Tooth and Nail (27 page)

Each picture caught her from a different angle: head on, from the back—wings blooming out the skin left bare by the halter top—and from each side. But from every angle, she was looking at me—in distress. And in every angle, her hand was outstretched, holding a small, white tooth.

She wasn’t the product of an idle mind, or a fantastical one. She didn’t have comical, golden round breastplates, and she didn’t have the creepy eyes of manga heroines. This fae wasn’t an exploration of the imagination.

She was a memory, rendered over and over again.

A few of the pictures were fresh and crisp, but most of the paper was yellowing and curled. I didn’t know who she was, and I knew I was looking at trouble, but I couldn’t help my relief that this fae’s face was most definitely not mine.

I scanned rows and rows of bookshelves, finding classic literature, political history books, a big book of notorious newspaper headlines—and many, many books about faeries: faerie tales, faerie folklore, faerie art.

Turning back to his computer, I noticed it had fallen into screensaver mode: a strange geometric swirl of primary colors. I wanted to look through his files, but I’d never put much faith in the validity of the TV and movie spies who sat down at the enemy’s personal computer, tapped a few keys, discovered the blueprint to destroy the world, downloaded it and ran off. I’d never be able to pull it off; it had taken me at least ten minutes to figure out how to play online sudoku a month ago. Besides, I didn’t want to touch a thing in this apartment. I didn’t put it past Mahoney to have a cereal prize spy kit lying around with fingerprint-dusting materials.

It wasn’t necessary, anyway. I had some answers.

I bent and rubbed Canine’s head again. “Thanks for the tour,” I whispered. “I gotta go.”

And I would have, the same way I came in, if I didn’t hear Mahoney’s key in the lock.

The front door creaked open and Canine sped off to greet his human, barking with crazed joy.

I stood, frozen, as Mahoney chuckled. “Honey, I’m home,” he said to his pet. “You always act like you thought I left forever. It was just a smoke. Okay, maybe more like three.”

His heavy shoes approached and my heart throbbed in my pained body. He detoured into his bathroom, leaving me a moment to remember what I was, and that I could get out of here.

Breathe. Breathe and accept. Relax.

Now, blink.

I intended, and edged toward the bedroom door. I didn’t need to hold my breath when Mahoney entered the room, almost touching where I should have been, but I did anyway.

He clunked in and fell into his desk chair, kicking his shoes off and away from him. He glanced at the game and jiggled his computer mouse.

Canine tore into the room and stopped in front of me. He wagged his tail, awaiting a pat, and not getting one, he offered one short bark. Then another, and another, and he jumped around me, trying desperately to command the attention of his new friend. He looked back over his doggie shoulder once at Mahoney—
don’t you see her?
he seemed to say—then yapped at me some more.

Mahoney looked at me.

My blood stopped running for a few painful seconds before I realized he was actually looking through me. I chanced lifting a hand to be certain I was blinking but my movement made Mahoney start. I was a trick of the light.

I backed against the wall and the window behind me. I didn’t know if I could go through brick. Or glass. But I didn’t know that I couldn’t.

Canine continued to bark, and Mahoney stilled him with a hand on his collar. “Are you here?” Mahoney asked the air I was in. “Are you?”

He couldn’t be crazy, because I
was
there, but I wasn’t who he thought I was. Was I?

“I’m still looking for you,” he said.

A shiver ran through my transparent being.

“It’s not just me anymore,” he added. “I found someone else. She’s looking too. I’m not the only one anymore.” He stood, his chair scraping the hardwood floor. “Let me see you again. It’s okay, it really is.”

Mahoney’s gentle, respectful, almost reverent tone disconcerted me, and I was suddenly afraid my mixed emotions would erase my cloak, give me away.

“Please,” he said.

I stepped back, and fell out onto a small patch of grass under his bedroom window. I stayed blinking as I pressed myself to the brick building, edged toward the parking lot, then ran.

>=<

Nodding at the Root desk operators in the monitoring room, I weaved in and out of desk space until I found Reese staring at her screen.

