White Witch, Black Curse
Kim Harrison
The 7th stirring instalment of the urban fantasy-thriller series starring Rachel Morgan. A pacey and addictive novel of sexy bounty-hunting witches, cunning demons and vicious vampires.Rachel Morgan, kick-ass witch and bounty hunter, has taken her fair share of hits, and has broken lines she swore she would never cross. But when her lover was murdered it left a deeper wound than Rachel ever imagined, and now she won’t rest until his death is solved… and avenged. Whatever the cost.Yet the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and when a new predator moves to the apex of the Inderlander food chain, Rachel’s past comes back to haunt her. Some wounds take time to heal but some scars never fade.
White Witch, Black Curse
Kim Harrison
Copyright (#ulink_1b86258d-cada-5eb8-b148-48717d9096a8)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper Voyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollins, 2009
Copyright © Kim Harrison 2009
Kim Harrison asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Source ISBN: 9780007311279
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2010 ISBN: 9780007372539
Version: 2016-02-03
To the guy who finishes my sentences and gets my jokes. Even the lame ones.
Contents
Cover Page (#u1416a29f-add5-5d92-92bf-2aa8de981fca)
Title Page (#uece188e7-5c81-5fcb-967d-17f388dbfb3d)
Copyright (#uea3ed039-98ec-5c86-a344-eb7e6d85a1dc)
Dedication (#uca3b2aba-1652-5817-b3f0-068af1a499c4)
One (#ubb6b43ab-7efe-53ab-8a73-d3260706436f)
Two (#ud5f6b575-0c5b-5da1-a85c-0cbbb8ffdc88)
Three (#u8eb084e1-d8ee-5284-80f1-20d0418e0f10)
Four (#u3b499ec9-b8df-5e8b-ba2c-18f836d468a7)
Five (#u9a2e9517-1221-57f3-ad7d-7fd722b1e1a7)
Six (#u3f8eaecd-bae4-5543-8973-8b9ae4da6c05)
Seven (#u8cef8970-7f04-5bfc-9ed8-0e6e7ed6f9cc)
Eight (#u4c02cdc1-c725-57f3-9144-590332868fad)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
By Kim Harrison (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#ulink_03b0f555-b5da-55f9-a8be-b4085a3b024c)
The bloody handprint was gone, wiped from Kisten’s window but not from my memory, and it ticked me off that someone had cleaned it, as if they were trying to steal what little recollection I retained about the night he’d died. The anger was misplaced fear if I was honest with myself. But I wasn’t. Most days it was better that way.
Stifling a shiver from the December chill that had taken the abandoned cruiser, now in dry dock rather than floating on the river, I stood in the tiny kitchen and stared at the milky plastic as if willing the smeared mark back into existence. In the near distance came the overindulgent, powerful huff of a diesel train crossing the Ohio River. The scrape of Ford’s shoes on the metallic boarding ladder was harsh, and worry pinched my brow.
The Federal Inderland Bureau had officially closed the investigation into Kisten’s murder—Inderland Security hadn’t even opened one—but the FIB wouldn’t let me into their impound yard without an official presence. That meant intelligent, awkward Ford, since Edden thought I needed more psychiatric evaluation and I wouldn’t come in anymore. Not since I fell asleep on the couch and everyone in the FIB’s Cincinnati office had heard me snoring. I didn’t need evaluation. What I needed was something—anything—to rebuild my memory. If it was a bloody handprint, then so be it.
“Rachel? Wait for me,” the FIB’s psychiatrist called, shifting my worry to annoyance. Like I can’t handle this? I’m a big girl. Besides, there wasn’t anything left to see; the FIB had cleaned everything up. Ford had obviously been out here earlier—given the ladder and the unlocked door—making sure everything was sufficiently tidy before our appointment.
The clatter of dress shoes on teak pushed me forward, and I untangled my arms from themselves and reached for the tiny galley table for balance as I headed to the living room. The floor was still, which felt weird. Beyond the short curtains framing the now-clean window were the dirty gray and brilliant blue tarps of boats at dry dock, the ground a good six feet below us.
“Will you hold up?” Ford asked again, the light eclipsing as he entered. “I can’t help if you’re a room away.”
“I’m waiting,” I grumbled, coming to a halt and tugging my shoulder bag up. Though he’d tried to hide it, Ford had some difficulty getting his butt up the ladder. I thought the idea of a psychiatrist afraid of heights was hilarious, until the amulet he wore around his neck turned a bright pink when I mentioned it and Ford went red with embarrassment. He was a good man with his own demons to circle. He didn’t deserve my razzing.
Ford’s breathing slowed in the chill silence. Wan but determined, he gripped the table, his face whiter than usual, which made his short black hair stand out and his brown eyes soulful. Listening in on my feelings was draining, and I appreciated his wading through my emotional crap to help me piece together what had happened.
I gave him a thin smile, and Ford undid the top few buttons of his coat to reveal a professional cotton shirt and the amulet he wore while working. The metallic ley line charm was a visual display of the emotions he was picking up. He felt the emotions whether he was wearing the charm or not, but those around him had at least the illusion of privacy when he took it off. Ivy, my roommate and business partner, thought it stupid to try to break witch magic with human psychology in order to recover my memory, but I was desperate. Her efforts to find out who had killed Kisten were getting nowhere.
Ford’s relief at being surrounded by walls was almost palpable, and seeing him release his death grip on the table, I headed for the narrow door to the living room and the rest of the boat. The faint scent of vampire and pasta brushed against me—imagination stoked by a memory. It had been five months.
My jaw clenched, and I kept my eyes on the floor, not wanting to see the broken door frame. There were smudges of dirt on the low-mat carpet that hadn’t been there before, marks left by careless people who didn’t know Kisten, had never known his smile, the way he laughed, or the way his eyes crinkled up when he surprised me. Technically an Inderland death without human involvement was out of the FIB’s jurisdiction, but since the I.S. didn’t care that my boyfriend had been turned into a blood gift, the FIB had made an effort just for me.
Murder was never taken off the books, but the investigation had been officially shelved. This was the first chance I’d had to come out here to try to rekindle my memory. Someone had nicked the inside of my lip trying to bind me to them. Someone had murdered my boyfriend twice. Someone was going to be in a world of hurt when I found out who they were.
Stomach fluttering, I looked past Ford to the window where the bloody handprint had been, left like a signpost to mock my pain without giving any prints to follow. Coward.
The amulet around Ford’s neck flashed to an angry black. His eyes met mine as his eyebrows rose, and I forced my emotions to slow. I couldn’t remember crap. Jenks, my backup and other business partner, had dosed me into forgetting so I wouldn’t go after Kisten’s murderer. I couldn’t blame him. The pixy was only four inches tall, and it had been his only option to keep me from killing myself on a suicide run. I was a witch with an unclaimed vampire bite, and that couldn’t stand up to an undead vampire no matter how you sliced it.
“You sure you’re up to this?” Ford asked, and I forced my hand down from my upper arm. Again. It throbbed with a pain long since gone as a memory tried to surface. Fear stirred in me. The recollection of being on the other side of the door and trying to break it down was an old one. It was nearly the only memory I had of that night.
“I want to know,” I said, but my voice sounded wobbly even to me. I had kicked the freaking door open. I had used my foot because my arm had hurt too much to move. I’d been crying at the time, and my hair had been in my eyes and mouth. I had kicked the door down.
A memory sifted from what I knew, and my pulse hammered as something was added, the recollection of me falling backward, hitting a wall. My head hit a wall. Breath held, I looked across the living room, staring at the featureless paneling. Right there. I remember.
Ford came unusually close. “You don’t have to do it this way.”
Pity was in his eyes. I didn’t like it there, directed at me, and his amulet turned silver as I gathered my will and passed through the door frame. “I do,” I said boldly. “Even if I don’t remember anything, the FIB guys might have missed something.”
The FIB was fantastic at gathering information, even better than the I.S. It had to be since the human-run institution had to rely on finding evidence, not sweeping the room for emotions or using witch charms to discover who committed the crime and why. Everyone was capable of missing something, though, and that was one of the reasons I was out here. The other was to remember. Now that I was, I was scared. My head hit the wall…just over there.
Ford came in behind me, watching as I scanned the low-ceilinged living room that stretched from one side of the boat to the other. It looked normal here, apart from the unmoving Cincy skyline visible through the narrow windows. My hand went to my middle as my stomach cramped. I had to do this, no matter what I remembered.
“I meant,” Ford said as he put his hands in his pockets, “I’ve other ways to trigger memories.”
“Meditation?” I said, embarrassed for having fallen asleep in his office. Feeling the beginnings of a stress headache, I strode past the couch where Kisten and I had eaten dinner, past the TV that got lousy reception, not that we ever really watched it, and past the wet bar. Inches from the undamaged wall, my jaw began to ache. Slowly I put a hand to the paneling where my head had hit, curling my fingers under when they started to tremble. My head had hit the wall. Who shoved me? Kisten? His killer? But the memory was fragmented. There was no more.
Turning away, I shoved my hand in my pocket to hide the slight shaking. My breath slipped from me in an almostvisible cloud, and I tugged my coat closer. The train was long gone. Nothing moved past the curtains but a flapping blue tarp. Instinct told me Kisten hadn’t died in this room. I had to go deeper.
Ford said nothing as I walked into the dark, narrow hallway, blind until my eyes adjusted. My pulse quickened as I passed the tiny bathroom where I’d tried on the sharp caps Kisten had given me for my birthday, and I slowed, listening to my body and realizing I was rubbing my fingertips together as they silently burned.
My skin tingled, and I halted, staring at my fingers, recognizing the memory of feeling carpet under my fingers, hot from friction. I held my breath as a new thought surfaced, born from the long-gone sensation. Terror, helplessness. I had been dragged down this hall.
A flash of remembered panic rose, and I squelched it, forcing my breath out in a slow exhalation. The lines I’d made in the carpet had been erased by the FIB vacuuming for evidence, erased from my memory by a spell. Only my body had remembered, and now me.
Ford stood silently behind me. He knew something was trickling through my brain. Ahead was the door to the bedroom, and my fear thickened. That was where it had happened. That was where Kisten had lain, his body torn and savaged, slumped against the bed, his eyes silvered and truly dead. What if I remember it all? Right here in front of Ford and break down?
“Rachel.”
I jumped, startled, and Ford winced. “We can do this another way,” he coaxed. “The meditation didn’t work, but hypnosis might. It’s less stressful.”
Shaking my head, I moved forward and reached for the handle of Kisten’s room. My fingers were pale and cold, looking like mine but not. Hypnosis was a false calm that would put off the panic until the middle of the night when I’d be alone. “I’m fine,” I said, then pushed the door open. Taking a slow breath, I went in.
The large room was cold, the wide windows that let in the light doing little to keep out the chill. Arm clutched against me, I looked to where Kisten had been propped up against the bed. Kisten. There was nothing. My heart ached as I missed him. Behind me, Ford started to breathe with an odd regularity, working to keep my emotions from overwhelming him.
Someone had cleaned the carpet where Kisten had died for the second and final time. Not that there had been much blood. The fingerprint powder was gone, but the only prints they had found were from me, Ivy, and Kisten—scattered like signposts. There’d been none from his murderer. Not even on Kisten’s body. The I.S. had probably cleaned his corpse between when I’d left to kick some vampire ass and my bewildered return with the FIB after I’d forgotten everything.
The I.S. didn’t want the murder solved, a courtesy to whoever Kisten’s last blood had been given as a thank-you. Inderland tradition came before society’s laws, apparently. The same people I’d actually once worked for were covering it up, and that pissed me off.
My thoughts vacillated between rage and a debilitating heartache. Ford panted, and I tried to relax, for him if nothing else. Blinking back the threatened tears, I stared at the ceiling, breathing in the cold, quiet air and counting backward from ten, running through the useless exercise Ford had given me to find a light state of meditation.
At least Kisten had been spared the sordidness of being drained for someone’s pleasure. He had died twice in quick succession, both times probably trying to save me from the vampire he’d been given to. His necropsy had been no help at all. Whatever had killed him the first time had been repaired by the vampire virus before he died again. And if what I’d told Jenks before losing my memory was true, he’d died his second death by biting his attacker, mixing their undead blood to kill them both. Unfortunately, Kisten hadn’t been dead for long. It might only have left his much older attacker simply wounded. I just didn’t know.
I mentally reached zero, and calmer, I moved toward the dresser. There was a shirt box on it, and I almost bent double in heartache when I recognized it.
“Oh God,” I whispered. My hand went out, turning to a fist before my fingers slowly uncurled and I touched it. It was the lace teddy Kisten had given me for my birthday. I’d forgotten it was here.
“I’m sorry,” Ford rasped, and my gaze blurring from tears, I saw him slumped in the threshold.
My eyes squinted shut to make the tears leak out, and I held my breath. My head pounded, and I took a gasping breath only to hold it again, struggling for control. Damn it, he had loved me, and I had loved him. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And it was probably my fault.
A soft sound from the threshold told me Ford was struggling, and I forced myself to breathe. I had to get control of myself. I was hurting Ford. He was feeling everything I was, and I owed him a lot. Ford was the reason I hadn’t been hauled in for questioning by the FIB despite my working for them occasionally. He was human, but his curse of being able to feel another’s emotions was better than a polygraph or truth charm. He knew I’d loved Kisten and was terrified of what had happened here. “You okay?” I asked when his breathing evened out.
“Fine. Yourself?” he said in a wispy voice.
“Peachy keen,” I said, gripping the top of the dresser. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was going to be this bad.”
“I knew what I was in for when I agreed to bring you out here,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye that I no longer would cry for myself. “I can take anything you dish out, Rachel.”
I turned away, guilty. Ford stayed where he was, the distance helping him cope with the overload. He never touched anyone except by accident. It had to be a crappy way to live. But as I rocked away from the dresser, there was a soft pull as my fingertips left the underside of the dresser top. Sticky. Sniffing my fingertips, I found the faint bite of propellant.
Sticky web. Someone had used sticky web and smeared it off on the underside of the dresser top. Me? Kisten’s murderer? Sticky web worked only on fairies and pixies. It was little more than an irritant to anyone else, like a spiderweb. Jenks had begged off coming out here on the excuse of it being too cold, which it was, but maybe he knew more than he was saying.
My heartache eased from the distraction, and kneeling, I dug in my bag for a penlight and shined it on the underside of the lip of the dresser. I’d be willing to bet no one had dusted it. Ford came close, and I snapped the light off and stood. I didn’t want FIB justice. I wanted my own. Ivy and I would come out later and do our own recon. Test the ceiling for evidence of hydrocarbons, too. Shake Jenks down to find out just how long he’d been with me that night.
Ford’s disapproval was almost palpable, and I knew if I looked, his amulet would be a bright red from picking up my anger. I didn’t care. I was angry, and that was better than falling apart. With a new feeling of purpose, I faced the rest of the room. Ford had seen the smeared mess.
The FIB would reopen the case if they found one good print—other than the one I’d just made, that is. This might be the last time I was allowed in here.
Leaning back against the dresser, I closed my eyes and crossed my arms, trying to remember. Nothing. I needed more. “Where’s the stuff?” I asked, both dreading and eager to realize what else lay hidden in my mind, ready to surface.
There was the sound of sliding plastic, and Ford reluctantly handed me a packet of evidence bags and a stack of photos. “Rachel, we should leave if there’s a viable print.”
“The FIB has had five months,” I said, nervous as I took them. “It’s my turn. And don’t give me any crap about disturbing evidence. The entire department has been through here. If there’s a print, it’s probably one of theirs.”
He sighed as I turned to the dresser and arranged the plastic bags, print side down. I took up the photos first, my gaze rising to the reflection of the room behind me.
I moved the picture of the smeared, bloody handprint on the kitchen window to the back of the stack, and tidied the pile with several businesslike taps. I got nothing from the handprint apart from the feeling that it wasn’t mine or Kisten’s.
The picture of Kisten was absent, thank God, and I crossed the room with a photo of a dent in the wall. Ford was silent as I touched the paneling, and I decided by the lack of phantom pain that I hadn’t made it. There’d been a fight here other than mine. Over me, probably.
I slid the photo behind the stack. Under it was a close-up of a shoe imprint taken under the bank of windows. My head started to throb, and with that as a warning, I knew something was here, lurking in my thoughts. Jaw tight, I forced myself to the window, kneeling to run a hand over the smooth carpet, trying to spark a memory even as I feared it. The print was of a man’s dress shoe. Not Kisten’s. It was too mundane for that. Kisten had kept only the latest fashions in his closet. Had the shoe been black or brown? I thought, willing something to surface.
Nothing. Frustrated, I closed my eyes. In my thoughts, the scent of vampire incense mixed with an unfamiliar aftershave. A quiver rose through me, and not caring what Ford thought, I put my face on the carpet to breathe in the smell of fibers. Something…anything…Please…
Panic fluttered at the edge of my thoughts, and I forced myself to breathe more deeply, not caring that my butt was in the air as primitive switches in my brain fired and scents were given names. Musky shadows that never saw the sun. The cloying scent of decayed water. Earth. Silk. Candlescented dust. They added up to the undead. If I’d been a vampire, I might have been able to find Kisten’s killer by scent alone, but I was a witch.
Tense, I breathed again, searching my thoughts and finding nothing. Slowly the feeling of panic subsided and my headache retreated. I exhaled in relief. I’d been mistaken. There was nothing here. It was just carpet, and my mind had been inventing smells as it tried to fulfill my need for answers. “Nothing,” I murmured into the carpet, inhaling deeply one last time before I sat up.
A pulse of terror washed through me as I breathed in the scent of vampire. Shocked, I awkwardly scrambled to my feet, staring down at the carpet as if having been betrayed. Damn it.
In a cold sweat, I turned away and tugged my coat straight. Ivy. I’ll ask her to come out and smell the carpet, I thought, then almost laughed. Catching it back in a harsh gurgle, I pretended to cough, fingers cold as I shifted to the next photo.
Oh, even better, I thought sarcastically. Scratch marks on the paneling. My breath came fast and my gaze shot straight to the wall by the tiny closet as my fingertips started to throb. Almost panting, I stared, refusing to go look and confirm that my finger span matched the marks, afraid I might remember something even as I wanted to. I didn’t recall making the marks on the wall, but it was obvious my body did.
I’d seen fear before. I’d seen fear bright and shiny when death comes at you in an instant and you can only react. I knew the nauseating mix of fear and hope when death comes slow and you frantically try to find a way to escape it. I’d grown up with old fear, the kind that stalks you from a distance, death lurking on the horizon, so inevitable and inescapable that it loses its power. But this outright panic with no visible reason was new, and I trembled as I tried to find a way to deal with it. Maybe I can ignore it. That works for Ivy.
Clearing my throat, I tried for an air of nonchalance as I set the remaining pictures on the dresser and spread them out, but I wasn’t fooling anyone.
Smears of blood—not splattered, but smeared. Kisten’s, according to the FIB guys. A picture of a split drawer that had been slid back out of sight. Another useless bloody handprint on the deck where Kisten’s killer had vaulted over the side. None of them hit me like the scratches or carpet, and I struggled with wanting to know, but was afraid to remember.
Slowly my pulse eased and my shoulders lost their stiffness. I set the pictures down, bypassing the bags of dust and lint the FIB had vacuumed up, seeing my strands of red curls among the carpet fuzz and sock fluff. I watched myself in the mirror as my fingers touched the hair band in a clear evidence bag. It was one of mine, and it had held my braid together that night. A dull throb in my scalp lifted through my awareness, and Ford shifted uneasily.
Shit, the band meant something.
“Talk to me,” Ford said, and I pressed my thumb into the rubber cord through the plastic, trying to keep the fear from gaining control again. Evidence pointed at me to be Kisten’s killer, hence the not-quite-hidden mistrust I now felt at the FIB, but I hadn’t done it. I’d been here, but I hadn’t done it. At least Ford believed me. Someone had left the stinking bloody handprints.
“This is mine,” I said softly so my voice wouldn’t quaver. “I think…someone undid my hair.” Feeling unreal, I turned the bag over to see that it had been found in the bedroom, and a surge of panic rose from out of nowhere. My heart hammered, but I forced my breathing to steady. Memory trickled back, pieces, and nothing of use. Fingers in my hair. My face against a wall. Kisten’s killer taking my hair out of its braid. No wonder I hadn’t let Jenks’s kids touch my hair much the last five months or why I’d freaked when Marshal had tucked my hair behind my ear.
Queasy, I dropped the bag, dizzy when the edges of my sight dimmed. If I passed out, Ford would call someone, and that would be that. I wanted to know. I had to.
The last piece of evidence was damning, and turning to rest my backside against the dresser, I shook a small, unbroken blue pellet to the corner of its bag. It was filled with a now-defunct sleepy-time charm. It was the only thing in my arsenal that would drop a dead vampire.
A faint prickling of the hair on the back of my neck grew as a new thought lifted through me and a whisper of memory clenched my heart. My breath came out in a pained rush, and my head bowed. I was crying, swearing. Pointing my splat gun, I pulled the trigger. And laughing, he caught the spell.
“He caught it,” I whispered, closing my eyes so they wouldn’t fill. “I tried to shoot him, and he caught it without breaking it.” My wrist pulsed in pain and another memory surfaced. Thin fingers gripped my wrist. My hand went numb. A thump when my gun hit the floor.
“He hurt my hand until I dropped my splat gun,” I said. “I think I ran then.”
Afraid, I looked at Ford, seeing his amulet purple with shock. My little red splat gun had never been missing, was never recorded as having been here. All my potions were accounted for. Someone had clearly put the gun back where it belonged. I didn’t even remember making the sleepy-time charms, but this was clearly one of mine. Where the other six were was a good question.
In a surge of anger, I kicked the dresser with the ball of my foot. The shock went all the way up my leg, and the furniture thumped into the wall. It was stupid, but it felt good.
“Uh, Rachel?” Ford said, and I kicked it again, grunting.
“I’m fine!” I shouted, sniffing back the tears. “I’m freaking fine!” But my lip was throbbing where someone had bitten me; my body was trying to get my mind to remember, but I simply wouldn’t let it. Had it been Kisten who had bitten me? His attacker? I hadn’t been bound, thank God. Ivy said so, and she would know.
“Yeah, you look fine,” Ford said dryly, and I pulled my coat closed and tugged my shoulder bag up. He was smiling at my lost temper, and it made me even madder.
“Stop laughing at me,” I said, and he smiled wider, taking off his amulet and tucking it away as if we were finished. “And I’m not done with those,” I added as he gathered the pictures.
“Yes, you are,” he said, and I frowned at his unusual confidence. “You’re angry. That’s better than confused or grieving. I hate using clichés, but we can move forward now.”
“Psychobabble bull,” I scoffed, grabbing the evidence bags before he could take them, too, but he was right. I did feel better. I had remembered something. Maybe human science was as strong as witch magic. Maybe.
Ford took the bags from me. “Talk to me,” he said, standing in front of me like a rock.
My good mood vanished, replaced by the urge to flee. Grabbing the shirt box from the dresser, I pushed past him. I had to get out. I had to put some distance between me and the scratch marks on the walls. I couldn’t wear the teddy Kisten had given me, but I couldn’t leave it here either. Ford could gripe all he wanted about removing evidence from the crime scene. Evidence of what? That Kisten had loved me?
“Rachel,” Ford said as he followed, his steps silent on the carpet in the hall. “What do you recall? All I get is emotion. I can’t go back and tell Edden you remembered nothing.”
“Sure you can,” I said, my pace fast and my blinders on as we crossed the living room.
“No, I can’t,” he said, catching up with me at the broken door frame. “I’m a lousy liar.”
I shivered as I crossed the threshold, but the cold brightness of late afternoon beckoned, and I lurched for the door. “Lying is easy,” I said bitterly. “Just make something up and pretend it’s real. I do it all the time.”
“Rachel.”
Ford reached out and drew me to a surprised stop in the cockpit. He was wearing winter gloves and had only touched my coat, but it proved how upset he was. The sun glinted on his black hair and his eyes were squinting from the glare. The cold wind shifted his bangs, and I searched his expression, wanting to find a reason to tell him what I remembered, to let go of the them-versus-us attitude between human and Inderlander and just let him help me. Behind him Cincinnati spread in all her mixed-up, comfortable messiness, the roads too tight and the hills too steep, and I could sense the security that so many lives entangled together engendered.
My eyes fell to my feet and the crushed remains of a leaf the wind had dropped here. Ford’s shoulders eased as he felt my resolve weaken. “I remembered bits and pieces,” I said, and his feet shifted against the polished wood. “Kisten’s killer took my hair out of my braid before I kicked the door off the frame. I’m the one who made the scratches by the closet, but I only remember making them, not who I was trying to…get away from.” My hand fisted, and I shoved it in a pocket, leaving the shirt box tucked under an arm.
“The splat ball is mine. I remember shooting it,” I said, throat tight as I flicked my eyes to his and saw his sympathy. “I was aiming at the other vampire, not Kisten. He has…big hands.” A new pulse of fear zinged through me and I nearly lost it when I remembered the soft feel of thick fingers on my jawline.
“I want you to come in tomorrow,” Ford said, his brow pinched in worry. “Now that you have something to work with, I think hypnosis might bring it all together.”
Bring it all together? Does he have any idea what in hell he is asking? The blood drained from my face, and I pulled out of his reach. “No.” If Ford put me under, I had no idea what might come out.
Fleeing, I dipped under the railing and swung my weight out and onto the ladder. Marshal waited in his big-ass SUV below, and I wanted to be in it with the heater going to try to drive away the chill Ford’s words had started. I hesitated, wondering if I should drop the shirt box or keep it tucked under an arm.
“Rachel, wait.”
There was the rattle of the lock being replaced, and leaving the box under my arm, I started down, watching the side of the boat as I descended. I toyed with the idea of taking the ladder away to leave him stranded, but he would probably put it in his report. Besides, he did have his cell phone.
