Dead Witch Walking (8 page)

Suddenly, I realized Ivy’s warm breath was on my cheek.

I sat back, her cross still in my hand. Her eyes were dark and her face blank. There was nothing there. Frightened, I flicked my gaze from her to the cross. I couldn’t just drop it. It would smack her right in the chest. But I couldn’t set it gently down against her, either.

“Here,” I said, terribly uncomfortable at her blank stare. “Take it.”

Ivy reached out, her fingers grazing mine as she grasped the old metal. Swallowing hard, I scooted back into my chair and adjusted Ivy’s robe to cover my legs.

Moving with a provocative slowness, Ivy took her cross off. The silver chain caught against the black sheen of her hair. She pulled her hair free, and it fell back in a cascading shimmer. She set the cross on the table between us. The click of the metal meeting the wood was loud. Eyes unblinking, she curled up in her chair opposite mine with her feet tucked under her and stared at me.

Holy crap
, I thought in a sudden wash of understanding and panic. She was coming on to me. That’s what was going on. How blind could I be?

My jaw clenched as my mind raced to find a way out of this. I was straight. Never a thought contrary to that. I liked my men taller than me and not so strong that I couldn’t pin them to the floor in a surge of passion if I wanted. “Um, Ivy…” I started.

“I was born a vampire,” Ivy stated softly.

Her gray voice ran down my spine, shutting off my throat. Breath held, I met the black of her eyes. I didn’t say anything, afraid it might trigger her into movement, and I desperately didn’t want her to move. Something had shifted, and I wasn’t sure what was going on anymore.

“Both of my parents are vampires,” she said, and though she didn’t move, I felt the tension in the room swell until I couldn’t hear the crickets. “I was conceived and born before my mother became a true undead. Do you know what that means—Rachel?” Her words were slow and precise, falling from her lips with the soft permanence of whispered psalms.

“No,” I said, hardly breathing.

Ivy tilted her head so her hair made an obsidian wave that glistened in the low light. She watched me from around it. “The virus didn’t have to wait until I was dead before shaping me,” she said. “It molded me as I grew in my mother’s womb, giving me a little of both worlds, the living and the dead.”

Her lips parted, and I shuddered at the sight of her sharp teeth. I hadn’t meant to. Sweat broke out on the small of my back, and as if in response, Ivy took a breath and held it. “It’s easy for me to pull an aura,” she said as she exhaled. “Actually, the trick is to keep it suppressed.”

She uncurled from her chair, and my breath hissed in through my nose. Ivy jerked at the sound. Slow and methodical, she put her boots on the floor. “And although my reflexes and strength aren’t as good as a true undead, they’re better than yours,” she said.

I knew all of this, and the question of why she was telling me increased my fear tenfold. Struggling not to show my alarm, I refused to shrink backward as she put her palms flat on the table to either side of her cross and leaned forward.

“What’s more, I’m guaranteed to become an undead, even if I die alone in a field with every last drop of blood inside me. No worries, Rachel. I’m eternal already. Death will only make me stronger.”

My heart pounded. I couldn’t look away from her eyes. Damn. This was more than I wanted to know.

“And you know the best part?” she asked.

I shook my head, afraid my voice would crack. I was walking a knife edge, wanting to know what kind of a world she lived in but fighting to keep from entering it.

Her eyes grew fervent. Torso unmoving, she levered one of her knees up onto the coffee table, and then the other. God help me. She was coming at me.

“Living vamps can bespell people—if they want to be,” she whispered. The softness of her voice rubbed against my skin until it tingled. Double damn.

“What good is it if it only works on those who let you?” I asked, my voice harsh next to the liquid essence of hers.

Ivy’s lips parted to show the tips of her teeth. I couldn’t look away. “It makes for great sex—Rachel.”

“Oh.” The faint utterance was all I could manage. Her eyes were lost in lust.

“And I’ve got my mother’s taste for blood,” she said, kneeling on the table between us. “It’s like some people’s craving for sugar. It’s not a good comparison but it’s the best I can do unless you…try it.”

Ivy exhaled, moving her entire body. Her breath sent a shock reverberating through me. My eyes went wide in surprise and bewilderment as I recognized it as desire. What the hell was going on? I was straight. Why did I suddenly want to know how soft her hair was?

All I’d have to do was reach out. She was inches from me. Poised. Waiting. In the silence, I could hear my heart pound. The sound of it echoed in my ears. I watched in horror as Ivy broke her gaze from mine, running it down my throat to where I knew my pulse throbbed.

