Borderline (25 page)

44

“Now?”
echoed Teo in disbelief.

“What did I say about giving orders twice, Teo?”

Teo scowled, rising from his chair. “Did it ever occur to you that some of us might have social lives or something? I gotta go make a phone call.”

“Sit,” said Caryl. “Your phone is in your pocket, and I don't want to waste more time herding stray sheep.”

I took a cue from that and dialed Inaya, hoping she'd be as cooperative as I'd implied. I greeted her by name when she answered, glancing around the room to make sure everyone noticed. Teo wasn't paying any attention, of course; he had his own phone out.

“I need you to get us on the lot tonight,” I said to Inaya.

“No problem.”

“There are a bunch of us, so we might want a van or something.”

“We have a van,” interrupted Caryl.

“Never mind the van,” I said. “We'll come pick you up, and then you can just deal with security and keys or whatever when we get there.”

She replied something about private security, but I lost most of it because Teo's voice had risen to a distracting volume, as though he were talking to someone in a noisy bar.

“A bunch of people from my stupid job are going down to Manhattan Beach tonight,” he was saying, “and they decided to drag me along. We'll have to have that drink later.”

“Could you hold just a moment, Inaya?” I said as sweetly as I could, and then put my hand over the phone. “Teo,” I said. “Can you lower your voice, please?”

Teo flipped me the bird.

I turned to Caryl, gritting my teeth. “Can we not just leave him here?”

Caryl rubbed at one of her temples with gloved fingertips in a long-suffering way that made it easy to forget she was the youngest person in the room. “I will keep Teo under control,” she said. “Can I trust you to do the same for yourself?”

I wasn't entirely sure that I could, but I nodded. Act as if ye have faith, and all that.

“Sorry, Inaya,” I said, putting the phone back to my ear. “You think you can get us past the security?”

“Oh, I can do better than that,” she said. “Just relax and I'll show you some real magic.”

•   •   •

Our ride was an unmarked white van with tinted windows—not suspicious at
all
. Inaya rode shotgun, and Teo made a point of squeezing between Tjuan and Gloria in the back bench seat rather than taking the more comfortable captain's chair next to mine. Poor Gloria got up with a sigh and took the chair instead. I watched Caryl calmly maneuvering the great white whale through evening traffic, and it occurred to me that when she
had been appointed head of the Los Angeles Arcadia Project, she had been too young to drive without an adult in the car.

“Caryl,” I said, “how dangerous is this, really?”

“I do not know what safeguards they have set up around the Gate,” she said, “but if they are linked to Vivian's essence and you cannot fully dispel them, we will leave them be. I have no desire to get anyone hurt tonight, especially with National's eyes on me.”

“Hope your probation works out better than mine did.”

Inaya directed us to the studio's main entry gate; there was enough room to pull in out of the main flow of street traffic before stopping in front of the unmanned guard booth and drop arm. There was a smaller pedestrian gate to the side; as soon as we stopped, Inaya hopped out and pulled out a set of keys, trying one at a time in the lock. I carefully maneuvered myself into the front passenger's seat of the van so I could watch and listen.

An energetic young blond guy approached her almost immediately. “Ms. West,” he said with a playful salute. “What brings you here at this hour?”

“Hmmmmm,” she said, considering him. “Can you keep a secret?”

Caryl shifted in the driver's seat. “Millie—”

“Trust the lady,” I said.

The guard was leaning against the gate in what I imagine he thought was a suave pose. “Keeping things safe is my job, Ms. West.”

Inaya gave him a slow, sly grin. Foxfeather must have recently sprinkled her with fairy dust or something, because even from my angle, that smile set loose a cascade of butterflies in my stomach.

“I'm having a . . . private party for some friends here tonight,” Inaya said. “But we might be doing some things that aren't strictly, you know—” She paused to make a puff-puff gesture with her elegant fingertips.

“Right,” said the guard.

“I don't want you guys in trouble about it, so I'm giving you the night off, full pay. Can you radio the others? I want everybody gone till morning. That should give us enough time to clean up, and we can all just pretend this never happened.”

The guard gave her another salute. “Sure thing, Ms. West.”

