The Poison of Ivy Read online

  “We’re getting you help,” she said, directing people around him to avoid any more contact until his row was clear.

  He was yelling through gritted teeth by the time she jumped over the chairs and into the next row, making sure the rows were clear all the way up to the front. She hopped onto the stage and ran into the wings of the stage, calling for Delilah. The woman was gone, as were any of the staff or crew who had helped with the show. Several floor-length rolling mirrors still stood quietly, waiting for the cue, though one of them was shattered into a thousand tiny reflective pieces on the floor. The Prophetess had barely managed to escape her death, apparently.

  A long, feathered thing that Ivy assumed was a dress and a large confetti cannon sat behind the mirrors, the only other things the Prophetess had left behind.

  She ran back out onto the stage, her gun still drawn, and found Vince fireman-carrying a short woman to one of the two ambulances that had arrived. Besides the five shooters and the woman she’d found left across the chairs like a blanket over a couch, there were two others dead—one laying in the aisles, her hair askew and her blood spread around her in the pattern of footprints, no one willing to stop their escape to help the woman who had bled out onto the concrete of the theatre. The other was an older woman, sitting in her seat, her arms on the armrests, a bullet hole in her now-shattered glasses. That left four bleeding, making small movements on the ground, plus the one Vince had carried to the ambulance already.

  Eight dead, including the shooters, and five injured.

  It wasn’t a good headline.

  Officers were flooding the theatre now, and she jumped down from the stage and ran toward the man who was still gripping his ribs. She yelled for two people running with a gurney, and she helped him onto it. He groaned softly, but his eyes were sharp, focused. Good. The adrenaline would keep him awake, keep him alive. His fingers were covered in his own blood, which dripped from his fingertips to the ground near Ivy’s shoes. The EMTs took off toward the ambulance, and Ivy moved on to the next injury, a girl who couldn’t be more than sixteen, crying at the two bullets that seemed to have gone right through her leg.

  “My name is Ivy Hart; I’m a police officer,” she said, trying to move the girl onto her opposite side. “What is your name?”

  The girl’s eyes were blurry with thick tears and mascara. “Brianna.”

  Ivy nodded. “Well, Brianna, you are going to be okay.” The girl shuddered beneath her touch. “I know it hurts,” she said. “But they missed the part of your leg that would kill you, okay?”

  The girl nodded, her teeth gritted. “Hurts,” she said. Her voice was agony.

  “I know,” Ivy said, waving over the gurney that had returned. “We’re taking you to help right now, okay? Be brave for us.”

  The girl yelled through her teeth as she was moved onto the gurney.

  Once the ambulances were off, Ivy made her way to Chief Marks, who had just jumped out of his patrol car.

  “Y’all all right?” he asked, his eyes scanning Ivy and Vince, who were both sweating and breathless from adrenaline.

  Ivy looked past Chief Marks at the bodies, crunched in unnatural positions between the seats.

  He followed her gaze and nodded. “There would have been much more if you hadn’t been here,” he said.

  There was a bullet hole in the projector’s screen, which showed a Kingsman card rotating. She’d never seen a Kingsmen card with their logo on both sides, but she figured that was more for the dramatic effect of the animation.

  “Good to know they had enough active Kingsmen to send to an event like this,” Ivy said, her eyes dropping to the ground.

  She didn’t mention the fact that she herself had almost been killed. She’d seen the recognition in the eyes of the Kingsman before she shot him. He’d been aiming at her because she was a cop, but she saw the momentary shift in his focus when he placed her as a WIP.

  “Good to know they have a graphic designer now,” Vince said, catching onto his partner’s sarcasm. The card spun, its design shimmering, the animated, dark-red ink glistening like still-warm blood.

  “Delilah?” the chief asked, ignoring their attitude. His voice dropped deep in the I sound of Delilah. His Southern accent made an appearance when he wasn’t actively thinking about stopping it.

