“I didn’t have a choice,” Nick was saying over their noise. “Rachel, I owed them, thanks to you running off with the focus. I told you how to get out. And I flew back here to get you home! Will you listen to me? I’m trying to help!”

“Trying to help?” Ivy strode across the kitchen, pixies darting out of her way in swirls of color. Nick made a dash for the sanctuary, but she was faster. Like a cat after a bat, she snagged him, her hand gripping him under his throat as she threw him across the kitchen to slam into my mom’s old fridge. He started to slip down, and she had him again, lifting him up and holding him there while he tried to make his lungs work. Atop the fridge, the Brimstone cookie jar wobbled and would have fallen off if not for the pixies working as a team to balance it.

“You summoned Rachel to San Francisco?” she said, showing her sharp canines. “She was driving. You could have killed us all!”

Jenks hovered beside his face, his son between his sword and the man’s eye. “You were trying to help? Help yourself, maybe!”

God, I have good friends. Hurting, I staggered around the counter to the big farm table shoved against the interior wall, all but falling into my hard-backed chair and nearly knocking an express mail box onto the floor. It was from my mom, her scrawl unmistakable. I was too tired to guess what she’d sent me this time, and I gingerly felt the backs of my knees.

Nick’s face was going red from a lack of circulation, and the notches in his ears gained in the rat fights stood out like bright flags. “Ivy, let him go before he files a lawsuit,” I said casually. That she was slowly choking the life from him was only mildly worrisome. I’d seen her vamp out before, and this was nothing, even if she had missed slaking her hunger this weekend. If she started looking sexy and dropping innuendos, I’d be worried. This was simply anger, and she likely wouldn’t tear his throat out for that.

“Why? He can’t go to the I.S.” Ivy leaned her face next to his, tilting her head and inhaling a line along his neck. A tingling rose through me, and Nick closed his eyes, shuddering. “He’s taken himself off the grid,” she whispered. “Made himself into a cookie by the side of the road. He can’t complain or be jailed for his own crimes. And he wouldn’t want that,” she crooned. “Would you, little Nicky? Being a blood toy would be better than jail.”

Okay, maybe I was wrong. Concerned, I levered myself to a stand. “Ivy—”