Chapter 2

Chapter

2

It being after midnight didn't mean that the city's services weren't busy. Even so, Ivy and I got only a few cursory looks as we walked through one of the rear entrances at the building that housed the city morgue, a six-pack of Topo Chicos and a pizza in my grip and a black-plastic-wrapped body over Ivy's shoulder.

Her smooth pace screamed confidence as Ivy strode past the lobby desk, giving the man there a curious gesture: a two-fingered peace sign that turned into a single upraised index finger with a twist of her wrist, sort of a two-into-one sign. The man started, then reached for the phone.

"We, ah, don't need to check in?" I asked, my hip complaining as I hustled to keep up.

"I just did." Ivy's scuffed black boots thumped a steady cadence on the tile floor. "We are on city business," she said, a soft smirk brightening her usual stoic expression. "They don't want a paper record of us being here."

The guy had called someone, though, and a flicker of worry lit through me despite her cool certainty. "City business," she had said. As in Constance's business. The woman wasn't entirely above the law, but her actions and words would rarely be questioned. Piscary had been like that, and an ugly feeling trickled through me. I was taking care of Constance's bodies. This was not what I had signed up for, and that a pizza and a couple of Topo Chicos would buy Brice a no-questions-asked drawer in the morgue didn't sit well.

Ivy's lips pressed and her pupils widened as she sensed my unease. That gesture at the back lobby desk said she'd clearly done this before. I hadn't, and I didn't like where this might be heading. I was supposed to be holding Constance's reins, not the other way around.

"Hey, I like the necklace," I said to distract her, and Ivy reached to touch it.

"Thank you," she said, seeming to be embarrassed as she fingered it. "Constance wouldn't leave until I put something on. Said I would be civilized if I was to represent her."

Represent her. There it was again.

"It was this or an antique hair pin," Ivy added, oblivious to my thoughts. "I haven't worn a hair pin since I was twelve." Her pace slowed, focus distant. "Piscary gave it to me."

I grimaced, wondering if I could smell decay through the plastic—even over the scent of the extra-large with everything. I took a breath to ask her how Constance's city management classes were going, my words unsaid as my phone hummed from a back pocket.

Shoulders rising, I awkwardly wrangled my phone out. "It's Trent," I said in surprise. He was supposed to be hiding in the ever-after from the FIB, and that he was calling meant he had risked coming to reality. Not a big thing when a ley line runs through your estate, but if the Federal Inderland Bureau caught him, he'd be dealing with more than charges of creating illegal genetic medicines—he'd be in prison for it. "Hey, hi," I said when I answered, and Ivy almost stifled a grimace. "What are you doing this side of the ley lines?"

"I'm not." Trent's smooth, melodious voice hit me as if I'd been sipping tequila all afternoon, and I found I could smile. The sound of crickets was soft behind him, and I figured he was probably in his manicured garden, standing in the ley line, not really here, or there, but enough of both that he could reach a cell tower. "Everything okay?"

I glanced at Ivy. "We made the news?" I asked, and he chuckled.

"Piscary's did," he said. "I knew you were there tonight." He hesitated. "Ah, everyone okay? Will you be needing bail?"

A trill of delight tripped down my spine. He was on the run himself, and he had asked if I needed bail—and I loved him for it. "Not yet," I said. "Maybe later. Constance is practicing tough love with Cincinnati and I'm cleaning up after her."

As soon as the words left my mouth, my expression froze. I was cleaning up after her. As if I was her lackey.

"Mmmm." Trent's soft utterance deepened my frown. "You up for a late dinner? I can get Al to watch the girls."

Al would love to watch his girls; the demon would drop everything at the chance. "Sounds good. You're at home, right? I'll bring it. What are you in the mood for?"

Ivy scuffed to a halt before the elevators. "You won't need bail," the living vampire said sourly, and I lifted my foot in a slow sidekick to hit the down button before she could reach for it.

"Something with vegetables," Trent said sourly. "All Quen cooks is potatoes and meat."

"Will do." My voice had gotten soft, but I couldn't help it. "Bye. Love you."

