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.
“Here,” he said, handing a cracker to one of his sons. “See that your mom gets this.”
“’Kay, Papa,” he said, and was gone, his feet never having touched the table. The other two ferried the rest of the portions out in a well-organized display of pixy efficiency. Ivy blinked at the normally nectarivorous pixies descending on the pickled herring like it was maple syrup. They’d eaten an entire fish last year for an extra boost of protein before their hibernation, and though they weren’t going to hibernate again this year, the urge was still there.
Sourly contemplating my new and improved list, I cracked the bottled water Ivy had brought me. I thought about heading into the kitchen for a glass of wine, but after glancing at Ivy, I decided to make do with what I had. The pheromones she was kicking out were enough to relax me as much as a shot of whiskey, and if I added to it, I’d probably fall asleep before two in the morning. As it was, I was feeling pretty damn good, and I wasn’t going to feel at all guilty that most of it stemmed from her. It was a thousand years of evolution to make finding prey easy, but I felt I deserved it for putting up with all the crap living with a vampire brought. Not that I was that easy to live with either.
I tapped the eraser against my teeth and looked at my list. The Weres were probably out, and Lee. I couldn’t imagine the Withons would be that ticked, even if I had busted up their daughter’s marriage to Trent. Trent might be angry, though, seeing as I’d gotten him jailed for all of three hours. A sigh lifted through me. I’d built up a lot of animosity with some pretty big people in a remarkably short time. My special talent. I should concentrate on finding traces of demon summoning and go from there, rather than investigating people who might hold a grudge.
The dinner bell Ivy and I used as a doorbell bonged, startling us. A jolt of adrenaline pulsed through me, and Ivy’s eyes dilated to a thin rim of brown.
“I’ll get it,” Jenks said as he flew up from the coffee table, his voice almost lost in the commotion his kids were making from the front corner of the newspaper-plastered sanctuary.
As Ivy went to turn down the music coming in from the back room, I wiped my mouth of cracker crumbs and did a quick tidy at the table. Ivy might take a job two days before Halloween, but if they were looking for me, they were going to be sadly disappointed.
Jenks worked the elaborate pulley system we’d rigged for him, and as soon as the door cracked, an orange cat streaked in. “Cat!” the pixy shrilled as the tabby headed right for his kids.
I bolted upright, breath catching as every pixy in the sanctuary was abruptly eight feet higher. Shrieks and calls echoed, and suddenly the air was full of little black paper bats dangling enticingly from thin strings.
“Rex!” Jenks shouted, darting to land right before the black-eyed animal, which was entranced and frozen by the overwhelming sensory input of twenty-plus dangling bits of paper. “Bad cat! You scared the fairy-loving crap out of me!” His gaze went to the rafters. “Everyone up there?”
A shrill round of “Yes, Dad,” made my eyeballs hurt, and Matalina came out of the desk. Hands on her hips, she whistled sharply. A chorus of disappointed complaints rose and the bats fell. A flow of pixies vanished inside the desk, leaving three older kids to sit and dangle their feet from the rafters as casual sentries. One of them had Jenks’s straightened paper clip, and I smiled. Jenks’s cat patted one of the fallen paper bats and ignored her tiny master.
“Jenks …,” Matalina said in warning. “We had an agreement.”
“Ho-o-o-oney,” Jenks whined. “It’s cold out. She’s been an inside cat since we got her. It’s not fair to make her stay outside just because we’re inside now.”
Her tiny, angelic face tight, Matalina disappeared into the desk. Jenks streaked in after her, a mix of young man and mature father. Grinning, I snagged Rex on my way to the door and the two shadows standing hesitantly in my threshold. I had no idea how we were going to handle this new wrinkle. Maybe I could learn how to make a ward to let people through but keep felines out. It was just a modified ley line circle. I’d seen someone do it by memory once, and Lee had put a ward up across Trent’s great window. How hard could it be?
My smile widened when the light from the sign over the door illuminated who was there. It wasn’t a potential client. “David!” I exclaimed when I saw him next to a vaguely familiar man. “I told you I was okay earlier. You didn’t have to come over.”
“I know how you downplay things,” the younger of the two men said, his face easing into a few smile wrinkles as Rex struggled to get away from me. “‘Fine’ can be anything from a bruise to almost comatose. And when I get a call from the I.S. about my alpha female, I’m not going to take that at face value.”
His eyes lingered on the faint mark on my neck where Al had gripped me. Dropping the wildly wiggling cat, I gave him a quick hug. The complicated scent of Were filled my senses, wild, rich, and full of exotic undertones of earth and moon that most Weres lacked. I drew back, my hands still on his upper arms,