The Undead Pool

“Your pen,” Jenks said, a bright gold dust slipping from him as he dropped it into Ivy’s waiting hand before landing on one of the more nasty pictures. Hands on his hips, he stared in disgust as the whining squeak of the pen on paper mixed pleasantly with the shouts of his kids in the sunny garden, where they were playing June bug croquet. It was as much fun as it sounded—unless you were the June bug.

Nervous and fidgety, I opened the bag of chips I’d bought for the weekend—seeing as we probably weren’t going to have the expected Fourth of July cookout. Crunching through a chip, I rated a few more reports. The over-the-counter glass cleaning charm that had melted the glass and then moved on to the insulation in the surrounding walls got a seven despite no deaths. The charm to inflate a tire taking out the lungs of the man who had invoked it got a two simply because it didn’t take much to explode lungs. He hadn’t survived. Then there was the carpet cleaner in the Hollows where the charm ate the carpet away, foam and all. The homeowner had been delighted at the hardwood floor underneath. I wished they all had happy endings.

Weary, I pushed at the picture of the university floor, broken open like a ground fault from the small-pressure charm that was supposed to cut a molecule-thin section of fossil from the parent rock. It got a ten. How in hell was I supposed to rate these without taking into account the cost of human life?

“You okay?” Ivy flipped through a report until she found what she wanted.

“Not really.” I ate a chip, then went to the fridge for the dip. Everything was better with sour cream and chives.

Jenks’s wings hummed at a higher pitch, startled when I dropped the chip dip on the counter. “You really think vampires are doing this?” he asked.

“David seems to think so.” I watched Ivy’s jaw tighten, already knowing what she thought about that theory. “Me, I’m not buying that vampires would use magic on a scale such as this, even if they think it will save the souls of their kin.” Especially after reading that pie-in-the-sky flyer, and I glanced at it on the counter where Ivy had dropped it after I’d showed it to her.

Ivy frowned, still bent over her work. “Did you know they made a saint out of him?”

“Who?” I ate a chip before dumping them into a bowl.

“Kisten,” she said, and I froze, remembering the Kisten look-alike on the bridge. That doesn’t mean they’re responsible for it. Then I did a mental jerk-back. Kisten? A saint?

“No shit!” Jenks exclaimed, and I just stared at her. Our Kisten?

Only now did she look up, the love she once had for him mixing with the sour disbelief for the misled. “Because of what he said to you,” she added. “They think he died his second death with his soul intact and unsullied by the curse.” Her head went back down, leaving me feeling uneasy. “Cincinnati has the highest concentration of Free Vampires in the United States. If they were going to try to eradicate the masters, they’d try it here first.”

“But why? Cincy is in shambles! It’s not working!” I said, scrambling to wrap my head around Saint Kisten. Saint Kisten, with his leather jacket, motorcycle, and windblown blond hair. Saint Kisten, who had killed and hidden crimes to protect his master. Saint Kisten, who willingly sacrificed his second life to save mine . . .

“Nina says she’s seen some of them,” she said, and my attention fixed sharply on her. “I thought she was making it up, but if David comes up empty, I’ll ask her.”

I rolled the top of the bag of chips down, not hungry anymore. “Sure.”

Taking the pen out from between her teeth, Ivy leaned in to the map. “Jenks, what time did you and Rachel leave the golf course yesterday?”

I’d be offended, but Jenks was better than an atomic clock. “We left the parking lot at twenty to eleven,” he said, and I moved the bowl of chips before his dust made them stale.

“And then you got on 71 and came home.” She frowned, waving Jenks off when his dust blanked out the liquid crystal. “No stops between? Good roads? Not a lot of traffic?”

“No,” I said, wondering where this was going. A cold feeling was slipping through me. “Traffic was fine until we got downtown. Then it was the usual stop-and-go.” Worried, I dragged my chair around to sit beside her and stare at her huge monitor and the gently sweeping wave of blue markers. It looked just like every other wave map she’d made, except it was the first and there weren’t as many violent crimes to go with it.

“Okay.” Ivy was clicking, and the city map was covered by a graph. “This is the wave you got caught up in last night at the bowling alley. It’s the first one that the FIB took note on the times associated with the misfires. I’m guessing the wave has a top speed of forty-five miles an hour, but that can vary. That first one seemed to be slower, especially.”

She had a page of math, and I gave it a cursory look. “And?” I asked, and she moved the mouse, bringing up a new map.