Even now I could smell the scent of vampire, pixy, and witch laced through the stronger scents of plywood, cut two-by-fours, and the sweaty Weres fixing the place. Kisten’s pool table sat against the wall where the Goddess had pushed it as if it had been made of cardboard. Ivy’s baby grand had fared better, but it was covered in construction dust, whereas Kisten’s pool table had a vinyl cover and a stenciled sign stating that whoever used it as a workbench would be eviscerated.
I smiled, arms swinging as I headed for it. It was good to have friends.
The scent of melting shoes and burning flesh tickled my nose, and I avoided the outlines of rubber glued to the floorboards where the Goddess had stood. The mystics who served as her uncountable eyes had been so thick that the corpse she’d been animating had been burning. A line of char showed where Al had circled us, the smut from a thousand years of curses serving as an unexpected protective filter from the Goddess’s rage. Plywood covered the hole in the floor, and my eyes rose to the thick cracked beams and, higher, past the false ceiling, to the glint of new nail tips.
There’d been the reek of burned pixy dust, the feeling of hopeless odds, of no escape. My focus blurred as I remembered Ivy’s pure sob of joy when Nina saw her soul in the one she loved and knew it was safe: good things, too.
Melancholy, I pulled the cover off the pool table in a sliding sound of vinyl.
A muffled gasp of surprise spun me to the abandoned altar, where we’d shoved the couch, chairs, and coffee table. It was a kid, towheaded and gawky, maybe sixteen. He stared at me in wide-eyed surprise from the sawdust-laden couch. A plate of half-eaten food sat on the low table before him, but it was obvious that he’d been sleeping.
“Goddess guts,” he said, a scared but resolute look on him. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
I dropped the vinyl cover, my feet placed wide on the floor of my church. “What are you doing here?” My gaze went to the plate, and he flushed, his fair features becoming red under his thin, transparent, almost white hair. He was an elf, and my stance eased. A little.
“I, ah, thought this was your waiting room.” He stood. He was almost my height, but youth made him thinner, awkward in torn jeans and an olive green T-shirt. “I was waiting.”
For me? “What do you want?” I asked, gaze flicking to the plate again.
His sneakers shifted on the old oak floors, and I stifled a shiver at the sound. “I, ah . . . You know Mr. Kalamack. Can you get me in to talk to him? It’s important.”
My eyebrows rose at the mix of fear and strength in his voice. Mr. Kalamack. I hadn’t thought of Trent as Mr. Kalamack in a long time. He was, as Jenks would say, my main squeeze, the sparkle in my dust, the flower in my garden, the sword in my . . . ah, yeah. We’d been dating.
“You need some help? What’s your name?” I reached for my phone, but the sound of a car door slamming pulled my attention to the front of the church. He was gone when I turned back.
Without a sound, I thought. “Kind of flighty, aren’t you?” I whispered as his lanky shadow passed outside the unbroken window, furtive and fast. He must have gone out Ivy’s window. God knew Ivy had used that particular egress on more than one occasion.
But my frown eased when the familiar clatter of pixy wings fell like a balm over the battered church and Jenks flew in, gold dust trailing from him in contentment. Saluting me, the four-inch pixy flew into the exposed rafters on his dragonfly-like wings to inspect the roof repair. More dust sifted from him like a living sunbeam, pooling on the floor before vanishing in a faint draft.
“Just ’cause we’re living on Kisten’s old boat doesn’t mean you can slack off on the yard work, Rache,” he said as he dropped down, hands on his hips in his best Peter Pan pose and hovered before me. “The lawn looks like hell.”
My spider dream flashed through me, but my breath to answer hesitated when Ivy strode in, a plate of cookies from the front steps in hand. “Ease up, Jenks,” she said, her voice like living dust, gray, silky—and just as irritating when she spoke the truth. “She’s been busy. We all have.”
Ivy hit the lights, and I squinted when they flickered on. I hadn’t even known power had been restored, but my flash of guilt vanished as I gave Ivy a quick one-armed hug and breathed deep, taking in the scent of oiled steel and orange juice. The distinctive smell of the I.S. tower was heavy on her, the multitude of vampires, witches, and Weres mixing together with the scent of paperwork and quick feet on the pavement. It told me as much as her professional attire and slightly dilated eyes that she’d come right from work. Under it all was a growing thread of Nina, as distinctive as a fingerprint. That they’d found a lasting happiness together made a lot of the crap my life dished out bearable.
“Cookie?” she said, backing up and holding out the plate, and I shook my head. The risk of a casual assassination attempt was too real and I didn’t know who had made them. True, I’d been half responsible for getting the ley lines—and hence magic—working again, but no one but me was happy that the demons were living freely in reality. Elf magic wasn’t working well, the running theory behind closed doors being it was because their Goddess had been reborn from an off-balance demon. Again sort of my fault.
I’d had only a smattering of jobs since, all from Trent. I was beginning to think he was finding events for me to escort him to so I’d have a paycheck. Boyfriend or not, I wasn’t going to work for him for free. If the danger was real—and it was—the paycheck should be, too.
“Is David here?” Jenks asked, and I shook my head, dropping down to find the rack to set up a game. Seeing my intent, Ivy braced her back against the wall and, straining, pushed the table in an earsplitting shriek of wood. Jenks shuddered a sickly green dust, but at least we could play now. It wasn’t often I saw the strength her living-vampire status gave her. Thanks to having been born with the vampire virus instead of infected with it later, she had canines that were slightly longer than mine, and sharp. And yep, she had a liking for taking blood, but she didn’t need it to survive as Nina, her undead partner, did.
“Watch the hole,” I said as the balls thumped into the rack. “When are they fixing that?”
“My contractor is still trying to find an old house to scavenge floorboards from,” Jenks said, anxious until I rearranged the balls to put the one at the top and the eight in the middle. He didn’t care about the rest. “Apparently there’s been a lot of construction in Cincinnati lately, and they’re running out of materials,” he finished dryly.
Again, not my fault, but the spontaneous offerings on the front steps notwithstanding, I was probably being blamed for that, too.
Ivy rolled a cue stick across the table to make sure it wasn’t warped. “Any idea why we couldn’t do this at David’s office?” she asked, her low voice sounding right even if the sanctuary was all sawdust, silent power tools, and planking.