  “Gone,” Ivy said. “I checked for her. She left some props, so I’m sure they’ll be back, but not for a while, I’d bet.” She looked back over her shoulder as if she could see the army of rolling mirrors through the thick black curtains. The roving lights were still moving across the stage in figure eights. “Don’t know how to turn off the lights,” she said. But as soon as she blinked, the lights were off, the sound of electricity pulled tight ceased, the speakers and stereos cutting off.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sunday, March 5, 2017, 11:21 a.m.

  Ivy stirred her coffee with a tiny wooden stirrer, and Cassiopeia sprinkled cinnamon over the top her own. “This is why we hide,” she said. She was pale from stress or sleeplessness or some combination of both. “I’m looking for new houses already,” she said. “I have a weird feeling.”

  “Generally, most people feel strange after a shooting happens in their town,” Ivy said, trying to calm the woman, but she didn’t think it did much to help. Ivy felt on edge herself, and she rubbed her forehead, hoping the caffeine would assist.

  Cassiopeia nodded nonetheless, her thick curls bouncing. She took a sip of her coffee, her dark fingernails wrapping around the cup.

  Vince slurped at his iced mocha cocoa frappuccino latte, or whatever ridiculous sugar concoction he’d ordered. Ivy was convinced it was mostly whipped cream, but it looked sophisticated enough that Vince could pass it off as caffeine.

  “I’m worried about opening up the coven or The Protection of the Female Goddess to new people,” Cassiopeia said. “And they were both made to reach out to others, to offer protection.” She took a sip of her coffee. “I feel torn about which duty is more important: protecting our own or reaching out to people who need it.”

  Ivy’s own mother had started The Protection of the Female Goddess before her death at the hands of a Kingsman to offer a support system to other women who had been targeted by the witch-hunting group. Ivy still hadn’t fully decided how she felt about her mother considering herself to be a witch but hadn’t had much time to process the idea since she’d been placed on the Kingsmen hitlist herself. What did sound like the woman she’d known until just before her thirteenth birthday was someone who had tried her best to help people feel connected to one another. She’d been a savvy businesswoman, but she’d had an even stronger heart—that was one of the things she remembered despite her mother having been gone for over fifteen years.

  “Perhaps it’s best to keep the group closed,” Vince said, noticing Ivy’s extended pause and subsequent distraction.

  Cassiopeia nodded. “I just hate not reaching out to witches who I know are terrified after going to that Prophetess gathering.”

  “That was a marketing ploy,” Ivy said. “It was nothing like the meetings of the L.A. coven,” she said, suddenly feeling a sort of loyalty to the coven, despite her complete disbelief in their spells and rituals.

  “How’s Aline?” Cassiopeia asked. “She told me she’d like to video into our meetings once she was better.”

  “That’s so Aline,” Vince said, taking another long sip of his whipped cream.

  “Second surgery down, just a lot of physical therapy ahead of her now.” Ivy shook her head. “Aline is level-headed as always. It’s Emily who I worry about, her handler.”

  Cassiopeia nodded. The young actress had nearly died after an attack on her life by the Kingsman at the Oscars. But it seemed clear that Emily had taken the bullet almost harder than Aline had herself.

  Ivy tapped her nails against the side of her coffee cup, waiting for its contents to get to a drinkable temperature. The top of her mouth still prickled from the too-hot sip she’d taken.

&nb
sp; Cassiopeia’s eyes flickered to the nearby camera crew.

  “They’re making a documentary about this.”

  Cassiopeia blinked at them before allowing her face to melt into her normal sweet smile. “If you’d like to see the inside of where we host the L.A. coven and The Protection, you’re welcome to, later this week sometime, though I’ll have to ask you to close your eyes on the way there.”

  Lindsey eagerly nodded, her entire crew swearing not to look.

  Cassiopeia’s electronic watch beeped, and she nodded. “I have to get ready for a meeting with some of the other coven leaders,” she said. “I’m going to recommend they don’t take in other members right now, until we can figure out how to tell who is loyal and who might sell us out to the nearest Kingsmen, you know?” she said, shaking her head. “Never thought I’d have to think about that, really.”

