My heart thudded as Al was silent, thinking. “Ask her,” he finally said, chin lifting to indicate me.
“Me?” My anger vanished. Jenks’s dust was an uneasy red and Trent’s face was pale.
“Rachel, please,” Ivy said, and I jumped when she took my hands. She was trembling. “I’ll do anything. I love her!”
“I . . . I know you do,” I stammered, trying to figure this out. Me? Was he serious?
Al took Ivy’s free hand, opening it to show that tiny bottle I’d given her. Taking it, he moved it to mine, closing my fingers about it. I swallowed hard at the stirring I felt within it. Tingles cramped my arm, and Nina moaned, voice raw and raspy.
“I can’t put Nina’s soul back into her body,” I protested. “It’s going to do the same thing it did to Felix and she’ll suncide to bring her mind, body, and soul back in balance.”
“True,” Al drawled, making Jenks yo-yo up and down in impatience.
“Then what, ash breath?” the pixy snarled. “You hurt any of my friends anymore and I’ll lobotomize you in your sleep!”
Al frowned, but Ivy’s hope had kindled in me and Al’s confidence fanned it to a painful brightness. “To remain sane, her soul needs the stimulation of a stable, living body and aura,” Al lectured, as if trying to teach a dull student. “And so . . . ,” he drawled, gesturing for me to finish it.
“I need to put it into someone still alive,” I said, glancing at Trent when he made an abrupt noise of realization. “Ivy, if I put her soul into you—”
“You can do that?” Jenks asked, his suspicion thick.
“Of course my itchy witch can,” Al huffed as Ivy went three shades whiter. “She already put an alien presence in that Were fellow, David, was it? And there was no love there. At least not at first. I think he rather likes it now.”
Yes, David liked the focus. It was made to live through another, the symbiosis complete and beautiful. But Nina’s soul was hers. To graft it to another . . . was that right?
But as I looked at Ivy’s hope and Nina’s ragged exhaustion, I figured what was right didn’t matter much. “She might still need to take in her aura with your blood,” I said, and Ivy grasped my hands. They were shaking, but her need to do this was absolute.
“I don’t care,” Ivy whispered, alive and filled with hope, more beautiful for having seen her despair only moments before. “I want this. It feels right. I love Nina. She . . . loves me. I can’t see her like this, and I can’t end it. Please!”
I felt light and unreal. “I don’t know what it will do to you. What happens when you die? Will both your souls perish?”
“I don’t care!” Ivy shouted, and I turned to Al and Trent, wanting their opinion.
“It’s Nina’s soul, free of her consciousness,” Al said. “Unlike that ill-fated attempt when you, ah, tried to bind with that soul, Ivy likely won’t notice a thing. But there will be far-reaching repercussions from this.”
“I don’t care,” Ivy whispered.
“Well, I do,” I said, very aware of how much he liked breaking people with their own desires. “Tell me why you want this, Al, or nothing happens.”
“Rachel!” Ivy cried, and I clenched my teeth and faced Al squarely. Behind him, Trent and Jenks waited, scared but trusting me.
Al’s smile went wickedly crafty. “Ivy will be the first of a new kind of master vampire,” he said, and Trent made a soft sound of understanding. “A living one. The newly undead will look to the living for their continued existence, much as they do now, but it’s the undead who will be bound to the living, not the other way around. It should impart a measure of . . . morality that’s absent now.”
I hesitated, seeing the hope for the end of a long-kept guilt in him, and Al dropped his eyes, embarrassed perhaps that I knew him so well. “The soul Nina sips from Ivy will be her own,” Al said. “Where is the guilt in that? Freely given, freely held. The undead will lose their clout. It will fall to the living. Where it should be.”
The undead controlled by the living? I thought, seeing the sense of it.
“I want to try,” Ivy said, and I turned to Nina.
Nina stared at us, her gaze pained and her desperation shining. “Ivy can have my soul,” she whispered, voice ragged, in ribbons. “She already has my heart,” she panted, head drooping so her hair hid her face. “Oh God, it hurts. That you might be able to do this hurts. Please. Just do something. I can’t exist like this.”
The need to fix this seemed to warm me from within. My hands shook, and tingles raced through me as Trent slipped an arm around my waist. I felt ill, breathless. “This will break the original curse, won’t it?”
A rare smile holding a long-held pain crossed Al’s face. “As no other thing can, but it must be done on an individual basis and will be reassuringly slow as it filters through the population and gives us something to pay our rent with.”
“The transition will be gradual enough that it won’t destroy the current balance,” Trent said, his expression hopeful as he saw the possibilities in what we were about to unleash. I thought it fitting we’d do it here in a broken church.
“What do we need?” I said, and Al clapped his hands once, making me jump and Jenks ink a bright sparkle of silver and black.
“Salt,” he said, eyes glinting. “Lots and lots of salt.”
Chapter 30
We didn’t have salt, thanks to my kitchen being firebombed, but we did have pixy dust. Jenks was almost his old self as we readied the charm, feeling needed as we moved the furniture to make a large space in the sanctuary. Candles glowed from the sills of the stained-glass window, and Bis slumbered, hanging from the light over the pool table. He’d never woken when Trent transferred his clawed feet to the cold metal, and he looked like a huge bat hanging there. I hoped he was all right, and I promised myself I’d see this through—one thing at a time.
My stomach hurt as Al finished wiping down the old oak floor, his goat-slitted eyes worried as he threw my silk dress into a corner, having removed “excess stray ions” with it. “Ivy goes in the middle,” Al said, sounding unsure. “The spiral is etched outward from her.”
“Ivy?” I called, and I heard her coaxing Nina out of their room. She was still bound, but she numbly sat where Ivy put her. Suspicious, I turned to Al. His motions were too fast, too quick. He wanted this even as his regret and worry grew with every moment. “Why are you doing this?” I asked.