Eerie turned an immediate bright red, and hurriedly looked away. Anastasia had to stifle a laugh. They were two easy, Alex and Eerie both. She almost couldn’t help herself.
“N-nothing,” Eerie sputtered, still looking conspicuously away from Anastasia with all the guile of a guilty child. “Well, just friends. I mean, we only met recently, and…”
“Why did you ask Svetlana to send the two of you to San Francisco, then?” Anastasia asked patiently. “That is out of the ordinary, even for you, Eerie.”
Anastasia waited, her eyes fixed on Eerie. The impasse was not long. Eerie hung her head in resignation.
“You’re scary, Anastasia,” Eerie hummed quietly. “I am helping Alex. I didn’t do anything bad.”
Anastasia sat up, and reached over to pat Eerie on the knee. She noticed that Eerie had found time to buy cute patterned pajamas. She wondered what kind of underwear she had bought, with an internal smirk.
“Why Alex, though? Why are you interested in helping him?”
Eerie got flustered again, but this time, she didn’t look away.
“Well, he helped me,” Eerie said reluctantly. “And he is… interesting. Don’t you think so, Anastasia?”
“Very.”
“And also,” Eerie continued, quietly, almost as if she were talking to herself, “he seems nice, don’t you think?”
Anastasia felt pity for Eerie, momentarily, and then squashed it. Now was not the time to be sentimental, she reminded herself. She decided to risk pushing a little harder.
“No, Eriu, I don’t think so,” Anastasia said casually. “But, if you do, then shouldn’t you consider what getting close to you could do to that ‘nice’ boy? It doesn’t end well for humans who get involved with changelings, you know. Or have you forgotten your family history?”
Anastasia waited for a response, and when she didn’t get one, looked over at Eerie. Later, she would applaud her own composure, masking the surprise she’d felt, keeping her face impassive. In the moment, however, she was too stunned for self-congratulation.
Eerie was staring at her, sitting up at the edge of the bed, her posture rigid and her expression stormy, her eyes as clear and cold as the stream near Anastasia’s childhood home. And also, Anastasia realized, Eerie was emitting a subtle, shifting radiance; as she watched, Eerie’s irises ran the gamut between bright blue and murky hazel, one shade blending into the next. Around her, tiny motes of light spun and danced, making periodic lazy half-revolutions about her, leaving behind brilliant, multi-colored trails, each particle part of a golden cloud, a shifting, fluid expanse of light that radiated out from where Eerie sat.
Anastasia thought that maybe her ploy had worked a little too well.
“Mistress of the Black Sun or no, be careful what you call me,” Eerie warned, her voice cool and subtly menacing. The musical quality her voice normally had was entirely absent, replaced with a composed iciness. “I cooperated with you because our interests in this matter aligned. That does not make us allies, Anastasia.”
Anastasia smiled, her suspicions confirmed.
“Finally, you come out to play, Eriu.” Anastasia looked impressed. “I had an inkling, of course, but it was too hard to be sure. Tell me, then, what do you have planned for little Eerie? And what about Alex? I never would have imagined you were the romantic type.”
Eerie’s eyes narrowed, her irises changing color like an oil slick in the sun, her skin translucent and permeated with an amber luminescence.
“I will not answer your questions. I am not one of your servants, and I do not care how long your shadow has grown.”
The changeling’s face contorted into an inhumanly rigid sneer, so different from Eerie’s normal expression that Anastasia could barely see the resemblance. Anastasia felt a little bit bad for Alex, despite himself.
“Take my warning to heart, whelp. You have been compensated in full for your part in this. I am under no obligation to share my designs with you, regardless of our previous collaboration. I advise you not to interfere in my affairs, with the boy, or anything else. We will not speak again.”
“Fine,” Anastasia said airily. “You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”
After a moment, the light around Eerie dissipated and her eyes slowly refocused. She sat back on the bed, looking self-conscious, and then turned her attention back to the mute TV screen and the crawl of numbers that represented an abstraction of the world economy. After a little while, Anastasia also resumed watching the silent television.
“So, you do like him,” Anastasia remarked cheerfully a few moments later.
She managed to keep the smile off her face until she heard Eerie stomp off to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Like children, she thought. All too easy.
Alex looked at the streets around him, confused, and then over at Margot.
“Hey, Margot? Is this the way back to the hotel?”
Margot seemed to find something in the buildings across the street that required her urgent attention.
“Round about,” Margot said finally, still avoiding eye-contact. “Wanted to check and see if we picked up any company, before we took it back with us. And,” Margot added, reluctantly, “there was something I wanted to talk to you about, anyway. She isn’t what you think she is, you know. Eerie, I mean.”
Alex sighed, and looked over at Margot. The bar behind her made heavy use of blue and pink neon, and she was weirdly illuminated by it as she walked underneath the signs, almost otherworldly. Literally otherworldly, Alex corrected himself.
“Are we still talking about this? Did Anastasia put you up to it?”
Margot looked perturbed, stepping neatly around the blankets and cardboard boxes of a homeless encampment, which extended out from the alcove of a gated electronics store to encompass the inner half of the sidewalk. Alex looked away from the eyes he saw there, shining in the darkness, feeling an obscure and fleeting shame.
“I’ve known Eerie since she was little. We’ve been neighbors, since we arrived at the Academy, and because no one else would talk to us, we ended up spending a lot of time together.” Margot frowned, momentarily, and then continued on. “I am working for the Black Sun right now, Alex. But, it is a temporary arrangement. I’m not one of Anastasia’s creatures. I’m somebody who helps out, in return for an appropriate fee.”
“I’ve always wanted to ask,” Alex said, with more malice than he’d intended, “why didn’t you do something about Steve, that day in the cafeteria? You were right next to her, after all.”
Margot was silent for a while after that, and Alex started to wonder if he’d gone too far with his last comment. Somewhere in the city around them, not too far, a woman or a child screamed, the sound starting high and piercing, like a siren, and then slowly modulating down, and then trailing away to nothing. The silence that followed was more disturbing than the scream.
“We aren’t friends Alex, she’s just someone I’ve known for a long time,” Margot said curtly. “My profession doesn’t allow for much in the way of personal relationships. And I’m not about to start compensating for Eerie’s social inadequacies. If Steve was a real threat, I would have stopped him. He is a petty bully. Not my concern.”
Alex laughed and looked up at the moon, jaundiced and huge, like that first night, with the Weir, the night that the world opened up to reveal another world inside of it, like one of those little Russian dolls. It seemed wrong that the moon should still look the same, when everything else felt so different to him.
“Are you sure? Because it doesn’t really look that way, to me.”
Margot shook her head. Alex had gotten used to her pigtails, and she looked a bit strange to him with her hair down.
“Are you any different, Alex? We are all mercenaries, if you think about it. The lucky ones get to negotiate their own terms of sale. That’s all there is to it. Don’t think they won’t find a way to buy you. You’re lucky they are even interested.”