Dead Witch Walking - Page 11/34

"Rache? Rachel, wake up. Are you all right?" A warm, low, unfamiliar voice was a black thread pulling me back to consciousness. I stretched, feeling different muscles work. My eyes flashed open to see shades of gray. Jenks stood in front of me with his hands on his hips and his feet spread wide. He looked six feet tall. "Crap!" I swore, hearing it come out as a harsh squeak. I was a mouse. I was a freaking mouse!

Panic raced through me as I remembered the pain of transforming. I was going to have to go through it all again to turn back. No wonder transforming was a dying art. It hurt like hell.

My fear slowed, and I wiggled out from under my clothes. My heart was pounding terribly fast. That awful lavender perfume was thick on my clothes, choking me. I wrinkled my nose and tried not to gag as I realized I could smell the alcohol used to carry the flowery scent. Under it was that incenselike ash smell I identified with Ivy, and I wondered if a vamp's nose was as sensitive as a mouse's.

Wobbling on four legs, I sank down to a crouch and looked at the world through my new eyes. The alley was the size of a warehouse, the black sky above threatening. Everything was shades of gray and white; I was color-blind. The sound of the distant traffic was loud, and the reek of the alley was an assault. Jenks was right. Someone really liked burritos.

Now that I was facedown in it, the night seemed colder. Turning to my pile of clothes, I tried to hide my jewelry. Next time I'd leave everything at home but my ankle knife.

I turned back to Jenks, jerking in surprise. Whoa, baby! Jenks was hell on wings. He had strong, clearly defined shoulders to support his ability to fly. He had a thin waist and a muscular physique. His shock of fair hair fell artfully over his brow to give him a devil-may-care attitude. A spiderweb of glitters laced his wings. Seeing him from his size-perspective, I could see why Jenks had more kids than three pairs of rabbits.

And his clothes... Even in black and white his clothes were stunning! The hem and collar of his shirt was embroidered with the likeness of foxgloves and ferns. His black bandanna, which had once looked red, was inlaid with tiny shimmers in an eye-riveting pattern.

"Hey, Hot Stuff," he said cheerfully, his voice surprisingly low and rich to my rodent ears. "It worked. Where did you find a spell for a mink?"

"Mink?" I questioned, hearing only a squeak. Tearing my gaze from him, I looked at my hands. My thumbs were small, but my fingers were so dexterous it didn't seem to matter. Tiny savage nails tipped them. I reached up to feel a short triangular muzzle, and I turned to see my long, luxuriant, flowing tail. My entire body was one sleek line. I'd never been this skinny. I lifted a foot, to find that my feet were white with little white pads. It was hard to judge sizes, but I was a great deal bigger than a mouse, more like a large squirrel.

A mink? I thought, sitting up and running my front paws over my dark fur. How cool was that? I opened my mouth to feel my teeth. Nasty sharp teeth. I wouldn't have to worry about cats - I was almost as big as one. Ivy's owls were better hunters than I thought. My teeth clicked shut and I looked up at the open sky. Owls. I still had to worry about owls. And dogs. And anything else bigger than me. What had a mink been doing in the city?

"You look good, Rache," Jenks said.

My eyes jerked to him. So do you, little man. I idly wondered if there was a spell to turn people pixy size. If Jenks was any indication, it might be nice to take a vacation as a pixy and troll Cincinnati's better gardens. Color me Thumbelina and I'd be a happy girl.

"I'll see you up on the roof, okay?" he added, grinning as he noticed my ogling. Again I nodded, watching him flit upward. Maybe I could find a spell to make pixies bigger?

My wistful sigh came out as a rather odd squeak, and I scampered to the drainpipe. There was a puddle from last night's rain at the bottom, and my whiskers brushed the sides as I easily crawled up. My nails, I was pleased to note, were sharp and could find purchase in what seemed smooth metal. They were as good a potential weapon as my teeth.

I was panting by the time I reached the flat roof. I practically flowed out of the drainpipe, gracefully loping to the dark shadow of the building's air conditioner and Jenks's loud hail. My hearing was better, otherwise I would never have heard him.