“Can you lift up the gate for us?”

“That won't be necessary,” Caryl called out to her.

Inaya looked confused but sent the security guard on his way. I retreated from the front of the van as she climbed back in. “Okay,” she said. “What exactly are you planning to do with the van?”

“I was hoping you would drive it away for us,” said Caryl.

“If you think I'm not going to help set those poor people free,” Inaya said, “you are out of your mind.”

From behind me, I heard a derisive snort from Tjuan. It was comforting to see that Teo was right; Tjuan apparently found
everyone
irksome.

“Inaya,” said Caryl calmly, “I need you to drive the van away from here. It is huge and all but glows in the dark, and stealth may be required. We will call you when we need you to bring it back.”

“Tell me you did not just Miss Daisy me.”

Caryl and Inaya locked eyes. I could almost see the sparks of Inaya's steel striking Caryl's flint. If it had been a movie, they'd have lunged forward and started kissing, but instead Inaya sighed and threw up her hands.

“It's your show, I guess,” Inaya said. “But you and I are going to have words later.”

She let us through the pedestrian gate before climbing back into the van and driving away. We all slipped on our fey glasses and scanned the darkened lot.

“Teo, stop fidgeting,” said Caryl dryly. “Millie, do you see anything? Feel anything?”

“I don't,” I said.

“Then just start walking.”

I sighed, vastly uncomfortable. The last time I had let my intuition guide me, it had guided me off a roof. At the moment I felt nothing in particular, so I picked a random direction.

“Squeak, squeak,” said Teo.

“What?” I snapped.

“We're a bunch of lemmings headed for a ledge.”

“Oh, I thought maybe my knee needed oiling.”

“Are you seriously critiquing my lemming sounds?”

“Are you seriously making falling-off-a-ledge jokes?”

Caryl's gloved hand landed on the back of my neck, hard, and from the sound Teo made, I could only assume her other hand was on him somewhere. “Stop it,” she said, and then took her hands away quickly. “If you persist in bickering,” she said, “so help me I will give you both cancer.”

I looked over at Teo in alarm and mouthed, “Can she do that?” He just nodded, eyes wide. We both elected to shut up at that point.

By luck or fate, my general direction turned out to be correct. As soundstages go, stage 13 wasn't particularly large, maybe a hundred by two hundred feet, and thirty feet high, topped by a gently peaked roof. Its main distinguishing feature was the
intricate fractal web of Unseelie magic that pulsed and writhed around it. Even from a distance, even knowing what I was looking at, it took every ounce of my self-control to resist the siren call of Move Along, Nothing to See Here.

“Thirteen? Really?” said Teo.

“Most lots don't even have a Stage Thirteen,” I said.

Caryl was studying Vivian's spellwork so intently that even without expression it was easy to read her admiration. “I think that's sort of the joke,” she said absently.

“Can you unlock it?” Teo asked.

“If we can find an entrance with the proper amount of wood around the door latch, then yes. But I don't have enough power to rust metal unless I dissolve Elliott, and we all know why that's a terrible idea.”

We circled the hangarlike structure until Caryl found a likely looking door at the top of a small flight of steps. She approached and gave it an exploratory touch with gloved finger­tips.

All at once she recoiled with a cry and pressed a hand to her chest. She turned and staggered down the steps toward us, leaning heavily on the rail with the hand that wasn't curled into the fabric of her blouse.

“What is it?” I asked her in alarm.

She replied with a labored inhale, then released the rail just in time to politely cover a barrage of wet coughs. When she withdrew her hand, her glove was spattered with red.

“Oh,
fuck
,” I blurted, backing up a couple of steps.

Teo, on the other hand, rushed toward her. In his panic he must have completely lost his senses, because he put his hand on the nape of her neck, where her tightly bound hair left her
skin exposed. Her familiar had just a slice of a second to look terrified before flying into a thousand pieces.

“Elliott!” I called out stupidly as his fragments dissipated like smoke.

Caryl stumbled a few feet away from Teo, drawing in quick, shallow breaths. Then she sank down on the pavement and clawed at her chest. “Stupid, stupid, stupid . . . ,” she gasped. “I shouldn't have touched it!”