"Love you, too," he said. "Desperately."

My smile was soft as I disconnected and tucked the phone away. "Trent says hi," I said as I hit the down button again, this time with my knuckle.

Ivy stared at the silver doors as if they were magic mirrors. "He did not."

Her tone was a flat nothing, and I eyed her, trying to figure out which one of her hang-ups I'd just walked over. She had a lot, and most of them weren't her fault, which was why I forgave her for them. "You want to join us?" I asked as the doors opened.

She walked in, motions stiff. "No," she said shortly. Propping Brice up in a corner, she took her phone in hand and began surfing.

"You're welcome to." I set the drinks down and hit the button for the basement. "Trent won't mind." The elevator began to descend. The faint smell of decay was becoming obvious. Bringing bodies in through the back door wasn't SOP, and the air system couldn't handle it.

Ivy didn't look up from her phone as she absently yanked Brice up. "All the way out to his estate? No thanks. I've got plans."

"Okay." I lifted the pizza box higher and breathed at a seam.

"Okay," Ivy echoed, a familiar tightness to her voice. She was testy, probably because Constance hadn't cooperated and she'd gotten to the party late, putting me in a danger that existed only in her mind. I hadn't been in any danger.

"Ah, you do know I could have dropped her at any time," I said, trying to work this out. "I was only waiting to give Constance a chance to handle it."

"That's not it." She squinted over her phone at me. I made a questioning face, and her brow scrunched. "Trent is good for you. You know that, right?"

My lips parted in surprise. "Ah…"

Ivy yanked Brice's corpse up straight again. "What I mean is, you think before you act now, and you're not trusting to chance as much. Steady." She slumped where she stood. "Your life expectancy is longer with him than with me, and I hate it."

"Ivy," I whispered, and she shrugged as I touched her shoulder, my eyes glistening. She and I had a past, and I knew we had a future. It wasn't the one that Ivy had wanted. Planned on. Plotted for.

"I'm not complaining," she said as she ran the back of her hand under her nose. "Just pointing it out so you don't screw it up. I don't have to like it," she finished softly. "Vampires bring out the worst parts of you, and elves bring out the best."

"And demons?" I said as the doors opened and a cool chill eddied in around our ankles. I picked up the six-pack and followed her into the low-ceilinged, tile-floored hallway. "Because demons are so steady."

Ivy shot me an amused look over her shoulder. "Al would sooner set himself on fire than hurt you," she said as she walked, and a feeling of guilt flickered. "Don't mind me. I'm happy. Happy for you, happy for me."

I had to move fast to keep up with her, following the big blue arrows on the wall to one of Cincy's oldest morgues, buried at the base of a city building.

Unfortunately Al wasn't the only demon in existence, and my boots scuffed the dirty tile as I wondered if Ivy's mood might be stemming from the fact that the last time we'd been to the morgue together had been to identify Kisten. We had gotten here too late. Someone at the I.S. had pushed his cremation up by two days to eliminate any possible evidence of wrongdoing. It was very much like what we were doing here. The I.S. worked hard to keep the city's master vampire happy. That I was now doing the same bothered me.

"Gurney," I said when we turned a corner, and Ivy unceremoniously dropped the wrapped body onto it and pushed the wheel-rattling cart through the next set of double doors.

"Hey, Jack!" I heard her exclaim faintly as I lingered in the hall, eyebrows rising at the sign over the door. Cincinnati Morgue, an equal opportunity service since 1966.

Nineteen sixty-six. That was the year the Turn began, when all but the elves came out of the paranormal closet to save what was left of humanity and prevent society from complete collapse. Roughly forty years later, humanity was still a minority, tough justice seeing as the plague was probably their fault, as it had been traced to a bioweapon that had gotten loose and spontaneously fixed itself into the genome of a genetically modified tomato. The now-extinct, fuzzy black tomato that could handle drought and cold temps had been distributed across the globe. It was going to save the world. Instead, it destroyed it.

"Tamwood, no," a masculine voice said, and I pushed through the double doors. "Not tonight."

