A Local Habitation (8 page)

Read A Local Habitation Online

Authors: Seanan McGuire

Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #General, #Mystery fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fiction - Fantasy, #Science Fiction And Fantasy, #American Science Fiction And Fantasy, #Fantasy - General, #Fairies, #Women private investigators

“Not that anyone bothered to tell us you were coming,” Alex continued. “If we didn’t have a picture of you in the database, we still wouldn’t know who you were.” Pausing, he asked, “Where are you?”
“What?” I snapped back into the present. “I’m right here.”
“You weren’t a moment ago.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Now that I was paying attention, I really was sorry; I hadn’t meant to zone out. “I guess I didn’t expect anyone to know who I was.”
“You can’t go around pissing off half the nobles in the Kingdom and expect to go unnoticed,” he replied, cheering up again. “I swear Jannie was more excited by the trouble you caused with that Goldengreen affair than she was by the concept of fiber-optic Internet connections. And that’s saying a lot.”
“Hang on—Jannie?”
“Yeah, Jannie. The lady whose company you’re standing in?”
“You mean Countess Torquill?” Maybe this orange-eyed Ken doll could point me toward Sylvester’s niece.
“Who?”
Or maybe not. “Aren’t you talking about Countess January Torquill?”
“What?” he said, eyes widening. Then he laughed, the rich, delighted laugh of a man confronted with something genuinely funny. “Oh, man. Oh, wow. Can I tell her you called her that? She’ll have an aneurysm.” I don’t like being laughed at under the best of circumstances. This
wasn’t
the best of circumstances. I glared. He stopped laughing. “What’s wrong?”
“Will you
please
tell me who you’re talking about?” I asked, plaintively. “We’re here on official business from the Duke of Shadowed Hills, and I’d really like to know what’s going on.”
Alex cocked his head to the side. “Sylvester sent you?”
“He’s worried about January, so he asked me to check in.”
“Please don’t get pissed at me for asking this, but . . . do you have any proof?”
“What?” I blinked at him.
Looking sheepish, Alex shrugged. “Proof. Do you have anything to prove that Sylvester sent you?”
“Just this.” I offered him the folder I was still carrying. “Really crappy directions to Fremont, our hotel reservations, and some stuff telling me whose fences I shouldn’t climb over.”
Alex flipped it open, scanning the contents before offering a quick nod. “Okay, good enough for me; if you’re dumb enough to be faking all this, I figure that’s your lookout, and the real Toby Daye’ll show up soon to beat your face in. Come on, I’ll take you to January.”
“Let me tell Quentin.” I reclaimed my folder and turned, moving to stick my head back into the cafeteria. Quentin was at the table we’d been sharing, shredding a napkin into long, narrow strips. “Hey.”
“What?” he said, not looking up.
“I’m going to go meet Sylvester’s niece. You want to come?”
“Is
he
going?”
“You mean Alex?” He nodded, continuing to shred his napkin. “Yes.”
“Then I’m staying here.”
I paused. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Quentin raised his head, meeting my eyes for a moment before looking down again. “I just don’t like him, that’s all.”
“Already?”
A shrug.
“You sure you want to stay here all by yourself?”
“I’m a big boy,” he said. “I think I’ll be okay in the big, well-lit cafeteria.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, stepping back and letting the door swing shut. If he wanted to be that way, I wasn’t going to stop him.
Alex was waiting where I’d left him. “Well?”
“He’s not coming.”
“His loss. Come on.” Flicking his hair out of his eyes, Alex turned to head down the hall. His legs were long enough to cover ground at a dismaying rate, and I hurried to catch up. At least we seemed to be staying in the same building.
“People come and go so quickly here,” I muttered. I’m not used to walking with people who treat it as some sort of unspoken race.
“We drew straws to see who’d get to deal with you,” he said, as he walked. “Gordan lost, but I owed her a favor, so she swapped with me. Something about wanting to actually get some work done today. Sucker. I would’ve paid
her
to let me check on you, instead of the other way around.”
“Is that so?” I glanced at his ears as I caught up to him, trying to be casual. You can usually get a hint about fae heritage from the shape of their ears, and I like to know what I’m dealing with. Maybe if my mother weren’t Daoine Sidhe—the blood-workers of a blood-obsessed culture—I wouldn’t be as entranced by bloodlines. But she is, and in a lot of ways, I am my mother’s daughter.
He was half-blooded, I could tell that much; the human in him was too strong to miss, and most fae don’t freckle. Still, the curve of his ears was unfamiliar. They were too sharp for Daoine Sidhe, too delicate for Tylwyth Teg, and not long enough for Tuatha de Dannan. I let my lips part, “tasting” the air. Sometimes I can catch the balance of someone’s blood on my tongue and sound out their heritage that way. It’s not a common gift, even among the Daoine Sidhe, and a lot of folks don’t recognize it at all.
That’s why I was surprised when Alex turned, shaking his finger. “Uh-uh. If you figure it out on your own, fine, but no tricks.”
I shut my mouth, blinking. It’s not considered rude to taste the balance of the blood, but that’s because so few of us can do it that it’s never had the chance to become socially unacceptable. “You could always just tell me, you know.”
“Now where would be the fun in that?” Alex stopped walking. His hair had fallen back over one eye, making him look slightly off-balance. “I bet we could find more entertaining ways for you to try working it out.”
“Could we, now? Got any suggestions?”
He smirked. “How do you feel about breakfast?” “Most men start with dinner.”
“I can dare to be different.”
“So far, I’m not seeing much difference.”
