“Not really,” Foxfeather said, holding out the orange wedge again. I didn’t reach for it this time. “It had three drinks very fast and asked me a lot of very boring questions.” She was still holding out the orange and beginning to look both impatient and hurt, so I reached for it, only to have her snatch it away again.
I gritted my teeth and took a deep breath. “Did the faun ask you about Viscount Rivenholt, or mention the Queen?”
“May Her Majesty, Queen Dawnrowan, reign for eternity. Hold still and open your mouth.”
I leaned my elbow on the counter and did as she asked. Foxfeather leaned forward in all her spectacular nakedness. Either she had put on some of that body lotion with glitter in it, or else a bit of fey was bleeding through her human skin. She slipped the orange wedge into my mouth, making no effort to avoid touching my lips with her fingers. At the contact, her facade dissolved like sugar, leaving me struck dumb by her starlight-and-opal beauty. When she withdrew her fingers, the facade snapped back like a rubber band.
“It hurts a little to touch you,” she said. “It feels like ice water pouring under my skin, and now I’m sleepy.”
I had a mouthful of orange and a head full of fairy and could only say “Mm.” I looked over at Teo. He was watching us intently, but more like he wanted to take notes than join in.
I swallowed and turned back to Foxfeather. “It’s very important that you tell us what you remember about Claybriar, and what he said to you.”
“Remembering is hard; I haven’t found my Echo yet. Why is this important?”
“Because Claybriar is missing and so is Viscount Rivenholt.”
“The viscount is missing?”
“Yes, we told you that before.”
“I don’t think you said that. I would have been worried.”
I could feel a headache starting just behind my left eye. “Well, he is missing, and we think Claybriar may have hurt him, so we need to know everything we can about him.”
“I don’t know anything about the viscount.”
“No, I meant Claybriar. I need to know about Claybriar.”
“I’m sorry, I get confused because you keep saying ‘him’ like it’s a person.”
“He seemed like a person when I talked to him.”
“It’s a facade,” she said as though I were the stupidest thing ever to crawl out from under a log.
“Just tell me what Claybriar wanted with you. Why he was in the bar.”
“It had misplaced some commoners or something. That was how I smelled something rotten. Why would anyone care if a few commoners went missing?”
Missing persons again, just like “Officer Clay” had mentioned. This had to relate to his mission for the Queen.
“Apparently the Queen cares about at least one of them.”
“She has to pretend she does, or they band together and loot and murder and it gets so ugly. Orange?”
I held up my hand in a sharp no thank you gesture, fighting the surge of fury that clenched my jaw. When dealing with the unknown, it’s important not to assume that it parallels the known. I was 80 percent sure Foxfeather was full of shit about commoners, but 80 percent wasn’t enough to justify choking the magic out of her right there in her kitchen.
“Anything else you remember?”
“It used your language well,” she said, “so it obviously comes here a lot.”
I watch too much TV, I suddenly remembered him saying at the coffee shop. I felt a weird twist in my gut. I should have known he was fey by the ridiculous amount of sugar in his drink.
“Did he say anything about when these commoners went missing? Was it all at once, or one at a time? How many are missing? Anything you can remember will be a huge help to the Arcadia Project, and to your Queen.”
To her credit, she really did seem to be trying hard to remember. She frowned, and her eyes crossed slightly. “It came in, looking not very pretty, but nice dark hair. It ordered cherry--pomegranate juice. Talking, talking, talking, missing commoners, it held up its paw like this”— here she splayed her hand out in my face, sticky with orange juice—“then it said bad things about the viscount, so I peeked at its real face. Then I kicked it out. I was mad. I carved it into the bar, but then I forgot to set the bar on fire. It’s still a very nice carving.”
I turned to Teo, splaying my hand in the same gesture Foxfeather had made. “The hand might mean five missing. He only mentioned one girl when he was pretending to be a cop, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that five is the same number of fey that have been half counted on the census for weeks. I think the Queen’s trying to figure out where they’ve gone.”
Teo studied Foxfeather for a moment. “My lady,” he said, “do you know of any way, or any place, where a fey could be both here and in Arcadia at the same time? Like, stuck in transit?”
Foxfeather laughed. “No, silly. That would be like falling halfway down a hole. Sideways.” She tilted her body charmingly at a near right angle and smiled. “One time, I held on to the edge of the Gate just for fun, but it stopped being fun very fast.”
“No arguments here,” I mumbled.