The Undead Pool

David took a sip of his coffee, eyes unfocused as he looked across the street. “One of their core beliefs is that the undead existence is an affront to the soul. Rachel, I’m not liking where this is going.”

I thought about it, the July morning suddenly feeling cold. “You think they might be responsible for putting the undead asleep? To show their living kin what freedom is?” I said incredulously, almost laughing, but David’s expression remained anxious. “Vampires don’t use magic, and that’s what this wave is made of.”

“Well, they’ve been using something to survive without the protection of a master. Why not witch magic?” he said. “What worries me is that up to now they’ve been very timid down to the individual, hiding in the shadows and avoiding conflict. Their entire belief system circles around the original vampire sin and that the only way to save their souls is to promote an immediate second death after the first. That they’d put the masters to sleep doesn’t bother me as much as that they would keep doing it after they realized it promoted vampire violence.” David shook his head. “It doesn’t sound like them.”

But someone was pulling these waves into existence. That the only faction who might want to see an end to the masters didn’t have the chutzpah to do it wasn’t helping. Frustrated, I slumped back against the planter, squinting up at FV mashed into one letter. Behind it, someone had their “magic wall” showing a replica of Edden’s map of vampire violence, the enthusiastic newsman tapping individual dots to bring up the gory details to focus on individual tragedies with the excitement of a close political race.

No undead existence? I thought. Ivy would embrace that, even if she’d never take her second life. Though we’d never talked about it, I knew she was terrified of becoming one of the undead, knowing firsthand what they were capable of in their soulless state and the misery they could heap upon their children, most of them beautiful innocents kept in an intentional childlike state who loved their abusers with the loyalty of an abandoned child suddenly made king.

Kisten had died twice in quick succession, both times in an attempt to keep me alive and unharmed. His final words still haunted me: that God kept their souls for them until they died their second death. To get it back after committing the heinous acts necessary to survive would send them straight to hell—if a hell existed at all. A quick and sudden second death might be the only thing to save a true believer.

Uneasy, I dropped my eyes. Vampires were truly messed up, but I didn’t think a quick second death was the answer.

“I need to talk to a Free Vampire,” I said softly, and David chuckled, a rough hand rubbing his chin and the faint hint of day-old stubble.

“I thought you might say that. I can’t, of course, give you an address, as that would be a breach of Were Insurance policy.”

“David . . .” I protested.

“No-o-o-o,” he drawled, pushing himself up and away from the planter. “Go home. Get some sleep. Give me some time to be subtle.”

Subtle? My lips curled into a grin, and I mock punched him. “Let me know when you’re going, and I’ll come with you. It’ll be a good chance for me to do something with the pack.”

His smile brightened, making the guilt rise anew. “I was hoping you’d say that,” he said, his words warming me from the inside. “Some of the new members have you on a pedestal. That has got to change.”

“You think?” I said, and he gave me a brotherly sideways hug that pulled me off balance.

“I’m so sorry about the pack dinner last month. I didn’t realize it until you’d left. Did McGraff really scoot your chair in and put your napkin in your lap?”

Feeling good, I nodded, embarrassed even now. “Maybe if they saw me screw up once in a while it might help.”

He laughed, the honest sound of it seeming to push the surrounding fear from the nearby people back another inch. “I’ll call before we go out.”

“I’ll wait for it. And thanks for the info. It’s a good place to start.”

Inclining his head, he gave me a squinting smile. “You going to tell Edden?”

“Hell, no!” I blurted, not a glimmer of guilt. Well, not much of one, anyway. This felt like an Inderland matter; humans, if they knew how fragile the balance was, would start taking Free Vampires out one by one and end the curse that way.

“Thanks,” he said, and with a final touch, he turned away. “Give me a day or two!” he said over his shoulder, and I smiled, thinking I didn’t deserve friends like this.

He walked away, and as I watched his grace, my smile slowly faded. If the master vampires didn’t wake up soon, this could get really ugly, really fast.

