Scowling, Jenks put his hands on his hips. “I still say a small team has a better chance than a big one. People talk too much and committees make decisions slower than a troll in love.”
Trent had his elbows on his knees as he looked at the map of Cincinnati Edden had e-mailed over. He was making notes, marking up the escape route Edden had indicated with a bright red line. “My biggest issue is this circular route around the city they want you to take. I understand needing to curtail as many misfires as possible, but the splintered mystics are hazardous. What if they catch up? You barely survived the last time,” he added, pencil tapping.
“Sometimes you just have to trust,” I said, and I couldn’t tell you why arguing with Trent didn’t feel like an attack. Maybe because he had yet to say no, just “convince me.” That, and I was still glowing from earlier—literally, if Jenks was to be believed. “The entire city wants them gone, and once they get in the line, the Goddess will take them.”
Wings a low hum, Jenks flew to the mantel to where he could keep one eye on the garden out the high windows. Trent kept studying that map as if trying to find a better way. I knew he liked this plan less than I did, but Ivy was on her way from the FIB and would fill in the gaps and turn it from one of my ill-thought-out schemes to one of her excellent strategies.
Trent reached across the space between us and took the bowl of popcorn as he said, “Speaking of trust, the Goddess doesn’t like you anymore. I’m not so sure she’s going to blindly accept them from you.”
My shadow of concern pricked through the mystics in me, bringing them to a full awareness. Letting them figure it out on their own, I shrugged. “Perhaps, but she does want her thoughts back. Crazy or not.”
Insane! a rising mystic in me cried out, and a slice of them swung around to the idea that we were in danger. Swallowing hard, I told them to chill. They were acting in concert a lot more. A hundred diverse voices I could handle. One determined developing Goddess complex was a lot harder.
Trent didn’t notice the controversy echoing in my skull, but Jenks did, and I took a handful of popcorn and flicked a kernel at him to get him to keep his mouth shut.
“Okay,” Trent said as he looked up at Jenks’s muttered swearing. “Assuming we go with this very rough plan—”
“Ivy will buff out the corners,” I interrupted. “It’s not like we have to do this alone.”
“We still need to figure out how to free the splinter,” he finished. “Your magic is twitchy, and my resources are about to take a nosedive.”
His Goddess-based magic, I mused, pulling my knees up to my chin until I realized it made me look scared. “I can do magic. The trick is to keep them from destroying everything once they’re stirred up.” I rubbed a spot on the coffee table, uneasy when a few mystics arrowed back to me with images of Ivy’s bike weaving through abandoned dented and burned cars down a side street. They were getting better at recognizing her, and every time a wandering mystic saw her, it came back to let me know. If I could get them to individually grasp the concept of time, I might be able to tell how old the image was. “Besides, I saw the containment array yesterday, and it relies on electricity, not magic. Cut the power, and they’re free.”
Trent pushed back from his hunch over the table. Propping an ankle on a knee, he eased into the leather cushions. It lacked a little polish in that he was barefoot, but he more than made up for it when he ran a hand through his hair and stared out the window at nothing. “Maybe. A lot of those pre-Turn mortuaries have secondary power sources. We’d have to cut that along with their mundane connection to the grid.”
“Right,” I drawled, remembering. Mortuaries were the natural choice before the Turn to help move the undead into their next existence, in effect underground minihospitals with all the power needs that went along with it. I had to hand it to Landon. He’d thought this through. “If I didn’t know better, I would think you don’t like my idea,” I said, only half kidding.
“I don’t, but it’s the one that impacts the fewest lives.”
“See?” Jenks said from the mantel. “I’m not the only one who thinks the I.S. and FIB are going to mess it up.”
“I have not said it’s a bad idea,” Trent protested. “Just that it’s not a good one.”
Jenks was laughing again. I would have gotten mad, but Trent was staring at my mouth. If the table wasn’t between us, I think he would have kissed me. The thought was almost as good as actually doing it, and my bad mood vanished.
“Tink’s titties, you’re at it again?” Jenks groaned.
