The Good, The Bad, And The Undead

what I needed.

'Nice window,' I said, thinking it was better than Trent's, the toad. He could have taken care of all of this had he acted when I told him Piscary was the murderer. Men were all alike: take what they can get without paying for it, lie about the rest.

Piscary shifted in his chair, and his robe parted to show his knee. I quickly looked away. 'Thank you,' he said. 'I hated sunrises when I was alive. Now it's my favorite part of the day.' I sneered, and he gestured to the table. 'Would you like a cup of coffee?'

'Coffee?' I said. 'I would have thought it was against the gangster code to have coffee with someone before killing them.'

His thin black eyebrows rose. I realized he must want something from me, otherwise he would have just sent Algaliarept to kill me on the bus.

'Black,' I said. 'No sugar.'

Piscary gave Kisten a directive nod, and he slipped soundlessly away. I pulled out the second chair across from Piscary, flopping down with my bag on my lap. I glanced out the fake window in the silence. 'I like your lair,' I said sarcastically.

Piscary raised one eyebrow. I wished I could do that. Too late to learn how now. 'It was originally part of the underground railroad,' he said. 'A foul hole in the ground under someone's shipping dock. Ironic, isn't it?' I said nothing, and he added, 'This used to be the gateway to the free world. It still is, occasionally. There's nothing like death to free a person.'

A small sigh slipped from me, and I turned to the window, wondering how much wise-old-man-crap he was going to make me listen to before killing me. Piscary cleared his throat, and I looked back. A wisp of black hair showed behind the V of his robe, and his calves visible through the wire mesh of the table were hard with muscle. I recalled my lust rising hot and fast in the elevator with Kisten, knowing it had mostly been vamp pheromones. Liar. That Piscary could to that to me and more with nothing more than a sound turned my stomach.

Unable to stop myself, I sent my hand over my neck as if to brush my hair from my eyes. I wanted to hide my scar, though Piscary was probably more aware of it than the nose on my face. 'You didn't have to rape her to get me to come see you,' I said, deciding to be angry instead of afraid. 'A dead horse head in my bed would have done it.'

'I wanted to,' he said, his low voice carrying the strength of the wind. 'Much as you'd like to think otherwise, this isn't all about you, Rachel. Some of it, but not all.'

'My name is Ms. Morgan.'

He acknowledged this with a three-second, mocking silence. 'I have been spoiling Ivy. People are beginning to talk. It was time to bring her back into the fold. And it was a pleasure—for both of us.' A smile of remembrance came over him, a glint of fang and a soft, almost subliminal, guttural sigh. 'She surprised me, going far past my intended purpose. I haven't lost control like that for at least three hundred years.'

My stomach quivered as a surge of his vamp-induced desire flashed through me and was gone. Its potency took my breath away, and I found myself reaching out to catch it. 'Bastard,' I said, wide-eyed as my blood pounded in me.

'Flatterer,' he said back, his eyebrows high.

'She changed her mind,' I said, as the last of his need died in me. 'She doesn't want to be your scion. Leave her alone.'

'It's too late. And she does want it. I put no compulsion on her when she made her decision. I didn't need to. She had been bred and raised for the position, and when she dies, she will have the complexity to be a suitable companion, varied and sophisticated enough in her thoughts so that I don't become bored with her and she with me. You see, Rachel, it's not honest to say that the lack of blood is what causes a vampire to go insane and walk out into the sun. It's the boredom that brings upon a lack of appetite that leads to insanity. Working to bring Ivy about has helped me stave that off. Now that she is poised upon her potential, she's going to keep me from going insane.' He inclined his head graciously. 'And I'll do the same for her.'

His attention went over my shoulder, and the hair on the back of my neck pricked. It was Kisten. The whisper of his passage brushed against me, and I stifled a shudder. The bruised and beaten vamp silently set a cup of coffee on a saucer before me and left. He never met my eyes, his manner holding a subdued pain. The steam from the porcelain rose three inches before the artificial wind caught it and blew it away. I didn't reach for the cup. Fatigue pulled at me and adrenaline made me feel ill. I thought of the charms in my bag. Why was Piscary waiting?

'Kist?' the undead vampire said softly, and Kisten turned. 'Give it to me.'

Piscary held out his hand, and Kisten dropped a crumpled paper in his palm. My face went slack in panic. It was my note to Nick.

'Did she call anyone?' Piscary asked Kist, and the young vampire ducked his head.

'She called the FIB. They hung up on her.'

Shocked, I looked at Kisten. He had watched the entire thing. He had hidden in the shadows while I held Ivy's hair as she vomited, watched as I made her cocoa, and listened as I sat beside Ivy while she relived her nightmare. While I had been taking forever on the bus, Kisten had ripped my salvation from the door. No one was coming. No one at all.

Not meeting my eyes, he walked away. There was the distant sound of a door closing. My gaze flicked to Piscary's and my breath froze. His eyes were entirely black. Shit.

The unblinking obsidian orbs made my palms sweat. With the coiled tension of a predator, he reclined before me in his midnight-blue robe with that fake wind moving the wisps of hair on his bare arms, tan and healthy looking. The hem of his robe shifted with his subtle movements. His chest moved as he breathed in an effort to ease my subconscious. And as I sat before him, the enormity of what was going to happen fell on me.

My breath came and went, and I held it. Seeing me recognize my death, he blinked slowly and smiled with a knowing glint. Not yet, but soon. When he could wait no longer.

'It's amusing you care for her so deeply,' he said, the power seeping from his voice to clench about my heart. 'She betrayed you so utterly. My beautiful, dangerous filiola custos. I sent her to watch you four years ago, and she joined the I.S. I bought a church and told her to move into it; she did. I asked her to put in a witch's kitchen and stock it with appropriate books; she went beyond to arrange for a garden that would be irresistible.'

My face was cold and my legs trembled. Her friendship had been a lie? A sham to keep tabs on me? I couldn't believe it. Remembering the lost sound of her voice as she asked me to keep the sun from killing her, I couldn't believe her friendship had been a lie.

'I told her to follow you when you quit,' Piscary said, the blackness in his eyes taking on the tension of a remembered passion. 'It was our first argument, and I thought that I had found the point where I could make her my scion, where she would show her strength and prove she could hold her own against me. But she capitulated. For a time I thought I might have made a mistake and she lacked the strength of will to survive infinity with me and I'd have to wait yet another generation and try with a daughter born of her and Kisten. I was so disappointed. Imagine my delight when I realized she had her own agenda and was using me.'

He smiled, the slip of teeth a little bigger, showing a little longer. 'She had fastened upon you as her way out of the future I saw for her. She thought you could find a way to keep her from losing her soul when she dies.' He shook his head in a controlled motion, the light glinting across his smooth scalp. 'Can't be done, but she won't believe.'

I swallowed, making fists as my feelings of betrayal faltered. She had been using him, not following his direction. 'Does she know you murdered those witches?' I whispered, sick at heart that she might have known and never told me.

'No,' Piscary said. 'I'm sure she suspects, but my interest in you stems from an older reason, having nothing to do with Kalamack's current holy grail of a ley line witch.'

I kept my eyes from my hands gripped tightly in my lap above the opening of my bag. I couldn't reach for the vial. If it wasn't for that, why did Piscary want me dead?

'It must have cost her pride dearly to come to me, begging for clemency when you survived your demon attack. She was so upset. It's hard to be young. I understood more than she knows what it is to want an equal. And I was inclined to spoil her more once I realized she had used me without my knowing. So I let you live, provided she