The Blood of Ivy

by Jessica King

  He sat in the pew, staring at the glistening white coffin. Sitting down, he could only see the top of her nose and chin, but seeing her surrounded by pink and white flowers, it almost looked like she died in a garden. It didn’t make him feel better or worse. It seemed strange for a girl who wanted to live in the world’s biggest cities as an adult.

  His father approached the microphone. “Thank you all for coming,” he said. He had tears coming from his eyes, his skin was sparkling with them, but his voice sounded normal. Cameron was jealous of that. It was the other reason he didn’t want to speak about his sister, the real reason: if he started crying, his voice would crack and break and get too loud or too soft, and it would end up being about him and people trying to comfort him, and he didn’t want that type of center-of-attention focus from everyone. He almost wanted people to forget he was there.

  “Trinity was a joy taken from us too soon,” he said. “And I could talk to you about how this is a celebration of life and about her promising grades and her service achievements and her extracurriculars. But the truth is, I just miss my daughter. Maybe it’s selfish of me not to think about all the great things she’d add to the world, to other people. But all I really want is my little girl squaring off against me, her hands on her hips, trying to tell me that if I didn’t let her use me as a tester for her new nail polish and lip gloss, that she was going to call the police.”

  A ripple of muted laughter filtered through the crowd.

  “All I want is for Trinity to push me into a pool or be waiting around the corner with whipped cream in her hand, ready to “hand pie” me in the face, which I think was her way of dealing with being angry because it would only happen after I said no to her. But she knew I love whipped cream and thought it was hilarious as all get out, so we found a compromise for expressing our emotions.”

  “That’s where all my whipped cream went!” his mother said from next to him, a tissue still on her face. More laughter.

  “I think you all laugh at these things because you knew she wasn’t some regular sweet kid. She had a flame inside her. She pulled pranks and thought Shakespeare was funny and believed that magic might be real.” The room grew quiet. “Which proves not only was she funnier than me and smarter than me, but she had more faith than I’ve ever managed to have in the world.”

  Unsettling darkness covered his father’s eyes, and Cameron imagined the extra eyelid of a crocodile sliding down, shutting out the light. Cameron felt it in himself, too—the faith he’d lost in the world since Trinity died.

  The crowd murmured as his father descended the stairs, and their pastor friend walked up, clapping his father on the back as he went. Cameron turned around, pretending that he needed to crack his back. Instead, he scanned the crowd. Most of them were crying. Cameron’s eyes were wet, but he hadn’t wanted to cry in public, so instead, his tongue was bleeding from how hard he’d bitten on it. When he turned the other way, he saw Robbie, Broadway, and another kid he remembered from the old neighborhood, Joaquin. Their moms were sitting next to them, and Cameron realized his mother must have invited them.

  They looked ridiculous in suits; Broadway’s was far too big for him in the shoulders, and Robbie had on a yellow bowtie. They didn’t see him looking, and he turned back around, his spirits lifted a bit. He thought he wouldn’t have wanted them there, but seeing them now, all he wanted was for them to cheer him up.

  The pastor, Litchfield, went on for about fifteen minutes about death. He didn’t say much about Trinity, but maybe his job was just to make them feel better about the idea of death in a more general sense. Like this was a precursor to the rest of their funerals. “We have a place with our Lord!” Litchfield said. He was clearly the type who yelled for two hours during a church service, when most people just wanted a thirty-minute, low-decibel lesson, and considering his time constraint now, he seemed extra loud like he needed additional volume to compensate for the time constraint. Trinity’s corpse could probably hear him.

  “In John 14, Jesus tells us so!” He carried a Bible in one hand as he stalked across the stage of the church. He didn’t need a microphone; everyone could hear him just as well without him standing behind the podium. “He says, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled’ friends! He says that ‘My Father’s house has many rooms! If that were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?’” He shook his head. “Brothers and sisters, do you understand what he is saying here? Jesus is telling us that there is already a room set out for us in the Kingdom. It’s already been done. So, for our Trinity, taken tragically young,” he said, gesturing to the sky instead of to the coffin, “she’s already got her room! She’s there!” He pointed out to the crowd. “And for those of you who won’t be dying of anything but your own stubbornness…” A laugh across the room, “…God’s got a room waiting for you, too, if you believe in him like our sweet Trinity.”