Teo knelt next to her. “Carrie, it's okay. It's not your—”

“And you shouldn't have touched me!” She rounded on him, savagery lending her damaged voice a genuinely frightening snarl. This set off another paroxysm of coughing; this time both gloves turned gory. Teo stepped back, speechless for once.

“Well,” said Tjuan, standing very still. “Now we're fucked.”

“We are under no circumstances fucked,” I said firmly. I took a couple of steps toward Caryl, who was struggling to take deep, even breaths. “Caryl,” I said. “What exactly happened at the door?”

“Metaspell.” She spoke urgently, snatching a breath between every few words. “I should have . . . seen the curse, but it was . . . it was lost in . . . all that warding. . . .”

“Don't beat yourself up about it,” I said. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she said, looking up at me with tear-filled eyes. “I'm going to die.”

45

Terror tried to rise up in me like a tide of ice water, but I clamped down on it hard. I left my glasses on, hoping they would conceal what was going on in my head. “We're all going to die eventually,” I said evenly. “Can you give me an ETA on your demise in particular?”

Caryl's gaze lost focus, as though she were searching inside herself. Her breaths were labored and shallow, and her lips were turning blue.

“Massive pulmonary embolism,” she said. “Blood oxygena­tion dropping rapidly—I'd say—minutes, not hours.”

I jumped to my feet and began to climb the steps to the soundstage door. “Is Vivian powering this ward?” I asked Caryl without looking at her.

“It seems to be . . . independent of her. But the curse—curses are always linked to essence.”

“Is the curse still in the ward, or did you use it up when you touched the door?” I reached out.

“I don't know. Millie,
don't
!”

But I had already put my hand on the doorknob. I felt nothing, of course; one moment the soundstage was a seething
mass of bruised magic making me want to look away—the next moment it was just a building, even through my glasses. I inhaled experimentally and found myself unhurt.

“Well then,” I said. “We're good to go.”

I turned to Caryl. When I saw her still struggling for breath, part of me crawled into a corner and died.

“Caryl,” I said flatly, “before you expire, could you be kind enough to dispense with the lock?”

“Millie!”
It was Gloria, her voice blurry with tears.

Caryl sat gasping in the middle of the pavement, pulling off her gloves and wiping her bare hands on her knees with an intensity worthy of Lady Macbeth. No one knew what to do, since the person who usually gave orders was busy imploding. I moved to Caryl again and crouched nearby, leaving a bit of distance between us. I stared at the discarded gloves where they lay limp and bloody on the pavement. “Caryl, I need you to unlock that door.”

Teo advanced as though he wanted to choke me, but then stopped short, flexing his hands. “Millie, for God's sake, let's just get out of here before somebody gets killed.”

“I'd say we missed that boat, wouldn't you?” I turned back to Caryl. “Are you sure the curse is lethal?”

“This is how . . . she killed Martin,” Caryl gasped. His name fell from her lips like “Mommy” from a lost child's, and for the first time I realized the depth of her love for him.

I had to look away. It wasn't the blood at the corners of her mouth that got me, or the corpselike tinge to her skin. It wasn't even the grief for her mentor, or the fear that made her eyes look so young behind their dark liner. It was the trust mixed into it, the way she looked to me with irrational hope
simply because I was the only person pretending to be calm.

“Vivian could undo the curse,” I said.

Caryl shook her head. “She would have to . . . be here.”

“We can call her.”

“No,” Tjuan interjected forcefully. “She'd kill all of us and have our bodies paved over.”

“Also, she'd have to take the 405,” added Gloria with a ­sniffle. “It's a parking lot this time of night.”

Tjuan frowned. “Wouldn't she just take La Cienega?”

“Still, it'd be forty-five minutes at the very—”

“Shut up!” I snapped. To my surprise, they did. I turned, forcing myself to make eye contact with Caryl. “What do you want to do with the time you have left?”

She set her jaw, staring at the soundstage. “I'd like to . . . unlock that door,” she rasped.

“That's my girl.”

She looked up at me. “I'm your girl?” She didn't sound nineteen; she sounded nine.

