Skin Deep

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.