Ever After (Rachel Morgan)

with Nina. Is she going to be okay? Felix was . . .” I hesitated, my anger vanishing as I remembered his hunched shadow, as he stood anguished in my kitchen in a moment of lucidity, his eyes rolling as he looked for me to kill him as a way out of his new hell. “I don’t like undead vampires, the way they use people like tissue and discard them, but seeing him broken like that and losing his mind?” I looked up, seeing her own pain. “I feel bad for him.”
    Ivy’s eyes were haunted as she watched her fingers encircle her cup.
    “Hey, ah, I’m going to check out the perimeter, okay?” Jenks said, then darted off through the drive-up window, scaring the crap out of the barista managing it. Though the sun was bright this morning, it was too cold for him to be outside long. He’d be back.
    Chicken, I thought, but I didn’t blame him. Ivy exhaled, still avoiding me. Either she would talk or she wouldn’t.
    “Maybe I shouldn’t have interfered,” she said, and I strained to hear her over the noise of “background” music and conversation. Ivy’s eyes came up, heartache mirrored in them. “People suffered for me last night, good people. Not just my friends at Piscary’s who fed that monster, but the ones at the safe house, too. Nina agreed to this arrangement with Felix. Who am I to try to help her?”
    I leaned over the table, and Ivy flinched as my hand covered hers. The cup was long cold, but her fingers were warm. “Nina did not agree to this . She bought into a lie, one coated in power and euphoria. People suffered for her, but they did it knowing it was to help one of their own come back. If Nina can survive, if you can bring her back from where Felix filled her with ecstasy and then dumped her, then there’s hope for them. That’s why they took your pain. You gave them hope that they might survive, too.”
    Ivy looked away in guilt, and I remembered the wild abandonment I’d seen time and again at Piscary’s under Kisten’s management, living vampires going there to lie to themselves that life was good and they had the world on a string. They needed knowing that there was a way out, perhaps more than they knew.
    My eyes were warm with unshed tears, and Ivy blinked fast when she pulled her hand out from under mine. She wanted to believe, but it was hard for her to accept others sacrificing for her.
    “Keep Nina safe,” I said, hiding my hand under the table. A resolve had filled me somewhere between finding Felix in my kitchen and Ivy stumbling home last night crying over someone else’s pain. I couldn’t let Ivy suffer the hell I’d seen Felix trapped in. I had to find a way to save her soul. I had to.
    “Thank you,” Ivy whispered, her motion slow as she balled up her ecofriendly napkin. Taking a deep breath, I could almost see her focus on the “now.” “It was a rough night. It took six of us to hold her down when the bloodlust hit her. If this goes okay, I’m going to try to be there when she wakes up so she knows I’m . . . okay.”
    She couldn’t look at me, and I wished she wasn’t so ashamed of what we had to do to survive. We all fell. What mattered was what we did after that. “Tell Nina for me that she can do this, okay? That it’s worth it.” That you’re worth it.
    “I will,” she whispered. “Next time I see her. Thank you.”
    Tears pricked my eyes, but I was smiling and so was she. Nina was strong. She would survive. I never would have thought that Ivy would ever be on the other end of the addiction, and I was proud of her.
    Ivy’s gaze flicked past me. She didn’t move, but something shifted in her, a predator’s quiet breath slipped in and out, and I suppressed a shudder. Just that fast, everything changed.
    Reaching for a napkin, I pretended to dab my mouth as I turned to the line. “Is that her?” I said, seeing a blonde with her sweater cut low and her spring skirt cut high. She was in a tight jacket, and she seemed to know everyone behind the counter, talking loud and cheerful as she flirted, waiting for her turn.
    Ivy was already reaching for her purse. “Yes,” she said, standing up and not looking at her. “Five minutes to eight. Right on time.”
    Jenks dropped down, his wings giving me a bare instant of warning. “She came in in the blue Mustang,” he said, still picking napkin from between his fingers. “I think it’s new since the cover is open. It’s too cold for that unless it’s your first convertible. I’ll get you