“Damn right.”

Caryl started to get to her feet, one hand positioned as though to keep her heart from bursting out of her rib cage. I reached to help her, hesitated out of habit, then remembered that the damage had already been done and gave her my hand.

Caryl gasped as she stood up straight. A deep gasp, a sweeping inhale of relief. It took me a moment to realize why.

“I fixed you!” I said breathlessly, my fingers tightening convulsively on hers. Her hand was as soft as a baby's.

She shook her head and laughed, tears glistening on her lashes. “No,” she said. “It's like the facades. You interrupted the circuit.”

An incredulous snort escaped me. “So you can live a long, full life, so long as I never let go of your hand?”

“Something like that.” She actually
giggled
, giddy as a cheerleader.

“Well then, this will work out dandy until one of us has to pee,” I said, just to hear her laugh again. “Come on.” I tugged her toward the soundstage.

Even with all things considered, Caryl managed to pull together enough focus to rot the wood around the door latch, allowing her to force it open with a well-placed shoulder. I immediately tore off my fey glasses; the golden radiance of Seelie magic that spilled from inside the soundstage was like staring directly into the sun.

Something powerful took hold of us both, compelling us to cross the threshold and shut the door behind us. By the time I processed that it was yet another ward, it was too late to do anything about it. We both looked around, blinking, and then swore in unison.

The pair of us stood holding hands in the middle of a broiling desert, white sun beating down on us at the apex of a faded sky. Behind and beside us was nothing but jagged horizon; ahead of us stood the remains of a classic Western ghost town, bleak and picturesque.

“I know what this is,” I said. I tried putting on my glasses again and nearly burned out my retinas for my pains. I slid them on top of my head, since the dress Foxfeather had given me had no pockets. “Bottom dollar says David painted the walls in here; this is a location from
Black Powder
. I just have to touch the—”

A sound behind me, like approaching thunder, made me
turn. Caryl crowded me, hanging on my arm, as we spotted a posse of a dozen men on horseback riding straight toward us. Black-and-white Appaloosas, skewbald pintos, bay mustangs, all gleaming with sweat under the desert sun and kicking up great clouds of dust as their riders spurred them into a frenzy.

“They're not real,” I said, backing up slowly. “I'm eighty percent sure they're just painted on the wall behind us.” But I was already adjusting the valve on my hydraulic knee.

“Millie . . . ,” Caryl said, tugging my hand as the posse continued toward us. They clearly intended to ride us down. “Even if it's psychic spellwork,” she said, “it will still
feel
like being trampled.”

“Gotcha,” I said. “Keep hold of my hand, don't pull ahead, and don't talk to me. Running is hard, so don't distract me.”

“Millie . . .” A panicked note crept into her voice as we began to feel the ground tremble under us. One of the riders reached behind him to free the rifle that was slung across his back.

We took off, and I threw all my focus into movement. I hadn't gotten the valve setting quite right. The knee didn't bend fast enough, forcing me to sweep the leg around in an arc with each panicked stride. I focused my fear into the desperate energy it took to keep myself upright. With clumsy control I managed to gather some acceleration, but Caryl was trying to run faster still, starting to drag me forward in a way that promised to topple us both. I could actually
smell
the horses behind us now.

Caryl looked over her shoulder, which slowed us abruptly. I couldn't yell at her to keep steady; even taking the trouble to find words would have broken my rhythm. I just kept blindly flailing forward. Caryl was an idiot without her construct;
when she saw how close the horses were, she tried to pull me along faster, as though she could help, as though she could give me back my body whole. I cursed fluently as my steps stuttered.

At last Caryl seemed to see the problem, and she tried to release my hand. But then she'd be dead for real, so I crushed her hand in my grip, refusing to let it slip away. The effort broke my rhythm, and I stumbled.

We both fell to the hard, hot ground in a tangle of bones and titanium, and the posse rode us down.

