“How bad is it?” I asked, yanking open a lower drawer and pulling out my TAKATA STAFF shirt. I figured she would look him up, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this. I was starting to like Pierce, which meant he was bad news.

“Bad enough.”

The shirt scraped my nose as I pulled it on, and feeling a little less exposed, I went to my closet for a pair of jeans. Ivy was sitting on my bed with Rex, her long fingers between the smiling cat’s ears. “He told me he’s a former coven member,” I said, shoving first one leg, then another into the fresh cotton and zipping it up. Much better.

“Once a member, always a member,” Ivy murmured when I turned around with my socks and sat on the end of my bed.

“Even when they kill you for knowing black magic.” Sure, you could kill a busload of people by perverting a white spell, but they’d shun you for doing a harmless black one. Damn hypocrites. Twisting my foot up, I marveled at the pristine smoothness of its underside. “Pierce told me they blew his cover because they didn’t like him summoning demons, but he was doing it to kill them.”

“That’s what I found,” she said slowly, “but there’s more.”

There was always more. “He knows about the demon thing,” I said, seeing her eyes downcast and clearly reluctant to say anything. “He’s not going to hurt me.”

But my confidence trickled away at her expression. “Ask him about Eleison.”

I bent to reach my running shoes, under my bed. They’d cost me a fortune, but were the most comfortable pair of shoes I had since Alcatraz had one pair of my boots and my other was split between here and the ever-after. I had to talk to Al, teil him the gun wasn’t my idea. What an ass, shooting at Al. “Is Eleison his girlfriend?” I asked. Dead girlfriends, I could handle.

Looking ill, Ivy shook her head. “It was an eighteenth-century southern town.”

Was? Oh. My eyes went to the wall as if I could see through it to where Jenks was with Pierce. My breath tight, I asked, “What did he do?”

Ivy let Rex drop to the floor, and the cat waited impatiently under the doorknob. “He used black magic to vaporize it while trying to kill a demon.”

“Mmmm.” Good thing I didn’t like the guy. “Are you sure it was him?”

Ivy nodded. “Four hundred innocents. Dead.”

My fingers tying my shoes were slow. “I guess putting four hundred people in the ground might explain why he was in purgatory.”