We both turned to the sound of a bike at the front. Thanks to the mystics, I’d been watching Ivy approach the last few minutes, but Jenks darted out to see. Suddenly nervous, I stood. I hadn’t aired out the church because it felt like an apology. Trent was lounging about in Jenks’s old clothes. His underwear was doing the tango with mine in the dryer. She’d understand, but Ivy didn’t handle surprises well.
“That’s Ivy,” I said as I went into the kitchen. “You want anything?” Yep, I was a chicken.
His head was over that legal pad again. Good grief, how much planning could you actually do for a run like this? “I could use another coffee,” he said, and my bare feet padded on the linoleum. “It goes with cookies surprisingly well.”
“It’s just Ivy!” Jenks’s voice echoed back.
“How on earth did she know that?” Trent muttered, and I smiled, pouring coffee into his favorite mug, then poured myself a glass of iced tea.
“Mystics,” I said as I came back in as Ivy’s boots sounded lightly in the foyer. “They’ve been bringing me back images of her the last five minutes.”
Trent’s eyes widened. “Are you sure you want to get rid of them?”
I extended his coffee to him, thinking he looked tired, but he had missed his afternoon nap. “Absolutely,” I said as about half a dozen mystics combined their complaint into one loud voice demanding to know why ice floated and everything else that became solid due to temperature reduction sank.
Trent glanced at the sound of Ivy’s boots in the hallway. “Maybe I should go. We can finish this later.”
“There is no later, there’s only now,” I said, then hesitated, thinking I was starting to sound like Newt. Ice clinking, I stood where I was between him and the doorway. “She’ll be fine,” I said, looking at the empty hallway with a feeling of foreboding. “She knows I’m not hers, but vampire instinct will make her feel attacked.”
“Like I said, maybe I should leave.”
“Rachel? I’m home!” Ivy shouted, Jenks’s voice lost in the sudden clatter of her boots. “You would not believe what the I.S. is trying to pull. Edden—”
Her words cut off, and I met Trent’s eyes, wincing. Surprise!
“Uh . . .” she muttered, still in the hall. “Rachel? Did you and Trent—”
She jerked to a stop in the doorway, her pupils widening as she took in Trent sitting on her couch in Jenks’s old clothes. They darted to me, and I tried to smile. I knew it must have looked kind of sick, but I kept doing it. “You’re here,” she said, meaning Trent.
“Yep!” Jenks said as he darted in, clearly having not told her. “They bumped uglies, did the horizontal fandango . . .”
A silver dust slipped from him as he gyrated. “Stop it, Jenks.”
“Rolled in the hay, played train and tunnel, got their parking tickets validated . . .”
“Grow up, Jenks!”
Giggling like a twelve-year-old, he went to the mantel when I threw a handful of popcorn at him. “I’m telling you, Ivy, this is the best thing to happen to her since that boy band she liked got run over by a pack of migrating deer. Look how relaxed she is. Better than a spa day.”
Ivy licked her lips, eyes darting to Trent as he put his feet on the floor and sipped his coffee. The rims of his pointy ears were a delicate shade of red, which made Jenks laugh more.
“Ah, hi,” she said, looking professional and caught completely off guard.
Trent smiled up at her. “How is Nina? Felix is leaving her alone, yes?”
“For the most part.” Her purse slipped from her shoulder, and she set it on the coffee table. Her eyes flicked over the maps and lists, but she looked very distracted. “I think it’s because he’s been too busy to harass her.”
This was going better than I had thought it would, and I set my glass of iced tea down, working my way around the coffee table to sit on the couch with Trent. “Your timing is perfect. We’re working out how to free the mystics and cart them from Cincinnati to Loveland.”
She started, her thoughts clearly jolted back to what she’d been saying when she came in. “Oh! Right. Has Edden called?”
My eyebrows rose, and Jenks stopped gyrating on the mantel. “Not recently. Why?”
