Chapter 17

  "You look like you're chokin' on that thought," Jessie said after a long moment's silence.

  I sipped my ginger ale and cleared my throat. "I've been having trouble digesting my suddenly elevated status in general. Just how much does the UNSDI have on me in that file you read?"

  Jessie spread her hands a little. "Less than they'd like, more than you're probably comfortable with. Catholic orphanage, early into college, just about done with a Masters in Medieval History. Anyone who thinks their life is any kinda private today don't understand the Internet. You're better than most, since you don't have much of a social media footprint."

  I nodded earnestly. "It's just…you have to understand, until I came into my inheritance, I had a tiny little three room apartment in Cambridge, and scholarships were covering a lot of my expenses. Then I started learning about my family history, and oh my god I have more money than anyone should ever have. I literally can't spend it faster than the investments bring more in, even giving away huge chunks of it to charities and worthy causes. And some of it isn't even in this world! How do you deal with that?"

  "Day by day, I reckon," Jessie said. "Sometimes that's all you can do with life, eh?"

  "Truth," I agreed. "It's like…people keep calling me 'Lady Reid' and…I'm not even sure if there's a lordship or a peerage in my family history anywhere, even an honorary one. It's all incredibly disconcerting, and has forced me to make some extremely radical changes to my mental image of myself."

  Jessie nodded. "I know exactly what you mean."

  For a moment, it looked like she was going to say more, but there was tension and uncertainty in her face. Instead she looked down at her menu. "We probably ought to order…" She trailed off, then looked up and her eyes glittered at me with obvious amusement. "Did you ask me to meet you here specifically just because it's generic American cuisine?"

  I smiled. "Well, you're all out of sorts, I thought a little taste of home…"

  She laughed softly. "Thank you kindly, Miss Caley. Burger?"

  I smiled at the endearingly informal formality. "Burger."

  She flagged down the waiter, we placed our orders, and her coffee was refreshed. As we waited, I asked, "Bottom-line it for me. What does the UNSDI want from me?"

  Jessie sipped her coffee. "Basically? Just a friendly working relationship in the short term. Medium term, they'd like me to have a look around the town of Oakwood and see if it'd be a good place to resettle some friendly supernatural types who just want a quiet life."

  I blinked a few times. "Come again?"

  She smiled a little and lowered her voice. "My bosses at the UNSDI don't think that the supernatural world can stay hidden from the mundanes for much longer. At least, not as well as it has. They give it five years, maybe seven, nine at the outside, before somethin' happens that blows the lid off the whole thing. In the meantime, they're always on the lookout for places where friendly supernatural folk can live peacefully beside mundane mortals. Oakwood sounds like that kind of place."

  That was the second time in as many days that someone had expressed that particular concern to me. That the supernatural world couldn't stay hidden for much longer. It wasn't unsettling at all.

  I nodded slowly. "It already is, sort of."

  Jessie looked pleased. "Maybe we can open up a little branch office there, since it'd be good to have one close to you, if everything works out."

  I thought about the soon-to-be refurbished social hall, which Clark Turner would be moving the clerk's offices back into. That would leave the little two story converted house he was currently working out of empty, right next door. It would be an awfully convenient location.

  I narrowed my eyes at Jessie. "No request for a look inside Oakwood Hall?"

  She shook her head firmly. "Not a bit of it. Not until the second date, at least."

  I felt my cheeks flush and coughed. "I have a girlfriend."

  "Good," she said earnestly. "We can all go out. Groups are always more fun."

  I blinked at her a few times, trying to sort out if she was flirting with me or just having a bit of fun. After a moment she laughed. "You should see your face. I take it everyone else who's contacted you has been looking for a lever to get inside your home," she emphasized the last word firmly, then shook her head. "No, I won't do that, not 'till you and me are friends. Wouldn't even if my bosses had asked me to, and they didn't. Besides, I think they have a standin' agreement of some sort with your family already, don't they?"

  I nodded. "The names on the agreement were Gabriel and Mika. Some sort of mutual aid arrangement."

