I edged around a trio of witches clustered at the small slate table, practicing their pentagrams in colored chalk and comparing notes on proper glyph positioning. “But why would Edden send them here?”
“Jails are full?” Jenks guessed. “The I.S. won’t help, and they have to go somewhere. But if you ask me, he’s sending them to you to get you up off your, ahem, ‘lazy ass’ and do something about Constance.”
“Yeah, okay. I get it,” I said, and Jenks lifted from my shoulder, his chuckle sounding like sunshine.
“It kind of brings the situation home, huh?” he said, turning to track the wad of wet towel arcing through the air to fall with a sodden splat on the witches’ table. One rose with a shout, and I felt a tweak on the ley line when he threw a spell across the room, where it exploded in a shower of sparks and laughter. “Not just a story on the news that you can turn off and ignore for another day.”
Crap on toast, this is awful. “I haven’t been ignoring anything,” I said, scowling when someone fell into the crawlspace with a whoop. It was real all right. Really noisy. Really smelly. Really . . . in my way.
I knew I was still wearing my frown when I finally got to the woman Sharron had sent over. She was about my height, but that was where any resemblance to me besides her curves ended. I was well toned, but she had muscles showing in her arms and wide shoulders. Her straight brown hair was cut below her ears, and her smile was toothy. She looked comfortable and casual in her worn overalls and faded Howlers cap, and I was willing to bet her boots had steel toes under the scuffed brown leather.
“Hi,” I said as the woman shifted to take me in with one long up and down, lingering on the flowers in my hair. I kept my smile in place to hide my dismay at the impression I was making. My church was a mess, and it was beginning to spill out both the front and back doors. “I’m Rachel. You must be Finley?”
Immediately the woman stuck out her hand. It was calloused and strong, and I met her firm pressure with my own. “Rachel. Yes. Sharron said you had a unique property.”
Her voice was low and strong, fitting her. “Ah, it’s usually just me and Jenks,” I said, and the pixy bobbed his hover in greeting, unusually reserved around the woman. “But there’s been several forced evictions, and apparently we’re a paranormal city shelter.” That I would have let them stay regardless didn’t need to be said.
“Yo!” Jenks said, keeping his distance. I could tell she wasn’t a witch or an elf or a living vampire, which left human—a human who was confident enough about herself that walking into a church full of Weres and vamps and working for a demon didn’t faze her. Either Finley knew enough about Inderlanders to hold her own or she blissfully knew nothing at all. And as I eyed her strength and her slight twitch at a loud howl, I was betting it was the former.
“A shelter without a kitchen?” Finley glanced at the temporary burners, plastic silverware, and big trash can overflowing with waste.
I sighed, wincing when someone came in and three people called to him by name. “We, ah, lost it last year when the vampires blew the addition off the back.”
“Oh.” Finley turned on a bootheel, her gaze lingering on the vamps playing cards before the blaring TV. “Well, tell me what you want to see. New windows? Maybe something that opens?”
Yeah. It was starting to smell in here. “That’s a start,” I said, and Jenks’s wings hummed.
“Do you think you could find some replacement colored glass?” Jenks blurted, surprising me.
Finley smiled, her head down over her clipboard-style tablet. “I can try,” she said as she typed into a list. “My supplier makes the odd foray into the abandoned stretches for materials.”
“Cool,” I said, fidgeting as I looked past the noise and mess to the bones of the church. “Maybe you could find a match for the floor and we could get that hole fixed.”
Nodding, Finley came up from her clipboard. “That’s odd,” she said as she looked closer at the perfectly round hole. “It looks as if it was burned out.” She hesitated when neither I nor Jenks said anything, finally looking up at the ceiling to see the matching, repaired hole. “Oh.”
Can I possibly make a worse impression? I wondered, eye twitching as two damp vampires padded past smelling of my shampoo, nothing but towels draped around their waists. “Ah, ideally I’d like the back of the church rebuilt,” I said, trying to turn Finley before she saw them. “But we don’t have the money for that at the moment. Our goal is to bring it to resale condition. You’re the only one brave enough to come out.”
Jenks’s wing pitch dropped, and I could have kicked myself.
“That’s right.” Finley bobbed her head. “Sharron told me you were blackballed. That kind of behavior puts tacks in my tea. You just got yourself a ten percent discount.”
Tacks in my tea? I thought, but Jenks’s wings had brightened in hope.
“Well, in that case,” I said, looking over the sanctuary, “we’d like an estimate on the hole in the floor, new windows, and maybe turning one of the bathrooms into a kitchen for resale.”
Jenks returned to my shoulder as Finley gazed appraisingly at the floor, then the ceiling. The pixies had come in, and the rafters were glowing. “It seems to me as a paranormal shelter, you need an open area for gathering, two separate rooms to accommodate the various Inderland sleep schedules so you don’t have people sleeping in the foyer, and, as you say, a kitchen.”
“True.” Good God. Are people sleeping in the foyer? But she was moving, and I jolted into motion to follow her. “But we have only what you see. You can’t invent space.” Not to mention we wouldn’t care what the church was used for after we sold it.
People were getting out of her way, impressing me. “No, you can’t invent space,” she said as she took another measurement. “But you can use it creatively. You have two separate bathrooms already, yes? One for boys, one for girls. You could do the same with the bedrooms. They’re small, but I could do bunk cots with minimal storage.”
Jenks’s dust slipping down my front was a coppery color of indecision, but he wasn’t saying anything. “Actually,” I said, not sure what was up with Jenks, “if I was dividing it up, I’d have one for the vampires and the other for everyone else. But one of them is my room.”
“Until we leave, Rache,” Jenks said, voice small, and I winced. In the excitement of having someone come out to fix the place, I’d forgotten. I wanted to stay, but Jenks’s feelings meant more than my desire for lots of room and a kick-ass garden.
“Right,” I said, glad I couldn’t see his face. “You know, I could move up into the belfry short term. That would open up my room and alleviate a lot of this.”