“Tink’s titties, that’s good stuff,” Jenks said, and I didn’t know what bothered me more: that it worked that fast, or that Ivy had known what it was and how to administer it.
“She made me hurt Gabby,” Sandra slurred, head drooping, and then she collapsed to the floor, her arm hanging from the gurney’s grab bar.
Tony gave her a dismissive glance, then turned to me. “I need to see your tower pass.”
“Sure.” I patted the lab coat’s pockets. “Must have left it in my other lab coat.”
Ivy sighed. “How much?” she asked, and Jenks rose up from where he’d been trying to make out Sandra’s slurred, whispered words.
Tony grinned. “To forget this? You don’t have that much.”
Ivy’s eyes narrowed, but Jenks hovered between them, his dust a cheerful gold.
“I’d think it would be just about equal to Ivy forgetting that you cuffed your charge to a rolling table and went to get a quick bite from the girl down the hall,” he said, grinning.
“Fuck.” Tony looked from the clearly defunct cameras to Jenks. “You saw that?”
“Saw? I got pictures,” Jenks claimed, and Tony slumped, hands on his hips as he looked from Sandra, mumbling about red daisies, to the empty hallway.
“Can you get her downstairs, or would you like some help?” Ivy asked sweetly.
“I got her.” His mood clearly bad, Tony uncuffed Sandra, then slung her over his shoulder. She was crying again, but with any luck, she’d forget about Jenks and me. Tony got about three steps to the door, then jerked to a halt. “You did the blood work, right?” he questioned, and I slapped Sandra’s paperwork into his hand.
“Thanks,” I said, and he looked me up and down.
“Don’t mention it,” he said. “If you do, I’ll mention it.”
“No problem.”
Tony used his foot to push open the door, and that fast, he was gone.
“That woman has some serious demon issues,” Jenks said, hovering in his best Peter Pan pose.
“Maybe this is what happened this morning.” Ivy stood the rolling cabinet upright and pushed it to the corner. “Something set her off, and she lost it.”
I rubbed my hand, red from hitting the tile. “No. She knew what she was doing. That wasn’t what happened with her wife. She was awake this time.”
“You sure?” Ivy asked, and both Jenks and I nodded.
“Your aura fades when you sleep. She was wide-awake,” Jenks said, then brightened, his thoughts probably returning to where mine had been.
“Yes,” I said slowly, still trying to rub the sting from my palm. “Ivy, Jenks said her aura was a lot like mine.”
Ivy frowned at the bottle she’d injected Sandra from, then wedged it in her pocket. “So?”
“So Al’s aura is similar to mine as well, and he tried to break into the demons’ weapons vault this morning in his sleep,” I admitted. Al’s, Trent’s, and mine. Son of a bastard, Trent . . . “If we can get an auratic reading on the other suspects and find they’re all similar, it proves that this is not random. That they were goaded into it.”
Ivy nodded, clearly seeing what I was getting at. Deep in thought, I slipped out of the lab coat and left it on the chair before following Ivy and Jenks into the hall.
“I can show you their auratic baselines,” Ivy said. “We take them in case of possession.” Her eyes flicked to Jenks on my shoulder, the pixy unusually quiet. “What am I missing?”
I twisted to reach for my phone in my back pocket and checked how many bars I had. “The numbers would be good, but we really need a visual.”
“Rachel, I can’t get you downstairs into lockup,” Ivy said, and Jenks’s wings rasped.
“I can do that,” he said, hovering backward before us as we headed for the elevators. “Hey!” Jenks shouted when I waved him away from my phone when his dust blanked it out. “I just said I could do that! What’s with ignoring the pixy?”
“No one is ignoring you,” I muttered as I hit the icon for Al, then frowned when I was dropped immediately into his voice mail. “Hey, Al? It’s Rachel,” I said as it beeped. “I’m at the I.S. Jenks and Ivy are verifying it, but I’m pretty sure that every person down here for aggravated domestic assault has the same basic aura pattern. You were attacked. Something is looking for you, and they just got in the way. Call me, okay? And don’t go to sleep.”