This was partly my fault, and I felt the helpless tears trying to start as I took more of Ivy's weight. There was no way to bind a vampire's soul to his body once he died, and as we slowly limped across the green space to Twin Lakes Bridge and the broken ley line, a warm tear ran a trail down my cheek.

"Don't cry," Ivy slurred. "It's going to be okay."

I wiped my eyes between our lurching steps, my stomach roiling. "Almost there."

Jenks dropped down, worry pinching his features. "Her aura isn't looking good, Rache."

"I know!" I shouted. "I know," I said again, softer.

"It hurts," Ivy said as I took even more of her weight. "It's not supposed to hurt, is it?"

Oh God. I knew the pain amulet was outclassed, but that the damage was too much for even the vampire toxins to mutate was scary. "Almost there. Hold on," I whispered, eyes fixed on the statue of Romulus and Remus. "You can rest when we get to the line."

But I didn't think we were going to make it, especially when Jenks's dust went an angry red. "There're two blood bags on the footbridge," he snarled, his blade catching the light. "Keep going. Don't stop no matter what you hear. I'll take care of them."

"Jenks!" I cried out as he darted away. Beside me, Ivy wheezed. Her fingers rose to touch her mouth, coming away red with blood. Immediately she curled her fingers up in a ball to hide it, but a flash of fear lit through me. Internal bleeding. My gun, too, was gone, left behind somewhere on the summer-burnt grass.

"Almost there," I said again as we moved another few feet, but inside, I was despairing. There were no hospitals in the ever-after, only demons who didn't care. I didn't think we'd make it all the way to the church. If Trent didn't show, I might have just killed Ivy by trying to save her.

Ivy's breath became labored, and the sudden shouting at the bridge yanked my attention up. With a quick flurry of motion, a woman swung wildly at Jenks, falling down the embankment and into the water, harried the entire way by the pixy. Suddenly she was screaming as Sharps, the resident bridge troll, rose up, swamping her.

Without a second look, the other vampire continued toward us, leaving her to sort herself out. He was vampire-child, beautiful, graceful, and sure of himself-and when he looked at me, I shuddered.

Jenks darted in and away, distracting him.

"Move faster, Ivy," I begged, knowing Jenks couldn't hold off a determined vampire. Eyeing the statue of Romulus and Remus, I brought up my second sight. A faint haze, ill looking and sporadic, hung at chest height. It was Al's line, half dead because of the shallow pond someone had dug out under it, but unable to die because the other half of it lay in the dry, desolate ever-after. It reminded me of the demon himself, having given up on life but clinging so tightly to the memory of a love he had once had that now he couldn't live or die.

He would never help me. Not now. And an old guilt pulled my brow even tighter.

From the water came a gurgling scream as the woman fought to be free of Sharps. Ivy moaned and I dropped my second sight. My eyes jerked to the controlled anger and grace striding toward us despite Jenks's darting flight and bloodied blade. The vampire knew the line was there and was trying to cut us off.

Crap on toast. I wasn't going to make it. I'd have to beat him off.

Ivy hung on my shoulder as I came to a heart-pounding halt, her head down and her breathing frighteningly raspy. A lousy twenty feet was between me and the line, and the suave man smiled when he rocked to a silent stand before us. He was the expected eight feet back, his hair moving in the light breeze as he assessed my determination, feeding off my fear even as I found a firmer stance. Eight feet. He'd fought magic users before. It was just far enough that he could dodge anything I might throw at him.

Fine. He was between me and the line, but I could still pull on it, and I allowed the line's energy to funnel down to my hand and gathered it in a tight ball of frustration. He was stunning in his black suit, but it was more than his sculpted, carefully bred-for beauty. It was his attitude of a complete and utter lack of fear. He was wearing sunglasses, and an old scar on his neck said he was someone's favorite. Behind him, the woman screamed at both Jenks and Sharps as she tried to get out of the water.

"Morgan," the living vampire said, his voice holding layers of emotion, and Ivy stirred, drawn awake by either the screams at the lake or the pull in his voice.

"Go to hell!" Ivy managed, and Jenks joined me. Together we faced him, my knees shaking and Jenks's wings clattering in threat.

The man's eyes flicked to Ivy, then back to me. "Give it up."

Not happening, and I found a better grip on Ivy, my bellyful of ever-after waiting for direction. "Come and get me," I mocked, trying to lure him a foot closer.

"You're not who I'm interested in. She's almost dead. All I have to do is wait."

