But I wasn’t done yet, and I dug the key to Piscary’s out from a front pocket. “You think it’s enough?”
“I think it could push the dead into the sun,” he smart-mouthed, and from across the fire, Stef bobbed her head.
“Add a little ley line magic to send it to Piscary’s,” I said as I opened the small fold of cloth that I’d had with the key. Inside it was a thin red root looking like a twining tendril. It had taken me the better part of an hour to find it, and Jenks wasn’t going to be happy.
“What is that?” he shrilled, clearly recognizing the parasitic weed. “Where did you get that? Throw it in the fire, Rachel. Now!”
“Relax, Jenks. I won’t let it out of the circle,” I said, and he flew up trailing a red dust as I used the length of flexible root to fasten the key to one of the lily stalks. My God, it was worse up close, and I held my breath as I tied a Gordian knot.
“That’s devil’s guts!” Jenks shouted. “Get it out of my garden.”
“I prefer dodder, myself,” I said, eyes watering as I backed up. Immediately I reinstated the salt circle, but the smell seemed to linger. “And it’s useful.”
“It’s a noxious weed!” Jenks faced me, wings humming. “If it gets a foothold, you never get rid of it!”
My lips pressed. “Which is why it took me so long to find it!” I shouted. “And don’t ask me where I got it from. I’m not telling.”
Jenks’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t come crying to me when it covers your precious plants, witch,” he muttered. “That stuff kills everything stuck in the ground.”
“Good thing you kill everything else,” I shot back, then softened. “Come on, Jenks. You should be thanking me. I found the one plant you missed and rooted it out. It’s gone.”
“What’s devil’s guts?” Stef asked hesitantly, and Jenks glared at me before going to sit on a tombstone on the far side of the fire.
“It’s a particularly nasty parasitic plant that will link the plant to the key to Piscary’s. And with that, the smell will go there, not here.”
“Oh!” she said, glancing between us. “Sympathetic magic.”
“Black magic,” Jenks muttered, but he was just being pissy.
“White,” I said. “I’m simply sending a nice smell into Piscary’s to welcome the incoming master vampire.” It was the perfect revenge. Annoyance at its best and not likely to get me in front of a judge even if it was linked to me. But as I prepared to magically join the plant and the key, the silhouette of a crow landing on the graveyard wall drew my eye.
My smile faded and, seeing it, the crow shifted from foot to foot. Crows were wily birds, but they generally didn’t hang around watching backyard fires at night. That left only one option.
“Damn it, Hodin, if that’s you, I’m going to pluck every last feather you have and jam them where feathers shouldn’t go.”
Jenks rose up, startled. His gaze followed my now-pointing finger, and his eyes widened. Wings angling, he made two piercing whistles, and every last pixy in the garden vanished.
Eyes narrowed, I tapped a line. The crow must have felt it and, cawing, he dropped to the ground just inside the garden . . . and dissolved into a puddle of feathers.
“Holy mother of God,” Stef whispered as she fumbled for my spelling salt, spilling it into a hasty circle and invoking it. She watched from behind a green-tinted barrier as the feathers erupted into a fountain, making a mound that grew taller and taller. In a wave, the feathers soaked in and became a tall, annoyed, leather- and black-jeans-clad demon. His red, goat-slitted eyes fixed on me as he brushed the last of the gray down from his softly curling, very long dark hair. A patch of moon shone on him, and he somehow seemed to fit.
“It’s a graveyard. Public space,” he said, his voice as dark as the rest of himself. “I can be here if I want.”
“I got a deed that says otherwise, demon snot,” Jenks said. “How long have you been here spying on Rachel?”
I eyed the rings on his fingers. There seemed to be more of them. He’d found somewhere to spell, apparently. “Have you made up with Al?” I asked, and when he hesitated, I added, louder, “Have you figured out how to separate Bis’s soul from the baku?”
This time, he winced, and my anger spiked.
“Then I don’t want to talk to you,” I said. “Go away. Make an appointment. I’m busy.”
Stef gasped. Yep. I was making demands. But he’d been locked up somewhere for the last two thousand years for practicing elven magic and was now horribly out of date. They wouldn’t even let him in the collective, meaning he had to rely on his own curses. He could, however, shape-shift like a mad dog. I wasn’t saying he was harmless, far from it, but our encounters so far had been mostly . . . studious, not stressful. And I didn’t like him showing up unexpectedly.
Hodin’s chin lifted. “I doubt very much that you could enforce that demand.”
“Yeah?” I pulled heavier on the line, and from behind the circle, the plant pushed out two more flowers.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Jenks exclaimed, and I backed off before I ruined my entire night’s work. “Before you two start throwing stuff, Hodin, what do you want?”
I may have eased up on the ley line, but I hadn’t let it go, and I began to slowly gather a ball of unfocused magic, hidden in my closed fist. My eyebrows rose when I realized it was making Trent’s ring glow, and, not wanting Hodin to see it, I shrugged the energy through my shoulders and down to my left hand instead.
“What he wants doesn’t matter if he and Al are still waging their little war,” I said, and Hodin muttered “Little war?” under his breath, clearly insulted. Fisted magic on my hip, I said, “What is it with you two, anyway?”
“Same as you.” He glanced at Stef cowering behind the stone and lifted his chin, clearly proud. “I freely mix elf and demon magic. The Goddess is a bitch, but a powerful one, and they’re spelling themselves into a corner by ignoring elven magic.”
“It’s more than that, or I’d be shunned right with you,” I said. “What did you do?” My eyebrows rose at the anger that flashed over him. “Or is it what you didn’t do?”
Hodin’s lip twitched. “There’s not enough Brimstone in the world to get me fuddled enough to tell you,” he said haughtily. “You promised to stand up for me. I’m here checking to see that my investment isn’t killing herself with an old, antiquated, outdated curse she found at the back of the cupboard.”
My annoyance fizzled as I recalled the stir in the collective. Nervous, I glanced at the flowering lily before letting the magic gathered in my fist flicker and go out. “Are they giving you trouble?”