Chapters (43)
- The Outlaw Demon Wails
- Dedication
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- The Undead Pool: An Excerpt
- Chapter 2
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Also by Kim Harrison
- Credits
- About the Publisher
Startled, I let the packet go as we met in the middle. Ivy caught it with her vampire reflexes before it unfolded more than two twists and casually folded it up. “It has to be someone outside Cincy,” she said, pretending ignorance at my fluster. “Piscary wouldn’t give him to a lesser vampire outside of the camarilla, only a higher one. I’m going to try to get into the airline records, but whoever it was probably drove in.”
“Okay. Do you need any help?”
Not meeting my eyes, Ivy dropped the packet in the bag and set it aside. “Have you given any thought to talking to Ford?”
Ford? The memory of the FIB’s psychiatrist flashed through me, and I warmed. He made me nervous.
“If you could remember anything. Anything at all,” Ivy was saying, sounding almost afraid. “Even a smell or sound.”
Scared, I felt the inside of my lip for the small scar. The memory of someone forcing my back into a wall rose up from my past. Vampire incense and the agonizing, aching need to be bitten, to feel the icy burning of teeth in me, followed close behind—and the fear that I couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t a memory of Ivy, but of Kisten’s killer. There was nothing to identify whom it had been, only the terror of being forced into something I desperately didn’t want.
My heart was pounding, and I looked up to find Ivy at the far end of the sanctuary, her eyes black as she felt my fear and it triggered her instincts. “Sorry,” I whispered, holding my breath to get my pulse to slow. Seeing her like that, I wondered how we were going to do this—live in a church together without pressing each other’s buttons. That we had been doing this for over a year didn’t help. It made things worse.
Ivy grabbed the leftover cake off her piano. Her motions edging into a vampiric quickness, she breezed past me and went into the hall. “Don’t worry about it.”
I listened to my breathing and counted to ten. Fingers slow, I gathered the bowl of jelly beans from my mom’s baby-shower game and followed her. I found Ivy leaning against the sink, her expression mildly peeved. The cake was sitting forgotten on the counter.