Finally I reached the ground. Head down, I placed my boots carefully in the slush, aiming for Marshal’s car, parked behind Ford’s in the maze of impounded boats. Marshal had offered to bring me out after I’d complained during a hockey game that my little red car would get stuck in the ruts and ice out here, and since my car wasn’t made for the snow, I’d said yes.
Guilt tugged at me for avoiding Ford’s help. I wanted to find out who’d killed Kisten and tried to make me their shadow, but there were other things I wanted to keep to myself, like why I’d survived a common but lethal blood disease that was also responsible for my being able to kindle demon magic, or what my dad had done in his spare time, or why my mother had nearly gone off her rocker to keep me from knowing my birth father wasn’t the man who’d raised me.
Marshal’s eyes showed his concern when I got in his SUV and slammed the door. Two months ago, the man had shown up on my doorstep, back in Cincinnati after the Mackinaw Weres had burned his garage down. Fortunately he’d saved both the house and the boat that had been his livelihood—now sold to pay for getting his master’s at Cincy’s university. We’d met last spring when I was up north rescuing Jenks’s eldest son and Nick, my old boyfriend.
Despite my better judgment, we’d been out more than a few times, realizing we had enough in common to probably make a good go of it—if it weren’t for my habit of getting everyone close to me killed. Not to mention that he was coming off a psycho girlfriend and wasn’t looking for anything serious. The problem was, we both liked to relax doing athletic stuff, ranging from running at the zoo to ice-skating at Fountain Square. We’d kept it friendly but platonic for two months now, shocking the hell out of my roommates. The lack of stress from not wondering will-we, won’t-we was a blessing. Curbing my natural tendencies and instead keeping our relationship casual had been easy. I couldn’t bear it if he got hurt. Kisten had cured me of foolish dreams. Dreams could kill people. At least, mine could. And did.
“You okay?” Marshal asked, his low voice with his up north accent heavy with worry.
“Peachy,” I muttered as I tossed the box with the teddy onto the backseat and wiped a cold finger against the underside of my eye. When I didn’t say anything more, he sighed, rolling his window down to talk to Ford. The FIB officer was making his way to us. I had half a mind to accuse Ford of asking Marshal to drive me here and back, knowing I’d probably need a shoulder to cry on, and though he wasn’t my boyfriend, Marshal was a hundred percent better than taking my raw turmoil back to Ivy.
Ford looked up as he angled to my door, not Marshal’s, and the tall man behind the wheel silently pressed a button to roll my window down. I tried to roll it back up, but he locked the controls and I gave him a dirty look.
“Rachel,” Ford said as soon as he closed the distance between us. “You won’t be out of control for even an instant. That’s how it works.”
Damn it, he had guessed why I was afraid, and embarrassed that he was bringing this up in front of Marshal, I frowned. “We don’t have to do it at my office if you’re uncomfortable,” he added, squinting from the bright December sun. “No one needs to know.”
I didn’t care if the FIB knew I was seeing their psychiatrist. Hell, if anyone needed counseling, it was me. But still…“I’m not crazy,” I muttered as I angled the blowing vents to me and my hair flew up from under my hat.
Ford put a hand on the open window in a show of support. “You’re probably the sanest person I know. You only look crazy because you’ve got a lot of weird stuff to deal with. If you want, while you’re relaxed, I can give you a way to keep your mouth shut about anything you want under just about any circumstance. Completely confidential, between you and your subconscious.” Surprised, I stared at him, and he finished, “I don’t even have to know what you’re keeping to yourself.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” I said, but my knees felt funny. What has he figured out about me that he isn’t saying?
Shifting his feet in the slush, Ford shrugged. “Yes, you are. I think it’s cute.” He glanced at Marshal and smiled. “Big bad runner who can take down black witches and vampires afraid of little helpless me.”
“I am not afraid of you. And you’re not helpless!” I exclaimed as Marshal chuckled.
“Then you’ll do it,” Ford said confidently, and I made a noise of frustration.
“Yeah, whatever,” I muttered, then fiddled with the vent again. I wanted to get out of here before he really figured out what was going on in my head—and then told me.
“I have to tell Edden about the sticky silk,” Ford said, “but I’ll wait until tomorrow.”
My eyes flicked to the ladder, still propped against the boat’s side. “Thanks,” I said, and he nodded, responding to the heavy emotion of gratitude I knew I must be throwing off. My roommate would have time to come out with the Jr. Detective Kit she probably had stashed in her label strewn closet and take whatever prints she wanted. Not to mention sniffing the carpet.
Ford smiled at a private thought. “Since you won’t come in, how about me coming over tonight about…six? Somewhere after my dinner and before your lunch?”
I stared at him for his brazenness. “I’m busy. How about next month?”
He ducked his head as if embarrassed, but he was still smiling when he met my gaze. “I want to talk to you before I talk to Edden. Tomorrow. Three o’clock.”
“I’m picking my brother up at the airport at three,” I said quickly. “I’ll be with him and my mother the rest of the day. Sorry.”
“I’ll see you at six,” he said firmly. “By then, you’ll be home trying to get away from your brother and your mom, ready for some relaxation. I can teach you a trick for that, too.”
“God! I hate it when you do that!” I said, messing with my seat belt so he would take the hint and go away. I was more embarrassed than angry that he’d caught me trying to evade him. “Hey!” I leaned out the window as he turned to go. “Don’t tell anyone I had my face on the floor, okay?”
From beside me, Marshal made a wondering sound, and I turned to him. “You either.”
“No problem,” he said, thunking the SUV into gear and moving forward a few feet. My window went up, and I loosened my scarf as the vehicle warmed. Ford slowly managed the slushy ruts back to his car, pulling his phone from his pocket as he went. Remembering my own phone, on vibrate, I dug my cell out of my bag. Scrolling through the menu to put it on ring, I wondered how I was going to tell Ivy what I remembered without both of us flaking out.
With a small noise of concern, Marshal put his SUV back into park, and my head came up. Ford was standing beside his open door with his phone stuck to his ear. A bad feeling began to trickle through me when he started back to us. It grew worse when Marshal put his window down and Ford stopped beside it. The psychiatrist’s eyes carried a heavy worry.
“That was Edden,” Ford said as he closed his phone and returned it to his belt case. “Glenn’s been hurt.”
“Glenn!” I leaned over the center console toward him, getting a good whiff of the scent of redwood coming off Marshal. The FIB detective was Edden’s son and one of my favorite people. And now he was hurt. Because of me? “Is he okay?”
Marshal stiffened, and I leaned back. Ford was shaking his head and looking at the nearby river. “He was off duty investigating something he probably shouldn’t have. They found him unconscious. I’m going to the hospital to see how much damage he’s suffered to his head.”
His head. Ford meant his brain. Someone had beat him up. “I’m coming, too,” I said, reaching for my seat belt.
“I can drive you out,” Marshal offered, but I was winding my scarf back up and grabbing my bag.
“No, but thanks, Marshal,” I said, my pulse fast as I gave his shoulder a quick touch. “Ford’s going out there. I’ll, ah, call you later, okay?”
Marshal’s brown eyes were worried, and his black hair, tight to his skull, hardly shifted as he nodded. It had been growing in for only a few months, but at least he had eyebrows now. “Okay,” he echoed, not giving me any grief for ditching him. “Take care of yourself.”
I exhaled, glancing once at Ford, waiting impatiently for me, then back to Marshal. “Thanks,” I said softly, and gave him an impulsive kiss on the cheek. “You’re a great guy.”
I got out, and, pace fast, followed Ford to his car, my thoughts and stomach churning at what we might find at the hospital. Someone had hurt Glenn. Sure, he was a FIB officer and ran the risk of injury all the time, but I had a feeling this involved me. It had to. I was an albatross.
Just ask Kisten.
Two (#ulink_9e407f2c-bc59-5d29-9cbc-b4cfb5f86302)
We’ll take the next elevator,” the tidy woman said with an overly bright smile as she pulled her confused friend back into the hall and the silver doors slid shut before Ford and me.
Wondering, I glanced at the huge lift. The thing was big enough for a gurney. Ford and I were the only two people in here. But then the woman’s harsh whisper of “Black witch” came in just before the doors met, telling me all I needed to know.
“The Turn take it,” I muttered, tugging my bag back up on my shoulder.
Beside me, Ford edged away, not enjoying my angry emotions as I fumed. I wasn’t a black witch. Okay, so my aura was covered with demon smut. And yeah, I’d been filmed last year being dragged down the street on my ass by a demon. It probably didn’t help that the entire universe knew I’d summoned one into an I.S. courtroom to testify against Piscary, Cincinnati’s top vampire and my roommate’s former master. But I was a white witch. Wasn’t I?
Depressed, I stared at the dull silver panels of the hospital elevator. Ford was a dark blur beside me, his head bowed as I stewed. I wasn’t a demon to be pulled back to the ever-after when the sun rose, but my children would be—thanks to the illegal genetic tinkering of the now-dead Senior Kalamack. He had unknowingly broken the checks and balances that elves magicked into the demon’s genome thousands of years ago, effectively allowing only magically stunted demon children to survive. The elves named the new species witches, telling us lies and convincing us to fight demons in their war. When we found out the truth, we abandoned the elves and demons both, migrating out of the ever-after and doing our best to forget our origins. Which we did admirably, to the point where I was the only witch to know the truth.
Ceri had filled in the gaps of Mr. Haston’s sixth-grade history class, having been a demon’s familiar before I rescued her. She’d read up on it between twisting curses and planning orgies.
No one knew the truth but me and my partners. And Al, the demon I had a standing teaching date with every Saturday. And Newt, the ever-after’s most powerful demon. There was Al’s parole officer, Dali. Mustn’t forget Trent and whoever he’d told, but that was likely going to be no one, seeing that his dad’s breaking of the genetic roadblock had been a stupid thing to do. No wonder they’d killed all the geneticists at the Turn. Too bad they’d missed Trent’s dad.
Ford jiggled on his feet, then, looking embarrassed, he pulled a black metal flask from a coat pocket, twisted off the top, tilted his head to the ceiling, and took a swig.
Watching his Adam’s apple move, I gave him a questioning look.
“It’s medicinal,” he said, a charming shade of red as he fumbled recapping it.
“Well, we are in a hospital,” I said dryly, then snatched it. Ford protested as I took a sniff, then touched it to my lips. My eyes widened. “Vodka?”
Looking even more embarrassed, the slight man took it from my unresisting fingers, capped it, and tucked it away. The elevator chimed and the panels slid apart. Before us was a hallway like any other in the building, with its low-mat carpet, white walls, and banister.
My worry for Glenn came rushing back, and I lurched forward. Ford and I bumped as we got out, and I felt a wash of chagrin. I knew he didn’t like to touch anyone. “Can I steady myself on your elbow?” he asked, and I glanced at the pocket he had dropped the flask into.
“Lightweight,” I said, reaching out for him, careful to touch him only through his coat.
“I’m not drunk,” he said sourly, linking his arm in mine in a motion that held absolutely no romance, but rather, desperation. “The emotions are sharp in here. The alcohol helps. I’m in overload, and I’d rather feel your emotions than everyone else’s.”
“Oh.” Feeling honored, I strode forward with him and past the two orderlies pushing a hamper. My good mood soured when one of them whispered, “Should we call security?”
Ford’s grip tightened when I spun to give them my opinion, and the two skittered away like I was the boogeyman. “They’re just afraid,” Ford said, his fingers tightening on me.
We continued down the hall, and I wondered if they could kick me out. The beginnings of a headache pulsed. “I’m a white witch, damn it,” I said to no one, and the guy in a lab coat coming toward us gave us a cursory glance.
Ford was looking pale, and I tried to calm myself before they admitted him. I should step up my efforts to find a muffler for him—other than alcohol, that is.
“Thanks,” he whispered as he picked up on my concern, then, voice stronger, he added, “Rachel, you summon demons. You’re good at it. Get over it, then find a way to make it work for you. It’s not going to go away.”
I huffed, ready to tell him he had no right to sound so high and mighty, but turning a liability into an asset was exactly what he had done with his “gift.” I gave his arm a squeeze, then started when I saw Ivy, my roommate, bending over the nurses’ desk, not caring that a male orderly had just walked into a wall watching her. Her black jeans were low and tight, but she had the body of a model and could get away with it. The matching cotton pullover was cut high to give a glimpse of her lower back as she craned to see what was on the computer. In deference to the cold, her long leather coat was draped over the counter. Ivy was a living vampire, and she looked it: svelte, dark, and broody. It made it hard to live with her, but I was no picnic either, and we knew each other’s quirks.
“Ivy!” I called, and her head turned, her short, enviably straight hair with the gold tips swinging as she came up. “How did you find out about Glenn?”
Ford’s shoulders slumped, all his tension slipping from him as he held my arm. He looked happy. But he would, seeing that he was picking up my emotions and I was happy to see Ivy. Perhaps I might invest in a little talk time about Ivy when Ford and I got together again. I could use his insight into our uneasy relationship.
I wasn’t Ivy’s blood shadow, but her friend. That a vampire could be friends with anyone without sharing blood was unusual, but we had an additional complication. Ivy liked both boys and girls, mixing blood and sex into one and the same. She’d been clear that she wanted me, too, in any capacity, but I was straight, apart from a confusing year of trying to separate blood lust from gender preference. That she’d bitten me more than once hadn’t helped. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. The rush from a vampire bite was too close to sexual ecstasy to dismiss, and it had taken me thinking I’d been bound to Kisten’s killer to wake me up. The risk of becoming a shadow was too great. I trusted Ivy. It was her blood lust I was worried about.
So we lived together in the church that was also our runner business, sleeping across the hall from each other and doing our best to not push each other’s buttons. One might think Ivy would be ticked off after wasting a year chasing me, but she had a blissful happiness that vampires didn’t often find. Apparently my telling her I wasn’t ever going to let her sink her teeth into me again was the only way she’d believe I liked her for her and not the way she could make me feel. I just admired the hell out of anyone who could be that hard on herself and still be so incredibly strong. And I loved her. I didn’t want to sleep with her, but I did love her.
Ivy came to meet us, her small lips closed and her slim boots silent on the carpet. She moved with a memorable grace, and there was a slight grimace on her usually placid face. Her features held a slight Asian cast, having an oval face, a small nose, and a heart-shaped mouth. It was seldom she smiled, afraid the emotion would break her self-control. I think that was one of the reasons we were friends—I laughed enough for both of us. That, and the fact that she thought I could find a way to save her soul when she died and became an undead. Right now, I was just looking to find the rent money. I’d get to my roommate’s soul later.
“Edden called the church first,” she said by way of greeting, her thin eyebrows high as she spotted Ford’s arm linked in mine. “Hi, Ford.”
The man reddened at the lilt she’d put in her last words, but I wouldn’t let him take his arm back. I liked being needed. “He’s having trouble with the background emotion,” I said.
“And he’d rather be abused by yours?”
Nice. “Do you know what room Glenn is in?” I said as Ford’s arm slipped away.
She nodded, her dark eyes not missing a thing. “This way. He’s still not conscious.” Ivy headed down the hallway with us in tow, but when we passed the desk, one of the nurses stood, determination on her no-nonsense face. “I’m sorry. No visitors except family.”
A pang of fear went through me, not because I might not see Glenn, but that his condition was so serious they wouldn’t let anyone in. Ivy didn’t slow down, though, and neither did I.
The nurse started after us. My pulse quickened, but another waved us on, then turned to the first nurse. “It’s Ivy,” the second nurse said, as if that meant something.
“You mean the vampire who’s—” the first nurse said, but she was pulled back to the desk before I heard the rest. I turned to Ivy, seeing that her pale complexion had shifted to pink.
“The vampire who’s what?” I asked, remembering her stint here as a candy striper.
Ivy’s jaw tightened. “Glenn’s room is down here,” she said, avoiding my question. Whatever.
An unexpected sense of panic hit me when Ivy made a sharp left into a room and vanished behind the oversize door. I stared at it, hearing the soft sounds of delicate machinery. Memories of sitting with my dad as he took his last, struggling breaths swam up, then more recent, of watching Quen fight for his life. I froze, unable to move. Behind me, Ford stumbled, as if I had slapped him.
Crap. I flushed, embarrassed that he was feeling my misery. “I’m sorry,” I gushed as he stood in the hallway and held up a hand to tell me he was all right. I thanked God Ivy had already gone in and wasn’t seeing what I’d done to him.
“It’s okay.” His eyes were weary as he came close again, hesitant until he knew I had the old pain safely tucked away. “Can I ask who?”
I swallowed hard. “My dad.”
Eyes down, he guided me to the door. “You were about twelve?”
“Thirteen.” And then we were inside, and I could see that it wasn’t the same room at all.
Slowly my shoulders eased. My dad had died with nothing to save him. As a law enforcer, Glenn was getting the best of everything. His father was in the rocker pulled up to his bedside, ramrod straight. Glenn was being taken care of. Edden was the one in pain.
The small, stocky man tried to smile, but he couldn’t do it. In the few hours since learning about his son’s attack, his pale face had acquired wrinkles I’d only seen hints of before. In his grip was a winter hat, his short fingers working the rim around and around. He stood, and my heart went out to him when he exhaled, the sound carrying all his fear and worry.
Edden was the captain of the FIB’s Cincinnati division, the ex-military man bringing to the office the hard, succeed-against-all-odds determination he’d gained in the service. Seeing him down to the bare bones of himself was hard. The fingering questions in the FIB as to my “convenient” amnesia concerning Kisten’s death had never occurred to Edden. He trusted me, and because of that, he was one of the few humans I absolutely trusted in return. His son, unconscious on the bed, was another.
“Thank you for coming,” he said automatically, his gravelly voice cracking, and I worked to keep from crying when he ran a blunt hand over his short-cropped, graying hair in a recognizable sign of stress. I came close to give him a hug, and the familiar scent of old coffee hit me.
“You know we wouldn’t let you do this alone,” Ivy said from her corner where she’d folded herself stiffly into a padded chair, quietly giving support the only way she could.
“How is he?” I asked as I turned to Glenn.
“They won’t give me a straight answer,” he said, his voice higher than usual. “He’s been beaten up pretty bad. Head trauma—” His voice broke, and he went silent.
I looked at Glenn on the bed, his very dark skin standing out starkly against the sheets. There was a white bandage around his head, and they had shaved a swath of his tightly curling black hair. Bruises marked his face, and he had a split lip. A nasty swath of bruised skin ran from his shoulder to under the sheets, and his fingers resting on the blanket were swollen.
Edden sank into his chair and looked at his son’s damaged hand. “They wouldn’t let me in,” he said softly. “They didn’t believe I was his father. Bigoted bastards.” Slowly his hand went out, and he cradled Glenn’s hand as if it were a baby bird.
I swallowed hard at the love. Edden had adopted Glenn when he married his mother—must have been at least twenty years ago—and though they looked nothing like each other, they were exactly alike where it counted, both strong in their convictions and consistently putting their lives in danger to fight injustice. “I’m sorry,” I almost croaked, feeling his pain.
In the threshold, Ford closed his eyes, clenched his jaw, and leaned against the frame.
Grabbing a chair, I dragged it across the linoleum to where I could see Edden and Glenn both. My bag went on the floor and my hand on the FIB captain’s shoulder. “Who did this?”
Edden took a slow breath. In her corner, Ivy sat up. “He was working on something on his own,” the man said, “after hours, in case what surfaced would be better left off the record. One of our officers died last week after a long wasting illness. He was a friend of Glenn’s, and Glenn found out he’d been cheating on his wife.” Edden glanced up. “Keep that to yourselves.”
Ivy got to her feet, interested. “She poisoned her husband?”
The FIB captain shrugged. “That’s what Glenn thought, according to his notes. He went to talk to the mistress this morning. That’s where—” His voice cut off, and we patiently waited while he steadied himself. “The working theory is,” he said softly, “that the husband was there and freaked out, attacked Glenn, and then they both left him for dead in their living room.”
“Oh my God,” I whispered, going cold.
“He was off duty,” Edden continued, “so he lay there almost an hour before someone checked on him because he didn’t come in to work. He’s a smart kid, and one of his friends knew what he was doing and where he had gone.”
My breath caught when Edden turned to me, pain etched deep in his brown eyes as he tried to find an answer. “We never would have found him otherwise. Not in time. They left him there. They could have called 911 and fled, but they left my boy to die.”
The warm prick of tears hit me, and I gave the stocky, heartbroken man a sideways hug. “He’s going to be okay,” I whispered. “I know it.” My gaze went to Ford as he came in to stand at the foot of the bed. “Right?”
Ford gripped the footboard as if struggling for balance. “Can I have a moment with Glenn alone?” he asked. “I can’t work with all of you in here.”
Immediately I stood. “Sure.”
Ivy touched the lump that was Glenn’s feet as she passed, and she was gone. Edden slowly stood, letting go of his son’s hand with an obvious reticence. Leaning over Glenn, he whispered in a severe tone, “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere, young man. You hear me?”
I drew Edden out of the room. “Come on. I’ll get you some coffee. There’s gotta be a machine around here somewhere.”
I looked back as we left. Glenn looked like crap, but as long as his mind was undamaged, he’d be okay. Ford could tell, couldn’t he?
As I escorted Edden down the hallway in Ivy’s wake, I felt a moment of guilty relief. At least Glenn hadn’t been hurt because of someone trying to get to me. It might sound like vanity on my part, but it had happened before. Ivy’s old master vampire had raped her to get her to kill me, had given Kisten to his death for the same reason. Piscary was dead now, Kisten, too; I was alive, and I wasn’t going to let others get hurt for me again.
Edden pulled out of my grip when we reached a bench across from a vending machine. Everything was done in institutional comfort: soothing shades of taupe and cushions not soft enough to encourage lingering. A wide window opened onto the snowplowed parking lot, and I sat so my feet were in the shaft of dusky sunlight coming in. There was no warmth. Edden sat beside me with his elbows on his knees, his forehead cupped in his hands. I didn’t like seeing the intelligent, quick-fingered man so depressed. I didn’t think he even remembered I was here.
“He’s going to be okay,” I said, and Edden took a deep breath.
“I know he will,” he said with a forcefulness that said he wasn’t sure. “Whoever did this was a professional. Glenn stumbled into something bigger than a wife cheating on her husband.”
Ah hell. Maybe it is my fault. Ivy’s shadow fell on us, and I looked up. Her silhouette was sharp against the bright window, and I leaned back into shadow.
“I’ll find out who did this,” she said, then turned to me. “We both will. And don’t insult us by offering to pay for it.”
My lips parted in surprise. She had tried to hide herself in shadow, but her words gave away her anger. “I thought you didn’t like Glenn,” I said stupidly, then went hot.
Her hand moved to her hip. “This isn’t a matter of like or dislike. Someone mauled a law officer and left him for dead. The I.S. won’t do anything about it, and anarchy can’t be allowed a toehold.” She turned and the sun came in. “I don’t think a human did that to him,” she said as she moved to sit across from us. “Whoever it was knew exactly how to cause an excruciating amount of pain without letting him pass out from it. I’ve seen it before.”
I could almost hear her think, Vampire.
Edden’s hands clenched, then he visibly forced himself to relax. “I agree.”
Unable to sit still, I squirmed. “He’s going to be okay,” I said. Damn it, I didn’t know what else to say! Ivy’s entire vampiric culture was based on monsters who worked outside the law, people who treated people like boxes of chocolates. The biggest and baddest, the ones who made the rules, got away with anything.
Ivy leaned across the wide space between us. “Give me the address where he was found,” she demanded. “I want to look.”
Edden pressed his lips together, making his mustache bunch out. It was the first sign of him regaining himself. “Ivy, I appreciate your offer,” he said, his voice firm. “But we can handle it. I have people out there right now.”
Her eye twitched, and though it was hard to tell, I think her pupils were dilating in pique. “Give me the address,” she repeated. “If an Inderlander did this, you’re going to need Rachel and me. The I.S. won’t help you.”
Not to mention that the FIB will probably miss the Inderland stuff, I thought, settling myself with a soft huff more firmly in the thin padding.
Edden eyed her, clearly peeved himself. “My department is working on it. Glenn will be conscious in a few days, and then—”
His eyes closed, and he became silent. Ivy stood, agitated. Almost brutal, she said, “If you don’t put the heat on whoever did this in the next few hours, they will be gone.” Edden met her eyes and she added more gently, “Let us help. You’re too involved. The entire FIB is. You need someone out there who can look at what happened with dispassion, not a desire for revenge.”
I made a small noise and crossed my arms over my middle. Revenge was on my mind. “Come on, Edden, this is what we do for a living!” I said. “Why won’t you let us help?”
A dry humor was in the short man’s eyes as he looked askance at me. “It’s what Ivy does for a living. You’re not a detective, Rachel. You’re a haul-them-in-girl, and none better. I’ll let you know when we find out who it is, and if it’s a witch, I’ll give you a call.”
That hit me with all the pleasure of a slap in the face, and my eyes narrowed. Ivy saw my irritation, and she leaned back, content to let me yell at him. But instead of standing up and telling him to get Turned—which wouldn’t do anything but get us thrown out—I swallowed my pride, contenting myself with bobbing my foot in anger.
“Then give Ivy the address,” I said, wanting to accidentally kick him in the shins. “She can find a fairy fart in a windstorm,” I said, borrowing one of Jenks’s favorite expressions. “And what if it is an Inderlander? You want to risk losing them because of your human pride?”
Maybe that was low, but I was tired of looking at crime scenes after the cleaning crew.
Edden looked from Ivy’s mocking expectancy to my admirably contained redhead anger, then pulled out a palm-size spiral notebook. I smiled at the scratch of the pencil as he wrote something down, a pleasant slurry of contentment and anticipation filling me. We’d find whoever attacked Glenn and left him to die. And whoever it was better hope I was there with Ivy, or they’d be subjected to her own personal version of justice.
The sound of the paper tearing free was loud, and with a wry grimace, he extended the strip of white and blue to Ivy. She didn’t look at it, handing it to me instead.
“Thank you,” I said crisply, tucking it away.