  She snorted. "Those two. Yeah, they're good people, but kind of a handful. In the best way," she added quickly. "You can trust 'em to the ends of the Earth."

  I found myself wondering, just for a moment - and it was a chilling thought - how far that was. Regardless, I believed her.

  "Caley," she said earnestly, "in all honesty, the UNSDI just want to have a friendly workin' relationship with ya. Seems to me they have a lot in common with your family, in some ways. It makes sense for you and us to be friends and work together when there's trouble. Getting a foot in the door at Oakwood, with an eye towards settling some folks who just want to live quiet lives, that'd be a bonus. Anything beyond that is gravy."

  "That does sound really good," I admitted. "What about you?"

  "What about me?" She asked guilelessly, her eyes sparkling again.

  "You said you volunteered to come over and 'court' me, as it were," I said, teasing her just a little. "Why?"

  For a moment, she looked a bit surprised at the question. Then she fell back into the little half smirk that seemed to be her default expression, but with - I thought - a hint of sadness. "I'd…I'm tryin' to reconnect with the world," she said softly. "Been tryin' for a few years now. It's hard. Everything is…familiar, but at the same time nothin' is…"

  The waiter, as waiters are wont to do, chose that moment - the wrong moment - to arrive with our food. Of course.

  We tucked in, and Jessie made appreciative sounds around her first bite while I tried to work out what she'd meant. Granted, we were virtually complete strangers, but I felt a weird kinship with this young woman, and didn't want to let go of that thread just yet. If Jessie Rhodes was going to be my primary contact within the UNSDI, I wanted to have a good feel for who I was dealing with.

  "So," she said, holding up a thick-cut chip. "French fry?"

  "Chips," I said with a smile.

  "Chips," she repeated, staring at the fried potato slice. She looked at me. "Potato chips?"

  "Crisps," I said, my smile widening a little.

  "Crisps," she repeated again, then popped the chip in her mouth and shook her head.

  "What's the old joke?" I asked teasingly, "two countries separated by a common language?"

  "The Canterville Ghost," Jessie said with a nod. "Granny…my godmother…made sure I'd read all the classics."

  "You were raised by your godmother?" I asked.

  She nodded around a bite of burger. "Yeah," she said when she swallowed. "When I was really little, I got lost…" She trailed off and frowned a little. "My life's been weird."

  "Mine was almost perfectly normal until last year," I said. "Except, you know, growing up with snow-white hair and mismatched eyes."

  Her eyes met mine for a moment and she nodded. "That run in the family?"

  I nodded. "Oh yeah, it's definitely hereditary. Apparently, every woman in my family has had white hair and virtually identical features. The complete heterochromia seems to skip generations." I sipped my drink, hoping that sharing some of my own weirdness would help her speak about her own. She seemed to want to. "My father painted a nearly life-size portrait of my mother just before they were married, and the first time I saw it I thought it was of me somehow, until I noticed her eyes were the same color."

  Her smile had softened from that little half-smirk into something that touched her eyes again. "Your family portrait hall would be creepy as all get out."

  I laughed. "Yeah, it would be. Maybe that's why there isn't one."

  She joined in my laughter for a moment, then looked down at her plate again. "When I was six, I got Lost." She said it a little differently this time, with extra emphasis on the word lost. "Stumbled into Faerie and couldn't find my way out again. Got lucky…got taken in by a powerful Wyldfae, who became my godmother. Granny…she did her best to give me a 'proper mortal education' - her words - but…you're starting to know the Fae. Everything they know about us is filtered through some weird distortion. Like a funhouse mirror. It's backwards and some bits are blown out of proportion and some bits are hardly to be seen, but it's all there, reflected in the Fey."

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I nodded, taking a bite of my burger and letting her talk.

  "I…honestly, I loved it," she said. "Livin' in a fairy wonderland was a great way to grow up. But it left me…different. Strange." She looked up, meeting my eyes, and again I was drawn to notice the unnatural perfection of her complexion and the odd iridescence of her eyes. "It's been tough reconnectin', now I'm back. Nothin's ever quite the way I expect it to be."

