Seanan McGuire - A Local Habitation

“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.

THE 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.

“It’s the place where paper goes to die,” I muttered.

A narrow path through the mess led to a desk in front of the room’s single green-curtained window. The brunette from downstairs was perched cross- legged on the desk’s edge, surrounded by towers of paper, attention focused on the portable computer balanced on her knees. Her glasses were sliding down her nose; they’d already made it more than halfway.

She raised her head and smiled, almost sincerely enough to hide the flash of wariness in her eyes. “Yes, it is. Can I help you with something?” Her tone was pure Valley Girl, implying a level of intelligence closely akin to that of granite.

I wasn’t buying it. “I’m looking for Countess January Torquill. Is this her office?”

“Sorry, no. It’s mine.” The smile didn’t waver.

“Well, I need to find her. I’m here at the request of her uncle.”

The wariness returned, barely kept in check by her frozen-glass smile. “Really? That’s fascinating. Because, see, normally people call before they send guests.”

“He sent me because his niece hasn’t called in a few weeks.” There was something about her smile that bothered me. Not the obvious falseness—she was clearly on edge—but the way it was shaped. “I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”

Her eyes widened, and she shoved her glasses back up her nose, smile abandoned. “What? Hasn’t called? What’s that supposed to mean? He’s the one who stopped calling!”

Moving her glasses made them frame her eyes rather than blocking them and brought the goldenrod yellow of her irises into sharp relief. I only know one family line with eyes that color. Ignore the hair, take away the glasses, and she looked more like Sylvester than Rayseline did.

“That’s not what he thinks,” I said. “January Torquill, I presume?”

Her eyes narrowed, and for a brief moment, I thought she was going to argue. Then she deflated, shoulders slumping, and said, “Not really. I mean, I’m January. I’m just not January Torquill. I never have been.” She shrugged, a flicker of humor creeping into her voice. “As far as I know, no one’s January Torquill. Which is probably a good thing—that’d be a terrible name to stick on a child. It sounds like something out of a bad romance novel.”

“So if you’re not January Torquill, that makes you . . . ?”

“January O’Leary. I’m not full Daoine Sidhe—my father was half-Tylwyth Teg, and his last name was ‘ap Learianth.’ That doesn’t exactly work on a business card. We settled on ‘O’Leary’ as the abbreviation when we incorporated.” She smiled again. This time, the expression had an edge I recognized all too well. Sylvester smiled that way when he was trying to figure out whether something was a threat. “It’s interesting that Uncle Sylvester didn’t tell you that. Considering the part where he sent you here, and everything.”

“You have a phone,” I said. “You could call him.”

“I already tried that while Elliot was stowing you and the kid in the cafeteria.”

“And?”

“No one answered.”

“I have directions in your uncle’s handwriting.” I held up the folder.

“Handwriting can be faked.”

I bit back an expletive. Half the Kingdom knew me on sight and expected me to start breaking things the second I walked into the room, while the other half wanted three forms of photo ID and a character witness. “Alex and Elliot knew who I was.”

“They know who you look like. There’s a difference.”

Sad to say, she had a point. I nearly got killed last December by a Doppelganger who impersonated my daughter. In Faerie, faces aren’t always what they appear to be.

“Okay. If you know who I look like, you presumably know what . . . that person . . . can or can’t do. Right?” January nodded. “It’s sort of hard to prove that I can’t cast a spell, so that won’t work. If you want to give me some blood, I can tell you what you did for your fifth birthday . . .”