“No, you, like...You don’t smell, and everything else does. You’re a space in the smell.”
Huh. No one had told me.
“So, Ronnie,” Cruz broke in, “let me see if I understand this. You were on your way to the clearing, and you passed someone you thought was Scarlett, going in the other direction?”
“Yeah.”
“And then you came into the clearing, and you saw her and me.”
“Yeah...wait,” Ronnie said, wrinkling his forehead. “I didn’t think about that. I felt you going back the other way.”
“That’s not possible, Ronnie.”
“Yeah...So I guess it couldn’t have been you, right? Because I saw you right after that, and you were back in the clearing.” He gave a relieved laugh, relaxing down on his seat. “Christ, when I saw you come in the store, I thought you were here to kill me, too.”
“Wait, you actually thought I did
that
?” I blame sleep deprivation, but it actually took me that long to figure out what he’d meant.
“Well, yeah. We all know about you. I’ve been near you before at the bar. Who else would feel like that?”
Cruz and I locked eyes, and I suddenly felt very cold.
“Another null,” I said softly.
The day I met Olivia was the day of my mom and dad’s funeral.
I hadn’t trusted my ability to drive, so I’d taken the train to Esperanza, feeling as if I were the main character in a movie that had suddenly switched genres. A week earlier, I’d been in a fun coming-of-age-in-college story. Suddenly, I was in a tragedy.
Jack picked me up at the station. He was obviously trying to look strong, but his eyes matched his scraggly red hair. At a little over six feet, my brother didn’t exactly tower over me, but he seemed huge and awkward as I walked up, unsure if he should go for a hug or a cheek peck or just take my overnight bag and march off. I dropped the bag and stepped into his arms. I’m all for feminism, but there’s something primal and comforting about being engulfed by someone bigger than you. When I pulled away, there were wet spots on his dark-blue button-down. I must have looked embarrassed, because he gave a little
it’s nothing
shrug and picked up my bag.
I can’t remember anything about the funeral home or the service, or how I got to the cemetery. It was like one minute I was leaving the station with Jack, then there was a blur of tears, and then we were looking down at the coffins as they were lowered into the earth. I kept thinking they weren’t just holes in the ground, they were holes in the world. Like once there was a space that was occupied by my mom and dad, and then that space had been violently
punched out, leaving a raw hole with ragged edges.
The whole world must be full of scars
, I thought dizzily. I was only eighteen.
Then a pretty woman picked her way across the grass in very high heels and handed me an old-fashioned linen handkerchief. She was in her mid-forties, with long chestnut hair and elegant makeup. Her blue eyes looked sharp enough to cut through you, and she had a five-inch scar running across her collarbone, which was exposed by a gray dress that was simple, but extremely expensive-looking, and tailored to her lean, angular frame. She was neither pretty nor ugly, but sort of haunting. Someone you’d remember.
“Thank you,” I said. I remembered that I was supposed to be playing some sort of role. A hostess. “Um, did you know my parents well?”
She glanced around. Jack had carried a couple of pots of flowers to the car, and the gravediggers kept their respectful distance. We were alone. “I’m afraid I didn’t know them at all,” she said. “But I’m sure they were lovely.”
I stared at her, confused. “I’m sorry...Are you a friend of Jack’s or something?”
She smiled serenely. “No, Scarlett. I’m a friend of yours. Or I’d like to be.”
On another day, I might have called for help right then, but I just kept looking at her, befuddled. Was she from a church or something?
“You see,” she went on, “there are very, very few of us. I think we should stick together, don’t you?”
Very, very few. Five or six in the world.
Had Olivia just been full of shit?
I wondered as Cruz and I walked back toward his car. It certainly wouldn’t be the only thing she’d lied about. But, no, that didn’t fit—Dashiell and Will had talked about the rarity of nulls, too, and I sort of suspected that if Dashiell had another null option, he wouldn’t be using me. If
Olivia was right about us being rare, though, how was it possible that there was another null in the clearing?
“Scarlett?” Cruz asked, breaking into my thoughts. “What does this mean?”
