The Poison of Ivy

by Jessica King

  Ivy scribbled down the details as Chloe talked. The Cline residence was dark in the daytime, but at night, it was downright spooky. The intricate furniture cast strange shadows on the walls, and the night lights plugged into the walls around the house had been made to look like tiny flickering fires.

  “Did you hear anything?” Ivy asked.

  “Everything sounded normal, other than the dogs barking,” Chloe said. She wrapped her robe tighter around her body.

  “But you didn’t hear the door?” Vince tried to open said door as quietly as possible. It squeaked on its hinges.

  “I—I thought I did, but it was maybe just a creak in the house? It’s an old house, especially for California,” Chloe said as a means of explanation. “It’d be nearly impossible for someone to move through it without causing it to creak, and I didn’t hear footsteps, especially if they were moving fast. But I saw something—there was definitely a shadow or something. And with the dog at the doors, I feel like they might have sensed something …” She cut herself off, realizing she was rambling.

  “Was there anything outside you can think of that might have spooked the dogs?” Ivy asked.

  Chloe pondered this a moment. “Not that I can think of. They usually don’t even bark much at joggers or anything. They’re friendly dogs.”

  Said dogs had heard them talking and were now begging for attention from everyone in the room. The floors did creak beneath them as they shifted the balance of weight.

  “These are some big boys!” Vince said, kneeling down to pet between their ears.

  Chloe smiled. “But they’re pretty old,” she said. Ivy noticed the gray and white around their muzzles. “I still think they’d be pretty protective if they needed to be, but they don’t quite have that same level of fire in them.” Chloe slid her hand beneath the chin of the other dog, whose tongue rolled out with its heavy pants. “But you’re a good boy, aren’t you?”

  The dog shuffled forward, and Chloe nodded. “I’m sorry if this was a waste of time again,” she said. Her eyes still shifted around the room.

  “Not a waste,” Ivy said. Of course, this would mean more paperwork, and really, she and Vince were supposed to be off the clock ten minutes ago, but she would never tell anyone that. “And if you feel like you need to call again, then call again.”

  Chloe thanked them, and the dogs nearly blocked them from leaving until Senator Cline called them back to his side. They complied, though Ivy could see what Chloe meant: the dogs seemed to waddle more than barrel toward their owner.

  +++

  Wednesday, March 15, 2017, 5:47 a.m.

  Calla saw her chance. The hit on Hattie Carver’s reincarnation, Chloe Cline, had been up for seventy-nine hours. She knew the killer assigned to Hattie might not be an activating Kingsmen, but if it was, they would likely be striking tonight before their four days was up in broad daylight of the afternoon. If the police were going to be called for murder from a recently activated Kingsmen, it was going to be tonight. If the killer was already activated, it would be nearly impossible to say.

  But if they were new, whoever was meant to kill her took their sweet time about it. It was nearly daylight by the time Ivy and her partner had shown up to the Senator’s mansion, and considering the lack of emergency vehicles, the woman had probably not been attacked. Ivy Hart and her partner left the home, waving to whoever was inside.

  Calla left her car in a street spot and limped down the street. “Officer!” she said. Ivy turned around.

  That old anger returned to Calla, and she did her best to let herself fall into it. She didn’t want to kill Ivy still, but knowing that Ivy controlled life and death in ways she couldn’t made her boil with that original rage she felt at the Kingsmen gathering when she first decided to be the best. If she killed the witch, she’d have as many lives as she wanted. She could simply restore herself like a videogame character losing a life and blinking back onto the screen at a checkpoint. If someone came after Calla, her system would turn off entirely. She couldn’t regenerate, couldn’t use elixir to bring herself back to perfect health. Nothing. She’d worked her entire life to be the best. Everyone told her that if she kept being the best out there, that it would allow her to control her life, to do whatever she wanted. But none of it mattered. She was a slave to killing witches. If she didn’t succeed, she’d be killed. And there’d be no reincarnation for her.

