“I won’t work for you again,” I said as he gave the irate drivers behind him a friendly wave and merged onto expressway traffic. My anger hesitated as I realized he had intentionally sat through the green light so that Jonathan would be forced to wait until it changed again.

I looked at Trent in disbelief. Seeing my understanding, he floored it. A shiver of excitement struck me as he shot me a quick smile, the wind pulling his short hair to hide the green of his eyes. “If that helps you sleep, Ms. Morgan, please, continue to believe so.”

The wind tugged at me, and I closed my eyes against the sun, feeling the pavement hum all the way to my bones. Tomorrow I’d start thinking about how I was going to get out of my agreement with Algaliarept, remove the demon mark, get Nick unbound as my familiar, and live with a vampire who was trying to hide that she was practicing again. Right now I was riding shotgun to Cincinnati’s most powerful bachelor with eighteen thousand six dollars and fifty-seven cents in my pocket. And no one was going to stop us from speeding.

Not a bad week’s work, all things considered.

An excerpt from the latest Rachel Morgan novel, The Undead Pool, on sale on February 25, 2014!

Chapter 2

The sun was a slow flash through Cincinnati’s buildings as I fought afternoon traffic headed for the bridge and the Hollows beyond. The interstate was clogged, and it was easier to simply settle in behind a truck in the far right lane and make slow and steady progress than to try and maintain the posted limit by weaving in and out of traffic.

My radio was on, but it was all news and none of it good. The misfired charm at Trent’s facility wasn’t the only one this morning, and so far down on the drama scale that it hadn’t even been noticed, pushed out by the cooking class in intensive care for massive burns and the sudden collapse of a girder slamming through the roof of a coffeehouse and injuring three. The entire east side of the 71 corridor was a mess, making me think my sand-trap crater had been part of something bigger. Misfires weren’t that common, usually clustered by the batch and never linked only by space and time.

Jenks was silent, a worried green dust hazing him as he rested on the rearview mirror. But when the story changed to a cleaning crew found dead, the apparent cause being brain damage from a sudden lack of fat in their bodies, I turned it off in horror.

Jenks’s heels thumped the glass. “That’s nasty.”