Stiletto

  “Good morning,” the man said cheerfully, holding out his hand. Odette shook it cautiously. “You are the first ones?”

  “We’re the first ones to arrive,” said Odette. “We’re not, like, ranked first or anything.”

  “That’s fine,” said the man. “I am Dr. Francesco Hethrington-Ffoulkes, and I’ll be overseeing the preparations for you.” Odette introduced herself and her brother while Pawn Bannister tapped away on his phone in the background.

  “Now, as you are formally guests of the Checquy here in the United Kingdom, and because several of your party do not legally exist, we are taking responsibility for your well-being and security. Accordingly, we will need to build a profile of your identifying characteristics. I’m afraid that it may seem a little intrusive,” he said apologetically.

  “We will be taking fingerprints, palmprints, toeprints, voiceprints, and impressions of your teeth, tongue, and ears. We will collect fingernail clippings, toenail clippings, strands of your hair, swabs from the inside of your mouth, and samples of urine and blood. Not to fret, young fellow,” he said reassuringly to Alessio, “it will be just a few drops, and we’ll be as gentle as possible.” Alessio, who had been responsible for harvesting his own blood and bone marrow since he was nine, regarded him stonily.

  “And that’s it?” said Odette before she could stop herself. Dr. Hethrington-Ffoulkes looked at her, startled. “I’m sorry, but you’re not even putting us through an MRI, or an x-ray, or, or one of those airport scanners . . .”

  “Millimeter wave,” said Alessio helpfully.

  “Yes, that. Don’t you want to run a Geiger counter over us? Or at least check my handbag?”

  “Well, I suppose we could, if you like,” said the Checquy doctor. “But it’s not really necessary. You see, detailed descriptions of your, uh, enhancements were provided to us ahead of time. Although I would like a few drops of both the venoms that you carry in your system, Miss Leliefeld,” he added hopefully, “if you wouldn’t mind. I have to admit, though, that’s just for my own personal research. I’m a bit of a toxicology buff.”

  “You know?” squeaked Odette.

  “We exchanged dossiers weeks ago,” said Bannister airily. “As a sign of goodwill. So, everyone knows who you are. At least, everyone who works in the Diplomatic section. We’ve got details of your education, your rank within the Broederschap, your surgeries. I do hope everything’s healing all right, by the way. And don’t worry, we’ve made sure to have lots of cold, noncaffeinated beverages available so your throat shouldn’t be aggravated at all.”

  Oh God, thought Odette. So the entire diplomatic corps knows everything about me. They know about my spurs, they know I’ve got a sore throat. Hell, they’ve probably got a report on that time I wet my pants at the museum when I was six years old. Despite her best efforts, she was blushing furiously.

  “You’re our guests,” said Dr. Hethrington-Ffoulkes in a reasonable tone. “It’s important that we begin from a situation of mutual trust and security. And also that we verify everyone’s identity.”

  “All right,” said Odette. “That makes sense.”

  “Very good,” said the doctor. “I’ll be taking care of you, Miss Leliefeld. Pawn Winger will escort Mr. Leliefeld.” Pawn Winger was a pretty doctor with red hair, and Alessio was so entranced by her that he didn’t even seem to mind that she was a Pawn. Or that she looked absolutely petrified by him. She led him over to a machine on the other side of the room.

  “We’ll start with the fingers and toes, shall we?” said Dr. Hethrington-Ffoulkes.

  “Certainly,” said Odette.

  “I’m afraid you’ll need to remove your tights,” said the doctor.

  “Oh, okay,” said Odette.

  “There’s a lavatory through that door, just over there.”

  The bathroom seemed to date back to the Victorian period, and unfortunately it did not appear to have been cleaned since it was built. There were all sorts of pipes that might once have been gleaming brass but now looked as if they were supporting several ecosystems. Odette felt distinctly unglamorous and unbusinesslike as she hopped about taking off her stockings while trying not to put a bare foot on the slick floor. So this is the world of high-stakes supernatural diplomacy, she thought grimly. She teetered on one high-heel-shod foot and fell against the sink. Great, just great. By the time she emerged from the bathroom, she was red-faced and her hair was somewhat less professional-looking than it had been. Dr. Hethrington-Ffoulkes escorted her to a corner of the room and helped her into a dentist’s chair. “Comfortable?”