  She let herself feel the envy of not controlling her destiny the way this reincarnation of Mary Caste could. And the piece of her mind that didn’t want to kill Ivy told her she wasn’t really killing the witch. She was simply taking away one of her many lives. She could do this. She could do it without guilt.

  Ivy jogged up to her. “Are you okay?” She pointed down to Calla’s ankle.

  “I—I was on a date,” Calla said, making her voice stutter. “A-and then he attacked me for b-being a witch, and I—” She looked down at the cracked cement and hoped she looked like she was crying. “I’m one of Cassiopeia’s friends. I think you know her?”

  This was a gamble. She knew Ivy had responded to the fire, and she knew that Cassiopeia was the contact point for the L.A. coven. But if she called Cassiopeia, this might all be over. She hopped lightly, losing her balance and refusing to put down her “injured” ankle.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lily,” Calla said. “I’m Lily.”

  “Do you want me to take you to the new coven house? Do you know where it is?”

  Calla thought for a second. Either Ivy didn’t know where the coven had moved after the fire, which she thought was unlikely, or Ivy was testing her. Calla shook her head quickly. She felt real tears building up as she tried to put on her best performance and let them fall. Good. Hopefully, this would gain her enough sympathy …

  “I don’t want to lead him there in case he’s following me,” she said. She also cast a suspicious glance at Vince for good measure, as if she was worried he couldn’t be trusted.

  “I’m off-duty technically,” Ivy said. She looked back at Vince. “How about I take her to my place for a few hours, and then I’ll take her to the coven.”

  “Up to you,” Vince said. Ivy nodded at Calla, who had managed to maintain a steady flow of tears.

  “Let’s get back to the station, which’ll scare anyone off who is following you. Then you can come with me. I’m sort of hiding out, too.”

  Calla nodded. “That would be great.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Wednesday, March 15, 2017, 6:12 a.m.

  Ivy shoved the last piece of her door-to-wall barricade puzzle into place. She waved her hand, trying to cool her sweating face. She’d discarded her duty belt and shirt long enough ago, and the tank top she wore beneath was damp from the sudden exertion. She examined her work. “To be frank, Lily, I’m not sure hanging out with me is the safest option out there,” she said. “I’m supposedly a reincarnation of Mary Caste, so I’ve got some dangerous people after me, too.”

  Lily flashed a smile at her. “Trust me, being with a trained officer makes me feel much better than being alone.”

  Ivy chuckled. “Guess that makes sense.”

  “Do you have to do a lot of weapons training to become an officer?”

  Ivy nodded. She was used to these kinds of questions. They let her fall into the comfortable rhythms of conversation, even with a complete stranger. “There’s quite a bit. I’d say I’m a pretty good shot. Knife training, but that’s more defense against being stabbed. Hand to hand combat, general self-defense with that, too. For the most part, the goal of an officer when they think they might get attacked is to make room between them and the person, right? Try to make that distance so I can draw my gun.”

  “How much distance?” Lily asked. Her voice echoed from the bathroom.

  “They used to say twenty-one feet, but you actually need more.” Ivy searched through one of her duffel bags for her phone charger. “Someone can run at you with a knife way quicker than you can draw a
gun, which is actually really strange, but—”

  Ivy heard a click near her head. She looked up into the barrel of a gun. She blinked once. How could she have fallen for that? Lily backed one step away, pointing the camera of her phone toward Ivy. She set the phone on the television stand, an extension of the case, keeping it faced upward toward her.

  “You’re a Kingsmen,” Ivy said.

  “You seem surprised.”

  “Until now, I haven’t had to deal with any female Kingsmen.”

  “Caught you off your guard?” Lily asked.

  Ivy didn’t want to say so out loud, but it had. She had much more easily believed Lily’s story than she had Mason’s at first. And with her barrier, she’d cut the accessible space of the room in half. Adrenaline made her hands twitch, and Lily took a few steps toward Ivy, both her hands locked around the handle of the gun. Ivy put up her hands.

  “So, what happens now, Lily?” Ivy asked. “Do you recite the names of Mary Caste’s reincarnations?”

