The Undead Pool (The Hollows #12)(31)
Author: Kim Harrison

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.

“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 . . .