I heard Caryl screaming in my ear, smelled blood. I felt my bones snap, the hot, bright pain of muscle tearing like raw chicken. I entered a slow-motion adrenaline dream, flashed back to falling, catching in a tree, things tearing and snapping and piercing, not knowing what was wood and what was bone. I thought I'd forgotten the fall, but there it was, fresh as new bread, and I was screaming, and my heart beat so hard it made a sound like a chair scraping over tile; I could feel it almost exploding in my chest.

Then the riders were gone, and I was alive.

I could feel my broken and bleeding body, but I looked down and saw that I was fine, except that my thigh had been jarred loose from the socket of my AK. Once I saw that I wasn't hurt, the pain faded. Caryl was curled in the fetal position on the ground next to me, gasping; her hand had slipped away during the fall. I reached over quickly to recapture it.

“Caryl,” I said. “You're okay. Look at yourself. You're not hurt.”

Her breathing slowed and she carefully sat up, wiping blood from her mouth and then feeling her own limbs experimentally. Dazed, she sat patiently and kept a hand on my arm while I
forced my thigh back into the suction suspension. Without my powder, I couldn't get a comfortable fit. I settled for “not going to fall off in the immediate future,” readjusted the hydraulic valve for walking, and then let Caryl help me to my feet.

“Shit,” I said. “I have no idea where the wall is now, much less the door.”

“I imagine that's the point of the horses,” said Caryl. I still couldn't get over the unsteadiness in her voice, the expressive way her syllables rode the currents of her emotion.

“How are you feeling?” I asked her.

“Perfectly fine,” she said, squeezing my hand.

“Well, I don't see a Gate standing around, do you? So if it's in here, it must be in one of those buildings.” I pointed to the little town.

“Do you hear something?”

I did hear it. The white noise of ragged breathing and feet pounding on sand. We both turned to see Teo sprinting toward us, followed by a wild-eyed Tjuan, who had thrown Gloria over his shoulder. They were being chased by nothing we could see, other than their own dust clouds.

“Oh hey, guys,” I said dryly as they barreled toward us, too panicked even to question our calm. “Those riders aren't”—they sprinted right by us—“real.”

They managed to make it all the way to town and dive for cover on the porch of a dilapidated hat shop. Caryl and I eventually caught up to them, watching them recover their breath and turn their heads in unison to watch the nonexistent posse gallop by. Gloria winced and coughed as though the horses' hooves had kicked up dust in her face.

“John Riven, you are a genius,” I muttered aloud. “An evil
genius I am going to personally throttle to death if I ever have the good fortune of meeting you.”

The ghost town looked just as it had in the stills from Berenbaum's postproduction office: at the far end was the clichéd town square complete with an old stone well, a plethora of hitching posts, and a chapel with a decaying bell tower. Stretching toward us from it was a single dusty lane two carriages wide, with saloons and feed stores and mining supply depots and other shops whose signs were too cracked and faded to read.

“Everyone okay?” I asked my comrades as we approached the porch.

“I think my heart actually stopped for a minute,” said Gloria, fanning herself with one hand. “My mouth tastes like an old penny.”

“I fucked up my ankle,” said Teo. “Didn't feel it till now, but
shit
.”

“I broke a nail,” Tjuan deadpanned.

“Okay,” I said. “I think our best plan is for the three of you to search the buildings for the Gate while Caryl and I try to find a wall so we can dispel this ward and see what this place really looks like and where the doors are.”

“What do we do if we find the Gate?” asked Gloria.

“Just shout,” I said. “This place is big, but not as big as it looks, so we should be able to hear you just fine from wherever. Caryl will know what to do once we find the Gate.”

Everyone looked to Caryl. She fidgeted, her hand tightening in mine. “Do as Millie says,” she said, trying for her usual crisp tone and almost managing it. “I am placing her in charge until National arrives next week.”

“Wha—” I spluttered, almost dropping her hand.

“Yes, ma'am,” said Gloria quickly, the way you do when your boss has gone crazy. “Come on, boys, let's split up and search the place. And for love of the Lord, Teo, let someone else search the saloon; I don't want you getting distracted by some magicked-up lady of the evening.” Her voice was too bright, too brassy, as she led them away.

I was still staring at Caryl, because with all this nonsense about putting me in charge, it had finally sunk in that she had every intention of dying.