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Minias sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. A faint whiff of Brimstone tickled my nose. “He has too close a tie to Al,” he said, his gaze on the ceramic mug cradled in his hands. “He wouldn’t do it. I asked. The man is a coward.”
My neck stiffened. “And if common sense makes me say no, then I’m a coward, too?”
“You can’t be summoned,” he said, as if I was being obstinate. “Why are you balking?”
“Al would know my name.” Just the thought made my pulse quicken.
“You know his.”
For one brief moment I considered it. Then the thought of Kisten flashed through me. I couldn’t take the chance. Not again. This wasn’t a game, and there was no reset button. “No,” I said abruptly. “We’re done here.”
My mother’s shoulders eased and Jenks’s feet touched the table. I was wire tight, wondering if this truce would last now that I had said no, whereupon he’d return to a normal demonic frame of mind and trash the place along with what was left of my reputation. But Minias finished his coffee in a final swallow, raising his hand and motioning for the clerk to make one more to go. He rose, and my held breath escaped. “As you want it,” Minias said as he picked up the cinnamon and stood. “I won’t be conveniently coming to save you a second time.”
I was about to tell him where he could shove his convenience, but Al was going to show up again, and if I could call Minias to collect him, my chances of survival would increase—I thought. I didn’t have to take Minias up on his offer, just survive until I figured out who was summoning Al and deal with him or her myself. Demon summoning wasn’t illegal, but my foot in their gut a couple of times might convince them it was a really bad idea. And if it was Nick? Well, that would be a real pleasure.
“What if I think about it?” I said, and my mother gave me a nervous smile and a pat on my arm. See, I can use my brain, too.
Minias smirked as if he saw right through me. “Don’t think too long,” he said, accepting the paper cup Junior was extending to him. “I’ve gotten word that they caught him on the West Coast trying to ride the shadow of night into tomorrow. The pattern-shift indicates he has everything he needs and all that’s left is implementing it.”
I refused to show my fear, not swallowing though my mouth was dry.
Minias leaned close, the scent of burnt amber high in my imagination as his breath shifted my hair. “You’re safe until the sun goes down tomorrow, Rachel Mariana Morgan. Hunt fast.”
Jenks rose up on his dragonfly wings, clearly frustrated as he stayed just out of the demon’s easy reach. “Why don’t you just kill Al?”
Tucking the entire container of cinnamon into a jacket pocket, Minias shrugged. “Because we haven’t had a demon birth in five thousand years.” He hesitated, then shook his arm to cause an amulet to slip from his sleeve and fall into his fingers. “Thank you, Alice, for the use of your amulet. If your daughter is half as skilled in the kitchen as you, she would make a fine familiar.”
Mom had made it herself? I thought. Not simply invoked a pilfered one?
The cloying scent of burnt amber rolled over me, and my mother blushed. It was obvious by the protests of the surrounding people that they had noticed the stench as well, and Minias smiled an empty smile behind the mirrored black glasses. “If you would banish me?”
I’d totally forgotten. “Oh. Sure,” I mumbled as the people behind him turned with their hands over their noses in complaint. “Ah, demon, I demand that you depart here and return directly to the ever-after to not bother us again this night.”
And with a nod, Minias vanished.
The people behind him gasped, and I waved. “University professor late for a class,” I lied, and they turned, laughing at their fear and dismissing the stench as an early Halloween prank.
“Lord help you, Rachel,” my mother said sourly. “If that’s how you treat men, it’s no wonder you can’t keep a boyfriend.”
“Mom, he’s not a man. He’s a demon!” I protested softly, pausing as she pocketed that charm. Clearly hair straighteners weren’t the only thing she was trading to Patricia. Scent amulets weren’t hard to make, but one strong enough to block out a demon’s stench was highly unusual. Talk about your niche market. Maybe she was specializing in charms no one else bothered with to avoid competition—and thus lawsuits—from annoyed, licensed charm makers.
Eyes on my coffee, I said, “Mom, about those amulets you’ve been making for Patricia.”
Jenks took to the air, and my mother huffed. “You’re never going to find Mr. Right if you don’t start playing with Mr. Right Now,” she said, gathering everything up on her plate. “Minias is obviously Mr. Never, but you could have been a little nicer.”