  "I know exactly what you mean," I said. "I have the same problem in reverse, sort of. My life - aside from my appearance - was perfectly mundane until last year. Now everything is weird…I never had a lot of connections to the world, but now I do and none of them are what I expected them to be."

  We looked at one another for a moment, and I thought…connection made.

  "Everybody at the UNSDI is accepting of weirdness and strangeness," Jessie said, "even the normies."

  "That's a good thing, isn't it?" I asked.

  "Surely is," she agreed. "It's about the only place in the world I can just be myself without drawin' looks or bein' pushed away. But even there…I'm isolated. Alone in a crowd."

  "Because of how you grew up," I said, thinking I had the gist of her thoughts.

  She nodded.

  "Again, I know exactly what you mean," I said. "Growing up in a Catholic orphanage…it was nothing like your life, I'm sure. But my looks and my mind made me Other." I emphasized the last word.

  "Yeah," Jessie agreed. "Other. Gabriel, Mika, and Vlad, our senior field officers at the UNSDI…they all know what it's like to feel alone and isolated. Ain't nobody our age at the UNSDI who's had to deal with the sort of weird shit we have. Maybe that's part of why they agreed to send me over here."

  She smiled then, and it was nothing like her other smiles. Still tight-lipped and showing no teeth, but not wry, sardonic, amused or sly. It was a tentative, hopeful smile.

  "Maybe I can help you understand the Sidhe," Jessie offered, "and you can help me reconnect with the mortal world."

  "That sounds pretty good," I said, suddenly feeling uneasy. Less than a year ago, I'd been confronted by a man in this very café who'd tried to control my mind to gain access to my home. Certainly, Jessie was nothing like him on the surface…but she was offering me help I wanted very badly, while sitting in the middle of a magical charm that was making people ignore anything less than perfectly normal about us…

  What if that magic was covering up something else? Sparkle was confident that no mind magic could affect me while she was connected to the Master Key and the heavily enchanted platinum choker it rode on around my neck. But…

  "Somethin' burned you," Jessie observed, her expression closing down a bit again. "You're suspicious, and I suppose ya got every right to be. I'm a complete stranger, after all."

  I shook my head a little. "It's not that. You're a stranger, but your approach is completely different than his was."

  "Wanna talk about it?" She offered. "My shrink says talkin' about traumas helps them be less troublin'."

  I hesitated for another moment, then quietly said, "His name was Bellinus von Einhardt, from the ICOA. He…tried to control my mind with magic a couple of times, with the goal of gaining entry to Oakwood Hall. When that didn't work…" I trailed off.

  Jessie put down her coffee cup. "He the one that attacked Oakwood Hall a few months ago?"

  I blinked. "How…?"

  Her wry smirk returned. "The UNSDI knows someone assaulted Oakwood Hall back in April, it was in your dossier. No details, but the localized thunderstorm and a lightnin' bolt that was visible from dozens'a miles away didn't exactly go unnoticed by the Met Office. We heard about it through channels almost as soon as they recorded it."

  She popped a chip in her mouth and chewed for a moment before swallowing and continuing. "See, Oakwood Hall's a kinda blank spot on the magical map - and sure'n my bosses would love to know how that works, but I ain't gonna pry - but the surroundin' area's very magically active, like the area around Glastonbury Tor, and Stonehenge, and a few other places. That activity spiked hard before and during the storm, then was at a steadily higher level for a few weeks after."

  "The UNSDI has ways of detecting magic at a distance?" I asked, floored.

  "Sure," she replied. "So does the ICOA. As I understand it, it's just a more complex form of basic magic detection…" She hesitated, then smiled lopsidedly. "Ya do know how to do that, right? If not, I could probably teach ya. My way's a bit different than the usual though. I just sniff it out, but putting yer nose to the wind is a hell of a lot easier than understandin' all the gobbledygook in the formulas they tried teachin' me."

  I smiled at the offer. "It was pretty much the first thing I learned about magic."

  She nodded. "You had a good teacher, then. That was pretty much the first thing my Granny taught me, too."