“No!” I cried, panicking.

I kicked out, gasping in fear as I found her weight on me, pinning me to the chair.

“Ivy, no!” I shrieked. I had to get her off. I struggled to move. I took a lungful of air, hearing it explode from me in a cry of helplessness. How could I have been so stupid! She was a vampire!

“Rachel—stop.”

Her voice was calm and smooth. Her one hand gripped my hair, pinning my head back to expose my neck. It hurt, and I heard myself whimper.

“You’re making things worse,” she said, and I wiggled, gasping as her grip on my wrist tightened until it hurt.

“Let me go….” I panted, breathless, as if I had been running. “God, help me, Ivy. Let me go. Please. I don’t want this.” I was pleading. I couldn’t help it. I was terrified. I’d seen the pictures. It hurt. God, it was going to hurt.

“Stop,” she said again. Her voice was strained. “Rachel. I’m trying to let go of you, but you have to stop. You’re making things worse. You have to believe me.”

I took a gasping breath and held it. I flicked my gaze at what I could see of her. Her mouth was inches from my ear. Her eyes were black, the hunger in them a frightening contrast to the calm sound of her voice. Her gaze was fixed to my neck. A drop of saliva dropped warm onto my skin. “God, no,” I whispered, shuddering.

Ivy quivered, her body trembling where it touched mine. “Rachel. Stop,” she said again, and terror swept me at the new edge of panic in it. My breath came in a ragged pant. She really was trying to get off me. And by the sound of it, she was losing the battle.

“What do I do?” I whispered.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “I need your help. I didn’t know it was going to be this hard.”

My mouth went dry at the little-lost-girl sound of her voice. It took all my will to close my eyes.

“Don’t move.”

Her voice was gray silk. Tension slammed through me. Nausea gripped my stomach. I could feel my pulse pushing against my skin. For what felt like a full minute I lay under her, all my instincts crying out to flee. The crickets chirped, and I felt tears slip from under my fluttering eyelids as her breath came and went on my exposed neck.

I cried out when her grip on my hair loosened. My breath came in a ragged gasp as her weight lifted from me. I couldn’t smell her anymore. I froze, unmoving. “Can I open my eyes?” I whispered.

There was no answer.

I sat up to find myself alone. There was the faintest sound of the sanctuary door closing and the fast cadence of her boots on the sidewalk, then nothing. Numb and shaken, I reached up to first wipe my eyes and then my neck, smearing her saliva into a cold spot. My eyes rove over the room, finding no warmth in the soft gray. She was gone.

Drained, I stood up, not knowing what to do. I clutched my arms about myself so tight it hurt. My thoughts went back to the terror, and before that, the flash of desire that had washed through me, potent and heady. She had said she could only bespell the willing. Had she lied to me, or had I really wanted her to pin me to the chair and rip open my throat?

T
he sun was no longer slanting into the kitchen, but it was still warm. Not warm enough to reach the core of my soul, but nice. I was alive. I had all my body parts and fluids intact. It was a good afternoon.

I was sitting at the uncluttered end of Ivy’s table, studying the most battered book I had found in the attic. It looked old enough to have been printed before the Civil War. Some of the spells I’d never heard of. It made for fascinating reading, and I would admit the chance to try one or two of them filled me with a dangerous titillation. None even hinted at the dark arts, which pleased me to no end. Harming someone with magic was foul and wrong. It went against everything I believed in—and it wasn’t worth the risk.

All magic required a price paid by death in various shades of severity. I was strictly an earth witch. My source of power came gently from the earth through plants and was quickened by heat, wisdom, and witch blood. As I dealt only in white magic, the cost was paid by ending the life of plants. I could live with that. I wasn’t going to delve into the morality of killing plants, otherwise I’d go insane every time I cut my mom’s lawn. That wasn’t to say that there weren’t black earth witches—there were—but black earth magic had nasty ingredients like body parts and sacrifices. Just gathering the materials needed to stir a black spell was enough to keep most earth witches white.

Ley line witches, however, were another story. They drew their power right from the source, raw and unfiltered through living things. They, too, required death, but it was a subtler death—the slow death of the soul, and it wasn’t necessarily theirs. The soul-death needed by white ley line witches wasn’t as severe as that required by black witches, going back to the cutting the grass analogy vs. slaughtering goats in your basement. But creating a powerful spell designed to harm or kill left a definite wound on one’s being.