I blinked. “Um...Well, for starters, it means we’ve been looking at the wrong victim pool.”
“Why?”
“Because if a null was there, then someone wanted to kill something from the Old World. It’s hard to kill both werewolves and vampires, even witches if they see you coming. But if you could turn them into humans first...”
He nodded. “If the werewolves run in that park, it could have been three of them.”
I thought about all the blood at the scene, spilled intentionally all over the clearing. “No. They were vampires. Or at least one of them was a vampire.”
“So can we go ask the...uh...vampire boss?”
I checked my watch. It was only three, which meant there were a good four hours until sunset. “We can, but he’s dead right now.”
Cruz didn’t laugh. “Can’t you just go near him, and he’ll come back to life and talk to us?”
I stopped and turned to look at him. “Whoa. We can’t just burst in there. You really think the cardinal vampire in LA doesn’t have daytime security? What would our story be? ‘Hi, it’s Scarlett, mind if I make your boss completely vulnerable for a few minutes? Along with this guy I brought who, by the way, has a gun?’ And that’s before we even find out what
Dashiell
would do if I stormed in there and made him vulnerable.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Well, we can start by tracking down the null, right? There are how many of you?”
“That I know of? A handful,” I said. I started walking again. “But who knows how many there are total. The theory is that there are some nulls who never find out what they are.” I explained the
difficulty in discovering new nulls. “If the null lives in a city with a low Old World population, they might live and die without ever knowing. There’s another argument that says that doesn’t happen, because nulls evolved to be born near Old World populations, but that’s all theoretical.”
“How many do you know about?”
I counted in my head. “Six. But we’re all really spread out, geographically. There’s one in New York, two in Europe, one in Japan, one in Russia, and me. That’s it.” From the corner of my eye, I saw his eyebrows furrow and his mouth open. I held up both palms in a
stop
gesture. “No, I have no idea why. We just seem to be born spread out like that. The Old World doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to solve those kinds of questions—at least not with modern scientific methods—so nobody has many answers.” To her credit, Olivia had at least tried to make connections between the nulls, spending most of one summer working on an online network between us. I’d corresponded with a couple of people at one point, the ones who spoke good English, but I hadn’t heard from anyone in more than eight months. Since she’d died.
“Well, can we find those nulls? Find out where they were the other night?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But do you really want to spend time trying to track down international alibis when there could theoretically be unknown nulls right here in the US?”
He looked unhappy. “It’s a cop thing. I have to cover all the bases, even the unlikeliest ones. Can you get me a list of names and phone numbers?”
“I only have e-mail addresses. But it’d be better coming from me.”
He thought that over for a moment. “Okay.” He shook his head. “Man, this stuff is weird.”
“Tell me about it.”
We were back at Cruz’s car. Cruz checked his watch. “Scarlett, look...I have to get to the airport, solidify my alibi for this afternoon. Could you maybe find your own way home?”
Molly’s place was only a couple of miles north, but it was still annoying. “Fine,” I grumbled.
“Great,” he said, undeterred. “I’ll come and get you when I’m done with my shift.”
“Call first. Where are we going?”
“To cover some more bases. I want you to think about places where these Old World...um...people, hang out. Like that bar. And I want to show their pictures around, see if we can ID anybody. Then we’ll go see the vampire boss after dark.”
I groaned. “That’s not going to go over well.”
He shrugged, unrelenting. “That’s how it is sometimes.”
I swallowed another lecture about taking vampires seriously and being respectful—scratch that,
afraid
—of Dashiell. Maybe later.
I considered walking back to Molly’s, but ended up splurging on an overpriced cab. As soon as I got there, though, I realized there wasn’t anything I needed to be doing. I toyed with the idea of tackling my laundry or starting to work on the search for a new assistant, but I didn’t have the energy for either. Instead, I decided to wake up Molly. If she was going to question me or spy on me or whatever, I wanted to get it over with.
