by Kim Harrison
The woman smiled, showing me perfect teeth. "Isolating that amino acid is expensive, but we've been using it for centuries. It has an excellent success rate."
I thought of Mary starving herself for another thirty years, and I unclenched my jaw.
"Not everyone thinks you should be castrated," she said as she adjusted her skirt over her ugly knees. "Magically or otherwise. I'm your friend, Rachel. You should trust me."
Oh. Yeah. That's a good idea. I looked at the ceiling, not seeing Bis, then back to her. Damn Trent back to the Turn. This was his fault. Didn't tell them, my ass.
"I alone believe that you don't need such harsh treatment," she continued. "If you can invoke demon magic, you are—"
"A tool?" I interrupted. "A weapon? Have you ever fought a demon, Brooke? You were stupid to have risked it trying to catch me. The only reason I keep surviving demons is because they want me for other things."
I shut up, not wanting to hurt my case any more than I probably just had, but Brooke was smiling her West Coast smile. "I'm trying to help you, Rachel."
"Ms. Morgan, please." I flicked a bit of dried egg off myself, almost hitting her.
"Mor-r-r-rgan," Brooke drawled, bringing my attention back. "I don't want you to become the property of a fucking elf in your efforts to survive."
Ohhh, potty mouth! I thought, smirking. "No, you'd rather see me become your property. The coven's secret weapon. No thanks."
The woman's tan darkened as she flushed in anger. "He can't protect you from us. Never. You think you're something special for surviving an I.S. death threat? Where do you think they get their charms from? The ones we don't keep for ourselves? We get what we want, Rachel. Always."
I stifled a shiver as I recalled Vivian's charms, technically white but with devastating results, all invoked without fear of repercussion, and then Pierce, one of their own buried alive because he'd stood up to them and said that even white charms weren't enough. A fear born out of self-preservation slipped through my anger.
"Sign this," Brooke said, confident as she brought an envelope from her purse and set it on the table between us. "It gives us permission to remove your ability to reproduce and chemically take away your ability to do ley-line magic."
Somehow I managed a snort of amusement I didn't feel. "As opposed to you doing so behind prison doors and with saturated fats?"
She hesitated, and then as if having made a decision, she leaned close enough for me to smell the linen her suit was cut from, clean and light. Her eyes were bright, almost feverish, and a chill spilled through me. This didn't look good.
"I don't mind your being able to invoke demon magic," she whispered, scaring me. "I don't care that you are the beginning of demons on earth. I do have a problem with most of the coven unable to see past their shortsighted noses, so entrenched in old fear that they can't see what you are. They would vote against me, and the majority rules, even if the majority is blind."
My mouth went dry. "And what am I?"
"You are what we all should be!" she exclaimed, then lowered her voice as she leaned back. "The power you have? We're stunted. Half of what we could be. We can be whole, and you're the way. You are the future. I can protect you. Sign that paper, and I promise you'll come out of the anesthesia completely yourself, with your magic intact. This is a sham to get you off the coven's radar and away from Trent Kalamack."
Whoa. Schism? Try the freaking Grand Canyon. "So I'd be your personal monster, not the coven's?" I said, more than a little afraid. "I don't deal with demons."
"You do," Brooke insisted, and the soft murmur from the cells ceased. "It's on the record. You survive every time. The power you can give back to us—"
"I meant," I said, disgusted, "I won't deal with you, and I'm not signing that paper."
Brooke's expression soured. "You're being foolish. If you can't see the future, then at least look at your present. You want to go back to that hole? Fine. Or you can be moved into the warden's apartments. Low security, real food. A view." Her gaze went to the inmates watching. "Privacy. Sign the paper. You have my word you will remain as you are now."
I looked at the paper on the table between us. Remain as I was? Cold, miserable, and a continent away from home? "Let's just say I took a stupid pill this morning, and I sign your paper. What will I be? Soldier? Brood-mare?
The woman smiled. "Motherhood is a noble profession."
My chin went up, and I nodded. "I never said it wasn't, but anything that comes from me will be baby-snatched by demons, Brooke sweetie."
"Way ahead of you," she said, the pen she took from her purse clicking onto the table. "You will become an egg donor," the woman said, unable to hide her eager look. "The demons would never know. You could even adopt one of your own kids. I'm going to."