Jenks shrugged, and I sighed.
“I noticed he didn’t offer to get the tab, though, did he?” my mother finished.
I took another swallow of my coffee and gathered myself to rise. I wanted to get home to my sanctified church before any more demons popped into my life with nasty solicitations. Not to mention I had to talk to Ceri. Make sure Ivy had told her Al was out.
As I slowly followed Jenks and my mom to the trash and then the door, my thoughts swung back to what Minias had said about no new demons being born for the last five thousand years. He was at least five thousand years old and had been assigned to monitor and seduce a female demon? And why no new demons? Was it because there were so few female demons left, or because having sex with one could be deadly?
Three
I set the stack of unopened desk organizers I’d bought last month on the scratched hardwood floor of the sanctuary, wincing at the high-pitched squeal of pixy children as they swarmed into the nook of my desk that I had just opened up. They weren’t moving in for the winter yet, but Matalina was getting a jump on prepping my desk. I couldn’t blame her for the fall cleaning. I didn’t use my desk much, and there was more dust gathering than work done at it.
The urge to sneeze took me, and I held my breath, eyes watering until the feeling evaporated. Thank you, God. I glanced at Jenks at the front of the church, where he was keeping a fair number of his younger kids busy, and out of the way, with decorating the sanctuary for Halloween. He was a good dad, a part of him that was easy to overlook when he was out busting bad guys with me. I hoped I found half as good a man when I was ready to start a family.
The memory of Kisten—blue eyes smiling—swam up, and my heart seemed to clench. It had been months, but reminders of him still came fast and hard. And I didn’t even know where the thought of children had come from. There wouldn’t have been any with Kisten, unless we fell back on the age-old tradition of borrowing a girlfriend’s brother or husband for a night, practices born long before the Turn, when to be a witch would sign your death warrant. But now even that hope was gone.
Jenks met my eyes, and a gentle dusting of gold contentment slipped from him as he watched Matalina. His pretty wife looked great. She had been fine all this summer, but I knew Jenks was watching her like the proverbial hawk with the onset of the cold. Matalina barely looked eighteen, but pixy life spans were a mere twenty years, and it made me heartsick that it was only a matter of time before we’d be doing this with Jenks as well. A secure territory and steady food supply could do only so much in lengthening their lives. We were hoping that by removing the need for them to hibernate they all would benefit, but there was a limit to what good living, willow bark, and fern seed could do.
Turning away before Jenks could see my misery, I put my hands on my hips and stared at my cluttered desk.
“’Scuse me,” I said, pitching my voice high as I edged my hands among the darting shapes of Matalina’s eldest daughters. They were chatting so fast that it sounded like they were speaking another language. “Let me get those magazines out of your way.”
“Thank you, Ms. Morgan!” one hollered cheerfully, and I carefully pulled out the stack of Modern Witchcraft for Today’s Young Woman out from under her as she rose up. I never read them, but I hadn’t been able to turn down the kid on my doorstep. I hesitated with the stack in my arms, not knowing if I should throw them out or put them next to my bed to someday read, maybe, finally dumping them on the swivel chair to deal with later.
A fluttering of black paper rose up as Jenks flew into the rafters with a small paper bat trailing after him by a thin thread. The smell of rubber cement mixed with the spicy scent of chili slow-cooking in the Crock-Pot Ivy had bought at a yard sale, and Jenks taped the string to a beam before dropping down for another. The swirl of silk and four-part harmony pulled my attention back to my desk, now barren, making the tiny nooks and drawers a pixy paradise done in oak. “All set, Matalina?” I asked, and the tiny woman smiled with a duster made from the fluff of a dandelion in her hand.
“This is wonderful,” she said, her wings a blur of nothing. “You are too generous, Rachel. I know how much of a bother we all are.”
“I like you staying with us,” I said, knowing I’d find pixy tea parties in my spice drawer before the week was through. “You make everything more alive.”
“Noisy, rather,” she said, sighing as she looked to the front of the church and the papers Ivy had spread to protect the hardwood floor from the arts and crafts. Pixies living in the church was a bloody nuisance, but I’d do anything to put off the inevitable another year. If there was a charm or spell, I’d use it in a heartbeat, regardless of its legality. But there wasn’t. I had looked. Several times. Pixy life spans sucked.
