Where Demons Dare. Kim Harrison

       Three

      I set the stack of unopened desk organizers I’d bought last month on the scratched hardwood floor of the sanctuary, wincing at the high-pitched squeal of pixy children as they swarmed into the nook of my desk that I had just opened up. They weren’t moving in for the winter yet, but Matalina was getting a jump on prepping my desk. I couldn’t blame her for the fall cleaning. I didn’t use my desk much, and there was more dust gathering than work done at it.

      The urge to sneeze took me, and I held my breath, eyes watering until the feeling evaporated. Thank you, God. I glanced at Jenks at the front of the church, where he was keeping a fair number of his younger kids busy, and out of the way, with decorating the sanctuary for Halloween. He was a good dad, a part of him that was easy to overlook when he was out busting bad guys with me. I hoped I found half as good a man when I was ready to start a family.

      The memory of Kisten—blue eyes smiling—swam up, and my heart seemed to clench. It had been months, but reminders of him still came fast and hard. And I didn’t even know where the thought of children had come from. There wouldn’t have been any with Kisten, unless we fell back on the age-old tradition of borrowing a girlfriend’s brother or husband for a night, practices born long before the Turn, when to be a witch would sign your death warrant. But now even that hope was gone.

      Jenks met my eyes, and a gentle dusting of gold contentment slipped from him as he watched Matalina. His pretty wife looked great. She had been fine all this summer, but I knew Jenks was watching her like the proverbial hawk with the onset of the cold. Matalina barely looked eighteen, but pixy life spans were a mere twenty years, and it made me heartsick that it was only a matter of time before we’d be doing this with Jenks as well. A secure territory and steady food supply could do only so much in lengthening their lives. We were hoping that by removing the need for them to hibernate they all would benefit, but there was a limit to what good living, willow bark, and fern seed could do.

      Turning away before Jenks could see my misery, I put my hands on my hips and stared at my cluttered desk.

      “’Scuse me,” I said, pitching my voice high as I edged my hands among the darting shapes of Matalina’s eldest daughters. They were chatting so fast that it sounded like they were speaking another language. “Let me get those magazines out of your way.”

      “Thank you, Ms. Morgan!” one hollered cheerfully, and I carefully pulled out the stack of Modern Witchcraft for Today’s Young Woman out from under her as she rose up. I never read them, but I hadn’t been able to turn down the kid on my doorstep. I hesitated with the stack in my arms, not knowing if I should throw them out or put them next to my bed to someday read, maybe, finally dumping them on the swivel chair to deal with later.

      A fluttering of black paper rose up as Jenks flew into the rafters with a small paper bat trailing after him by a thin thread. The smell of rubber cement mixed with the spicy scent of chili slow-cooking in the Crock-Pot Ivy had bought at a yard sale, and Jenks taped the string to a beam before dropping down for another. The swirl of silk and four-part harmony pulled my attention back to my desk, now barren, making the tiny nooks and drawers a pixy paradise done in oak. “All set, Matalina?” I asked, and the tiny woman smiled with a duster made from the fluff of a dandelion in her hand.

      “This is wonderful,” she said, her wings a blur of nothing. “You are too generous, Rachel. I know how much of a bother we all are.”

      “I like you staying with us,” I said, knowing I’d find pixy tea parties in my spice drawer before the week was through. “You make everything more alive.”

      “Noisy, rather,” she said, sighing as she looked to the front of the church and the papers Ivy had spread to protect the hardwood floor from the arts and crafts. Pixies living in the church was a bloody nuisance, but I’d do anything to put off the inevitable another year. If there was a charm or spell, I’d use it in a heartbeat, regardless of its legality. But there wasn’t. I had looked. Several times. Pixy life spans sucked.

      I smiled wistfully at Matalina and her daughters as they set up housekeeping, and after rolling the top of the desk down to leave the now-traditional one-inch gap, I grabbed my clipboard and looked for somewhere to sit. On it was a growing list of ways to detect a demon summoning. In the margin was a short list of people who might want me dead. But there were safer ways to kill someone than sending a demon after them, and I was betting the first list would get me closer to who was summoning Al than the second. After I exhausted the local stuff, I’d look out of state.

      The lights were high and the heat was on against the hint of chill in the air, turning the autumn night to a noon summer. The church’s sanctuary wasn’t much of a sanctuary anymore; the pews and altar had been removed even before I had moved in, leaving a wonderfully open space with narrow stained-glass windows stretching from knee height to the tall ceiling. My desk was atop the shallow stage up front, to the right of where the altar had been.

      Back by the dark foyer was Ivy’s seldom-played baby grand piano, and tucked into the front corner across from my desk was a new cluster of furniture to give us somewhere to interview prospective clients without dragging them all the way through the church to our private living room at the back. Ivy had a plate of crackers, cheese, and pickled herring arranged on the low coffee table, but it was the pool table my gaze lingered on. It had been Kisten’s, and I knew that the reason I was drawn to it was because I missed him.

      Ivy and Jenks had given the table to me on my birthday. It was the only piece of him Ivy had taken besides his ashes and her memories. I think she’d given it to me as an unspoken statement that he’d been important to both of us. He had been my boyfriend, but he had been Ivy’s onetime live-in and confidant, and probably the only person who truly understood the warped hell that their master vampire, Piscary, had put them through with his version of love.

      Things had changed radically in the three months since Ivy’s former girlfriend, Skimmer, had killed Piscary and landed herself in jail under a wrongful-death charge. Instead of the expected turf war, with Cincy’s secondary vampires struggling to assert their dominance, a new master vampire had stepped in from out of state, one so charismatic that no one rose to challenge him. I’d since learned that bringing in new blood was commonplace, and there were provisions set up in Cincinnati’s charter to deal with the sudden absence of a city power.

      What was unusual, though, was that the new master vampire had taken in every single one of Piscary’s displaced vamps instead of