“Huh,” Jenks said, a smile on him as he looked at me sitting with my hands clasped primly in my lap and that unusual amount of space between Marshal and myself. “I guess you can teach a young witch new tricks.”

“Jenks!” I exclaimed, knowing he was talking about me distancing myself from Marshal, but the poor witch didn’t have a clue. Thank God. Incensed, I made a snatch for the pixy, and the laughing four-inch man settled himself on Marshal’s shoulder. Marshal stiffened but didn’t move but for tilting his head and trying to see Jenks.

“You said you were here for an interview?” Ivy said pleasantly, but I didn’t trust her mood as far as I could throw her. Which was about three feet on a good day.

Moving carefully as if Jenks might leave, Marshal eased into the cushions and away from her. “At the university,” he said, showing signs of nervousness.

“What’s the job?” Ivy questioned, and I could almost hear her think “Janitor?” Though not saying one cross word, she wasn’t being nice, like I’d asked him to come over to betray Kisten’s memory.

Marshal must have picked up on it, too, for he shifted his wide shoulders and tilted his head to crack his neck, clearly a nervous tick. “I’d be coaching the swim team, but once I’m on the payroll, I can put in for a real teaching position.”

“Teaching what?” Jenks asked suspiciously.

At that, Marshal smiled. “Minor ley line manipulations. More of a high school course than anything else. A primer to bring deficient students up for the hundred-level classes.”

Clearly Ivy wasn’t impressed. But she probably didn’t know that he had to be at a four-hundred level to instruct anyone in anything. I had no idea where my ley line proficiency put me, seeing as I was picking it up as I went along, learning what I had to when I needed it, not what was safe or prudent in a steady, progressive pace.

“Cincinnati doesn’t have a swim team,” Ivy said. “Sounds like quite a job to build one.”

Marshal’s head bobbed, and the stubble on it caught the light. “It will be. Normally I wouldn’t even try for the position, but I earned my bachelor’s here, and coming back feels right.”

“Hey!” Jenks exclaimed, and I shivered in the draft from his wings. “You’re a Cincy boy! What year did you graduate?”

“Class of 2001,” he said proudly.

“Holy crap, you’re almost thirty?” the pixy said. “Damn, you look good!”