Free The Undead Pool by Kim Harrison Page B

to eat in. Gold hoops and a white chemise would have to do, and I rifled through the dryer, finally finding it hanging up behind the door.
    â€œOut!” I said firmly to Jenks. “You too, Bis,” I added, and Jenks jerked into the air, leaving behind a flash of black sparkles like ink as he spun to the glass-door shower.
    â€œBis! Damn it, you creepy bat!” Jenks swore, and the teenage gargoyle made a coarse guttural laugh like rocks in a garbage disposal. “What the hell are you doing?”
    â€œPracticing,” the gargoyle said, his color shifting back to his neutral pebbly gray. Bis hung from the ceiling with his clawlike fingers, his dexterous, lionlike tail with the white tuft wrapped around the showerhead for balance. He was the size of a cat, and I’d be worried about him pulling out the plumbing if he weren’t exceptionally lightweight. He had to be for his leathery wings to be able to keep him in the air. I’d felt his presence the instant I entered the bathroom, easily spotting him in the shower practicing changing his skin tone to the pattern of the tile. The mischievous kid had taken a liking to startling Jenks, knowing it made the pixy mad.
    â€œI mean it,” I said, chemise in hand as I pointed to the door. “Both of you, out.”
    Still laughing, Bis swooped out, intentionally making the back draft from his wings spin Jenks’s flight into a dangerous loop before he darted out after him. I couldn’t help my smile as I listened to Jenks complain to Ivy as I put the chemise on instead of the flat cotton tee.
    â€œMuch better,” I whispered as I evaluated the results, and grabbing my jacket, I headed for the hall, ambling to the kitchen at the back of the church. Ivy looked up from her slick new laptop as I entered, her eyes skating over my outfit in approval. Her old tower and monitor were gone, and an overindulgent, high-def screen she could plug her laptop into now took up a good portion of the thick country-kitchen farm table pressed up against the interior wall. Her high-tech efficiency went surprisingly well with my herbs and spell-crafting paraphernalia hanging over the center counter. The single window that overlooked the kitchen garden was a black square of night. Al’s chrysalis and Trent’s old pinkie ring sitting under a water glass were the only things on the sill now that most of the dandelions were done. The radio was on to the news, but thankfully there’d been no new reports of misfires. Maybe it was over. I sighed, and as if feeling it, Ivy took the pencil from between her teeth. “Nice balance.”
    Pleased, I dropped my jacket onto my bag on the table as I made my way to my charm cupboard. “Thanks. I don’t know why I even bother. I’ll probably be spending the night sitting outside a boardroom door.” Standing before the open cupboard, I fingered my uninvoked charms to find two pain amulets. Both Bis and Ivy were looking at her maps, the gargoyle’s gnarly claws spread wide to maintain his balance on the awkwardly flat surface. He really was a smart kid, and I’d been toying with the idea of giving him my laptop so he’d stop using Ivy’s—but then I’d have to use Ivy’s, and that was no good either.
    â€œWhat’s up?” I asked, and she stuck the pencil back between her teeth, spinning the topmost map for me to see.
    Bis looked worried, and with one hand at my hip, the other on the table, I leaned over the map showing Cincinnati and the Hollows across the river, color coded like a zip-code map to show the traditional vampire territories. Everyone looked to Rynn Cormel as the last word in vampire law, but lesser masters handled their own problems unless things got out of hand. Squabbles were common, but the number of red dots on Ivy’s map wasn’t good. Every section had at least one violent crime within the last twenty-four hours, probably ignored in the