  I finished the last bite of my burger before picking up the thread of my explanation. "So…yes, von Einhardt was the one who attacked the Hall. He damaged the wards around the property, had an accomplice summon a giant boar to batter down the front gates, then cruised in and tried to kill me."

  Jessie chewed her last bite slowly, chasing it with the last of her coffee, before replying. "Since you're here to meet with me, I take it that peckerwood's been dealt with?"

  There was, I thought, a curious glint in her eyes, something dangerous.

  I nodded. "I had some help."

  "Not as much as she thinks," Sparkle said quietly but clearly from below my chin.

  The dangerous gleam instantly vanished from Jessie's eyes, replaced by wary curiosity. "That Sparkle? She's what, hidin' as part of your pendant?"

  "Yes," I said, content to let her think that's all the Master Key was, for the moment.

  "May I?" She asked, gesturing toward me. When I nodded, she rose a little and leaned across the table, peering at the Master Key. I saw her nostrils flare as she inhaled. Then she sat back, shook her head, and whistled softly. "That's right amazin', that is. Even knowin' she's there, I can barely sense her at all."

  I felt a pulse of pride and pleasure from Sparkle, and smiled. "She's had a lot of practice. I guess she used to do the same thing for my mother."

  "That's really cool," Jessie said, leaning forward a little again. "So, just to be clear: this von Einhardt's not a problem anymore?"

  I shook my head carefully, wondering at the question and the curious dangerous look that had come into her eyes.

  She sat back, looking satisfied. "Good. You said he was ICOA." She was still saying it 'eye-coah', but this time more than the others it sounded like she meant to spit after saying it.

  I nodded. "I know he was a member. I don't know if he was acting on their behalf, but he was definitely one of theirs. I'm also reasonably certain that he was responsible for the deaths of my parents." I did not mention that he had been my great-grandfather on my father's side. "He wanted to get into the Hall very badly at the end…badly enough to be stupid about it, I think. And if his colleagues knew anything about it, they haven't let on when they approached me. And they weren't particularly subtle about anything else."

  "No," Jessie agreed, "subtle don't belong in the same sentence with them. They're convinced the whole world should still be bendin' a knee to them. Not that anybody outside the old British Empire ever did, far as I know." She pursed her lips, then carefully asked, "Would you object to me makin' inquiries from my end? Maybe I can find out somethin' about what he was up to for ya."

  "You'd do that?" I asked, surprised.

  "Yes," she said firmly. "I ain't a fairy queen. I want to do favors for my friends, and I hope we're gonna be good friends, you and me. If there's one thing the UNSDI has in abundance, it's info. Shouldn't be hard for me to find out if we know - or can learn - anything."

  I gave her a warm smile, and felt the approval from both Sparkle and Penny. "I'd very much like to be your friend, Jessie. I'm letting the ICOA's…intrusions…into my privacy make me a little paranoid, and I really shouldn't. You've put your best foot forward at every step so far, and that speaks highly for you and the UNSDI. I'd very much appreciate anything you can tell me about von Einhardt's activities before he came after me. He's not a problem for me anymore, but his colleagues seem destined to become one."

  "For you and everybody else, the snotty little shits," she muttered bluntly, that hard edge back in her eyes. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone. She smiled a wide, closed-lipped smile, her eyes sparkling happily. "I'm very happy to help."

  The waiter seemed to materialize beside our table. "All done, ladies? Care for dessert?"

  Jessie and I shared a look, then she asked, "You have chocolate cake?"

  "We do indeed, miss," he said with a nod. "Double layer chocolate cake with mousse filling and buttercream frosting."

  I thought she was going to start drooling.

  She met my eyes with a hopeful look. "Share a slice with me?"

  "Lovely idea," I agreed, then added to the waiter, "One piece and two forks, please."

  He flashed a quick smile and nodded. "Of course. I'll take your plates and be right back with that. Freshen your drinks?"

  "Please," we both said together, looked at one another in surprise, and laughed together.

  It felt good.

