Jenks’s wings clattered, and I flicked my gaze to his. “What do you want me to do, Rache?” he asked. “He’s almost at the gate. My kids are mobbing him.”

My jaw clenched, and I forced it to relax. I had a nice silk blouse picked out to wear tonight. Something professional and classy. And here I was in a bikini and with a dirty kitchen. “Let him come back,” I finally said. “If this is about that paper of his, he can suck my toes and die.”

With a nod and a wing chirp for Jumoke to accompany him, Jenks and his son darted to the side of the church and the slate path there. I settled back, tilting my head so I could see the gate without looking obvious about it. Trent’s voice—his beautiful, resonant, soothing, political voice—slipped over me even before he got to the gate, and I touched the braid that Jenks’s kids had put my curly red flyaway hair in this morning. I hated that I liked his voice, but it was a familiar hatred, one that had lost its fire long ago.

The wooden latch to the tall gate lifted, and my heart thumped as I took my sunglasses off. Eyes half closed, I pretended to be sleeping.

Wreathed in pixy kids, Trent came into my garden, his motions both slow and irate; clearly he was not liking the noisy, winged escort. Keeping my expression bland, I took in his slim form. In the months since I’d last seen him, Trent had deepened his tan, and his baby-fine, almost translucent hair caught the dappled sun. Instead of his usual thousand-dollar suit, he had on a lightweight gray short-sleeved shirt, dress slacks, and shiny dress shoes. It made him look harmless, but Trent was anything but. And what was he doing here alone? Quen never let him out by himself.

Trent made his way down the fern-laced slate path with the pixies chatting at him, his innocent businessman facade hiding his true demeanor as the head of an illegal bio-drugs and Brimstone distribution. Why am I helping him again?

I am helping myself, I thought, suddenly feeling almost naked. If I didn’t annul the familiar bond between us before I left for the witches’ meeting, Trent would start trying to kill me again, and as much as I detested the man, I liked him rather more when he wasn’t trying to put me in the ground.

Feeling like a big fat hypocrite, I closed my eyes entirely, listening to Trent murmur something to one of Jenks’s kids as his steps scraped on the broken patio tile. My heart beat faster. If it had been anyone other than Trent, someone might think I liked the man. In reality, I was trying hard not to look like the crazy witch living in a church with a gargoyle in the belfry, pixies in the garden, and a cat on the fence—even if I was. No way was he getting into my kitchen. Not with candles all over the place and half-crushed herbs and magnetic chalk everywhere.