“Thanks,” Ivy said, handing the hammer back, and I slid it onto the mantel.

“No problem.” I straightened my short-sleeved shirt to cover my midriff and pulled a handful of thin nails from the box beside the hammer and arranged them between my lips. “You wanna ’old ’is for ’e well I ’ammer it?” I asked as I tried to maneuver an unwieldy piece of paneling into place.

Bending, Ivy took it by the one edge and wedged it tight against the old paneling, her vampire strength making it look like she was holding a sheet of cardboard.

With a few quick whacks, I put a nail in the upper left corner, moved around her to put another in the lower right, then a third in the upper right. The rich scent of vampire incense mixed with the sawdust and my latest perfume in a pleasant fragrance of contentment. “Thanks,” I said after I took the nails out of my mouth. “I can get it now.”

Her smooth oval face showing nothing, she backed up, her hands rubbing against each other as if soothing herself. It was the first time we had done anything together since she had bitten me, and it felt good. Like we were back to normal.

“Hey, Rache,” Jenks said loudly as the kids before him rose up and joined the others in a dusty sunbeam, “I’ve got one for you. How about Rumpelstiltskin?”

I didn’t bother to write that one down on the legal pad sitting on the dusty mantel, simply lifting my eyebrows at him as he laughed at me. I’d been trying to think up a password since coming back from my mom’s with the toolbox, and I wasn’t having any luck.

“I’d go with an acronym,” Ivy suggested. “One that isn’t in the dictionary. Or your names backward?” Her eyes fixed on mine with an odd intensity as she intoned, “Nagromanairamlehcar.”

That both Jenks and she had thought of the same thing proved Minias was right about the no-backward theme. “No,” I said before Jenks did. “Minias nixed it. He said it’s too easy to run through the dictionary backward and find you. No numbers, no spaces, no real words, and nothing backward.” Grabbing a few more nails, I stretched to reach the top of the panel.

Ivy dropped back and watched me for a moment before starting to move quietly about and put the tools away. I could feel her attention on me as I worked down the stud line, aware she was there but not uncomfortable about it. It was noon, for criminy’s sake, and she had probably slaked her blood lust with Skimmer last night. And does that bother me? I asked myself, smacking a nail with an extra amount of force. Not at all. Not one bit. But I couldn’t stop the memory of her biting me from swimming up from my subconscious.