by Ким Харрисон
Again my throat closed, and I set my drink down. "Nice pool table," I said miserably.
"I'm glad you like it." At my shoulder Ivy blinked fast but didn't look at me. "It's your birthday present from Jenks and me."
Jenks darted up with a clatter of wings. "Happy birthday, Rachel," he said with a forced brightness. "I was going to give you some color-changing nail polish, but Ivy thought you'd like this better."
Unshed tears made my vision swim, but I wasn't going to cry, damn it. I stretched out my hand and ran my fingers over the rough felt. It had stitches, just like me. "Thanks," I said.
"Damn it, Ivy!" Jenks said as he darted erratically from me to her. "I told you it was a bad idea. Look, she's crying."
I sniffed loudly, glancing up to see that only Keasley had noticed. "No," I said, my voice a shade too tight. "I love it. Thank you."
Ivy took a drink, maintaining a silent, companionable misery. I didn't need to say a word. I couldn't. Every time I had tried to comfort her the last two weeks, she'd fled. I'd learned it was better just to meet her eyes and look away with my mouth shut.
The pixy landed on her shoulder in silent support, and I saw her tension ease.
The pool table might be mine in name, but I think it meant more to Ivy. It was the only thing besides Kisten's ashes that she had taken. And the fact that she had given it to me was an affirmation that she understood that he'd been important to both of us, that my pain was as important as hers. God, I miss him.
The ice in my drink shifted to smack my nose when I took a sip. I wasn't going to cry. Not again. Edden wanted me to come in and talk to Ford about my memory, "for your own piece of mind, not the case," he had said. But I wasn't going to. I might have had my memory loss forced upon me, but now that it was gone, it could stay gone. It would only cause more pain. The FIB were bucking the system and trying to find out who had killed Kisten by way of who had made the deal between Piscary and Al to get him out, but that was a dead end.
The ringing of the doorbell cut through my mournful musings, and I started. "I'll get it," I said, pushing from the pool table and heading for the door. I had to do something, or I was going to make myself cry.
"It's probably Ceri," Jenks said from my shoulder. "You'd better hurry. Cake and rain don't go together very well."
I couldn't help my smile, but it froze and broke to nothing when I yanked open the door and found Quen standing there, his Beemer running at the curb. Anger rose at the reminder of the murdered Weres, I knew too many people in the morgue. I didn't want to live my life like that. Trent was a slimy, murdering bastard. Quen should be ashamed to work for him.
"Hi, Quen," I said, putting an arm up to block his entrance. "Who invited you?"
Quen took a step back, clearly shocked at seeing me. His gaze went behind me to the party, then returned. He cleared his throat, tapping the legal-size envelope he had against his hand. The rain seemed to glisten on his shoulders, but he was completely unaffected by it. "I didn't know you were having a get-together. If I can talk to Jenks a moment, I'll go," he said. His gaze lingered on my head, and when he smiled, I snatched Ceri's hat off.
"What, not going to hang around for cake?" I snapped, snatching at the envelope. I'd take his money. Then buy a lawyer to put him in jail with Trent, currently out on bail.
Quen jerked the envelope out of my reach, his face creasing in bother. "This isn't yours."
Pixy kids were starting to gather around the doorframe, and Jenks made an ear-piercing chirp. "Hi, Quen, is that mine?" he said as his kids scattered, laughing.
The elf nodded, and I cocked my hip, not believing this. "You're going to stiff me again?" I exclaimed.
"Mr. Kalamack isn't paying you for arresting him," Quen said stiffly.
"I kept him alive, didn't I?"
At that, Quen lost his ire, chuckling as he touched his chin and rocked back on his heels. "You have a lot of nerve, Morgan."
"It's what keeps me alive," I said sourly, starting when I found Rex at the foot of the belfry stairway, staring at me. God! Creepy little cat.
"Do tell." He hesitated, looking past me before he brought his attention back. "Jenks, I've got your paperwork." He went to hand the envelope to him, then hesitated again. I could see why. The envelope was three times Jenks's weight if it was an ounce.
"Just give it to Rache," Jenks said, landing on my shoulder, and I smugly held out my hand for it. "Ivy's got a safe we can put it into."
Quen sourly handed it over, and, curious, I opened it up. It wasn't money. It was a deed. It had our address on it. And Jenks's name.
