The Undead Pool

Kisten had died twice in quick succession, both times in an attempt to keep me alive and unharmed. His final words still haunted me: that God kept their souls for them until they died their second death. To get it back after committing the heinous acts necessary to survive would send them straight to hell—if a hell existed at all. A quick and sudden second death might be the only thing to save a true believer.

Uneasy, I dropped my eyes. Vampires were truly messed up, but I didn’t think a quick second death was the answer.

“I need to talk to a Free Vampire,” I said softly, and David chuckled, a rough hand rubbing his chin and the faint hint of day-old stubble.

“I thought you might say that. I can’t, of course, give you an address, as that would be a breach of Were Insurance policy.”

“David . . .” I protested.

“No-o-o-o,” he drawled, pushing himself up and away from the planter. “Go home. Get some sleep. Give me some time to be subtle.”

Subtle? My lips curled into a grin, and I mock punched him. “Let me know when you’re going, and I’ll come with you. It’ll be a good chance for me to do something with the pack.”

His smile brightened, making the guilt rise anew. “I was hoping you’d say that,” he said, his words warming me from the inside. “Some of the new members have you on a pedestal. That has got to change.”

“You think?” I said, and he gave me a brotherly sideways hug that pulled me off balance.

“I’m so sorry about the pack dinner last month. I didn’t realize it until you’d left. Did McGraff really scoot your chair in and put your napkin in your lap?”

Feeling good, I nodded, embarrassed even now. “Maybe if they saw me screw up once in a while it might help.”

He laughed, the honest sound of it seeming to push the surrounding fear from the nearby people back another inch. “I’ll call before we go out.”

“I’ll wait for it. And thanks for the info. It’s a good place to start.”

Inclining his head, he gave me a squinting smile. “You going to tell Edden?”

“Hell, no!” I blurted, not a glimmer of guilt. Well, not much of one, anyway. This felt like an Inderland matter; humans, if they knew how fragile the balance was, would start taking Free Vampires out one by one and end the curse that way.

“Thanks,” he said, and with a final touch, he turned away. “Give me a day or two!” he said over his shoulder, and I smiled, thinking I didn’t deserve friends like this.

He walked away, and as I watched his grace, my smile slowly faded. If the master vampires didn’t wake up soon, this could get really ugly, really fast.

Seven

“Jenks, get me that black marker in my room, will you?” Ivy asked, looking lean and svelte as she stretched over the big farm table to reach the FIB reports Edden had couriered over. She was trying to make a correlation between the misfires and the vampire mischief. She rated the mischief, I rated the misfire severity. Everything went on the map, and so far we’d not found a link from the precise pattern of misfires to the random acts of violence. But we had to do something as we waited for David to call. The waves were coming more frequently now, and people were scared.

“Who was your slave last week?” Jenks said from the sink, and Ivy’s head snapped up.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, you are such a pen geek.”

I stifled a smile, thinking it was odd of her to ask, but Nina was napping in Ivy’s room, exhausted and scared to death that Felix was going to make another play for her. Impossible since all the undead—masters and lackeys both—were sleeping, but she was terrified, and logic meant nothing when you were scared. Jenks could be in and out without her ever knowing.

“Thick or thin?” the pixy asked. He was catching drops from the faucet to wash a cut one of his youngest daughters had come in with, and after giving her a fond swat on the butt, he rose up, smiling after her cheerful vow to stab her brother in the eye as she flew out.

“Thick,” Ivy said, and Jenks darted out of the kitchen.

His dust slowly settled, and I blew it off the pictures arranged before me on the center counter, trying to decide which was more destructive: the first-aid mishap that shifted the spell caster’s skin to coat the bare lightbulb, or the dog walker who suddenly didn’t have a lower intestine. Shuddering, I put a sticky note with the number eight on the dog walker, seven on the skinned man. The dog walker might survive, but the skinned man hadn’t made it to the phone.

We’d had three more waves since the one that caught Trent and me at the bowling alley, and I didn’t like that they were regularly making it across the river and into the Hollows now before dying out. I was still hopeful that the waves were a natural effect that simply had to be understood to be stopped. I didn’t want to believe that anyone, unhappy vampire faction or not, would do this intentionally. Feeling ill, I put a four on the report of an entire middle-school class gone blind in a routine magic experiment.