Ivy took off her riding jacket and draped it over the chair I’d been in, clearly still trying to wrap her head around Trent and me. “Um, Columbus’s I.S. took jurisdiction over the run,” she said, and beside me, Trent softly swore under his breath. “They pushed out not only the FIB, but the local I.S. as well. Edden’s lucky to be observing. I’m guessing he hasn’t called because he’s still trying to argue some sense into them.”
“Or he’s afraid,” I said, and Trent exhaled loudly, a hand to his forehead. “Jenks, where’s the phone?” I added, relieved in a way that we had something more important to talk about than my sex life.
“I was afraid of this,” Trent said softly as he checked his watch.
“They can’t kick us out,” Jenks said as Ivy crossed the hall to go to the kitchen, and I slumped beside Trent. “It’s our run! Who is going to move the mystics?”
“Apparently they are!” Ivy shouted from the other room. “Felix cut a deal with his old buddies, and with everyone else sleeping, there’s no one to say otherwise. The Columbus I.S. agents working the case are going to keep the captured mystics, and Felix gets whatever he wants in exchange. Whenever he wants it.”
Nina, I thought, my eyes finding Ivy’s when she came back in, not with the phone but her laptop. My God. He’d given the ability to control wild magic to the I.S., and therefore the undead, in exchange for Nina.
Looking scared, Ivy sat in my recently vacated chair. Her hair hid her eyes, but her fingers were trembling as she opened the computer and waited for it to come alive. It was her security, and it was going to come up short this time.
“Ivy?”
She didn’t look up. Trent was fidgeting, but Jenks was mad enough for all of us, the pixy hovering in the center of the room, his dust spilling onto the papers until I thought I could smell smoke. “Whadya mean they get the captured mystics?” he said bitingly. “They like what’s going on in Cincinnati?”
“As a matter of fact, some of them do,” she said, her eyes holding intolerance. “Being able to put your rivals to sleep is something many of the undead would pay dearly for.”
“They wouldn’t!” I exclaimed as I pieced it together. Ayer had said his original idea had been a more personal choice, a building, a room—a single undead. They could parcel the mystics up. Sell them like miniassassins. Having trouble with your labor pool? Buy a city full and watch them toe the line.
Trent slumped into the cushions, his disgusted expression making it clear he’d figured it out immediately. “The I.S. having control of the mystics would be worse than the Free Vampires putting all of them asleep,” he said.
Not to mention it would cause a legal blind eye to fall on Felix turning Nina into his belonging. This was three times wrong. “I say we go there, steal the mystics, and get them to the Goddess before they leave the I.S. tower.”
“Yes!” Jenks said, exploding from the mantel in a burst of silver. “I never liked the idea of working with them anyway.”
Ivy’s relief was almost palpable, but Trent, not used to working with such a small, maneuverable ship, frowned. “You think we four—”
“Five,” I corrected him, pointing to the steeple and Bis.
“Five,” he continued, “can break into the mortuary, one they’re probably already monitoring, cut the power, free the mystics, and run for Loveland all under the I.S.’s nose?”
I nodded, rising to go stand beside Jenks to form a visual alliance. His dust made my skin tingle, and I smiled as Ivy exhaled, her fear easing. “Yup. Welcome to my world, Trent.”
“Seven,” Jenks said as he hovered by my ear. “Don’t forget Nina and David. We got an entire city of Weres to plow our road. They’re out there already, and no I.S. agent can stop a Were on four paws.”
“Seven, and a city of Weres,” Trent said. “So how do we get in? It’s a fortress. Lots of security. No easy way out once you get in.”
“If it’s pre-Turn, the security is all outdated,” Jenks said as he flew silver-dusted wreaths around Ivy and landed on her shoulder. “I have yet to find the building I can’t break into. Hell, if I can get Rache into your back office, I can get into a pre-Turn coffin klatch.”
Flicking his hair back, Trent pulled his map of the city close. A shiver rose through me as I saw him fitting into my life in a way I’d never imagined, and then I stifled it, remembering the heat in his eyes as he lay atop me, the feel of his body against mine. Why had I done the smart thing and waited so long?