Son of a bastard . . . This wasn't the original team sent to kill Ivy. It was probably the one sent to collect her body, and they'd be eager for the extra kudos killing her would bring them. Behind me, a car door slammed. I didn't dare look, but from the edge of my sight, three more men in suits started across the grass. Damn it, I couldn't fight off four of them and protect Ivy, too, even with Jenks.

The living vampire's beautiful brown eyes went black as he breathed in my fear. "Let us finish the job, or we beat you up and we finish the job anyway. She's dying her first death before the sun goes down."

"Over my dead body." The sun was nearing the horizon, but there were hours left in its path.

"And my broken wings," Jenks added, dusting Ivy's scalp again as blood began to mat her hair.

They were almost to us. I had to do something, his being out of range or not. I thought of Trent. Had he gotten my text? Was he on his way?

"Dead?" the vampire said, recapturing my attention. "No, he wants you alive. For now."

My frustration rose. The hazy read smear of the ley line was just behind him. Twenty lousy feet. "It can't be done!" I shouted, Jenks's dust tingling against my skin. "Tell Cormel it can't be done!"

"Then you owe him for the year he's kept you both safe," the man said. "Watching you suffer Ivy's second life will do."

"I already saved him once! I'm not paying the same debt twice."

The man chuckled, motioning for the arriving thugs to circle us. I could smell them, the rising scent of vampire incense bringing Ivy's eyes open and a new tension to her face. "You prolonged his misery is all."

He gestured, and I moved, throwing a single burst of energy at the beautiful man before turning my attention inward. "Rhombus!" I shouted, relief a slap when Jenks, contrary to his instinct, dropped down, safe inside my circle.

The rushing vampires skidded to a halt, stymied. Before me, my black-and-gold fist-size unfocused magic slammed into the head vampire, throwing him back four feet to hit the ground hard.

Nothing could get through my barrier unless it held my aura: not bullet, not vampire, not demon-unless he was very determined and I'd left an opening. But we were trapped in it, trapped twenty feet from safety. Damn it! This was so not fair. Every other demon could shift his aura to slip into a line, but I couldn't jump on my own, couldn't jump a lousy twenty feet. The line was so close I could almost feel it humming.

Dazed, the vampire found his feet, his beauty ruined by his snarl. "She's going to die in there!" he shouted, stalking forward to halt so close the barrier hummed a warning and I could see the first wrinkles about his eyes. "She's going to die, and then she will fall on you!"

Ivy stared up at me, clearly in pain, clearly feeling the pinch of instincts and desires she had lied to herself were under control. Tears filled her black eyes, and she reached out, her hand shaking as it found mine. "I'm sorry," she said, and anger filled me that they had brought her to this. "Please don't let me wake as the undead. I won't remember why I love you. Promise me. Promise me you won't let me wake as an undead."

My throat closed, and as Jenks's dust sifted red between us, I dropped down, my arms going around her. She wanted me to kill her if she should die. I couldn't do it. "I promise."

"Liar." She smiled at me, hand shaking as she touched my cheek.

Panic renewed, and I felt unreal, dizzy as I looked at the vampires ringing us in the late afternoon. There was no one to help me. I had to find a way.

"She won't last an hour," the beautiful man said, anticipation making his eyes black. "She will wake undead. You will fix her soul to her, or die at her own hands."

Ivy shook, and I let her go, resolve filling me as I stood until the shimmer of my circle hummed just over my head. "Jenks, I need you to do something," I said, and his face went white.

"I'm not leaving you, Rache."

I eyed the twenty feet and four vampires that separated us from the line. "I'm going to kick some vampire ass and get to that line. Ivy and I can wait in the ever-after."

"With the surface demons?" Jenks barked, his wings clattering harshly.

I had no choice. "Go try to wake Bis up. He can jump us to Trent's." I looked at the pixy, seeing his fear in his tight, angular face. He didn't want to leave us, was terrified we would die without him. He was probably right.

"No!" His wings clattered as he understood what I was saying. "It's hours until sunset. Don't ask me to leave you!"

I dropped down to grab Ivy's elbow to help her stand up. "I'm sorry, Ivy. You have to help me get you to the line."

"But she can hardly walk!"

"Which means she still can!" I shouted, and Ivy clutched at me, halfway to a stand and heavy in my grip. "Jenks, please," I said softly, and he hovered, helpless and angry, before us. "I can't jump on my own and Bis can't find me. You have to tell him where we are."

Slowly his expression shifted from anger to a frustrated understanding. "Keep her alive," he said, and I nodded, again making promises I couldn't keep.

Scared, I turned to the vampires watching suspiciously. Behind them, Cincinnati drowsed in the late afternoon sun. Al could have jumped us right to Trent's, or the hospital, or the church. But I wasn't one of them any longer. The break with the demons had been clean-even if the jagged edges of it still dug into my soul in the quiet parts of the night.

