A Perfect Blood

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.
    If he got me killed, I was going to be pissed.
    “How much time do we have?” I asked Jenks again, my pulse hammering as I turned my phone on, praying I’d get a signal. One bar. It might be enough, and Jenks was silent as I scrolled through my recently called numbers and hit Trent’s.
    “Enough if you’re quick about it,” Jenks said, his expression worried. His wings moved fitfully as he stood, his back almost to me as a show of his ambivalence.
    “I just want to know,” I said as I tossed my hair from my ear and put the phone to it.
    It rang three times before it was picked up, and I fidgeted while Jenks pouted. I didn’t know what I was going to say, a feeling that was compounded when the line clicked open and Trent’s very muzzy voice murmured, “Rachel? Mmm, hi.”
    My eyes met Jenks’s, and he sniggered at me. Hi? He sounded half asleep. Elves usually napped around noon, but Trent had been taking a lot of flack since coming out of the closet as an elf, and I’d be willing to bet that he was trying to stretch his natural sleep schedule to at least finish out a human workday before crashing. “Um, you got a minute?” I said, warming.
    “I didn’t think about this before I installed that switchboard,” he said, his voice sounding more like his own. “What can I do for you? Since I’m awake.”
    Embarrassed, I winced. “Sorry,” I said, meaning it. “Ah, about those charms you gave me?” I should have called him earlier, and my scuffing feet made echoes as I turned the radio down all the