I smiled wistfully at Matalina and her daughters as they set up housekeeping, and after rolling the top of the desk down to leave the now-traditional one-inch gap, I grabbed my clipboard and looked for somewhere to sit. On it was a growing list of ways to detect a demon summoning. In the margin was a short list of people who might want me dead. But there were safer ways to kill someone than sending a demon after them, and I was betting the first list would get me closer to who was summoning Al than the second. After I exhausted the local stuff, I’d look out of state.
The lights were high and the heat was on against the hint of chill in the air, turning the autumn night to a noon summer. The church’s sanctuary wasn’t much of a sanctuary anymore; the pews and altar had been removed even before I had moved in, leaving a wonderfully open space with narrow stained-glass windows stretching from knee height to the tall ceiling. My desk was atop the shallow stage up front, to the right of where the altar had been.
Back by the dark foyer was Ivy’s seldom-played baby grand piano, and tucked into the front corner across from my desk was a new cluster of furniture to give us somewhere to interview prospective clients without dragging them all the way through the church to our private living room at the back. Ivy had a plate of crackers, cheese, and pickled herring arranged on the low coffee table, but it was the pool table my gaze lingered on. It had been Kisten’s, and I knew that the reason I was drawn to it was because I missed him.
Ivy and Jenks had given the table to me on my birthday. It was the only piece of him Ivy had taken besides his ashes and her memories. I think she’d given it to me as an unspoken statement that he’d been important to both of us. He had been my boyfriend, but he had been Ivy’s onetime live-in and confidant, and probably the only person who truly understood the warped hell that their master vampire, Piscary, had put them through with his version of love.
Things had changed radically in the three months since Ivy’s former girlfriend, Skimmer, had killed Piscary and landed herself in jail under a wrongful-death charge. Instead of the expected turf war, with Cincy’s secondary vampires struggling to assert their dominance, a new master vampire had stepped in from out of state, one so charismatic that no one rose to challenge him. I’d since learned that bringing in new blood was commonplace, and there were provisions set up in Cincinnati’s charter to deal with the sudden absence of a city power.
What was unusual, though, was that the new master vampire had taken in every single one of Piscary’s displaced vamps instead of bringing his own camarilla. The small bit of kindness cut short an ugly mess of vampire misery that would have put me and my roommate in serious jeopardy. That the incoming vampire was Rynn Cormel, the very man who had run the country during the Turn, probably had a lot to do with Ivy’s quick acceptance. Respect usually came slowly from her, but it was hard not to admire someone who had written a vampire sex guide that sold more copies than a post-Turn bible, and had been president.
I had yet to actually meet the man, but Ivy said that he was quiet and formal, and that she was enjoying getting to know him better. If he was her master vampire, they were going to have a blood tryst at some point. Euwie. I didn’t think they had yet, but Ivy was private about that sort of thing, despite her well-earned reputation. I suppose I should have been thankful he hadn’t taken Ivy as his scion and made my life hell. Rynn had brought his own scion, and the woman was just about the only living vamp to come with him from Washington.
So after Kisten died, Ivy got a new master vampire, and I got a pool table in my front room. I’d known that a blood-chaste witch and a living vampire could never make it work in the long run. Regardless, I had loved him, and the day I found out who Piscary had given Kisten to like a thank-you card, I was going to sharpen my stakes and go for a visit. Ivy was working on it, but Piscary’s hold on her had been so heavy the last few days of his existence that she didn’t remember much. At least she no longer believed she had killed Kisten in a blind, jealous rage.
I eased myself up to sit on the edge of the table, smelling the scents of vampire incense and old cigarette smoke rise from the green felt like a balm. It mixed with the odor of tomato paste and the sound of melancholy jazz filtering in from the back of the church, bringing to mind my early mornings spent in the loft of Kisten’s dance club, inexpertly knocking pool balls around while I waited for him to finish closing up.
Closing my eyes against the lump in my throat, I pulled my knees up to prop my heels against the bumper and wrapped my arms around my shins. The heat coming from the long Tiffany lamp Ivy had installed over the table beat on the top of my head, hot and close.
