“Thank you,” Eli said, looking very relieved. He quickly dropped both rings on the coffee table, as if they’d burned him.
Which, Jesse realized, seeing the welts on Eli’s wrists, they had.
“You’re welcome.” Jesse turned to Scarlett, who had been sitting on the couch eating her burrito during the exchange. “Now, what the hell’s going on?”
The werewolf excused himself to get to a bartending job, and Jesse spent the next half an hour listening as Scarlett explained the call to the dog park, her kidnapping, and the “meeting” with Dashiell.
When she was finished, Jesse was almost in a daze. “That...is a lot to take in.”
“Yes.”
“The vampire boss, Dashiell—he thinks you’re behind it?”
“Yes.”
Her eye was already purpling, despite the frozen veggies, and the bruise on her jaw was one of the darkest he’d seen. And that was only from a few hours ago. Jesse felt his teeth grit together. They’d slapped her around for something she hadn’t done.
“Dashiell’s guys were the ones who did this to you?”
“Yes. To be fair, though, they don’t think about this kind of thing”—she gestured to her face—“as all that big of a deal. And I doubt that Dashiell actually ordered Hugo to hit me. I definitely got the feeling that Hugo just really enjoys hitting people. Probably a bad childhood.”
Jesse stared at her. He’d been on plenty of domestic abuse calls as a rookie, and most of the abused women tended to be either hopping mad or falling all over themselves making excuses for their piece-of-shit spouse. Scarlett, on the other hand, seemed so...casual. “Why aren’t you more upset about this?” he asked.
“About getting hit? Because in the Old World, the favored reaction to getting hit is to hit back. I did that, and now I’m over it. Bigger fish.”
She hesitated, and Jesse raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“Actually, there’s one other thing you should probably know about. If we can’t figure this out by the end of tomorrow night, Dashiell’s going to...um...kill me. And you, too, I assume.”
“
What?
”
After my parents’ funeral, it took about a week for me to figure out that I had nowhere to go. I hung around Esperanza for a day or two, but the town was too small. Every time I stepped out of the house, I ran into someone wanting to hug me or hold my hands or tell me what wonderful people my parents were. I had been raised to be polite and accommodating, which made me defenseless to what I began to see as attacks of kindness. And every time I was inside the house, I was assaulted by memories, by the holes in the world. To make things even worse, Jack, my goofy, gentle, book-smart big brother, had become a stranger who couldn’t look me in the eyes or say anything that wasn’t businessy—what to have for dinner, what of Mom and Dad’s stuff I wanted, what to do with the house. Eventually, it all built up into a full-blown panic attack, and I threw my clothes into a garbage bag and took off for LA. I still haven’t been back to my hometown.
When I returned to the dorms, though, I realized I didn’t belong there, either. I didn’t go to class, which no one cared about, but my new roommate couldn’t look at me, and everything about college seemed so pointless and alien. Frat parties? Free concerts in the quad? A rally to protest some unjust new amendment? I couldn’t understand how anyone could expect me to be even a tiny bit interested in college when my mom and dad were rotting in boxes in the ground.
That Sunday night, I got a phone call from Olivia, the woman who’d approached me in the cemetery. With nothing better to do, I agreed to meet her at the Starbucks near campus, and she continued trying to explain what I was, what we were. I still thought she was probably crazy, but I was at least a little more able to listen now.
What I didn’t realize until after Olivia died years later was that I had never given her my phone number.
“I’m sorry,” I finally had said that day, after she’d gone over it all again, “but you expect me to believe that some wacky branch of evolution created vampires and werewolves, and nulls are people who can neutralize all their powers and basically undo evolution?”
“Not exactly how I would put it, but yes.” She took a ladylike sip of her tea. Olivia, I had already realized, was very ladylike. I tried to sit up straighter.
“If even some of what you’re saying is true, what makes you think I can do that? That I’m one of them?”
“Scarlett, honey...One of the professors at Santa Monica is a werewolf. Last Monday at exactly eight fifty-four a.m., you learned that your parents died, correct?”
Stunned, I nodded. I remembered the time.
“When you lose control of your emotions, your power intensifies. Your radius, the area in which your power works, widens. Dr. Madchen was almost a mile away, but she felt you, felt herself change back to a human, briefly. She called me to see if I was in the area, and eventually, we...traced the signal, I suppose you could say, back to you.” When I said nothing, she went on. “Haven’t you ever been in a public place and had a strange feeling brush over you, as though something had pressed against you without touching you?”
I was suddenly frightened, not because I thought she was a crazy person or because I thought she’d been stalking me, but because I realized I was starting to believe her. What she was
describing had never happened to me in Esperanza, but whenever I was in LA, I felt it fairly often. And if what she was saying was true, then the world had just become very, very frightening.
“Why did you call me tonight? What is it you want from me?”
She smiled. “Oh, Scarlett, I don’t want anything from you. In fact, I’d like to offer you a job. And a place to live, if you need it. The hours are fabulous—you get full-time wages for what amounts to about ten hours per week, give or take. It can be messy, which is unfortunate, but you’ll learn quickly, and being what you are, you’ll be perfectly safe. I promise. And I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
It took a little while to calm Cruz down. He was all for having Dashiell arrested or me shipped out of town, and we went back and forth for a while on why both of those plans would end with people getting hurt or killed. Eventually, I managed to convince him that the best thing we could do was just keep working on the case. I tried not to think too hard about what would happen if we hadn’t found the killer by Dashiell’s deadline. No pun intended. Would I try to run? To fight?
