“About time. I’m starving,” Ivy muttered as the distant sound of the door opening filtered back, and Glenn’s cheerful “Hello in the church” came to us. I took in Ivy’s soft flush of anticipation, making me wonder if she was simply talking about the pizza he was supposed to be bringing over—or something more earthy.
I reached for an apron as I recalled finding Glenn’s coat last spring smelling like Ivy. They’d been out on more than a few dates. Normally I’d be worried if a human tried to keep up with Ivy—she was a living vampire who’d been warped by her previous master into not being able to love without physically hurting her partner—but Ivy was learning new patterns and Glenn was not your average guy.
Glenn was ex-military, not overly large but powerful, having the grace of a slow jazz song, the sure momentum of an ocean wave, and the need to raise a person to the best of her abilities. He was nothing if not steady, and Ivy needed steady. I thought it telling that the first time they’d met, he’d asked me why I risked living with her, calling her unreliable, dangerous, and a psychopath, none of which I had been able to deny at that point. But she was also loyal, strong, determined, and a damn good person trying to overcome her past.
I looked up from tying on Ivy’s
COOK THE STEAK, DON’T STAKE THE COOK
apron as Glenn breezed into the kitchen from the dark hallway, a box of pizza in one hand, Jenks on his shoulder, and pixy kids wreathing his head, all of them talking at once. I smiled. So much for first impressions.
“Still working?” the tidy man said as he noted Ivy’s papers and my spelling equipment. Rain spotted the short leather jacket that showed off his narrow waist and wide shoulders. He was a shade taller than Ivy, one ear having a diamond stud and his curly black hair in a flattop, making him look more military than usual.
“You too, I see,” I said, my smile faltering as he dropped the pizza box next to my spelling supplies and a tuft of dandelion fuzz took to the air. The pixies were on it in an instant, and with a squeal of excitement, a bright-cheeked, excited boy who looked about four darted out of the kitchen with it, six of his siblings in hot pursuit.
“Come back with that!” Jenks shouted, almost as fast as he zipped after them.
Ivy leaned in to give Glenn a quick kiss on the cheek, and in a smooth motion, she shifted the pizza box to the kitchen table as she stood. There wasn’t a mark on the man’s beautifully dark skin, and as he took his coat off and draped it over a nearby chair, I couldn’t help but wonder where Ivy had been biting him. Then I wished I hadn’t.
“I’m off the clock, but who really stops working?” Glenn said as he shifted his shoulders to make his shirt fit better. He liked to dress the part of an FIB detective, especially when he was mingling with his I.S. counterparts, and he made it look good. “There’s a lot of information to go over and only a short time to catch these maniacs.”
“Besides,” Jenks said as he brought me my dandelion fluff, “coming over here gave him an excuse to eat pizza.”
“Thanks, Jenks,” I said, wondering if the spell was ruined even before I’d lit the Sterno can. My stomach grumbled at the smell of the pizza. I hadn’t eaten yet, but mixing spell prep and food was a
very
bad idea. I’d eat later.
Ivy turned from the cupboards with three plates. “You brought your copy, right?” she asked. “You’re not using mine.”
Grinning to show his very white teeth, Glenn pulled a creased, copied version of the I.S.’s information, still stapled together and showing signs of having been worked with. “I know better than to write on your paper.” He smacked her on the butt with it, and Ivy turned, growling at him as she opened the pizza box. It was obvious she was enjoying the attention. I’d seen Ivy and Glenn interact before, but it still kind of freaked me out. Wiping my hands on the apron, I put myself behind the center counter where I could work, stay out of their way, and yet keep an eye on them. Jenks, too, looked uncomfortable, and together we pretended to read my recipe.
Sighing happily, Glenn sat in Ivy’s chair before her computer, leaning forward to take a piece of pizza. He was the only human I knew who’d eat it, and he’d become quite the tomato junkie. I’d pimped ketchup to him in exchange for handcuffs until he got tired of the blackmail and admitted to his dad that he ate tomatoes. Most humans wouldn’t since a bio weapon had accidentally slipped into a genetically modified tomato and killed a quarter of the world’s human population about forty years ago.
