American Demon

by Kim Harrison

  Jenks rose from the plate of food, his dust a scared blue. “The Tink-blasted hell I’m not.”

  But Ivy smiled, the pain showing only at the corners of her eyes. “Nina and I are doing fine at Piscary’s old digs,” she said, and I knew the truth of that. “Cormel has his own place, and it feels like home. Especially now that Nina’s redecorating.”

  “Rache,” Jenks pleaded, begging me to say something, but I shook my head, having known this was coming. Jenks and I had moved into Kisten’s big power yacht after the church had been declared unfit for habitation. Parking it at Piscary’s quay had helped ease the coming heartache, but moving into Piscary’s, even the upstairs apartments, had been out of the question. Not with Nina as twitchy as she was. Trying to move all of us back to the church was an even worse idea. We had too many frightened people knocking on our door. Besides, a witch living with two vampires in love wasn’t smart, even if I wasn’t a witch, but a demon.

  Jenks slowed his wings until their hum vanished when he saw me side with Ivy. “Son of a fairy-farting whore,” he muttered, adding a bitter, “Excuse me. David is here.”

  My shoulders slumped as he flew a blue-dusted path to the front door and worked the pulley system we’d put in place so he could open it.

  David’s warm greeting was muffled, and Ivy turned her back to the door, her eyes pinched with heartache. “This is harder than I thought it was going to be,” she whispered. “Even if David comes through, there’s no way the church will be livable before the snow flies. It’s airtight and the ductwork has been fixed so we’re not heating the outside, but the city won’t give an occupation permit without a kitchen. Is the boat warm enough for him?”

  I shook my head as I remembered how slow he’d been this morning, sitting on my steaming coffeemaker, trying to warm up. A sustained temperature below forty-three degrees would drop him into hibernation, and without having properly prepared for it, his life would be at risk. “He’s managing so far, but it’s going to get colder.”

  Ivy leaned closer. “He should move in with me and Nina.”

  “Yeah, but he won’t,” I said, and she nodded in understanding. “If it helps, I’m meeting Trent after this,” I added. “Ray and Lucy have a playdate with Ellasbeth.”

  “Sorry?” Ivy said with a closed-lipped smile, clearly not knowing how a structured lunch with Lucy’s admittedly prickly mother related to Jenks.

  “It’s Friday,” I said, relishing the thought that I’d made it through another week without pissing off any world power. “I’m going to spend the weekend with Trent. As usual. I’m hoping if I can get Jenks to come with me, he might move in with Jumoke and Izzy for the winter. Which will be both unusual and a miracle in pixy culture. He’ll be okay in Trent’s conservatory.”

  The sound of Jenks’s wings pushed our heads apart, and I felt myself flush. “Spend the winter with my kids?” Jenks said as David’s small silhouette eased into the church and shut the door. “Tink’s a Disney whore. Talk about a fifth wheel.”

  “I think it’s a good idea,” Ivy said, nodding her hello to David, now cautiously entering the sanctuary, his shoulders hunched in mild unease and looking like a young Van Helsing with his long, wavy black hair, casual jeans and shirt, and short cashmere scarf. Weres could enter holy ground as much as anyone else, but they clearly felt off. “They need all the help they can get to keep their newlings alive through the winter. Izzy had what, five?” Ivy added.

  Jenks’s frown vanished. “Five,” he said, hands on his hips. “They’re already thinking up names.”

  But they wouldn’t get them until spring and the new parents were sure they’d survive, and I hid a smile when he sat down cross-legged atop the eight ball. I would have said he looked cute, but he’d have given me a lobotomy with the garden sword strapped to his hip. My thoughts jerked back to my dream about turning Jenks into spiders, and I shoved the fear away, smile fading.

  David’s rugged, slightly stubbled face was beaming. “You have no idea how good it is to see you three together,” he said, and Ivy rolled her eyes to hide her pain that it was ending—because I had screwed up, and she had found love.

  “Hi, David.” Boots clunking, I crossed the room to give him a long, earnest hug, breathing in the scent of green and growing things that lingered about him.

  “There’s a pack run this Sunday. You’re invited,” David said as we parted.