“Gemma!” she said, standing and giving me an enthusiastic hug. Her arms barely made it around me. I felt, as always with her and Frederica, like the Un-incredible Hulk. I tried not to gasp as she pressed against my banged-up midsection. “I haven’t talked to you since the night you were on assignment,” she said.

“I owe you dinner for that,” I told her. “More like dinner every night for a month. You saved my life.”

“You would have figured it out,” she said modestly.

“Uh, no,” I said. “But thanks for your blind, unwavering faith.”

“You can count on me.”

“Svein around?”

“He came in with his duffel bag, so try gym one or two. Down past the Butterfly Room. I’ll show you.”

“It’s okay, I’ll find it,” I said. She might have insisted on the walk, but she turned and touched the screen I hadn’t realized was behind her and suddenly called out, “I’ve got one!”

The supervisor headed over, and I squeezed Reese’s shoulder before going in search of Svein, leaving the squeal of the newly found spider signal.

I peered into gym one, where a couple of men and one woman were working weight machines. And indeed, in gym two I found Svein, wearing sweatpants and not much else. The room was Spartan—mostly rubber-mat flooring. I slipped in and sat on the floor next to the door and watched him as he moved in intricate patterns around the room, punching and kicking the air. He was sweating, but his movements weren’t accompanied by the determined grunts of Smiley’s guys. His fists cut the air—powerful, but relaxed and graceful. He lunged and blocked, and his bare feet never slipped. I imagined his mind must have been calm white because his muscles instinctively knew where to go without hesitation, and I was mesmerized by the beauty of the human body in fight.

Or maybe by his particular bare-chested human body in fight, a trickle of perspiration running down the center to his navel. His arms were carved by his art, and his stomach was tight. He could take a hit, and doubtless he could throw one, but only in the purest form of sport. Not in a bar fight, or a street fight, or a fae fight.

My own stomach throbbed and I realized I should have been taking some more painkillers right about now.

Svein saw me as he moved around the room, but I stretched out my legs and relaxed, willing to wait, respecting his work.

When he was done, he walked over to me. I had to really try not to stare below his neck. I’d seen a lot of athletic men in prime shape who were shirtless. But with Svein, there was a magnetic pull that I had to brace my feet on the floor to resist.

If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t let on. “I’m impressed,” I told him, echoing his criticism of me at Smiley’s. “Though not as impressed as your bravado had led me to believe I’d be.”

“
Touche
,” he said.

“Didn’t expect The Root to have fitness facilities.”

“Employee benefits.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding. “I should have known. This is a massive culture, a massive operation. What were you doing?”

“Taekwondo
poomse
. Forms,” he clarified.

“Nice.”

“You should try it. Martial arts would be good training for you.”

“I’m lacking in grace,” I said, “in case you haven’t noticed.”

“I’ve noticed quite a bit.”

I ignored his implication, which was easier than it could have been since I
had
come here for a reason. “Mahoney saw a fae, a tooth collector,” I said, “and he’s trying to find her.”

Svein sat down on the floor in front of me and leaned back on his forearms. “Before you explain what you know, would you mind explaining how you know?”

“I went to his place.”

“Uninvited, I assume.”

“He might have invited me in,” I said, “had he been there.”

He sighed and leaned over on one arm so he could rub his eyes with his other hand. “Now, who’s doing whose job?” he asked. “You need to let me do this kind of thing.”

“You would have just done the same thing I did. Besides, I wanted to do it myself. He pissed me off.”

“All the more reason,” he said.

“For your information, I was Miss Calm, Cool and Collected. Until he came home.”

He closed his eyes and didn’t open them.

“He’s got pictures,” I said. “Drawings of a tooth faerie. One very specific tooth faerie. I don’t know when or how, but he saw her, and it was a long time ago.”

“Only children too young to have a fully developed memory can see us,” he said, opening his eyes again and leaning forward, crossing his arms on his knees. “How could he remember?”

“I don’t know, but he did, and does, and he’s still looking for her. In the pictures, she had wings, and her hair and clothes were kind of 1980s.”

“He was born in 1980,” Svein said. “I remember that from the file.”

“Huh,” I said. “I thought he was much younger than me.”

“Even you must realize how intimidating you are to the average man, human or fae.”

“I don’t intimidate you.”