As I walked into her room, Molly gasped, her eyes flying open. Sometimes it’s like that. “Hey,” she said, running a hand through the tangles in her red hair. Vampire hair and fingernails grow. I don’t know why the magic works like that, but it does. Which is good for Molly, because she gets bored with her hair every three months or so. “You’re home! Ooh, it’s only three thirty, that’s so awesome. Want to go shopping? I was thinking I needed a new laptop bag.”
She seemed back to her usual peppy self, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding. I decided I didn’t really want to spend the day brooding about the possibility of another null being in town. “That sounds fine, if that’s what you want to do.”
“Really?” she squealed. “Let me just get dressed.” I had to stay in the room in order for this to happen, so I politely turned my back. She thinks that’s hilarious and told me so again.
I’ve seen a couple of reality TV shows where people—usually couples—are tied together and forced to stay within a few feet of each other. In real life, without the additional help of a rope (I’ve considered it, but even in LA, I think it’d look too weird), this is surprisingly hard to keep up. It’s so easy to forget and go off to the bathroom or wander a few feet away to look at something or answer your cell phone. By now, though, Molly and I had it down to an art form. We only screwed up once, early in our relationship, when we got separated in a crowd at the farmers’ market. Luckily, we were indoors, so when she collapsed, we just told everybody that she’d fainted. Close call.
We went to Westside Pavilion, and I followed Molly around Nordstrom’s for a while, ignoring her pleas to pick out a new wardrobe for me. Molly thinks my T-shirt-and-jeans look is gauche and trashy, and is constantly trying to use me as her own personal Barbie doll. I once pointed out that she wears T-shirts all the time, but she airily told me that her shirts and jeans were expensive, so it was okay. I don’t think there’s anything okay about paying $200 for jeans, but I’m crazy like that.
This is an argument we have a lot.
Molly eventually bought a pair of turquoise flats, which cost more than a community college education, and we went to the Apple store so she could get the laptop bag. Then we settled down in the cafeteria with Jamba Juices.
Molly took a big slurp, not disguising her enjoyment. “So what’s going on with you and the dog?” she asked cheerfully.
“Nice,” I said. Will and Dashiell seem to get along pretty well, or at least they’ve developed a good working relationship, but there’s not a lot of love lost between most vampires and werewolves, a conflict that the movies have actually gotten right. Both groups prefer each other to the damned witches, though, and I don’t blame them. “Nothing is going on, because nothing happened.”
“Really? Your mouth says no, but your eyes say yes.” Her own eyes sparkled, and I relaxed a little. It was as though the serious moment from that morning had never happened. Maybe I had just been paranoid about that after all. Maybe Molly had just been trying to be a good friend or something.
“You watch too much TV.”
“That may be true,” Molly said, “but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Are you into him?”
“Nah,” I said. I explained about my suspicion that Eli just likes me for the calm I can give him, trying to be delicate so she wouldn’t think I was accusing her of the same. I made sure to downplay my connection to Eli, though, just in case she was reporting to Dashiell. Then I told her about Eli being chosen as my new “partner,” and she wrinkled her nose in sympathy.
“That sucks,” she said.
“Yeah.”
We were quiet for a while, and then Molly asked me about the investigation. “My friend Frederic says you’ve been running around with this cop, digging into Old World business. Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
There it was. Looks like I hadn’t been paranoid after all. Her tone had been trying for lightness, but she wasn’t used to having to operate human emotions, and the intensity had leaked through.
I shrugged. “They can’t really hurt me.”
“Of course they can,” she said sensibly. “Being up against a normal human doesn’t mean you can’t get hurt; it just means they’ll have to use run-of-the-mill ways to kill you.”
“Gee, I’d hate to have a boring death.”
“I’m not kidding, Scarlett.” Her face was open and solemn, and she suddenly looked much older. Wise and sad.
I sighed. “I know you’re not. But at this point, I don’t have much choice. If I don’t help Cruz, he says he’ll talk about Old World business. Which means he’ll die.”
“Since when do you care about one human death?” Molly asked, not unkindly.
I looked up at her, shocked. Had I really gotten that casual about dead bodies? I mean, sure, I need a certain distance to be able to do the work, but I couldn’t be that bad. Molly just saw me as uncaring because she was that way herself.
Right?