“Is that a challenge?”
“Maybe.”
Still smirking, Alex leaned down and kissed me.
His lips tasted like coffee and clover. I blinked, startled, before leaning in and kissing him back. He put a hand on my shoulder, pulling me into a slightly better angle, and deepened the kiss, drawing it out until my head started to spin. Then he let me go, stepping backward, and asked, “Different?”
“Different,” I agreed. I could feel a blush running all the way to the tips of my ears.
“See you at breakfast.” He winked, turning to open the door behind him. “Ladies first.”
Laughing as I tried to sort through the spin of my emotions, I brushed past him into the most architecturally impossible hallway I’d ever seen. Real angles don’t bend that way. I looked back to Alex, who was barely managing to contain his look of anticipatory amusement.
So we were going to play it that way, were we? Putting on my best innocent expression, I asked, “So when were you going to tell us that we were inside the knowe?”
Alex’s amusement faded into surprise. “You knew?”
“Newsflash: you don’t usually find lace-o’-dreams flowers growing on mortal lawns. Plus? The sky was the wrong kind of blue.” I shrugged. “I’m guessing we crossed worlds when we came through the front door.”
He stopped, folding his arms. “Okay, how did you figure
that
out?”
“Air-conditioning’s turned too high. The first thing you notice is the cold, and that keeps you from noticing the shift. Estate?”
“Shallowing.”
“Thought so. I’m assuming the mortal buildings overlay the knowe?”
“Pretty much.”
There are two types of knowe. Some, like Shadowed Hills, are literally Summerlands estates connected to the mortal world by doors punched through the walls of reality. Nothing forces them to conform to mortal geography, and for the most part, they don’t bother. The Summerlands-side of the Torquill estate is all virgin forest and cultivated farmland, and it looks nothing at all like the land surrounding the city of Pleasant Hill. Shallowings, on the other hand, are little pockets carved from the space between worlds, not entirely existing in either one. Because they aren’t anchored entirely in Faerie, they rely a lot more on the actual geography of both realities. We’ve been banned from all the lands of Faerie but the Summerlands since Oberon disappeared, and Shallowings are getting more common as real estate gets scarcer.
“So what happens when you have human visitors?” In a way, it was a slightly more adult version of the question I’d asked Quentin earlier.
Are you being careful?
“Well, we keep them to a minimum, but when we have to let them in, we buzz them through the gate under a different code and someone meets them at the parking lot. They’re led to the human-side cafeteria or server rooms. That’s why the buildings aren’t connected; as long as you don’t come in through the front door, you don’t get into the knowe, and you can’t see anyone or anything that’s inside it.”
There was a certain twisted logic to that idea. It was certainly no worse than the game of “ring around the poison oak” you had to play to get into the knowe at Shadowed Hills. “And there’ve never been any slipups?”
“One or two.” He opened another door. The hall beyond was carpeted in a bilious green, and the walls were studded with corkboards covered in comic strips and memos. The windows indicated that we’d somehow managed to reach the second floor without taking the stairs—cute. “Nothing major, and they’ve all been taken care of with no lasting harm done.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“We had a Kitsune on staff until fairly recently.” Alex’s smile faltered, replaced by an expression I didn’t have a name for. “She made sure they didn’t remember anything.”
Not all Kitsune can manipulate memories, but the ones that can tend to be damn good. I nodded, almost grudgingly. “Good approach.”
“We thought so.” The expression I couldn’t name vanished as quickly as it came. “You don’t have a phone, do you?”
“What?”
“A cellular telephone?” He mimed talking into a receiver as he continued, “If you do, it’s going to be useless inside the knowe. If you want, I can have it modified.”
“Modified?”
“Gordan replaces the battery with one of her special ones, works a little voodoo, and gets the circuits realigned. She’s our hardware whiz.” He shrugged. “I just use the toys she makes.”
“Interesting.”
“Believe me, so are you, but this is where the bus stops.” He gestured toward a door. “That’s Jan’s office. Try to be nice? She’s usually easygoing, but it’s been a hard few weeks, and she’s a little cranky. I’d hate to see that pretty head of yours get bitten off.”
“I’ll be as nice as she lets me,” I said, turning toward the door.
My hand was raised to knock when he said, “Toby?”
“Yes?”
“Nice meeting you.”
That earned him a smile. “Same here,” I said, and knocked.
The sound of my knuckles meeting the wood was sharp and slightly hollow, indicating that the room on the other side probably wasn’t actually connected to the doorframe. Physical reference points don’t matter as much in Faerie; Jan’s office could have been almost anywhere in the knowe and still have been connected to the same door.
A voice called, “Come in!” Shaking my head, I turned the knob and did as I was told. There’s a first time for everything.
SIX
T
HE OFFICE WAS THE SIZE of my living room, but was packed with enough stuff to fill my apartment. Shelves and filing cabinets rose out of a sea of papers, providing landmarks in the universally messy landscape. Computers lined the walls, linked together by a feverish tangle of wiring, and the glow from their screens added a green undertone to the light, making the room seem slightly unreal. A coffeemaker surrounded by an invasion force of green plastic army men rested on a shelf by the door; the toaster oven next to it had its own problems, since it looked like it was about to be gutted by a herd of brightly-colored plastic dinosaurs.

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