My eyes started to fill, and I pushed the pain down. I missed Kisten. His smile, his steady presence, just being with him. I didn’t need a man to feel good about myself, but the shared feelings between two people were worth suffering for. Maybe it was time to stop saying no to every guy that tried to ask me out. It had been three months. Did Kisten mean that little to you? came an accusing thought, and I held my breath.
“Get off the felt,” came Ivy’s voice out of my swirl of emotions, and my eyes flashed open. I found her at the top of the hallway leading to the rest of the church, a plate of crackers and pickled herring in one hand, two bottled waters in the other.
“I’m not going to tear it,” I said as I dropped my knees to sit cross-legged, loath to move since the only other place to sit was across from her. It was easier to keep our distance than deal with the building pressure of Ivy wanting to sink her teeth and my wanting her to, both of us knowing it would be a bad idea. We’d tried it once and it hadn’t worked out well, but I was a get-back-on-the-horse kind of girl—even when I knew better.
Almost of their own accord, my fingers rose to my neck and the nearly unnoticeable bumps of scar tissue marring my otherwise absolutely pristine skin. Seeing my hand where it was, Ivy folded herself gracefully into a chair behind the plate of crackers. She shook her head at me, making the gold tips of her short, sin-black, lusciously straight hair glimmer, frowning at me like a ticked-off cat.
I pulled my hand down and pretended to read the clipboard now propped in my lap. Despite her grimace Ivy seemed relaxed as she eased into the black leather, looking pleasantly exhausted from her workout this afternoon. She was wearing a long, gray, shapeless sweater over her tight exercise outfit, but it couldn’t hide her trim, athletic build. Her oval face still carried the glow of exertion, and I could feel her brown eyes watching me as she worked to quell the mild blood lust stirred by the spike of surprise that I had given off when she had startled me.
Ivy was a living vampire, the last living heir of the Tamwood estate, admired by her living vampire kin and envied by her undead ones. Like all high-blood living vampires, she had a good portion of the undead’s strengths but none of the drawbacks of light vulnerability or the inability to tolerate sanctified ground or artifacts—she lived in a church to irritate her undead mother. Conceived as a vampire, she’d become an undead in the blink of an eye if she died without any damage for the vampire virus to repair. Only the low-born, or ghouls, needed further attention to make the jump to a damned immortality.
Moved by scent and pheromones, it was an ongoing ballet between us of want and need, desire and will. But I needed protection from the undead who would take advantage of me and my unclaimed scar, and she needed someone who wasn’t out for her blood and had the will to say no to the ecstasy a vampire bite could bring. Plus, we were friends. We had been since working together in the I.S., an experienced runner showing a newbie the ropes. I’d, um, been the newbie.
Ivy’s blood lust was very real, but at least she didn’t need blood to survive as the undead did. I was fine with her sating her urges with anyone she wanted, seeing as Piscary had warped her such that she couldn’t separate love from blood or sex. Ivy was bi, so it wasn’t a big deal to her. I was straight—last time I checked. But after getting a taste of how good a blood tryst felt, everything was doubly confusing.
It had taken a year, but I finally admitted that I not only respected Ivy but loved her, too—somehow. But I wasn’t going to sleep with her just to have her sink her teeth in me unless I was truly attracted to her and not just to the way she could set my blood burning, aching to fill the hole Piscary had carved into her soul, year by year, bite by bite. …
Our relationship had gotten complicated. Either I had to sleep with her to safely share blood, or we could try to keep it to a blood exchange alone and run the risk that she would lose control and I’d have to slam her against the wall to get her to stop before she killed me. In Ivy’s words, we could share blood without hurt if there was love, or we could share blood without love if I hurt her. There was no middle ground. How nice was that?
Ivy cleared her throat. It was a small sound, but the pixies went silent. “You’re going to damage the felt,” she almost growled.
My eyebrows rose, and I turned to look at the table, already knowing its surface like the palm of my hand. “Like it’s in such good shape?” I asked dryly. “I can’t make it any worse. There’s a dent in the slate the size of an elbow by the front left pocket, and it looks like someone stitched up nail gouges there in the middle.”