  “A little ill at ease,” admitted Odette as the chair rose up smoothly, presumably bringing her to a more convenient working level. The doctor smiled without looking at her. He was peering at her feet carefully. I wish I’d gotten a pedicure, she thought. But who knew? She realized, to her intense mortification, that there was a bit of dried slime from the bathtub under the nail of one of her big toes.

  “There isn’t going to be any problem with me taking a clipping of your toenails, is there?” he asked, looking up at her. “They can be cut, right?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said. She flinched a little when he touched her foot—his hands were much cooler than she had expected—and his assistant flinched in response, which made Odette flinch again. Whereupon the assistant flinched even more violently, and it took a real effort for Odette not to continue the cycle lest they both end up convulsing on the floor.

  The assistant handed Hethrington-Ffoulkes a tablet computer, and he consulted it briefly before pressing it against Odette’s left foot. “Now, if you could just flatten your foot as much as you can, please. We want as complete a scan as possible. Good.” The doctor looked at the result and nodded. “Nice, clear images of the toes,” he said approvingly. He tapped away at the screen, and a frown grew on his face. “Oh, dear,” he muttered to himself. “Oh, dear, oh, dear.”

  “What?” asked Odette nervously. “Is there a problem?”

  “Not with your foot,” he said absently. “I’m just checking the cricket scores, and the West Indies are thrashing us.” He shook his head at the computer before pressing it against her other foot. Meanwhile, his assistant was gingerly using another tablet to take prints of her hands. Odette smiled and the woman looked away. “Now we just need to get some ink-based prints as backup, and then we’ll move on to the casts,” he said.

  For the next half hour, the doctor and his jumpy assistant did their thing, scanning and copying and taking samples. Whenever new members of the delegation filtered in, there would be a pause in the proceedings as Dr. Hethrington-Ffoulkes stopped what he was doing and went over to introduce himself, leaving Odette gagging on a mouthful of dental putty or reciting the first stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” into a microphone. At one point, she had to suffer the indignity of reentering the unpleasant bathroom and peeing into a container while a wide-eyed nurse watched to make sure she didn’t substitute someone else’s urine or give birth to some stoats or something.

  Of course, the Grafter envoys submitted to the examinations without any complaint. They were accustomed to taking business calls even while undergoing thoracic surgery, so a few scrapings and clippings couldn’t throw them off their stride. The Checquy doctors and nurses were careful in their work, although they seemed aghast at the fact that they were working on actual Grafters. There was a slight commotion when Grootvader Ernst’s fingerprints insisted on changing even as they were scanned, and the nurses were somewhat at a loss when one of the visiting dignitaries turned out not to have fingernails or toenails, but apart from these setbacks, the proceedings proceeded without incident.

  “You’re quite thorough,” remarked Odette as the doctor held a container of molding putty against her left ear.

  “Ah, we’ll be taking even more samples once our organizations are united,” said Dr. Hethrington-Ffoulkes. “The Checquy keeps very, very detailed records of all its operatives. All this is just for security and legal purpose
s.”

  “Legal purposes?”

  “We need to establish beyond a doubt who is present at what meetings and who signs what. Now, we just need to take some pictures of your eyes.”

  The dentist’s chair sank down, and Odette put her bare feet on the cold tiled floor. The eye machine was just a few meters away and she had watched as her colleagues had their retinas and pupils scanned and the insides of their eyeballs photographed. “It’s pretty standard optical coherence tomography,” said the doctor. “No unusual technologies. And after that, you’re done.” She sat in the chair offered, and there was a mechanical whining as the apparatus was lowered and closed around her head. “Right, now, if you can just look directly into the lenses.” Odette obediently stared ahead, keeping her eyes wide open as a light erupted out of the machine. It flared with the force of a thousand supernova suns into her unnaturally dilated, gorgeously large belladonna-style pupils.

