Chapter Nine
Even at a slow thirty mph on the back of Ivy's bike, the wind was frigid, and I pressed my head into Wayde's shoulder, shivering. He was still in his boxers and T-shirt, and if he could take it, I could, too. The feelings of dread and anticipation had tightened my gut until I felt ill. The sweet coffee wasn't sitting right, and the rumble of Ivy's bike under me, usually soothing, only wound my tension tighter.
We were down by the waterfront, the Cincy side of things, and when our momentum shifted, I looked up through the cloudy goggles that Ivy kept in her side bag for unexpected riders. We were at a stop sign, and whereas I knew Wayde would probably not have stopped under most circumstances, he did now.
I put down a foot to help keep us balanced. The smell of soap and Were drifted back, and I breathed it in as I pushed my goggles up and looked at the amulet in my hand. This was why he'd stopped, not the sleek black new-model Lexus following us.
"Keep going," I said loudly, seeing no change in the amulet's glow, and Wayde nodded.
The heat from the Lexus's engine hit the back of my calves, and my foot rose to the rest as we accelerated. Nina was driving it. I suppose I could have done this from the comfort of her borrowed front seat instead of freezing my ass off out here behind Wayde with no real coat, no leather, and garden shoes instead of my boots, but I wasn't willingly going to put myself alone in a car with her, even if she had been polite at the coffeehouse. It was obvious she still wasn't happy about my forcing them to give primary jurisdiction to the FIB, even if I had agreed to see the run through. If I didn't finish this quietly and to their satisfaction, they were going to frame me or wipe my memory, or both.
Mental note. Call Trent about a possible elf-magic-based spell to block memory charms. There'd been nothing about one in my spell books, nothing from a quick Internet search. I was sure the demons had something, but that didn't help me.
Nina had shown up almost immediately after my call from Junior's, making me wonder if she'd been waiting for it. Ivy and Jenks would join us when they could, and Glenn was probably on his way. I longingly thought of my coffee, left behind when I said I'd ride with Wayde. He'd had time to shave, but he was still in his jammies. We must look quite the pair, creeping down the service road with a Lexus twenty yards behind and two I.S. vehicles after that.
God, he smells good, I thought as I hugged Wayde. I lied to myself that I was just trying to stay out of the wind, but the reality was, this was the closest I'd gotten to another human being in months, and I wasn't above teasing myself. My thoughts strayed to our conversation at Junior's, and my focus blurred. It sure had sounded like the hint of an offer to hang with him for a while. True, he was kind of straggly looking right now, but I'd seen him out of his shirt and had been duly impressed. Unfortunately, though I knew that it might start with no strings attached, it would turn into something more. I couldn't do that, as pleasant as it sounded.
Why again was I on this bike? Oh yeah. Avoiding Nina.
I pulled my head up as Wayde went by the two empty stadiums. Squinting, I pushed back from him enough to look at the amulet. "Keep going!" I shouted, and he motored on.
The wind increased as we slipped from the lee, and I hunched into him again. I was more than a little relieved that whatever my amulet had pinged on wasn't at the stadiums. There wasn't a game today, but I'd been banned, and if Mrs. Sarong found me poking around, it would strain our delicate relationship. Finding a mutilated body or the magic to turn a witch into a monster would have been the icing that made the camel trip . . . or whatever.
I shivered, not knowing what we'd find, other than it probably wouldn't be pleasant. The sites that the I.S. had found had contained little more than a heavy moulage coating, a cage, and washed-down walls.
My eyes glanced at the amulet and my pulse quickened. It was getting fainter. "Turn around!" I said, squeezing his middle. "We passed it!"
But what had we passed? Nothing obvious. I'd swear that the amulet was focused on something between the expressway and the river, and there wasn't much between them. Maybe there was an entrance to the forgotten Cincy tunnels down here.
Wayde flicked his turn signal on and made a smooth, probably illegal U-bangy and started back the other way. There were a few low buildings between us and the stadiums, and letting go of Wayde's middle, I pointed at the buildings as we passed Nina and the two I.S. cruisers. No Glenn yet, and while Wayde took a left onto the service road, I tucked the amulet away and tried to get my phone out.
"What are you doing?" Wayde asked as my weight shifted and the bike swerved.
"Calling Glenn," I said loudly as I put one arm back around his waist and punched numbers with my thumb. I could barely hear the dial tone over the wind, and I eyed the low building as we approached it. It looked like an old office complex turned museum. Museum? I didn't like the sound of that, and my head started to hurt.
"Rachel?" Glenn's voice came over the phone, and I leaned into Wayde to get out of the wind. "Where are you? I'm at the coffeehouse. Are Ivy and Jenks with you?"
I frowned. Coffeehouse? What is he doing still there? "I was kind of hoping they were with you," I said. "I'm down by the stadiums. Nina was supposed to call you. I'm sorry." I looked up as we slowed, idling into a circular drop-off at the front of the building. "We're at the Underground Railroad Museum. Huh. I didn't know this was here." Pierce would like it, I thought, then squashed it. I doubted Pierce was still alive. He'd taken responsibility for my "death" so Al would take him into the ever-after instead of Trent. Pierce hated Trent, but Trent had been the only one who knew how to move my soul back into my body. There was no doubt that Pierce had loved me, but ultimately I hadn't trusted him, his loose morals, or his questionable black magic. It bothered me, and a flash of guilt rose and died.
I was so messed up.
Glenn hadn't said anything, and I pressed the phone closer. "Glenn?"