It wasn't Iceman behind the desk, but Jack, and I set the six-pack on an empty gurney just inside the door as Ivy wheeled Brice's corpse deeper into the large rectangular room. File cabinets lined one wall. An ancient, ugly desk that should have been thrown away in the seventies sat across from them. This was the admittance room. The morgue itself was beyond a second pair of swinging doors. There were no necropsies or autopsies performed here. It was strictly storage, either for one of Cincy's mortuaries or, in the case of living vamps crossing into their undead stage, for self-repair. Intervention was not allowed. If the vampire virus couldn't mend their body in three days, they would starve and die their second death—from a lack not of blood but of aura.

It wasn't common knowledge outside of vampiric circles that it wasn't actually blood that the undead needed but the aura the blood carried. The soft energy given off by the soul bathed the body, convincing the mind that a soul was present and that they were alive. Lose that, and the mind shuts down to bring the mind, body, and soul back in line. It was the vampire virus that tricked the mind into believing that borrowed auras were from its own soul, and if an undead wasn't able to take in blood for any reason, as soon as the residual aura was gone, the mind realized the body was dead, and it followed suit.

"Where's Iceman?" I asked, and Jack's gaze shot to me.

"Night off." Clearly nervous, Jack stood up from his thick textbooks and tugged his scrubs straight. "Ivy, I can't."

Ivy locked the gurney's wheels. "Come on, Jack," she wheedled. "I brought you dinner. It's you or the river. I'm only thinking of the river otters. You like river otters, right?"

The young man's gaze lingered on my developing bruises and the obvious floor burn. "I saw the news. That's Brice Witherspoon. She's got to be at least forty years dead. There will be questions. You can't tell me no one saw you bring her down here."

I set the pizza beside the Topo Chicos on the empty gurney and lifted the lid. Ivy had her foot on the desk, pretending to tie her boot to show off her physique. The guy was a student, though, and I knew where his true desire lay. Smirking, I took a sliver of pizza, eyes closing as I angled it into my mouth.

The "mmmm" that escaped me was one hundred percent real. Tart and tangy. Piscary might be twice dead, but his legacy lived on in his pizza, and I practically groaned as the cheese lifted and pulled. Pizza has vegetables on it.

I wasn't sure why Jack was being so reticent despite it being as irregular as all hell. The I.S., or Inderland Security, was who policed the paranormals. They didn't like me , but Constance technically owned them , which was why Ivy had brought Brice's body here instead of the no-questions-asked safe-haven box at Spring Grove Cemetery.

"Of course people saw me bring her down," Ivy said, a flicker of annoyance crossing her face when she realized he was watching me instead of her. Mood closed, she took her boot off the desk. "You don't think I did this, do you? It was Constance. Brice made a play. Lost. End of story."

Jack waved a hand at the hall, pointing. "Then take her to the I.S. morgue."

Ivy smiled to show her teeth. "This is faster," she said. "Well, if you don't want it…"

That was my cue, and I lifted the box with one hand and brought it to the desk, dropping it with a heavy thump, sending the aroma of cheese and tomato billowing into the air. "Mmmm," Ivy groaned as she angled a slice in, hunched and giggling when the cheese pulled and snapped.

I didn't like this blatantly manipulative side of Ivy. It was weird. And working, I decided as Jack gazed longingly at the pizza.

"Ah, I don't have any space left for self-repair," he said, and Ivy beamed, the joyful expression looking wrong on her.

"She isn't coming back," Ivy assured him as she chewed, her eyes wide and blinking. "Tell you what. You sit here and enjoy what's left of my dinner, and I will pop her in the furnace. All you have to do is sweep out the bin and put her in a box for her next of kin."

I fought to keep my expression neutral. Ivy knew how to work the furnace? There were some things I didn't want to know, and that was one of them.

Jack glanced at the pizza again. "Constance did this?"

Ivy nodded as she pulled a square of paper towel from the nearby roll.

"And I'm not going to see any paperwork, right?" he asked, and I shook my head. I.S. sanctioned or not, it was still illegal. And easy. I didn't like easy.