  Cameron looked at the high ceiling of the sanctuary but quickly looked away. It felt strange to think of Trinity as some sort of half-translucent version of herself floating around in the clouds or something like that. He wasn’t sure how else he was supposed to think of spirits and people after they died, but the idea of it was entirely unsettling. If he was see-through one day, would all the other ghosts be able to see his internal organs? He blinked the distraction away.

  He’d barely shaken the thought by the time Pastor Litchfield was done and trotting down the stairs, sweat collecting on his brow and upper lip.

  His mother had taken up a steady cry, and as they broke for refreshments, a series of his mother’s friends came up to comfort her.

  Cameron found Robbie, Joaquin, and Broadway, who gave him a sort of thump on the chest before they headed outside for the lemonade and cookies.

  A sour note hit his ears, and he looked up. About fifteen people were in the parking lot with words like “witch” and “evil” on signs. They were yelling at Trinity not to come back, and Cameron stopped. His mother and her friends ran into him, a bottleneck at the door of the church, but they pushed around him. He heard his mother dissolve into another fit of tears, the sound of her heartbreak escaping through her lips. The stuttering breaths turned into a wail that shook his bones and turned his vision red.

  “We’ve got you,” Robbie said in his ear, and Cameron nodded.

  In his suit and tie, he took off toward the Kingsmen.

  His mother screamed behind him, but the only noise he needed to hear was the three sets of footsteps right on his heels. Cameron launched himself at the closest Kingsmen, tackling him to the pitch. It was still warm from the sunlight, and Cameron pressed the man’s face into the smell of baked tar and dragged until the man grunted beneath him. With his other hand, he punched into the man’s nose, which burst with blood. He looked up to see a few Kingsmen running, Robbie, Broadway, and Joaquin on three others, with several Kingsmen either trying to break up the fight or find an opportunity to join in. Cameron yelled and swung at a Kingsmen, who dropped the sign he’d been clenching onto with bulging knuckles. Cameron picked up the sign and tore off the paper, using the wood stick to hit the man in the ribs.

  Broadway had knocked one man out, who laid on the ground motionless for a few seconds before even managing to stir; he had made his way onto the next. The two swung at one another until Broadway managed to get a good hit to the ribs, and despite the burning in his own torso, Cameron was suddenly happy Broadway had gotten some good practice in yesterday. A flurry of words that were certainly not appropriate for church flew from both sides, and the next person he pinned, Cameron spit in his face, cursing him.

  Some of the men among the funeral attendees managed to break it up, yelling at the Kingsmen to load up their car and leave, and then at Cameron and boys for fighting at a funeral, though no one was too hard on them, and people kept trying to give them more lemonade.

  His mother didn’t say a word, which meant she was still deciding how she felt about the whole matter, though Cameron figu
red that was fair, and he endured the silent car ride home, sipping too-sweet lemonade.

  By the time they got home, she’d decided. She was angry. Both at him for letting the disturbance get worse, and for fighting in general. “Don’t think I didn’t see who you were fighting with, Cameron,” she said.

  “Mom, her killers were there,” he said. She cast him a wary glance. “Pretty much. They thought she should be dead. You don’t want me to throw a punch at someone who is happy that Trinity is gone?”

  His mother wiped away a tear, but her eyes were as angry as ever.

  “That’s not what she’s talking about, and you know it,” his father said, coming into the kitchen. His necktie was loose around his shoulders like a black snake taking a nap. He sat in one of the kitchen table chairs. “Why are you hanging out with those boys?”

  Cameron rolled his eyes. “They’re my friends.”

  “You have friends at your new school.” His father’s shoes flopped beneath the kitchen table as he kicked them off, the black of his socks somehow darker than the black of his pants.