  “Ow! Klootzak!” she shouted, flinching back and slamming her head against the equipment.

  “What happened? Are you all right?” asked Dr. Hethrington-Ffoulkes in the frantic tones of a man who might have inadvertently sparked a diplomatic fiasco.

  “Yes,” said Odette sourly, holding her hands over her eyes. Her head was pounding as though she’d just walked into a wall, and there appeared to be a disco-kaleidoscope arrangement on the inside of her eyelids. Her tender rods and cones were screaming bloody murder. “It’s my own stupid fault. I didn’t even think. My pupils were bigger than they should have been.”

  “Oh,” said the relieved voice of Dr. Hethrington-Ffoulkes, somewhere to her left. Then, with obvious curiosity: “Why?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Odette, feeling that treacherous blush climb up her cheeks again. She concentrated, and the blood was sucked out of her face, leaving her even more light-headed. She cautiously took her hands away from her eyes. By now, her pupils had constricted as much as they could, but her eyes still felt like they were pulsating.

  “Would you like an aspirin or something?”

  “No, I’m not allowed painkillers yet, they’ll interfere with my system,” she said. “If you could just please get me out of this thing and let me sit down for a while.”

  “Of course,” said Dr. Hethrington-Ffoulkes. He retracted the apparatus from around her head, put his latex-gloved hand in hers, and guided her to a chair. “Your shoes and handbag are right next to you,” he said. “I’m going to go help the others finish up the exams. You’re the first to be done, so you’ve got some time to recuperate.”

  “Thank you,” said Odette, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice. The noise of the examinations was muted, but it reverberated through her head. She heard the doctor move away and risked opening her eyes a chink. Even through her contracted pupils, the room was blindingly bright, but she could make out people moving about.

  Squinting, she could just see the bathroom door immediately to her left. I’m going to sidle in there discreetly, she thought, throw some water on my face, put my stockings and shoes back on, and maybe have a quick therapeutic vomit. She fumbled for her handbag and shoes, stood up, and, keeping her hand on the wall, awkwardly made her way to the bathroom.

  As Odette stepped through the door, her sullen brain made several observations in rapid succession:

  1.There’s much more of an echo in this bathroom than before.

  2.It doesn’t smell as bad in here as it did.

  3.Someone has lowered the floor and added a step where there was no step.

  4.I am falling forward uncontrollably.

  5.Someone appears to have replaced the dingy tiles of the bathroom with polished marble in a black-and-white-checkerboard pattern.

  6.I am able to notice this because I am now lying sprawled on the floor.

  7.My face really, really hurts.

  All of these thoughts added up to the inescapable conclusion that she had, in her dazzled state, gone through the wrong door. Please, God, let me have gone into the men’s room, she thought desperately. Let me look up and see several men urinating into a trough and looking at me quizzically over their shoulders. Let me not have gone through the door I think I went through. She took a deep breath and lifted up her face.

  Wow. Thanks for nothing, God.

  As she had feared, the elegant marble floor did not reflect a disgusting lack of equality in the standards of the Apex House lavatories. Instead, it reflected the fact that she was in the large, beautifully appointed foyer where the Checquy elite had gathered to greet their distinguished guests. She sighed and rested her cheek on the cool marble for a moment.

  Finally, she got up on her knees and grimly waited for her eyes to reset. Slowly, details began to swim out of the blur of her vision. Through the clearing haze, she saw a small crowd of people standing at one end of the room. All of them were dressed in expensive-looking suits, and all of them were staring at her in astonishment.

  They were not normal people. Quite aside from the fact that they all had exquisite posture, some of them were obviously not your standard-issue human beings. Odette’s eyes had scanned the group and automatically picked out the four people she least wanted to see. The members of the Checquy Court. Her treacherous memory was helpfully presenting little dossiers on them and their positions in the Checquy’s demented chess-based hierarchy.

