Ким Харрисон - The Good, The Bad, And The Undead

"Ivy—" I started.

"No," she said, flicking me a frightened look.

"I just want to say I'm sorry," I rushed. "Don't go. I'll drop it." How could someone so strong and powerful be so afraid of herself? The woman was a conflicting mass of strength and vulnerability that I didn't understand.

Her eyes went everywhere but to mine. Slowly her wire-tight posture relaxed. "But it wasn't your fault," she whispered.

Then why do I feel like crap? "I'm sorry, Ivy," I said, pulling her eyes to mine for a brief moment. They were as brown as chocolate, with no hint of black rimming them. "It's just—"

"Stop," she said, her gaze going to her hand clutching the table, the nails still shiny from the clear polish she had put on to go to Piscary's. She visibly forced her grip to relax. "I…won't ask you to be my scion again if you don't say anything more." The last was hesitant, disquieting in her vulnerability.

It was almost as if she knew what I was going to say and couldn't bear to hear it. I would not be her scion—I couldn't. The tie that would bind us would be too tight and take from me my independence. While I knew in the vampire existence that the giving and receiving of blood was not necessarily equated with sex, to me they were the same. And I didn't want to say, "Can we just be friends?" It was trite and degrading, even if to be her friend was all I wanted. She'd take the words as the brush-off most people used them for. I liked her too much to hurt her that way. And I could tell it wasn't a lingering bitterness that prompted her promise. She wouldn't ask me to be her scion because she didn't want the pain of being rejected again.

I didn't understand vampires. But that's where Ivy and I were.

She met my eyes with a faltering sureness that strengthened as she saw my silent agreement to ignore what had happened. Her shoulders eased and she regained a wisp of her usual confidence. But as I sat in our kitchen with my feet in the sun, I went cold with the knowledge of how badly I was using her. She was freely giving me protection against the many vampires that would take advantage of my scar—in essence, she was ensuring my free will—and she was willing to overlook that I wasn't paying for it in the usual vampiric fashion. God help me, it was enough to make me hate myself. She wanted something I couldn't give her, and she was content to take my friendship in the hopes that someday I could give more.

I took a slow breath, watching her pretend not to notice my eyes on her as I let the pieces fall into place. I couldn't leave. It was more than not wanting to lose the only real friend I had had in eight years or my desire to help her win the war she fought against herself. It was the fear of being turned into a plaything by the first vampire I ran into in a moment of weakness. I was trapped by convenience, and the tiger with me was willing to lap cream and purr, betting she'd find a way to change my mind. Great. I'd have no problem sleeping tonight.

Ivy's eyes met mine, her breathing hesitating a bare second as she realized that I'd finally figured it out. "Where's Jenks?" she asked, turning to her screen as if nothing had happened.

I exhaled slowly, coming to grips with my new outlook. I could leave and fight off every lustful vamp I ran into, or I could stay under Ivy's mantle, trusting I'd never have to fight her off instead. As my dad was fond of saying, a known danger was far better than an unknown one.

"At Trent's helping Glenn," I said, my fingers trembling as I reached for another cookie. I'd stay. We had an understanding. Or was Nick right, in that I really did want her to bite me but couldn't accept that my "preferences" had slid a little? Surely the former. "I'm off the case. I found a body and word got out a witch was helping the FIB."

Her eyes met mine over the screen between us, her thin eyebrows high. "You found a body? At Trent's compound? You're kidding."

I nodded, slumping with my elbows on the table, unwilling to delve any deeper into my psyche right now. I was too tired. "I'm pretty sure it's Dan Smather's, but it doesn't matter. Glenn is more uptight than a pixy in a room full of frogs, but Trent's going to walk." My thoughts shifted from what I was going to do about Ivy to the memory of Dan's mutilated body strapped to the chair. "Trent is too smart to leave anything to connect him to the body," I said. "I don't understand why it was on his property to begin with."

She nodded, her attention going back to her screen. "Maybe he put it there."

A wry grimace crossed me. "That's what Glenn thinks. That Trent is the murderer but wanted us to find it, knowing we couldn't link it to him, and therefore making it twice as hard to catch him if he makes a mistake later on. It fits with Sara Jane's reaction. She doesn't know Dan Smather better than her UPS man, but something…" I hesitated, trying to put my feeling into words. "Something isn't right." I thought back to the picture she'd given me. It had been the same photo as the one on his TV. I should've known then that their courtship was contrived.

I was starting to doubt my own, grudge-laced belief that Trent was responsible for the murders, and that was disturbing. He was capable of murder—I'd seen that firsthand—but the mutilated, bloodless body tied to that chair and tortured was far and away from the clean, fast death he had inflicted upon his head geneticist last spring. Thinking, I reached for a cookie. Biting the head off, I got up to hunt through the fridge to decide what I was going to fix for dinner and let my subconscious work on it. Maybe I'd make something special. It had been a while since I had done more than open boxes and stir things on the stove.

I glanced at Ivy, feeling guilty and relieved all at the same time. No wonder she thought I wanted more than to be her roommate. Some of this was my fault. Most maybe.

"So what did Trent do when you found the body?" Ivy asked, mouse clicking as she checked out her chat rooms. "Any guilt?"

"Ah, no," I said, pushing my uncomfortable feelings aside even as I took a half pound of lean hamburger out of the freezer and set it clunking into the sink. "And the surprise he let slip wasn't that I found a body but that it was Dan's body. That's why I don't like the idea that he put it there to cover himself. He knows more than he's saying, though." I gazed out the window at the sunlit garden and the glimmers of pixy wings as Jenks's kids fought off a migrating hummingbird from the last of the lobelias. It had to be migrating. Jenks would have killed it before letting competition get a foothold in his garden.

As the children shouted and called, working together to drive the hapless bird away, my thoughts returned to the worry Trent had let show when I found that ley line running through his office. He had been more upset about me finding that line than finding Dan's body.

The ley line. That's where the real question lurked. My fingers tingled as I turned, wiping the frost from the hamburger off on a towel instead of my suit dress. I glanced at the window, wondering if I would draw more attention by shutting it or if I should press my luck and hope Jenks's kids were too busy to eavesdrop. Ivy pulled back from her computer screen as she saw my sudden secrecy. Jenks had a big mouth, and I didn't want him knowing of my suspicions of Trent's possible ancestry. He would blab it around, and Trent would hire a plane to "accidentally" drop Agent Orange on the entire block to stop the rumors.

Splitting the difference, I shut the curtains and stood by the window where I could see the shadow of pixy wings should any flit close enough to hear. "Trent has a ley line in his office," I said, my voice hushed.

Ivy stared at me in the blue-tinted sun. "No kidding? What are the chances of that?"