  The waiter grinned, collected our plates, and disappeared. He returned with a fresh glass of ginger ale for me, refilled Jessie's dangerously black and strong coffee, and disappeared again. When he returned a minute later, he brought the requested slice of cake and two forks.

  I clearly heard Sparkle whimper as he put it down on the table.

  Once he was gone, I laughed softly. "I'm going to have to get Sparkle a special treat when we get home. She has a wicked sweet tooth, and she's probably dying at the sight of that cake." Sparkle huffed almost silently, but settled down.

  "Wish my notice-me-not charm was a bit stronger," Jessie said. "I'd like t'meet her, and Penny too. But it's all I can do to make people ignore my…weirdness. I think an honest-to-goodness fairy gobbling down cake would overload it."

  "Would you be willing to teach me how to cast it?" I asked hopefully as I picked up my fork. "It seems very useful, and maybe I could figure out a way to make it stronger."

  "I don't…relate…to magic the way most mortals do. I don't cast 'spells' the way mortal spellcasters do," she said softly. Then she smiled, a surprisingly shy and tentative little smile. "I reckon I could maybe pass on the trick of it. It's all just secrets and tricks to me. Might have to work up a trade though. Favors I can happily do for free, but Fae Secrets and Tricks usually gotta be taken, traded or earned. It's just how it works."

  Needless to say, the chocolate cake didn't last long at all.

  "You know," Jessie said as she finished her coffee, "if that peerage thing is really buggin' you, I hear you can buy up a slice'a Scotland, and they let you put 'laird' on your checks and shit."

  I smiled ruefully. "I'm afraid that's just a very low-key scam for the tourists."

  "Well, hell," she sighed, but her eyes were sparkling anyway. "Now I gotta think of a new birthday present for Lord Phil, Duke of Warehouseshire."

  We laughed together, and I said, "Oh, do it anyway. As long as you know it's not legally binding, I can see how it'd still be fun."

  She nodded. "I'll think about it." She sighed. "Right now though, I'd better get back to what passes for my office. I've got a first-contact report to write."

  "A positive one, I hope," I said.

  "Very positive," she agreed. "And I imagine ya have your own schedule to keep."

  "Lessons, lessons, and more lessons," I said ruefully. "This made a very pleasant break from the routine."

  "Ya got my number," she said. "Well…cell and email ain't changin' anyway. Pretty sure I have a new local number."

  "Speaking of which," I said, and retrieved the little notebook from my bag. I pulled one of the perforated pages from the back, and scribbled my contact info on it. "This is my cell and email, so you can reach me more easily." I slid the piece of paper across the table to her.

  She took it and slid it into a pocket on her vest. "Thank you. Hey, lunch is on me today. I know ya got more money than God, but I have an expense account."

  I flashed her a quick, friendly grin. "Okay, but only if you come out to Oakwood and have dinner with me soon. None of this generic American grill…actual, authentic British pub food."

  She gave me a dubious look.

  "Mrs. O'Day at the Oak & Ivy Pub in town makes an incredible beef stew, which she serves in crusty sourdough bread bowls."

  Jessie blinked a few times, then licked her lips. "All right, you're makin' me want to come out there tonight. Gimme a few days to get settled in and get my bearings here, and I'll give ya a call to make arrangements."

  "Good!" I said. "I can give you a little tour of Oakwood at the same time, maybe introduce you to some of the town council members."

  We both rose, and when she extended her hand this time, it was to shake mine warmly. "Miss Caley," she said, "it's been a genuine pleasure. I'm lookin' forward to next time already. And to meeting Sparkle and Penny all proper-like."

  "I hope to speak with you soon," I said. "And please let your employers at the UNSDI know that I'm very interested in pursuing a working relationship with them."

  Jessie's smile widened without showing teeth, and she released my hand. "They'll be happy to hear that. I am too. I'll call soon."

  "I'll look forward to it."

  With a little nod, she turned on her heel and glided away toward the counter to pay the bill. For a moment, I wasn't entirely certain her feet actually touched the floor when she walked.

  This was, I felt certain, the beginning of a very interesting friendship.