Breath held against the pain, Ivy got her weight over her feet and wavered to a rise. I felt her clench in agony as she fought to keep from coughing, her grip on me hurting. She took one breath, then another. Head up, she stared at the men ringing us. At the bridge, the woman finally got out of the water, dripping and bleeding from scratches and with a malevolent gleam in her eye. Five now.

I sucked in the line energy, feeling it hiccup and stutter. Does Al know I'm using his line? I wondered, feeling Al's utter abandonment of me again-jealousy, heartache, and hatred too much for him to forgive.

"Let me go, Ivy. I have to fight," I whispered, and after the briefest of hesitations, she did, her eyes closing as she uncrimped her fingers from around my arm. I could tell it had taken all her resolve, and she swallowed her saliva back, refusing to give in to her instincts-but instincts die last and hard.

"I like it when you say my name," she said as her eyes opened. "It doesn't hurt anymore."

Shit. This wasn't good. Not good at all. "I'm glad," I whispered, wishing my knees weren't shaking. "I'm going to have to kick some ass. Can you get to the statue on your own? Maybe critique me when it's over?"

"Over a beer," she said. Her hand wasn't so tight against her middle. I didn't know a charm for this. I had nothing.

Ivy slowly lost her balance and leaned into me again, unable to stand on her own. She wasn't going to make it, no matter what happened, and I shoved my panic down deep. "Thank you, Jenks," I whispered.

His wings clattered, and he wouldn't look at me, that same black dust sifting from him and making my skin tingle. I held Ivy close, the chill of her pressing into me as her head hung down and her breathing grew shallow. She was close to passing out. Slowly I lifted my chin and found the eyes of the waiting vampire.

"You first," I said, yanking a wad of ever-after into me. My breath came in with a sharp sound. Ivy stiffened in my grip, and I wondered if she felt it as I pulled everything I could handle into me. "Jenks, grab something!" I shouted as the building energy crested, lapped the top of my abilities, and, with a spasm that seemed to shake me to my core, edged into pain as I took even more. I had to take it all. All.

"Rache!" Jenks shrilled, tugging on my hair as he wound himself up in it. "What are you doing?"

I had one shot, and I wasn't going to waste it, even if it burned my synapses to a twisted mass. "Corrumpto!" I shouted, letting the energy explode from me.

My knees buckled. I felt airy, light and unreal. The line hummed through me, smelling of ozone and stardust. A soundless wave sped out, flattening the grass and bowling the vampires head over heels, making them look like crows. Ivy shuddered, her eyes opening black and deep. Together we straightened as a distant bell rang, and then another. Across the river, the basilica's bells tolled, and tears threatened when I recognized my own church bells ringing an echo from the force of my blast.

My skin was tingling, and I almost went down as Ivy's weight suddenly became my responsibility. "Ivy!" I called, bringing up my second sight and looking for the ley line. The vampires were down. We had to move. "Come on! Just a few steps!"

But then panic took me, not that the head vampire was getting up off the pavement, but that the ley line was gone! It wasn't running where it should, through the man-made ponds and beside the statue the vampire was leaning heavily against.

"Where is it?" I shouted, and Ivy sagged in my grip. Bewildered, and head humming as if it held a hive of bees, I strengthened my second sight until reality wavered under a broken landscape of dust, cracked rock, and bloated sun hazing an empty landscape and dry riverbed. The desolation of the ever-after was complete, and the gritty wind lifted through my hair even though I still stood in reality. But there was no line. What have I done?

Jenks hovered before me, blinking in shock. "You're in it," he said, a weird greenish dust sifting from him. "How did you move it, Rache?"

My mouth dropped open, and I spun, shocked. I moved the line? How?

"Get her!" the vampire screamed, and the present rushed back.

"Rhombus!" I shouted, staggering under Ivy's weight as my circle sprang up heady and thick since I was standing right in the middle of the line. I'd moved it? How? I had only tapped it. But Jenks was right. I was standing in Al's flimsy line, and it was growing stronger, no longer dampened and drained by the ponds. I'd shifted it. I had moved it to me.

The vampires slid to a halt, one of them screaming as he touched the circle and a snap of energy struck him like lightning. We were in the line. Ivy was with me. I looked past the angry vampires, knowing the line had been behind them, knowing it couldn't be moved. But it had.

And somehow, I didn't care that I'd done the impossible.

"Sorry about the beating," I said as I melded my aura around Ivy's to shift her with me to the ever-after.