"Over here, Rache," he called. "Someone's bent the intake screen."

My silky tail was twitching in excitement as I joined him at the air conditioner. One corner of the screen was missing a screw. Even more helpful, the screen was bent. It wasn't hard to squeeze in with Jenks levering it open for me. Once through, I crouched in the more certain dark and waited for my eyes to adapt as Jenks flitted about. Slowly another mesh screen came into focus. My rodent eyebrows rose as Jenks pulled aside a triangular cut in the wire. Clearly we had found the I.S. vault's unadvertised back door.

Full of a new confidence, Jenks and I explored our way into the building's air ducts. Jenks never shut up, his unending commentary about how easy it would be to become lost and die of starvation no help at all. It became clear that the maze of ductworks was used frequently. The drops and steeper inclines actually had quarter-inch rope tied to the top of them, and the old smell of other animals was strong. There was only one way to go - down - and after a few false turns, we found ourselves looking out into the familiar expanse of the record vault.

The vent we peered from was directly over the terminals. Nothing moved in the soft glow from the copiers. Sterile rectangular tables and plastic chairs were scattered across the ugly red carpet. Built into the walls were the files themselves. These were only the active records, a measly fraction of the dirt the I.S. had on the Inderland and human populations, both living and dead. Most were stored electronically, but if a file was pulled, a paper copy stayed in the cabinets for ten years, fifty for a vampire.

"Ready, Jenks?" I said, forgetting it would come out as a squeak. I could smell burnt coffee and sugar from the table by the door, and my stomach growled. Lying down, I stretched an arm through the vent's slats, scraping my elbow to awkwardly reach the opening lever. It gave way with an unexpected suddenness, swinging with a loud squeak to hang by its hinges. Crouched in the shadows, I waited until my pulse slowed before poking my nose out.

Jenks stopped me as I went to push a waiting coil of rope out of the duct. "Hold on," he whispered. "Let me trip the cameras." He hesitated, his wings going dark. "You, ah, won't tell anyone about this, right? It's kind of a - uh - pixy thing. It helps us get around unnoticed." He gave me a chagrined look, and I shook my head.

"Thanks," he said, and he dropped into space. I waited a breathless moment before he zipped back up and settled himself on the edge of the opening and dangled his feet. "All set," he said. "They will record a fifteen-minute loop. Come on down. I'll show you what Francis looked at."

I pushed the rope out of the ductwork and started to the floor. My nails made it easy.

"He made an extra copy of everything he wanted," Jenks was saying, waiting by the copier's recycle bin. He grinned as I tipped the can over and began rifling through the papers. "I kept tripping the copier from inside. He couldn't figure out why it was giving him two of everything. The intern thought he was an idiot."

I looked up, just about dying to say, "Francis is an idiot."

"I knew you would be all right," Jenks said as he began arranging the papers in a long line on the floor. "But it was really hard to sit here and do nothing when I heard you run. Don't ask me to do that again, all right?"

His jaw was clenched. I didn't know what to say, so I nodded. Jenks was more of a help than I had thought to give him credit for. Feeling bad for having discounted him, I tugged the scattered pages into order. There wasn't much, and the more I read, the more discouraged I became.

"According to this," Jenks said, standing on the first page with his hands on his hips, "Trent is the last of his family. His parents died under circumstances reeking of magic. Almost the entire house staff was under suspicion. It took three years before the FIB and the I.S. gave up and decided to officially look the other way."

I skimmed the statement of the I.S. investigator. My whiskers twitched when I recognized his name: Leon Bairn, the same who ended up as a thin smear on the sidewalk. Interesting.

"His parents refused to claim kinship to human or Inderland," Jenks said, "as does Trent. And there wasn't enough left of them to do an autopsy. Just like his parents, Trent employs Inderlanders as well as humans. Everyone but pixies and fairies."

It wasn't surprising. Why risk a discrimination lawsuit?

