A Perfect Blood

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

    T he 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