A Fistful of Charms (42 page)

Kisten's sigh was heavy. “Will you tell her that there was a riot in the mall downtown last night? It was at four in the morning so it was mostly living vampires, thank God, and some Weres. The I.S. handled it, but it's going to get worse. I don't want a new master vampire in the city, and neither does anyone else.”

I stood before the rack of pixy dust and rifled through the hanging vials, reading the tiny cards attached to each. If Piscary lost control of Cincinnati, Trent would have free rein. But I didn't think it was a power play by the undead vampires
or
Trent. It was more likely that the riot had been the Mackinaw Weres looking for me. No wonder Walter had agreed to a thirty-six-hour truce. He had to get his pack together.

Tired, I let the vials slip through my fingers. “I'm sorry, Kisten. We have a couple of days before we can call this done. It depends on how fast I can do the prep work.”

He silently took that in, and I could hear Ceri singing with the pixies in the background. “Can I help?” he asked, and my throat tightened at the concern in his voice, even as I heard his reluctance to leave Cincinnati. But there wasn't anything he could do. It would be over one way or the other by tomorrow night.

“No,” I said softly. “But if we don't call you by tomorrow midnight, we're in trouble.”

“And I'll fly up there in two hours,” he assured me. “Are you sure there's nothing I can do? Call someone? Anything?”

Shaking my head, I fingered a book on how to knot love charms from hair. These things were illegal. Small towns have very little in the way of policing witches, but then I saw
that it was a fake, a novelty item. “We have it okay,” I said. “Will you feed Mr. Fish for me?”

“Sure. Ivy told me.”

“He only needs four grains,” I rushed. “Any more and you'll kill him.”

“Don't worry about it. I've had fish before.”

“And stay out of my room,” I added.

He started making a fake radio hiss, whistling and popping. “Rachel? The connection is going bad,” he said, laughing. “I think I'm losing you.”

A smile, the first in days, touched me. “I love you too,” I said, and he stopped.

There was a suspicious hesitation. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Worry slid through me. He was starting to pay attention. “Why?” I said, realizing my hand had gone up to cover my neck. “Um, yeah,” I reiterated, thinking it had sounded guilty. “I'm just stressed. Nick…” I hesitated. I couldn't tell him Nick had been playing kiss-and-tell. It was embarrassing to have been that stupid. “I told Nick to kiss off, and it bothered me,” I said.
Not really a lie. Not really.

He was silent, then, “Okay. Can I talk to Ivy?”

Relieved, I exhaled into the mike. “Sure.”

I handed the phone to Ivy—who had come up behind me to listen, presumably—but she closed the top and handed it back. “He can handle it a few days more,” she said, then turned to the counter. “Do you have everything? It's getting late.”

Tension edged her voice. She was trying to hide her mood, but not doing very well. Concerned, I took the basket from her. “Everything but the dust. Maybe she has some behind the counter. God, I'm tired,” I finished without thinking. Ivy didn't say anything, and I put the basket on the counter, eyeing the aphrodisiac bottle Ivy set by her catnip.

“What?” Ivy said, seeing me look at it.

“Nothing. Why don't you put your stuff in with mine?”

She shook her head. “I'm going to get something else too, but thanks.”

The woman behind the counter set her coffee on her stained hot plate, her fingers reaching to take my things out of the basket. “Will that be all then, ladies?” she asked, hiding her wariness of Ivy behind her professionalism.

“You don't happen to have clock dust?” I asked, feeling it was a lost cause.

Immediately she lost her tinge of her nervousness. “From stopped clocks? Sure enough I do. How much do you need?”

“Thank the Turn,” I said, leaning against the counter as my muscles started to feel the weight of standing too long. “I didn't want to have to go to Art Van and dust their floor samples. I just need a, uh, pinch.”

Pinch, dash, smidgen. Yeah, real exact measurements. Ley line magic sucked.

The woman glanced at the front door. “Be but a sec,” she said, then, with the fixative in her hand, she went into a back room. I stared at Ivy.

“She took my stuff,” I said, bewildered.

Ivy shrugged. “Maybe she thinks you're going to run out the door with it.”