Humanity owed its continued existence to us Inderlanders coming out of the closet to keep society intact as plague swept through their genome, killing everyone who had eaten the lethal fruit. It hadn’t affected us, and they were understandably skittish about tomatoes even now. But Glenn . . . I smiled as he groaned in pleasure, a long string of cheese running from his mouth to his piece of pizza. Glenn had risked it when cornered in an Inderland eatery and the choice had been to eat it or admit to a room full of vampires that he was chicken.
“Mmm,” he said, chewing slowly and savoring every morsel until he swallowed. “Ivy, I wanted to go over the distance between the dump sites and where the victims were held. See if we can narrow the search. The I.S. has their amulets all over the city, but if we can zero in on one borough, it will be faster.”
I lit the Sterno can from the stove’s pilot light and set the spell pot on the tripod. Competition between the I.S. and the FIB was good. I didn’t trust the I.S. amulets, which was why I was making my own. That standard magic-based tests were not working normally also didn’t sit well. They were usually as reliable and a great deal faster than the pre-Turn techniques of genetic comparisons, which were now barely legal.
“Besides,” Glenn added, his voice a dark mutter, “I don’t think they’ll tell us immediately when they find the latest base of operations.”
Ivy had sat down kitty-corner to him, angling her chair so that her back wasn’t to me. “You think the I.S. will keep information from you now that you’ve got jurisdiction?” she said, her voice mocking and high. “Glenn, we’re all in this together.” Leaning over the pizza on her lap, she patted him on the cheek a little too hard.
Jenks and I exchanged a look, and his wings hummed nervously. I set the spring water to boil, hoping I wasn’t going to have to watch them flirt all night.
“You know I won’t withhold information,” Glenn said, a smidgen of his usual business attitude showing. “I don’t like that they managed to keep three HAPA crimes quiet for almost two weeks.” Glenn’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, and his pizza dangled, forgotten, from his thick hands. “That’s almost too hard to believe.”
I tended to agree with him.
Memory charms.
I was starting to have a real problem with them. My motions to grind the seeds up grew rougher, and I leaned into the job, taking my anger out on the dandelion fluff, tick seed, and sticktights. “They thought I was the one doing it,” I said when I backed off to add the corn pollen.
Glenn looked first at me, then Ivy to see if I was joking. His expression was a mix of amazement and anger. “You?” he almost barked when she nodded.
Seeing that Ivy had quit tweaking the man’s libido, Jenks darted to the open pizza box. “Rache set them straight,” he said proudly as he hovered over the crust. “In loud words,” he added, using a pair of chopsticks from his back pocket to help himself to the sauce.
“I’ll bet.” Glenn set his pizza down, reaching for the paper towels we kept out and tearing one off. “I’m sorry, Rachel. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have been so nice to them.”
I shrugged, then cracked an egg, shifting the yolk from eggshell to eggshell to separate it from the white. Not many earth charms used eggs, but this one did to bind the dry ingredients to the wet. “I’m getting used to it,” I said sourly, hoping we’d seen the last of Nina. “At least I got my license back and my car registered in my name.” Until they wiped my memory. Damn it, those things were illegal for a reason! I knew the demons had a curse that would block memory charms, but that was out. Maybe the elves had one. Trent could make a Pandora charm, which was basically a spell that repaired the damage from one. I simply wanted to prevent it.
Frustrated, I promised myself I’d call Trent as soon as I had ten minutes to myself. He’d sounded mad at me, but that was all the more reason to talk to him. I wasn’t going to let misunderstandings fester anymore, especially with Trent. The man was starting to scare me.
“Jenks, you want this?” I asked the pixy as I held up the yolk still in the shell half, and he shook his head. Eggs gave me migraines, so I dumped it down the sink, dusting my hands as I turned around. Almost done.
Glenn finished his first piece of pizza, and after a longing look at the rest of the pie, he moved his plate to the center counter. “ ’Scuse me,” he said as he reached across Ivy for one of her maps, intentionally brushing her. Ivy almost hit his jaw as she went for a pencil next to her keyboard, and I looked away when they put their heads together and began talking of walking speeds and the problems inherent in analyzing rapid transit.
Jenks took one look at them and flew back to me in disgust. “Jealous?” he asked me as he landed on the open spell book, and I frowned.
“No. Get off the spell book.”