  She gave her phone number to Lindsey, who thanked her and then dropped into the seat across from Vince and Ivy. “Do you mind if we do some of our interview questions here? The lighting is so much better,” she said, motioning to the bright window beside them. Despite the great lighting, Michael swooped in, setting up a silvery light reflector across from the window, drawing the attention of many of the coffee shop’s patrons.

  “Sure,” Ivy said since it seemed to be assumed that they would be staying anyway.

  Vince poked his straw around the bottom of his cup of sugar.

  They asked Ivy again about Aline, about catching her boyfriend and Kingsman, Oliver Corbyn, after he’d tried to kill her at the Oscars, the ensuing media madness that led to the rise of both witches and Kingsmen alike all over the country. They were all easy questions. Facts that Ivy had been mulling over in her head for what felt like months but had been a measly few weeks.

  “And, Ivy, you’re being threatened too, right?” she asked.

  Ivy nodded carefully.

  “They think you’re a reincarnation of the witch Mary Caste?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll admit that I’m a near physical replica of my mother, who was also thought to be Mary Caste, as well as the other women of that witching line, though I have no association with anything in the Wiccan world like that.”

  Lindsey nodded. “Does it worry you that there has been such a sudden rise in Kingsmen, then?”

  Ivy felt the trap here. She didn’t think Lindsey was malicious, but the woman was obviously a storyteller. Ivy wouldn’t let her have this one. “I’m not scared for me, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “I’m capable of protecting myself like any of our other officers, and I’ve taken the precautions I’ve deemed necessary. But I know that not every person being targeted by the Kingsmen feels that type of safety. So yes, the numbers worry me because it’s going to lead to a lot of people allowing themselves to publicly hate and humiliate, and that’s going to breed fear. People who feel that freedom or that type of desperation are the most dangerous people. Their actions are unpredictable in a way that can be harmful to themselves or those around them.”

  Lindsey smiled and signaled for the two cameras with them to cut, and the green light in Ivy’s peripheral blinked out.

  “You rehearse that in the mirror or something?” Vince asked.

  “In the shower, actually,” she said, and Vince laughed. Ivy looked out the coffee shop window at the bright signs offering every type of food. The roads were so tired of the sun that they’d turned a light gray, and the concrete made a scraping sound beneath the edge of a skateboard.

  “You knew you’d get that question eventually,” he said, not asking.

  Ivy nodded. “Yeah.” On the other side of the windowsill, an ant searched for a place to put down the crumb on its back, and she followed it with her eyes.

  Lindsey had moved out of earshot, but he lowered his voice anyway. “For real, are you scared?”

  “Yes,” Ivy said. She looked at Vince, who looked neither surprised nor disappointed.

  “Ivan took the site down,” he said.

  “And about fifty others popped up,” she said.

  It was true. Ivan, a skilled programmer—and hacker—in the tech department, had taken down the original Kingsmen site, but people had now simply been listing their phone numbers on social media, hoping the man in charge of the Kingsmen would find it and add them to the never-ending number of growing Kingsmen. New websites for the group popped up every day. Some of them were crude pages on social media; others had basic web designs, and the LAPD was struggling to take them down as they consistently changed in small ways and reuploaded to the web. It sickened Ivy, but people wanted their own slice of the taboo situation. Ivy thought that most people probably didn’t understand the extent of the Kingsmen, and saw it as some sort of stunt, a ridiculously intense flash mob.

  “Not much else we can do,” he said. “None of them have the recruiting features though, and whoever is heading all this seems too careful to just pull the numbers of willing soldiers off the internet.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Ivy said, grabbing her bag.

  Several of the sites had recently fallen into disuse; they needed to find the new online headquarters of the Kingsmen before they could get that recruiting system back up. Vince slurped down the rest of his drink, and Ivy handed him a bottle of ibuprofen.

  “You’re going to crash so hard in about two hours.”