She wanted one of my unborn children? Parcel my progeny out to the highest bidder? "You are disgusting," I said, but all I got from her was a bemused expression. She took a breath, and I raised my cuffed hands to stop her next words. "What time is it?" I asked, and her expression became annoyed.
"Three fifteen," she said, wiry arm shifting so she could glance at her watch.
Sighing, I sank back into the rank cushions. Almost time. "Brooke, I'm already gone. The only reason I tried to get away from you boneheads earlier was because I wanted a couple of hours to see the sights before I headed home. Crooked Street maybe. Or Treasure Island. That sweet little bridge you're all so fond of. I can't say I like the Alcatraz tour, though. It's a little too realistic."
Brooke snorted to show her disbelief. "We are surrounded by salt water. There are no ley lines on the island. A very expensive ward keeps witches from jumping in for a rescue. Even if you could tap a line through a familiar, which I know you don't have, you wear charmed silver."
"This?" I held up my hands to show the link on my pulped wrist. It had my name on it, and a freaking serial number. "This is really pretty," I said, dropping my arm. "But, Brooke, sweetheart, you can't hold me." Any time, Ivy.
"I think we can." Confidence showed as she leaned back in the tatty chair.
I shook my head, smiling. "No, you can't. It's almost sunrise in Cincinnati. You know what happens when the sun rises? The lines close to summoning traffic. Oh, you can still get around with them, but a summons won't work. And you know what's going to happen just before then?" Brooke's expression was empty, but then she got it.
"You can't jump by line," she said, voice loud. "You're cut off."
I leaned forward, the beating, the humiliation, and the indignity of being locked in a metal closet all day falling from me to leave only a bitter satisfaction. "I'm not a demon," I said softly. "But I'm in their system."
A sneeze shook me, and a quiver grew in my middle. I was going home. "You should have come to talk to me," I said, wishing I could cross my knees and look smug. "I really am a nice person most times, but you just pissed me off."
I sneezed again, and a gut-cramping feeling rose, threatening worse. "I'm going home to take a hot bath and get some sleep. Tell you what," I said, gripping the arms of the chair—as if it could keep me here a moment longer—"I understand how easy it is to underestimate me. Let's start fresh. You can either instigate a war with me or come and talk. Your choice."
Eyes wide, Brooke stood, reaching across the table to grab me. A gray blur dropped between us, hissing.
My heart beat once, hard, and I forced myself to remain seated when Bis spread his wings, tufts of fur puffed and tail switching like a cat's. One clawed foot gripped her unsigned contract, and his head was lowered, red eyes promising violence.
"Shit, it's a gargoyle!" Mary shouted, her words taken up and passed along. "Rachel has a gargoyle!"
"Security!" Brooke shouted as she stood. She was going to lose me, and she knew it.
My head spun when Bis spread his wings and hopped to my shoulder. The unfamiliar pattern of West Coast ley lines exploded in my thoughts, harsh and jagged, tasting of broken rock. Bis could feel them all the time, and when we touched,
I felt them too. The young gargoyle wrapped his tail around my neck, and tears threatened. I was going home.
I wanted to stand, but I couldn't. The pull of the summons had become painful, so I made the vampire kiss-kiss gesture to Brooke as I relaxed my grip on reality and felt the lines pull me in. The smut for this, I would willingly take.
Damn, I had good friends.
Eight
There was no pain as my body dissolved into a thought and that thought was yanked across the continent. I wanted to go, and I'd already accepted the smut on my soul for the imbalance I was causing. Actually, by taking the smut on freely, the feeling of disconnection seemed to be muffled. Or perhaps if you break the rules too many times, you start to build up scar tissue. Or maybe it was because I'd slipped from the fractured West Coast lines to the solid, warm ley lines of my birthplace. It could have been simply that the memory of Bis and his tail wrapped around my neck helped to create a feeling of comfort. But whatever it was, the usual tearing apart of soul and mind almost felt good. Like stretching. Which kind of worried me.
The faint outlines of my kitchen echoed in my memory before they became real, and the woody scent of herbs and copper cleaner tickled my nose. It was more than a little relief—it would be just my luck that a third party summoned me and I ended up in someone else's circle dressed in this hideous orange outfit with fashionable white canvas pull-on shoes.