A soft scrape of shoe on carpet brought my attention up, and I followed Ivy’s gaze, over my shoulder. Ford was shuffling to us, his head bowed and my bag in his grip. I felt a moment of panic, and in response, he looked up, smiling. My eyes closed. Glenn was okay.
“Thank you, God,” Edden whispered, standing up.
I had to hear it, though, and as Ford handed me my forgotten bag and took the cup of coffee Ivy gave him, I asked, “He’s going to be okay?”
Ford nodded, eyeing us over the rim of the paper cup. “His mind is fine,” he said, grimacing at the coffee’s taste. “There’s no damage. He’s deep into his psyche, but as soon as his body repairs itself enough, he will regain consciousness. A day or two?”
Edden’s breath shook as he exhaled, and Ford stiffened when the FIB captain shook his hand. “Thank you. Thank you, Ford. If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know.”
Ford smiled thinly. “I’m glad I could give you good news.” Regaining his hand, he backed up a step. “Excuse me. I need to try to convince the nurses to back off on the meds. He’s not in as much pain as they think, and it’s slowing down his recovery.”
“I’ll do it.” Ivy eased into motion. “I’ll tell them I can smell it. They won’t know the difference.”
The beginnings of a smile curved my lips up as she almost sauntered down the hall, calling out to one nurse by name. Edden couldn’t stop smiling, and I could see a hint of tears in his eyes as he shifted from foot to foot. “I need to make a couple of calls.” He reached for his cell phone, then hesitated. “Ford, can Glenn hear me when I talk to him?”
Ford nodded, smiling tiredly. “He might not remember it, but he can.”
Edden looked from me to Ford, clearly wanting to be with Glenn. “Go!” I said, giving him a happy little push. “Tell Glenn I want to talk to him when he wakes up.”
His steps fast, Edden strode toward Glenn’s room. I sighed, glad this story would have a happy ending. I was tired of the other kind. Ford looked pleased, and that was good, too. His life must be hell. No wonder he didn’t tell anyone he could do this. They’d work him to death.
“What happened to Glenn’s mom?” I asked now that we were alone.
Ford watched Edden wave to the nurses as he passed beyond the wide, smooth door and into Glenn’s room. “She died fifteen years ago during a sixty-dollar stab-and-grab.”
That’s why he’s a cop, I thought. “They’ve had only each other for a long time,” I added, and Ford nodded, starting for the elevators. He looked whipped.
Ivy joined us after a last comment to the nurse. Falling into place on my other side, she looked across me to Ford. “What happened at the marina?” she asked as she shrugged into her long coat, and the afternoon’s memories rushed back.
Her tone was slightly mocking, and I gave her a sidelong glance. I knew she was secure in her belief that her slow, steady investigations would find Kisten’s killer faster than my reconstructing my memories. It was with no little pleasure that I glanced at Ford, then said to her, “Do you have time to go out tonight and smell the carpet?”
Ford chuckled, and Ivy stared, rocking to a halt at the elevators. “Excuse me?”
I punched the button for the lift. “Your nose is better than mine,” I said simply.
Ivy blinked, her face blanker than usual. “You found something the FIB missed?”
I nodded as Ford pretended not to listen. “There’s sticky silk stuck to the rim of the dresser’s top. There might be a print, ah, other than the one I made today. And the floor under the window smells like vampire. It’s not you or Kisten, so it might be his murderer.”
Again, Ivy stared, looking uncomfortable. “You can tell the difference?”
The elevator doors slid open, and we all entered. “Can’t you?” I said, backing up and pushing the button for the street level with a booted toe just because I could.
“I’m a vampire,” she said, as if this made all the difference.
“I’ve lived with you for over a year,” I said, wondering if I wasn’t supposed to be able to tell the difference. “I know what you smell like,” I muttered, embarrassed. “It’s no big deal.”
“Yes, it is,” she whispered as the doors closed, and I hoped Ford hadn’t heard.
I watched the numbers count down. “So you’ll go out tonight?”
Ivy’s eyes were black. “Yes.”
I stifled a shiver, glad when the doors opened to show the busy lobby. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” she said, her gray-silk voice so thick with anticipation that I almost pitied the vampire who had killed Kisten.
Almost.
Three (#ulink_064ab4df-33ca-5bac-8fb9-91f4432c3a3c)
I gripped the wheel of my car tighter in annoyance as Jenks continued to sing. Though the sun was going down and the roads had an arid frozenness, the interior of the car was hot. I had half a mind to turn off the heat. Anything to get Jenks to shut up.
“Five trolls in dra-a-a-a-ag,” the four-inch man sang from my shoulder. “Four purple condoms, three French ticklers, two horny vamps, and a succubus in the snow.”
“Jenks, enough!” I shouted, and from the passenger seat, Ivy snickered, idly tracing a hand on the inside of the misted window to clear a spot from which to gaze out at the evening. The street was thick with holiday lights, and it was holy and serene, in a money-oriented, middle-class sort of way. Unlike Jenks’s carol. Which was thirteen-year-old humor to the max.
“‘On the eighth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me—’”
I checked behind me and thunked the brakes. Ivy, with her vamp reflexes, easily caught herself, but Jenks was catapulted from my shoulder. He short-stopped himself inches from the windshield. His dragonfly-like wings were a blur of red and silver, but not a shadow of dust slipped from him, saying he’d half expected this. The smirk on his angular face was classic Jenks.
“What…,” he complained, hands on his hips in his best Peter Pan pose.
“Shut. Up.” I rolled through the stop sign. It was icy. Safer that way. At least that was going to be my story if a zealous I.S. cop stopped me.
Jenks laughed, his high-pitched voice sounding right with the easy companionship that filled the car and the festive warmth displayed outside it. “That’s the trouble with you witches. No Christmas spirit,” he said, going to sit on the rearview mirror. It was his favorite spot, and I turned the heater down a smidge. He wouldn’t be there if he was cold.
“Christmas is over,” I muttered, squinting to see the street sign in the dusk. I was sure we were close. “I’ve got plenty of holiday spirit. It’s just not Christian in origin. And though I’m no expert, I don’t think the church would be happy with you singing about succubi.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said as he shifted the layers of green cloth Matalina had draped over him—her attempt at pixy winter wear. “They’d rather hear about rutting incubi.”
The pixy yelped, and I jumped when he darted off the mirror, Ivy’s hand just inches from smacking him. “Shut up, pixy,” the soft-spoken vamp said, her gray-silk voice severe. Her working leathers made her look like a biker chick gone sophisticate, slim and sleek, and her eyes were pupil black under her Harley-logo cap. Jenks took the hint, and muttering something it was probably just as well I didn’t hear, he settled on my big hoop earring to snuggle in between my neck and the soft red scarf I had worn for just this reason. I shivered when his wings brushed my neck, a whisper of chill that felt like water.
A sustained temperature below forty-five would send him into hibernation, but he could handle short, protected trips from the car to wherever. And after he’d found out about Glenn, there was no stopping him from coming out with us. If we hadn’t invited him to the crime scene, I’d find his half-frozen body in my shoulder bag as a stowaway. Frankly, I think he was out here trying to get away from his brood of kids, spending the winter in my desk.
Jenks, though, was worth five FIB investigators, and that was on a bad day. Pixies excelled in sneaking around, making them experts at finding the smallest thing out of place, their curiosity keeping them interested after everyone else had come and gone. Their dust didn’t leave a lasting impression, and their fingerprints were invisible unless you used a microscope, in my opinion making them excellent first-ins at a crime scene. ‘Course, no one at the I.S. had cared what I thought, and it wasn’t often that a pixy would work in anything other than a temporary backup position anyway. That was how I’d met Jenks, and it had been my good fortune. I would’ve taken him with me to the boat earlier today, but he would have had severe problems with the temperature.
Ivy sat up, inadvertently telling me we were close, and I started paying attention to house numbers. It looked like a human neighborhood, on the outskirts of Cincinnati in what was probably a lower- to lower-middle-class neighborhood. It wasn’t a high-crime district, from the number of lights and the general tidiness of the homes, but it held a slightly run-down, soft comfortableness. I’d be willing to bet the area was mostly retirees or new families just starting out. It reminded me of the neighborhood I’d grown up in, and I could hardly wait until tomorrow when I’d be picking up my brother, Robbie, at the airport. He had worked through the solstice, but had somehow managed to get New Year’s off.
That the lights around me now were the green and red of Christmas didn’t mean it was a human neighborhood. Most vampires celebrated Christmas, and lots of humans celebrated the solstice. Ivy still had her tree up in the living room, and we exchanged presents when we felt like it, not on a specific date. Usually that was about an hour after I got back from shopping. Delayed gratification was Ivy’s thing, not mine.
“That’s got to be it,” Ivy said softly, and Jenks shivered his wings for warmth, tickling me. Down the street on the left was a cluster of FIB cruisers, parked with their lights off and looking gray in the dim light. At the corner in a drop of light, two people stood gossiping, their dogs tugging at their leashes to go in. There weren’t any news vans yet, but there would be. I could almost smell them.
Not an I.S. cruiser in sight, which was a relief since they’d probably send Denon out here. I hadn’t seen the living low-blood vampire since blowing apart his cover-up of the Were murderers last summer, and I’d be willing to bet that he had suffered another demotion. “Looks like the I.S. isn’t coming,” I said softly, and Ivy shrugged.
“Why would they? They don’t care if an FIB officer gets beat up.”
I pulled to the curb and parked the car. “They might if it was an Inderlander who did it.”
Jenks laughed. “Doubt it,” he said, and I felt a tug on my hat as he ducked under the soft yarn for the trip inside.
Unfortunately, he was right. Whereas the I.S. policed the supernatural species, they would, and did, ignore a crime if it suited them. Hence the human-run FIB that had come into being. I had once thought that the FIB was way outclassed by the I.S., but after working with them for a year, I was impressed and shocked by the information they could dig up and put together.
It had been only forty years ago during the Turn that the combined Inderland species of vamp, witch, Were, and more had actively lent a hand to prevent humans from becoming the latest endangered species when a badly engineered, genetically altered tomato mutated and wiped out a large chunk of the human population. Though to be honest, if humans had died out, most of Inderland would suffer when vamps started preying on us instead of soft, naive, happy humans. Not to mention that Mr. Joe Vampire and Ms. Sue Were liked their high-maintenance lifestyles, impossible without the backing of a large population.
“What are you doing?” Ivy said, her hand on the door as I fumbled around under the seat.
“I’ve got an FIB sign in here somewhere,” I muttered, fingers jerking back as they unexpectedly found something cold and squishy.
A closed-lipped smile came over Ivy. “The entire FIB knows your car.”
Making a soft sound of agreement, I gave up and tugged on my gloves. Yeah, they did, seeing that they’d given it to me in payment for helping them out once, something most of them seemed to be forgetting lately. “Ready, Jenks?” I called, and got a half-heard stream of curses back. Something about my cream rinse and puking fairies.
Ivy and I got out together. The excitement of a run hit me when the doors thumped shut. Standing by my car, I pulled the sharp, dry air all the way to the bottom of my lungs. The clouds had that solid feel that they only get right before a heavy snow, and I could smell the pavement, white with salt and so dry and cold it would burn your fingers if you touched it.
Heels snapping, Ivy came around the car, and I followed her to the small house. The crunchy five inches of snow had been packed down, but a sad-looking three-foot snowman presided over a corner of the yard, his face melted and his hat covering his eyes. The curtains were open, and the yellow rectangles of light on the snow were starting to become obvious. Red and green lights from a neighbor’s display made an odd counterpoint, and I could hear the conversation from the duo on the corner. Cold, I tugged my bag up higher as we walked.
More neighbors were coming out; I felt a surge of disgust when the slow-creeping lights of a van with an antenna showed under the streetlight.
Crap, they were here already? I’d wanted to talk to the neighbors before the interviewers had them thinking sensationalism instead of realism. I was sure Edden had interviewed the closest, but his people wouldn’t ask the questions I wanted answers to.
“There,” Ivy murmured, and I followed her gaze to the dark shadow coming out from the garage’s side door to meet us.
“Hey, hi!” I called out, pitching my voice high to give the impression we were harmless. Yeah, right. “Edden asked us to come out. We’re from Vampiric Charms.” Asked us? It was more like forced into it, but why bring that up.
The young FIB officer flicked on the outside lights, washing the crusty drive in an artificial glare. “Can I see some ID?” he asked, then did a double take. “Oh!” he said, tucking his clipboard back under an arm. “You’re the witch and the vamp.”
From my hat came a disgusted “And a really cold pixy. Can you hurry it up, Rache? I think my ‘nads fell off.”
I stifled a grimace, pasting on a fake smile. I’d rather be known by our company name than “the witch and the vamp,” but at least Edden had told them we were coming. Maybe he wasn’t going to be such a pain in the butt about us helping. I watched the officer’s body language, but couldn’t tell if his impatience was from the FIB’s new distrust or simply the cold.
“Yes, Vampiric Charms. We’re here to help with the possible Inderland connection,” I said before Ivy could get all vampy. Her pulling an aura and scaring the crap out of him wouldn’t help—as entertaining as it might be.
“Can we go in?” Ivy asked with a faint promise of threat, and Jenks snickered.
“Sure.” The officer’s head was down as he wrote something. “Put on a pair of booties, okay?”
Ivy was halfway to the door off the garage, her motions stiff at his assumption that she didn’t know her way around a crime scene. I glanced back at the street, hesitating. The news crew had set up, and the huge light they had was gathering people like a bonfire. “Hey, uh, Ivy…,” I murmured, and she hesitated, a long, gloved hand resting on the open door.
She smiled with half her mouth. “You want to go talk to them?” I nodded, and she added, “You’ll be okay, Jenks?”
“Oh crap,” I swore under my breath. I’d forgotten about him.
“I’m fine!” he barked, and I felt a soft tug as he settled himself. “Nothing’s going to change inside, but I want to hear what the neighbors say. Gossip, Ivy. That’s where the truth is. It’s all about the gossip.”
I didn’t know about gossip, but if he said he’d be okay, I’d rather get first impressions than stale, regurgitated comments after everyone had had a chance to think.
Ivy frowned, clearly of the opinion that crimes were solved by carefully gathered evidence, not nebulous feelings and hunches. But with a shrug, she went inside and I headed out into the night.
Pace fast, I found a spot at the back of the growing crowd, trying to stay out of the camera’s line of sight. Jenks was probably hearing twice what I could, and I went on tiptoe to glimpse the man with red cheeks in the felt coat the newscaster was interviewing. I didn’t think it was live, seeing that it wasn’t six yet, and I eased closer, jostling for position.
“They were the nicest people,” the man was saying, his eyes bright with excitement. “Nice people. I never would have expected anything like this from them. They kept to themselves and were real quiet.”
My eyebrows rose, and Jenks snorted. Sounded like Inderlanders to me.
But then the kid next to me made a rude sound, and Jenks tugged my hair when the boy said snidely to his friend, “Like he knew him. The guy is a creep, and the woman is whacked.”
“Got it, Jenks,” I whispered so he would stop yanking on my hair. Slow and steady investigation was nice, but I wanted to find them before the sun went nova.
Smiling, I turned to find a young man in a black knit hat with the Howlers’ emblem, and encouraged by the show of Inderland acceptance, I felt an unusual surge of kinship. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and his hands were jammed into his jeans pockets. “Whacked?” I said, giving his friend a quick smile to include him in the conversation. “You think?”
“I know,” he shot back, then fidgeted. I was guessing he was in high school, and I turned the Mrs. Robinson charm on full.
“Yeah?” I said, almost bumping into him as the crowd grew noisy when the newscaster looked for fresh meat. “Don’t you love how they always say one thing in front of the camera, but at the bar, the truth comes out?”
He grinned, clearly thinking I thought he was older than he was. From under my hat came Jenks’s impressed “Nice. Reel him in, Rache.”
“So you know them?” I said, linking my arm in his and easing him from the news crew. I kept us close so as not to leave the highly charged atmosphere the news van was creating, angling so that if a camera should point our way, all they’d get would be my back. His friend had stayed behind, and was currently jumping to try to get in the background of the shot. He didn’t have a coat either, and I thought it unfair that they were warm and I was freezing my butt off out here. Witches had a lower cold tolerance than just about everyone else, excluding pixies.
“You’re not a reporter,” he said, and I smiled, glad he was smarter than I’d thought.
“I’m from Vampiric Charms,” I said, digging in my bag until I found a bent card and handed it to him. “I’m Rachel. Rachel Morgan.”
“Righteous!” he said, his face becoming animated. “My name is Matt. I live over there. Hey, I’ve heard of you,” he said, tapping the card against his hand. “Is that really you in that shot, being dragged down the street—”
“On my ass,” I finished for him, adjusting my hat to send a whiff of cold air under it to get Jenks to stop laughing. “Yeah, that’s me. But I don’t really summon demons.” Much.
“That’s cool. That’s cool,” he said, seeming to grow three inches taller. “You’re trying to find the Tilsons?”
A jolt of adrenaline made me shiver. Edden hadn’t told me their names. “More than just about anything. Do you know where they went?”
He shook his head, trying to look older than he was as he gave his friend a superior look. “No, but they are weird. The entire family. I mowed their lawn this summer. The guy is a janitor at my school. He says he’s allergic to grass.” Matt smirked. “He’s allergic to work if you ask me. But if you make him mad, stuff happens to you.”
My eyes widened. “Magic?” Were they Inderlanders, like Ivy thought?
Matt shook his head and looked ill. “No, stuff like your dog dying. But his wife is even weirder. I don’t see her much. She stays inside a lot with their kid. She talked with my mom once, and she wouldn’t let my mom touch her baby.”
“No kidding,” I said, hoping he’d say more.
“And that baby of theirs is just as freaky as they are,” he said, glancing at his friend. “Got these weird blue eyes that follow you around. She’s quiet, like she’s deaf or something. Her mom never puts her down. Mrs. Tilson wears the pants in the family, that’s for hell sure.”
“Is that so…,” I prompted, and Matt bobbed his head.
“Last year, someone put a firecracker in the can in the back toilet. Blew shit all over the place. Tilson was screaming about killing someone, so they sent him home. I mowed their lawn the next day. I was scared, man, but my dad made me. Tilson is nuts. He thought I knew who blew up the john and he pinned me against the fence. God, I thought I was going to die. But then she came out and he went all soft and stuff. He even apologized. Freakiest shit I’ve ever seen. She’s smaller than you, and all she did was say his name and he went all meek and shit.”
I blinked, my mind racing as I tried to figure it out. Mr. Tilson was a homicidal maniac with a chip on his shoulder. Mrs. Tilson was in charge. And the kid was weird. Living vampires, maybe?
“How old is the baby?” I asked, trying to keep him talking. This was pure gold.
Matt made a face. “I don’t know. A year? My mom says she’s going to be a spoiled brat and Mrs. Tilson shouldn’t wait five years before having another one, like she says she wants. Some kind of medical reason. She wants five or six kids, my mom says.”
“Five or six?” I said, truly surprised. Maybe the Tilsons were Weres and the woman was from a highly dominant pack. But why space them out over five years? “That’s a lot.”
“Yeah,” the kid said, scoffing. “I’m not having any kids. But if I do, I’m going to have them all right away. Get it over with. I don’t want to be sixty and changing diapers.”
I shrugged. There was eight years between me and Robbie, and I didn’t see anything wrong with it. He’d raised me as much as my parents, and I had no complaints. But my mom was a witch, so changing diapers at sixty was about the norm. Glenn’s attack was sounding more and more like an Inderland incident. “Thanks,” I said, suddenly wanting to get inside. Jenks was probably freezing. “I should get in there. But thank you. You really helped.”
The boy’s expression became disappointed, and I smiled. “Hey, I could use someone this spring to mow my graveyard.” I hesitated. “If you don’t think that’s too weird. My number is on the card.”
He beamed, fingering it. “Yeah, that would be great,” he said, then glanced at the house. “I don’t think my dad will let me mow their lawn anymore.”
“Call me, about April?” I said, and he nodded. “Thanks, Matt. You were a big help.”
“No problem,” he said, and I gave him a final smile and walked away. When I looked over my shoulder, he had his head bent to his friend’s, and they were ogling my phone number. “You okay, Jenks?” I said, hoofing it away from the lights and back to the garage. Damn, wait until Ivy heard what I’d found out.
“Yeah,” he said, gripping my hair harder. “But will you slow down? Unless you want pixy barf in your hair.”
Immediately I checked my pace, tripping when I took the curb without looking so I wouldn’t have to tilt my head. Jenks swore when I stumbled, but my pulse jackhammered when my head swung up. It wasn’t the almost-fall that shook me, but who was standing by my car, staring at it. Tom Bansen—it had to be—the same man who had tried to kill me by way of Al.
“Holy crap, it’s Tom,” I said, then shouted, “Get away from my car!” as I started to jog.
“Son of a fairy whore,” Jenks swore. “What’s he doing here?”
“I don’t know.” Caution slowed me down as I approached. “Better be quiet. If he knows you’re here, all he has to do is knock my hat off and Matalina is a single parent.”
Jenks became quiet. Tom continued to stand with his hands in his pockets, looking at my car as if debating something. Nervousness coated my anger as I halted a careful five feet back, puffing out white clouds in the streetlight and looking at the man like the snake he was. I’d heard he’d gotten fired from the I.S.—probably for the stupidity of being caught summoning demons to murder someone—but since I’d been the one Tom had been trying to off, the I.S. had done nothing more than that.
“What are you doing here?” I said, not anxious to have to defend myself, but not wanting to let him poke around in my car either.
The young man had a new hardness in his blue eyes as he stood on the shoveled sidewalk and looked speculatively at me in the lamplight. He was clearly cold in his parka and hat, the chill almost killing the redwood scent that all witches had. I’d once thought he was attractive in a tidy, almost scholarly way—I still did, actually—but freeing Al to kill or abduct me had long since shifted the attraction to disgust.
“Trying to make a living,” he answered, a tinge of red showing on his cheeks. “I’ve been shunned, thanks to you.”
My jaw dropped and I backed up. I wasn’t surprised, but I wasn’t going to take the blame for it either. “I wasn’t the one kidnapping girls to pay demons for black curses,” I said. “Maybe you should rethink your logic, Sherlock.”
He smiled in a not-nice way. Turning as if to leave, he said, “I’ll be around if you want to talk.” I sputtered in disbelief at the invitation and he added, “Nice car,” before he walked away, hands still jammed into his big pockets.
“Hey!” I shouted, almost going after him, but the thought of his shunning and Jenks in my hat changed my mind. Rocking back on my boot heels, I exhaled loudly. Shunned? The coven of ethical and moral standards had shunned him? Damn! I hadn’t thought they’d go that far. Sure he summoned demons, but that didn’t get one shunned. It must have been kidnapping that girl for black magic. Shunning was exactly what it sounded like, and the man was in trouble. Getting the ethical and moral standards coven to reverse a decision was like surviving an I.S. death threat. He was absolutely cut off, and any witch associating with him ran the risk of being shunned in turn.
Making a living, I thought as I watched him. Tom had probably gone independent, seeing that the I.S. wouldn’t touch him now, even under the table. And looking like he was having a hard time of it, I added as he got into a rust-cut ‘64 Chevy and drove away.
I headed for the Tilsons’ house, jerking to a halt at a sudden thought. Fingers fumbling in my bag, I pulled out my key ring and the lethal-magic detection amulet on it. The thing had saved my life a couple of times, and Tom had a vested interest in seeing me gone.
“Rache…,” Jenks complained as I started to make a slow circuit around my vehicle.
“You want to be blown up smaller than fairy dust?” I muttered, and he tugged on my hair.
“Tom’s a weenie,” the pixy protested, but I finished my circuit, breathing easier when the amulet stayed a nice, healthy green. Tom hadn’t spelled my car, but a sense of unease lingered, even as I turned to the cordoned-off house and crossed the street. And it wasn’t because I might have some competition in the independent-runner arena. My car had originally belonged to an I.S. agent who died in a car bombing. Not this car, obviously, but a bomb had killed him.
Just that fast, my life can end. Tom hadn’t left a charm on my car, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask Edden if he’d have one of his dogs sniff around it. Boot heels clacking, I reached the door off the garage and went inside. Jenks sighed heavily, but I didn’t care if I did look like a paranoid chicken when I asked Edden for a ride home.
I was done with being stupid about these kinds of things.
Four (#ulink_0f8ed515-4f5c-533a-9a6d-29acfa891f69)
The sudden cessation of wind as I passed into the garage was a blessed relief, and I paused, taking in the curious mix of space and clutter, the edges stacked with old boxes from grocery stores and mail-order places. Close to the steps leading inside were several large toys, bright with primary colored plastic. The toddler sled had been used from the looks of it, but the rest was summer stuff. It had been a good Christmas, apparently.
Tracks of flattened snow showed where a big-assed truck had been on the otherwise swept cement. There wasn’t room for two vehicles, and I wondered if Mr. Tilson was overcompensating for something. ‘Course, maybe it was Mrs. Tilson who had the truck fetish. I sniffed deeply for the scent of Inderlander, finding only the dry smell of old concrete and dust, and I shivered.
I eyed the storage boxes, remembering what my dad had once told me when I’d tried to get out of cleaning the garage. People put things in garages that they don’t want but can’t get rid of. Dangerous stuff, sometimes. Too dangerous to keep inside, and too dangerous to throw out and risk someone finding. Mr. and Mrs. Tilson had a very full garage.
“Come on, Rache!” Jenks complained, tugging on my hair. “I’m cold!”
Giving the boxes a last look, I went up the cement steps. The hum of a vacuum was a faint presence as I opened the cheerfully painted door and entered a seventies kitchen, nodding to the officer with a clipboard seated at the table. The window above the sink looked out over the front yard and the news van. A high chair done in pinks and yellows was pulled up beside the square table. A box of throw-away boot covers was on it, and I sighed, taking my gloves off and tucking them in my coat pockets.
