Jamming the rolled insulation back between the two-by-four studs, I turned. The afternoon sun came through the high windows in the living room to make dusty beams that the pixies were playing in. They had just woken from their afternoon nap, and Jenks had them in here so Matalina could get a few extra winks. She’d been feeling poorly lately, but Jenks had assured us that she was doing fine. His kids were a bloody nuisance, but I wasn’t going to suggest they leave. Matalina could get all the sleep she wanted.
Fumbling, I pulled the hammer from the sill. I had borrowed it from my mom this morning, having dodged her questions with the excuse that I was putting up a birdhouse, not fixing the damage of an insane demon who’d trashed our living room. That it was July and too late for nests had never occurred to her.
“Here,” I said, smacking the ash handle into Ivy’s bare hand with a soft and certain pop. She smiled before turning to pound in a nail that had pulled through the paneling Newt had ripped down. Pixies squealed, and Jenks’s attention shot to them as he sat on a far sill with his youngest set of sextuplets, teaching them to tie their shoes. Immediately his blurring wings stilled, and he resumed his lesson. It was a nice piece of pixy life we didn’t get a chance to see often, a reminder that Jenks had an entire life outside of Ivy and me.
Ivy looked like a construction worker’s calendar girl in her worn hip-hugger jeans and black T-shirt, her straight hair covered with one of those paper hats you get at paint stores. Body moving with a controlled grace, she pounded the stray nail into the paneling. Soon as she backed up, three pixies were there to inspect it, all helpfully pointing out the tear she had made in the paper veneer. Saying nothing, Ivy glued it back down and continued on.
Smiling, I turned away. Ivy wasn’t pleased she had missed another one of my encounters with a demon. It was probably why she was hanging so tight today, needing to reassure herself that I was okay. And I could use her help. After seeing the estimate to replace a few sheets of paneling and carpet, we had decided to do it ourselves.
So far it had been easy. Just tidy the studs Newt had pulled the paneling off and put up new. There was no wall behind the thin sheets, and the insulation was the roll type, not the blown-in stuff we had put in the church’s ceilings last fall. It didn’t really look up to code, but that’s what you get when you do it yourself. As for the carpet, it could stay out on the curb. There had been an oak floor under it. All it needed was a nice coat of shine.
“Thanks,” Ivy said, handing the hammer back, and I slid it onto the mantel.
“No problem.” I straightened my short-sleeved shirt to cover my midriff and pulled a handful of thin nails from the box beside the hammer and arranged them between my lips. “You wanna ’old ’is for ’e well I ’ammer it?” I asked as I tried to maneuver an unwieldy piece of paneling into place.
Bending, Ivy took it by the one edge and wedged it tight against the old paneling, her vampire strength making it look like she was holding a sheet of cardboard.
With a few quick whacks, I put a nail in the upper left corner, moved around her to put another in the lower right, then a third in the upper right. The rich scent of vampire incense mixed with the sawdust and my latest perfume in a pleasant fragrance of contentment. “Thanks,” I said after I took the nails out of my mouth. “I can get it now.”
Her smooth oval face showing nothing, she backed up, her hands rubbing against each other as if soothing herself. It was the first time we had done anything together since she had bitten me, and it felt good. Like we were back to normal.
“Hey, Rache,” Jenks said loudly as the kids before him rose up and joined the others in a dusty sunbeam, “I’ve got one for you. How about Rumpelstiltskin?”
I didn’t bother to write that one down on the legal pad sitting on the dusty mantel, simply lifting my eyebrows at him as he laughed at me. I’d been trying to think up a password since coming back from my mom’s with the toolbox, and I wasn’t having any luck.
“I’d go with an acronym,” Ivy suggested. “One that isn’t in the dictionary. Or your names backward?” Her eyes fixed on mine with an odd intensity as she intoned, “Nagromanairamlehcar.”
That both Jenks and she had thought of the same thing proved Minias was right about the no-backward theme. “No,” I said before Jenks did. “Minias nixed it. He said it’s too easy to run through the dictionary backward and find you. No numbers, no spaces, no real words, and nothing backward.” Grabbing a few more nails, I stretched to reach the top of the panel.