Skin Deep (6 page)

“And you don’t find stripping in front of me the least bit inappropriate?” he asked.

She pulled out a matching business jacket, followed by a pair of flat-heeled shoes. She hated the suit, but it survived being stuffed repeatedly into a bag. As she absorbed the essence out of the emerald on the chain around her neck, the Janice Crawford glamour evaporated. Instant Laura Blackstone, public-relations director. “For one thing, you’ve seen more at the beach. For another, you are in a relationship with a
leanansidhe
. If Cress suspected you had the least bit of interest in me, she’d tell me, and we’d both make your life miserable.”

He chuckled. “True. I’d still prefer you at least ask me to turn away next time.”

She stuffed her SWAT-team gear into the duffel bag. “Will do, boss. Tell Cress I’ll see her in the morning.”

Terryn pressed the elevator button. “I’d prefer to debrief you now.”

Laura picked up the duffel and leaned against the wall. “Terryn, I have been in a police raid, watched an officer die, been attacked by an Inverni, shot at, and have a concussion and partial memory loss. Then I was chased by maniacal van drivers, shot at again, wrecked the Crawford SUV, and I’m really worried you and Cress are about to eat chunks of monkey. I’d like to go home and sleep.”

Terryn stepped into the elevator. “It’s ice cream with nuts. You need to get out more, Laura. All I can say is, be in early, please.”

She nodded once. “Will do.”

“Good night,” he said, as the doors closed.

Laura slung the bag over her shoulder and returned to the garage. In one smooth move, she tossed the duffel in the back of the Mercedes and started the engine. She tilted her head back and inhaled deeply. It still smelled new. She loved her car.

She cranked up the volume on the satellite radio. She spent a lot of time in cars. Music was one cultural trend that she managed to keep tabs on. When she wasn’t in an undercover persona, the stations she gravitated to were considered alternative—angsty boy bands singing about what a bummer life was. She didn’t think they had any understanding of what that meant, but she liked the beat. She sang at the top of her lungs as she raced up the exit ramp, ignoring the pounding in her head. Turning onto Pennsylvania Avenue, she hoped the only problems on the final leg home would be long traffic lights. When she was Laura Blackstone, the only thing people shot at her were questions. Generally, it was easier to dodge those.

CHAPTER 4

AS LAURA ENTERED
her apartment, she dropped her keys on the entry table and picked up the mail. She flipped through the envelopes, sorted the junk out from the bills, and put the two stacks on the kitchen counter. The refrigerator held little more than breakfast items and condiments. She pulled out the orange juice and mixed it into a healthy shot of vodka. Leaning on the counter, she stared into the living room and drank, not gulping, not sipping, but in a slow, measured manner, as if taking medicine before bed.

The housekeeper had been in. The only difference between before and after her visits was the dust quotient. Laura liked the living room in an intellectual, even aesthetic way, but she rarely used it for anything. She didn’t entertain. The Alexandria apartment was supposed to be home, but she spent little time in it. Instead, it had become about keeping up appearances. A high-profile professional at the Fey Guild would live in such a place. Nicely appointed. Spacious. Expensive.

She wandered with her drink to the sliding glass door that led to the balcony and a view of the river. It was nice, in a city-nice kind of way. The area had history, quaint shops and boutiques and cafes. If she were only a Fey Guild director, she imagined she would love living there. But as it was, she had no connection to the place. She didn’t associate with her neighbors or interact with the local neighborhood. That would mean keeping up contacts, establishing relationships, and having another aspect of her life that needed to be guarded against her undercover work and vice versa.

She rubbed her finger along the wet edge of her glass, thinking about the politics and strange winding path that had brought her to this point in her life, where she went home alone after two days of people trying to kill her.

When the world of Faerie inexplicably merged with modern reality, the factions were simple and clear-cut. On the one hand were the Celtic fey such as herself, ruled from Ireland by High Queen Maeve. On the other were the Teutonic fey, who answered to Donor Elfenkonig, the Elvenking of Germany. The two strains of fey had spent decades in open hostilities, each side blaming the other for the loss of Faerie. After a hundred years, still no one understood what had happened to cause Convergence.

