My tension, born of surprise, vanished and I relaxed, my face next to hers as I took in her scent as if it were water. I didn’t care if it was chock-full of pheromones meant to relax me, to make it easier for her to bite me. That’s not why she was holding me. She had been worried. And she was alive. A dead vampire wouldn’t have cared if I was myself or not. Ivy was alive. Maybe Kisten is, too. Please let Piscary have lied to me.

“It’s me,” I said, remembering Ivy and Edden grappling with me in the back of a car when I’d been lost to the curse. “Uh, I have to go to the bathroom.”

Ivy stepped back. “You scared me,” she said.

“I scared myself,” I said, catching myself against the bedpost as I scuffed forward.

“Jenks!” Ivy yelled when my bare feet edged into the hallway. “She’s okay! She’s up!”

“What is that stench?” I said, sniffing the distastefully harsh scent of bad incense.

“We got the church unblasphemed,” she said, following me out. “The guy just left. I think you embarrassed him, so he did some research. All he had to do was find and replace the original scrap of holy cloth that the sanctity was focused on. Jenks’s kids found it, and the rest was easy.”

I nodded, thinking that odd sensation I’d felt when waking up must have been the blasphemy falling away. Then I wondered what the guy was going to do with the fouled cloth. Put it in the ever-after, maybe? That’s what I’d do. I wobbled three more steps to the bathroom, then turned. “You’re alive, right?” I asked, remembering the EMTs stopping their efforts.

From my doorway Ivy laughed. I must have really scared her. I’d never seen her show so much emotion. Clearly happy, she smiled. “I’m alive,” she said, looking beautiful with her eyes wet. “Piscary didn’t…” She took a breath. “I passed out when Piscary gave me enough vamp saliva to stop my heart, but the FIB guys kept me alive and the EMTs gave me an antitoxin. I never died,” she said happily. “I still have my soul.”

Good, I thought. Something had gone right for a change. I was afraid to ask her about Kisten. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I murmured, the situation turning critical.

“Oh!” she said, suddenly embarrassed. “Sure. I’ll, um…”

Her thought was cut short when Jenks blew in from the back rooms. “Rache!” he shrilled, shedding gold sparkles. “You okay? Tink’s bordello, you’re one wild woman. I’ve never seen anyone do the things you did. Who taught you to swear in Latin?”