A Perfect Blood (The Hollows #10)(80)

My tension eased when Nina looked away. “I honestly don’t know how you do it, Ms. Tamwood. Most of my people would have succumbed years ago.”
Jenks dropped back, lighting them with his silver dust. He’d heard everything with his exquisite hearing. “Ivy defines herself with her denial.”
Nina looked at him in question. “Do tell,” she said, and I wondered how old Felix was if he was using one of Pierce’s phrases. “Nina tells me that Rynn Cormel has given you your blood freedom?” she asked. “Is that so?”
Glenn had reached a fire door, the lock clearly having been broken recently. His face was troubled when we came to a halt before him, and I didn’t wonder why. I knew Ivy was holding Nina’s arm and flirting to distance Felix’s thoughts from me, but he might not. “We have to be quiet from this level down,” he said needlessly. “Rachel, can you still tap a line?”
“So far,” I said, but one more stairway might put me below the easy reach of one. Good thing I still had my splat gun. And, ah, Trent’s charms.
Glenn worked the latch, and the fire door opened, showing a dark stairway leading down. The air shifting the strands of my hair smelled of oil and canned meat. Jenks hovered uncertainly, finally moving forward to light the path as I followed Ivy down.
The stairway was tight, more like an escape hatch than anything else, and I wondered if this was really a way out. I could understand it if this was a last-stand kind of bunker, but it would be a death trap if there was a real catastrophe—such as an invading force knocking at your door.
We reached the end in silence, and Nina gently pushed open the second fire door. She looked too eager for my liking, but Ivy was nearby. Maybe the pain amulet she’d asked for earlier was for Nina after Ivy cracked her head open. 
“Saints alive, I’ve missed this,” Nina said as she slipped into an even darker hallway.
“Easy, Felix,” Ivy whispered, her hand on Nina’s arm.
“Dim the light, Jenks,” Glenn whispered as he followed me into the hallway, and I got a quick glimpse of a cylindrical passageway before Jenks landed on Ivy’s shoulder and his dust settled and went out. It looked as if the builders had simply set huge sewer lines and poured a flat floor in the bottom of them. Thick cords of electrical wiring snaked along the curved walls at head height. I knew there were possibly more than fifty men down here scattered about, but I felt alone, and I shivered.
“This way,” Glenn said as he brushed past me. “We have twenty minutes to get in place. Rachel, we find your service shaft first.”
Jenks couldn’t dampen his glow and still fly, and Glenn cracked a glow stick, the pasty green light making enough glow to see by as I followed him. The hair on the back of my neck prickled as Ivy and Nina whispered behind me in the dark. I couldn’t hear their footsteps, but my gut knew they were there, and I tried to slow my pulse before I set the vampires off.
Fingers fumbling, I turned my radio up, and my shoulders eased at the sound of people. Almost before I knew it, Glenn stopped, looking first down, then up. It was my air shaft, bisecting the tube we were in. One pipe went straight down, the other up. A grate covered the lower shaft, and I looked down it as Jenks went to check it out, noticing that the tube made a sharp right turn about three feet down. Jenks’s wings sounded unreal down here, reminding me of summer and dragonflies. “This is it?” I whispered, and Glenn nodded.
“Radio?” he asked, and I gave him a thumbs-up. “Ley line?” he asked next, and I hesitated, reaching out, finding the barest whisper. It would be enough.
“I’m good,” I said, and Ivy’s eyes tightened at my word choice. I still had my splat gun, for the Turn’s sake, and I wasn’t going to hide upstairs with Dr. Cordova. “Don’t hang around on my account,” I said, and he peered down the dark hallway as Jenks rose to check out the upper shaft, flying right through his previous light trail. He really was amazing, when you got right down to it, and I wondered why they’d stuck him with me.
Glenn snapped another glow stick, and a cold, sickly green light joined Jenks’s pure glow. Glenn handed it to me, and then checked his watch. Wings clattering, Jenks dropped back down from the upper shaft.
“What are you still here for?” he said snarkily as he hovered at my shoulder. “We’ve got this. Go on!”
“Jenks, if you want to go with Ivy, I’m good with that,” I said, thinking he’d be of better use with her than sitting at an air shaft with me.
“Hell no!” he said, landing on my shoulder. His wings stopped, and it grew darker. “I’m staying here. You never know. They might come this way.”