“I’m not average.”

No argument there. “Well, Mahoney saw a damn fae,” I said, “and he’s still looking for her. Judging by the literature in his den of iniquity, he’s as obsessed with fae as with politicians, if not more. He wants to find her, and show the world the tooth faeries exist.”

“The tooth
faerie
,” Svein corrected me. “The folklore in this country is that there’s one Santa Claus, one Easter bunny, and one tooth faerie. I’m betting he thinks the one he saw is
the
one.”

“Still doesn’t explain how he was able to see her at all. What can we get from his background? Can I see his file?”

“I remember most of it,” Svein said. “I only did it recently and there wasn’t much on his childhood. He was an only child, like you. Two parents, average home. We caught all his teeth. He must have seen the faerie at his home, as nearly impossible as that is.”

“Maybe she wasn’t blinking. Maybe she was careless and screwed up. Should we look her up, pay her a visit and ask her?”

“I don’t see the point,” Svein said. “Fae are supposed to report in when they’ve been compromised, and they would, because the greater good is more important than one fae’s screw-up. It isn’t in his collection file, and frankly, if it was, it would make his file a historical one. There hasn’t been a time in recent history that any of us have been seen. We’re well trained and our abilities are natural—more natural than yours, since you’re half fae. It would have been as instinctive as breathing for the fae to have been blinking at little Mahoney’s home that night.”

“Yet he was old enough to lose a tooth, so his memory was developed, and he shouldn’t have seen her,” I said. “Unless…”

“What?”

“Didn’t you tell me he was home schooled?”

“So?”

“So he wasn’t out in the world with his peers as early as other kids. So maybe he stayed innocent...just a little longer than other kids.”

“And he saw her,” Svein said, nodding. “And he could remember her.”

I thought again of Cindy Lou Who. Little Juliette’s parents probably assured her she’d seen only a dream and she had believed them, the thin memory of me dissolving into her vast imagination. “I wonder who he told,” I said. “I wonder who told him he was crazy, told him to stop making things up. But he held on to his conviction.”

“This might also explain why you can’t glamour him,” Svein said. “He saw a fae when not only was he old enough to see her in the first place, but old enough to recognize her as a faerie of some kind. Sounds like after seeing her face in person, he’s immune to glamour.”

“Like if you’re exposed to mononucleosis early, and you develop immunity,” I said. “Which would have been nice for me. Having mono sucked.”

“The question is,” Svein said, “how are you in the picture?”

“He saw me that night at Watergate. I dropped a tooth and he saw it. He thinks I’m him. He thinks I’m a fellow hunter, that I saw a faerie also as a child. He thinks I’m closer than he is to the answer.”
Give me something, tell me something.

“That puts you in the clear,” Svein said, standing. “Excellent work. Now we can go back to dealing with Dr. Clayton full time and put the D.C. Digger behind us.”

“How can I?” I looked up at him. “He’s after Avery.”

“Is there something on Avery to find?”

I didn’t like his tone. Not one bit. “Absolutely not.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“But Avery’s father was a good politician too, a good man, and the media tore him apart on something he had nothing to do with. Even when it came out he’d done nothing, his career was ruined. Mahoney could do that to Avery.”

“Other journalists could do that to Avery.”

“Most of them have quit trying by now,” I said. “But if Mahoney thinks I’m holding out, for all I know, he could make something up.”

“So
you
make something up,” Svein said. “Tell him you saw the tooth faerie when you were a kid and she did the hokey pokey with you and took you to her ice cream castle. That ought to shut him up.”

“Tell him a lie?”

“Well, you’re saying the Digger could lie, so beat him to it. Counter his punch with one of your own. You’re good at that.”

I let my head drop. “Ouch,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing. My stomach hurts.”

He put out his hand, and I took it so he could haul me upright. Too close to him, I took a step back.

“Don’t worry about Mahoney,” Svein assured me as he reached for his crumpled T-shirt on a nearby chair and tugged it on. “He’s nothing. Clayton’s the problem. I have a few ideas, and we need to make a plan.”

“Yeah, that,” I said. “I’ve got some interesting things to say on the topic of the good dentist.”