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your kind when it comes again. Who knows? Perhaps the I.S. is riddled with witches on the threshold of becoming demons.”
    “Sure, okay,” I said, knowing I was the only witch besides Lee Saladan that Trent’s dad had saved, modifying our mitochondria to produce an enzyme that allowed us to survive the naturally occurring demon enzymes in our blood. I could pass the cure on, but Lee couldn’t.
    “Oh dear,” Nina said around a sigh, somehow injecting the soft oath with a world of disappointment. “There are no more of you?” she asked, having sensed in my last words that there were not. “Are you sure? Pity. I think I will stay nevertheless. You amuse me, and so little does anymore.”
    Better and better. With a solid effort, I pulled my arm from hers as we stepped from the sidewalk and walked on the frost-burnt grass. I still wanted to know why Trent had been out here, but didn’t think I’d be willing to pay the price for it. Besides, Jenks and Ivy would probably know, seeing that they were out here already.
    Nina’s eyes were full of a delicious delight at my rebellion as we headed for the crackling radios. The older dead vampires got, the more human they became, and seeing such an old presence in a young body unnerved me more than seeing a masculine presence in a feminine one.
    “I kind of like Nina, you know,” I said, not knowing why but feeling I had to stick up for the woman being used so callously. I’d lived long enough with Ivy to know that those who attracted the undead’s attention were abused and warped, and Nina had no clue to the depth of misery she was in for.
    Nina sniffed, shifting her shoulders to look at the sky through the branches. “She’s a sweet girl, but poor.”
    Ire pricked through me, and the last of his charisma shredded. “Being poor is not an indication of potential or worth. It’s a lack of resources.”
    Nina turned, her dark eyebrows high in surprise. The delicious tang of experienced, confident living vampire was growing more complex and stronger the longer the undead vamp was in her, and I felt my expression freeze as I remembered Kisten. A fairy tale of a wish slipped through me that this might be Kisten, undead and reaching out to me, but no. I’d seen him dead twice. Nothing remained of him but memories and a box of ash under Ivy’s bed. Besides, this guy was really old.
    “You’ve loved one of us before,” Nina breathed, as if the undead vampire in her shared my pain.
    Blinking, I pulled myself out of my brief misery, finding that I’d put a hand on my neck to hide the scar that could no longer be seen. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    “This way,” Nina said, making me take a small detour around a patch of grass. I could see nothing different about it as we passed, and Nina sniffed. “There are bones there,” she said, her low voice having the hint of old emotion.
    Curious, I looked back at the earth again. “Must be icky knowing where everything is buried,” I said, thinking she was better than a metal detector.
    “She was about eight,” Nina said. “Died of cholera in the 1800s. They missed her grave when they moved them because someone stole her marker.”
    We were nearing the gazebo, wreathed with people and noise, but I turned to look behind me again even as I continued forward. “You can tell that from walking over a grave?”
    “No. I helped bury her.”
    “Oh.” I shut my mouth, wondering if the missing marker was under this guy’s coffin. The undead did not love, but they remembered love with a savage loyalty. Uneasy with all the people, I looked to find Ivy, standing with two I.S. agents in suits, going over a stapled printout. The sparkle of light on her shoulder was probably Jenks, the pixy making a burst of bright dust to acknowledge me but not leaving the warmth of Ivy’s shoulder as they studied a clipboard.
    Behind them stood the gazebo bandstand, brightly painted and open. It would have been pretty except for the bloody,