Motions holding a heavy reluctance, Jack yanked open the top drawer of the metal desk, shuffling about until he found an old, overly thick key. "You know the code to open the door?" he said as he extended it, and Ivy dropped what was left of her slice into the box to take it.

"Jack, you are a gem!" she exclaimed, pulling him across the desk to give him a quick buss on his cheek. Key in hand, she flounced to the gurney. "Rachel, I could use a hand."

"Sure." I jammed the crust into my mouth and pulled a paper towel from the holder, quickly wiping my fingers clean before dropping it in the trash. Jack had gone several shades to red, which made me wonder if Jack had done it for the kiss, not the pizza—even if he was now focused on it like a terrier on a bone.

Arms swinging, I followed Ivy through the second set of doors. There were four rows of drawers on either side, humans on one, vamps on the other, and everyone else where they could find space. As Jack had said, every drawer seemed to have a name tag, but Ivy was headed for the wide metal door set past the small waiting area.

"Hey, um, Ivy? How many times have you done this?" I said as she rolled Brice's body past the comfortable chairs arranged around the low table.

"Don't worry. The kiln is easy to operate." Ivy eased the gurney to a halt before what looked like a fire door, then tapped a door panel awake with one manicured finger. Without hesitation, Ivy typed a five-digit code into the keypad…and the lock disengaged with a metallic thump.

45202. My eyebrows rose. The building's zip code? Not much of a password.

I waited as she pushed the door open, flicked on the lights, and wheeled Brice into another low-ceilinged room. "That's not what I asked," I said as I followed her, taking a moment to make sure the unusually thick door wasn't going to shut on its own. The walls and floor seemed new, but the kiln itself was old, its corners softened under decades of black paint.

Ivy used the old, oversize key Jack had given her to open the waist-high, oven-like door to show a surprisingly modern-looking interior with smooth, tarnished walls and gleaming burners. A digital panel beside the door suggested it had been retrofitted sometime in the nineties. Below the large door was a smaller one to retrieve the ashes. Somewhere in between was probably a cremulator. It was hard to turn a body to ash unless the heat was hellacious, and this unit looked too old. Truth be told, the city morgue's kiln wasn't used that often, as there were far nicer crematoriums within the city limits. It was the city master's furnace. And I am using it…

She still hadn't answered me, and I took a quick breath at the thump of igniting gas and the whine of a fan. It was a stark reminder that she had once been Piscary's scion—until she had started saying no and Kisten had stepped in. And then Kisten had said no and had been punished.

I wasn't sure why I was even here as Ivy used the mitts hanging beside the door to pull out the tarnished rack as if preparing to bake some bread—and then angled the plastic-wrapped body onto it. Motions smooth, she pushed Brice in and locked the door using that oversize key. With a methodical quickness, she dropped to the second, smaller door, doing a quick check to make sure the ash from the last run was gone.

Finished, Ivy bowed her head. "You should have been smarter," she said softly, clearly speaking to Brice. "Your ignorance is your fault. I should have known you were ignorant and stopped you. That is my fault." Jaw tight, she hit the start button. Only then did the furnaces come on full with a muted lion's roar.

It wasn't a touching eulogy, but it was more than I would have expected.

Head down, Ivy pushed the empty gurney to the morgue. "Jack will make sure that her scion gets her ashes," she said. There was no victory in her voice, only a depressing knowledge that she was probably going to die on the same sword she wielded.

"Ivy, I'm sorry," I said as I walked beside her. This was why she had asked me to be here. To do this alone too often would break a person.

"For what?" Her voice was light, but I could hear the bound pain in it.

"That you have to do this to protect someone you don't even love."

"It protects you," she said as she pushed the set of double doors open.

A little huff of chagrin escaped me, and then I stopped stock-still, almost running into Ivy as she jerked to a halt. Jack was gone, and a young woman, almost a girl, really, sat in his stead, boot heels propped on the desk as if she owned it.

"Elyse Embers. This is a surprise," I said, and the tall, brown-skinned, straight-haired woman took a somehow…mocking bite of pizza. My guess put her heritage heavily slanted toward South America even though her accent was a hundred percent Midwest vanilla.

