Pike stared at the tightly curled mouse nestled in Constance’s jewelry. He took a slow, pained breath, touched his swollen face . . . and finally slid the knife back in his boot. “Why do I feel as if I just signed my own death warrant?” he muttered, elbows going to his knees, his head down and his shoulders slumped in fatigue.
I smiled, one ear listening to Jenks’s muffled swearing. “No, you just freed yourself,” I said as I tried to make a sling for my wrist out of my shirt, my vision threatening to go black until I gave up and stopped moving my arm. “And Joni, and anyone else you like working with, but the secrecy has to be absolute, because if anyone ever finds out that Constance isn’t the one calling the shots, we’re both going to be wishing Sharps had ground our bones for bread at Twin Lakes Bridge.”
Pike looked up, hope almost painful in the back of his eyes. “You think you can . . .”
My head rose at the sound of pixy wings. “I know I can,” I said as Jenks finally pulled the mouse cage free and laboriously lifted it into the air, his dust a heavy wash.
“Could you have put any more junk in that purse of yours?” Jenks said as he set the small but foolproof cage on the bench. “Good job, Rache.” Immediately he flew back to my bag, diving inside to bump about again.
Good job? It didn’t feel like a good job. It felt like a seat-of-the-pants job, but that was about par. Frowning, I awkwardly picked Constance up by the tail and dropped her into the cage. The movement jolted the vampire awake and I immediately fastened the latch, shoulders slumping in relief as Constance began making tiny, panicked sounds as she sat on her haunches and rubbed at her arms as if trying to push the fur off. Damn it all to the Turn and back. I was going to have to do her job, but with Pike, I just might be able to.
Tired, I lifted the cage high to look at the very unhappy, very odd-looking mouse with canines almost as long as her whiskers. Prehistoric Rodentia. “Oh, Constance,” I said, voice mockingly high, and the mouse flung herself at me and the bars with a sudden, shocking fury. “I’m so glad we found an accord and you agreed to handle the vampires under my authority.”
Pike looked up from dabbing at one of his deeper scratches, a faint smile easing his pinched features.
“What’s that?” I lifted the cage, pretending to listen as she screamed at me in tiny, high squeaks. “You want all but a few handpicked favorites to leave so the people they kicked out can go back to their homes? What a wonderful goodwill gesture on your part.”
Pike chuckled, his stance easing even more. Across the gondola, Jenks reemerged from my bag, one of my pain amulets as large as him rasping along behind him. Thank you, Jenks.
“And how nice you decided not to harass Kalamack’s Brimstone interests anymore,” I said to Constance as Jenks dragged the heavy amulet across the floor. “Or challenge the Weres’ territories? That’s a wonderful idea. Happy streets, happy bottom line, and isn’t that what everyone wants? Especially the DC vamps?” Eyebrows high, I looked at Pike as I set the cage down, and Constance attacked the bars with a frightening vengeance. “Think you can manage most of that?” I asked him, relief filling me when I bent to take my amulet and the agony in my wrist retreated to something almost bearable.
“What about when someone wants to talk to her?” His brow furrowed. “Or two houses disagree about blood rights? Someone will notice she’s not coming out of her rooms.”
“That’s where I come in,” I said, able to look at my swelling wrist now that it wasn’t exploding anymore. “I can imagine that no one really wants to see Constance. Would you go down to talk to her if you didn’t have to?”
He shook his head, focus distant in thought. “You keep my brothers at bay and we run the city together.”
“More or less, meaning I have more, you have less,” I corrected him. “I stand between you and your brothers, and you run the vampire affairs under me how I want them to be run. At my direction. The same way you’d be doing under Constance only without the blood or sex. If you get yourself killed by carelessness, that’s not my problem.”
He grinned. “No blood or sex? I’m not sure the benefits are commensurate with the task.”
But his good humor told me we almost had this settled, and I smiled, slumping deeper into the bench. Constance had shifted her efforts into knocking the cage over, and I was toying with the idea of letting her do it. She was close to the edge, and hitting the floor might calm her down a notch. Relenting, I used my foot to nudge the cage from the drop-off. Immediately she attacked my foot, but her teeth were ineffective on my boot, and I pushed her all the way to the back, where she squeaked at me until Jenks dusted her into a higher fury.
“One problem,” Pike said as he used a handkerchief to clean Jenks’s irritant-dust from his face. His scars stood out in sharp relief, Jenks’s new scores almost unnoticeable amid the chaos of lines. “No one will believe any of this if they don’t see Constance walk out of here.”
Jenks looked up from his insulting hover over Constance. His expression was worried, but I wasn’t. “Yep,” I said as I leaned to the broken-mesh window. Peering down, I could see emergency lights flashing and the enormous lights from a news van shining on a veritable mob. Edden had moved forward, and between the Weres, vamps, and news crews, there was a growing air of a circus. But who I wanted wasn’t down there, and taking a breath, I looked . . . up.
“Hodin!” I shouted toward the city-lit clouds. “You want to stay in the garden? Jenks needs a doppelganger charm!”
Pike’s eyebrows were high when I pulled my attention back inside. He knew about doppelganger charms. Everyone did. They were only legal on Halloween because the expensive ones were so convincing that they couldn’t be parsed out from reality. Demon doppelganger curses were even more convincing. And expensive. But seeing as nothing would mean much if I couldn’t tie this up with a nice bow, it was worth finding out if Hodin would do it for a place he could call home. Sorry, Al. He’s here, you aren’t.
Jenks darted up, then down, and finally to me. “Rache, are you sure?” he said, and then a black shadow thumped against the glass. It was an enormous crow, bedraggled feathers falling as he eyed me with one red, goat-slitted eye and ugly claws holding him there.
“The crow . . .” Pike said as Hodin dissolved into a feather-laced mist that poured through the tiny window and into the gondola. “At the meeting?” Pike got to his feet with a vampiric quickness, his eyes fixed on the tall shape taking form even as he retreated. “That was a demon? I thought it was a prop. You know. The crazy demon living in a church.”
Yeah, that was me, but I didn’t need a prop to pull it off. Mood sour, I painfully got to my feet, one hand on the swaying wall as Hodin solidified in his leather jacket and black jeans, wavy hair loose, and an empty, waiting expression on his long face. He’d been there the entire time, watching to see if I survived. He probably wanted the church for himself.