Plush baby toys were in a large basket tucked neatly out of the way, and I could almost hear a contented, gurgling laughter. The sink held a bowl of cookie-dough-encrusted utensils. A dozen sugar cookies sat on the counter, cooling for the last eight hours. A tear-away tag was tied to the oven, the upper part signed and dated, with the time, stating that Officer Mark Butte had turned off the oven. The Tilsons had left in a hurry.
The kitchen was a curious mix of warmth and cold, the heater on to combat the in-and-out traffic, and I unzipped my coat. My first impression of the house was just as jumbled. Everything to make a home was here, but it felt…empty.
There was the chatter of work in the next room, and when I bent to put a blue bootie over my boot, Jenks shot out from under my hat. “Holy crap!” he swore, flitting over the entire kitchen in three seconds, giving the seated officer a coronary. “It smells like green baby paste in here. Hey, Edden!” he said louder. “Where you at?” And he darted out, his wings a gray blur.
From deeper in the house came an exclamation as Jenks probably startled another FIB officer. A set of heavy steps approached, and I straightened. I’d gotten my boots at Veronica’s Crypt, and covering them in blue paper should be outlawed.
Edden’s squat figure suddenly took up the archway to the rest of the house. Jenks was on his shoulder, and the FIB captain looked better now that he was doing something to help his son. He nodded to the seated officer and smiled briefly at me, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He was still in his street clothes. In truth, he probably shouldn’t be out here, but no one was going to tell him he couldn’t oversee the investigation of his son’s mauling.
“Rachel,” he said in greeting, and I coyly waved a bootiecovered foot at him.
“Hi, Edden. Can I come in?” I asked, hardly sarcastic at all.
He frowned, but before he could start in on me about my lousy investigation techniques, I remembered Tom in the street. “Hey, can I ask a favor?” I said hesitantly.
“You mean more than letting you in here?” he said so dryly that I was sorely tempted to tell him about the sticky silk at Kisten’s boat, which they’d missed, but I held my tongue, knowing he’d find out about it tomorrow after Ivy had had a chance to go out.
“I’m serious,” I said as I undid my scarf. “Can someone check out my car?”
The squat man’s eyebrows rose. “Having trouble with the transmission?”
I flushed, wondering if he knew I was the one who’d trashed it while learning how to drive a stick shift. “Uh, I saw Tom Bansen at my car. Maybe I’m being paranoid—”
“Bansen?” he blurted out, and Jenks nodded from his shoulder. “This is the same witch you tagged in his basement for summoning demons?”
“He was looking at my car,” I said, thinking it sounded lame. “He said something about making a living, and seeing that there are lots of people who want to see me, uh, dead…” I let my thought trail off. I kept to myself that he’d been shunned and Jenks didn’t say a word. It was a witch thing. When someone got shunned, it was an embarrassment to all of us. “I checked for lethal charms, but I wouldn’t know a car bomb from an odometer cable.”
The FIB captain’s expression grew hard. “No problem. I’ll have the dog unit come out. Actually…” He looked at the seated officer and smiled. “Alex, go wait by Ms. Morgan’s car for the explosives team.”
The man stiffened, and I winced apologetically. “Don’t let anyone get within ten feet,” Edden continued. “It might turn you into a toad if you touch it.”
“It will not,” I complained, thinking being a toad might be pleasant compared to what Tom could probably do.
Edden shook his head. “There is a news van in the street. I’m not taking any chances.”
Jenks snickered, and I warmed. Chances were good nothing was wrong with my car, and I felt like a baby, but Edden’s hand on my shoulder made me feel better. All the way up until he turned me back to the kitchen’s door and Alex’s retreating back. “Maybe Alex should take you home right now,” he said, “so he can check out your church. For your own safety.”
Oh for God’s sake, he’s trying to get rid of me. “That’s why we’ve got a gargoyle in the eaves,” I said sharply, and slipping out from under him, I resolutely paced deeper into the house. Take me home for my own safety, my ass. He was letting Ivy stay. Why couldn’t I?
“Rachel,” Edden protested, his compact bulk spinning to follow.
Jenks laughed, taking to the air and saying, “Give it up, FIB man. It’ll take more than you to get her out. Remember what Ivy and I did to your finest last spring? Add Rachel to that, and you can say your prayers.”
From behind me came Edden’s dry “You think Ivy wants another stint as a candy striper?” But I was here and he was going to let me in on the evidence-gathering part of things. The FIB was confident that Mr. Tilson had attacked Glenn, seeing that it was his house, but his lawyer might try to pass it off on a burglar or something else. Not cool.
“Nice house,” I said, eyes roving over the bright walls, low ceilings, and clean but worn carpet. We passed a short hallway, then stepped down into a large living room. Immediately I stopped. “Oh my God,” I said, taking it in. “They have shag carpet.” Green shag carpet. This might be why Mr. Tilson was nuts. It would make me nuts.
There were only a few FIB personnel still here doing their FIB thing. One of them flagged Edden over, and he left me with a stern look that said not to touch anything. The faint tickle of fingerprint dust caught in my nose. Ivy was in the corner with a tall woman who, by the twin cameras draped over her, had to be the photographer. They were both looking at her laptop and the shots she had taken earlier.
It was bright and overly warm, and Jenks left Edden to park it on the top of the curtains. Warmer up there, probably. The FIB had been here most of the day before letting us in here, not wanting to chance my messing up their precious virgin site, but it still looked raw to me.
The green-tiled coffee table between the olive-and-orange-striped couch and the brick fireplace—painted to match the floor, incidentally—was on its side and shoved into the raised hearth. The curtains over the wide windows were open to the backyard. God help me but the curtains matched the putrid color combination. Looking at everything, I started to feel nauseous, as if the seventies had taken refuge here against extinction and were preparing to take over the world.
There was no blood except a small splatter against the couch and wall, an ugly brown against the yellowish green paint. From Glenn’s broken nose, perhaps? An armchair had been shoved into an upright piano, and loose-leaf sheets of music were stacked on the bench. Leaning up against the wall by the large window overlooking the snow-covered swing set was a picture. It had fallen turned against the wall, and I wanted to see what it was in the worst way.
A Christmas tree was propped up in the corner, disheveled and clearly having fallen at some point if the dark spot on the rug where the water had drained out wasn’t enough of a clue. There were a lot of decorations for one room, and they were a curious mix of style. Most were the inexpensive, mass-produced variety, but there was what was probably a two-hundred-dollar snow globe and an antique Tiffany-style mistletoe display. Weird.
Three stockings hung from the mantel, and these, too, looked expensive—too classy for most of the decorations. Only the smallest had a name. HOLLY. The baby’s probably. The mantel was empty of pictures, which I thought was odd seeing as there was a new baby in the house. The top of the piano was bare as well.
Jenks had dropped down to talk with the guy at the piano. Ivy had her head next to the photographer’s. Edden wasn’t paying me any attention. Everyone looked busy, so I wandered to the fireplace and ran a finger over the smooth wood for evidence that the mantel had once held pictures. No dust.
“Hey!” the man with Edden exclaimed. “What do you think you’re doing?” His face red, he glanced at Edden, clearly ticked off because he wanted to kick me out but couldn’t.
Faces turned, and embarrassed, I backed up. “Sorry.”
Ivy glanced up from the laptop in the sudden quiet. Both she and the photographer wore questioning expressions as they stared at me, looking like yin and yang with Ivy’s short black hair and the photographer’s long blond tresses. I remembered seeing the photographer at Trent’s stables, taking pictures, but Ivy hadn’t been there, and I wondered how she had gotten chummy enough in fifteen minutes to have their heads together discussing the niceties of angles and shadows.
Almost smiling, Edden harrumphed. Head bowed and stubby-fingered hand in the air to say he was taking care of it, he rocked into motion. Ivy gave the photographer one of our cards, then crossed the room to join me. Jenks landed on her shoulder halfway there, and I saw her lips move in a soft comment that made the pixy laugh.
By the time they all reached me, I had cocked my hip and crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m not going to touch anything else!” I exclaimed, wondering if the harsh expressions on the FIB officers’ faces were for me breaking protocol or a lingering doubt about my involvement in Kisten’s death. I knew Edden had done his best to squelch it, but that meant little to a lifetime of prejudice.
Rolling his eyes at Ivy, Edden took my elbow to lead me into the hallway. Ivy, too, was smiling, but as soon as the privacy of the hall took us, she became serious. “Rachel’s here now, so how about showing us where Glenn was beat up?” she asked, surprising me.
“That’s it,” Edden said, glancing past me and into the living room. “Everything else looks untouched.”
I jerked my elbow from Edden and leaned against the wall. Jenks’s wings clattered as he flew to snuggle in my scarf, and Ivy shook her head. “There isn’t enough emotion in the room for someone having been mauled,” she said. “You say it happened this morning? No way.”
Edden’s face scrunched up, and I looked at Ivy. A vampire could read the pheromones left in a room, giving a qualitative, though not terribly quantitative, impression of the emotions that had been given free rein. By the way Edden looked, I guessed he knew about the ability but didn’t trust it. Neither did the courts, disallowing a vampire’s testimony unless they were trained, registered, and attended quarterly calibration seminars. Ivy didn’t, but if she said there wasn’t a sign of a struggle here, then I’d believe her over a bloodsplattered wall.
“The rest of the house is undisturbed,” he said, and Ivy frowned. “Do you want me to tell you what we do know while we tour the house for signs of…emotion?” he finished, and I smirked. Wait until they heard what I found out. But Ivy shot me a look to shut up, and my breath slipped from me. Okay…I’ll wait.
“I’m listening,” she said to Edden as she went down the short hall. Her stride was long and confident, and the man toting the FIB evidence vacuum pressed into the wall to let her pass. She went first into a tidy, opulent bedroom with pillows, rich drapes, rugs, and beautiful things arranged on what looked like an antique carved bedroom set. Drawers were open and the closet clearly had hangers missing. The rich femininity didn’t match the rest of the house. Not at all. Well, except for the snow globe, stockings, and mistletoe display.
“The mortgage is in Mr. and Mrs. Tilson’s names,” Edden said, his hands in his pockets as he rocked back on his heels, clearly not interested in the incongruity of decorating styles. “They’re human,” he added, and I almost blurted, No they aren’t, biting my tongue instead.
“He and his wife bought the house about a year and a half ago,” Edden continued, and Jenks snorted, silent to all but me. “She’s a stay-at-home mom caring for their daughter, but we’ve found that Holly is registered at three day cares. Mr. Tilson works as a janitor, retired from being a science teacher in Kentucky. Took early retirement, I guess, and wanted something to do and to supplement his pension.”
Like clean crap from the walls of the boys’ bathroom? Yeah, that sounded right.
“We have a tap on the phone and we’re watching the credit cards,” Edden was saying as Ivy skulked around the room. “There’s no extended family that we know of yet on either side, but everyone is out for the holidays and it’s taking a long time to get anything.”
His words broke off suddenly, and he stared at me. “Why are you smiling?”
Immediately I forced my expression to go innocent. “No reason. What else have you got?”
“Very little.” He eyed me. “We’ll find them.”
Ivy eased around the carved furniture like a shadow, using a pen to shift the curtains and nodding at the securitysystem sticker on the window. Her sleek leather made her look like a well-paid assassin against the elegant surroundings hidden inside the depths of the house. Someone had excellent tastes and I didn’t think it was Mr. Tilson the janitor. Mr. Tilson the hit man, maybe.
“Here’s a recent picture,” Edden said, handing me a piece of paper with a copy of Tilson’s school ID. Jenks startled me when he vaulted from the folds of soft yarn to hover over the nine-by-eleven paper. The face not smiling back at me was blurry, but according to the tag he was blond and blue eyed. There were some wrinkles, but not a lot, and he had a receding hairline.
“Pretty harmless looking for someone who can beat up an FIB detective,” Jenks said.
“It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for,” I murmured, silently asking Jenks if he was done before handing the paper back to Edden. Ivy hadn’t come over to look, so she’d probably seen it already.
“We don’t have anything yet on Mrs. Tilson,” Edden said, starting when Ivy jerked into a fast pace and left the room. “But we’re working on it.”
His last words were rather distant, and I could guess why. Ivy was edging into the eerie vamp quickness she took pains to hide from me. Her unnerving speed aside, I enjoyed seeing her like this, wrapped up in thinking. Work was the only time she let herself forget the misery of her wants and needs and found a feeling of self-worth.
Edden followed me into the hallway. It wasn’t hard to figure out where Ivy had gone. Jenks had already flown past the open door to the bathroom, and there was a frightened, older FIB officer leaning against a wall at the end of the hall.
“She in there?” Edden asked the man, who clearly had not been expecting an intense vampire in leather to burst in on him. Edden gave the sweating man a pat on the shoulder. “Will you find out if the fingerprints have been sent off yet?”
The officer walked away gratefully, and Edden and I entered what was clearly the baby’s room.
If Ivy looked out of place in the bedroom, she looked like she was from Mars next to the crib, frilly lace curtains, and brightly colored expensive toys. The child had been lavished with attention, from the looks of it. And where Ivy stuck out, Jenks fit right in, hovering with his hands on his hips and staring in disgust at a framed shot of Tinker Bell.
“We’re gathering information for a trial more than searching for a way to find them,” Edden said to keep the conversation going and cover the pain in the back of his eyes. “I’m not letting a lawyer uphold the Constitution so far that we have to let them go.”
I jumped when one of the toys burst into music. Jenks just about hit the ceiling in a cloud of dust, clearly the guilty party.
“You can’t pack up a baby and go that fast without leaving a trail,” I said, adrenaline flooding me. “I heard the woman dotes on her kid.” I gazed at the mounds of toys. “All you’ll have to do is post a man at the toy store. You’ll have them in a week.”
“I want them now,” Edden said grimly. The music cut off, and seeing Jenks hovering miserably in the middle of the room, Edden added, “Don’t worry, Jenks. We were done here.”
Oh, sure, I get yelled at, and the pixy gets told it doesn’t matter. But as Ivy poked around, I drifted to the books in the overstuffed rocking chair, smiling at a familiar title. I reached for them, not wanting to leave this spot of innocence and good taste. A feeling of melancholy had overtaken me. I knew it was from my dilemma about having kids. If it had just been my blood disease, I might have taken my chances, but I couldn’t face my children being demons.
I had let the hide-and-seek book slip from my fingers when Ivy gingerly came to a halt among the stuffed animals and pastel colors, standing as if the soft domesticity might be catching. “Is this the last room?” she asked, and when Edden nodded with a tired motion, she added, “Are you sure Glenn wasn’t attacked somewhere else and dropped here?”
“Pretty sure. His prints on the walk come right to the door.”
Her calm face showed a glimmer of anger. “There’s nothing in this room either,” she said softly. “Nothing. Not even a whisper from a cranky baby.”
Seeing her ready to go, I stacked the books on a small table. The thump of a small cardboard doll hitting the floor drew my attention, and I picked it up. The lavish hide-and-seek book was extravagant for a small house in a depressed neighborhood, but after seeing the bedroom, I wasn’t surprised. It was obvious they spared no expense when it came to their kid. Nothing fit. Nothing made sense.
Jenks flitted to Ivy’s shoulder, clearly trying to cheer her up. She was having none of it and waved him away. Edden waited for me by the door as I leafed through the book to put the doll back. But there was already a hard bump in the pocket where it belonged.
“Just a minute,” I said, using two fingers to dig it out. I didn’t know why, but the doll needed to go back in her bed and I was the only one who could do it. That’s what the oversize print said. And I was feeling melancholy. Edden could wait.
But when my fingertips connected with the smooth bump in the pocket, I jerked my hand out, jamming my fingers into my mouth before I knew what I was doing. “Ow!” I yelped from around my fingers, then stared at the book, now fallen onto the chair.
Edden’s face became wary, and Jenks flew to me. Ivy stopped dead on the threshold, staring with eyes black from the surge of adrenaline I’d given off. Embarrassed, I took my fingers out of my mouth and pointed. “Something’s in there,” I said, feeling quivery inside. “It moved. Something is in that book! And it’s furry.” And warm, and it shocked the hell out of me.
Ivy came back in, but it was Edden who took his pen and stuck it in the pocket. The three of us crouched over the book while Jenks stood nearby and bent to look in.
“It’s a stone,” he said as he straightened, looking at me quizzically. “A black stone.”
“It was furry!” I backed up a step. “I felt it move!”
Edden wedged the pen in, and a black crystal came sliding out to glint dully in the electric light. “There’s your mouse,” he said dryly, and I felt the blood fall to my feet as I recognized it.
It was a banshee tear. It was a freaking banshee tear.
“That’s a banshee tear,” both Ivy and I said together, and Jenks gave a little yelp, taking flight to flit madly between me and Ivy until he finally landed on my shoulder.
I stepped back, wringing my hand as if I could erase having touched it. Damn, I’d touched a banshee tear. Double damn, it was probably evidence.
“It felt furry?” the pixy said, and I nodded, eyeing my fingers. They looked okay, but it had been a banshee tear, and it gave me the creeps.
Edden’s expression of confusion slowly cleared. “I’ve heard of these,” he said, tapping it with his pen tip. Then he straightened to his entire height and looked me directly in the eye. “This is why there’s no emotion here, isn’t it.”
I nodded, deciding this was why it looked like a home, but didn’t feel like it. The banshee tear explained everything. The love had been sucked right out. “They leave them where there’s likely to be a lot of emotion,” I said, wondering why Ivy had gone pale. Well, paler than usual. “Sometimes they will tip the scales and make things worse—sort of push everyone to a higher pitch. The tear soaks everything up, and then the banshee comes back to collect it.” And I had touched it. Euwie.
“A banshee did this?” Edden said, his anger slipping through a crack in his veneer of calm. “Made that man hurt my son?”
“Probably not,” I said, thinking about what Matt had told me and glancing at Ivy. “If Mrs. Tilson was cheating on her husband, that’s reason enough for a banshee to leave a tear. I bet she got it in here by posing as a babysitter or something.”
I looked at the tear, heavy and dark with the stored emotion of Glenn’s mauling—and I shivered, remembering how warm it had felt. “The I.S. has a record on every banshee in Cincinnati,” I said. “You can analyze the tear, find out who made it. The banshee might know where they went. They usually choose their victims carefully and will follow them from place to place if the pickings are good. Though they prefer to feed passively, they can suck a person dry in seconds.”
“I thought that was illegal.” Edden slid the crystal into an evidence bag and sealed it.
“It is.” Ivy’s voice was mild, but I thought she looked ill.
Jenks was picking up on her mood, too. “You okay?” he said, and she blinked her softly almond-shaped eyes once.
“No,” she said, her gaze falling to the tear. “Even if Mrs. Tilson was cheating on her husband, the suspect knew exactly where to hit Glenn to hurt but not maim. The house is clean to the point of obsession, but there’s too much money being spent on the little girl and the wife for him to be a wife beater. The man doesn’t even have a remote for the TV, for God’s sake,” she said, pointing to the unseen living room, “yet they have silk sheets and a baby computer.”
“You think the woman beat him up?” I interrupted, and Ivy frowned.
Edden, though, was interested. “If she was an Inderlander, maybe a living vampire, she could do it. She’d know how to induce pain without damage, too.”
Ivy make a noise of negation. “I’d be able to smell it if a vampire had visited, much less lived here,” she said, but I had my doubts. Last year, I would have said it was impossible to make a charm to cover an Inderlander’s scent from another Inderlander, but my mom had spelled my dad into smelling like a witch for their entire marriage.
I stood there and tried to figure it out, both Jenks and me jumping when Edden clapped his hands once. “Out,” he said suddenly, and I protested when he manhandled me into the hall. “Ivy, you and Jenks can stay, but, Rachel, I want you out.”
“Wait a minute!” I complained, but he kept me moving, yelling for someone to bring the vacuum. Ivy just shrugged, giving me an apologetic smile.
“Sorry, Rachel,” Edden said when we reached the activity of the living room, his brown eyes glinting with amusement. “You can poke around in the garage if you want.”
“Excuse me?” I exclaimed. He knew I hated the cold. It was an offer that really wasn’t one. “How come Ivy gets to stay and help?”
“Because Ivy knows how to handle herself.”
That was just rude. “You suckwad! I’m the one who found the tear!” I said as I stood in the archway to the living room and watched everyone buzz about the new development. Several heads turned, but I didn’t care. I was being gotten rid of.
Edden’s face darkened with emotion, but his next words were postponed when Alex, the officer he had sent to watch my car, came in, cold on his breath and snow on his boots. “Ah, they won’t be able to have a dog out to look at your car for a couple of hours,” he said nervously, seeing Edden’s anger directed at me. “There’s a big Brimstone bust out at the Hollows airport.”
I jumped as, suddenly, Ivy was next to me. “What’s wrong with your car?” she asked, and I let my air out in a huff.
“Tom Bansen was standing next to it,” I said. “I’m being paranoid.”
Ivy smiled. “Don’t worry about him,” she said. “You’re under Rynn Cormel’s protection. He wouldn’t dare.”
Unless the vampires want me dead, I thought, then turned back to Edden. “Edden…,” I complained, but the squat man put a hand on my shoulder and moved me to the kitchen.
“Alex, take Ms. Morgan home,” he said. “Rachel, I’ll call you if we need you. If you don’t want to leave, you can wait in the kitchen, but it’s going to be hours. Probably not until tomorrow. You might as well go home.”
He wasn’t telling Ivy to go home. I took a breath to whine some more, but someone had called his name, and he was gone, leaving only the faint scent of coffee.
A familiar wing clatter drew my attention to Jenks, sitting on top of a picture frame, and he dropped to me. “Sorry, Rache,” he said, and I slumped back into the wall, disgusted.
“I’m staying,” I said, loud enough for everyone to hear, and Alex exhaled in relief, going to stand over a heating vent. “How come Ivy gets to help?” I asked Jenks, already knowing the answer and envious of how she, a vampire who had once beaten up an entire floor of FIB guys, was fitting in better than me, a witch who had helped them bring in the city’s master vampire in their own back room. It wasn’t my fault Skimmer killed him.
Hell, I thought. Maybe I should take some classes on crime scene protocol. Anything would be better than standing on the sidelines and watching everyone else play. I was not a bench warmer. Not by a long shot.
Jenks landed on my shoulder in a show of support. I knew he wanted to help, and I appreciated his loyalty. At his movement, Edden looked up from his cell phone. “Is your finger okay?” he asked suddenly, and I glanced at it. It looked fine.
Not answering him, I pushed from the wall and stomped out. Jenks rose to follow me at head height into the empty kitchen. “Rache…,” he started, and I grimaced.
“Stay with Ivy if you want,” I said bitterly, zipping up my coat and wrapping my scarf around my neck. I wasn’t going home. Not yet. “I’ll be in the garage.”
His tiny features became relieved. “Thanks, Rache. I’ll let you know what we find out,” he said, slipping a trail of gold dust as he zipped back to the nursery.
It’s so unfair, I thought as I took my blue booties off. So my protocol sucked dishwater. I was getting results faster than a houseful of FIB agents. Leaving, I slammed the screen door and stomped down the cement steps. Home. Yeah. Maybe I’d make cookies. Gingerbread men with little FIB badges. Then I’d bite their freaking heads off. But when my feet hit the cement floor, I slowed. Oh, I was still mad, but Edden had said I could look through the garage. I thought he’d offered only because he knew it was too cold, but why not?
Hands on my hips, I used a boot tip to unwedge the informal closure on the nearest box. It popped open to show a mishmash of stuff that looked like classic post-yard-sale clutter: books, knickknacks, photo albums, and several cameras. Expensive ones.
“Photo albums?” I questioned, looking at the silent walls. Who keeps their photo albums in the garage? Maybe it was temporary, for Christmas, to make room for all the baby toys.
I moved to the next box, slipping on my gloves for warmth as I opened it to find more books and clothes from the seventies—explaining their living room, perhaps. Under it was another box that contained last year’s styles. I held up the first—a dress that I might find in my mother’s closet—thinking that Mrs. Tilson must have been heavy once. The dress was way bigger than me, but not a maternity cut. It didn’t match Matt’s description. It didn’t match what I’d seen in the open closet, either.
Frowning, I put the dress back, digging to the bottom to find a stack of yearbooks. “Bingo,” I whispered, kneeling to feel the cold cement go right through my jeans. I didn’t have to wait until Edden’s office dug up a photo of them. I could see for myself.
My knees were cramping, so I pulled the kiddie sled over and sat on it, knees almost to my ears as I leafed through a yearbook with Clair Smith penciled on the front flap. Clair had graduated from a high school a few hundred miles upstate, and was apparently popular if the overwhelming number of signatures meant anything. Lots of promises to write. Apparently she toured Europe before going to college.
There was another yearbook from a local college where she’d gotten her four-year journalism degree, majoring in photography, and had met Joshua, according to the hearts and flowers around his signature. My gaze slid to the box of albums. So maybe it was school stuff. It might explain the cameras, too.
She was a member of the photography club in high school, and had graduated in ‘82. I stared at the picture of the young woman standing on the bleachers surrounded by awkward teenagers, my finger resting on her name. Unless there was a misprint, Clair was a rather round young woman with a cheerful smile, not the slight, mild woman Matt had described. She wasn’t fat, but she wasn’t my size either. And if she’d graduated in ‘82, that would make her…over forty now?
I felt my face lose its expression, and I turned to look at the wall of the house as if I could pull Ivy out here with my thoughts. Over forty with one kid and wanting five more? Spacing them five years apart?
She had to be an Inderlander. Witches lived a hundred and sixty years and could have kids the entire span, apart from twenty years on either side. Maybe that was the source of strife? Mr. Tilson found out his wife was a witch? But it didn’t smell like a witch lived here. Or a vampire. Or a Were.
I exhaled, setting the book aside and shuffling until I found one with Joshua Tilson printed on the front cover. His school had splurged for real fake-leather bindings. Nice.
Joshua had graduated from Kentucky State the same year as Clair. I thumbed through the pages, looking for him. My lips parted, and a chill tightened my muscles. Slowly I brought the page closer to my nose, wishing the light were brighter out here. Joshua didn’t look anything like the photo Edden had shown me.