"Hey, hi." She dropped the slice back into the box. "An extra-large with everything," she said as she ripped a paper towel from the roll. "Is that the going price for cremation these days?"

"We brought a six-pack of Topo Chicos, too," I smart-mouthed. It might not have been the cleverest comeback, but I got bitchy when surprised.

"Where's Jack?" Ivy asked, the rim of brown around her pupils shrinking.

Elyse bobbed her head, acknowledging her. She would have looked like a collage freshman at a mixer if not for the money behind her lightweight black silk jacket, trendy jeans, and classy boots. The diamond pin in the shape of a M?bius strip on her lapel was her badge of office, and she wore it front and center as the coven of moral and ethical standards lead member. She was too young for the position. Again, not my fault. It is not.

"I sent him to find some real napkins," she said as she wiped her fingers clean. "He thinks I'm working with you," she added as she came out from behind the desk. "What a cutie."

I said nothing. We were too deep for me to reach a ley line, but Elyse probably could through her familiar. It made me vulnerable. Ivy, too, hadn't moved, and my neck was beginning to tingle from the pheromones she was kicking out. It had been Elyse who had tried to lure me into being a member of the coven of moral and ethical standards, promising me the spell to bring Kisten back as a ghost if I did. The deal sounded good on the surface, but they didn't want me . They wanted what I knew. I would be doing their bidding, when, where, and how they wanted—not be a real member with a voice.

It ticked me off that I was tempted, regardless.

"Looks like you took a beating." Elyse leaned back confidently against the desk. "No wonder you want to get rid of the evidence. I wouldn't want anyone to know how badly I fucked up a simple restitution chat, either."

Language, I mused, thinking the word made her sound less of a threat, not more. "What do you want? You gave me until June to uncurse Brad. I'm working on it."

Elyse sniffed in amusement. "Relax, I'm not going to bust your chops over a vampiric power struggle. You're simply hard to pin down and I figured you might be here." She tossed the mangled paper towel to the trash, missing. "You. Me. My office. Tomorrow," she said as she drew a business card from her jacket pocket and extended it. "Here's the address."

I let her hold it there for a good three heartbeats before I took it. Hard to pin down? She didn't want to come out to the church is all. I didn't blame her. My stronghold was formidable. "Carew Tower?" I said when I read it. "You're renting space from Trent?"

The tall, slim woman grinned. "Ironic, isn't it? But the location is central and it came with parking. Is three thirty okay? Yes? Good." She pushed from the desk, her nose wrinkled at the scent of the dead. "I'll see you there."

"Uh-huh," I managed, still trying to figure out how she knew to look for me here.

"Oh, and bring that book you used to curse Brad Welroe," she added, one hand on the door. "It will make the afternoon go smoother."

Ahhh, twist me to the Turn and back.

Ivy took a step forward and Elyse jerked, shoving herself backward through the double doors and into the hall. She was afraid—even down here where I couldn't reach a ley line and she could—but my God, she was good at hiding it.

"Oh, and if you go to the ever-after, we will assume you are fleeing justice," Elyse said from the safety of the hallway. "I will follow you there and drag you out, resident demons or not. Seems I'm the only witch on the planet who didn't get cursed. Thanks for that, by the way. See you tomorrow."

She let go of the door and it swung inward. Elyse was gone by the time it swung through again, the door closing in ever-shortening arcs as the sound of her steps faded.

"Is it a job offer or a ticket to Alcatraz?" Ivy asked.

"Does it matter?" I said, not sure which would be worse. Alcatraz I could escape. Probably. The coven? Not so much. I could show them the book and take the job to stay out of Alcatraz, but I'd have to abdicate my subrosa standing. "Constance isn't anywhere near ready. And even if she was, I don't trust her. Do you?"

Motions slow in thought, Ivy went behind the desk to replace the key. "No," she said softly, brow furrowed.

I stood with my arms wrapped around my middle, my entire night—my entire week, probably—ruined. There wasn't anyone I trusted to maintain the city except maybe Ivy.

And you had to be an undead or a demon to even be considered for the job.