My will seemed to stretch forward and yank me into existence. With a jolt, everything happened at once, and my aura—which had been holding me together while I existed only as a thought in the ley lines—rose through the memory of myself to build a body. My clothes, bruises, cuffs, everything, down to the egg in my hair, would come through intact. You couldn't fool the demon archive and show up clean, rested, and in a pair of designer boots. I'd tried. The charmed silver, though, would be gone. Small favors.
I took a breath, and I suddenly had lungs. Stumbling, I stayed upright as I popped into existence between the center counter and the sink. The kitchen was dim with early sunlight, shocking since it was dark where I'd been seconds ago. Ivy and Jenks were waiting, worried and tense. Jenks was flying, and all I could see wrong with Ivy was a welt on her forehead.
Immediately the shimmer of smut-covered ever-after around me dropped. It was Ceri, then, who had summoned me. "Thank God," I said, leaning back against the center counter, my head bowed as I mumbled, "Thank you, Ceri. I owe you big." Bis wasn't here, swimming back to Pierce for the jump home, I guess.
Ivy's face was pale as she came close, taking in my tired, filthy state. "What did they do to you?" she said as she fumbled at her key chain for one of her handcuff keys. The steel rings came off, hitting the counter with a loud clatter, and I felt loved.
"Tink's little red panties, Rache," Jenks swore, pinching his nose shut as he hovered over them. "You reek like a fairy's outhouse! Ivy, get her a pain amulet, will you? And maybe one to make her not stink? Good God, how did you get so stinky? You were only gone a day!"
I smiled, glad to be home. But my expression froze when I turned to thank Ceri again. Ceri hadn't summoned me home. It was Nick.
"You putrid pile of troll crap!" I jumped for him, hands grasping. My knees gave way and I slipped, catching myself on the edge of the counter and gasping at the sudden pain. Jenks darted into the air, and Ivy reached for me, concerned.
Nick jumped to his feet. His face was tight and angry, but that was nothing next to my outrage, and I grunted when Ivy pulled me upright and I pushed her away.
"Rache, wait!" Jenks exclaimed, silver sparkles falling from him. "He's here so Jax can make peace with Matalina. He summoned you back. We couldn't find Keasley, and Trent won't let anything get through to Ceri!"
"Bull!" I pointed at Nick, standing sullenly beside the archway to the hall with his too-long hair and faded jeans. "He summoned me, then left me to fight my way out alone!"
Ivy's eyes flashed a full, dangerous black, and Jenks's wings hit an unusually high pitch.
"He did what?"
Nick backed into the hall, hands raised. A streak of pixy dust darting in turned into Jax. The renegade pixy had drawn the entire pixy clan with him, and I froze, stunned by the flitting silk and high-pitched voices as Matalina hovered over it all like a distressed angel.
"I didn't have a choice," Nick was saying over their noise. "Rachel, I owed them, thanks to you running off with the focus. I told you how to get out. And I flew back here to get you home! Will you listen to me? I'm trying to help!"
"Trying to help?" Ivy strode across the kitchen, pixies darting out of her way in swirls of color. Nick made a dash for the sanctuary, but she was faster. Like a cat after a bat, she snagged him, her hand gripping him under his throat as she threw him across the kitchen to slam into my mom's old fridge. He started to slip down, and she had him again, lifting him up and holding him there while he tried to make his lungs work. Atop the fridge, the Brimstone cookie jar wobbled and would have fallen off if not for the pixies working as a team to balance it.
"You summoned Rachel to San Francisco?" she said, showing her sharp canines. "She was driving. You could have killed us all!"
Jenks hovered beside his face, his son between his sword and the man's eye. "You were trying to help? Help yourself, maybe!"
God, I have good friends. Hurting, I staggered around the counter to the big farm table shoved against the interior wall, all but falling into my hard-backed chair and nearly knocking an express mail box onto the floor. It was from my mom, her scrawl unmistakable. I was too tired to guess what she'd sent me this time, and I gingerly felt the backs of my knees.
