Skin Deep

CHAPTER 11

MARIEL TATE’S OFFICE at the Guildhouse was a floor below Terryn’s, far enough away to avoid any persona conflicts for Laura yet close enough to help the transition between personas when necessary. Laura found Liam Wilson, the office assistant, working at his desk in the anteroom. “Hey, Mariel. I had a feeling you would be coming in.”

She liked him. Not many humans worked in the Guildhouse, and Liam was the only one that worked in InterSec. The fey had their fears and suspicions like everyone else, and having humans work in the heart of their U.S. diplomatic building was not desirable. Liam had shown knowledge of the fey world that impressed both Mariel and Genda Boone, the colleague with whom Mariel had been hiring an assistant. When his background check came back clean, he got the job.

He blushed when she smiled at him. “And why is that?”

He handed her a stack of pink slips of paper. “Phone messages. They always start piling up when everyone but me knows you’re about to show up.”

She took the messages and grinned. “Remind me to tell you about the restaurant in the Bahamas. You will love it. Is Genda in?”

Genda traveled as much as Mariel Tate, at least in theory, did. They both presented themselves as high-level consultants at diplomatic meetings. Laura suspected that if Genda performed undercover work for InterSec, it was minor. Industry news often reported Genda’s attending the conferences she said she did. As far as Laura was concerned, the lack of corporate espionage-to say nothing of dead bodies-in Genda’s wake validated her suspicion that the woman was nothing more than a diplomat.

Liam followed her into her office. “She’s at a meeting, but she’s in town. I have four other messages for you: a code call verifying your arrival, two from a police officer named Aaron Foyle, and one from someone claiming to be your mother, who I will not assume is the president of France, despite the accent.” The code call was a fake from Terryn. Since she didn’t recognize the phone number, wasn’t French, and didn’t know the French president, she assumed the other call was Cress joking around.

She slid into the chair behind the sleek black desk. The Mariel office was her favorite work space. In her other offices, she avoided personal trappings in order to prevent cross-contaminating personas, but Mariel’s space was her repository for souvenirs of world travel. The earth-tone colors of the room made a nice counterpoint to the riot of color in paintings, sculptures, and objets d’art. Pushpins of places she’d been or pretended to have been littered a map on a side wall. Red pins stood out even in the white of expanse of the North and South Poles, though she had been to only one of them.

“And here’s a sealed pouch.” He placed the leather envelope next to the messages and waited for her to touch it. InterSec eyes-only documents had several layers of spells on them. A courier chain spell registered the body signature of each person permitted to carry the pouch. Another spell rang softly if the pouch was moved more than a few feet away from whoever was supposed to carry it. Getting released from the spell happened when someone else with a registered body signature touched it. The idea that the pouches spent time in bathrooms and bedrooms creeped Laura out, and she thought about it every time she touched one.

The next layer of security was a simple quartz crystal embedded in the zipper pull keyed solely to whoever was allowed to open the pouch. Touching the crystal released the lock and simultaneously disengaged another spell on the papers inside. If someone other than a designated person opened the pouch, the pages disintegrated. Laura opened the pouch and removed the dossier Terryn had prepared on Sanchez’s FBI connection.

She pulled a notepad across the desk. “This is for your eyes only, Liam. Please call this Aaron Foyle back and tell him I need a conference room on-site in Anacostia.” She wrote a list, ripped the page from the pad, and handed it to him. “Tell Foyle I want to see these three people. I will arrive at 8 A.M. and meet with him first. Have a car pick me up at noon with something wonderful to eat that won’t spill.”

Liam wrinkled his nose. “Are you sure you don’t want to do this here?”

She acknowledged his sympathy with a knowing look. “Sure. But these folks have several investigators coming after them. I’d rather invade their space than make the diva demand right now. I have a meeting to go to this afternoon, but I’ll call if I need something, okay?”

He looked crestfallen. “You just got here.”

She put on an apologetic face. “I’m here for a bit, though. Maybe we can have lunch in a few days?”

“Great,” he said. She knew he meant it. Because of their shared love of food, Laura treated him to lunch at the better restaurants in town or “accidentally” left expense-account vouchers for him when she heard about a new place.

She had a hard time deciding whether Liam had a crush on her or not. The vibe coming off him was intense interest, but it wasn’t lust. In general, humans were hard for her to read unless their emotional state was high. She got along well with Liam, but she never thought of him as more than a nice guy. Humans didn’t interest her often. They tended to take a much shorter view of circumstances than the fey. The fey, of course, took the long view of situations. If they lived well and took care of themselves, some lived centuries. Laura wasn’t that old, but she already had a different, more circumspect, perspective on the future than humans, and she was prone to think more about long-term implications. Which was why her attraction to Sinclair surprised and intrigued her.

She flipped through her mail, separating out a few larger envelopes. Out of habit, she reached for her crystal paperweight without looking and instead grabbed nothing but air. She went through the stack of paper in the in-box and elsewhere on the desk, but the crystal wasn’t there. She glanced at the credenza beneath the map. If she didn’t purposefully activate her heightened memory-and she might not have for an incidental thing like moving a paperweight-she was subject to the same vagaries of memory as any human. Occasionally, she used the crystal piece as a resonator for a spell and might have left it in her hidden room. She made a mental note to check.

Ignoring her messages, she placed the Sanchez file on the center of her desk and turned on her computer. She scanned Mariel’s email, amused and marveling at Cress’s ingenuity. Laura knew that Cress didn’t personally send the emails. Cress worked with an InterSec tech to create a life for Mariel. She read a couple of real messages from Terryn about InterSec administrative issues.

Laura opened the Sanchez dossier. The InterSec agent mole at the FBI had scant information on him-not even his real name-but had confirmed that he was involved in investigating low-level fey terrorists. Lawrence Scales, his field officer, was known as a straight-up guy, with major arrests notched on his belt. The InterSec report indicated that Sanchez had been working more important cases lately, an indication that he had been a rising star.

Laura leaned back in her chair and stared at the map across the room. She would find out what Sanchez had been doing. It was what she did. He had been undercover. Deegan had figured that out, but not everyone had the ob servational skills of a trained druid. Sanchez had trusted people to protect him. Deegan did, too. Their trust had failed somewhere. She found no suspicious references to Deegan in the file.

The circumstances of Sanchez’s death cast a troubling shadow over her. Whom had he trusted? In whom was that trust misplaced? She grappled with that issue every day of her life. Terryn and Cress never gave her any reason to doubt that they would protect her. She assumed Cress and Terryn thought the same thing about her. But she had lied to them on and off over the years. Sometimes it was to protect their position. Sometimes it was to have something to call her own. But what would that do to their trust in her if they found out? How would they handle it? What would happen to her then? The idea that she might be on her own path to the morgue was disquieting. In his lifetime, Terryn had had his share of betrayals. His family had a long history in the Seelie Court. She knew he hadn’t gone from being a potential heir to the throne of Faerie to the head of an InterSec section without making enemies or losing allies.

She gazed out the window at the Mall and wondered if the day might come that he questioned her trust. Would any explanation justify some of the secrets she’d kept from him? Sometimes she worried that she played the persona game too much and forgot where the lines were drawn.