"Beating?" The vampire leaned closer, not knowing what had happened. "That wasn't a beating."

I tightened my hold on the line, feeling it start to take us. "No, the one your master is going to give you." Thank you, Jenks. I will keep her alive.

The man's eyes became round, fear shimmering his motion for the first time, making him somehow more captivating with the contrasting shadows of fear and power. We'd bested him, and he was going to be punished.

"No!" he shouted as I shifted my aura and the world moved around us. The red of sunset became the harsh red of the ever-after sun. His howling cry of denial evolved, peaked, and became the scream of the gritty wind. The image of his crooked fingers reaching for us dissolved, and I saw it mirrored in the broken rock surrounding us. The sound of Jenks's wings was gone. We were alone and the world was broken-just like me.

My heart thumped and I shifted Ivy's weight until she hissed in pain. I squinted at the distant, red-smeared horizon, then brought my eyes closer, sending it over the remains of the Hollows, already in shadow. The spires of the basilica rose over it all, the bastion carefully preserved where most everything was left to crumble. The space where my church would have been was nothing but rock and grass. My idea to walk to it vanished. Ivy was done.

"You can rest now," I whispered. "It's going to be okay." Heart aching, I eased her down against a boulder, and she gripped my arm, refusing to let go. My eyes shot to hers, and the utter blackness in them stitched all my fears into one smothering black piece. I couldn't kill her to prevent her undead existence. If Bis didn't find us in time . . . I . . . I didn't know.

My throat was tight as I sat beside her and pulled her head to rest against me. She could move no farther, and this was as good a place as any, better than some. Whatever happened, we would face it together, away from the filth she'd struggled her entire life to escape.

Chapter 3.

The gritty wind had rubbed the skin between my short boot and pants leg raw. I huddled closer to Ivy, trying to get into the lee of the stone, but the boulder wasn't large enough. Ivy didn't move as my weight shifted, and I twisted my leg almost under myself to hide it. It would be asleep in about three minutes, but the respite from the wind was worth it.

Ivy's shallow breath came and went, her scent obvious under the choking burnt amber reek that permeated the ever-after. I listened for the clink of rock or sliding rubble that would mean a surface demon as I looked over the dry bed of the Ohio River and to the crumbled remains of the Hollows below. The sun was almost down, and the light was vanishing from the basilica's steeple inch by slow inch. Elsewhere the shadows were already thick. Behind me where Cincinnati would be, things moved, howled, and hooted as the sun vanished.

Surface demons. The large circle I'd put around us would keep them at bay, but they were gathering. No one, not even Newt, stayed still on the surface after dark-and we'd been noticed.

The horizon was still bright, but directly overhead the sky was that peculiar ever-after shade of reddish black that reminded me of old blood. A tiny sliver of moon would set just after the sun, and it glowed an eerie silver. It was the only pure thing, but so distant as to depress rather than uplift.

Experience told me the wind might abate with the sunset, a prospect I both welcomed and dreaded. It got cold when the sun went down, and Ivy was suffering, drifting in and out of consciousness. We were both thirsty, but she'd never said a word, happy that I was here with her.

Vampires suck, I thought, not for the first time as I rested my head against her shoulder and closed my eyes against the upwelling grief. How had we gotten here, playing a deadly game of waiting where Ivy's life hung in the chance between time and pixy wings?

Black traces of smut ran over the gold glow of my aura hazing my protection circle, arching like electricity between poles. The surface demons were gathering outside, not so patiently waiting for my circle to fall. One of them stood so his silhouette would be obvious against the darkening sky. He was taller than the rest, and the way he held his staff made me wonder if he was the same one Newt had tormented last summer in her calibration curse.

"You should go," Ivy whispered, and I started, not having realized she was awake.

I tugged her coat closer around her, careful not to hurt her. "No," I said simply, and she turned her black eyes to me, unblinking and catching the faint light from the sky.

"I'm going to die compromised," she said, as if she were talking about cutting her hair. "Without medical intervention, I'll wake hungry and incoherent. You should leave. I don't want to hurt you."

My thoughts flashed to the one time we'd tried to share blood. She'd mistakenly taken her feelings of love from it and had nearly killed me. I'd seen the beast of hunger in her before, and she hurt me because I would hurt her to stop it. "No," I whispered, and she sighed.

Silent, I watched the tall surface demon elegantly swing his staff to drive another from his rock, and the smaller demon scuttled sideways. "Bis will be awake soon," I said, but it sounded like a prayer even to me. Ivy wasn't shivering anymore, scaring me. "It will be okay. Jenks went to get Bis. He can jump you right to Trent's surgical suite. It won't be long now."