Seven

Jenks, get me that black marker in my room, will you?” Ivy asked, looking lean and svelte as she stretched over the big farm table to reach the FIB reports Edden had couriered over. She was trying to make a correlation between the misfires and the vampire mischief. She rated the mischief, I rated the misfire severity. Everything went on the map, and so far we’d not found a link from the precise pattern of misfires to the random acts of violence. But we had to do something as we waited for David to call. The waves were coming more frequently now, and people were scared.

“Who was your slave last week?” Jenks said from the sink, and Ivy’s head snapped up.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, you are such a pen geek.”

I stifled a smile, thinking it was odd of her to ask, but Nina was napping in Ivy’s room, exhausted and scared to death that Felix was going to make another play for her. Impossible since all the undead—masters and lackeys both—were sleeping, but she was terrified, and logic meant nothing when you were scared. Jenks could be in and out without her ever knowing.

“Thick or thin?” the pixy asked. He was catching drops from the faucet to wash a cut one of his youngest daughters had come in with, and after giving her a fond swat on the butt, he rose up, smiling after her cheerful vow to stab her brother in the eye as she flew out.

“Thick,” Ivy said, and Jenks darted out of the kitchen.

His dust slowly settled, and I blew it off the pictures arranged before me on the center counter, trying to decide which was more destructive: the first-aid mishap that shifted the spell caster’s skin to coat the bare lightbulb, or the dog walker who suddenly didn’t have a lower intestine. Shuddering, I put a sticky note with the number eight on the dog walker, seven on the skinned man. The dog walker might survive, but the skinned man hadn’t made it to the phone.

We’d had three more waves since the one that caught Trent and me at the bowling alley, and I didn’t like that they were regularly making it across the river and into the Hollows now before dying out. I was still hopeful that the waves were a natural effect that simply had to be understood to be stopped. I didn’t want to believe that anyone, unhappy vampire faction or not, would do this intentionally. Feeling ill, I put a four on the report of an entire middle-school class gone blind in a routine magic experiment.

“Your pen,” Jenks said, a bright gold dust slipping from him as he dropped it into Ivy’s waiting hand before landing on one of the more nasty pictures. Hands on his hips, he stared in disgust as the whining squeak of the pen on paper mixed pleasantly with the shouts of his kids in the sunny garden, where they were playing June bug croquet. It was as much fun as it sounded—unless you were the June bug.

Nervous and fidgety, I opened the bag of chips I’d bought for the weekend—seeing as we probably weren’t going to have the expected Fourth of July cookout. Crunching through a chip, I rated a few more reports. The over-the-counter glass cleaning charm that had melted the glass and then moved on to the insulation in the surrounding walls got a seven despite no deaths. The charm to inflate a tire taking out the lungs of the man who had invoked it got a two simply because it didn’t take much to explode lungs. He hadn’t survived. Then there was the carpet cleaner in the Hollows where the charm ate the carpet away, foam and all. The homeowner had been delighted at the hardwood floor underneath. I wished they all had happy endings.

Weary, I pushed at the picture of the university floor, broken open like a ground fault from the small-pressure charm that was supposed to cut a molecule-thin section of fossil from the parent rock. It got a ten. How in hell was I supposed to rate these without taking into account the cost of human life?

“You okay?” Ivy flipped through a report until she found what she wanted.

“Not really.” I ate a chip, then went to the fridge for the dip. Everything was better with sour cream and chives.

Jenks’s wings hummed at a higher pitch, startled when I dropped the chip dip on the counter. “You really think vampires are doing this?” he asked.

“David seems to think so.” I watched Ivy’s jaw tighten, already knowing what she thought about that theory. “Me, I’m not buying that vampires would use magic on a scale such as this, even if they think it will save the souls of their kin.” Especially after reading that pie-in-the-sky flyer, and I glanced at it on the counter where Ivy had dropped it after I’d showed it to her.

Ivy frowned, still bent over her work. “Did you know they made a saint out of him?”

“Who?” I ate a chip before dumping them into a bowl.

“Kisten,” she said, and I froze, remembering the Kisten look-alike on the bridge. That doesn’t mean they’re responsible for it. Then I did a mental jerk-back. Kisten? A saint?

“No shit!” Jenks exclaimed, and I just stared at her. Our Kisten?