Laura wondered where she would be if the merging hadn’t happened, even who she would be. She was a child caught between the twilight of Faerie and the dawn of Convergence. Her parents raised her as a Faerie druid child would have been raised, not like other hereborn fey, who had been immersed in modern culture. Faerie meant something to her. Maeve meant something to her. Protecting and defending the Celtic fey—and, yes, the bewildered humans caught in the middle—against the aggressions of the Elvenking meant something to her. That was why she’d entered into the service of the Guild and, eventually, InterSec.

She finished her drink and returned to the kitchen, rinsed the glass, and placed it on the drainboard. In the bedroom, she removed her drab white T-shirt and the black business suit and laid them out on the bed. As she walked into the bathroom, she ran her fingers through her hair, scratching at her scalp. The scent of gunshot residue made her nostrils flare. Glamours could do many things, but filtering odors was difficult. When she stepped in the shower, the water sluiced the smell off her.

With the water pouring down on her head, soothing the pounding in her skull, Laura tried not to think, a skill she had mastered to an uncomfortable degree. But despite parking her car, having a drink to unwind, undressing, and showering, her mind would not rest. She had been shot at before with both bullets and essence. She had risked her life more often than she cared to remember. She always separated those things from herself, thought of them as part of the job. If she spent time stressing about it, she shouldn’t be doing the job.

But tonight, doubt hovered in the corners of her mind. She had almost died and was not sure why. Did all her deeply held beliefs about Faerie and Maeve and justice really have anything to do with almost dying in a drug lab in a run-down building in a run-down neighborhood? Did all that mean anything anymore? she wondered.

She toweled off, checking herself for bruises and cuts. It was not unusual for her to come off an assignment at the end of the day only to realize she needed a bandage. She parted her hair on the side to examine the area where the bullet had slammed the helmet against her head. The simple act of moving the thick blond strands made her wince from subtle pain. A rich maroon-and-green bruise smeared across her scalp. She combed her hair straight to her shoulders, glad it covered the spot. She wouldn’t have to create a minor glamour to hide it, though someone was bound to comment about the dark circles under her eyes. At least she could pass them off as insomnia.

She wrapped herself in an oversize white bathrobe. Cinching the robe closed, she took one more look at herself in the mirror, as if hoping her reflection might give her an encouraging nod. It didn’t.

She cut through the kitchen to turn off the living-room lights and check that the security alarms were on. She trailed her free hand along the back of the tan sofa as she walked past it, its nubbed fabric tickling her fingertips. The maid had unwrapped and fanned magazines beside a vase of fresh flowers on the coffee table. Every couple of weeks new magazines arrived, the old ones vanished, but Laura never read them. She had subscribed to them long ago to give the illusion that she had interests in decorating and cooking. Every time she used the apartment, she messed up the layout so it would look like she read them. She wondered if the maid took the old ones home.

Without conscious thought, she retrieved the glass from the drainboard and had the vodka bottle in her hand. She stared at it, startled to see her own hand through the glass and clear fluid, as if someone else was holding this thing she had not meant to hold. She placed the bottle next to the empty glass on the counter.

Enough, she thought. The drink, the shower, the maid. She knew enough about her work and her life to know the dangers of the long, slow slide into a bottle. She had seen it happen time and again to others, but she wasn’t going to let it happen to her. Flipping through the bills again, she glanced at the bottle and decided to make one more drink after all. One more, then, one more than usual, and that would be it. Getting shot in the head and almost run off a bridge warranted a little leeway.

She took the glass to bed with her and turned on the television. The news recycled the story about the failed raid. If an officer hadn’t died, the coverage would have been a blip of a mention and on to the weather. Laura preferred when that happened. It meant an operation had gone off without a hitch, so much so that the media didn’t think it was newsworthy.

Despite the exhaustion, the headache, and the bruises, she would step up and do what InterSec required her to do. It was important. Too important to risk failure. Maintaining multiple glamours was taxing, but she would manage it. That didn’t mean she wanted to. It meant she knew what she was in for.