"I know what you're thinking," Jenks said. "But he doesn't seem to lean either way. His personal secretaries are always warlocks. His nanny was a human of some repute, and he roomed at Princeton with a pack of Weres." Jenks scratched his head in thought. "Didn't join the fraternity, though. You won't find it in the records, but the word is he's not a Were, or a vamp, or anything." Seeing my shrug, he continued. "Trent doesn't smell right. I've talked to a pixy who got a whiff of him while backing up a runner out at Trent's stables. She says it's not that Trent doesn't smell human, but that something subtle about him screams Inderlander."

I thought of the spell I had used to disguise my looks tonight. Opening my mouth to ask Jenks about that, I shut it with a snap. I couldn't do anything but squeak. Jenks grinned, and pulled a broken pencil lead from a pocket. "You're going to have to spell it," he said, writing down the alphabet on the bottom of one of the pages.

I bared all my teeth, which only made him laugh. But I had little choice. Skittering across the page like it was a Ouija board, I pointed out, "Charm?"

Jenks shrugged. "Maybe. But a pixy could smell through it, just as I can smell witch under the mink stink. But if it's a disguise, it would explain the warlock secretary. The more you use magic, the stronger you smell." I looked at him quizzically, and he added, "All witches smell alike, but those who work the most magic smell stronger, more unearthly. You, for example, reek from your recent spelling. You pulled on the ever-after tonight, didn't you?"

It wasn't a question, and I sat back on my haunches, surprised. He could tell from my smell?

"Trent might have another witch invoke his spells for him," Jenks said. "That way, he could be able to cover his smell with a charm. The same goes for a Were or vamp."

Struck by a sudden idea, I spelled out, "Ivy's smell?"

Jenks flitted uneasily into the air before I had even finished. "Uh, yeah," he stammered. "Ivy stinks. Either she's a dabbler that quit sipping blood last week or an intense practitioner that quit last year. I can't tell. She's probably somewhere in between - probably."

I frowned - as much as a mink can frown. She'd said it had been three years. She must have been very, very intense. Swell.

I glanced to the vault clock. We were running out of time. Impatient, I turned to Trent's skimpy record. According to the I.S., he lived and worked in a huge estate outside the city. He raised racehorses on the property, but most of his income came from farming: orange and pecan groves in the south, strawberries on the coast, wheat in the Midwest. He even had an island off the Eastern seaboard that grew tea. I already knew this. It was standard newspaper fodder.

Trent grew up as an only child, losing his mother when he was ten and his father when he was a freshman at college. His parents had two other children that didn't survive infancy. The doctor wouldn't give up the records without being subpoenaed, and shortly after the request, the office had burnt to the ground. Tragically, the doctor had been working late and hadn't made it out. The Kalamacks, I thought dryly, played for keeps.

I sat up from the records and snapped my teeth. There was nothing here I could use. I had a feeling the FIB records, if I could by some miracle see them, would be even less helpful. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that very little was known about the Kalamacks.

"Sorry," Jenks said. "I know you were really counting on the records."

I shrugged, pushing and tugging the papers back into the bin. I wouldn't be able to put the basket upright, but at least it would look like it fell over and hadn't been rifled through.

"You want to go with Francis on his interview concerning his secretary's death?" Jenks asked. "It's this coming Monday at noon."

Noon, I thought. What a safe hour. It wasn't ridiculously early in the day for most Inderlanders, and a perfectly reasonable time for humans. Maybe I could tag along with Francis and help. I felt my rodent lips pull back across my teeth in a smile. Francis wouldn't mind. It might be my only chance to dig something up on Trent. Nailing him as a distributor of Brimstone would be enough to pay off my contract.

Jenks flew up to stand on the rim of the basket, his wings moving fitfully to keep his balance. "Mind if I come with you to get a good sniff of Trent? I bet I could tell what he is."

My whiskers brushed the air as I thought about it. It'd be nice having a second pair of eyes. I could hitch a ride with Francis. Not as a mink, though. He would probably scream like a sissy and throw things if he found me hiding in the backseat. "Talk later," I spelled out. "Home."

Jenks's smile grew sly. "Before we go, do you want to see your record?"

I shook my head. I had seen my record lots of times. "No," I wrote. "I want to shred it."