Only now did she look up, the love she once had for him mixing with the sour disbelief for the misled. “Because of what he said to you,” she added. “They think he died his second death with his soul intact and unsullied by the curse.” Her head went back down, leaving me feeling uneasy. “Cincinnati has the highest concentration of Free Vampires in the United States. If they were going to try to eradicate the masters, they’d try it here first.”

“But why? Cincy is in shambles! It’s not working!” I said, scrambling to wrap my head around Saint Kisten. Saint Kisten, with his leather jacket, motorcycle, and windblown blond hair. Saint Kisten, who had killed and hidden crimes to protect his master. Saint Kisten, who willingly sacrificed his second life to save mine . . .

“Nina says she’s seen some of them,” she said, and my attention fixed sharply on her. “I thought she was making it up, but if David comes up empty, I’ll ask her.”

I rolled the top of the bag of chips down, not hungry anymore. “Sure.”

Taking the pen out from between her teeth, Ivy leaned in to the map. “Jenks, what time did you and Rachel leave the golf course yesterday?”

I’d be offended, but Jenks was better than an atomic clock. “We left the parking lot at twenty to eleven,” he said, and I moved the bowl of chips before his dust made them stale.

“And then you got on 71 and came home.” She frowned, waving Jenks off when his dust blanked out the liquid crystal. “No stops between? Good roads? Not a lot of traffic?”

“No,” I said, wondering where this was going. A cold feeling was slipping through me. “Traffic was fine until we got downtown. Then it was the usual stop-and-go.” Worried, I dragged my chair around to sit beside her and stare at her huge monitor and the gently sweeping wave of blue markers. It looked just like every other wave map she’d made, except it was the first and there weren’t as many violent crimes to go with it.

“Okay.” Ivy was clicking, and the city map was covered by a graph. “This is the wave you got caught up in last night at the bowling alley. It’s the first one that the FIB took note on the times associated with the misfires. I’m guessing the wave has a top speed of forty-five miles an hour, but that can vary. That first one seemed to be slower, especially.”

She had a page of math, and I gave it a cursory look. “And?” I asked, and she moved the mouse, bringing up a new map.

“Last night’s wave that ended at the Laundromat was straight. The one that came through this morning before dawn was too, but the tracks were slightly different. It dissipated before it got to the church,” Ivy said. “And since most Inderlanders are asleep about then—”

“I’m not,” Jenks said, and Ivy sighed, bringing up a new map.

“Most magic-using Inderlanders are asleep then, and it wasn’t noticed much. But if you look at the one that hit you first at the golf course and then again at the bridge, you can see they do shift direction.”

My eyes narrowed as she drew her line, making a slight angle shift obvious. If it had continued on its original path, it would have missed the bridge completely.

Ivy was quiet as she eyed me. “Rachel, it shifted to follow you. They all are.”

Panic iced through me. “Oh, hell no!” I said, standing up fast when Ivy’s eyes flashed black at my fear. “You mean something is getting out of the line and is hunting me?” I said, pointing at the monitor.

But Ivy simply sat there, calm and relaxed, that pen back between her teeth. “It’s not very responsive. After you left the golf course, it took almost ten minutes before it realized you were gone and shifted to follow.”

Feeling icky, I stared at the map, wishing Ivy wasn’t so damn good at her job. Jenks hovered between us. “So it’s more like a slime mold after the sun.”

Jenks shrugged. “You have the same aura signature as the line. Maybe it’s trying to get back to it. Whatever it is.”

“You think it’s alive?”

They said nothing, and I stifled a shudder. I didn’t know if I liked this better than Free Vampires trying to change the world. “I have to call Al. Where’s my mirror?”

Jenks spun in the air to look at the front of the church. He darted out, and from the front came a familiar-sounding boom of the heavy oak door crashing into the doorstop, followed by a woman’s voice raised in anger. “Where are my children!”

Oh my God. Ellasbeth. I flushed, the memory of that last kiss with Trent flashing through me.

“You ever hear of knocking?” Jenks said, his voice hardly audible from the distance, but his voice carried when he was ticked. “Hey! You can’t just barge in here!”

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