“What?”

There was a short silence, then, “Never mind.”

She cracked the window, and with the cool air off the water shifting my hair, I decided to hang back here for a while. Getting her home ASAP was an excellent idea. Vamps were homebodies—high-maintenance, party-till-you-die, don’t-look-at-me-funny-or-I’ll-kill-you homebodies, but homebodies nevertheless. And for obvious reasons. I still didn’t know why she was here. How she was going to handle her hunger without the net of people she had left in Cincinnati worried me. Maybe it’d be easier out of Piscary’s influence. God, I hoped so.

The van eased into motion, and I rifled through my bag for a complexion charm. It was too bumpy to put on makeup, but I could at least look rested and relaxed. And it would get rid of the bags under my eyes, I thought morosely, flipping open my little compact mirror. Squinting in the dim light, I looked closer.

“Hey, Ivy?” I bolted forward, hunched as I lurched up to the front. “Are my freckles gone?” Eyes wide, I leaned out between Ivy and Nick, tilting my head so they both could see.

Ivy glanced from the road to me, then back again. A slow smile spread across her face, telling me my answer before she said a word. “Open your mouth,” she said.

Bewildered, I did, and she looked, making me nervous when she smoothly halted without watching the car that had stopped before us.

From my right came Nick’s soft, “Are they gone?” and Ivy nodded.

“What’s gone?” Shoving the pain amulet at Nick, I opened my mouth and tried to see what they were looking at. “My fillings are gone!” I exclaimed, shocked. Pulse hammering, I looked at my wrist. “That’s still there,” I said, looking at Al’s demon mark and wanting to check the underside of my foot for Newt’s, which I didn’t because of all that hair. I looked at my elbow instead. “But the scar from when I fell off my bike isn’t,” I added.

Twisting, I tried to see the back of my shoulder where I’d cut myself falling into the lawn mower doing cartwheels. Ah, I had been doing the cartwheels, not the lawn mower.

“Your neck is unmarked,” Ivy said softly, and I froze, meeting her eyes in the mirror. There was the faintest swelling of black. “Do you want me to see if it’s really gone?” she asked.

I leaned back, suddenly aware of her. Nick cleared his throat in a subtle show against it, which halted my first impulse to say no. If it was gone, it would be worth all the blackness I had put on my soul. Despite my better judgment, I nodded.

Ivy exhaled long and slow, the sound setting my blood to thrum. Her eyes dilated to a full black, and I stiffened, fixed to them through the rearview mirror. Though her fingers were still on the wheel, I felt as if she was touching my neck with a shocking intimacy, pressing with a light but demanding insistence.