It seemed like forever, but the woman came back, her loud steps warning us. “Here you go,” she said, carefully setting a tiny black envelope down with the fixative. The bottle now had a string tag around it with an expiration date. I picked it up, feeling a different weight to it.

“This isn't the same bottle,” I said suspiciously, and the woman smiled.

“That's the real product,” she explained. “There aren't enough witches up here to support a charm shop, so I mix tourist trinkets with the real stuff. Why sell real fixative to a fudgie when they're just going to put it on a shelf and pretend they know what to do with it?”

I nodded, now realizing what had been bothering me. “It's all fake? None of it is real?”

“Most of it's real,” she said, her ringed fingers punching the register with a stiff firmness. “But not the rare items.” She looked at my pile. “Let me see, you're making an earth
magic disguise charm, a ley line inertia joke spell, and…” She hesitated. “What on earth are you going to use the fixative for? I don't sell much of that.”

“I'm fixing something,” I said guardedly. Crap, what if the Weres found out? They might realize I was going to move the power of the artifact before we blew it up. If I asked her to keep quiet about it, she would likely blab it all over the place. “It's for a joke,” I added.

Her eyes flicked to Ivy and she grinned. “Mum's the word,” she said. “Is it for that gorgeous hunk of man with you? Saints preserve us, he's beautiful. I'd love to trick him.”

She laughed, and I managed a weak smile. Did the entire city know Jenks? Ivy rocked back a step in irritation, and the woman finished wrapping my black candle in matching tissue paper and bundled everything into a paper sack. Still smiling, she totaled it up.

“It'll be $85.33 with tax,” she said, clearly satisfied.

I stifled my sigh and swung my shoulder bag forward to get my wallet. This was why I had a witch's garden—and a clan of pixies to maintain it. Not only was ley line magic stupid, but it was expensive if you didn't render your own fetal pigs for making candles.
Just this once.

Ivy pushed her two things forward, and looking the proprietor in the eye, said clearly, “Just put it on my bill. I need three ounces of Special K. Medicinal grade, please.”

My lips parted and I flushed. Special K? That was Cincy slang for Brimstone, K of course said to stand for Kalamack.

But the woman hesitated only briefly. “Not from the I.S., are you?” she asked warily.

“Not anymore,” Ivy muttered, and flustered, I turned my back on them. Ivy saw nothing wrong with an illegal drug that had kept vampire society healthy and intact for untold years, but buying in front of me made me feel all warm and fuzzy.

“Ivy,” I protested when the woman disappeared into the back room again. “Trent's?”

Ivy gave me a sidelong glance, eyebrows high. “It's the
only brand I'll buy. And I need to restock my cache. You used it all.”

“I'm not taking any more,” I hissed, then straightened when the woman returned, holding a palm-sized package wrapped in masking tape.

“Medicinal?” she said, glancing at the aphrodisiac bottle. “You store it in that, lucky duck, and you'll be the one that's going to need medical attention.”

Ivy's face blanked in surprise, and I dragged my bag from the counter, ready to flee. “It's an aphrodisiac bottle,” I said. “Don't pick things up unless you know what they are—Alexia.”

Ivy looked as guiltless as a puppy as she dropped the package into her open purse.

The woman smiled at us, and Ivy counted out thirteen hundred-dollar bills and coolly handed them over.

I blinked. Holy shit. Kalamack's medicinal stuff was five times as expensive as the street variety.

“Keep the change,” Ivy said, taking my elbow and moving me to the door.

Twelve hundred dollars? I had sucked down Twelve hundred dollars of drugs in less than twenty-four hours? And that wasn't counting Jenks's contribution. “I don't feel well,” I said, putting a hand to my stomach.

“You just need some air.”

Ivy guided me across the store and took my bag from me. There was the jingle of the door, and a flush of cool air. It was dark and cold on the street, matching my mood. Behind us came the sliding sound of an oiled lock, and the
CLOSED
sign flickered on. The store's posted hours were from noon to midnight, but after a sale like that, you deserved to go home early.

Fumbling, I put a hand on the bench under a blue and white trolley-stop sign and sat down. I didn't want to chance spewing in Kisten's Corvette. It was the only thing we could drive around town in now that the truck had been seen fleeing a crash and neither Ivy nor I wanted to get in the van.