"I'm here," he said, and my foot went down when Wayde stopped the bike at the museum. "I'll be there in five minutes. Don't let Nina go in there without me, okay?"
I could hear the tension in his voice, his anger. "You got it," I said, turning where I sat to glare at Nina, now pulling up behind us. I'd be willing to bet she hadn't called Glenn. The Turn take it, what was it with them? The important thing was that we stopped these wackos, not who got the credit for the tag. Besides, there probably wasn't going to be anything here that Nina hadn't seen before. Unless this was a cover-up? They hadn't wanted the FIB involved at all until I forced the issue. What was a high-ranking I.S. vampire doing on a run anyway?
"Stop it, Rachel," I muttered as I swung myself off the bike. Nina was here because I'd jerked primary jurisdiction away from her, not because they were covering up anything.
Wayde tugged his shirt back down where it belonged, a strange look in his eyes when he took his helmet off and set it on the back of the bike. "You okay?" he asked, surprising me.
"Nina didn't call Glenn," I said, handing him the goggles.
"And you're surprised because . . ."
I gathered my hair in a thick, tangled ponytail, then let it go in dismay. I'd never get through the tangles. My front was cold from where I'd been pressed up against Wayde, and we watched Nina get out of her fancy borrowed car, shutting the door carefully, using two hands, actually polishing her fingerprints off with the cuff of her long coat. Clearly it was hers only for right now.
She'd taken the time to go shopping since I'd last seen her, and was now in a tailored pantsuit, purchased, I was sure, with the dead vampire's funds. Her hair, too, had been styled, falling in professional, attractive waves. New, very expensive shoes finished the look, stylish yet comfortable enough to run in. They matched her handbag and new watch. Nice that he is making her descent into hell so pleasant.
Holding her hair against the wind, she talked for a moment with one of the officers from another car. A family came up from the nearby underground garage, the parents giving us a wide berth as they went inside with their kids protectively close.
My back stiffened when the officer talking to Nina turned, crossed the road, and went up the wide stairs to the big glass doors. "Hey, wait a minute!" I called, and Nina waved him on.
Jaw clenched, I strode up to Nina. "The FIB has jurisdiction," I said, pointing at the officer vanishing inside. "We wait for Glenn. Get your man back out here. And why didn't you call Glenn? I just got off the phone and he had no idea where we were." Eye to eye with the woman, I glared at her. "Think he's better than you? Worried you need the advantage to look good? You should be. The FIB is better than you want to admit."
Nina reached for my hand, and I took a quick step back, sobering fast as her undead companion slipped in behind the woman's eyes. I could tell, not only because they flashed pupil black, but because her entire posture now had the relaxed tension of the undead, sort of a satiated-lion look. "Afraid? I am nothing of the kind," she said, her voice smooth and confident. Still very womanly, she now exuded a feeling of control and power, an intoxicating mix of masculine and feminine, yin and yang. She gave Wayde a long up-and-down look, taking in his army boots and thin T, then dismissed him. "My message surely got lost in his voice mail. When did you have the time to get that marvelous tattoo, Rachel? It suits you. Does it go all the way around your neck? May I see?"
Blinking, I took another step away, forcing my hand down. Hiding one's neck only made it look that much more appetizing to a vampire.
"Your tattoo?" Nina prompted, showing her small, pointy teeth, and I backed into Wayde. Sure, she was smiling, but I knew better. The vampire inside her was still peeved about yesterday. That my amulets worked when theirs hadn't probably hadn't gone down well, either.
"Yesterday," I said, more nervous yet. "Get your man out."
My voice didn't tremble at all. Go me. Where in hell was Glenn?
"My officer is simply speaking with the curator," Nina said, and I breathed easier when she looked away. "You can't have two I.S. cruisers pull up to your establishment and not explain yourself." Expression blank, she looked me up and down, and I suddenly felt grossly underdressed in my jeans and garden shoes. "How sure are you that this is the place?" she said with a sniff, her taking a wider stance, her hand straying to her waist where I'm sure the dead vampire kept his phone.
I looked at the amulet around my neck, glowing green. "Pretty sure. If you want, we can do a triangulation with the rest of the amulets before we go in with guns blazing."
Nina laughed, and I watched Wayde hide a shudder by scuffing his feet. "We aren't going in with 'guns blazing,' " Nina said. "If they're holding to their usual pattern, the people who committed these crimes are long gone. If this is indeed where they were." Her eyebrows rose. "It hardly looks like the area where one would go to perform acts of demonic magic," she said softly, squinting into the wind and bright autumn light as she looked up at the roofline.
"Yes, well, looks can be deceptive," I said. The more suave Nina became, the less I liked it. Living vampires considered it an honor to let their undead kin see through their eyes, speak through their mouths, and it was obvious that Nina the DMV worker was getting a great deal out of the arrangement, but I couldn't help pitying her for the emotional fall when the dead guy left her for good and she went back to being just herself again. And that was if she was lucky.
I watched her from out of the corner of my eye, trying not to be obvious about it as I searched for something, anything, that belonged to the living Nina, but it was as if she was entirely gone, reduced to an elegant pantsuit and a pair of Prada shoes. Ivy could have been something like this. Had been, perhaps, before she stood up to Piscary. No wonder she'd wanted out.
As I watched, Nina frowned and brought her gaze back from the city. A second later, Wayde breathed a relieved "There he is." I followed his gaze across the interstate to the city to see the flashing lights of an FIB vehicle.
"Finally," I said, and Nina chuckled.