me sharing a quiet moment, me in my robe and him sitting on my coffeepot, trying to get warm enough to fly. Snippets of conversation that never happened slowly evolved into actions that never occurred as I began to dream.
“One of us isn’t going to make it off this boat,” my dream Jenks said, black sparkles falling from him as he drew his garden sword and flew at me.
My body twitched as, in my dream, I flung myself back to hit the teak floorboards. Still dreaming, I tapped a line and blasted Jenks into a thousand spiders that rained down on me.
Gasping, I snorted awake, heart pounding as my tingling hands brushed my legs to push off the imagined spiders. Jenks . . . , I thought, horrified that I’d hurt him, even in a dream. Jenks was my rock, the one I depended upon the most, the one who depended upon me to keep him alive through the winter. Why would I dream he’d try to hurt me, forcing me to hurt him?
“Damn,” I whispered as I made fists of my tingling hands. Had I tapped a line in my sleep? Shaken, I reached for the door and got out to distance myself from the nightmare.
The late-November morning was chill after the stuffy car, and I hunched deeper into my dark green leather coat. It was almost black, really, the oily sheen going well with my ofttimes frizzy red hair, pale complexion, and occasional kick-ass attitude. Still . . . I eased the door to my car shut, using my hip to close it with a soft click to preserve the quiet of the middle- to lower-class neighborhood. It was just before nine, which meant the few humans on the street were on their way to work or school and most Inderlanders were nowhere near thinking about getting up.
Hands in my pockets, I followed the cracked sidewalk to the church’s wide steps. My vamp-made boots were nearly silent in the dappled sun showing through bare branches. A bedraggled, loose-feathered crow sat ominously among the flowers and plates of food that decked the cement steps, and I frowned. The offerings had been left by grateful ex-familiars, freed when the demons regained the ability to walk in reality. It had been two months, but the pile had grown, not diminished, and seeing them there reminded me of when Cincinnati thought I’d died in the blast that had torn off the back of the church and spread it over the garden and adjacent graveyard.
It had been a hard September.
“Shoo,” I said, waving at the bird, and the untidy thing flew onto the nearest tree, silent and unafraid, waiting for me to leave before it would come back down and take what it wanted.
The door was unlocked, and a feeling of Camelot lost rose as I gazed up at the shiny metal plaque. TAMWOOD, JENKS, AND MORGAN, VAMPIRIC CHARMS LLC. Lip twitching, I pushed the door open and went in, boots scuffing in the dark vestibule as I shut the door and sealed out the morning light. I wasn’t ready to let this go, but even I was having a hard time ignoring the writing on the wall with the three of us being scattered while the church was repaired.
I slowed as the peace of the place erased the lingering unease from my dream. On the table beside the door, letters and junk mail were stacked in an ever-higher mess. “Postal weeds,” Jenks called them, and as I waited for my eyes to adjust to the glow of the single unbroken window, I winnowed through the topmost envelopes to find the bills and tuck them in my back pocket.
Even now I could smell the scent of vampire, pixy, and witch laced through the stronger scents of plywood, cut two-by-fours, and the sweaty Weres fixing the place. Kisten’s pool table sat against the wall where the Goddess had pushed it as if it had been made of cardboard. Ivy’s baby grand had fared better, but it was covered in construction dust, whereas Kisten’s pool table had a vinyl cover and a stenciled sign stating that whoever used it as a workbench would be eviscerated.
I smiled, arms swinging as I headed for it. It was good to have friends.
The scent of melting shoes and burning flesh tickled my nose, and I avoided the outlines of rubber glued to the floorboards where the Goddess had stood. The mystics who served as her uncountable eyes had been