There was a high, tinkling shout, and I carefully peered around the table to see Jax’s wings turn a shocking shade of yellow. As if it was a signal, a slew of pixy arrows rained down. The encroaching vanguard of purple-winged fairies went down with tattered wings. With a bloodthirsty yell, six of Jenks’s younger kids dove out of my old teakettle, hidden under the shrubs, and attacked them with cold steel and vicious shouts. Three seconds later, the fairies lay dead and his children were giving one another high fives. Holy shit. Jenks’s kids were savages!

“Rache!” Jenks barked above me, and I looked up, my expression still holding the horror. “What are you doing out here?” he asked, rising up and then down to avoid a spear.

“Taking notes,” I said, nudging Pierce to take his bubble down long enough to give Jenks a place to rest. “Have you seen Ivy?” God, if she was injured somewhere …

The haze of green-tinted ever-after blinked out of existence, then returned. Jenks hovered before me with the scent of crushed dandelions, bringing my senses awake and filling me with the need to move. “She’s practicing her moves up front,” he said cryptically. Worried, I started to rise, only to be jerked back down. “She’s fine!” Jenks said, laughing at my fear. “Don’t go looking for her. She’s vamped out.” He smiled, looking devilish. “Kinda scary.

“Pierce,” Jenks said, surprising me. “Rache can’t do anything here. Jump her out.”

“I can’t jump anyone but myself,” Pierce said. “Only a demon or a skilled gargoyle, which Bis is not, can carry another.”

A familiar scream ripped through the air, lifting over the fairy battle cries and the breathy sounds of tattered wings struggling for lift. Jenks lifted up to the limits of Pierce’s bubble, and both Pierce and I looked around the edge of the table.

“Sweet mother of Mary,” Pierce whispered as Ivy vaulted over the wall between the street and the church, her curved sword in her good hand. Dodging tiny spears, she took out two fairies with ugly splats of sound. Shaking them off, she rolled to the shed, eyes wild and hair settling to hang perfectly as her back slammed up against the old wood. Holy crap, she was like Mary Lou Retton on Brimstone!

“Let me out, Rache!” Jenks shouted, but I wasn’t the one holding the circle.

Ivy jumped into motion an instant before a barrage of arrows thunked into the shed where her middle would have been. A smattering of tiny arrows was embedded in her new cast, and she wiped them off using the sword blade. With vampiric speed and grace, she bounded back to the stump and the protection of Jenks’s kids.

“Ivy!” I called, wanting her to join us—even if she was vamped out.