  “All they want to do is talk about Trinity,” Cameron said. “I don’t want to talk to them.” It had become exhausting, everyone trying to be so understanding.

  “They’re trying to be nice,” his mother said. “It’s their way of telling you they are there for you.”

  Cameron shook his head. “I don’t care if they’re trying to be nice. They’re making it worse.”

  His mother’s eyes softened, and he was at what his mother might call a “breakthrough point,” which just meant that an emotional conversation was on the horizon where she would be more than happy to help him talk through any issues. He didn’t want that. Beyond being soppy and frustrating, he always felt weirdly exposed after them. Trinity had loved breakthroughs. They usually ended up in her and Mom crying, then going to get milkshakes together or something like that.

  Cameron walked away, and he heard his mother say, “David, let him.”

  He slipped into his room and laid on the bed, shedding his layers like a second skin. They smelled like the church and like half-decayed flowers. He struggled against buttons and zippers, unwilling to get up until he finally had to hunt through his room for a pair of sweatpants. He came up empty. His mother must have done his laundry, and all his clothes were probably folded in their bedroom.

  He slipped through the hallway and found the basket he expected next to his mom’s side of the bed. He tugged on a pair of pants and left the room before he saw a brightly colored canister in a box at the end of their bed. It was a bit bigger than the pepper spray on girls’ keychains. He picked it up and rolled it around in his hand before nearly dropping it.

  The toxic symbol had been stuck on—a replica of the sticker his father had put on his laptop for fun. DB1307 Immediate Takedown Agent was written in black marker around the bottom edge.

  What did takedown mean? He squinted at it the writing beneath, his father’s handwriting minimally legible. Non-lethal Biotoxin followed by a list of chemical names that sounded vaguely familiar the way all chemicals sounded after a high school Chemistry class. He remembered the gun in Broadway’s pocket, and a thought that had been sliding around in his mind came to the forefront, still hidden in the shadows that Trinity’s death had caused.

  Could he pull the trigger on someone?

  He gripped the cool metal of the canister in his hand. He wasn’t sure he could pull the trigger of a gun, but maybe he could for a non-lethal biotoxin.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Saturday, April 1, 2017, 8:40 a.m. | Central European Standard Time

  Armed with the knowledge that Amara wasn’t the killer, Ivy returned to St. Peter’s Basilica. The haunting melody of a chant flowed from one of the chapels serving mass, and after finding the offices empty, Ivy and Vince waited outside the service.

  Two women in clothes that seemed too casual for all the fancily dressed Catholic grandmothers who were surely inside stepped out of the chapel. “That’s him, right?” one of the women asked, her blond hair pulled up into a bun. “They all look the same.”

  “That’s him,” the woman next to her said. “Simon or Simeon, I can’t remember.”

  “I’m starving, Sophia,” the blonde said.

  “Obviously, this is a little bit of a higher priority,” Sophia said. The blonde flashed her a look. “Sorry, I’m hungry too.”

  Ivy and Vince hung against a wall.

  “You’re sure, though?” the blond said. Her voice got softer as if they were aware of Vince and Ivy, who had thankfully worn plain clothes instead of their uniforms. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  “No,” Sophia said. “No, he helped a bunch of others. They’re trying to start an underground network of us, one by one. Apparently, he doesn’t want a big thing coming out about this.”

  The blonde laughed one quick, breathy laugh. “Maybe not the best publicity.” This made Sophia laugh, too, and she shook her head. The two continued whispering after that, but they’d dropped their voices so low Ivy couldn’t hear them anymore. She pulled out her phone and texted Vince.

  Father Simon has a meeting with those two? Could they be Kingsmen?

  He could. He would have already been inside, so he wouldn’t be on the security cam night of.

  He was on Ivy’s exact train of thought. The killer would already have been inside when the doors closed for the evening at the basilica. So, either someone stuck around, or it was a person there after hours and someone with enough power to ask all the staff to keep a space clear for the night.

  The underground network comment is what’s bothering me.

