A Perfect Blood (The Hollows #10)(74)

Trent put his hands on the counter, still at last. “You called me a businessman. You were right. I should have sent Quen to get the sample.” His expression became empty. “Quen wouldn’t have gotten caught.”
“I was mad,” I said. “It was the worst insult I could think of. Jenks says you weren’t a slouch when you, ah, reacquired Lucy.”
His eyes darted to mine, then away, but I saw the pride and love for his daughter. “I had fun with that. Jenks is quite the operative.”
I gazed at the charms between us, wondering how long he had worked on them. Fun. He had called it fun. The Withons would have killed him had they caught him. That had been the agreement. He’d been confident enough of his success that it had been fun.
“I’ll leave these with you, then,” he said, his voice low, almost a monotone. “Throw them out if you don’t want them. It’s all the same to me. The ones with the blue pins temporarily paralyze your opponents, the ones with the gold pins temporarily blind them. Maintain eye contact when you pull the pin so the charm acts on who you want.” Trent looked at his watch. “Sorry about the coffee. I have to go. Maybe next time.”
He was leaving, and for some reason I couldn’t fathom, I didn’t want him to. I hadn’t known he relaxed by rescuing elven charm recipes. Or that he was stuck in a life he didn’t want. “Trent, about this morning.”
He hesitated, now eyeing his phone. “Don’t worry about it. The carpet has been replaced and most of the fish survived.”
“No,” I said, coming around the corner of the counter. “I didn’t mean that . . .” Trent looked up, waiting, and I swallowed hard. “I didn’t really thank you. For helping with Al.”
“You’re welcome.” He hesitated, his eyes going to my empty wrist, tossing his hair from his eyes. “Is that all?”
“No.” He snapped his phone closed and tucked it back in an inner pocket of his jacket, and I fidgeted, remembering his face when he’d opened up to me, just that little bit. “Ah, I’m sorry you can’t be what you want . . . to be.”
His professional mask back in place, he put his hands behind his back. “I never said that.”
“I know.” The silence stretched until it became awkward. “Thank you for the charms.”
Finally he smiled, but it was faint and it faded fast. Even so, I exhaled as if it meant something. “You’re welcome,” he said, tugging his jacket sleeves down. “Good luck finding HAPA. My guess is they’re downtown somewhere.”
Downtown? They couldn’t be downtown. We’d find them in an hour if they were downtown, and they knew it.
But he was leaving, and I just stood there, feeling inadequate. Trent glanced at my hands, then gave me a sharp nod. “I’ll see myself out,” he said as he turned away. “Good choice on the fabric color for the table. Red is tacky.”
Red is tacky echoed in my mind as I slumped back against the counter as his steps grew faint. He made a comment to the Weres working on the table, and then he was gone.
“You are pathetic, Rache,” Jenks said, and my eyes darted to the top of the rack and I saw him standing there, hands on his hips and frowning at me, his wings a silver blur. “Rachel and Trent, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. No wait, it was a hospital room, and he had his hands on your ass and you had your tongue down his throat. I can see why you might be confused.”“Grow up, Jenks. He’s helping me to help himself. You watch. In three months, he’s going to be knocking on my door with some problem that only I can solve, and I’m going to do it because I owe him. He’s a businessman. Period. I am a commodity he has been working toward for two years.”
Damn it, why had I fallen for that poor-me crap? Ticked, I went to the demon texts, piling them up in my arms before going behind the counter and shelving them.
“Yeah, okay.” Clearly not believing me, Jenks landed next to Trent’s charms and kicked one, sending it rocking. “Except for one thing.”
I came up from shelving my books, catching the charm he had kicked as it rocked off the counter. The tingle of wild magic pricked, and I shivered, remembering it flowing through me and the charms he’d been making for the last year or so. Wild magic. “What,” I said flatly.
“This,” he said, kicking at the ring, and I took it up, turning it in my fingers to study it. It really was pretty, made of three individual metallic bands, interwoven to make one solid piece—sort of like a puzzle ring but able to hold together off a finger. “He didn’t tell you what it does,” Jenks said, rising up as his kids started screaming from the front room, arguing over the chalk again. The Weres began laughing, and I didn’t think it was because they were almost done.
I’d noticed that myself, and I set it down in mistrust. “So? He was in a hurry.”
