Pale Demon by Kim Harrison Page A

her a call.
    “What were you just doing?” Trent said suddenly, and I jerked, dropping my phone.
    “Jeez, Trent!” I yelped. “How long have you been watching me?” I flushed, glancing in the back to see Jenks’s wings shift and spill a silver dust as he slept on. “I’m calling Ivy.”
    Trent sat up, rubbing his right bicep where his familiar mark was, before he bent almost double to get my phone from under my feet. “You forgot I was here,” he said as he handed it to me, smiling as if it pleased him. “What were you doing? Before, I mean. You were looking at something, and it wasn’t the view. Your aura had a shadow on it. I’ve never seen that.”
    Great. He’d been watching me. Grimacing, I focused on the road. The traffic was starting to thicken as we approached the city. “Really?” I said shortly. Jenks had said the same thing to me once when I was doing some high magic. I didn’t like that my “aura shadow” showed up when I was using my second sight. Smiling as if nothing was wrong, I tossed my phone to him, and he deftly caught it. “Will you call Ivy for me? Tell her where we are?”
    He tossed it back, and it thumped onto my lap. “I’m not your secretary.”
    Dude, that was just rude, I thought, intentionally swerving from the right lane to the left as I flipped the phone open.
    Trent clutched the door and the dash, and from the backseat Jenks shrilled, “Hey! Rache! What the Disney blasted hell are you doing?”
    I was smiling my prettiest as Trent growled, “Give me the phone.”
    “Thank you,” I all but sang, dropping it into his hand and rolling up the window so he could hear better. He seemed harmless in his jeans and shirt, and I wondered how much of his charisma came from his wardrobe. Jenks apparently appreciated the drop in wind, and he flew back to the front, looking rumpled and sleepy as he yawned and sat on the rearview mirror.
    “Where are we?” he asked, rubbing a hand over his wings to check for tears.
    “Still on I-70,” I said as Trent scrolled through my call list, eyebrows going high when he found the mayor’s number. Yeah, we had talked. Got that little misunderstanding about her son a few years ago taken care of. “We’ll be crossing the Mississippi in a minute,” I added.
    Rubbing his arm again, Trent hit a button and put the phone to his ear. I wondered if he knew he was doing it, rubbing his familiar mark. “One of these days your smart-ass attitude is going to get you killed,” he said softly.
    “Not today,” I said, then watched Jenks peer behind us.
    “Huh,” the pixy said, not sounding at all worried. “They’re still there.”
    Nodding, I flicked my gaze to the mirror, seeing a gold Cadillac a way back. “Yup.”
    Phone to his ear, Trent turned to look. “We’re being followed?”
    “Relax, cookie maker,” Jenks said as he continued to work over his wings. “They’ve been there since Terre Haute.”
    A knot of worry started to tighten. Was it me they were following or Trent?
    There was a faint hail on the tiny speaker, and Trent continued to watch the car behind us through the side mirror. “Ms. Tamwood,” he said, and I marveled at his voice. “Rachel would like to talk to you,” he added as I held out my hand.
    “Hey, hi,” I said as I wrangled the phone to my ear. “We’re almost across the Mississippi. How was your flight?”
    “Lousy.” Ivy sounded tired, but she’d been up longer than I had. “I’m at the arch,” she continued. “Stay on I-70, then take the South Memorial Drive exit just after the bridge.”
    “Thanks, I already looked at the map,” I said, mildly peeved. The woman had not only laminated the map, but she’d used a marker to star where we could stop for Jenks.
    “Follow Memorial Drive all the way down to Washington,” she continued, as if I’d said nothing. “There’re signs everywhere to the parking structure.”
    “Okay, thanks,” I said, exasperated, but Jenks was laughing as he landed