  “Maybe this winter,” I said, and he nodded, accepting the new distance I’d put between us since his girlfriend had become pregnant. It wasn’t because he was now taken goods, but because I wouldn’t risk endangering him further than I already had. “How’s Serena?”

  David’s smile widened. “Ornery. She’s not allowed to shift anymore.”

  I nodded, imagining it. “You’re going to be a great dad,” I added, and Jenks hummed close, almost dripping attitude as he spilled a gold wash of pixy dust.

  “All right, Mr. Peabody,” Jenks said, surprising me with the nickname Kisten had given David. “You going to piss in the pot or play with yourself? You’ve had my claim for six weeks.”

  “Jenks!” I exclaimed, but then froze when David winced.

  “I tried,” David said, and Jenks made a rude sound. “Every last trick and loophole. But the kitchen and living room were lost in a city power struggle—which we’re under no obligation to cover—and the damage to the sanctuary was caused by a demon.”

  “It was a Goddess,” I said, and David brought his gaze back down from the roof.

  “Granted, but Newt was originally a demon. And since demon damage isn’t covered—”

  “Newt wasn’t part of the Goddess when the Goddess did the damage,” I interrupted. Jenks was hovering beside me, but Ivy had given up by the looks of it and was dropping balls one by one into the pockets as if they were her choices, gone forever. “And I didn’t summon her.”

  “Regardless.” David hesitated as he noticed the charred circle for the first time.

  Frustrated, I crossed my arms over my middle as Ivy propped the stick against a window frame. I’d find the money somewhere. Maybe if I changed my name, someone would hire me. “Well, thanks for trying,” I finally said, and David’s expression eased.

  “Son of a fairy-farting whore,” Jenks swore, shunning my hand when I held it out for him.

  “We’ll find the money,” I insisted, but even if we did and we moved back in, Ivy wouldn’t be at the big oak farm table with her maps and laptop, drinking orange juice and scowling as she told Jenks to keep his dust off her screen. It would be just me, Jenks, and Bis, knocking around in a big, empty church. Even his kids were gone.

  “I’m sorry,” David said into the stretching silence. “Everything ends.”

  The sickly yellow dust spilling from Jenks nearly broke my heart. “Yeah,” the small pixy said. “But I thought I’d be dead before it was over.”

  Head low, Ivy stood beside the table. “Me too,” she said, breathing the words.

  Panic iced through me. It would be so easy to move in with Trent, become part of his world, twining our lives in equal measures. But I enjoyed my independence too much, and bringing my chaotic life that close to his girls wasn’t going to happen. Besides, who would go all the way out to the Kalamack estate to hire me?

  But Jenks looked as if he was going to throw up. I had to do something to get that look off his face. Fingers cold, I touched the pool table, feeling as if Kisten were here reminding me that love sometimes hurt when it was real. “Well, there’s no help for it,” I said with a forced cheerfulness. “We’re going to have to get that sign changed, Jenks.”

  Ivy’s head snapped up, her eyes flashing pupil black in alarm. David, too, looked surprised, and I stiffened, steeling myself for what was going to come out of my mouth next.

  “What for?” Jenks clattered his wings, probably thinking I was abandoning Ivy.

  �
��New business cards, maybe,” I added with a fake nonchalance. “With just your and my name on them.” I tore my gaze from Jenks’s shock. “I’m not giving up the firm,” I said, voice soft so it wouldn’t crack. “And I need your help, Jenks, if you’re still willing to work with me. Ivy’s not dead, and even if she was, she’d still be in Cincinnati. If we get in a jam, she’ll bail us out.”

  Ivy’s shoulders lost their stiffness, and Jenks’s wing hum lessened. I exhaled, the tight band about my chest easing. “Besides,” I said, nose wrinkling at the ugly smell of decay suddenly drifting through the church, “with Ivy and Nina working for the I.S., they might throw a few jobs our way. You know, the stuff they can’t figure out.”

  Ivy, too, had noticed the rank smell, her face showing her distaste even as she relaxed. Beside her, David turned to the back of the church in question. My thoughts went to the teenage elf I’d chased off, but he’d wanted to meet Trent. Making a magic stink wouldn’t help his case.

