Trent gave me a squeeze, but I couldn’t get myself out of my funk. He was bringing pieces back into play to try to regain his standing. I knew he wouldn’t sacrifice me to reach his end, but there was no way he could do it if I was beside him—and someday he’d realize that. He’d grow cold, indifferent. I’d seen it before.

“I don’t trust Landon,” I said, feeling my breath come back from him as my fingers defined the lines of his back. “I don’t trust Ellasbeth, and I certainly don’t trust them together. As soon as we’re no longer useful to Landon, and she realizes she won’t get what she wants, she’ll try to gain custody with a more permanent means, you know that, right?”

Trent let me go, avoiding me. Damn it, he did know, and yet he was giving her the very chance she needed to stick a knife in his ribs. “Trent—”

“You think Landon’s charm is true?” he interrupted.

He was still holding me, and I pressed into him. “I don’t like using a charm passed down by oral tradition for two thousand years,” I said, then added, “But I think they use it enough that as long as Landon remembered it right, it will work. Are you sure you don’t have anything in your library? He could be setting us up. That charm might take our souls for all I know.”

His reassuring smile only made me more concerned. “He wants an end to the vampires more than an end to me or you. We can trust that.”

“So we’re safe until the undead vampires are dead. I should probably write it down before I forget.” I reluctantly pulled from him to get a pencil and paper from Ivy’s desk. “Even if it will be in my handwriting and not his.”

“I think Jenks has it,” Trent said, looking out at the garden. “Jenks!” he shouted, startling me. “Where’s the charm?”

Pen in hand, I turned from the table to see Trent stretching to the hanging rack to turn the few hanging pots as if to empty them. “You had him copy it? Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you—” Spent dust spilled out of one, covering Trent in silver. He sneezed, missing the postage-stamp-size scrap of paper now drifting to the floor. It had to be the copied charm, and I picked it up, recognizing Jenks’s handwriting and the glyph of a pentagram. “There it is,” he said, seeing it in my hand and smiling. “Because you aren’t used to dealing with civil servants disguised as religious leaders.”