  “I can already feel the headache,” Vince said, holding a hand to his head. “But it was worth it.”

  “Was it?” she asked,

  Monday, March 6, 2017, 10:01 a.m.

  Ivy had avoided the news for the past two days, hoping to ride out the wave of news stories about the shooting at the Prophetess’s gathering. She knew the Prophetess’s profits had skyrocketed, as the shooting had caused a massive spread of her face and products. It was a possible motive, Vince had pointed out, which was certainly true, but Ivy felt that the attack had been Kingsmen-backed alone. She thought of the shattered mirror. A bullet wouldn’t have landed so close to her if she’d planned it. But other than updates on Delilah, she’d refused to watch the country mourn over people she might have saved, no matter how much Chief Marks told her it wasn’t her fault.

  But, when Chief Marks told her that the senator had called, Ivy asked, “Called for what? Like a vigil?” She flipped the gum in her mouth—it had grown tasteless on all sides, and she grimaced.

  “No,” Chief Marks said. “He called for you.” He looked at Vince. “And Vince.”

  “I feel that I was a bit of an afterthought, Chief,” Vince said, pretending to be hurt. “We all know that I’m the daring hero, and Ivy is my comedic relief.”

  Ivy laughed at this, and Chief Marks cracked a smile. “You two need to head over there within the next hour. He says he’s worried about his safety and the safety of his wife.” Ivy had never met the senator personally before, but she’d worked plenty of his events leading up to his most recent election. She didn’t remember if he’d been particular about his protection back then.

  “Why’s that?” Ivy asked. “Doesn’t he have a security team?”

  “Not a security team that knows how to deal with Kingsmen.”

  Ivy closed her eyes. “Let me guess,” she said, “his wife looks eerily like a woman who’s supposedly died five or more times.” Ivy wondered which reincarnated witch the senator’s wife was accused of being.

  “Bingo,” the chief said. “He wants to consult with you two since you’ve had to deal with a public figure with the same group targeting her.”

  “You told him that Aline did get shot, right?” Vince asked, and Ivy nearly threw her water on him. “You told him that we accidentally mistook an FBI agent to be her killer?”

  “A little soon, Vince!” she said, though she was trying to press her smile together.

  They’d visited Aline since her second surgery, and the woman had cracked so many jokes, smiling in her normally playful way, that it didn’t feel so wrong to make jokes about her near-death.

  Vince sh
rugged and began dancing in his chair to a ringtone that was sounding from someone’s bag.

  “Pretty sure that’s the Tetris theme song,” Ivy said, and Vince turned his body at angles like he was a robot. He made a sharp half-swivel in his chair. “Not sure why you think Tetris means robot, but okay,” Ivy said, ignoring her partner.

  “Does the senator want us to set up some sort of security system, or—” Ivy wasn’t quite sure what he would want. Did he want Ivy and Vince to be part of the security detail? She didn’t like telling people she couldn’t help them, but their detective skills seemed to be in high demand at the moment.

  “Dunno,” the chief said. “I’m guessing he just wants some advice. Most people are confused about how the Kingsmen even operate.”

  “That makes all of us,” Ivy said, “including most of the Kingsmen, I’d bet.” Ivy didn’t like to think that the Kingsmen were mysterious or organized in a way that would label them as an “operation,” but if there weren’t some sort of inner working at play here, the organization would have crashed almost immediately when it exploded after the Oscars. Clearly, there was at least one person who understood the Kingsmen—the kingpin.

  “Well, his wife is apparently too scared to leave the house, and he would like some sort of assurance.”

  “Which we can’t really give,” Ivy pointed out.

  “I think anything might help,” the chief said.

  The camera crew was already gathering their things, wrapping cords around themselves like pet snakes. Chief Marks patted Mikey on the back, who was wearing a band T-shirt and cargo pants. She wondered if he got his fashion sense from his grandfather, who was known to have a favorite band T-shirt himself.

  “Are they riding with us?” he asked, eyeing the equipment.

  Monday, March 6, 2017, 11:23 a.m.