  At least it won’t be going public soon. It’ll give the police time to react.

  They hadn’t had the luxury of having time when the Kingsmen descended upon Los Angeles. Maybe there was still time to stifle the flame here.

  The mass ended, and attendees stuck around for a long time. Pictures and greeting the priests and one another took a good amount of time, especially since it was the last service of the day. Ivy made a mental note that she’d at least want to attend one service here. She didn’t often find herself in a church in her adult life, but her mother had been a dedicated attendee of the Catholic church near her childhood home, even after she had started to become involved with the L.A. coven and building The Protection of the Female Goddess.

  She hadn’t been able to reconcile the two pieces, not in a way that felt harmonious to her; she’d read about that internal struggle in her mother’s journals. But she’d been so connected to each that she’s simply taken ahold of both and felt like she’d been pulled into two. It must have been excruciating to live like that, Ivy thought, and she wondered how many Kingsmen felt that type of pull, how many witches across the world did. Surely most of them had come from other belief systems, too?

  She shook herself. The priests and deacons had disbanded. Father Simon stayed in the temple, sitting in the front pew. Ivy watched the two women walk back into the chapel and make quick work of the aisles leading down to Father Simon. He nodded to them, and there was a quick exchange of something on the pew, though Ivy couldn’t see what it was from her faraway angle. He stood and ushered the two women out a back door, placed at the front of the chapel. He pointed in different directions, and they nodded, thanking him.

  He closed the door behind them and caught Vince and Ivy’s eyes at the back of the chapel. He was looking a bit pink when he made his way to them. “Hello, Detectives.”

  Ivy nodded. “Amara was not the killer. We are certain about that, at least.”

  “Hmm,” Father Simon said.

  “Who were those two women to you?” Ivy asked, nodding to the door Sophia and the blonde woman had disappeared through.

  Father Simon looked back toward the front pew. “Just some women who wanted directions out,” he said. “They didn’t want to pass through the crowd.”

  “It looked like they were holding something,” Ivy said. But Father Simo
n’s head popped up, and he smiled, looking over their shoulders.

  “Excuse me, Detectives,” he said. “I see someone trying to flag me down.” He laughed nervously and exited the chapel into the lobby area.

  “Okay then,” Vince said. “He couldn’t answer?”

  Ivy looked toward the exit the women had gone through. “He didn’t want to lie in church.” She turned to Vince and raised her eyebrows, a bit shocked at her own words. “I think we need to ask him where he was when Tatiana was killed. Because that,” she pointed to the front of the church where he’d been sitting, “didn’t make him look too innocent.”

  “Whatever he gave them, it had to be small,” Vince said. He tapped a foot against the floor, growing restless. “She didn’t have anything in her hands, so it must have been tucked on her person somewhere. Do you think it was money?”

  Ivy shook her head. “If I had to guess, I’d think it was Kingsmen cards.”

  +++

  Saturday, April 1, 2017, 4:12 p.m.

  “Big time, Cammie,” Robbie said, handing him a beer. Cameron much preferred this to the Fireball, and Robbie squeezed a piece of lime in through the bottleneck. It dropped into the beer and bubbled with a satisfying fizz.

  “What’s big time?” Cameron asked.

  “You didn’t see the construction half a mile down?” he asked.

  Cameron had seen it driving by. Robbie nodded to the house next to his, and he followed him inside. It was some kid named Derek’s house, not much older than Cameron and Robbie. But it was his alone, and at least ten Underworld Brothers were laughing, sunk into the beaten leather couch. He and Robbie greeted them. Cameron could hear the noise of female laughter out the opposite end of the house, the screen door showing silhouettes.

  “We got new territory, or the Angels got new territory. Probably gonna have to fight for it,” Robbie said. His T-shirt today was nearly down to his knees, and Cameron realized it must be his dad’s, who was a ridiculously tall man to begin with, and he liked to wear oversized T-shirts on top of that. Cameron wondered if Robbie had intentionally adopted his father’s style, or if it had been an accident, the way he and his father both yawned with their heads tilted back.