My breath came quick and shallow. Frightened, I forced myself to turn so my back was almost to her. Damn, damn, damn! This wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t done anything! She had been so normal … and then this? From the corner of my sight I watched Ivy hold herself still, scrambling for control. If she moved, I was going out the window.

But she didn’t move. Slowly my breath came easier. My pulse slowed, and her tension decreased. I took a deep breath, and the black in her eyes diminished. I flipped my hair out of my face and pretended to wash my hands, and she slumped to her chair by the table. Fear was an aphrodisiac to her hunger, and I had been unwittingly feeding it to her.

“I shouldn’t have put this on again,” she said, her voice low and strained. “I’ll wait in the garden while you invoke your spell.” I nodded, and she drifted to the door, clearly making a conscious effort to move at a normal speed. I hadn’t noticed her standing up, but there she was, moving into the hallway. “And Rachel,” she said softly, standing in the threshold. “If I ever do start practicing again, you’ll be the first to know.”

Eighteen

“I don’t think I’ll ever get my nose clear of the stink in that sack.” Jenks took a dramatic breath of the night air.

“Purse,” I said, hearing the word come out as a bland squeak. It was all I could manage. I had recognized right off what Ivy’s mother’s purse smelled like, and the thought that I had spent a good portion of my day in it gave me the willies.

“You ever smell anything like that?” Jenks continued blithely.

“Jenks, shut up.” Squeak, squeak, chirp. Guessing what a vamp carried when she went hunting wasn’t high on my list. I tried really hard not to think about Table 6.1.

“No-o-o-o,” he drawled. “It was more of a musky, metallic kind of—oh.”

But the night air was pleasant enough. It was edging toward ten, and Trent’s public garden had the lush smell of rising damp. The moon was a thin sliver lost behind the trees. Jenks and I were hidden in the shrubbery behind a stone bench. Ivy was long gone.

She had tucked her purse under the seat this afternoon, pretending to be faint. After blaming her weariness on low blood sugar, half the men on the tour had offered to run up to the pavilion to fetch her a cookie. I had nearly blown our cover laughing at Jenks’s nonstop, overly dramatic parody of what was going on outside her purse. Ivy had left in a swirl of manly concern. I hadn’t known whether to be worried or amused at how easily she had swayed them.

“This feels as wrong as Uncle Vamp at a sweet-sixteen party,” Jenks said as he edged out of the shadows and onto the path. “I haven’t heard a bird all afternoon. No fairies or pixies, either.” He peered up at the black canopy from under his hat.