My eyes went to the surrounding stuff, then remembered Edden’s comments about Mr. Tilson retiring. Then Matt’s complaint that the same man ought to be able to mow his own lawn, the rage Mr. Tilson had fallen into, how young his family was, and how they were going to have lots more kids. Stuff in the garage they didn’t want in the house but couldn’t risk throwing away.
I didn’t think Mr. and Mrs. Tilson were the people who lived here. They were someone else and couldn’t risk being found out by calling the ambulance, so they had fled.
I shivered, the motion reaching all the way to my fingertips. “I-i-i-i-i-vy-y-y-y-y!” I shouted. “Ivy! Come see this!”
I listened to the silence for a moment. She wasn’t coming. Annoyed, I got up, book in hand. My knees were stiff from the cold, and I almost fell, jerking myself straight when Ivy poked her head out.
“Find something?” she said, amusement in her dark eyes.
Not “Are you still here?” or “I thought you left,” but “Find something?” And her amusement wasn’t at my expense, but Edden’s, who was now behind her.
I smiled, telling her I had indeed found something. “Glenn wasn’t beaten up by Mr. Tilson,” I said smugly.
“Rachel…,” Edden started, and I triumphantly held up the yearbook and came forward.
“Have you gotten your fingerprints back yet?” I asked.
“No. It’s going to be almost a week—”
“Be sure to check them against known Inderland criminal offenders,” I said, shoving the book at him, but Ivy took it. “You won’t find them matching up to Mr. Tilson’s record, and that’s assuming he has one. I think the Tilsons are dead, and whoever is living here took their names along with their lives.”
Five (#ulink_2cfa2d64-2777-5ee2-a2f1-d79a213a9321)
Thanks, Alex!” I shouted, waving to the FIB officer as he drove down the shadowy, snow-quiet street to leave me standing on the sidewalk outside our church. Ivy was already halfway up the walk, anxious to be on her own turf where she had her ironclad ways of coping. She’d been quiet all the way home, and I didn’t think it was from us needing a ride because I was too chicken to open my car door and see if I exploded.
Alex’s taillights flashed as he rolled through a stop sign at the end of the road, and I turned away. The church that Ivy, Jenks, and I lived in was lit up and serene, the colors bleeding out of the stained-glass windows and onto the untouched snow in a fabulous swirl. I studied the roofline to try to spot Bis, our resident gargoyle, but there was nothing between the white puffs of my breath. The church was pretty with its Christmas and solstice decorations of live garlands and cheerful bows, and I smiled, glad to live in such a unique place.
This last fall, Jenks had finally fixed the spotlights angling onto the steeple, and it added to the beauty. The building hadn’t been used as a church for years, but it was sanctified-—again. Ivy had originally chosen the church to operate our runner firm from to tick off her undead mother, and we’d never moved to more professional digs when the opportunity had arisen. I felt safe here. So did Ivy. And Jenks needed the garden out back to feed his almost four dozen kids.
“Hurry up, Rache,” Jenks complained from under my hat. “I’ve got icicles hanging.”
Smirking, I followed Ivy up the walk to the worn front steps. Jenks had been silent on the ride home, too, and I’d have almost been willing to find out what happened on the ninth day of Christmas just so I wouldn’t have had to keep the conversation going with Alex all by myself. I couldn’t tell if my roommates, Ivy especially, had been thinking or just mad.
Maybe she thought I’d shown her up by discovering that the Tilsons were impostors before she had. Or maybe she was upset that I wanted her to go out to Kisten’s boat. She’d loved him, too. Loved him more deeply than me, and longer. I’d have thought she’d be eager for the chance to find his killer and the vampire who had tried to turn me into a blood toy.
Ivy’s pace ground to a stop on the salted steps, and my head came up when a soft curse slipped from her. Halting, I sent my gaze to follow hers to our business sign, over the door. “Damn it all to the Turn and back,” I whispered, seeing the spray-painted Black Wit and a half-scripted c trailing down the brass plaque to drip onto the twin oak doors.
“What is it?” Jenks shrilled, unable to see and tugging on my hair.
“Someone redecorated the sign,” Ivy said blandly, but I could tell she was mad. “We need to start leaving some lights on,” she muttered, yanking open the door and going inside.
“Lights?” I exclaimed. “The place is already lit up like a…a church!”
Ivy was inside, and I stood there with my hands on my hips, getting more and more pissed. It was an attack on me, and I felt it to my core after the hint of FIB animosity at the crime site. Son of a bitch.
“Bis!” I shouted as I looked up and wondered where the little guy was. “You out here?”
“Rache,” Jenks said as he tugged on my hair. “I gotta check on Matalina and my kids.”
“Sorry,” I muttered. Pulling my coat tight about me, I passed into the church and yanked the door shut. Angry, I let the locking bar thump down, though technically we were open until midnight. There was a soft lifting of my hat, and Jenks darted off into the sanctuary. I slowly took my hat off and hung it on the hook, my mood easing at the high-pitched chorus of hello-o-os from his kids. It had taken me four hours to scrape the paint from the brass the last time. Where in hell was Bis? I hoped he was okay. The “artists” had clearly been interrupted.
Maybe I should spell the sign, I thought, but I didn’t think there was a charm to make metal impervious to paint. I could put a black spell on it to give whoever touched it acne, but that would be illegal. And despite what the graffiti said, I was a white witch, damn it.
The warmth of the church soaked into me as I hung my coat on a peg. Past the dark shadow of the windowless foyer was my desk, at the back of the sanctuary where the altar used to be, the oak rolltop currently covered with plants and serving as a winter home for Jenks and his family. It was safer than hibernating in the stump in the backyard, and since I didn’t ever use my desk, it was only a matter of enduring the indignity of finding pixy girls playing in my makeup or using the hair in my brush to fashion hammocks.
Across from my desk was an informal grouping of furniture around a low coffee table. There was a TV and a stereo, but it was more of a place to interview clients than a real living room. Our undead patrons had to come around to the back and the unsanctified part of the church and our more private living room. That’s where Ivy’s Christmas tree was, with one present still under it. After ruining David’s coat trying to tag Tom, I’d had to get him a new one. He was in the Bahamas right now, at an insurance seminar with the ladies.
One front corner of the church held Ivy’s baby grand piano—out of sight from where I now stood—and across from that, a mat where I’d taken to exercising when Ivy was out. Ivy went to the gym to keep her figure. At least that’s where she said she was going when she left anxious and came home rested, relaxed, and satiated. In the middle of it all was Kisten’s battered pool table, rescued from the curb whereas Kisten himself hadn’t been.
My mood slowly shifted from anger to melancholy as I took off my boots and left them under my coat. A passel of Jenks’s kids were in the open rafters singing carols, and it was hard to stay upset with their ethereal three-part harmony mixing with the smell of brewing coffee.
Coffee, I thought as I flopped onto the couch and pointed the remote at the stereo. Crystal Method filled the air, fast and aggressive, and I tossed the remote to the table and put my feet up, out of the draft. Coffee would make everything better, but I probably had at least five minutes until it was done. After that close ride in the cop car, Ivy needed some space.
Jenks dropped down onto the elaborate centerpiece Ivy’s dad had brought over one night. The thing was all glitter and gold, but Jenks went well with it, standing on the painted sticks that looped in and around. He had one of his kids with him; the little pixy boy had his wings glued shut again, tear tracks giving away his misery.
“Don’t let it get to you, Rache,” Jenks said as he sifted dust from himself and wedged it in the fold his son’s wings made. “I’ll help you clean the paint off tomorrow.”
“I can do it,” I muttered, not relishing the idea that whoever put it up there would probably do a drive-by to see me busting my ass on a ladder. Jenks helping me was a nice thought, but no way would it be warm enough.
“I don’t get it,” I complained, then did a double take at the tiny cut-out snowflakes now decorating the windows. That’s why the glue. They were the size of my pinkie nail, and were the sweetest things I’d ever seen. “No one cares about the good stuff I do,” I said as Jenks’s son squirmed under his dad’s attention. “So what if I had to summon a demon if it all ended well? I mean, you tell me Cincinnati isn’t better without Piscary. Rynn Cormel is a way better crime boss than he was. Ivy likes him, too.”
“You’re right,” the pixy said as he gently pulled his son’s wings apart. Behind him, Rex, Jenks’s cat, peeked in from the dark foyer, pulled from the belfry by the sound of her four-inch master’s voice. Just last week, Jenks had installed a cat door in the belfry stairway, tired of asking one of us to open the door for his cat. The beast loved the belfry with its high windows. It made easy access for Bis, too. Not that the cat-size gargoyle came in much.
“And Trent,” I said, watching Rex since Jenks was preoccupied with a flightless child. “Beloved city son and idiot billionaire goes and gets caught in the ever-after. Who has to bust her butt and make a deal with demons to get him back?”
“The one who got him there?” Jenks said, and my eyes narrowed. “Hey, kitty, kitty. How’s my sweetest fluff ball?” he crooned, which I thought risky, but hey, it was his cat.
“It was Trent’s idea,” I said, foot bobbing. “And now it’s my tail in the ever-after paying for his rescue. Do I even get one thank-you? No, I get trash painted on my front door.”
“You got your life back,” Jenks said, “and an end to Al trying to kill you. Got an understanding in the ever-after that any demon messing with you is messing with Al. You got Trent’s silence as to what you are. He could have brought you down right there. It wouldn’t be graffiti on your door but a burning stake in the front yard, with you tied to it.”
I froze, shocked. What I am? Trent kept silent as to what I am? I should be thankful he didn’t tell anyone? If he told anyone what I was, he’d have to explain how I got that way, which would put him on the stake next to me.
But Jenks was smiling at his son, oblivious. “There you go, Jerrimatt,” he said fondly as he gave the youngster a boost into the air where he hung, shedding bright sparkles to pool on the table. “And if glue should somehow end up in Jack’s mittens, I won’t have any idea who did it.”
The small pixy’s wings fanned into motion and a cloud of silver dust enveloped both of them. “Thanks, Papa,” Jerrimatt said, and his tear-wet eyes took on a familiar glint of deviltry.
Jenks watched his son fly away with a fond look. Rex watched, too, tail twitching. Turning back to me, Jenks saw my sour mood. Trent kept silent as to what I am, eh?
“I mean,” the pixy backpedaled, “what Trent’s dad did to you.”
Mollified, I took my feet from the table and put them on the floor. “Yeah, whatever,” I muttered as I rubbed my wrist and the demon mark there. I had another on the bottom of my foot, since Al hadn’t traded it back for his summoning name yet, enjoying my owing him two marks. I lived with the worry that I’d be pulled into someone’s demon circle some night, but no one had summoned Al and gotten me instead—yet.
The demon marks were hard to explain, and more people than I liked knew what they were. It was the victors who wrote the history books, and I wasn’t winning. But at least I wasn’t living in the ever-after, playing blow-up doll to a demon. No, I was just playing his student.
Leaning my head back and looking at the ceiling, I shouted, “Ivy? That coffee done?”
Rex skittered under the pool table at my voice, and at Ivy’s positive call, I clicked off the music and lurched to my feet. Jenks went to help Matalina break up a fight about glitter, and I paced down the long hall that bisected the back end of the church. I passed the his-and-her bathrooms that had been converted into Ivy’s opulent bathroom and my more Spartan facilities that also boasted the washer and dryer. Our separate bedrooms were next, my best guess putting them originally as clergy offices. Though the dark hallway didn’t change, the feeling of the air did as I entered the unsanctified back end of the church, added on later. This was where the kitchen and private living room were, and if it had been sanctified, I would have slept here.
Put simply, I loved my kitchen. Ivy had remodeled it before I had moved in, and it was the best room in the place. A blue-curtained window over the sink looked out on the small witch’s garden. Beyond that was the graveyard. That had bothered me at first, but after mowing the site for a year, I had a fondness for the weathered stones and forgotten names.
Inside, it was all gleaming stainless steel and bright fluorescent light. There were two stoves—one gas, one electric—so I didn’t have to do my spells and cook on the same surface. The counter space was expansive, and I used it all when I spelled, which was often, since the charms I used were expensive unless I made them myself. Then they were dirt cheap. Literally.
In the center was an island counter with a circle etched into the linoleum around it. I used to keep my spell books in the open rack under it until Al had burned one in a fit of pique. Now they were in the belfry. The counter made for a secure place to spell, unsanctified or not.
Up against the interior wall was a heavy antique farm table. Ivy was sitting at the back corner of it, near the archway to the hall, with her computer, printer, and stacks of carefully filed papers. When we’d moved in, I had the use of one end of it. Now I was lucky if I got a corner to eat on. So of course I’d taken over the rest of the kitchen.
Ivy looked up from her keyboard, and I dropped my bag on yesterday’s unopened mail and collapsed in my chair. “You want some lunch?” I asked, seeing as it was nearing midnight.
She shrugged, eyeing the bills. “Sure.”
I knew it bugged her, so I left the mail where it was under my bag, and I lurched back to my feet with tomato soup and cheese crackers in mind. If she wanted something more, she’d say so. A pang of worry went through me as I pulled a can of soup off the pantry shelves. Glenn liked tomatoes. God, I hoped he was okay. That he was unconscious had me concerned.
Ivy clicked through a couple of Web pages as I made good with the can opener. I hesitated at the sight of my copper spell pots, then reached for a more mundane saucepan. Mixing spell prep and food prep wasn’t a good idea. “Research?” I asked, hearing in her silence that she was still upset about something.
“Looking up banshees,” she said shortly, and I hoped she didn’t know how coy she looked with the end of the pen between her teeth. Her canines were sharp, like a cat’s, but she wouldn’t get the extended ones until she was dead. She wouldn’t get the light sensitivity or the physical need for blood to survive until then either. Ivy still had a taste for it, however, and though it made her devilishly hard to live with, she could do without.
The lid came off with a ting, and I sighed. “Ivy, I’m sorry.”
Her foot moved back and forth like an angry cat’s tail. “For what?” she said mildly, then stilled her foot’s motion as she saw me notice it.
That my methods are getting faster results than yours, I thought, but what I said was, “For sending you out to Kisten’s boat?”
I hated the question in my voice, but I didn’t know what was bothering her. Ivy looked up, and I studied the rim of brown around her eyes. It was wide and full, telling me she had control of her emotions. “I can handle it,” she said, and I frowned, hearing something else.
Turning my back on her, I shook the congealed soup into the pan with a dull thwap. “I don’t mind going out with you.” I did, but I was going to offer.
“I’ve got it covered,” she said more forcefully.
Sighing, I searched for a wooden spoon. Ivy dealt with the uncomfortable by ignoring it, and though I wasn’t averse to avoiding issues to maintain a pleasant living space, I tended to poke sticks at sleeping vampires when I thought I could get away with it.
The phone rang, and I caught Ivy’s dark glare as I whipped around to answer it.
“Vampiric Charms,” I said politely into the receiver. “How can we help?” I used to answer with my name, until the first graffiti incident.
“Rachel, it’s Edden,” came the FIB captain’s gravelly voice. “Glad you’re home. Hey, we’re having trouble getting the fingerprints out—”
“Re-e-e-eally?” I interrupted, making a mocking face at Ivy and turning the receiver so she could hear him with her extraordinary vamp hearing. “Imagine that.”
“They keep going to the wrong office,” the man continued, too intent to hear my sarcasm. “But we do know the banshee tear belongs to a Mia Harbor. The woman’s been around since Cincinnati was a pig farm, and I wanted to ask you to come down tomorrow about nine and help us interview her.”
I leaned against the counter with a hand to my forehead. What he wanted was for me to bring a truth amulet. Humans were adept at reading body language, but a banshee was devilishly hard to interpret. Or so I’d heard. The I.S. never sent witches after banshees.
Ivy was staring at me, brown-rimmed eyes wide. She looked surprised. No, shocked. “Nine is too early,” I said, wondering what was up with her. “How about noon?”
“Noon?” he echoed. “We need to move quickly on this.”
So why did you kick me out when I was making progress? “I need the morning to make up a truth charm. Those things are expensive. Unless you want a five-hundred-dollar bill for it tacked onto my consultant’s fee?”
Edden was silent, but I could hear his frustration. “Noon.”
“Noon,” I said, feeling like I’d won some points. Actually, I had a truth amulet in my charm cupboard, two feet away, but I didn’t get up until eleven most days. “As long as we’re done by two. I’ve got to pick up my brother at the airport.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “I’ll send a car. See you here.”
“Hey, has anyone looked at my car yet?” I said, but the line had gone dead. “Tomorrow,” I said with a smile, setting the phone back in its cradle. I waltzed to the fridge for the milk, then looked at Ivy when I realized she was still just sitting there. “What’s the matter?”
Ivy leaned back into her chair, her expression worried. “I met Mia Harbor once. Right before I was assigned to work with you in the I.S. She’s an…interesting lady.”
“Nice lady?” I asked as I dumped in the milk. If she had been around since Cincy was a pig town, then she was probably a really old nice lady.
Ivy’s brow was furrowed when I glanced at her, and she put her eyes on her screen. Her behavior was off. “What is it?” I asked as neutrally as I could.
The pen she was tapping stilled. “Nothing.”
I made a scoffing sound. “Something’s bothering you. What is it?”
“Nothing!” she said loudly and Jenks buzzed in.
Grinning, the pixy landed on the island counter between us in his best Peter Pan pose. “I think Ivy’s pissed ‘cause you found the banshee tear and she didn’t,” he said, and Ivy’s pen started tapping again. It was so fast, it almost hummed.
“Nice going, Jenks,” I muttered as I stirred the milk into the soup. The ticking of the burner was loud until the gas lit with a whoosh and I turned it to low. “Where’s that buddy gargoyle of yours? He’s supposed to keep watch at night.”
“I don’t know,” he said, not worried at all. “But he’s as hard as a rock. I wouldn’t worry about him. Maybe he’s visiting his folks. He does have a life, unlike some of us here.”
“I think Rachel finding that tear was great,” Ivy said tightly.
I glanced over my shoulder at Jenks, and at my encouragement, he went to make irritating circles around her. He could get away with a lot I couldn’t, and if we didn’t find out soon what was bothering her, it might be too late to head it off when we did.
“Then you’re mad because you’ve been working on Kisten’s murder for six months, and Rachel got farther in six minutes by sniffing the floor,” he guessed.
Ivy leaned her chair back on two legs, balancing as she measured his flight, probably calculating where she’d have to be to catch him. “Both are valid ways of investigation,” she said, her pupils widening. “And it’s only been three months. I didn’t look the first three.”
I continued to stir the soup with a clockwise motion as Jenks rose up in a column of sparkles and darted out of the kitchen. The pixy noise in the sanctuary had reached dangerous levels, and I knew he wanted to handle it to give Matalina a break. She was doing great this winter, but we were all still worried about her. Nineteen was old for a pixy.
That Ivy hadn’t done anything to find Kisten’s killer for the first three months wasn’t a surprise. The hurt had been that bad, and she thought she might have been the one who had done it. “I don’t mind going out with you tonight,” I offered again. “Ford left the ladder.”
“I’m doing this myself.”
I bowed my head over the soup, breathing in the acidic scent and feeling Ivy’s pain now that Jenks wasn’t here cluttering everything up. I’d been Kisten’s girlfriend, but Ivy had loved him, too—deeper, on a gut level, with the strength of the past, not like my new love, based on the idea of a future. And here I was, making her deal with the pain. “Are you okay?” I asked softly.
“No,” she said again, her voice flat.
My shoulders slumped. “I miss him, too,” I whispered. I turned to see her perfect face frozen in grief. I couldn’t help it, and risking a misunderstanding, I crossed the room. “It’s going to be okay,” I said, touching her shoulder for an instant before I withdrew and went into the pantry for the crackers.
Ivy had her head bowed when I came out, and I said nothing as I found two bowls and set them on the table with the crackers between them, shoving my bag and the mail out of the way. Uncomfortable with the silence, I hesitantly stood before her. “I’m, uh, starting to remember a little,” I said, and her dark eyes flicked to mine. “I didn’t want to tell you in front of Edden because Ford thinks he’ll reopen the case when he finds out.”
Fear flickered behind her eyes, and my breath caught. Ivy is scared?
“What did you remember?” she said, and my mouth went dry. Ivy was never scared. Ticked, seductive, chill, occasionally out of control, but never scared.
I shrugged, trying to look nonchalant when I pulled back, a sliver of my own fear sliding under my skin. “I know for sure it’s a man. I got that today. He caught a splat ball without breaking it when I tried to shoot him. And he dragged me down the hall on my stomach after I tried to get out.” I looked at my fingertips, then put a hand to my middle. Eyes on the hallway behind her, I whispered, “I tried to claw my way out through a wall.”
Ivy’s voice was a thin whisper. “A man. You’re sure?”
She doesn’t still think it was her, does she? I nodded, and her entire posture slumped.
“Ivy, I told you it wasn’t you,” I blurted. “God, I know what you smell like, and you weren’t there! How many times do I have to say it!” I didn’t care that it was really weird I knew what Ivy smelled like. Hell, we’d been living together for a year. She knew what I smelled like.
Ivy put her elbows on either side of her keyboard and dropped her forehead into the cradle of her fingers. “I thought it was Skimmer,” she said flatly. “I thought Skimmer had done it. She still won’t see me, and I thought that was why.”
My lips parted as it started to make sense. No wonder Ivy hadn’t been hell-bent on finding Kisten’s killer. Skimmer had been both her best friend and girlfriend in high school, the two sharing their blood and bodies while Ivy was out in a private school on the West Coast. The intelligent, devious vampire had moved east to get Piscary out of prison and hopefully become a member of a foreign camarilla to be with Ivy, and the top-of-her-class lawyer would cheerfully kill Kisten or me if that’s what it would take. That the petite but deadly woman had killed Piscary only added to the travesty of vampire logic. She was in jail for the crime of killing a city master—in front of witnesses—and would likely stay there until she died and became an undead herself.
“Kisten couldn’t be taken down by another living vampire,” I said, pitying Ivy for having lived with this alone for six freaking months.
Her deep brown eyes had lost their fear when they met mine. “He’d let Skimmer kill him if Piscary gave him to her.” Ivy looked at the mirrored black square the night had turned the window into. “She hated him. She hates you—” Ivy’s words caught, and she shifted her keyboard in a nervous reaction. “I’m glad it wasn’t her.”
The bubbling soup was threatening to run over, and I got up, giving her shoulder a squeeze of support before I went to turn it down. “It was a man,” I said, blowing on the top and flicking the gas off. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll find him, and we can put an end to it.”
My back was to her, and I froze as a faint tingle started at my neck, the scar she’d given me hidden under my cursesmoothed skin. I felt the muscles in my face grow slack, and my motion of stirring the soup slowed as the feeling deepened into a soft anticipation that struck the pit of my being and rebounded. Knowing Ivy couldn’t see, I let my eyes close. I knew this feeling. Missed it, even as I struggled, against my instincts, to push it away.
In her relief that Skimmer hadn’t killed Kisten, Ivy had unconsciously filled the air with pheromones to soothe and relax a potential source of blood and ecstasy. She wasn’t after my blood, but she’d been uptight for the last six months, which was probably why just this hint of pheromones felt really good. I breathed them in, enjoying the rush of desire that tightened my gut and set my thoughts spinning. I wasn’t going to act on it. Ivy and I had a safe, secure, platonic relationship. I wanted to keep it that way. But that wouldn’t stop me from this tiny little indulgence.
Sighing, I forced myself to focus on what I was doing. I adjusted my posture and shoved the whisper of desire deep, where I could ignore it. If I didn’t, Ivy would sense my willingness, and we’d be right back where we’d been six months ago, unsure, uneasy, and way too confused.
“Are you going to open your mail sometime this century?” Ivy asked, her voice distant. “You’ve got something from the university.”
Glad for the distraction, I tapped the spoon and set it in the spoon cozy. “Really?” I said, turning to find her eyeing the half-hidden stack of mail. Wiping my fingers off on my jeans, I came closer, pulling the slim envelope with the university emblem on it out from under my bag but leaving the rest, as it so clearly bothered her. I’d registered for a couple of ley line classes right before winter break, and this was probably the confirmation. I could use ley lines, but everything I knew had been learned by the seat of my pants. I was in desperate need of some formal classes before I fried my synapses.
Ivy shifted her crossed legs and focused on her computer as I ran my finger under the seal, having to tear the envelope to actually get it open. I pulled the letter out, hesitating as my check floated to the floor. Ivy was on it in a flash, short hair swinging as she bent to pick it up.
“I’ve been denied entrance,” I said, bewildered as I scanned the formal letter. “They say there was a problem with my check.” My eyes shot to the date under the letterhead. Crap, I had missed early registration and now I’d have to tack on another fee. “Did I forget to sign it or something?”
Ivy shrugged, handing it to me. “No. I think this has more to do with the professor dying the last time you took a class.”
Wincing, I jammed everything back in the envelope. Problem with my check? I had money in my account. This was crap. “She’s not dead. She’s in Trent’s basement playing Ms. Fix-it with the elven genetic code. The woman is in heaven.”
“Dead,” Ivy said, smiling to show a slip of teeth.
I looked away, stifling a quiver at the sight of her fangs. “This is so unfair.”
The harsh clatter of pixy wings gave us a second of warning, and I dropped the letter in disgust as Jenks buzzed in. Ivy’s eyes were wide in question as she gazed at him, and turning, I was surprised to see a stream of red sparkles slipping from him. “We got trouble,” he said, and I jumped, looking down when a faint bump came from under the floor.
Ivy stood and looked at the faded linoleum. “Someone’s under there.”
“That’s what I’m telling you!” Jenks said, sounding almost snotty as he hovered between us with his hands on his hips.
There was a masculine, muffled shout and a series of thumps. “Holy crap!” I shouted, dancing backward. “That sounded like Marshal!”
