Page 22 of Demon's Bluff
“No-o-o?” he drawled, his thick fingers clasped and an exaggerated expression of wonder on him. “I justassumed—”
“No,” I said again. “I was an idiot when I was dating Kisten. I was an idiot the entire time I was living with Ivy. I mean, I do love her, but I do dumb things when I’m around her too much, and it’s not Ivy’s fault.” It was my own. It had always been my own. I simply didn’t do well around vampires. They smelled too delicious to resist. That’s how they survived: convincing smart people to make dumb decisions.
A small noise of disbelief escaped Al as he stretched out on the couch and stared at the ceiling, watching the swirl of descending pixy dust. Jenks was up there, eavesdropping. “And you think that by recovering Kisten’s ghost, you won’t return to said dumb state?” he asked.
My brow furrowed. “He never should have died like that. Piscary made him into a party favor.” I tilted the box, and a handful of marbles rolled. It was all that was left. “Killed him because he had become better at managing the living vampires than Piscary had ever been. He wasn’t a threat until he said no to Piscary, and Kisten never would have stood up to him if not for me.” I took one of the marbles in hand, and then dropped it back into the box with a rolling rattle. “I owe him everything.”
“Mmmm.” Gaze on the ceiling, Al dipped his fingers into that tiny pocket of his vest. “And the curse to do so is in elven?”
My pulse quickened. This was why he’d come in from the garden. “Can you read it?”
Al snorted. “Who do you think was responsible for teaching it to their brats? Tell me why you let the curse to wake Kisten’s ghost leave your hands?”
“Because they had the book to uncurse Brad and I was standing thirty-three floors up.”
He sat up. “People heal. Stone can be rebuilt,” he scoffed.
“It was a library,” I said, and Al’s expression pinched in understanding. “Honestly, though, I was concerned about what a bunch of scared magic users would do,” I added, remembering Elyse’s smug expression and Scott’s worry. “And then blame me for it. Why risk it when I can simply get a picture of the spell I want and walk out with my book? That was the deal: I walk out with it after I showed them mine and they showed me theirs.”
“She reneged on a deal? You are within your rights to take every and any action to retrieve it.”
Within my rights. Yeah. I was still breaking in, though, and that’s not how they would see it in a court of law. Demon logic didn’t hold water in a Cincy court. I’d found that out the hard way, and from the rafters came a tiny snort of agreement.
I leaned over the box, staring at those stupid marbles. Depressed, I began to gather them to give to Jenks’s grandkids. But as I chased the glass around the dusty bottom, my thoughts drifted back to Kisten.
I hadn’t thought of Kisten in weeks, and now, thanks to Elyse, I couldn’t get him out of my head. It had really messed Ivy up when Kisten had found his second death on the heels of the first. Usually, when a living vampire dies, his or her soul waits in purgatory until their second, true death and the mind, body, and soul can move on together to whatever waits—purgatory being the ever-after. It had been a shock to find out that what I’d been calling surface demons—the vicious, half-starved, ragtag monsters in the ever-after—were really the tortured souls of the undead vampires. They existed apart and separate, having little agency other thana will to rend and tear. But seeing as the entire species of vampires had been created by the demons, it made sense. They had to put their souls somewhere.
“Al?” I jiggled the marbles in my hand, sending a trace of ley line energy through them to make sure they weren’t spelled.Just empty glass.“Where do the souls of the undead go now that the original ever-after is gone?”
Al continued to stare at the ceiling, his hands laced over his middle, boot heels on the armrest. “They are in the bubble of reality you and Bis created. We moved the curse to keep the souls of the undead from rejoining their minds prematurely to forestall the mess you created the last time their souls were pulled into reality.”
Yeah, that had been a mistake, and I dropped the marbles into a bowl Al had said I could keep. “How come I’ve never seen one?”
The demon shrugged. “I expect they are in the mountains, enjoying the reality you and Bis created. It doesn’t look like hell, so they probably assume they are in heaven. And when in heaven…” He turned his red, goat-slitted eyes to me, a wicked smirk twisting his lips as he left his last words unsaid.
“You act like an angel,” I finished for him. “Not a demon. Is that why—”
“No.” Al sat up, his attention going to the front of the church. “Your demonic kin are behaving themselves because they realize they are both outnumbered and embarrassingly out of touch. Give them a hundred years to adapt and they will apply the full force of their presence upon the elves to bring them back under our collective heels.”
I sighed, my own gaze going to the double doors at the sound of a motorbike. Al had heard it long before me.
“Personally, I can’t wait for them to catch up.” Al thumped his boots on the floor and tugged his sleeves down. “Rachel? I have decided that you will indeed retrieve your book tonight. I’ll assist you with moving the church to the ever-after if the coven attempts to put you in Alcatraz for recovering what is yours. The toadstool ring is thick enough to handle the shift. Earth magic is amazing. Unfortunate that it takes too damn long to prep it.”
Leave Cincy? Is he serious?I thought as Jenks dropped down on wingsand sparkles. I was not about to abandon reality. I was Cincy’s subrosa. Until June anyway.
“That’s Ivy,” Jenks said as there was a thud at the door followed by a gust of air blowing through the church.
“Hey, Rachel?” Ivy called as she closed the door behind her. Her low voice brought my shoulders down in a wash of remembrance as the church suddenly felt complete. Her confident steps in the dark foyer scuffed to a halt when Al half turned where he sat, his eyebrows high as he took in her leather-clad svelte form and the pizza box she had in one hand. How she had gotten it here on her bike was a marvel of balance. But that was Ivy.
“Hi, come on in.” I stood to brush the rest of Al’s rejects from the table into the box to make room for the pizza, my motion faltering when I realized Al wasn’t following protocol and leaving, instead settling back with a copy of myWitch Monthly, his glasses pushed low, so he could see over them.
“Getty!” Jenks darted into the kitchen. “We got pizza. You want to split a tomato?”
“I heard you had a rough day.” Ivy sauntered in looking like a frat boy’s dream in her sexy leather and carrying a boxed pizza. “Al, if I had known you were here, I would have brought two,” she added, her voice holding a hint of antagonistic jealousy. I wasn’t a cookie for them to fight over, but they each had their claim on me and neither of them shared well.
Al flipped a page. “Good evening, Ivy Alisha Tamwood,” he intoned, his focus firmly on the magazine.
Ivy dropped the pizza onto the still-cluttered table with a loud pop. “I know what using all three of my names means,” she said, and I cleared my throat, warning him.