Glenn nodded sharply, checking his watch again. “Okay. Sing out if you see something. Channel seven puts you through to me alone. You know where the dial is?”
I bobbed my head, and Jenks swore at me when my hair hit him. “Thanks, Uncle Glenn,” I said sarcastically, wanting to know why he’d arranged for no Inderlanders at the take zone. He’d be griping about it if it was Dr. Cordova’s idea, so clearly it was his own—and a faint feeling of mistrust slipped into me.
Behind him, Nina was beginning to look impatient. “I can hear them,” Nina whispered. “Little men, like mice in the walls. We need to go.”
“Yeah, go,” Jenks said, as clearly unnerved by her comment as much as I was.
With a last nod, Glenn turned away. Ivy and Nina followed, and in three seconds, the sound of their steps faded. In another three, they turned a corner and the light from Glenn’s glow stick was gone.I exhaled and leaned against the wall, listening to the silence and breathing in the scent of fear that was more than forty years old. Slowly I recognized the draft pulling my hair up. Tilting my head, I turned the earpiece down and slid to the floor. “How long till they move on them?” I breathed.
“Fifteen minutes, sixteen seconds,” Jenks said from my shoulder.
I was silent, then crossed my arms and shifted my weight to my other hipbone. “We’re not going to see any action, are we?”
“If you go by Glenn’s prediction, not a fairy’s chance in a pixy garden,” Jenks said. “But I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think they were going to screw it up and send them our way. The bastards are going to run, and it won’t be for the back door.”
“That’s what I think, too.” I smiled in the dark and waited.
Chapter Twenty-four
The green glow stick that Glenn had left me made Jenks look like a tiny, sickly wraith as he sat on my knee with his legs pulled up, mirroring me. It seemed colder now that I wasn’t moving, and my back was to the curved wall as I sat beside the ventilation shaft, my shoulder bag next to me. The draft was pulling the stray strands of my hair up and back. I rolled the glow stick between my palms as I listened to the sporadic radio chatter. I had the speaker cranked since it wasn’t in my ear, dangling down my front so Jenks could hear it, too. The conversations revolved around HAPA: who they were, what they were capable of, how many times they’d evaded arrest. I should’ve been listening, but I was thinking about Trent’s charms.
“You okay?” Jenks asked, his wings glittering like they held water drops.
I smiled, remembering how beautiful his wings were close up when I’d shrunk down to help him through the first difficult day after his wife died. “Thinking about Trent’s charms,” I admitted.
Jenks scowled, his angular features pinching as he picked at his boots. “Yeah? That Pandora charm he made you almost killed you. You should’ve let me bury them in the garden.”
I dragged my shoulder bag closer, peering down at the blue and gold pins. It was hard to tell the difference in the dim light, but I shoved two paralyzing charms in my right boot, two blinding charms in my left.
“Oh God. You’re going to use them!” Jenks moaned, and I moved my knee wildly until he took off.
“I’ll look pretty stupid if I need them and I don’t have them,” I said, wiggling my foot until the cool metal warmed and their pinch vanished. I wasn’t one for organization, but even I knew that leaving loose charms rattling in a bag wasn’t a good idea, and as Jenks pantomimed hanging himself, I gathered the rest, slipping them into a zippered inner pocket of my shoulder bag where they wouldn’t interfere with my reach for the splat gun. I still didn’t know what the tiny ring Trent had left me did, and I looked at it, remembering what Jenks had said about his boys. Trent had simply forgotten. That’s all. 
“Do I have time to make a call?” I asked, leaning over to get my phone out of my bag.
“What? Right now?” Jenks dropped back down to my knee, his expression disgusted. “Seriously, Rachel, it was sweet and all that he made you charms, but are you willing to trust your life to Trent’s maybe skills?”
The memory of watching him preparing to break into the Withons’ high-security compound and steal his own daughter filled my thoughts. It wasn’t how good he had looked in that black thief outfit, every line of muscle showing, or the obvious preparations he’d made, all the way down to getting me to help him get there alive. It was his confidence, his desire. I’d seen it under the arch before it fell, in the Arizona desert when he summoned Ku’Sox, and in a stupid little bar in Las Vegas when he didn’t want to leave to get our car. I’d seen it yesterday afternoon when he helped me with Al. He was trying to be what he wanted, and he really . . . wasn’t half bad. For some weird reason, I trusted him. God help me.