"You bought the church?" I stammered, and the pixy darted off my shoulder, literally glowing. "Jenks, you bought the church?"
Jenks grinned, the dust slipping from him a clear silver. "Yup," he said proudly. "After Piscary tried to evict us, I couldn't risk you two bankers losing it in a poker game or something."
I stared at the paper. Jenks owned the church? "Where did you get the money?"
In a flash of vampire incense, Ivy was beside me. She pulled the paper from my slack fingers, eyes wide.
Quen shifted his weight, his shoes gently scuffing. "Good evening, Jenks," he said, his voice carrying a new respect. "Working with you was enlightening."
"Whoa, wait up," I demanded. "Where did you get the money for this?"
Jenks grinned. "Rent is due on the first, Rache. Not the second, or the third, or the first Friday of the month. And I expect you to pay to get it resanctified."
Quen slipped down the steps with hardly a sound. Ceri was coming up the walk, and the two passed with wary, cautious words. She had a covered plate in her hands; the cake, presumably. She glanced back once as she rose up the stairs, and I moved so she could come in. Ivy, though, was too struck to move.
"You outbid me?" Ivy shouted, and Ceri slipped between us and into the sanctuary, Rex twining around her feet. "That was you I was bidding against? I thought it was my mother!"
The click of Quen's car door opening was lost in the hush of rain, and Jenks still hadn't answered me. Quen glanced at me across the top of his car before he got in and drove away. "Damn it, pixy!" I shouted. "You'd better start talking! Where did you get the money?"
"I… uh, pulled a job with Quen," he said hesitantly.
The masculine murmur of Keasley and David rose, and I shut the door against the damp night. Jenks had said "job," not "run." There was a difference. "What kind of job?" I asked warily.
If a pixy could hover guiltily, Jenks was. "Nothing much," he said, darting past Ivy and me into the sanctuary. "Nothing that wouldn't have happened anyway."
My eyes narrowing, I followed him back to the party, setting Ceri's hat on the piano in passing. Ivy was right behind me. "What did you do, Jenks?"
"Nothing that wouldn't have happened on its own," he whined, shedding green sparkles onto the pool table. "I like where I live," he said, landing behind the side pocket in his best Peter Pan pose. "You two women are too flaky to put my family in your hands. Just ask anyone here. They'd agree with me!"
Ivy huffed and turned her back on him, muttering under her breath, but I could tell she was relieved her new landlord wasn't her mom.
"What did you do, Jenks?" I demanded.
Ivy's eyes narrowed in a sudden thought. Faster than I would have believed possible, she snatched up a pool cue and slammed it down inches from Jenks. The pixy shot up into the air, almost hitting the ceiling. "You little bug!" she exclaimed, and Ceri grabbed Keasley and the cake and headed toward the kitchen. "The paper says Trent's been released."
"What!" Appalled, I gazed at Jenks up near the ceiling. Keasley jerked to a brief halt in the hallway, then continued on. David had dropped his head into his hands, but I think he was trying not to laugh.
"The fingerprint they lifted from Brett and the paperwork was lost," Ivy said, smacking a beam with the cue to make Jenks dart to the next one over. "They dropped charges. You stupid pixy! He murdered Brett. She had him, and you helped Quen him
get off?"
"Wha-a-a-at," he griped, moving to my shoulder for protection. "I had to do something to save your pretty little ass, Rache. Trent was thi-i-i-i-is close to taking you out." His voice went high in exaggeration. "Arresting him at his own wedding was stupid, and you know it!"
My anger evaporated as I remembered Trent's expression when the cuffs ratcheted shut. God, that had felt good. "Okay, I'll give you that," I said, trying to see him on my shoulder. "But it was fun. Did you see the look on Ellasbeth's face?"
Jenks laughed, doubling up. "You should have seen her dad's," he said. "Oooooh, doggies, that man was more upset than a pixy papa with eight sets of girls."
Ivy set the pool cue on the table and relaxed. "I don't remember it," she said softly.
Her lack of memory was disturbing, and trying to ignore that I was missing chunks of my week, too, I looked up as Ceri and Keasley came back in, the cake almost on fire from all the candles they'd stuck into it.