Ivy was a blur headed for the back door. I jumped to follow, jerking to a halt when the rear door in the back living room thumped open unseen. Bis, who rented out the belfry, flew into the kitchen at shoulder height, his skin a stark white to match the snow and his eyes glowing like a demon’s. The cat-size gargoyle beat his wings in my face, and I backed up. “Get out of my way, Bis!” I shouted, squinting at the draft and thinking about Jenks’s cold sensitivity. “What the Turn is going on out there?”
There was a commotion in the living room, but Bis wouldn’t get out of my way, shouting in his resonant voice about how he was sorry, and he’d clean it up. That he had followed the kids with the paint and didn’t know it was a distraction. I was ready to smack him one when he landed on my shoulder.
I could barely feel his weight, but vertigo hit me and I slumped back into the counter, shocked into thoughtlessness. The sensation wasn’t unexpected, but it got me every time—with Bis’s touch, every single ley line in Cincinnati became clear and present in my mind. It was sensory overload, and I wavered on my feet, focus blurred. It was worse when he was excited, and I almost passed out. That Jenks’s kids were darting among the hanging pots didn’t help.
“Get. Off,” I breathed forcefully, and looking chagrined, the gargoyle beat his wings three times and perched himself sullenly on top of the fridge. The pixy kids scattered, shrieking as if he were death itself. Bis’s creased face scowled at me with teenage bad temper, and his pebbly skin shifted to match the stainless steel of the appliance. He looked like a sulky gargoyle peering over the edge like that, but that’s what he was.
My head jerked up when Ivy shoved a snow-and-dirt-covered man into the kitchen. His face was hidden by a hood, and frozen chunks of dirty snow scattered across the floor, leaving streaks of mud as the kitchen’s warmth thawed them. The odor of cold earth rose, and I wrinkled my nose, thinking it almost smelled like the man who had killed Kisten, but not quite.
Ivy sauntered in behind him to take a stance in the door with her arms crossed over her chest. Marshal was behind her, and he came in, sliding around Ivy with no hesitation and grinning from ear to ear, excited and bright eyed under his knit hat. His coat and knees were covered in dirt as well, but at least he hadn’t rolled in it.
The unknown man in the parka lifted his head, and I almost flew at him. “Tom!” I shouted, then checked myself. It was Tom. Again. Under my house instead of looking at my car. Fear slid through me, replaced with anger. “What are you doing under my house!”
Jenks was at the ceiling yelling at his kids to get out, and when the last fled, with their wooden swords and plasticcoated straightened paper clips, Tom pulled himself upright and pushed his hood back. His lips were blue with cold, and his eyes held an irritated anger. It was then that I noticed the ley line zip-strip on his wrist, where his gloves ended. He was basically magically neutered, and my estimation of Marshal went up a notch for not only knowing what to do with an experienced ley line witch, but for having a zip-strip to begin with.
“I was coming over to drop off that box you left in my car,” Marshal said, shifting to stand between Tom and me. “That’s when I saw this”—he gave Tom a shove and the man caught himself against the island counter—“coming over the far wall. So I parked and watched. He gave a couple of kids a can of black spray paint and a twenty, and after Bis chased them off your front door, he snuck around back and broke the lock on your crawl space access.”
Mouth open in anger, I thought about giving Tom a shove myself. “You paid someone to ruin our sign!” I shouted. “Do you know how long it took me to clean it the first time?”
Tom’s lips were starting to pink up, and he pressed them together, refusing to answer. Behind him, I saw Bis sneak out of the kitchen. The small gargoyle had gone entirely white to match the ceiling, and only the rims of his ears, his long clawlike nails, and a thick stripe down his whiplike tail were still gray. He was crawling along the ceiling like a bat, wings held to make sharp angles and claws extended. It just about broke my creepy meter.
“Rachel,” Marshal said gently, “he did it to get rid of Bis.” Marshal took off his hat and unzipped his coat, sending a wave of redwood into the kitchen, heady from whatever magic he’d used to catch Tom. “What’s important is finding out what he was doing under your church.”
We all turned to look at Tom. “Good question,” I said. “Got an answer, witch?”
Tom was silent, and Ivy cracked her knuckles one by one. I hadn’t even known she could, but that’s what she was doing, pop, pop, pop.
“Ivy,” I said when it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything. “Why don’t you call the I.S.? They might be interested in this.”
Tom snickered, his arrogance clear. “Sure, you do that,” he said. “I’m sure the I.S. would love to know a shunned witch was in your kitchen. Who do you think they’ll believe if I tell them I was buying charms from you?”
Oh shit. My gut twisted, and I frowned when Marshal’s eyes widened at the word “shunned.” Without a word, Ivy set the phone down. Her eyes a dangerous black, she eased closer. A threatening haze seemed to drift a few seconds behind her as she placed her finger under his chin and asked in a soft voice, “Is there a contract out on Rachel?”
Fear bubbled against my skull, and I caught it before it triggered something worse in Ivy. I’d lived with a death threat before, and it was hard. If not for Ivy and Jenks, I would have died.
Tom took a step back and rubbed his wrist. “She’d be dead already if there was.”
Jenks bristled, his wings a sharp clatter as he came to stand on my shoulder.
“Oooooh, I’m scared,” I said to hide my relief. “What are you doing here, then?”
The angry witch smiled. “To wish you a happy New Year.”
My eyes narrowed, and, fist on my hip, I looked at the dirty puddles his boots were making. Gaze slowly rising, I took in his white nylon pants and his gray coat. His face was calm but the hatred was there, and when Ivy shifted her feet, he jerked, tense. “I’d start talking,” she threatened. “If you’re shunned, no one will care if you don’t show up for church next week.”
The tension started to rise, and my gaze broke from Tom when Bis flew back in.
“Tink’s diaphragm!” Jenks shouted. “When did he leave? Rachel, did you even see him leave?”
“Here, Rachel,” the gargoyle said as he dropped an amulet and my hand flashed out to catch it. The metallic circlet hit my palm with a cool sensation, smelling like redwood and frozen dirt. “I found it stuck to the floorboards. It was the only one.”
Tom’s jaw went stiff as he clenched his teeth. My anger grew as I recognized it from the days when I’d sit with my dad while he prepped his spells for a night at work. “It’s a bug,” I said as I handed it to Marshal to look at.
Ivy’s face grew even grimmer, and spreading her feet, she tossed her short, gold-tipped hair out of her eyes. “Why are you bugging our kitchen?”
Tom didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. I’d found him in front of the Tilsons’ house. He had told me he was working. He probably thought we’d have the inside scoop on the situation, and since he didn’t have access to anything magical or the Inderland database, he was going to steal what we knew and use it to jerk the tag out from under us.
“This is about the Tilsons, isn’t it,” I said, and I knew I was right when his eyes went to the soup, scumming over. “You want to tell me now? Save me the trouble of having Ivy beat it out of you?”
“Stay away from her,” Tom said vehemently. “I’ve been watching that woman for five months, and she’s mine! Got it?”
I leaned back, nodding as he confirmed my thoughts. Tom knew they weren’t the Tilsons and was probably working on the murders already. He seemed to think the woman had done it. “I’m just doing my job, Tom,” I said, starting to feel better. Sure he had bugged me, but my car was probably not wired to explode; dead people don’t talk—usually. “Tell you what. You stay out of my way, I’ll stay out of yours, and the best witch will win. Okay?”
“Sure,” the man said, confidence suddenly flowing from him. “Good luck with that. You’re going to come begging to talk to me before this is all over. I guarantee it.”
Jenks’s wings made a cool draft on my neck. “Get the cookie out of here,” he said sharply, and Marshal came forward to manhandle him out. Ivy beat him to it, gripping Tom’s wrist and twisting his arm into a painful angle to propel him into the hall.
“Don’t forget his amulet,” I called after her, and Bis darted down to take it from Marshal and fly after them. I heard a muttered comment from Ivy, and then the back door shut. Bis didn’t come back. I assumed he’d gone with her.
“She can handle him okay?” Marshal asked, and I nodded, my knees suddenly shaky.
“Oh yeah. She’ll be fine. It’s Tom I’m worried about.” My stomach hurt. Damn it, it had been ages since anyone had dared to violate the security of my home, and now that it was over, I didn’t like it. Grimacing, I stirred the soup, nervous energy making me slop it over. Jenks was flitting like a mad thing, and while wiping up my spill, I muttered, “Park it, Jenks.”
The kitchen grew quiet apart from the rasp of Marshal taking off his coat, but it was the gurgle of him pouring two cups of coffee that brought my attention back. I managed a thin smile when he brought me one. Jenks was on his shoulder, which was unusual, but the man had saved us a lot of trouble, and Jenks had to appreciate that since he couldn’t go outside and Bis was just one gargoyle—and a young, inexperienced one at that.
“Thanks,” I said, turning from the soup and taking a sip of coffee as I leaned against the counter. “For Tom as well as the coffee,” I added.
Looking satisfied and smug, Marshal pulled a chair around and sat with his back to the wall and his legs in the middle of the room. “Not a problem, Rachel. I’m glad I was here.”
Trailing a thin green dust, Jenks flew to land beside me, pretending to feed his brine shrimp on the sill. I knew Marshal thought my estimation of the danger I could attract was overrated, but even I’d admit that his catching a shunned ley line witch was impressive.
I breathed deep as I listened to the pixy play-by-play, filtering in from the sanctuary, of what Ivy was doing to Tom. The subtly masculine-flavored scent of redwood eased about me, a witch’s characteristic smell. It was nice smelling it in my kitchen, mixing with vampire and the light garden scent I was starting to recognize as pixy. Marshal was eyeing the ceiling in an expectant way, and chuckling, I went to sit with him.
“All right,” I said as I touched his hand encircling his coffee. “I admit it. You saved me. You saved me from whatever Tom had planned. You’re my great big freaking hero, okay?”
He laughed at that, and it felt good. “You want that box from my car?” he said, starting to gather himself to stand.
I thought about what was in it, and froze. “No. Will you throw it out for me?” I’m not throwing Kisten away, I thought guiltily. But to keep his last gift in my bottom drawer was pathetic. “Uh, thanks again for going with me out to the boat.”
Marshal shifted his chair, angling it to face me. “No problem. Is your FIB friend okay?”
I nodded, my thoughts drifting to Glenn. “Ford says he’ll be awake in a few days.”
Jenks had gotten himself a pixy-size mug of coffee from the still-dripping machine, and he settled between us on the box of crackers. He was unusually quiet, but he was probably keeping an ear on his kids. There was a sound of rising awe from the sanctuary when Ivy did something, and I winced.
My eyes went to the corner of the envelope, and in a sudden surge of irritation, I picked it out. “Hey, will you do something for me?” I asked as I handed it to Marshal. “I’m trying to pay for some classes, and I need to get this to the registrar’s office, like yesterday.”
“I thought registration ended,” Jenks piped up, and Marshal’s eyebrows went high as he took it.
“It did,” he said, and I shrugged.
“They sent my check back,” I complained. “Can you see if they will take it? Use your connections to get it in the system? I don’t want to have to pay the late fee.”
Nodding, he folded the envelope over and slid it into a back pocket to look at later. Brow furrowed, he leaned back in his chair, thinking. “You want some soup?” I asked, and Marshal smiled.
“No, thanks,” he said, then his eyes brightened. “Hey, I’ve got tomorrow off. It’s a teacher workday at the university, but it’s not like I’ve got any papers to grade. You want to go do something? Blow off some steam? After I get your check in, that is? I hear they opened up a new skate park on Vine.”
Whereas two months ago the offer would have tripped all my warning flags, now my lips curled up in a smile. Marshal wasn’t my boyfriend, but we did stuff together all the time. “I don’t think I can,” I said, annoyed that I couldn’t say yes and go. “I’ve got this murder I’m working on…and my sign to clean…”
Jenks’s wings clattered. “I said I’d help you with that, Rache,” he said brightly, and I smiled and curved my hand around him.
“It’s too cold, Jenks,” I protested, then turned back to Marshal. “Then I’ve got to pick up my brother at the airport at three, talk to Ford at six, and then go back to my mom’s and do the good-daughter thing by having dinner with her and Robbie. Saturday I’m in the ever-after with Al…” My words trailed off. “Next week, maybe?”
Marshal nodded in understanding, and suddenly seeing a golden opportunity to avoid being badgered at my mom’s, I blurted out, “Uh, unless you want to come with me to my mom’s for dinner? She’s making lasagna.”
The man laughed. “You want me to play boyfriend so your life doesn’t look pathetic, right?”
“Marshal!” I gave his shoulder a smack, but I was red-faced. God, he knew me too well.
“Well, am I right?” he needled, his eyes glinting under his hat-flattened hair.
I made a face, then said, “You going to help me here or not?”
“You bet,” he said brightly. “I like your mom. Is she making pi-i-i-ie?”
He stressed the word as if it meant the world to him, and I grinned, feeling better about tomorrow already. “If she knows you’re coming, she’ll make two.”
Marshal chuckled, and as I sipped my coffee and smiled back, content and happy, Jenks flew out of the kitchen on quiet wings, a green trail of dust spilling from him to slowly fade to nothing.
Six (#ulink_65e1d89f-36b0-53dd-a631-f3d1573a080d)
The FIB’s lobby was noisy and cold. Gray street slush had been tracked in, making a soggy mess of the rug and creating a slowly diminishing black path to the front desk, set back from the twin glass doors. The FIB emblem in the middle of the room was dingy from a hundred footprints. It reminded me of the emblem on the floor of the demons’ law offices. A joke, Al had said, but I had my doubts. I shifted nervously in the nasty orange chairs they had out here. Saturday, and my teaching date with Algaliarept, always seemed to come up too fast. Trying to explain to Robbie and my mom why I was going to be incommunicado all day would be tricky.
I had cheerfully strode into the FIB about ten minutes before—my mood excellent since Alex had brought my car home—my snappy boots leaving prints on their emblem as I went to the front desk to announce who I was—only to be asked to take a seat, like I was some weirdo off the street. Sighing, I hunched over with my elbows on my knees and tried to find a comfortable position. I wasn’t happy about being asked to wait. If Ivy had been here, they would’ve fallen all over themselves, but not for me—a memorychallenged witch they didn’t trust anymore.
Ivy was currently out on the street trying to pick up the sixth-month-old trail of Kisten’s killer. Guilt for not having done anything sooner had gotten her up long before me. Jenks had come with me today in the hopes that we’d stop at a charm shop on the way home. He wasn’t interested in a charm, but the stuff that went into making them—things that a garden-loving pixy cheating hibernation can’t get in December. Matalina wasn’t doing well, and I knew he was upset, ready and willing to spend some of the rent money he got from Ivy and me on his wife. Sitting here in the FIB’s lobby was a poor use for both our days. Not to mention that it was cold.
I straightened to swing my bag between my knees to try to burn off some irritation, and snuggled into my scarf, Jenks wiggled to life. “What’s up, Rache?” he asked, landing on my hands to get me to stop swinging my bag.
“Nothing,” I said shortly.
His brow rose, and he gave me a look. “Then why did your pulse quicken and your temperature rise?” He made a face. “Your perfume stinks. God, what did you do, bathe in it?”
I stared at the receptionist, avoiding Jenks’s question. I couldn’t tell him I was worried about his wife not making it through the winter. He buzzed his wings for my attention, and I tapped the banshee report on my knee. I had written it for Edden this morning—which only made me madder. I was here to help, and they left me waiting with distraught parents and thugs cuffed to the walls? Nice.
“Lookie here, Rache,” Jenks said, not a speck of dust falling from him as he flew heavily two seats down and landed on a discarded paper. “You made some print.”
“What?” Expecting the worst, I leaned over and snatched it up. Jenks laboriously flew back and settled on my hand as I held the paper up, scanning the picture. This was all I needed, but my worry eased when I found it was just a shot of the Tilsons’ house with a crowd and a news van out front. The caption said YEAR-END BRIMSTONE BUST GONE WRONG, and you couldn’t even tell it was me unless you knew it.
“Gonna save it for your scrapbook?” Jenks asked as I quickly read the article.
“No.” I tossed the paper back where it had been, then stretched to turn the picture side down. Drug bust, eh? Good for them. Keep it that way.
Hands on his hips, Jenks flew into my line of sight, but I was saved from whatever smart-ass remark he was going to gift me with when the doors cycled open and two uniformed FIB guys roughly escorted in a thin Santa. The man was shrieking about his reindeer. The cold draft hit us, and Jenks dove for my scarf.
“Tink’s titties, you think you could put a little more perfume on, Rache?” he complained, and I shivered as his wings brushed my bare skin.
“It’s from Ivy,” I said.
“Oh.”
I sighed as I settled in to wait. I’d found the new bottle of citrusy scent on the kitchen table this morning. I’d known what it meant and had immediately dabbed on a splash. Apparently, after yesterday, Ivy thought it prudent to reinstate our practice of trying to muddle the mixing of our natural scents. We hadn’t had to resort to chemical warfare on her instincts for a while, but we’d been trapped in the church with the windows closed for months.
The Santa broke from the officers and bolted for the door. I jerked upright, then relaxed as the two officers fell on him. All three slid into the doors with a thump. The guy was cuffed. How far was he going to get? “Damn,” I swore softly, wincing. “That’s going to leave a mark.”
A presence of old coffee tickled my nose, and I wasn’t surprised when Edden appeared at my elbow. “The one on the bottom is Chad. He’s new. I think he’s trying to impress you.”
My irritation at having to wait returned, and I looked up at the squat FIB captain. He was in his usual khakis and dress shirt. No tie, but his brown dress shoes were polished and he held himself with his familiar uprightness. His eyes, too, looked more determined. Tired, but the fear was gone. Glenn must be doing better.
“I’m impressed,” I said, catching the drama out of the corner of my eye as Chad dragged Santa into the back. “Can’t you bring the loonies in the rear door?”
Edden shrugged. “It’s too icy, and we’d get sued.”
From my scarf, Jenks said, “And crashing into the door like that is so-o-o-o much safer.”
“Resisting arrest with lots of witnesses,” he said. “I’d say that’s safer.” Then he tilted his head and peered at my scarf. “Hi, Jenks. I didn’t see you. Kind of cold, isn’t it?”
“Enough to freeze my balls together, yeah,” Jenks said, peeking out at the sound of Edden’s louder voice. “You got anyplace warmer? Between the cold and Rachel’s perfume, I’d be more comfortable at a fairy’s bris.”
The short man smiled, and he extended a hand to take the banshee essay that I’d written for him in my copious spare time. “Come on back. Sorry to make you wait here. New rules.”
New rules, I thought sourly as I stood. New rules or new mistrust? Old mistrust, maybe given new life. At least Chad liked me. “No problem,” I said sourly, not wanting to let him know how much it bothered me. He knew it was there, I knew it was there. Why rub my nose in it? “How’s Glenn doing? Has he regained consciousness yet?”
Edden had a hand on the small of my back, and where I’d usually take offense, he could get away with it. Edden was cool. “No,” he said, his eyes down with a thought. “But he’s doing better. More brain activity.”
Once away from the cold draft, Jenks left my scarf, and I nodded, thinking I should go out and see Glenn tonight after dinner. I’d be ready for some silent company by then. Maybe tickle his feet until he woke up or peed his sheets or something. I smiled at the thought, almost missing it when Edden made an unexpected left away from the interrogation rooms.
“Aren’t we going to the interrogation rooms?” I said, and Edden led me to his office.
“No. We can’t find Mia Harbor.”
My pace didn’t slow, but me cooling my heels in the lobby was making a lot more sense. So much for the truth amulet stuffed in my bag.
Jenks was starting to slip a thin trail of dust, telling me he was warm and in good form. “She went AWOL?” the small pixy said, flying backward to create a small commotion among the watching officers.
Edden wasn’t impressed with Jenks’s aerial display, and he held the door to his office open and gestured for me to enter. “Yup,” he said, but he didn’t follow me in. “She moved without filing her new address. We’ve a warrant out for her arrest, so if you want her, she’s all yours, Rachel.”
“A banshee?” I said, laughing. “Me? How much money you got, Edden? I don’t do suicide runs.”
Edden tossed my essay on his desk, hesitating as if trying to decide whether I was kidding. “You want some coffee?” he finally said. “How about you, Jenks? I think I saw a honey packet from someone’s biscuits in the fridge.”
“Hell yes!” he exclaimed before I could protest, and Edden nodded, leaving the door open as he went in search of it.
I gave Jenks a wry look as he buzzed over Edden’s office to check out the new bowling trophy. Spinning the chair around, I plunked into it and set my bag at my feet. “I was really hoping you’d be sober for this,” I said, and Jenks landed on Edden’s cluttered desk with his hands on his hips.
“Why?” he said, unusually belligerent. “You don’t need me if the banshee isn’t here. Give me a break. Like I’ve been honey drunk any longer than five minutes.”
I looked away in disapproval, and he buzzed a harsh flight to Edden’s pencil cup to sulk. Crossing my knees, I bobbed my foot. I was waiting again, but it was warmer, quieter, and I had the promise of coffee.
Edden’s office was a pleasant mix of organized clutter that I could identify with and was part of the reason I had taken to him so quickly last year. The man was ex-military, but you’d never know it by the dust and stacks of files. Still, I bet he could put his finger on anything he wanted in three seconds flat. The pictures on the walls were few, but in one of them he was shaking hands with Denon, my old boss at the I.S. It would worry me if I hadn’t once heard the pleasure Edden had taken in jerking a case out from under him. The smell of old coffee seemed embedded in the gray tiles and institutional-yellow walls. A new laptop sat open on his desk instead of a monitor, and the clock that had once been behind him was now behind me. Otherwise, it was the same as the last time I had sat here, waiting for Edden to bring me coffee.
I heard Edden’s footsteps before his bulky silhouette showed through the blinds between his office and the rest of the other offices, all open. The man came in with two china mugs instead of the expected foam ones. New rules again? One was clearly his by the brown-stained rim. I got the clean one with rainbows. How sweet…
Jenks rose up in a column of blue sparkles as Edden sat behind his desk, the pixy taking the packet almost as large as he was and retreating to a corner, out of my reach. “Thanks, Edden,” he said, wrestling with the plastic to tear it open.
I leaned to shut the door with my foot, and Edden eyed me. “You have something to say in private, Rachel?” he asked, and I shook my head. Taking the packet from Jenks, I tore it open and handed it back.
“Trust me,” I said, thinking that having the harried FIB officers deal with a drunk pixy was too much to ask for. My reputation was bad enough as it was.
“So,” I said to draw Edden’s attention from Jenks, who was humming happily and starting to list already, one wing not fanning as fast as the other. “Isn’t a felony charge a little harsh for failure to register a new address?”
Edden’s gaze darted from me to Jenks, and then back. “It’s not for failure to register. It’s because she’s a suspect.”
“‘S good honey, Eddie,” Jenks interrupted, and I set my coffee mug down loud enough to make his wings hum.
“The banshee is a suspect?” I questioned. “Why? All she did was leave a tear.”
Edden leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee. “Alex took her photo out to the neighbors to see if she had been near the scene recently. Babysitter, cosmetics lady, whatever. Every single person asked ID’d Ms. Harbor as Mrs. Tilson.”
“What?” I yelped, sitting up fast.
“Holy crap,” Jenks swore, almost crashing into the stack of files on Edden’s desk as he took flight with his honey packet. “The banshee took a human’s name? What the hell for?”
My first wash of surprise ebbed into an uneasy answer, and by looking at Edden’s severe face, I knew he had the same idea. Mia had killed them and was trying to cover it up. Good God. Tom is trying to tag a banshee? By himself? Go for it, coffin bait. “That might explain why Tom Bansen was under our kitchen floor yesterday,” I said, and Edden started.
“Under your—”
“Kitchen floor,” I finished. “All dressed up like a military guy on urban-assault detail. Bis and one of my friends caught him trying to bug the church.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” Edden said, and I made a face while Jenks slurred something about the gargoyle.
“Because Tom’s been, ah, shunned,” I said, flushing. “No Inderlander will hire him, the I.S. included. He has no choice but to go independent. Bringing in a banshee will probably earn him enough money to get himself set up somewhere he can live his life out in the wilds. He warned me off the case. Now that I think about it, he told me specifically to stay away from Mia. He probably knows at least as much as we do.”
“Then why bug you?” he asked, and I shrugged.
“Because if he’s been shunned, he lacks the resources of both the FIB and the I.S. I guess he figured he’d listen in to what we found and act on it before we did. Tom probably knows exactly where she’s gone. Maybe I should try to bug him.”
Edden looked grim, rubbing his mustache, when I finally looked back. “Want a car at your house?”
Immediately I shook my head. “No, but one at my mom’s might be nice.”
“Within the hour,” he promised, the pen almost lost in his grip as he made a note.
Jenks had started climbing Edden’s desk files like a drunken mountaineer, and I blushed when I found out what happened on the tenth day of pixy Christmas. Shaking off the visual, I turned to Edden. “If Mia is Mrs. Tilson, we need to find her fast. The man with her is in danger.”
Edden made an ugly sound and just about threw the pen in the cup. “I don’t care.”
“He’s liable to wind up dead,” I protested, then took a sip of my coffee now that Jenks wasn’t hiding behind it. My eyes closed in bliss for a moment. I’d give the FIB one thing: They knew how to make coffee. “A banshee’s liveins never live long,” I said. “And if Mia has a baby, her emotion requirements will be almost triple.” I paused in my motion to take another drink. That was probably why she had to put five years between her children.
Edden’s mustache was bunched up, and his expression was hard. “I’m not concerned about Mia’s accomplice,” he said. “He was healthy enough to beat up my son. We pulled his record this morning by way of his fingerprints. His name is Remus, and we would never have found him this fast but he’s got a file thicker than my fist, starting from high school with an attempted date rape, up to about three years ago when he spent time in a psychiatric jail for an especially foul animal-cruelty charge. They let him out, and he dropped off the face of the earth. No credit card activity, no rental history, no W-2 forms. Nothing until now. So you can understand if I don’t rush out and try to find him for the sake of his own health.”
My stomach hurt. God, the two of them had probably killed the Tilsons together. They had killed those happy faces that were in that yearbook and taken their names, their lives, everything. Shoved what they didn’t want into boxes in their garage.
