Mark Del Franco - Skin Deep

Laura picked up her folders and PDA. She had enough time to get a few hours’ work in before Terryn couldn’t put off Foyle any longer.

“Laura, do you have a minute?”

She paused at the door, too long to pretend she hadn’t heard Resha. Fixing a smile on her face, she faced the conference room. “Sure, Resha, what’s up?”

He gestured at the empty seat to his left. Against her better judgment, she sat, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t keep her long. His eyes shifted beneath heavy lids as he waited for the room to empty, a pleasant smile plastered on his face. At least, through Laura’s years of familiarity with his kind, she knew it indicated pleasure. To the uninitiated, it had the cold tooth slash of a predator.

“I was hoping you could help me with something,” he said.

She popped the cap of her Waterman pen and held it poised over a blank sheet of paper in her notepad. “Sure.”

Resha reached out a long thin hand, the pale fingers too long for comfort, the dull gray claws more so. As much as she would have liked to, Laura did not recoil from the cool, slick touch on her arm. Just because Resha was not as lecherous as his brother merrows did not mean she wanted him to touch her. “No, no, it’s not something official. Well, technically. I was wondering if you knew much about glamours.”

With exaggerated care, she replaced the cap, keeping her eyes on the blank sheet of paper as she considered how to answer him. Resha wasn’t a political game player, at least not a powerful one. The Guild board of directors let him run programs that had little political impact, or at least impact that Resha couldn’t screw up or interfere with. Why he was asking such a loaded question made her start looking for exits and doing a mental inventory of passports and bank accounts. As a druid, she couldn’t lie and say she didn’t know anything about glamours. All druids did. She forced the smile back on her face. “Oh, I haven’t used them in years. I was much more fascinated by them when I was young.”

Resha nodded, dropping his hands on the table. “I was wondering what you thought if I got one. Would it be difficult?”

She relaxed, but not completely. Not until she understood where this was going. “It would depend on what you needed. They’re easy to purchase. I can think of a few jewelry stores that might take custom orders.”

He nodded, his lidded eyes narrowing. “Yes, but I’m uncertain about discretion.”

She smiled, more genuinely. “Everything has a price, Resha.”

“What would you think if I pinked my skin?” he asked.

The idea was so mundane, she almost let her jaw drop. Here she was fearing one of her undercover personas had been compromised, and Resha was being used to wheedle information from her, when he was only talking about cosmetics. “What do I think personally or professionally?”

“Both.”

She shook her head. “I don’t see a reason in either case.”

He smiled again. “Yes, well, you have an aspect that humans find pleasing. You can pass as one of them. I can’t.”

He had a point. With his exaggerated features-the sharp peak in his forehead, those teeth and claws, the blade of a nose-humans knew he was fey, even if they might not know exactly what kind. Those physical traits didn’t include what happened when a merrow hit the water. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that making his pale white skin any other color would not change a thing about his appearance.

Steeling herself, she reached out and squeezed those cold, pale hands. “Don’t take this as anything more than a compliment, Resha, but you’re a perfectly handsome man of your species. Why are you worried about what humans think?”

He pressed his wide lips together. “Television, Laura. The National Archives ceremony is going to be televised. People in Washington are used to dealing with solitaries who don’t fit the human mold. But outside the cities, particularly out West, it’s a different story. Most of this country does not see the fey on a daily basis.”

She tapped his hand for emphasis. “Which is precisely why you shouldn’t change a thing. This ceremony is about alliances and cooperation. We’re celebrating our diversity.”

He shook his head and shrugged. “Yes, well, that’s fine when you’re not the one with the camera in your face because you’re diverse.”

Laura stood and retrieved her folders. “Resha, I’m hearing none of this. Be who you are. If we can’t do that, then everything the fey have been fighting for here is pointless.”

He smiled again, that strange merrow smile that demonstrated exactly what he meant by other people not understanding. “You always put the best spin on things.”

She grinned at him as she made for the door. “That’s my job, Resha. Wear your blue Hermиs tie. It complements your skin tone.”

She cut through the service kitchen to the back stairs to avoid the slow elevator. As she climbed the two flights to her floor, she decided to be amused by the conversation instead of annoyed. She was the last person to criticize someone who wanted to change his looks. Keeping her head down, she strode down the long hallway through the accounting department, one of the few areas of the Guildhouse where she wasn’t peppered with questions when she appeared.

As she entered her office, her assistant, Saffin Corril, followed her in. “Your zipper’s in the front,” she said.

Laura dropped her paperwork and spun her skirt around. “Dammit, I wish I’d never bought this thing.”

Saffin placed a stack of pink messages on the desk. “Stop wearing it on days you have a meeting in the fifth-floor conference room or start taking the elevator.”

Laura looked up from the first message on the stack. “What the heck does that have to do with my skirt?”

The brownie smiled. “You always take the stairs from the fifth floor too fast, then you charge down the hallway to avoid people. Poof. Your skirt spins.”

They stared at each other. The corner of Saffin’s mouth twitched, and Laura laughed. She dropped into her desk chair. “You’re too observant for your own good.”

“Can I have a raise?” she asked.

“No. You can have next Tuesday off. I’m out of the office, and you’ve put in a ton of time on the Archives ceremony,” said Laura.

“Groovy. Thanks,” she replied.

Laura nodded with a slight smile as she flipped through the messages. Saffin was tall for a brownie. With her long, wispy, blond hair and slender body, Laura could picture Saffin with flowers in her hair on an ashram in the sixties, which was where Saffin was then. Brownies gravitated to hospitable situations that reflected their preferred demeanor and liked to take task-oriented positions that played to their industrious natures. People loved brownie assistants and financial managers. But if someone prevented one of them from performing his duties, a brownie might turn into a boggart. Their boggart nature ranged from annoying to downright dangerous. A brownie transformed from a passive, friendly person into a gangly aggressor with teeth and claws to back it up. No one wanted a maniacal boggart harassing them for a response to a memo. Saffin confessed to Laura she was asked to leave the ashram because she kept going boggie when others forgot to weed the soybeans. Saffin liked a tidy garden.

“Senator Hornbeck’s office called three times,” Saffin said.

Laura dropped her head back. “Good gods, why won’t that man leave us alone? I am not going to put Tylo Blume at the podium. I don’t care what favors he’s done Hornbeck.”

The senator was pressing her to include Tylo Blume as a speaker at the Archives’ exhibit opening. Blume supported Hornbeck’s ideas about mutual cooperation between humans and the fey, a sentiment Laura didn’t disagree with. But Blume wasn’t in the same league as the other speakers and had done little to support the cause until recently.