I ate dinner at the table with everyone at the Residence that night, but I decided to take a lesson from Stevie and sit around brooding while the others talked.
Teo’s exquisite nectarine jerk chicken salad might as well have been McNuggets for all I could taste it. But I sat through dinner because Caryl was there, and I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. Judging by the constant tingling sensation on my neck and shoulders, Elliott had been all over me like a prom date since we left Residence One, and I knew that meant Caryl wanted something from me, even if she herself was eating one-handed while reading through Rivenholt’s file for the eighty-fifth time with the other. I just had to wait until her Reason Mind came up with a justification to ask for what her Emotion Mind wanted.
I could see it now, past the dark liner around her eyes, the expertly applied shading under her cheekbones. How could I have missed the veinless smoothness of her skin? She didn’t exactly exude good health, but there were no signs of age, either, aside from her voice and manner.
When she had finished eating and began pulling her gloves back on, she finally spoke up. “Millie, I need to see you in your room.”
Gloria eyed us both as we left; I could feel her stare boring into my back. My mind half formed a cliché about fitting me for a knife; then I remembered I wouldn’t be her first victim. I followed Caryl up the stairs and let her into the dark warmth of my room, where I turned on the overhead light and shut the door behind us.
28
“You’ve only one chair,” Caryl said, looking around my room.
“You’re young,” I said. “Sit on the floor.”
She did, folding her legs carefully and resting her gloved hands on her knees. “There’s something you probably ought to know,” she said.
“Just one thing?” I pulled my folding chair closer to her and sat in it, then slipped on my fey glasses. Elliott was settling himself comfortably on my knee. “Does this have anything to do with your mother, or your gloves, or why you’ve done forty years’ worth of screaming?”
Elliott blinked at me, his wings drooping.
“No,” Caryl said.
“Well, those are the things I want to know about, before you start in on any more terrifying revelations about parallel universes.”
“Is my history important?” said Caryl. Elliott was making himself very small on my lap.
“I don’t know,” I said, “because I don’t know your history. Take off your gloves.”
“I don’t think that is a good idea,” she said dryly.
“It’s just us,” I said.
Caryl shrugged and began to pull off her gloves one finger at a time. “It doesn’t really matter what I feel, much less why. There is no rhyme or reason; it’s nothing more than a chemical bath in the brain. Could we discuss instead what I came up here to talk about?”
“Come over here. Give me your hand.”
Elliott rustled his wings in apparent frustration. “I cannot do that,” said Caryl blandly. “That is the entire point of the gloves.”
“I’m starting to get that. Why are you so weird about touching?”
“Skin-to-skin contact creates so much conflicting neurochemical input that it overloads the Elliott construct. Shatters it. If I am not the one to deconstruct the spell, I cannot -reabsorb the lost energy, and I must take a trip to Arcadia to replenish myself.”
I sighed, looking at her Buddha-like posture and then at Elliott, who was attempting to hide his eyes in my shirt. “I don’t know what to do with you,” I said.
“You could start by letting me return to relevant matters.”
“Damn it, Caryl,” I said. “I guess you don’t have to tell me what made you this way. But it’s going to keep bothering me, and I’m going to keep asking.”
Elliott wrapped both wings around his head, looking miserable. Caryl studied me a moment before speaking again.
“They took me when I was a baby,” she said, starting to put her gloves back on. “The Unseelie Court. I don’t remember my life before that—I was too young—and I will not talk about what it was like there.”
“Okay,” I said, drumming my fingers on my knee. “How did you get back here?”
“Eventually the Unseelie King discovered me and reported me to the Project. The Project returned me to my parents. I was seven years old.”
“Did they even recognize you?”
“No, nor I them. To be frank, I was hardly human. They’d had two more children, built another life. I was institutionalized. After two years my predecessor, Martin, took an interest in me, taught me how to make Elliott. Once my behavior improved, I was released. My parents gave me into Martin’s custody, and I began to work for the Arcadia Project as his assistant until he passed away four years ago.”
“Was horribly murdered by Vivian, you mean.”
“Yes.” Caryl gave the wrist of each of her gloves a tug to settle them on more snugly. “I was the only wizard or warlock not already entrenched in a more important position, and so National allowed me to take over for him.”