Jenks dropped the empty honey packet, staggering under the desk lamp and staring up at it. Realizing that he was singing to it to get it to turn on, I flicked the switch. Jenks exploded into gold sparkles and collapsed, giggling. My expression went blank. He was stuck on the tenth day of Christmas, but finally he gave up and started singing about four purple condoms.
I looked at Edden and shrugged. “Maybe the little girl belongs to Remus,” I said, and Edden jerked the topmost file out from under Jenks. The pixy rose three inches before falling down, mumbling as he pillowed his head on his folded arms and fell asleep in the artificial warmth of the light. Edden handed me the file, and I opened it. “What is this?”
He leaned back to lace his hands over his middle. “Everything we have on Mia. That baby makes her a lot easier to track. Without her, Remus wouldn’t exist. We found another licensed day care that Mia frequents, making four now and at least two more informal ones.”
I leafed through the small packet to read the addresses, impressed again with the FIB’s investigative techniques. The day cares were mostly in Ohio, on Cincy’s outskirts.
“I called them all this morning,” Edden said. “Mia didn’t show up anywhere yesterday, and the one she was scheduled for was concerned. Apparently she always stays to help instead of paying them for care, claiming that she wants Holly to have more socialization skills.”
“No kidding?” I said, eyebrows high. I could buy that, but not if she was taking her daughter to five other day cares to do the same thing.
“No, no, no,” Jenks slurred from under the glaring light. His eyes weren’t open, and I was surprised he was conscious enough to listen, much less comment on the conversation. “Kid isn’t socializing. The kid is sucking down emotion like…”
His words trailed off in confusion, and I offered, “A pixy with honey?”
Jenks cracked an eye and gave me a thumbs-up. “Yeah.” His eyes closed, and he started to snore. I didn’t know why, but I unwound my scarf and covered him. Embarrassment, maybe?
Edden was watching us with a questioning expression, and I lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “Mia’s probably trying to spread her daughter’s damage around.”
Edden made a noncommittal grunt, and I continued to leaf through the information. “The neighbor kid who mowed their lawn said that Mia told his mom she wanted a lot of kids but had to space them out, five years apart,” I said. “That would go along with Holly being a banshee. You can’t have two kids around like that. Hell, a banshee usually has a kid once every hundred years or so, so if Mia is thinking another one in five years, she must have a really good way to keep from killing people to support her daughter’s growth…”
My words drifted to nothing. Either that, or someone with her who knew how to abduct people in a way so that they never went reported as missing. Someone like a homicidal maniac capable of serial murders. Sort of like Remus—someone who would enjoy hunting people and bringing them back for his wife and darling baby to drain. That might be why Remus was in good enough health to beat up an FIB officer, feeding his two tigers well enough that Mia could plan on adding to her little family. This was really not good.
Edden was quietly waiting for me to come to just that conclusion, and I closed the file. Numb and feeling sick, I glanced at Jenks, out cold, then to Edden, silently waiting. “I’m not doing this,” I said, dropping the packet on his desk. The draft shifted Jenks’s hair, and the pixy grimaced in his drunken stupor. “Banshees are dangerous—apex predators. And I thought you didn’t want my—excuse me—our help.”
At my blatant accusation, Edden reddened. “Who is going to bring her in, then? The I.S.? I talked to them this morning. They don’t care.” His eyes went everywhere but to mine. “If we don’t bring her in, no one will,” he muttered.
And he would want justice, seeing that she had something to do with his son being in the hospital. Frowning, I slid the file back off Edden’s desk and onto my lap, but I didn’t open it. “Next question,” I said, my tone clearly stating I wasn’t taking the job—yet. “What makes you so sure the I.S. isn’t covering it up?” I wasn’t about to get on the I.S.’s bad side for a paycheck. I’d done that before, and was smarter now. Yeah, it had felt great showing up the I.S., but then Denon took my license and I was stuck riding the bus again.
Edden’s expression went tight. “What if they are?”
My face scrunched up, and I fingered the file. Yeah, it left a bad taste in my mouth, too.
“According to the woman I talked to at the I.S.,” Edden said, “there should be a trail almost eighteen months long on this woman, starting with several simultaneous deaths at the time of Holly’s conception and continuing on to today. That’s probably when the Tilsons were murdered. Ms. Harbor is devious, clever, and has a tremendous knowledge of the city. About the only thing going for us is that she won’t leave Cincinnati. Banshees are highly territorial and dependent upon the people they’ve been siphoning off for generations.”
I bobbed my foot and looked at the essay I had written. “Why did you ask me to write this if you already knew it?” I asked, my feelings hurt.
“I didn’t know it yesterday. You were sleeping, Rachel,” Edden said dryly, then hid his slight guilt behind a sip of coffee. “I talked to Audrey something or other in records this morning. She was going to make me fill out a year’s worth of forms until I dropped your name.” A faint smile replaced his concern, and I relaxed.
“I know her,” I said. “You can trust what she said.”
Edden laughed, making Jenks mumble in his sleep. “Especially after I promised you’d babysit for her.” He ran a hand over his mustache to hide a smile. “She was kind of cranky. You witches aren’t at your best before noon, are you?”
“No,” I said, then my smile faded. Audrey had three kids last I checked. Crap. I was going to have to have Jenks help me; otherwise they’d railroad me into a closet or trick me into letting them eat candy.
“Audrey said Mia’s net of people is probably so intricate that she can’t risk leaving Cincy. If she does, the deaths to support the baby will be fast and easy to find, rather than the carefully chosen, hidden ones.” He hesitated, and a flash of worry for his son crossed his face. “Is that true? They already killed an FIB officer. That wasting disease was probably Mia, right?”
He was too far away for me to reach out and touch his hand in support, but I wanted to. I really needed to visit Glenn and look at his aura. It wasn’t as if I could help him, but I’d like to know if that’s why he was still unconscious. “Edden, I’m sorry,” I finally said. “Glenn will be okay, and we will find them. They won’t be allowed to think they can do this with impunity.”
The older man’s jaw clenched, then relaxed. “I know. I just wanted to hear from you that we have a chance and that they didn’t hop a plane and are in Mexico, sucking the children there dry.”
From under my scarf came a high-pitched sigh, and Jenks mumbled, “On the eleventh day of Christmas, my lover gave to me…”
I nudged the stack of files. “Hush, Jenks,” I said, then pulled my eyes to Edden, softening my gaze. “We will get them, Edden. Promise.”
Jenks’s mumbling grew loud, and I felt uneasy when I realized he was apologizing to Matalina. That was a hindsight better than what the drummers had been doing with the piper’s pipes, but his heartfelt whining was almost worse.
“Then you’ll help us?” Edden asked, rather unnecessarily, I might add.
It was a banshee, but with Ivy’s help—and a lot of planning—we three could do it. “I’ll look into it,” I said, trying to drown out Jenks’s vow that he would never touch honey again if she would get better. This was getting depressing.
Edden, too, was glancing at my scarf as he rummaged around in a top drawer. He found what he was looking for, and extended his fist, palm down. “Then you might need this,” he said, and I reached for whatever it was.
The smooth feel of crystal fell into my palm, and I jerked back. Heart pounding, I stared at the opaque drop of nothing, warming fast against my skin. I waited for my hand to cramp up or the stone to feel fuzzy or move or something, but it just sat there, looking like a cheap, foggy crystal that earth witches sell ignorant humans down at Finley Market.
“Where did you get this?” I asked, feeling squeamish even as the tear did nothing. “Is it one of Mia’s?” It seemed to wiggle in my hand, and it was all I could do not to drop it, but then I’d have to tell him why, and then he might take it back. So I blinked at him, my fingers going stiff in an open cradle.
“We found a stash of them in a glass flower vase, disguised as decorative stones,” Edden said. “I thought you might be able to make one into a locator amulet.”
It was a great idea, and I dropped the crystal into my coat pocket, deeming I’d held the squirmy thing long enough. My held breath slipped from me, and the hesitant, almost belligerent embarrassment he was hiding gave me pause until I realized he had taken the tear from evidence.
“I’ll give it a try,” I said, and he grimaced, eyes lowered. I had to pick up my brother at the airport, but I might be able to squeeze in a stop at the university library as well as a charm shop for Jenks before that. A locator charm was devilishly hard. I honestly didn’t know if I could pull it off. The library would be the only place I could find the recipe. Well, besides the Internet, but that was asking for trouble.
My scarf was now spouting poetry, waxing lovingly about Matalina’s charms in beautifully poetic to downright lustful terms. Giving the stack of papers a push, I flicked off the light. Jenks let out a long complaint, and I stood.
“Come on, Mr. Honeypot,” I said to Jenks. “We gotta go.”
I flicked my scarf off him, and the pixy didn’t move apart from huddling into a ball. Edden stood up, and together we eyed him. I was starting to get a bad feeling about this. Usually when Jenks got honey drunk, he was a happy drunk. This looked depressed, and I felt my face lose its expression when I realized Jenks was saying Matalina’s name over and over.
“Oh crap,” I whispered as he started making promises he couldn’t keep, asking her to make one she couldn’t. My own heart breaking, I carefully scooped him up, holding the unaware pixy in my hands, cupping him in a soothing darkness and warmth. Damn it, this wasn’t fair. No wonder Jenks took the opportunity to get drunk. His wife was dying, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
“Is he going to be all right?” Edden whispered as I stood in front of the desk, not knowing how I was going to get home with him like this. I couldn’t just shove him in my bag and hope for the best.
“Yes,” I said absently, deep in thought.
Edden shifted from foot to foot. “Is his wife okay?”
I brought my eyes up, unshed tears for Jenks warming them as I found a deep understanding in Edden’s gaze, the understanding of a man who had lost his wife. “No,” I said. “Pixies live only twenty years.”
I could feel Jenks light and warm in my hands, and I wished he was bigger so I could just help him into the car, take him home, and cry with him on the couch. But all I could do was carefully slide him into the masculine glove Edden was holding out to me. The lined leather would keep him warm, whereas my scarf wouldn’t.
Jenks hardly noticed the move, and I could get him to the car safely and in a dignified manner. I tried to tell Edden thanks, but the words stuck in my throat. Instead, I picked up the folder. “Thanks for the addresses,” I said softly, and I turned to go. “I’ll give them to Ivy. She can make sense out of rat tails in the dust.”
Edden opened the door, and the noise of the open offices hit me like a slap, jerking me back to reality. I wiped my eyes and tugged my bag higher up on my shoulder. I held Edden’s glove carefully. Ivy and I would map out Mia’s network, starting with the day cares. Then move on to see if she worked at elderly day care centers or volunteered at the hospital. This could get really ugly.
There was a soft pull on my elbow as I rocked into motion, and I paused. Edden had his eyes on the tile, and I waited until he brought them to mine.
“Tell me when Jenks needs someone to talk to,” he said, and my throat closed. Recalling what Ford had told me about Edden’s wife dying in a stab-and-grab, I mustered a smile and nodded. My boots clicked fast on the tile as I made for the door, head high and eyes unseeing.
I wondered if Edden would talk to me next year when we went through the same ordeal with Jenks.
Seven (#ulink_36558197-2280-5de6-882b-ae8446d24858)
The airport was noisy, and I leaned against a support beam and tried not to fidget as I waited. Jenks and I had been here for nearly an hour, but I was glad I’d gotten here early when security stopped me at the spell-checker gate. It had either been my truth amulet or my lethal-spell detector interfering with theirs, because they were about the only invoked charms I had on me. Dumping out my bag for three uniformed stiffs to paw through was not my idea of how to meet guys. Jenks had thought it was hilarious. No one else was getting searched.
The pixy was currently down the hall at the flower cart, not a single indication that he had been honey drunk earlier. He was working a deal with the owner for some fern seed if he could entice a few people to buy roses for their departing loved ones. He had still been out cold when we passed the charm shop, and I hadn’t stopped either there or the library. But if he could get the fern seed, he’d be a happy pixy.
It was cool in the drafty terminal, but vastly warmer than the blue, white, and gray world outside the huge plate-glass windows. Plows kept the runways clear, and the mounds of snow at the outskirts just begged to be played on. The people around me were a mix of hurried harassment, bored irritation, and anxious expectation. I fell into the last, and as I waited for Robbie’s plane to clear checks and disembark, I felt a shiver of anticipation—though some of that might have been lingering anxiety from having been stopped at the heavy-magic detector.
Witches had always worked in aviation, both on the ground and in the air, but during the Turn they’d taken it over and hadn’t given it back, changing the laws until there had to be at least one highly qualified witch on duty at each security checkpoint. Even before the Turn, witches had been using heavy-magic detectors right along with the mundane metal detectors. What had looked like a random check on a harmless-looking man or woman had often been a covert search for contraband magic. Why I’d been stopped I didn’t know. Bothered, I tried to smooth out my brow and relax. Unless Robbie was in first class, it would be a while.
A cloying, too-sweet scent of cinnamon and the rich aroma of coffee gave a glimmer of contentment to the rising excitement. The conversations grew loud when the door opened and the first yawning person pushed through, intent on reaching the rent-a-car stand, his eyes glazed and his pace fast. A few feet from me was a mom with three toddlers, like stair steps, probably waiting for their dad. The eldest wiggled from his mom and ran for the huge windows, and I jumped when the mom set a circle to stop the toddler dead in his tracks.
A smile curved over my face when the little boy screamed in frustration, pounding at the faintly shimmering barrier glowing a thin blue. That had been something I’d never had to worry about when I was little. Mom sucked dishwater at making circles. I hadn’t been able to walk until I was three anyway, too sick to do much more than survive before then. It was a miracle I’d made it past my second birthday—an illegal medical miracle that worried me every time I went through something like the heavy-magic detection field. There was no way to detect the tampering done to my mitochondria, but I worried anyway.
Anxious, I shifted my weight to my other foot. I was eager to see Robbie, but tonight’s dinner wasn’t going to be fun. At least I’d have Marshal to take some of the heat off me.
The toddler’s screaming shifted from frustration to recognition, and I turned when his mother dropped her circle. She was beaming, looking absolutely beautiful despite the weariness of keeping three energetic children within society’s norms. I followed the toddler with my eyes as he ran to an attractive young woman in a smart-looking suit. The woman bent to pick him up, and the five of them came together in a wash of happiness. They all began to move in a confused tangle, and after a heartfelt kiss between the two women, the one in the suit exchanged a trendy bag for a gurgling infant. It looked noisy, messy, and utterly comforting.
My smile slowly faded as they moved away, and my thoughts went to Ivy. We’d never have such a recognizable relationship, where we somehow fell into normal roles that could function within society’s parameters. Not that I was looking for something so traditionally nontraditional. Ivy and I did have a relationship, but if we tried to make it fit her ideas or go past my limits, it would blow everything to hell.
Something older than the spoken word tickled my instinct, and I pulled my eyes from the couple’s vanishing backs. My gaze landed on my brother, and I smiled. He was still in the tunnel, obvious over the shorter people ahead of him. His red hair stood out like a flag, and he had a sparse beard. Sunglasses almost made him look cool, but the freckles ruined it. Seeing his smile widen as our eyes met, I pushed from the piling and waited, anticipation tingling my toes. God, I’d missed him.
People finally moved out from between us, and I could see his narrow-shouldered frame. He had on a light jacket and was carrying a shiny leather satchel and his guitar. At the head of the tunnel he stopped and thanked a short, awkward-looking salesman-type guy who handed him a piece of luggage and vanished into the crowd, carrying it for him so he wouldn’t have to check it, I suppose.
“Robbie!” I called, unable to stop myself, and his smile grew. His long legs ate up the distance, and he was before me, dropping his things and giving me a squeeze.
“Hi, sis,” he said, his hug growing fierce before he let go and stepped back. The crowd flowed around us, but no one minded. Little pockets of reunion were going on all over the terminal. “You look good,” he said, tousling my hair and earning a slug on his shoulder. He caught my fist, but not until after I’d connected, and he looked at my hand, smiling at the little wooden pinkie ring. “Still not liking your freckles, eh?” he said, and I shrugged. Like I was going to tell him I didn’t have freckles as the side effect of a demon curse?
Instead, I gave him another hug, noticing that we were almost the same height with me in heels and him in…loafers? Laughing, I looked him up and down. “You are going to freeze your butt off outside.”
“Yeah, I love you, too,” he said, grinning as he removed his sunglasses and tucked them away. “Cut me some slack. It was seven in the morning and seventy-two degrees when I left. I haven’t had any sleep but for four hours on the plane, and I’m going to crash if I don’t get some coffee in me.” He leaned to pick up his guitar. “Mom still making that nasty excuse for road paste?”
Smiling as if I would never stop, I picked up the larger bag, remembering the last time I’d carried his luggage. “We’d better stop and get some now. Besides, I’m waiting for Jenks to finish up with something, and I want to talk to you about Mom.”
Robbie straightened from trying to grip his satchel and guitar in the same hand, his green eyes looking worried. “Is she okay?”
I stared for a moment, then realized what my last words must have sounded like. “Mom’s happier than a troll under a toll bridge. What happened out there with you, anyway? She came back tan and humming show tunes. What’s up with that?”
Robbie took the bag from me, and we angled to the nearest coffee stand. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “It was her, ah, traveling companion.”
My brow furrowed and my pulse quickened. Takata. I’d thought as much. She’d gone out to the West Coast to spend time with her college sweetheart, and I wasn’t sure what I thought about him. I mean, I knew who he was, but I didn’t know him.
Silently we got in line, and as I stood shoulder to shoulder with Robbie, I suddenly felt tall. Takata was birth father to both of us, a college sweetheart who gave our mom the children her human husband—and Takata’s best friend, incidentally—couldn’t, while Takata ran off and traded his life for fortune and fame, down to dying his hair and changing his name. I couldn’t think of him as Dad. My real dad had died when I was thirteen, and nothing would change that.
But standing beside Robbie now, I snuck sidelong glances at him, seeing the older rocker in him. Hell, I could look in the mirror and see Takata in me. My feet, Robbie’s hands, my nose, and both our heights. Definitely my hair. Takata’s might be blond where mine was red, but it curled the same way.
Robbie turned from the overhead menu and gave me a sideways hug. “Don’t be mad at him,” he said, instinctively knowing where my thoughts were. He’d always been able to do that, even as kids, which had been really frustrating when I was trying to get away with something. “He’s good for her,” he added, shoving his luggage farther along the line. “She’s moving past the guilt of Dad dying. I, uh, spent some time with them,” he said, nervousness making his words soft. “He loves her. And she feels special with him.”
“I’m not mad at him,” I said, then smacked his shoulder just hard enough to make him notice. “I’m mad at you. Why didn’t you tell me Takata was our dad?”
The businessman in front of us turned around briefly, and I made a face at him.
Robbie moved forward another foot. “Right,” he murmured. “Like I’m going to call you up and tell you our mom was a groupie.”
I made a scoffing noise. “That’s not what happened.”
He looked at me and made his eyes wide. “It makes more sense than what did happen. For Christ’s sake, you would have laughed your ass off if I had told you our real dad was a rock star. Then you would have asked Mom, and then she would have…cried.”
Cried, I thought. Nice of him to not say “go off her rocker,” because that’s what she would have done. It had been bad enough when the truth came out. A sigh shifted my shoulders, and I scooted forward to the counter when the guy ahead of us ordered his tall latte something or other and moved off.
“I’ll have a grande latte, double espresso, Italian blend,” Robbie said, his eyes on the menu. “Light on the froth, heavy on the cinnamon. Can you make that with whole milk?”
The barista nodded as he wrote on the paper cup. “This together?” he asked, looking up.
“Yeah. Um, just give me a medium-size cup of the house blend,” I said, suddenly disconcerted. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that Robbie’s order had sounded exactly like how Minias took his coffee.
“You want a shot of something in it?” the barista persisted, and I shook my head as I ran my card through the machine before Robbie could.
“Just black.”
Robbie was struggling with his stuff, so I grabbed both cups when they came up and followed him to a table too small and sticky to encourage anything but the shortest of stays. “I can carry stuff now,” I said as I watched him stagger under it.
He gave me a sideways smile. “Not while I’m around. Sit.”
So I sat, and it felt good as he bustled about, arranging his things and asking an old couple if he could have one of their chairs. I had a moment of panic when I realized the abandoned paper on the table was folded to show that shot of the Tilsons’ house. Snatching it up, I jammed it in my bag just as Robbie joined me.
Landing heavy in his chair, he took the lid off his coffee and inhaled his first deep sniff, followed by a deep draft. “That’s good,” he said around a sigh, and I followed suit. For a moment he was silent, and then he eyed me expectantly over his paper rim. “So, how’s Mom?”
The businessman who had been ahead of us had foam on his nose as he stood and looked at the departure screens. “Fine.”
Robbie silently cracked his knuckles. “Do you have anything to say to me?” he asked so smugly that I turned to look at him.
There’s a cop car outside Mom’s house, and you’ll want to know why. I’m doing a murder investigation, and it might spill over into my home life. The university won’t let me attend classes. I have a date every Saturday in the ever-after with Big Al the demon. And thanks to Trent Kalamack’s dad, I’m the source of the next demon generation.
“Uh, no?” I said, and he laughed, scooting his guitar closer.
“You bailed on the I.S.,” he said, green eyes showing his amusement. “I told you joining them was a bad idea, but no-o-o-o-o! My little sister has to do things her way, then work twice as hard to get out of them. I’m proud of you for realizing it was a mistake, by the way.”
Oh, that. Relieved, I took the lid off my coffee and blew across the top of the rich blackness, giving him a sideways look. “Bailed” wouldn’t quite be the word I would use. “Stupidly quit” might be more appropriate. Or “attempted suicide.” “Thanks,” I managed, though what I wanted to do was start a tirade about how it hadn’t been a mistake in the first place. See, I can learn.
“They aren’t still after you, are they?” he asked, glancing to the side and shifting uncomfortably. I shook my head, and his long face became relieved—apart from a remaining hint of caution. “Good.” He took a deep breath. “Working for them was too dangerous. Anything could have happened.”
And usually did, I thought as the first hot sip of coffee slipped down and I closed my eyes in bliss. “Like what I’m doing now, is that safe?” I said as my eyes opened. “Jeez, Robbie, I’m twenty-six. I can take care of myself. I’m not the puny ninety-pound nothing I was when you left.” It might have been a tad harsh, but the resentment of his trying to stop me from going into the I.S. remained.
“All I meant was that the people who run it are liars and corrupt vamps,” he cajoled. “It wasn’t just the danger. You would never have been taken seriously there, Rachel. Witches never are. You hit that glass ceiling, and there you sit for the rest of your life.”
I would have gotten mad, but looking in hindsight at the last year I spent at the I.S., I knew he was right. “Dad didn’t do too bad,” I said.
“He could have done a lot more.”
Actually, he had done a lot more. Robbie didn’t know it, but our dad had probably been a mole in the I.S., passing information and warnings to Trent’s dad. Crap, I thought in sudden realization. Just like Francis. No, not like Francis. Francis had done it for money. Dad must have done it for the greater good. Which begged the question of what he’d seen in the elves to risk his life helping them stay out of extinction. It hadn’t been in return for the illegal medicine to save my life. They had been friends even before I was born.
“Rachel?”
I took another sip of my coffee, scanning the busy terminal for Jenks. A sense of unease was growing in me, and I almost choked on my drink when I spotted the security guard looking at us from across the hall, just standing there, watching. This keeps getting better and better.
“Earth to Rachel…Come in, Rachel…”
I gave myself a mental shake and pulled my gaze from the air cop. “Sorry. What?”
He looked me up and down. “You got quiet all of a sudden.”
I forced my eyes to stay off the armed guard. Another one had joined him. “Just thinking,” I hedged.
Robbie looked into his coffee. “That’s a switch,” he needled. But there were three rent-a-cops now. Two I could handle, but three was iffy. Where are you, Jenks? I wanted to get out of here, and I pretended to accidentally knock my coffee over.
“Whoops!” I exclaimed brightly, and while Robbie jumped up to avoid getting soaked, I scurried for the napkins to get a better look at the terminal police. Two Weres, I thought, and a witch. They had joined forces and were making their slow way over here. Shit.
“Think you can walk and drink at the same time?” I muttered to Robbie when I returned and started mopping up the mess. “We need to find Jenks and get out of here.”
“The cops?” he said, and my eyes jerked to his in surprise. “You didn’t have to waste good coffee like that to get me to move.”
“You know?” I said, and he grimaced, his green eyes showing more than a hint of anger.
“They’ve been dogging me since I got to the airport,” he said, his lips barely moving as he put the lid on his cup and hoisted his bag. “I was all but strip-searched at security, and I swear the air marshal was sitting beside me on the plane. What did you do, little sister?”
“Me?” I almost hissed, peeved that his first thought was that they were after me. I wasn’t the one who played in Brimstone-laced dives and went on season-long tours, moving to a new city every night. No, I just stayed in little old Cincinnati, bumping into city leaders the way most people run into their neighbors at the grocery store.
“Can we just get out of here?” I said, thinking this might explain why I’d been searched on the way in.
Robbie made a noise of agreement, and as I shouldered one of his bags and picked up his instrument, he handed me his coffee and took his guitar back. “You break things,” he said in explanation, and the strap slipped from my grip.
The cops swaggered behind us as we headed to the luggage claim, and it gave me the creeps. Robbie was silent until we hit one of the moving sidewalks, and in the soft hum of it, he pulled me close and whispered, “Are you sure the I.S. isn’t still after you for quitting?”
“Positive,” I insisted, but I was starting to wonder. I was working on a twin murder involving a banshee and a human. Edden said they didn’t care about Mia, but what if they were covering something up? Not again, I thought dismally. But they would have sent Denon to threaten me by now. Maybe he’d gotten a promotion instead. The last time I’d seen the ghoul, he’d looked better.