  “You don’t mind Ivy being gone?” Jenks asked, reminding me that even though he’d loved and lost, raised children and buried them, he was still only twenty.

  “Of course I mind,” I said, and Ivy bowed her head so her hair hid her eyes. “It’s going to be as hard as hell to wake up without her across the hall, crabbing about me using all the hot water and snarling if I ate her cookies, but what choice do we have? She’s in love, Jenks.”

  Jenks dropped to me, and my hand came up for him to land on. My throat caught when he stood there, a chance to find a new way spreading before us.

  “Yeah?” Jenks said, looking relieved. “How about taking the hooker silhouette off the ad Ivy put in the Yellow Pages.”

  I nodded, throat tight, and Jenks lovingly flipped off Ivy at her annoyed growl. “We’ll design something,” I said. “And what is that stench?”

  “It smells like something that died two weeks ago,” David said as he tried to peer through the cracks of a boarded-up window.

  “It wasn’t there when we got here,” Jenks said, then darted to him.

  Jenks was gone, but his dust lay warm upon me. I couldn’t bring myself to brush it away, and slowly it vanished in the heat from my hand. It would be hard without Ivy, not just for her expertise but because she was our friend. But like I’d said, she wasn’t dead, and I had to stop feeling as if she was simply because she wasn’t sleeping across the hall.

  “Thanks,” Ivy said, and I smiled when she gave my hand a tight squeeze.

  “Don’t thank me,” I said as I turned her touch into a full hug. “I’m serious. We’re going to miss you like the undead miss the sun, but this is where we are.”

  “Yeah, Ivy.” Jenks flew circles around us until Ivy and I parted. “Just you wait,” he said as he landed on my shoulder to feel right. “You’ll be begging to come back after six months in the tower.”

  “Back to this? Not a chance,” Ivy said over her shoulder as she headed for the back, giving the plywood-covered hole in the floor a wide berth. But it was obvious how hard it was for her to let go. Nina needed her, and Jenks and I . . . did not. And Ivy needed to be needed.

  “I think the smell is coming from the graveyard,” Ivy said, her movements edging into vampire quickness as she went down the hall to the plywood nailed over the raw opening that once led to the kitchen and back living room. I could see her frustration that she couldn’t be what Nina needed and still keep things the same, but Ivy and Nina shouldn’t have had to put up with any roommates, much less a pixy and a witch-born demon with more baggage than an entire rock band.

  David’s hands clasped uneasily. “Er, I should leave if you have a body out there.”

  “If we do, it’s not ours.” I started for the back, wincing at the screech of a nail pulling out. “Ivy, be careful!” I exclaimed. “There’s a six-foot drop past that plywood.” Jenks was on my shoulder, and for the first time in weeks, I felt good. “You okay with the temp, Jenks?”

  “Don’t turn into my mom, Rache,” he muttered, but he didn’t leave my warmth.

  David’s shoulders jostled mine in the tight confines of the hall, and, grinning, he tried to beat me to where Ivy was working on the makeshift door. Giving up, she backed up three steps and gave it a solid kick. Nails screeching, the plywood was knocked clear into the burned foundation of what had once been the kitchen and back living room.

  Cool air and sun poured in. I squinted, my hand going over my nose in disgust. Past the burned foundation stones and weedy garden was a zombie stumbling about in the leaf-coated, long-grassed graveyard.

  “Oh, yuck.” David dropped back with his hand over his nose.

  “Dude.” Jenks hovered beside Ivy and me, a weird silver-purple dust spilling from him. “The news said they got the last one three days ago.”

  “Apparently not.” David leaned against the hall’s wall, pale behind his stubble. “He looks like an old one. He smells too bad for it to be just what he’s been eating. That’s decay.”

  “You think?” My jaw clenched in revulsion. It was a zombie. Animated dead. A handful of them had been found in Cincinnati over the last few months, all in various stages of decay and age. No one was sure where they’d come from, but the timing made me think they’d been tucked in an I.S. quarantine somewhere and had escaped when the ley lines had gone down. That the I.S. was claiming innocence made it seem more than likely.