Shit. My roommates were turning me into a Brimstone addict.

Ivy gracefully folded herself to sit beside me, all the while scanning the street. “Medicinal grade is processed six times,” she said, “to pull out the endorphin stimulants, hallucinogenic compounds, and most of the neuron stimulators, to leave only the metabolism upper. Technically speaking, the chemical structure is so different, it's not Brimstone.”

“That's not helping,” I said, putting my head between my knees. There was gum stuck to the sidewalk, and I nudged it with my toe, finding it hardened to an immovable lump from the cold.
Breathe: one, two, three. Exhale: one, two, three, four.

“Then how about if you hadn't taken it, you'd be laying in bed needing Jenks's help to use the bathroom?”

I pulled my head up and took a breath. “That helps. But I'm still not taking any more.”

She gave me a short-lived close-lipped smile, and I watched her face go as empty as the dark street. I didn't want to get up yet. I was tired, and it was the first time we had been together alone since—since the bite. Returning to the motel room with Jenks, Jax, the kitten, and Nick to make my peachy-keen illegal charms and black curses had all the appeal of eating cold lima beans.

A station wagon passed us, the muffler spewing a blue smoke that would have earned the driver a ticket in Cincinnati. I was cold, and I hunched into my coat. It was only eleven-thirty, but it looked like four in the morning. “You okay?” Ivy said, obviously having seen me shiver.

“Cold,” I said, feeling like a hypochondriac.

Ivy crossed her legs at her knees. “Sorry,” she whispered.

I lifted my gaze, finding her expression lost in the shadow from the streetlight behind her. “It's not your fault I didn't bring my winter coat.”

“For biting you,” she said, her voice low. Her attention touched upon my stitches, then dropped to the pavement.

Surprised, I scrambled to put my thoughts in order. I'd
thought I was going to be the one to bring this up. Our pattern had always been: Ivy does something to scare me, Ivy tells me what I did wrong, I promise Ivy not to do it, we never bring it up again. Now she wanted to talk?

“Well, I'm not,” I finally said.

Ivy's head came up. Shock shone from her dark eyes, raw and unhidden. “You said on the phone that you'd done some thinking,” she stammered. “That you were going to make smarter decisions. You're leaving the firm, aren't you? As soon as this run is over?”

Suddenly I saw her depression in an entirely new light, and I almost laughed in relief for my misunderstanding. “I'm not leaving the firm!” I said. “I meant smarter decisions on who I trusted. I don't want to leave. I want to try to find a blood balance with you.”

Ivy's lips parted. Turned as she was to me, the streetlight glinted on her perfect teeth, and then she snapped her mouth shut.

“Surprise,” I said weakly, my pulse fast. This was the scariest thing I'd done in a while—including standing down three Were packs.

For six heartbeats Ivy stared at me. Then she shook her head. “No,” she said firmly, resettling herself to face forward and put herself in shadow. “You don't understand. I lost control. If Jenks hadn't interfered, I would have killed you. Jenks is right. I'm a danger to everyone I care about. You have no idea how hard it is to find and maintain a blood relationship. Especially if I leave you unbound.” Her voice was calm but I could hear panic in it. “And I'm by
God
not going to bind you to me to make it easier. If I do, everything would be what
I
want, not what
we
want.”

I thought of Jenks's warning and had a doubt, then remembered Kisten telling me of her past and felt a stab of fear. But the memory of her heavy sobs as she lay crumpled on the pavement filled me, the despair in her eyes when Jenks said she ruined everything she cared about. No, he had
said she ruined everything she loved. And seeing that same despair hiding in her fierce words, determination filled me. I couldn't let her believe that.

“You said I needed to trust the right people,” I said softly. Heart pounding, I hesitated. “I trust you.”

Ivy threw her hands in the air in exasperation and turned to face me. “God, Rachel, I could have killed you! As in dead! You know what that means? Dead? I do!”

My own ire flared, and I sat up. “Yeah? Well…I can be a little more savvy,” I said belligerently. “I can take some responsibility for keeping things under control, be a little more aware of what's going on and not let you lose yourself…like that. We'll do better next time.”