We were nearing the end of the sidewalk, and Robbie hoisted his bag higher in such a way that he could glance at the armed men behind us. The twenty feet had become fifteen, and I was getting edgy. Jenks’s distinctive wing chirp pulled my attention to a flower cart, and seeing him busy, I pointed to the baggage claim, then jerked my head behind me. He made a burst of light in acknowledgment, which delighted the woman with him, and we continued on.
“Jenks?” Robbie said softly. “That’s your backup, right?”
“Yes.” I frowned as I shifted Robbie’s bag to a more comfortable position. “You’ll like him. He’s getting something for his wife. I don’t know why those guys are following us.”
“You’re not trying to get out of dinner tonight, are you?” Robbie said loudly as we got off the walk, and I forced a laugh.
“Maybe,” I said, willing to play along. “I have a few things I have to do. I’ve got a library book to return, and a sick friend in the hospital I want to visit tonight.”
“Don’t you dare,” Robbie said for the benefit of security as we slowed to funnel through a small hallway by the security gates. “I need you there as a buffer in case Mom gets the photo albums out.”
I smirked, knowing exactly what he meant. “Mmmm, you should have brought Cindy with you. I’m bringing someone tonight.”
“Not fair,” he exclaimed as we passed into the unsecured part of the airport, and I glanced behind us to see that our escort had dropped to one. Thank God it’s the witch. One witch I can handle, even without Jenks.
“Yes fair,” I said as I pointed to the hallway we had to take. “His name is Marshal, and he works at the university as a swim coach. He helped me once on a run, and he’s the first guy I’ve ever hung with who isn’t trying to get a little something, so be nice.”
Robbie eyed me as we got on the escalator. “He’s not…”
I looked over at his hesitation to see him holding the moving railing with his pinkie delicately extended, and I smiled with half my mouth. “No, he’s straight. I can be with a straight guy who’s single and not sleep with him. God!”
“Well, I’ve never seen it,” Robbie said, and I shoved him, burning off a little of the adrenaline from the three security guys. “Hey!” he exclaimed good-naturedly, catching himself in time to handle the end of the escalator with no problem.
We were silent as we scanned the monitors for his flight number and carousel, then slowly joined the growing group of people angling for a good spot. Any day, Jenks.
“You still living in that church?”
My blood pressure spiked, and I dropped his bag with a thump. “With that vampire, yes.” How does he hit my buttons so fast?
His gaze on the bags spilling out one by one, Robbie made a noise deep in his throat. “What does Mom think?”
“I’m sure you’ll hear all about it tonight,” I said, tired already. Actually, my mom was pretty cool about it. And with Marshal there, she might not bring it up at all.
“There it is,” Robbie blurted out, saving me from further conversation, and then his expression became concerned. “I think it’s mine,” he added, and I dropped back when he wedged himself between two shorter women to lug the rolling suitcase off the belt.
The clatter of pixy wings and the soft sound of cooing people told me Jenks was around, and I wound my scarf around my neck to give him a place to warm up. The lights had been bright around the flower cart, but it was drafty here by the doors.
“Hi, Rache,” Jenks said as he landed on my shoulder with the scent of cheap fertilizer.
“Get what you want?” I asked as Robbie lugged his rolling suitcase off the belt.
“No,” he said, and I could hear the annoyance in his voice. “Everything had a waxy preservative on it. Why, by Tink’s little red shoes, are three cops following you?”
“I have no idea.” Robbie trundled his suitcase to us, his head down and looking annoyed. “Hey, Robbie, I want you to meet Jenks, my business partner,” I said as my brother halted before us, disgust clear in the way he yanked the pull lever up.
“Someone broke the lock on my suitcase,” he said, then forced the irritation from his face when Jenks flew down to look at it.
“Yep,” the pixy said, hovering before it with his hands on his hips, then darting up, making Robbie’s head snap back. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” Jenks said.
“You’re the one keeping my sister out of trouble?” Robbie said as he offered Jenks a hand to light upon, his smile honest and full. “Thanks. I owe you big.”
“Naahh.” Jenks’s wings turned a delicate shade of red even as they hummed to life. “She’s not that hard to watch. It’s my kids who run me ragged.”
Robbie sent his eyes to me, then back to Jenks. “You’ve got kids? You don’t look old enough.”
“Almost four dozen,” he said, justifiably proud that he could keep that many children alive. “Let’s get out of here before cookie-farts over there starts to have delusions of grandeur and tries to search your underwear again.”
Lips parted, I glanced at the security cop standing thirty feet back—smiling at me. What in hell was going on? “You want to see if anything is gone?” I asked.
“No.” He frowned at the busted lock. “Jenks is right. There’s nothing in there but clothes and a half ream of music.”
“I know,” Jenks said. “I was listening to the radio chatter at the flower cart. I should have guessed it was you they were talking about, Rache.”
“Did you hear why they’re watching us?” I asked, heart pounding. “Is it the I.S.?”
Jenks shook his head. “They didn’t say. If you go for another coffee, I can find out.”
I looked at Robbie in a question, but he was shifting uneasily from foot to foot. I glanced at the security guy, now standing with his arms crossed over his chest, as if begging me to complain. “No,” Robbie said as he started gathering his things. “It’s not worth it. Where are you parked?”
“Idaho,” I quipped, but inside I was getting upset. Why did they search my brother’s bag if I’m the one they’re watching? “So…tell me about Cindy,” I asked as we neared the big glass doors. Jenks dove for my scarf as they slid open, and we went out into the bright but cold afternoon.
Robbie’s face lost its uneasy expression, beaming as he launched into a stream of happy conversation, as I’d hoped he would. I made the right sounds at the right times, almost having to force my interest in his girlfriend as Robbie and I found our way to my car.
All the way to the lot I scanned faces, watched the horizon, checked behind me, and breathed deep for the distinctive scent of Were, vampire, or witch while trying to pretend everything was normal and keeping up my end of the conversation about new bands and what I’d been listening to. Though still uptight, I breathed easier when we got to my car and found that Denon wasn’t waiting for me. It helped that my bad-mojo amulet on my key ring stayed a nice bright green.
Clearly glad to be going home, Robbie continued to chat while we loaded his bags in the back and bundled into the front seat. I cranked the heater on full for Jenks, who immediately started cussing about perfume and left me to settle on Robbie’s shoulder. I think it was more because my vastly underdressed brother had angled all the vents toward himself than my perfume. The conversation bobbled when Robbie noticed the lethal-magic detection charm hanging from my keys. He knew what it was—he’d watched our dad prep for work, too—and though his face creased in concern because his little sister had to have an amulet to warn her of car bombs, he didn’t say anything.
It wasn’t until we hit the expressway and started for home that I began to relax, but all the while I was checking my rearview mirror for the flashing of I.S. lights, and thinking, Am I coming too close again to one of their cover-ups? And if I am, am I going to back off or bust it open once more?
Eyes squinting because of the bright sun as much as my sour mood, I recalled the look of anger on Robbie’s face when he saw that his stuff had been pawed through, and I decided that yup, I was going to crack it open and let the sun shine in.
Eight (#ulink_e7319af8-9d44-543d-bf96-167ac1738275)
The draft from the heater made my curls tickle my neck as I sat at Ivy’s antique table and looked through one of my dad’s old demon texts for a recipe for twisting a locator amulet. A curse, to be excruciatingly honest. Jenks was reading over my shoulder, hovering an irritating two feet up. I don’t think he was pleased that even though I’d found a locator-amulet recipe in my safely mundane earth-magic books, I was still looking. Most detecting charms, be they earth or ley line magic, were sympathetic magic—using something you have to detect whatever it is you’re interested in: car bombs, shoplifters, listening devices, whatever. Earth-magic locator charms, however, worked by finding auras over long distances. It was very sophisticated magic, and I was hoping that the demons had an easier version. Chances were good they did.
I’d escaped my mom’s about an hour before, claiming I had work to do and promising that I’d be back at midnight. Robbie hadn’t said anything to Mom about the airport cops, but I was still peeved his stuff had been searched. Worried, really, but I handled anger better than fear.
The sun was going down now, and a dark gloom had taken the kitchen. Past the blue curtains, the sky was a dull gray, and, wanting to get Jenks off my shoulder, I stood, open book tingling in my hand as I went to thunk on the rocker switch by the archway. Jenks’s wings hummed as bright fluorescent light flickered into existence, and I shuffled to the center counter. The curse book thumped down and, still not looking up from the pages, I crossed my ankles and leaned over the book, using the end of a pencil to turn the page. I’d like to say that the book was cold from having been in the unheated belfry, but I knew better.
Jenks buzzed closer, his wings managing to sound disapproving. Rex watched from the threshold, her ears pricked and the little bell Jenks had put on her last fall gleaming. I’d try to coax her in, but I knew better. The only reason she was here was Jenks. Hovering an inch above the yellow pages, Jenks put his hands on his hips and looked at me. I couldn’t help but notice that the dust he was letting slip was making the hand-penned words glow. Interesting…
“Ra-a-a-ache,” Jenks drawled in warning.
“I’m just looking,” I said, waving him off before turning another page. Demon books didn’t have indexes. Most didn’t have titles. I was reduced to browsing. It made for slow going. Especially since I was one to linger, curious as to how bad a bad curse could be or how neutral some of them were. Some were easy to tell by just the ingredients, but others seemed to be a curse only because of the mixing of earth and ley line magic that all demon curses contained. They were black only because they threw nature’s book so far out of balance. I was hoping the demon equivalent of a locator charm was one of these.
I had decided last year that I wasn’t going to avoid twisting a demon curse solely on the basis of the smut. I’d been given a brain, and I was going to use it. Unfortunately, the rest of society might not agree with me. Jenks, apparently, wanted to play the part of Jiminy Cricket, and he was reading the pages as carefully as I.
“That’s an excellent one,” he said, sounding almost reluctant to admit it as he dusted the curse that detailed out how to twist a broomstick-size rod of redwood into flight. There was an earth charm to do the same thing, but it was twice as complicated. I’d priced it out last year, deciding the only flying this little witch was going to do would be in the seat of an airplane.
“Mmmm,” I said, turning the page, “I could pay my rent for a year for just what the stick costs.” The next page was a curse to turn human flesh into wood. Yuck. Jenks shivered, and I turned the page, sending his blue sparkles sifting to the floor. Like I said, some of these were really easy to tell they were black.
“Rachel…,” Jenks coaxed, clearly thrown.
“I’m not doing that one, so relax.”
His wings buzzed fitfully, and he sank an inch in height, preventing me from easily turning the page. Exhaling, I stared at him to get him to move by my will alone. Crossing his arms over his chest, he stared right back. He wasn’t going to give an inch, but when two of his kids, in front of the dark kitchen window, started arguing over a seed they’d found in a crack in the floor, the distraction lifted him up enough so that I could turn the page.
My fingertips resting on the faded yellow pages were going numb, and I curled them into a fist. But my heart started beating faster when I thought I recognized what was a locator charm under them. If I was reading it right, the demon curse used sympathetic magic, like a detection spell, not auras, like regular locator charms. Though a curse, the magic before me looked a hell of a lot easier than the aura-based one in the earth-magic book. All the better to tempt you with, my dear.
“Hey, look at this,” I said softly as Jenks gave a warning chirp to his offspring to settle their argument. Together we read through the ingredients. “The attunement object has to be stolen?” I questioned, not liking that, so it was no surprise that I jumped when the front doorbell rang.
Hands on his hips, Jenks alternated his stern gaze between me and his two children, their faces red and wings dusting a black haze into the sink. “I’ll get it,” he said before I could move. “And you two better have this decided before I get back, or I’ll decide it for you,” he added to his kids before he darted out.
Their volume dropped, and I smiled. It was almost six, which meant human or witch. Possibly Were or a living vampire. “If it’s a client, I’ll see them in the sanctuary,” I called after him, not wanting to have to hide my books if they should peek into my kitchen on the way to the back living room.
“Gotcha,” Jenks shouted faintly. Rex had run off under him, her tail up, ears pricked, and little bell jingling. The two pixies at the window started right back up again, their hushed, high voices almost worse than their loud ones.
I gave a last look at the curse before I marked the page and closed the book. I had everything I needed, but the identifying object, in this case the crystal tear, had to be stolen. That was kind of nasty, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that made it a black curse. Earth magic had a few ingredients like that. Rue, for example, worked best when it was sown while cursing, and it didn’t work in a charm unless you stole it. Which was why mine was planted by the gate for easy pilfering. Jenks stole mine for me. I didn’t ask from where. The charms made from stolen rue were not considered black, so would this one be?
Standing, I crossed the room to my coat for the tear Edden had given me. He had stolen it from evidence. Wondering if that was enough, I pulled the tear out, shocked to see that it had lost its clarity, and had turned black. “Whoa,” I whispered, and I looked up as Ford’s voice became obvious in the hall. Immediately I looked at the clock. Six? Crap, I’d forgotten he was coming over today. I was in no mood for his mumbo jumbo, especially if it worked.
Ford came in with a tired smile, his dull dress shoes making wet spots as they lost the last of their snow. Rex trailed behind with feline interest, sniffing at the salt-and-water mix. A mess of Jenks’s kids were with him, all talking in a swirl of silk and pixy dust. Ford’s brow was creased in pain, and they were clearly sending him into overload.
“Hi, Rachel,” he said, taking off his coat in such a way that it made half the pixies retreat, but they came right back. “What’s this about you being followed at the airport?”
I gave Jenks a dark look, and he shrugged. Gesturing for Ford to sit, I dropped the demon book on the stack I’d brought down from the belfry and wiped my hands on my jeans. “They were just harassing me,” I said, not knowing how my brother fit into it, but sure it was me they were after, not him. “Hey, what do you think about this? It was clear this morning when Edden gave it to me.”
Ford sat at Ivy’s spot and held out his hand, shaking his head when a trio of pixy girls asked him if they could braid his hair. I shooed them away when I came around the counter to give the tear to him, and the girls flitted to the windowsill to take sides in the seed issue.
“Tink’s tampons!” Jenks yelped when he saw the tear on Ford’s palm. “What did you do to it, Rache?”
“Nothing.” At least it hadn’t felt furry or wiggled when I touched it. Ford squinted as he held it to the artificial light. The argument at the sink was starting to spill into the rest of the room, and I gave Jenks a pointed look. The pixy, though, was with Ford, fascinated by the black swirls running through the gray crystal.
“Edden gave it to me to make a locator charm,” I said. “But it didn’t look like that. It must have picked up the emotions at the airport when they were following us.”
Ford looked at me over the tear. “You got angry?”
“Well, a little. I was more peeved than anything else.”
Jenks darted to the window as the argument reached an eyeball-hurting intensity. “Peeved, nothing. She was like a pimple on a fairy princess’s ass, red and ready to pop,” he said, then started speaking to his kids too fast for me to follow. Instant pixy silence ensued.
“Jeez, Jenks!” I exclaimed, warming. “I wasn’t that upset.”
Ford shifted the tear back and forth between his fingers. “It must have absorbed the emotions from not only you, but everyone there.” He hesitated, then added, “Did the tear…take your emotions away?”
Seeing his hope, I shook my head. He thought it might be a way to help him muffle emotions, perhaps. “No,” I said. “Sorry.”
Leaning across the corner of the table, Ford handed the tear back, doing a pretty good job of hiding his disappointment. “Well,” he said, settling into Ivy’s chair and pulling Rex onto his lap. “I’m on the clock. Where would you be most comfortable?”
“Can’t we just have coffee instead?” I suggested as I tucked the tear back in my coat pocket for lack of anywhere better. “I’m not in the mood to try to remember Kisten’s killer.” Stupid cat won’t let me touch her, but a perfect stranger gets head butts and kitty kisses.
His dark eyes went to the silent coffeemaker. “Like anyone ever is?” he said softly.
“Ford…,” I whined, and then one of the pixy kids shrieked. Ford shuddered and turned a shade whiter. Irritated, I looked at Jenks. “Jenks, can you get your kids out of here? They’re giving me a headache.”
“Jumoke gets the seed,” Jenks said flatly, cutting off the rising protests with a sharp wing chirp. “I said you wouldn’t like it!” he exclaimed. “Get out. Jumoke, ask your mother where she hides her seeds. It will be safe there until spring.”
It also would ensure that she wouldn’t die without someone else knowing where she hid their valuable seed stash. Pixy life spans sucked.
“Thanks, Papa!” the exuberant pixy shouted, then fled, trailing the rest of them in a calliope of sound and color.
Relieved, I came around the counter to sit at my spot. Ford looked better already, and he shifted to a more comfortable position when Rex followed the pixies out. Jenks dropped down before him in his best Peter Pan pose, hands on his hips. “Sorry,” he said. “They won’t come back.”
Ford glanced at the coffeemaker again. “One of them is still in here.”
I shoved the demon texts next to the mundane university textbooks to make some space. “Cheeky bugger,” I muttered, standing up to get Ford a coffee.
Jenks’s brow furrowed, and he made a harsh whistle. Smirking, I waited to see who the eavesdropping pixy was, but no one showed. Maybe I could fritter all our time away, and that would be that. Talk about Jenks, maybe.
“Thanks, Rachel,” Ford said with an exhale. “I could use some caffeine. It’s real, yes?”
Pouring a cup, I slid it into the microwave and hit “fast cook.” “Decaf is cruel and unusual punishment.”
Jenks was buzzing around the kitchen like a firefly from hell, shedding sparkles to make artificial sunbeams. “I can’t find anyone,” he grumbled. “I must be getting old. Are you sure?”
Ford cocked his head and seemed to be listening. “Yup. It’s a person.”
A smile came over Jenks as the sensitive man included pixies as people. Not everyone did. “I’ll go do a nose count. Be right back.”
He zipped out, and I opened the nuker. Ford’s cup was steaming, and leaning close as I set it by him, I whispered, “Can we go out and talk about Jenks instead of me?”
“Why?” Ford asked, as if knowing I was stalling, then took a sip. “His emotions are stable. It’s yours that are jumping like bunnies in a fryer.”
I frowned at the connotation, then sat in my own chair, pulling my cold coffee close. “It’s Matalina,” I said softly, hoping the eavesdropper couldn’t hear, much less Jenks.
Ford set his mug down, but his fingers didn’t leave it, seeking the warmth. “Rachel,” he said even more softly, “I don’t mean to sound trite, but death comes to everyone, and he will find a way to deal with it. Everyone does.”
My head went back and forth, and I felt a sliver of fear. “That’s just it,” I said. “He’s not human, or witch, or vampire. He’s a pixy. When she dies, he might go with her. Will himself to death.” It was a wildly romantic notion, but I had a feeling it was standard pixy fare.
“He has too much to live for.” Ford’s knobby fingers tightened on the porcelain, then released. “You, the firm, his children.” Then his eyes lost their focus. “Maybe you can ask one of his kids if that’s common.”
“I’m afraid to,” I admitted.
There was the buzz of Jenks’s wings darting past the arch as he went into the living room, and Ford’s expression became neutral. “What’s this Edden was saying about Marshal catching someone under your church?”
I rolled my eyes. “Tom Bansen, formerly of the I.S. Arcane Division, was bugging the church. Marshal was returning the box I forgot in his car and he caught him.” I managed a smile despite the pang of hurt from what I’d asked Marshal to throw away. “Marshal is coming to dinner tonight with my mom and brother.”
“Mmmm.”
It was long and drawn out, and I brought my gaze up to see the usually stoic FIB psychologist wearing a wan smile. “What’s that supposed to mean? Mmmm?” I said tartly.
Ford sipped from his mug, his dark brown eyes twinkling deviously. “You’re taking someone to meet the family. It’s good to see you moving forward. I’m proud of you.”
I stared at him, then laughed. He thought Marshal and I… “Marshal and me?” I said with a guffaw. “No way. He’s coming over as a buffer so I don’t walk out of there tonight facing a blind date with my mom’s paperboy.” Marshal was great, yeah, but it was also nice knowing I could leave things alone if I tried.
“Right.”
His voice dripped disbelief, and I set my mug down. “Marshal is not my boyfriend. We just do stuff together so no one hits on either of us. It’s nice and comfortable, and I’m not going to let you turn it into anything more with your psychobabble bull.”
Ford placidly arched his eyebrows at me, and I stiffened when Jenks zipped in and said, “You musta hit pretty close to the mark there, sheriff, to get her riled up like that.”
“He’s just a friend!” I protested.
Relenting, Ford dropped his eyes and shook his head. “That’s how good relationships start, Rachel,” he said fondly. “Look at you and Ivy.”
I felt the muscles in my face go slack and I blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You’ve got a great relationship there,” he said, busying himself with his coffee again. “Better than a lot of married couples I see. Sex ruins it for some people. I’m glad you’re learning that you can love someone without having to prove it with sex.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said uneasily. “Hey, let me top your coffee off there.”
I could hear him shift as I turned my back on him and went to get the carafe. And he wanted to put me under hypnosis? No freaking way. He knew too much about me already.
“Ford,” Jenks said gruffly, “your spider sense is whacked. All my kids are accounted for. Maybe it’s Bis.” He looked at the corners. “Bis, you in here?”
I smiled as I poured half a cup into Ford’s mug. “Not while the sun is up, he’s not. I saw him on the front eave when I went out for the paper this afternoon.”
Taking a sip of coffee, Ford smiled. “There are three emotion sets in this room other than mine. Someone’s nose got counted twice. Look, it’s okay,” he added when Jenks started dripping green sparkles. “Forget about it.”
The soft strains of ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man” drifted into existence, muffled but annoying. It was Ford’s phone, and I eyed him with interest, thinking it an odd sort of tune for the straitlaced guy, but then my lips parted when I realized it was coming from my bag. My phone? But I knew I’d had it on “vibrate.” At the very least, it wouldn’t be playing that song. “Cripes, Jenks,” I said, scrambling for my bag. “Will you leave my phone alone!”
“I haven’t touched your phone,” he said belligerently. “And don’t be blaming it on my kids either. I bent their wings back last time, and they all said it wasn’t them.”
I frowned, wanting to believe him. Unless it was general nuisance, Jenks’s kids usually didn’t make the same mischief twice. Dropping my bag on my lap, I pulled out my phone, finding the call to be from an unlisted number. “Then why does it keep going off ‘vibrate’? I almost died of embarrassment the night I tagged Trent.” Flipping it open, I managed a courteous, “Hello?”
Jenks landed on Ford’s shoulder, smiling. “It started playing ‘White Wedding.’”
Ford laughed, and I pulled the phone from my ear. There was no one there. Clicking through the menu, I put it on “vibrate.” “Leave it alone,” I growled, and it went off again.
“Jenks!” I exclaimed, and the pixy flew up to the ceiling, grinning from ear to ear.
“It’s not me!” he chimed out, but he was having too much fun for me to believe him.
It wasn’t worth trying to catch him, so I dropped the phone in my bag and let it ring. Ford was very still, and a wave of apprehension swept me at the look in his eyes. Scared, almost.
“Someone else is in this room,” he said softly, and Jenks’s laughter cut off. I watched as Ford pulled out his amulet. It was a swirl of emotions, confusing and chaotic. No wonder he liked to work one on one. “Both of you, go back by the fridge,” he said, and it was as if the warmth left my body. Shit, what in hell is going on?
“Go,” he said, waving, and I stood up, totally creeped out. Maybe it’s a demon, I thought. Not really here, but here on the other side of the ever-after, looking at us with his second sight. The sun wasn’t down yet, but it was close.
Jenks silently landed on my shoulder, and we backed up until the amulet shifted to a frustrated black.
“And he or she is extremely frustrated,” Ford said mildly. “He, I think.”
I didn’t believe this. How could he be so calm? “You sure it isn’t a pixy?” I almost whined, and when Ford shook his head, I asked, “Is it a demon?”
Ford’s amulet flashed a confused orange. “Maybe?” Ford offered, and when the amulet turned the purple of anger, he shook his head. “Not a demon. I think you have a ghost.”
“What?” Jenks yelped, the burst of yellow pixy dust settling onto the floor to slowly fade. “How come we didn’t know before? We’ve been here a year!”
“We do live next to a graveyard.” I looked over my kitchen, feeling it was alien suddenly. Damn it, I should have gone with my first gut feelings when I saw the tombstones. This wasn’t right, and my knees weren’t feeling all that sturdy. “A ghost?” I stammered. “In my kitchen?” Then my heart did a flip-flop, and my gaze shot to my demon library, down from the belfry. “Is it my dad?” I shouted.
Ford put a hand to his head. “Back up. Back up!” he cried. “You’re too close.”
Heart pounding, I looked at the eight feet between us and pressed into the fridge.
“I think he meant for the ghost to back up,” Jenks said dryly.
My knees started to shake. “This is freaking me out, Jenks. I don’t like it.”
“Yeah,” Jenks said. “Like I’m all peach fuzz and nectar here?”
Ford’s expression eased, and the amulet around his neck went a sorrowful brown tinged with the red of embarrassment. “He’s sorry,” Ford said, gaze unfocused as he concentrated. “He didn’t mean to scare you.” A smile came over him, unusually soft. “He likes you.”
I blinked, and Jenks started to swear in one-syllable sentences in a way that only a pixy can manage. “Likes me?” I stammered, then got the willies. “Oh God,” I moaned. “I’ve got a peeping Tom of a ghost. Who is it?”
The amulet went entirely red. Ford looked down at it as if needing confirmation. “I’d say not a peeping Tom. I’m getting that he’s frustrated, benevolent, and he’s starting to feel better now that you know he’s here.” Ford’s eyes slid to my bag. “Ten to one he’s the person who has been changing your ring tones.”
I fumbled for a chair, yanked it to the fridge, and sat down. “But my phone has been doing this since the fall,” I said, looking at Jenks for confirmation. “Months.” Anger started trickling in. “He’s been here all that time? Spying on me?”
Again, the amulet went an embarrassed red. “He’s been trying to get your attention,” Ford said gently, as if the ghost needed an advocate.
I put my elbows on my knees and dropped my head into my hands. Swell.
Clearly frustrated, Jenks landed on the sill beside his brine shrimp tank. “Who is it?” he demanded. “Ask him his name.”
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/kim-harrison/white-witch-black-curse/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.