  The stately looking older lady with the dark chocolate eyes and disapproving expression is Lady Linda Farrier, one of the two heads of the Checquy. Viscountess in the British aristocracy. Spent a couple of years as lady-in-waiting to the last Queen. She can walk into people’s dreams and tinker about with their sleeping minds. Apparently, she once goaded an enemy of the Checquy into gnawing his own hands off in his sleep.

  The blond man with the tan who is smoking a cigarette inside a government building is Major Joshua Eckhart. Chevalier—responsible for international operations. Superior tactician. Manipulates metal via touch. He can warp it, mold it, render it liquid. He killed Graaf Gerd de Leeuwen. Then he went out for a hamburger.

  Next to him is the newest appointee to the Court, Bishop Raushan Attariwala.

  And there’s Rook Thomas, the only person who appears to be concerned about the fact that I just pitched face-first onto the floor.

  Odette became aware of some flashes of distant light flickering in her vision. Maybe I have a concussion, she thought, and this is all a hallucination.

  Instead, it turned out that some photographers were present in order to record the historic meeting of the Checquy and the Grafters. The photographers, who knew a good thing when they saw it, were immortalizing this moment for posterity.

  Terrific.

  11

  The car that came for Felicity was driven by an older man wearing tweed and a dissatisfied expression. Felicity had a sneaking suspicion that he was actually a retired Checquy operative who lived nearby and who had been abruptly reenlisted into service to ferry her back to London. For one thing, the car was an extremely nice Jaguar, and for another, there was a set of golf clubs in the backseat.

  You never leave the Checquy, she thought. You may get your farewell party, your gold watch, and your pension, but one day, you’ll be called back out of retirement to smite evil or oversee an investigation or transport a girl in pajamas and two pairs of bed socks.

  “Felicity Jane Clements?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He gestured for her to get in, and the car peeled off almost before the door was closed. She hurriedly put on her seat belt.

  “Do you have my address?” she asked.

  “You’re wanted at the Hammerstrom Building,” he said. “No detours.”

  “Dressed like this?” she asked incredulously. He shrugged and then proceeded not to say a single word for the entire drive. To make matters worse, traffic between Ashford and London had been held up by an accident on the M20. Apparently, a truckload of carbonated beverages had overturned, and the subsequent chaos had resulted in miles of backed-up c
ars. The driver kept sighing heavily in a way that suggested he blamed Felicity for the whole thing, and it took her some effort to resist the urge to apologize.

  Much to her surprise, she fell asleep. She woke up forty-five minutes later with a jerk and a gasp only to find that they had moved approximately twenty-five meters and that her face was welded to the shoulder strap of her seat belt by the copious amounts of drool that had seeped out of her mouth. Peeling her face away from the belt made a mortifyingly loud noise, and the driver’s mouth twisted in disgust.

  Then, in the middle of Essential Classics on BBC Radio 3, it suddenly hit her. Perhaps she’d been unconsciously avoiding it, or perhaps the journey in Chopra’s arms through that strange place had done something to her thoughts, or perhaps she’d simply been too exhausted to think about it. But now it filled her mind.

  They’re dead.

  Her comrades Odgers and Jennings. Even Andrea Cheng, who, with her powers and her sharp mind, had always been able to escape any situation, was unlikely to have escaped the inferno. They’d been murdered in front of her. Now when she closed her eyes, Felicity saw Odgers lying on that floor, her blood pouring from her throat. Or else she saw Jennings, silhouetted in flames that boiled out of his own body.

  I’ll have to face their families, she thought helplessly. Odgers’s husband. Jennings’s and Andrea’s partners. It was the thought of Jennings’s little daughter, Louise—her own goddaughter—that really broke her. The knowledge that she would have to answer questions about Louise’s father’s death, and that she would have to lie. That girl would never know the truth.

  “Nooooo . . .” She realized that she had actually made a sound, moaning softly despite herself.