“Knock it off or I’m going to come in there and turn your wings backward!” Jenks shouted down the dark hall, then came back, grinning. “So I’ve seen my boys do that a hundred times with the neighboring pixy girls. Give her their favorite seed and be too flustered to tell her what it was.” He rose up again, the screams from the front becoming louder. “I gotta take care of this. ’Scuse me.”
He darted out, leaving me blinking as I stared at the ring, among the rest of the charms. A cold feeling was trickling through me. Jenks was wrong. Trent had simply forgotten.
Right?
Chapter Twenty-two
The pool cue slid between my fingers in a steady motion that Kisten had taught me. Squinting in the sun, I pulled back, staring at the one ball perched at the top of a very tight rack. I’d watched Wayde set them up, and he knew what he was doing, jamming everything to the front of the rack before carefully lifting up and away. A tight rack was crucial for a good break. With that you didn’t need a lot of power, just a wee bit of accuracy.
Sending the cue stick forward, I hit the ball, sending it into the others with a satisfying crack. Pixies squealed and scattered, making a rainbow of dust over the sunlit table as I slowly straightened, my smile satisfied but a bit melancholy. The balls rolled and bounced, but none went in. I stepped to the side, my fingertips trailing across the smooth varnish of the bumper. It was cold and hard, not like Kisten’s skin—but I still felt like he was here somehow. Sort of. 
“Nice break.” Wayde’s eyebrows were high, his estimation of me rising by the looks of it. Smiling my thanks, I extended the cue to him. It was the only decent one we had, but now that the table was again usable, we might invest in a stick or two.
“Jenks, get your kids off the table,” I said as I dropped back about four feet to give Wayde some mental as well as physical space. “They’re getting their dust all over it.”
Jenks’s wings hummed at a higher pitch, and the three or four pixy bucks watching rose up into the lights. “You never worried about their dust before,” Jenks said, darting over to snag his daughter before she got in the way of Wayde’s shot.
His motions quick and sharp, Wayde took aim at the two ball. With a short tap, the ball plunked in, and the cue ball rolled backward a good two feet. I exhaled, recognizing his skill. It wasn’t hard to make a ball back up, but to get it to stop right where you wanted it to line it up for the next shot wasn’t easy.
“You want to play the winner?” I called out to Ivy, lounging on a chair with her back to the wall as she pretended to read a magazine and watch us without being obvious about it. She’d put herself right in the sun, which told me she’d had a rough morning. She sat in the sun only when she was frustrated.
“No.”
She didn’t look up, but the pages of her magazine crackled as she turned them. Ivy was casual this afternoon: jeans and a baggy sweater, her hair down and her phone on the table. Though she looked comfortable, there was a quickness to her motions and a slight widening of her pupils that told of a rising excitement. It could have been from her morning with Nina, but it had been almost twenty-four hours since my curses had hit the street, and I was betting it was that. The sun was streaming into the westernmost windows, but it would be dark in a few hours. We could bring in a bunch of bad-behaving humans in the dark, but I’d much rather do this before the dead people came out to play. Especially Felix. I was starting not to like him. His lack of ability was starting to impact Ivy, and I didn’t like it.
From behind me, I heard another ball thunk into a pocket. Spinning, I looked quickly at the table, seeing the nine ball gone and Wayde lining up a bank shot with the five. “You’re good,” I said as I sat on the back of the couch and waited my turn.
“I think he’s been sandbagging the last month, Rache,” Jenks said as he sifted a gold sunbeam right onto the cue ball.
Wayde stood from where he’d been bending over the felt, stoically waiting for the ball to stop glowing. “The table was crap,” he said, eyes meeting mine from under his shaggy bangs. “Pool is a game of absolutes. You can’t play well on a crappy table.” With a smooth, unhurried motion, he pulled back and sank the five. “And it was a crappy table.”
I couldn’t argue with him, but I had just gotten used to having to compensate for that dip by the far pocket. Sighing, I got up from the back of the couch and went to press my forehead to the cold stained glass, seeing the blurry world through a rose tint. He might clear the table before it was my turn. It made for a lousy evening of play, but I was too antsy to play anyway. The longer it took for my amulets to find HAPA, the more likely they were going to mutilate another innocent. My fingers twitched. Was I a demon, or was I a demon?