“But given the amount of blood loss, Teo said Rivenholt’s facade would have dropped.”
Caryl nodded. “It does seem likely that if the man was unaware of the existence of fey before, he has just had a very shocking introduction to the concept.”
For a moment I almost felt bad for Clay, but then I remembered that he was a lying sack of crap who was probably in cahoots with the queen of the damned.
“Is there any reason that Vivian would want to harm her business partner’s Echo?” I asked Caryl, perplexed.
“Leverage, possibly?” she mused. “You say she promised not to hurt Berenbaum, but if she didn’t extend that promise to Rivenholt, she could still use him to ensure Berenbaum’s cooperation with something.”
“That means Rivenholt is almost certainly still alive, then, because if she killed him, she’d lose the leverage.”
Caryl gave me a long look. “If he is in Vivian’s custody, you had best hope she has already killed him.”
“Caryl!” scolded Gloria, approaching the two of us. “Look at her face. This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talkin’ about.”
I eyed Gloria, suspicious of this sudden defense of me.
“I appreciate your concerns,” Caryl said, “and I share them to some extent. But Millie and Teo have done a tremendous job of getting information thus far.”
I made an incoherent sound of disbelief. “She wants to take the assignment from us, doesn’t she.”
“Aw, don’t take it personal, honey,” said Gloria, and gave me a sugary smile.
26