  “Yes, as it is my job,” she said. She adjusted the gun so that it pointed to Ivy’s heart. Ivy noticed the flicker in her eyes.

  “You don’t want to shoot me,” Ivy said.

  Lily’s eyes hardened. “I would not test me, witch.”

  “So, you’ve killed before?” Lily said nothing, but Ivy started to run through recent cases in her mind. The figure of a woman flashed in her recent memory. The long black hair. “Do you read tarot cards?”

  Lily gripped the gun tighter. “No more questions.”

  “Okay,” Ivy said. “No more questions.” She nodded, holding her palms up higher and aligning them with the height of the gun.

  Ivy lunged, ducking out of the centerline of the gun, wrapping her hands over the gun. She pushed down and back, bringing the barrel up so that it began to face Lily instead of herself. Ivy heard one of Lily’s wrists pop, and the woman dropped her hold on the gun, and Ivy took a strong step back, pointing the gun at Lily.

  “I am not Mary Caste,” Ivy said. “Put up your hands.”

  Lily growled and yanked a short knife free from her back pocket and lunged for Ivy. Ivy fired.

  Lily dropped to her knees, then to the dirty carpet, and Ivy took the knife from her slackened fingers. Ivy threw the gun away from the two of them and dropped to her knees next to Lily, pulling a shirt from her duffel bag.

  “Keep breathing, Lily,” she said. “Stay with me.” She pressed the T-shirt to Lily’s abdomen with one hand and dialed 9-1-1 with the other.

  9-1-1, what’s your emergency?

  Ivy relayed the motel’s address and her room number. “Lily, I have to undo the barricade so they can help us,” Ivy said. She grabbed the young woman’s hand and pressed it into the T-shirt. Her hands trembled as Lily tried to push the reddening T-shirt against the bullet wound.

  Ivy moved the furniture away from the door and ran back to Lily. She took over, holding the T-shirt against her stomach. Lily’s lids fluttered beneath thick lashes, and Ivy’s fingers began to feel warmth collecting in the fabric: too much blood leaking from the girl. She’d gone pale too quickly, and Ivy bit down hard on her tongue.

  “C’mon, Lily,” she said. “You can do this.”

  The girl’s breaths became staggering, and the tongue gasping for air began to grow too bright a red. She heard the sirens, heard the footsteps, heard her own yells at Lily to stay with her. But the girl was gone, a pile of Kingsmen cards a few feet away, they must have fallen out of her pocket when she drew the knife. Ivy stood from the girl, who was quickly surrounded by paramedics and walked into the bathroom. She dropped to her knees in front of the toilet and vomited up all of Vince’s late-night snacks.

  By the time they had cleared the body, Ivy had remembered the phone on the TV stand. She stopped the recording and sat on the ground. The motel manager eventually found her, and she asked for water. She felt too shaky to stand. So, she sipped lukewarm water from a plastic cup next to Lily’s bloodstain on the carpet until Joyce could drive her to the station. She’d acted in self-defense, and she had the video to prove it. But it didn’t do much to console her as she pulled her knees to her chest and stared at the drying blood.

  +++

  New message: 8:22 AM

  Freemason,

  Your excellent display as an exemplary Kingsman has caught our attention. A group of us from L.A. have remained in contact since the Kingsmen gathering. We would like to invite you to meet with us in person to discuss further strategies for witch elimination this afternoon. You will find the time and date below as an online calendar invite.

  Wednesday, March 15, 2017, 8:54 a.m.

  Mason had practically run to his old Professor’s office. Parking on campus was perhaps even worse than he remembered during his time in grad school, but he hadn’t minded the long, brisk walk. He was shaking with nervous energy. He had beaten Professor Wilkins to his office, which he had expected. The doctor had once said that he was “incurably a night owl,” and that in an 8 a.m. meeting, when several professors would take students for pre-class discussions, he was entirely useless to his students. “But at nine, I can be so-so.”

  It was 8:54. Mason paced, reading and rereading the message on his phone until Wilkins arrived at 9:13, about as prompt as he could expect.