I couldn't very well stay mad when they started singing "Happy Birthday," and I felt the tears prick again that I had people in my life who cared enough to go through the misery of trying to pretend everything was normal when it wasn't. Ceri settled the cake on the coffee table, and I hesitated only briefly at my wish. It had been the same every year since my father had died. My eyes closed against the smoke as I blew the candles out. They smarted, and I wiped them with no one saying anything as they clapped, teasing to find out what the wish was.
Taking up the big knife, I started slicing the cake, layering perfectly triangular pieces on paper plates decorated with spring flowers. The chatter became overly loud and forced, and with Jenks's kids everywhere it was a madhouse. Ivy wouldn't look at me as she took her plate, and seeing as she was the last, I settled myself across from her.
David followed Ceri and the cat to the piano, where she started playing some complicated tune that was probably older than the Constitution. Keasley was trying to keep the pixies occupied and out of the frosting, entertaining them with the way his wrinkles disappeared when he puffed his cheeks out. And I was sitting with a plate of cake on my lap, absolutely miserable and having no cause for it. Or not really.
The awful feeling of loss I had felt in the FIB conference room rose from nowhere, pulled into existence by the reminder of Kisten's death. I'd thought Ivy and Jenks were dead. I'd thought everyone I cared about had been severed from me. And that I had given up and accepted the damage of a demon curse when I thought I'd nothing left to lose had opened my eyes really fast. Either I was an emotional wimp and had to learn to handle the potential loss of everyone I loved without caving or—and this was the one that scared me the most—I had to come to grips and accept that my black-and-white outlook on demon curses wasn't so black and white anymore.
I had a sick feeling that it was the latter. I was going bad. The lure of demon magic and power was too much to best. But damn it, when she's fighting demons and nasty elves with the strength of the world's economics on their side, a girl has to get a little dirty.
I looked at my chocolate cake and forced my jaw to unclench. I wasn't going to agonize over the smut on my soul. I couldn't and still live with myself. Ceri was coated with it, and she was a good person. Hell, the woman had almost cried over forgetting my birthday cake. I was going to have to handle demon magic the same way I did earth and ley line magic. If the stuff that went into the spell or curse didn't hurt anyone, and the working of the spell/curse didn't hurt anyone, and the result of the spell/curse didn't harm anyone but me, then I was going to twist the stupid curse and call myself a good person. I didn't give a damn what anyone else thought. Jenks would tell me if I was straying, wouldn't he?
Fork in hand, I cut a bite, then put it back on the plate untasted. I met Ivy's miserable expression, seeing the tears in her eyes. Kisten was dead. To sit here and eat my cake seemed so hypocritical. And trite. But I wanted something normal. I needed something to tell myself that I was going to live past this, that I had good friends—and since I didn't drown my sorrows in beer, I'd do it in chocolate.
"You going to eat that, or cry over it?" Jenks said, flitting in from the piano.
"Shut up, Jenks," I said tiredly, and he smirked, sending a glitter of sparkles to puddle on the table before the breeze from the upper transom window blew them into infinity.
"You shut up," he said, spooning up a wad of my frosting with a pair of chopsticks. "Eat your cake. We made it for your damned birthday."
Eyes warming from unshed tears, I jammed the fork into my mouth just so I wouldn't have to say anything else. The sweet chocolate tasted like ashes on my tongue, and I forced it down, reaching for another bite like it was a chore. Across from me Ivy was doing the same thing. It was my birthday cake, and we were going to eat it.
In the rafters pixies played, safe in their garden and church until the two worlds collided. Kisten's death would darken my coming months until I found a new pattern to my life, but there were good things to balance against the heartache. David seemed to be handling the curse—he seemed to like it, actually—and since he had a real pack, his boss would stop gunning for me. Al was tucked away in an ever-after prison, most likely. The Weres were off my case. Piscary was not only no longer my landlord but was dead. Really dead. Lee would step into the gambling and protection vacuum he'd left behind, and seeing as I had some part in freeing him, he probably would give up on his urge to knock me off. Having Lee back would pacify Trent, too, though it rankled me back to the Turn that he was out of jail. God! The man was like Teflon.
And Ivy? Ivy wasn't going anywhere. We would figure this out eventually, and no one would die trying. No longer tied to Piscary, she was her own person. Together with Jenks, we three could do anything.
Right?
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