Black ley line witches got around that by fostering that payment onto someone else, usually attaching it right on the charm to give the receiver a double whammy of back luck. But if the person was insanely “pure of spirit” or more powerful, the cost, though not the charm, came right back to the maker. It was said that enough black on one’s soul made it easy for a demon to pull you involuntarily into the ever-after.

Just as my dad had been,
I thought as I rubbed my thumb against the page before me. I knew with all my being that he had been a white witch to the end. He would have had to be able to find his way back into reality, even though he didn’t last to see the next sunrise.

A small sound jerked my attention up. I stiffened upon finding Ivy in a black silk robe, slumped against the doorframe. The memory of last night washed through me, knotting my stomach. I couldn’t stop my hand from creeping up to my neck, and I changed the motion to adjusting my earring as I pretended to study the book before me. “ ’Morning,” I said cautiously.

“What time is it?” Ivy asked in a ragged whisper.

I flicked a glance at her. Her usually smooth hair was rumpled, waves from her pillow creasing it. Her eyes had dark circles under them, and her oval face was slack. Early afternoon lassitude had completely overwhelmed her air of stalking predator. She held a slim leather-bound book in her hand, and I wondered if her night had been as sleepless as mine.

“It’s almost two,” I said warily as I used a foot to push out a chair across the table from me so she wouldn’t sit beside me. She seemed all right, but I didn’t know how to treat her anymore. I was wearing my crucifix—not that it would stop her—and my silver ankle knife—which wasn’t much better. A sleep amulet would drop her, but they were in my bag, sitting out of easy reach on a chair. It would take a good five seconds to invoke one. In all honesty, though, she didn’t look like much of a threat right now.

“I made muffins,” I said. “They were your groceries. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Uh,” she said, shuffling across the shiny floor to the coffeepot in her black slippers. She poured herself a cup of lukewarm brew, leaning back against the counter to sip it. Her wish was gone from around her neck. I wondered what she had wished for. I wondered if it had anything to do with last night. “You’re dressed,” she whispered as she slumped into the chair I had kicked out for her in front of her computer. “How long have you been up?”

“Noon.”
Liar
, I thought. I’d been up all night pretending to sleep on Ivy’s couch. I decided to officially start my day when I put my clothes back on. Ignoring her, I turned a yellowing page. “Spent your wish, I see,” I murmured cautiously. “What was it?”

“None of your business,” she said, the warning obvious.

My breath left me in a slow exhalation, and I kept my eyes lowered. An uncomfortable silence descended and I let it grow, refusing to break it. I had almost left last night. But the certain death waiting for me outside Ivy’s protection outweighed the possible death at Ivy’s hands. Maybe. Maybe I wanted to know what it felt like for her teeth to sink into me.

This was
not
where I wanted my thoughts to go. Ivy had scared the crap out of me, but seeing her in the bright light of post noon, she looked human. Harmless. Dare I say, a grump?

“I have something I want you to read,” she said, and I looked up as the thin book she had been holding hit the table between us. There was nothing written on the cover, the embossing almost completely worn away.

“What is it?” I said flatly, not reaching for it.

Eyes dropping, she licked her lips. “I’m sorry about last night,” she said, and my gut tightened. “You probably won’t believe me, but it scared me, too.”

“Not as much as you scared me.” Working with her for a year hadn’t prepared me for last night. I’d only seen her professional side. I hadn’t considered she was different away from the office. I flicked my eyes up at her and away. She looked entirely human. Neat trick, that.

“I haven’t been a practicing vamp for three years,” she said softly. “I wasn’t prepared for…I didn’t realize—” She looked up, her brown eyes pleading. “You have to believe me, Rachel. I didn’t want that to happen. It’s just that you were sending me all wrong signals. And then you got frightened, and then you panicked, and then it got worse.”

“Worse?” I said, deciding anger was better than fear. “You nearly ripped out my throat!”

“I know,” she implored. “I’m sorry. But I didn’t.”

I fought to keep from shuddering as I remembered the warmth of her saliva on my neck.

She nudged the book closer. “I know we can avoid a repeat of last night. I want this to work. There’s no reason it can’t. I owe you something for taking one of your wishes. If you leave, I can’t protect you against the vamp assassins. You don’t want to die at their hands.”

My jaw clenched. No. I didn’t want to die at the hands of a vampire. Especially one who would say she was sorry while killing me.

I met her gaze across the cluttered table. She sat in her black robe and kick-off slippers, looking as dangerous as a sponge. Her need for me to accept her apology was so raw and obvious, it was painful. I couldn’t do it. Not yet. I reached a finger out to pull the book closer. “What is it?”

