A flash of guilt took me, and I looked back at the church—anywhere but at that book.

Doors thumped and engines raced. My neighbors watched behind twitching curtains. It was obvious by their unkempt state and untied shoes that my visitors weren’t assassins per se, but they could still kill someone—and with Cormel running the city, there’d be no inquiry, no notice. Ivy would be a warning, or worse.

“Hey!” I shouted as a woman with a bad case of bed hair shuffled to the last car. “That’s my coat!”

Head hanging, the woman stopped right in the middle of the street, took off my red jacket, and dropped it with a tired indifference. The rest of them were complaining and wanting her to hurry up, and not bothering to open the door to the car, she dove in headfirst through a back window. The car accelerated in a noisy squeal of tires.

I slammed Trent’s door, stalking to my jacket. It reeked of vampire, even worse of her perfume scented heavily with pine. I’d have to air it out for weeks, maybe send it to the cleaners. Vampire incense stuck to leather worse than burnt amber in my hair.

Trent scuffed to a halt beside me, one hand in a pocket, the other holding that book. “I think I just turned a profit on this one party alone,” he said, squinting up at the steeple, and I gave him a dry look. But my mood improved dramatically when a familiar glint of pixy dust arrowed out from the fireplace’s flue.

“Rache!” Jenks shouted as he came to a dust-laden halt before us, his sparkles continuing forward on momentum, making me sneeze. “Tink loves a duck, how did you get them to leave?”

I held my jacket like a dead rat. “Cormel gave us until midnight.”

Jenks flew backward as Trent and I started for the open front door. “And then what?”

My steps slowed. “He gets serious about killing Ivy.”

“Yesterday wasn’t serious?” Jenks said as he alighted on Trent’s shoulder, but it was obvious we were on borrowed time. My stomach clenched as Trent and I took the shallow steps, and I blanched at the smell wafting out the door.

“Nice.” Holding my breath, I went in. “What did they do? Have an orgy?”

The whine of Jenks’s wings increased as I propped the door open. “Uh, something like that. But no one died. Hey, I tried to keep them out of your stuff. I’m sorry. It was just Belle and me after the sun came up and we had to pick our battles.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s not your . . . fault . . .” I stopped just inside the sanctuary, lips parting as I took in the empty bowls, smeared glasses, crushed beer cans, and chips bags. The furniture had been rearranged, and someone had drawn a mustache and beard on the TV, presumably on someone’s face at the time. Kisten’s pool table had a cooler on it, and a dark stain spread under it as water dripped from the long crack running the width of the plastic. It was worse than the time my high school boyfriend had volunteered my house for the homecoming party because he knew my mom was working.