Ivy reddened, picking up an old issue of Vamp Vixen that she had out for clients. “Oh, my God,” I said, untwisting my legs and jumping off as I imagined just how gouges like that could get there. “I’ll never be able to play on it again. Thanks a hell of a lot.”
Jenks laughed to sound like wind chimes, and he joined me as I headed over for some of the pickled herring. The puff of leather was soothing as I flopped into the couch across from Ivy, dropping my clipboard beside me and reaching for the crackers.
“The blood came right out,” she muttered.
“I don’t want to know!” I shouted, and she hid behind her magazine. The cover story was SIX WAYS TO LEAVE YOUR SHADOW BEGGING AND BREATHING. Nice.
Silence slipped between us, but it was a comfortable one, which I filled by shoving pickled herring into my mouth. The tart vinegar reminded me of my dad—he had been the one who’d gotten me hooked on the stuff—and I settled back with a cracker and my clipboard.
“What have you come up with so far?” Ivy asked, clearly looking for a shift in topics.
I pulled the pencil from behind my ear. “The usual suspects. Mr. Ray, Mrs. Sarong. Trent.” Beloved city’s son, playboy, murdering slicker-than-a-frog-in-a-rainstorm bastard Trent. But I doubted it was him. Trent hated Al more than I did, having run into him once before to come away with a broken arm and probably a recurring nightmare. Besides, he had cheaper ways to knock me off, and if he did, his secret biolabs would hit the front page.
Jenks was jabbing the point of his sword into the holes of the crackers to break them into pixy-size pieces. “What about the Withons? You did bust up their plans to marry off their daughter.”
“Nah …,” I said, not believing anyone could hold a grudge for that. Besides, they were elves. They wouldn’t use a demon to kill me. They hated demons more than they hated me. Right?
Jenks’s wings blurred and the table was cleared of the crumbs he had made. Eyebrows raised at my doubt, he started layering herring bits on his tiny crackers, each the size of a peppercorn. “How about Lee?” he said. “Minias said he didn’t trust him.”
I set the arches of my feet on the edge of the coffee table. “Which is why I do.” I had gotten the man away from Al. One would think that would be worth something, especially when Lee had taken over Cincy’s gambling when Piscary died. “Maybe I should talk to him.”
Ivy frowned at me over her magazine. “I think it’s the I.S. They’d love to see you dead.”
My pencil scratched against the yellow tablet. “Inderland Security,” I said, feeling a ping of fear drop through me as I added them to the list. Crap, if it was the I.S., I had a big problem.
Jenks’s wings hummed as he exchanged a look with Ivy. “There’s Nick.”
I unclenched my jaw almost as fast as it tightened up.
“You know it’s him,” the pixy said, hands on his hips as Ivy peered at me over the magazine, her pupils slowly dilating. “Why didn’t you tell Minias right there? You had him, Rachel. Minias would have taken care of it. And you didn’t say a thing!”
Lips pressed tight, I calculated the odds of me hitting him with the pencil if I threw it at him. “I don’t know it’s Nick, and even if it was, I wouldn’t give him to the demons. I’d take care of it myself,” I said bitterly. Think with your head, Rachel, not your heart. “But maybe I’ll give the cookie a call.”
Ivy made a small noise and went back to her magazine. “Nick’s not that smart. He’d be demon fodder by now.”
He was that smart, but I wasn’t going to start a witch hunt. Or stupid-human hunt, rather. My blood pressure, though, had gone back down at her low opinion of him, and I reluctantly added his name to the list. “It’s not Nick,” I said. “It’s not his style. Demon summoning leaves traces, either in collecting the materials to do it, the damage done while he’s there, or the increase in educated young witches dying of unnatural causes. I’m going to check with the FIB and see if they’ve found anything odd the last few days.”
Ivy leaned forward, knees crossed as she took a cracker. “Don’t forget the tabloids,” she offered.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said, adding that to the list. A “Demons Took My Baby” story could very well be true.
Propping the tip of his metal sword on the table, Jenks leaned against the wooden hilt and let out a piercing chirp by rubbing his wings together. His kids flew up in a noisy flurry by the door, and I held my breath, fearing they were all going to descend on us, but only three came to a swirling, wing-clattering stop, their fresh faces smiling and their innocence beguiling. They were capable of murder, all of them. Down to his youngest daughter.