The Undead Pool

Ivy seemed to gain two inches as she scanned for someone wearing an I.S. badge and a tie. Across the cleared pavement, the last of the charmed people were finding their feet. The only one still on a stretcher was the kid. “Mind if I go with you?” she asked Edden. “I don’t recognize anyone, but someone out here probably owes me a favor.” She looked at me as if for approval, and I nodded. I was fine, and if anyone could get my car back, it would be Ivy.

“Great,” Edden said. “Jenks, stay with Rachel. I don’t want anyone from the press bothering her.” He hitched his pants up and tightened his tie. “We’ll be right back. Someone needs a refresher on this sharing information thing we’re supposed to be doing.”

I rolled my eyes, wishing him luck as Ivy looped her arm in his and they started across the bridge to the Hollows end of everything. “They’re just afraid, Edden,” I heard Ivy say as they left, a sultry sway to her hips. “FIB forensics can put them in the ground, and they’re tired of looking bad.”

I couldn’t help my smile as I watched them, her svelte sleekness next to his round solid form, both very different but alike where it counted.

“Ah, ’scuse me, Rache,” Jenks said, a pained look on his face. “I gotta pee. Don’t move.”

I looked around, finding a car I could lean up against. “Okay.”

His wing hum increased as he hovered right before my nose. “I mean it. Don’t move.”

“Okay!” I said, resting my rump against the car, and he darted over the edge of the bridge.

Sighing, I turned to the insistent beeping of the last car being towed off. Most of the news crews had left with the recovering spell victims, and it was beginning to thin out. A man in a trendy black suit drew my attention, up to now hidden behind the Toyota being carted out, and I frowned as he looked at his phone, fingers tapping. It wasn’t his dress, and it wasn’t his haircut—both trendy and unique—it was his grace. Living vampire?

A distant pop across the bridge sounded, and the man started, his eyes scanning until they fastened on mine.

A chill dropped through me as I took in his blond hair shifting in the wind, the grace with which he tucked it behind an ear, the knowing, sly smile he wore as he looked me up and down. Suddenly I felt alone. “Jenks!” I hissed, knowing he was probably within earshot. This guy wasn’t FIB, and he definitely wasn’t I.S., even if he was a living vampire. The suit said he had clout, and confidence almost oozed from him. “Jenks!”

Putting his attention back on his phone, the man hit a few more keys, slipped the phone in a pocket, turned, and walked away. In three seconds, he was gone.

“Jenks!” I shouted, and the pixy darted up, his dust an irate green.

“Good God, Rache, give me a chance to shake it, huh?”

My hands on the warm car burned, and I curled my fingers as I scanned the crowd. Slowly my pulse eased. “Are you sure my aura is okay?” I asked out of the blue.

Hands on his hips in his best Peter Pan pose, he said, “You called me back about that?”

“I think it might be linked to the misfires,” I said truthfully, and he looked askance at me.

“Yeah, but you were nowhere near any of the other ones. It wasn’t you, Rache.”

“I suppose.” Heart pounding, I leaned back against the car, arms wrapped around my middle. I couldn’t tell Jenks I had been spooked by a vampire, not under the noon sun, and not by a living one. He’d laugh his ass off.

But as we waited for Ivy to return with good news about my car, I shivered in the heat, unable to look away from the crowd and a possible glimpse of that figure in black.

He’d looked like Kisten.

Three

It wasn’t Kisten, I thought again for the umpteenth time as I shook two tiny pellets of fish food into my hand, wiggling a finger at Mr. Fish in his bowl on the mantel. But it had looked too much like him for my comfort, from his lanky, sexy build to his funky sophistication and even his thick mass of blond hair. I’d been so embarrassed I hadn’t even told Ivy. I knew she’d loved him too—loved him long before I’d met him, loved him, and watched him die twice defending me. But those feelings belonged to someone else, and I now knew what vampires were born knowing: those who tried to live forever truly held no future.

The heat from Al’s smaller hearth fire was warm on my shins, and I soaked it in, worried about the beta resting on the bottom of the oversize brandy snifter, gills sedately moving. The wood fire crackled, and I breathed the fragrant smoke, much better than the peat moss fire that stank of burnt amber that he’d had last time.