A Perfect Blood

clean up my mess. I was silent, the book on my lap forgotten as I thought about what he’d said. My mind started to wander, straying back to him. He looked good there with his hair all over and that sexy butt of his. His sleeves were up to show some of the tattoos I normally didn’t get to see.
    Stop it, Rachel, I thought, and I put my eyes back on the book in my lap. “So, ah, why did you leave?” I asked. “Tired of spending a year in hell for three minutes in heaven?”
    Wayde was digging in the drawers for a dry dish towel, pulling out a gold one that was torn but really soaked up the water. “Takata asked me to,” he said as he began to dry the largest bowl. “He said his daughter needed someone to yank her back from the edge of the stage before she fell off.”
    I frowned, wondering if Trent would mind being the size of a fairy for a day. He could talk to the newest tenants in his garden. “Gee, thanks,” I said sourly.
    “Well, what about you?” Wayde leaned over to set the bowl between us on the counter. “Growing up to be a bad-ass runner must have had its perks.”
    “Right,” I said dryly as I rubbed my forehead. “I was in and out of hospitals until I was almost eighteen, or didn’t Takata tell you that? Home-schooled most of the time, but with enough public school to know what it’s like to get beat up.”
    Wayde winced, the cloth slowing on the next bowl. “Growing up sucks.”
    I reached for one of Ivy’s sticky notes and started making a list. Ceri knew this curse. She would help make sure I got it right. Me trying out curses on myself was one thing. On Trent, it was completely different. “I would’ve given a lot to be somewhere new every day where no one knew who I was, that my dad was dead and my mom nuts.”
    “That bad, huh?”
    Suddenly I wished I hadn’t said so much. “Not really,” I said, trying to back out of my mini pity party. “I’m a drama queen tonight. Ford, the FIB’s psych, would say my childhood gave me trust issues, but hiding from my mom that I was getting beaten up and fighting off boys with sticky hands gave me a better perspective of what’s really important. I wouldn’t change it.” Much. I hadn’t talked to Ford in ages, and I wondered how he was getting on with Holly. I suddenly realized that a bunch of my friends needed babysitters and vowed to start screening my calls. All I needed was someone else’s kid on my hip as I took down a surprise assassin.
    Wayde set a third pot inside the stack and dropped down to put them exactly where they belonged on the bottom shelf. “And what is important, Rachel Morgan?” he asked, and I looked at him through the open shelves.
    “Friends you can trust.” I tapped the pencil against the book. “Maybe Ford was right.”
    Wayde silently dropped the cloth and returned to the suds to wash the smaller stuff.
    “I want these guys, Wayde,” I said into the silence, thinking about Chris dancing in delight as Winona withered in agony and turned into a monstrosity. “I want them to know they can’t do what they did to Winona with impunity.” My hands gripped the demon texts, and I forced them to open. The pages were beginning to glow. Responding to my anger, perhaps, even though I was not tapping a line right now? Damn, I’d missed the weird stuff like this. Everything was connected. I’d forgotten how that felt.
    “You’ll get them,” Wayde said, his back to me and the metal stuff clanking.
    “I’m not so sure.” Something always seemed to break their way. HAPA was like mint. You could rip it up, and six months later, it was back, healthier than ever. Mint smelled better, though, and you could make juleps out of it. I don’t know what I could make out of HAPA. Compost, maybe.
    “You want these rinsed in saltwater?” he asked as he held up my spoons.
    “Yes, but not until you get the suds off them,” I said, looking at the dripping bubbles.
    Wayde silently ran the tap, letting the spoons sit on the drying cloth for a moment as he washed the mortar and pestle, actually taking a scrub pad to them. “At least I can tap a line again,” I said, rubbing my leg and circling in to where there should be a bullet scar but wasn’t. “Trent doesn’t think he did anything, but he did.”
    Why am I telling him this? I asked myself, but I couldn’t talk to Ivy or Jenks. They would jump to the wrong conclusion. Fidgeting, I looked past Wayde to the dark night, wanting nothing more than to be out in