from those Weres, anyway?”
My breath came in a slow, controlled sound. Damn.
Edden chuckled, and I put myself in the car and slammed the door, trying to get his stubby fingers in it. Scowling, I looked at the driver. It was Glenn. He looked as happy as I felt. I had to say something. “You don’t look anything like your dad,” I said snidely.
His gaze was fixed with a ramrod stiffness out the front window. “He adopted me when he married my mother,” he said through clenched teeth.
Jenks zipped in trailing a sunbeam of pixy dust. “You’re Edden’s son?”
“You got a problem with that?” he said belligerently.
The pixy landed on the dash with his hands on his hips. “Nah. All you humans look alike to me.”
Edden bent to put his beaming round face in the window. “Here’s your class schedule,” he said, handing me a yellow half page of paper with printer holes along the sides. “Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Glenn will buy any books you need.”
“Hold it!” I exclaimed, alarm washing through me as the yellow paper crackled in my fingers. “I thought I was just going to poke around the university. I don’t want to take a class!”
“It’s the one Mr. Smather was taking. Be there, or you won’t get paid.”
He was smiling, enjoying this. “Edden!” I shouted as he backed up onto the sidewalk.
“Glenn, take Ms. Morgan and Jenks to their office. Let me know what you find at Dan Smather’s apartment.”
“Yes sir!” he barked. His knuckles gripping the wheel showed a fierce pressure. Pink patches of Ivy-Aid decorated his wrists and neck. I didn’t care that he had heard most of the conversation. He wasn’t welcome, and the sooner he understood that, the better.
“Right at the next corner,” I said, resting my arm on the open window of the unmarked FIB car. Glenn ran his fingertips through his close-cropped hair as he scratched his scalp. He hadn’t said a word the entire way, his jaw slowly unclenching as he realized I wasn’t going to make him talk to me. There was no one behind us, but he signaled before turning onto my street.
He had sunglasses on, taking in the residential neighborhood with its shady sidewalks and patchy lawns. We were well within the Hollows, the unofficial haven for most of Cincinnati’s resident Inderlanders since the Turn, when every surviving human fled into the city and its false sense of security. There has always been some mingling, but for the most part humans work and live in Cincinnati since the Turn, and Inderlanders work and—uh—play in the Hollows.
I think Glenn was surprised the suburb looked like everywhere else—until you noticed the runes scratched in the hopscotch grid, and that the basketball hoop was a third again taller than NBA regulation. It was quiet, too. Peaceful. Some of that could be attributed to Inderland’s schools not letting out until almost midnight, but most was self-preservation.
Every Inderlander over the age of forty had spent their earliest years trying to hide that they weren’t human, a tradition that is unraveling with the cautious fear of the hunted, vampires included. So the grass is mown by sullen teenagers on Friday, the cars are dutifully washed on Saturday, and the trash makes tidy piles at the curb on Wednesday. But the streetlights are shot out by gun or charm as soon as the city replaces them, and no one calls the Humane Society at the sight of a loose dog, as it might be the neighbor’s kid skipping school.
The dangerous reality of the Hollows remains carefully hidden. We know if we color too far out of humanity’s self-imposed lines, old fears will resurface and they will strike out at us. They would lose—badly—and as a whole, Inderlanders like things balanced just as they are. Fewer humans would mean that witches and Weres would start taking the brunt of vampires’ needs. And while the occasional witch “enjoyed” a vampiric lifestyle at his or her own discretion, we’d bind together to take them out if they tried to turn us into fodder. The older vampires know it, and so they make sure everyone plays by humanity’s rules.
Fortunately, the more savage side of Inderlanders naturally gravitates to the outskirts of the Hollows and away from our homes. The strip of nightclubs along both sides of the river is especially hazardous since swarming, high-spirited humans draw the more predatorial of us like fires on a cold night, promising warmth and reassurance of survival. Our homes are kept as human looking as possible. Those who strayed too far from the Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver veneer were encouraged in a rather unique neighborhood intervention party to blend in a little more…or move out to the country where they couldn’t do as much damage. My gaze drifted over the tongue-in-cheek sign peeping out from a bed of foxgloves. DAY SLEEPER. SOLICITORS WILL BE EATEN. For the most part, anyway.
“You can park up there on the right,” I said, pointing.
Glenn’s brow furrowed. “I thought we were going to your office.”
Jenks flitted from my earring to the rearview mirror. “We are,” he said snidely.
Glenn scratched his jawline, his short beard making a rasping sound under his nail. “You run your agency out of a house?”
I sighed at his patronizing lilt. “Sort of. Anywhere here is fine.”
He pulled to the curb at Keasley’s house, the neighborhood’s “wise old man” who had both the medical equipment and know-how of a small emergency room for those who could keep their mouths shut about it. Across the street was a small stone church, its steeple rising high above two gigantic oaks. It sat on an unreal four city lots and had come with its own graveyard.
Renting out a defunct church hadn’t been my idea but Ivy’s. Seeing tombstones out the small stained-glass window of my bedroom had taken a while to get used to, but the kitchen it came with made up for having dead humans buried in the backyard.
Glenn cut the engine, and the new silence soaked in. I scanned the surrounding yards before I got out, a habit begun during my not-so-distant death threats, which I thought prudent to continue. Old man Keasley was on his porch as usual, rocking and keeping a sharp eye on the street. I gave him a wave and got a raised hand in answer. Satisfied he would have warned me if I had needed it, I got out and opened the back door for my canister of fish.
“I’ll get it, ma’am,” Glenn said as his door thumped shut.
I gave him a tired look over the car’s roof. “Drop the ma’am, will you? I’m Rachel.”
His attention went over my shoulder and he visibly stiffened. I whipped around expecting the worst, relaxing as a cloud of pixy children descended in a high-pitched chorus of conversation too fast for me to follow. Papa Jenks had been missed—as usual. My sour mood evaporated as the darting swooping figures in pale green and gold swirled about their dad in a Disney nightmare. Glenn took his sunglasses off, his brown eyes wide and his lips parted.
Jenks made a piercing whistle with his wings, and the horde broke enough for him to hover before me. “Hey, Rache,” he said. “I’ll be out back if you want me.”
“Sure.” I glanced at Glenn and muttered, “Is Ivy here?”
The pixy