He was laughing as I shooed him away, landing on Glenn’s plate instead, just about the only place I’d let him alight at this point. The water was boiling, and after checking the recipe, I carefully brushed the crushed seeds into it. It fizzed and foamed, and I blew out the flame. I’d add the egg white and fairy dust along with the focusing object after it cooled. In this case, I’d be using the man’s hair. This was sympathetic magic, meaning it worked by making a connection between the amulet and whatever it was sensitized to. Sticktights, tick seed, and egg white were for binding. Corn pollen, fairy dust, and dandelion seed were for drifting on the ether to search, and my blood would be the catalyst to make it work. The man’s blood would have made a better focusing object, but there wasn’t a clean enough sample. Hair was a good substitute.
So why did I feel so weird using it?
I glanced at Ivy and Glenn, happy with maps and colored markers, then teased a hair from the bundle Jenks had snatched for me. It was black and fine, from his head and not the curse-modified pelt he’d had from the waist down.
Ivy laughed, low and throaty, and I looked up to see them absorbed in whatever point of contention they had deemed worthy of arguing over. Jenks snickered, and I glared at him. “Shut up,” I muttered, my shoulders shifting uncomfortably. Damn vampire. It was starting to smell good in here, what with the pizza and the pheromones. And the scent of . . . wine and salt?
It was coming from the bundle of hair that Jenks had snitched for me, and with a sudden burst of connection, I brought it to my nose. As Glenn’s deep voice murmured about property values and crime rates, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, smelling sweat and fear. Deeper was shampoo, and lightly, lacing it like a perfume that he’d once walked through, was the hint of wine and salt. I’d smelled it at the crime scene, too.
My eyes opened. “Jenks, come sniff this.”
Jenks’s wings clattered, but he didn’t move from where he was licking his chopsticks clean. “Tink’s panties, Rache. You’re starting to sound like my kids.” Turning his voice mocking and high, he said, “Dad! Come smell this! It stinks!” Shaking his head, he dropped his voice and added, “Why the hell would I want to smell something if it stinks?”
I put my forearms on the counter and loomed over him. “Seriously. Wine and salt?”
Eyeing me, he stood, walking over and making a big show of smelling it. “Yeah,” he finally said, and my heart gave a thump. “Once you get past the meadow.”
“Thanks,” I said, and he went back to his dinner, his attitude cautious.
Wine and salt . . .
Motions slow, I set the hair aside and dropped one strand into the cooled liquid before adding the egg white and the fairy dust. All that was left was my blood to kindle it. I was afraid to try. It might not work, and it wasn’t as if I could do the demon equivalent anymore.
My gaze dropped to the counter, as if I could see through it to the shelf where I kept my demon books next to my missing scrying mirror. I’d lost it and never replaced it since I didn’t need the interdimensional chat charm if I was playing dead to the demons.
That’s when it clicked.
Scrying mirror. Someone was trying to make a scrying mirror into a calling glyph. But to do that, they’d need demon blood.
Shit.
I gripped the counter, feeling my face go cold and wavering, as if I’d moved too quickly. That’s what HAPA was doing. This wasn’t merely a scare tactic and hate crime. They were trying to duplicate demon blood in order to perform curses. The mutilated corpses the I.S. had found were their attempts to turn a witch into a demon.
“Oh my God . . .” I whispered, and Ivy and Glenn both looked up, their expressions holding curiosity as well as banked heat. HAPA wanted a little magic of its own, and since demons were considered tools, they didn’t have a problem using demon magic.
“You want to share with the class, Rache?” Jenks said, and I tried to find my voice.
“The blood analysis,” I said softly, holding the counter to keep from swaying. “Ivy, what does it say about the magic-enzyme levels?”
Ivy shifted a few inches from Glenn as she reached for it, crossing her knees as she rocked back in the chair. “ ‘Blood composition in all the victims show elevated levels, progressively worse with each victim.’ ” She slowly blinked, her eyes going blacker as she sensed my dread. “Is that important?”
I nodded. “If they started from someone with naturally high levels of those enzymes, everything would go faster. Does it say if they are carriers for the Rosewood syndrome?”
Jenks made a high-pitched noise, and Ivy shook her head, her lower lip between her teeth as she double-checked. “You think . . .” she said, her words trailing off as I nodded.
Rosewood syndrome. I wasn’t a carrier. I was a survivor. I had twice the enzymes they were playing with now.
Crap on toast.