A Perfect Blood (The Hollows #10)(50)
Author: Kim Harrison

"It looked clean to me," Wayde said as he took the wooden one I gave him.

"You haven’t been using that one, have you?" I asked.

"Uh, no?" he said, telling me he had, and I sighed, my eyes closing in a long blink as I looked out the kitchen window at the night, vowing that he was going to taste it before anyone else. The worst it would do to him would make him go to sleep. Maybe.

I opened my eyes when Jenks flew to the fridge. "Whatcha playing?"

"Pixy sticks," Belle said, then slammed her hand down on the pile and yelled, "Squish!"

"Aw, pigeon poop!" Bis said, throwing his cards down. "Are you cheating?"

"If I was-s, I wouldn’t tell you."

Wayde was smiling. It had been his idea for Bis to teach her how to read, and he knew the game was just a subterfuge to hide what they were really doing. "Any word yet on the amulets you sent out?"

I watched him blow on a spoonful of chili, and when he didn’t fall down after tasting it, I pushed myself from the counter and started cleaning up my mess. "No. Nothing from either the FIB or the I.S." I looked at the clock on the stove behind him, then moved a dirty pot to the sink. It hit with a clang, and Wayde jumped.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked suddenly. "You’re going in angry, and you shouldn’t be going in at all."

"Dude!" Jenks exclaimed from the fridge, a hand of cards half his size in his awkward grip. "We talked about this!"

Wayde was standing before the oven, that spoon in his hand like it was a baton. "No," he said. "I think I’m within my rights here. I want to hear from Rachel why she thinks the I.S. and FIB can’t do this without her. She made the charms. Enough already." He dropped the spoon back in the pot and turned to face me, his stance awkward and belligerent. "It’s as if you’re taking this personally. It’s not your mother out there."

Taking a deep breath, I leaned my elbows against the counter, almost the entire length of the kitchen between us, glancing at Jenks to tell him that it was okay and to chill. "No, it’s not my mother. But she was someone’s daughter. She had hooves, Wayde. And fur." Pushing up from the counter, I ran a hand over it to brush the fir needles into my palm. Calm. Cool. Collected.

Faced with my nonchalance, Wayde lost some of his bluster, and he replaced the lid with hardly a sound. "It’s dangerous going in already vulnerable."

"You should have seen Hot Stuff a year ago," Jenks said. "At least now she takes the time to plan things out."

A soft tapping of boots in the corridor, then Ivy breezed in with a clipboard of several color-coded pages. "Any word yet?" she said as she sat before her computer. She took a deep breath, read the tension in the air, and looked at me, her eyes starting to go black and her posture suddenly very still.

"Or at least she lets Ivy plan it," Jenks said snidely.

"Splat!" Belle shouted, and Bis slammed his hand down, barely beating her.

"You guys keep changing the rules!" Jenks exclaimed. Dropping his cards, he flew to Ivy, circling her in an annoying pattern until she flicked a long finger at him.

"What are we talking about?" the sultry vamp said as she leaned back and stuck the end of a pen between her teeth. I was pretty sure she’d sated her hunger yesterday, but the crime scene had probably put her on edge.

Jenks landed on the top of her monitor, and I turned my back on them to rinse out my rag. "Rachel taking an active part in this run," the pixy said. "Going in angry."

"It’s how the woman rolls," she said, and I tried to ignore the ribbing as I wiped the counter down. "She shouldn’t be going in at all, but she is. We’ll adapt."

"Yeah, the angrier she gets, the more the bad guys suffer," Jenks said, his pride obvious. "And they are going to suffer this time, baby!"

I frowned, unable to meet Wayde’s disapproving eyes as I tucked Jenks’s toad-lily flowers in a cupboard to dry. I wasn’t proud of that part of my personality – especially since I didn’t have much magic anymore to back up what came out of my mouth. "I’m not angry," I said, shutting the cupboard with a thump.

"Yes, you are."

"I am not angry!" I shouted.

Bis made a small noise from the fridge, and Ivy looked up from her computer. Her eyes going to Jenks, she clicked her security back on, stood, and stretched. "Excuse me," she said, and left. Bis followed, clinging to the ceiling like a chagrined bat, Belle in a crook of his tail.

"Jenks!" Ivy shouted from the hall.

"What?" he shouted, hands on his hips. "She says she’s not angry!"

Damn it, I hadn’t meant to push Ivy’s buttons. "Look," I said as I brought my attention up to find Wayde waiting. "You haven’t really given this much thought, have you?" I said softly. "What’s really going on here."

"Now you’re in for it," Jenks said, hovering backward, enjoying this.

Wayde’s posture shifted, and somewhat uneasy, he said, "I saw the man at the park. You need to back off and let someone else do this."

More tired than angry, I shook my head. Weres were not known for looking at the big picture, focused more on the here and now. They made great bodyguards and crime scene techs, but not so much so when it came to extrapolating. "HAPA is trying to make a source of demon blood so they can have their own magic. What do you think will happen if they’re successful and humans can do demon magic at will? With a cost they don’t believe in and a risk they can’t see?"

Wayde made a "so what" face at me, but I could see him thinking, and when he seemed to sober, I backed off, satisfied.

"Who is going to control them if they’re successful?" I said, tossing the rag into the soapy water to make it splash. "Who’s going to keep them from wiping us out species by species? Not me. We aren’t prepared for a new demographic of magic-using humans who are sadistic, power hungry, don’t like Inderlanders, and see genocide as an acceptable form of communication." My head hurt, and I put a damp hand to it, smelling the fresh scent of soap. "At least demons have some sense of fair play."

I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth, but it was true. Their morals might not match ours, but demons did have them. Demons had them . . . These humans did not. What is wrong with this picture?

"Demons enslave people," Wayde said. He was taking bowls out of an adjacent cupboard, but hungry was the last thing I was.

"Not as many as you think. And they don’t snatch innocents, only people who have made themselves available." My head hurt, and I opened my charm cupboard for a pain amulet. "I need to call Trent."