Page 84 of Demon's Bluff
“Sorry, Kisten.” I shoved him over, straining to roll him into place. The man was heavy with muscle. “Ivy might not have Kisten’s ashes,” I said breathlessly. “We never got to identify him. He was cremated at the city morgue before we could.” Which was SOP for a master’s mistake, now that I thought about it. I’d done it myself.
I dropped my bag onto Kisten’s chest, feeling the early hour all the way to my bones. “I could use some help here.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Elyse raised a hand in protest. “You find him here. Dead.”
“Not until Tuesday. That’s two days from now.”
“And then?” she said, still not moving. “What then?”
Crap on toast, why wasn’t she helping me? The bloody sun was about to come up. “If he’s still undead Tuesday morning, I will put a doppelganger in his place. Maybe they cremate a John Doe.”
She made no move to help, even when I flipped the ends of the blanket over him and began to drag him to the narrow door. It was undignified, and I hated it, but Kisten wouldn’t care. He’d laugh, probably.
“This would go faster if you would help,” I said, looking past my hair at her. “We’ve got to get him underground before the sun comes up.”
Elyse exhaled loudly. “They check for body authenticity before running the furnace. Ivy has Kisten’s ashes.”
I shook my head, grunting as I got him another foot closer to the door, and stopped. “I helped Ivy cremate one of Constance’s city lessons three days ago. No one checked the body. They took us at our word.” Frustrated, I let go of Kisten’s shoulders, leaving his head propped against my legs. “It was your idea for me to find closure. I’m closing. The virus is still alive in him. Until it isn’t, I’m keeping him away from the sun. You going to help me or not?”
“There are only two seats in that truck,” she tried next, but Kisten wouldn’t mind being put in the truck bed.
“Please,” I said evenly, begging her. “Help me get him underground and we can talk about the ramifications all day. You’re right he’s not going to make it, but once he’s gone, really gone, I can bring his body home under the same stasis spell you’re going to need and do that stupid curse you dangled in front of me.” And if this worked, Iwasgoing to use a stasis spell on him. To do otherwise would have him a decayed corpse by the time we got home. “You owe me, Elyse.”
She flushed. “I don’t owe you anything—” she started, but I’d have none of it.
“Nu-uh,” I said, eyes narrowing on her. “You said you were sorry for using Kisten’s death to manipulate me. That you saw how cruel it was when Newt did it. If you really meant that, prove it. Help me move him underground and find a body to take his place so I can bring him home and use that curse you tried to trick me with to protect Cincy when I have to go into hiding to avoid Alcatraz.” I took a slow breath. “Or were you lying that you were sorry about that, too.”
“Fine!” she shouted, clearly frustrated, and my pulse quickened as she dropped her empty chili bowl on him beside my bag and grabbed his ankles. “If we both need the same charm, you might actually twist it.”
“You are a piece of work, Elyse.” Head down, I took his shoulders and we maneuvered him into the narrow hall, elbows knocking.
“He’s not going to wake up hungry, is he?” she asked.
Oh, if only,I thought, then shook my head. “Not with his aura still clinging to him,” I said, then added as I snuck a glance at her, “Thank you. I really appreciate this.” Because if I managed to get Kisten’s body home intact, I could do that stupid spell and slip the coven. Sure, I’d be bringing Kisten’s ghost back every night, but he could maintain Cincy’s vampire population while I hid in the ever-after.I don’t want to hide in the ever-after…
But that’s where I’d be if I couldn’t uncurse Brad.
“I’ll help you stash Kisten and find a replacement body,” she said. “But after he’s underground, I want to get some sleep. I am so tired, I could hibernate. And we are even after this, Rachel Morgan,” she added, face red. “You can’t hold me manipulating you with Kisten over me again. Got it?”
I puffed a strand of hair out from before my eyes, thinking I would manipulate her with anything I wanted, any damn time I felt like it.
“Sure.”
Chapter
20
Elyse and I had almostcome to blows over how to get Kisten off the boat. She’d been afraid of falling in, and I had finally agreed to toss him to the dock like a sack of dirty laundry.One, two, three, fling…After that, it had been embarrassingly easy to lug Kisten into our borrowed truck and from there to the library. I needed someplace safe underground, and using one of the nonprofit emergency shelters was out of the question. All city buildings but the I.S. and FIB had been closed due to Al rampaging through Cincy last night and had yet to be reopened, and the rare-book vault seemed the logical place.
I had found myself missing Jenks again as we broke in at the delivery door, and it was more than me needing to short out the cameras myself with a well-flung spell. A long book bin and the freight elevator had gotten us all down into the basement—though I was a little peeved at Elyse for not helping me shift Kisten out of the rolling bin and into a more dignified position once we got there. “He doesn’t care,” she said. But I did.
Unfortunately, he was too heavy for me to lift on my own, and tipping the bin to dump him on the floor wasn’t going to happen. So there he had sat as we caught a few winks, his head uncomfortably wedged in a corner, the backs of his knees draped over the side, feet dangling. After several hours, he was chalk white, his blood having pooled in his extremities. His aura, too, was growing thin, and that was a problem.
No soul meant no aura, the nebulous energy field not only serving asthe body’s first line of defense but also functioning as a conduit of communication between the body, soul, and mind to ensure that when the body died and the soul left, the mind would follow, thereby keeping all three together when they moved to whatever came next.
Not so with vampires. The vamp virus tricked the mind that the body was still alive after death, and as long as the vampire could take in enough aura-laced blood to bathe the mind, the mind never figured it out. It wasn’t blood that the undead vampire truly craved but the aura contained in it, a clever link the demons who created the first vampires played upon to prevent the newly undead from destroying their aura source. You take too much blood/aura, the person passes out. You know to stop.
Kisten’s soul was indeed gone—transitioned to the ever-after to wait until his mind figured out it was supposed to be dead. The aura from his soul was rapidly vanishing, and without an influx of new, aura-carrying blood, he would die his second death when the remnants of his aura dissipated. I might had saved him from the sun, but nothing could stop him from starving to death as his and Art’s virus battled for supremacy, and my soul ached.I’m sorry, Kisten,I thought as I stifled the urge to arrange his hair.But you are alive, undead, whatever.