  “How did it get past the graveyard’s gates?” Ivy asked, seeming to handle the stench better than David, who had slumped back down the wall until he was sitting with his knees to his chest, his head low as he took shallow breaths.

  “No idea,” I said, but knowing from experience that a person could slip through the chain holding the car gates shut. “You know, seeing him careening from stone to stone out there looks both somehow really right and really disturbing.”

  “Tink’s titties, he smells worse than the wrong end of a Were’s outhouse.” Jenks’s wings rasped as he landed on Ivy’s shoulder. “Get him to leave, Rache.”

  My God, he stinks. “Why is this my problem?” I said as the zombie made a lonely, guttural, social caw. Arms over my middle, I watched Mr. Z stumble into a headstone to leave a black smear. Nice. Someone’s experiment had gone free-range and was leaving chunks in my graveyard.

  “Awwwww, Rache. He’s dropping parts. Do something!”

  “I’ll call it in,” David said from behind us, and the beeps of his phone rose faintly.

  “This is going to make me late getting home,” Ivy said with a sigh.

  One hand on the broken wall, I leaned out, almost gagging on the smell. “How did he get across the river? Weren’t most of them found in Cincy?”

  “I think everyone is ignoring them now so they don’t have to deal with them,” David said, clearly on hold.

  “I can’t imagine why,” Ivy said, a hand over her face and voice muffled.

  “Rache,” Jenks begged, “he’s dropping chunks. How am I going to get rid of that?”

  I shrugged, my eyes lifting to a sudden commotion in the trees as a murder of crows began a raucous cawing, hounding something in the scorched oak tree in the back. Jenks touched his sword hilt, his eyes on the bare branches, but then they all flew off with harsh calls.

  “Why is this my problem?” I said again, and then I sneezed, the unexpectedness of it making it loud and obnoxious.

  “That did it,” Jenks said as Mr. Z turned, his filthy lab coat fluttering as he focused on our voices with an odd concentration. At my feet, David shuddered.

  “Fantabulous,” I said as Mr. Z began shambling our way. “You think someone lured him in here, hoping we’d take care of it?” Crap on toast, I didn’t want to have to stop at the boat and change before meeting Trent and the girls at the top of Carew Tower for his lunch and my breakfast, but that’s what I’d be doing if I touched it.

  “Probably.” Ivy jumped from the open hall
way to land on the plywood with an attention-getting thump. “You got anything on you for this?”

  Jenks looked at me and shrugged, and sighing, I awkwardly followed her. “I should have worn more leather,” I muttered, then louder, “Anything that works on a zombie?” I hefted a charred two-by-four the cleanup crew had missed. “Sure. Jenks, some distraction?”

  Jenks darted off, and Ivy lifted a crowbar, wiping the colorful wet leaves from it and taking a few practice swings. “You look nice today,” she said. “I’ll take the bottom.”

  “Thanks,” I said in relief. “I dressed up for David. He always makes me feel like a slob.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said, glancing back at the trim man. Yes, he had some scruff, and his long hair was escaping the clip at the back of his neck, but he carried himself with enough grace that he looked like a million bucks in jeans and a leather coat.

  “The I.S. won’t send anyone,” David said loudly, standing to lean against the interior wall. “They want you to take him to the zoo.”

  “The zoo?” I said in disbelief. Weapons in hand, Ivy and I paced forward as Jenks buzzed the slow zombie, easily staying away from his confused swipes. “Are they serious?”

  “They put in an exhibit last week.” Ivy pointed for me to go right while she took the left.

  My God, the stench was a thousand times worse this close. “They’re putting these things on display?” I muttered, breath shallow as I wove through the tombstones and tall grass.

  Jenks zipped to us as Mr. Z whimpered, his back to us as he tried to find the pixy. A flat circle of grass detailed his circular path, making a nice place to down him. “They’re probably the only people who have a strong enough air filter,” Jenks said as he settled in my hair, clearly cold. “Fairy farts, he stinks. I think I burned my wings on his stench.”

  “The kids love them!” David shouted from the raw opening to the church. “Watching them bang into things. Lose parts. You know!”