“A—uh—dating guide?” she said hesitantly.

I took a quick breath and drew my hand back as if stung. “Ivy. No.”

“Wait,” she said. “That’s not what I mean. You’re giving me mixed signals. My head knows you don’t mean it, but my instincts…” Her brow furrowed. “It’s embarrassing, but vampires, whether living or dead, are driven by instincts triggered mostly by…smell?” she finished apologetically. “Just read up on the turn-ons, okay? And don’t do them.”

I settled back into my chair. Slowly, I pulled the book closer, seeing how old it was by the binding. She had said instincts, but I thought hunger was more accurate. It was only the realization of how hard it had been for her to admit that she could be manipulated by something as stupid as smell that kept me from throwing the book back in her face. Ivy prided herself on her control, and to have confessed such a weakness to me told me more than a hundred apologies that she was really sorry. “All right,” I said flatly, and she gave me a relieved, closed-lipped smile.

She took a muffin and pulled the evening edition of the
Cincinnati Enquirer
that I had found against the front door to her. The air was still tense, but it was a start. I didn’t want to leave the security of the church, but Ivy’s protection was a double-edged sword. She had bottled up her blood lust for three years. If she broke, I might be just as dead.

“ ‘Councilman Trenton Kalamack blames I.S. negligence in secretary’s death,’ ” she read, clearly trying to change the subject.

“Yeah,” I said cautiously. I put her book in the pile with my spell books to read later. My fingers felt dirty, and I wiped them on my jeans. “Ain’t money grand? There’s another story of him being cleared of all suspicion of dealing in Brimstone.”

She said nothing, turning pages between bites of muffin until she found the article. “Listen to this,” she said softly. “He says, ‘I was shocked to learn of Mrs. Bates’s second life. She seemed the model employee. I will, of course, pay for her surviving son’s education.’ ” Ivy gave a short snort of mirthless laughter. “Typical.” She turned to the comics. “So will you be spell crafting today?”

I shook my head. “I’m going to the records vault before they close for the weekend. This,” I flicked a finger at the paper, “is useless. I want to see what really happened.”

Ivy set down her muffin, thin eyebrows high in question.

“If I can prove Trent is dealing in Brimstone and give him to the I.S.,” I said, “they’ll forget about my contract. They have a standing warrant for him.”
And then I can get the hell out of this church,
I added silently.

“Prove Trent runs Brimstone?” Ivy scoffed. “They can’t even prove if he’s human or Inderlander. His money makes him slipperier than frog spit in a rainstorm. Money can’t buy innocence, but it can buy silence.” She picked at her muffin. Dressed in her robe and with her sloppy hair, she could have been any of my sporadic roommates over the past years. It was unnerving. Everything changed when the sun was up.

“These are good,” Ivy said as she held up a muffin. “Tell you what. I’ll buy groceries if you make dinner. Breakfast and lunch I can get on my own, but I don’t like cooking.”

I made a face in understanding and agreement—I didn’t appreciate the finer arts of culinary expertise, either—but then I thought about it. It would take up my time, but not having to go to the store sounded great. Even if Ivy only offered so I wouldn’t have to put my life on the line for a can of beans, it sounded fair. I’d be cooking either way, and cooking for two was easier than cooking for one. “Sure,” I said slowly. “We can try it for a while.”

She made a soft noise. “It’s a deal.”

I glanced at my watch. It was one-forty. My chair squeaked across the linoleum as I stood up and grabbed a muffin. “Well, I’m out of here. I’ve got to get a car or something. This bus thing is awful.”

Ivy laid out the comics atop the clutter surrounding her computer. “The I.S. isn’t going to let you just walk in.”

“They have to. Public record. And no one’s going to tag me with a bunch of witnesses they will have to pay off. Cuts into their profits,” I finished bitterly.

The arch to Ivy’s eyebrows said more clearly than words she wasn’t convinced.

“Look,” I said as I pulled my bag from atop a chair and sorted through it. “I was going to use a disguise spell, all right? And I’ll leave at the first sign of trouble.”

The amulet I waved in the air seemed to satisfy her, but as she went back to her comics, she muttered, “Take Jenks with you?”

It really wasn’t a question, and I grimaced. “Yeah. Sure.” I knew he was a babysitter, but as I poked my head out the back door and yelled for him, I decided it would be nice having the company, even if it was a pixy.