Skin Deep by Mark Del Franco Page A

meeting or a reporter or a strategy group and spin the Guild and the fey in the best light possible. People would compliment her on her marketing talents, despite the fact that the skill was predicated on not telling the whole truth in order to get what she wanted. She was good at it. Too good, she thought lately, to the extent that she wondered if deep down she had started lying to herself.
    She drained the remains of her drink and slid the glass onto the nightstand.

CHAPTER 5
    TO AN OUTSIDE observer, which in a Guildhouse invariably meant a human one, a meeting at the D.C. Fey Guild attracted an assortment of people not encountered on a regular basis. Most everyone knew what a Celtic fairy or a Teutonic elf looked like. Dwarves were obvious and easy. Druids didn’t raise an eyebrow, but the average person had a hard time telling the difference between a brownie and a kobold. The solitary fey were another matter altogether.
    The solitaries claimed neither Maeve nor Donor Elfenkonig as their leader, though the various individuals and groups had natural affinities for one or the other. In truth, “solitary” was a bit of misnomer, because not all solitaries were single, lonely individuals. The name was more a recognition of their status apart from the more mainstream fey, who often despised and belittled them when they weren’t dismissing them. After Convergence, the solitaries had found a new voice for themselves in a world where monarchies did not hold sway.
    Laura shifted in her seat and glanced around the conference table as the public-relations staff meeting drew to a close. The department had more solitaries than any other at the Guild. Politics dictated that the group tasked with convincing humans that the fey should be treated inclusively employ the solitary fey even the Guild didn’t love. Their high profile rarely translated into much authority. To the other fey, they still lived under a cloud of fear and suspicion.
    A large contingent of brownies were part of the department. They weren’t solitaries, and they had a tendency toward efficiency that the solitaries lacked. The other staffers ran a gamut of species that kept taxonomists awake at night. Blue-skinned nixies milled about the floor, too fidgety to remain in seats, while the odd wood fairy with its bark-skinned flesh sat as still as an oak. Several sleek selkies, almost human-looking when out of the water, gathered in a clique at one end of the table, as far as possible from the pale merrows at the other end. The two fey water species had an intense dislike for each other.
    Laura used her body language to appear attentive to Resha Dunne. He was a merrow, a member of one of the most hostile types of sea fey. Where his brothers tended toward aggression and seduction, particularly with human women, Resha seemed insecure and tentative about everything. Of course, Laura had never seen him in his water aspect, which was when his species tended to be at its worst in temperament. Even so, Resha was someone she chose to spend little time with. He felt clammy and smelled damp to her.
    Although he was the solitary representative on the Guild board of directors, Resha voted the Celtic party line as a matter of course. He never attended a meeting that he couldn’t drag into overtime. What could be discussed in an hour took two when he was involved, with a monotonous litany of agenda items and committee forming at the end for the next meeting. Usually Laura delegated one of her staff to deal with him, but the fey exhibit being planned at the National Archives was too high-profile for her to avoid him without insulting him. She flipped through the memos in front of her to hide the fact that she was scanning her PDA to monitor email.
    Keeping the lives of her competing personalities under control was difficult to do alone. Terryn helped enormously, either by direct intervention or propagating disinformation campaigns on her whereabouts. That need to juggle and balance