Motions slow and provocative, I went up the worn back-porch steps, daring the coven to take a potshot at me, but it was probable that Vivian was at the coven, relating how I’d given Brooke to a demon. They had to have heard about the fairies by now, too. Ceri had taken the survivors with her when she’d left in the same cab I’d pulled up in this morning with Nick. All but one fairy, apparently, which I had yet to see and Jenks didn’t know about.

My hand on the screen door, I looked over my shoulder at the garden, remembering how dangerous it had been when I was four inches tall. Fairies and pixies were the Arnolds of the Inderland world as far as I was concerned. Suddenly uneasy, I looked to the invisible ley line, feeling like someone was watching. My eyes rose to see Bis sleeping on the steeple. Creeped out, I darted inside as if the monster under the bed had taken up residence under my porch.

The screen door smacked behind me, making me jump, and I kicked my running sneakers off, leaving chunks of dirt that Ivy would eventually yell at me about. I shut the main door by leaning back against the thick wood, and my gaze fell on the tiny arrows still in Ivy’s couch. Had it been only yesterday?

Ivy and Nick’s soft bickering in the kitchen was soothing. They’d been at it since downloading and printing out the blueprints of Trent’s outbuildings from the city’s public files. Ivy insisted that she’d gone through a secure server and that the download would be undetected, but I was sure we were on someone’s list now.

Twigs in hand, I went into the kitchen, my peace growing as I found them reasonably calm at Ivy’s big table, construction blueprints between them. Nick and Ivy had been modifying them, changing what was on file at the city to match what had actually happened at the construction site. The taped-together pages covered the table, and most of Ivy’s stuff had been stacked on the floor to make more room.

Only Pierce looked up as I entered, standing at the fridge with a glass and playing with the water dispenser. At the table, the argument over some small placement of a camera continued. Ivy was edging into a vampy state, her eyes dark and motions quick, but she wasn’t sultry, which was her big tell for losing it. Her black mood wasn’t bothering Nick, and he was strenuously arguing a point, erasing her marks and penciling in his own. The white flash of her new cast had been covered with a black stretchy fabric that might have been a sock with the toe cut off. I had no doubts that being in a cast wasn’t going to slow her down at all.