  “Mason! Can I help you?” The professor unlocked his office door, motioning for Mason to go ahead of him. Mason strode into the office and dropped his bag beside the well-worn armchair across from the professor’s own swivel chair. It was a routine they’d performed a million times, and Mason hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.

  “I’m going to be meeting with actual Kingsmen today,” Mason said. “I just feel like I could use some advice on how to … act around them?”

  Wilkins’ eyebrows tugged closer to one another. “Hmm. Is it odd that they are meeting in person?”

  “I heard there was a convention a while back, but this is the first time I’ve heard about smaller meetings. Of course, this is my first week on the leaderboard.”

  “Because you are faking the deaths of witches.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm.”

  He was nervous. He should have reached out to the King by now. But he was scared. More scared than he anticipated. This meeting would be a good first step if he made it through. “But I’m worried if I’m not, I don’t know, if I don’t have enough—” Mason tried to think of the adjective he was trying for, but nothing came to mind.

  “Grr?” the professor substituted.

  “Exactly.”

  “Hmm,” the professor said. It was something he often did, which Mason had found frustrating at first. Like perhaps Wilkins did that as a means of filling the silence while he was waiting for a student to answer their own question—a tactic Mason had always hated—but he shortly found out that Wilkins actually made two particular “hmms.” One was when he was thinking—the one he’d repeated several times so far in their short conversation. The other was specific to when he was thinking about food.

  “I think it’s less about showing … aggression,” Wilkins said, “and more about showing confidence. Now, that could mean aggressive confidence, but,” he looked into his coffee, considering it, “these people don’t blink, and if they don’t agree with an opinion, they say what they think, not what people want to hear. But they will say it in a way that makes other people feel valued. Usually. That might depend on how they measure up physically, of course.” Professor Wilkins tapped the pads of his pointer fingers together. “And they’re not going to be the type to feel peer pressure. Do you know what I mean?”

  Mason nodded. “I should go for likability over showing strength?”

  “Don’t show any type of physical aggression until you know you have others on your side.”

  “I can do that.”

  +++

  Wednesday, March 16, 2017, 10:50 a.m.

  Edward Thorne missed his watch. He’d worn it every day for as long as he could remember. He hadn�
�t realized he had a very specific tan line on his wrist until he was under the greenish glow of the prison lights.

  He’d been placed in a dormitory of other men awaiting trial who were considered too dangerous for regular jails. He’d never considered himself dangerous before.

  “What are you in for?” Someone had vaguely told Edward that the man approaching him now was named Cherry. He was rather reddish all over, and all his tattoos were either created with maroon lines or were filled in with various shades of red.

  Edward didn’t think it was wise to say he was in for murder, but in the time it took him to try to think of something else that might have been believable, Cherry had announced that he was probably a pedophile.

  “I’m in for murder,” Edward said, which caught Cherry’s attention.

  His eyes narrowed, and he took several steps closer to him. Edward could feel the eyes of the other ten men in the dormitory.

  “Who’d ya kill?” Cherry asked. Up close, Edward could see that if Cherry hadn’t opted for a bald head covered in the red scales of a dragon, he’d probably have the orangish-blonde hair that grew in coarse, short-cut hairs from his chin.

  “I killed three women and two men,” Edward said, raising his own chin.

  “You know ‘em?”

  “No.”

  “All at once?”

  “No.”

  “We got a serial killer, boys!” Cherry said. He put his hand on Edward’s knee. “Now, I gotta say I have a hard time believing you killed five people when I got caught after taking out just one.” Cherry turned toward his crowd. “And it was an accident!” He looked up to the camera in the corner where the ceiling and two walls met. A giant black eye was watching their every move. “It was manslaughter, not murder!” He turned back to Edward and smiled like they were old friends. “So, who’d you kill?”

  Edward swallowed and scratched at his orange-beige uniform. How did he explain that he got caught up killing witches? But when a middle-aged man with a peppered beard rolled over, Edward was caught off-guard “I’m guessing you’re one of those King people?” he asked. “I watch the news. Unlike these imbeciles.” The man looked bookish behind his glasses.