Nick's face was going red from a lack of circulation, and the notches in his ears gained in the rat fights stood out like bright flags. "Ivy, let him go before he files a lawsuit," I said casually. That she was slowly choking the life from him was only mildly worrisome. I'd seen her vamp out before, and this was nothing, even if she had missed slaking her hunger this weekend. If she started looking sexy and dropping innuendos, I'd be worried. This was simply anger, and she likely wouldn't tear his throat out for that.
"Why? He can't go to the I.S." Ivy leaned her face next to his, tilting her head and inhaling a line along his neck. A tingling rose through me, and Nick closed his eyes, shuddering. "He's taken himself off the grid," she whispered. "Made himself into a cookie by the side of the road. He can't complain or be jailed for his own crimes. And he wouldn't want that," she crooned. "Would you, little Nicky? Being a blood toy would be better than jail."
Okay, maybe I was wrong. Concerned, I levered myself to a stand. "Ivy—"
"Let her kill him," Jenks was saying over the sound of his kids. "We've got the graveyard right out back. Humans are like Jell-O. There's always room for one more."
"I didn't have to come here," Nick gasped, and Ivy tightened her grip until he gagged. "The coven didn't give me a choice! They yanked me across state lines and threatened to give me to the FIB. I had to tell them something. They were going to put me away!"
"Better me than you, huh?" I leaned heavily on the table, tired.
"I knew you'd escape," Nick said, spittle at the corners of his mouth. "You've got a foolproof get-out-of-jail-free card. Rachel, you took a demon's name? Why?"
My breath caught at the accusation in his rasping voice, and my anger dulled to shame. I had a demon's name. He'd used it twice to summon me. "Let him go."
Jenks spun in the air to me. "Rache..."
"Let him go!" I exclaimed, and Ivy took her fingers from around Nick's throat. The man fell into a tangle against the fridge, hand over his neck and coughing. Head down, he mumbled to Jax, hovering by his face, his words indistinct. The imprint of Ivy's fingers showed red and clear. Ivy turned away, shaking as she worked to bring herself down. Great. This was exactly what I needed. A jacked-up, hungry vampire and a traitorous ex-boyfriend in the same room.
Jenks wasn't happy, and with an earsplitting whistle, he chased his family out—all but a defiant Jax and a heartbroke
n Matalina, now perched on the fridge. Her face was riven with tears. Jax s homecoming had turned ugly.
Moving with that vampiric smoothness that gave me the willies, Ivy yanked my charm cupboard open and plucked an invoked amulet from my cache. Her eyes were still dangerously black as she strode across the kitchen and extended it. My shoulders eased as the smooth disk of redwood met my fingers. It was one of my own, and the relief from the pain was a blessing.
I'd been an earth witch long before I started dabbling in ley-line magic, and though the amulet didn't completely block the pain, it helped. Dropping the cord around my neck, I snugged the disk under the orange jumpsuit where it could touch my skin. A puff of nasty air came up and I winced. Jenks wasn't kidding. I needed a shower. "Thanks," I said, and Ivy nodded, still trying to gain control over her instincts. Me being stinky probably helped.
"I had to give them something," Nick said loudly as he pulled himself off the floor, his long pianist's—no, thief's—hands on his throat and his voice rough. "I'm sorry for summoning you to San Francisco, and I left so they wouldn't force me to do it again. I risked airport security to get here in time to summon you home, if that means anything to you."
"Yeah? You kept their money, I bet," I said bitingly, and his eyes narrowed.
"I have to eat." Shame, perhaps, made his voice harsh, but I doubted it. "Besides, I didn't think it would be you who showed up that first time. I thought it would be Al and that he would tear them and me apart. End everything."
His words hit me hard, and I looked away, sinking back down into my chair.
"You took Al's name? Rachel, why?" he asked, his voice holding an unexpected hurt. "I thought you were smarter than that. I thought you were the good one."
I couldn't look up, unable to speak. I was the good one. Wasn't I?
"Get him out of here," Jenks said loudly. "Both of them."
Jax's wings clattered, and Matalina protested, but a pop of displaced air in the hallway struck me like a slap. Al? I thought with a pulse of fear-based adrenaline as I looked. But it wasn't Al. It was Pierce and Bis. Duh. The sun was up.