Tomorrow she would pretend she was plain Laura Blackstone, public-relations director for the Guild. She would get up in front of a meeting or a reporter or a strategy group and spin the Guild and the fey in the best light possible. People would compliment her on her marketing talents, despite the fact that the skill was predicated on not telling the whole truth in order to get what she wanted. She was good at it. Too good, she thought lately, to the extent that she wondered if deep down she had started lying to herself.

She drained the remains of her drink and slid the glass onto the nightstand.

CHAPTER 5

TO AN OUTSIDE
observer, which in a Guildhouse invariably meant a human one, a meeting at the D.C. Fey Guild attracted an assortment of people not encountered on a regular basis. Most everyone knew what a Celtic fairy or a Teutonic elf looked like. Dwarves were obvious and easy. Druids didn’t raise an eyebrow, but the average person had a hard time telling the difference between a brownie and a kobold. The solitary fey were another matter altogether.

The solitaries claimed neither Maeve nor Donor Elfenkonig as their leader, though the various individuals and groups had natural affinities for one or the other. In truth, “solitary” was a bit of misnomer, because not all solitaries were single, lonely individuals. The name was more a recognition of their status apart from the more mainstream fey, who often despised and belittled them when they weren’t dismissing them. After Convergence, the solitaries had found a new voice for themselves in a world where monarchies did not hold sway.

Laura shifted in her seat and glanced around the conference table as the public-relations staff meeting drew to a close. The department had more solitaries than any other at the Guild. Politics dictated that the group tasked with convincing humans that the fey should be treated inclusively employ the solitary fey even the Guild didn’t love. Their high profile rarely translated into much authority. To the other fey, they still lived under a cloud of fear and suspicion.

A large contingent of brownies were part of the department. They weren’t solitaries, and they had a tendency toward efficiency that the solitaries lacked. The other staffers ran a gamut of species that kept taxonomists awake at night. Blue-skinned nixies milled about the floor, too fidgety to remain in seats, while the odd wood fairy with its bark-skinned flesh sat as still as an oak. Several sleek selkies, almost human-looking when out of the water, gathered in a clique at one end of the table, as far as possible from the pale merrows at the other end. The two fey water species had an intense dislike for each other.

Laura used her body language to appear attentive to Resha Dunne. He was a merrow, a member of one of the most hostile types of sea fey. Where his brothers tended toward aggression and seduction, particularly with human women, Resha seemed insecure and tentative about everything. Of course, Laura had never seen him in his water aspect, which was when his species tended to be at its worst in temperament. Even so, Resha was someone she chose to spend little time with. He felt clammy and smelled damp to her.

Although he was the solitary representative on the Guild board of directors, Resha voted the Celtic party line as a matter of course. He never attended a meeting that he couldn’t drag into overtime. What could be discussed in an hour took two when he was involved, with a monotonous litany of agenda items and committee forming at the end for the next meeting. Usually Laura delegated one of her staff to deal with him, but the fey exhibit being planned at the National Archives was too high-profile for her to avoid him without insulting him. She flipped through the memos in front of her to hide the fact that she was scanning her PDA to monitor email.

Keeping the lives of her competing personalities under control was difficult to do alone. Terryn helped enormously, either by direct intervention or propagating disinformation campaigns on her whereabouts. That need to juggle and balance was one of the reasons she avoided an independent personal life. It would add yet another layer of subterfuge and lies that she didn’t think was worth it. At least, that was what she had convinced herself of.

Terryn was running interference for her with Foyle while she attended the Guild meeting. Every few minutes, Foyle would send an annoyed text message, demanding Janice Crawford report for duty. Duty, in this case, meant desk work while the fiasco of the raid was investigated. Terryn would respond with his usual calm and noncommittal reply.

No less than three congressional committees were demanding answers about the raid. She swore to herself when she saw Senator Hornbeck’s Fey Relations Committee on the list of interested parties. Laura Blackstone was having enough trouble with him about the National Archives ceremony she was working on with the Guild. She didn’t need to open another front of aggravation with him.