I had very little money, and nowhere to go. How would I possibly stand a chance? Besides, Dashiell knew about Jack. I wasn’t going to let anyone else die just for knowing me. Not ever.
Denial, Scarlett
, I thought.
Denial is your friend. Focus on the case
. Before I’d left, Dashiell had given me the names of the dead vampires’ human servants: Victoria Grottum, Thomas Freedner, and Jason Myles. When I asked him for more information, he’d just waved a hand dismissively. Why would you need the home addresses of your employees’ food supply?
Cruz got on my computer and logged in to the LAPD database to check out the names. The news was not good: Grottum and Myles didn’t have California driver’s licenses, so neither of them had a home address listed with the DMV. That was weird in itself,
since LA is a driving city, but maybe they had moved in from other states or something. Neither of them paid taxes or had registered cell phones. They were, for all intents and purposes, off the grid. I guess when a vampire pays all your bills and fills all your needs, so to speak, you don’t worry too much about legalities.
Thomas Freedner, the third human servant,
did
have an LA license and an address listed, but when Cruz followed up with the building’s landlord, it turned out Freedner had moved two years earlier. No forwarding address, no phone number listed.
So we weren’t going to get an easy assist from the LAPD computers. That made things more complicated, but I did actually have a plan. In my job, you learn a lot about where everyone spends their downtime. Werewolves, by and large, hang out at Hair of the Dog when they want to socialize with other wolves. The witches have get-togethers in their homes, like really twisted Tupperware parties. The vampires have their own places to gather, places that are dark and underground and, at best, ethically questionable. But there’s another Old World group in LA—the human servants. And they go clubbing.
“So these people are like voluntary food?” Cruz asked me as we drove east on the 10 Freeway toward downtown.
“Yes and no. Human servants belong to a specific vampire. Like going steady, I guess. They’re under the vampire’s protection, and if another vampire feeds off them, that vamp gets in trouble. But there are plenty of people who offer themselves to the vampires who aren’t human servants,” I told him. “There’s a lot of voluntary food.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
I sighed. “Some of them are thrill-seekers; they’re in it for the adrenaline rush of playing with fire. Some are the vamparazzi, the groupies who worship vampires and want to become one. They make me sad.” I realized that I was speeding and immediately slowed down. What was wrong with me tonight? Oh, right, I’d been
kidnapped and slapped around by vampires and might die in like a day. “But the worst ones are the terminally ill. They’re hoping to be turned so that they can live forever.”
“And how do you get turned again? You drink their blood?”
“Yep. Vampire blood is dead blood; it’s infected with the same magic that animates the vampires. In theory, if you drink so much as a drop, you get sick for a couple of days, it kills you, and then you turn. Or the vampire might kill you, and then you turn faster.” I could feel Cruz shudder in the seat next to me. “But they don’t turn very many people anymore,” I added helpfully.
“Why not?”
I sighed. “That’s this whole big other thing.”
“Can’t you just give me the short version?”
I glared over at him, but he just showed me an innocent expression. Ugh. “There’s something...wrong with magic,” I finally explained. “There are two parts to the transformation—the human crosses the line from living to dead, and the magic bonds with their blood to revive them. But the magic chooses, for lack of a better word, which blood to bond with, and lately, it hasn’t been choosing very many people.” There have always been failed attempts to create a vampire, but in last century or so, it has become much more likely to fail than to succeed. “Every time it doesn’t work, the failure means a human corpse that needs to be dealt with.”
“Wait, so magic is...dying?”
I shrugged. That was a question for people a hell of a lot smarter than me. “All I know is, it’s gotten a lot harder to make a baby vampire. I think they’ve mostly stopped trying.”
He thought about all that for a few minutes while I drove in silence.
“Scarlett, how did you find out about all this stuff?” Cruz finally asked. “I mean, you neutralize everything, so it’s not like you could’ve experienced any of this firsthand.”
“I had a teacher.”
“Where is she now?”
“She died,” I said shortly. “Cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Forget about it.” I took the exit for downtown, maneuvering the van onto busy Figuoreoa Street.
“So,” Cruz said, ready to change the subject, “how will we know who these people are? I mean, you got their names, but how will we find them?”
For the first time since we’d gotten in the van, I grinned. “We’ll just ask,” I said cheerfully. “Nobody wants to mess with the bogeyman.” Even if she is just a janitor.
The LA night was cool and brisk, clear enough to see miles and miles of city lights. I rolled the windows down when we got off the freeway, and Cruz smiled and closed his eyes. For a second, I thought he was going to hang his head out the window and pant, and I had to smile.
Our first stop was a rooftop club on one of the big downtown skyscrapers.
“Wow,” Cruz said, whistling as we got off the elevator. “I was expecting...I don’t know, neon strobe lights and techno music. This is actually...nice.”
It really was. Aside from the city lights, the only light source on the roof came from paper lanterns that cast a warm glow onto the faces of the partygoers. A DJ played low orchestral music, and some people were dancing. Others sat at tables with white tablecloths, chatting and comparing scars. I noted with some satisfaction that we blended in okay. I was wearing an entire outfit that Molly had lent me—black leather pants and an emerald-green tank top under a soft-gray blazer. I had been afraid to ask her how much any of it cost, so I just promised to return it safely. Cruz, as it turned out, owned a little collection of designer clothes. He was in an Armani suit, no tie, with a dark-sapphire shirt underneath. “Sometimes my
parents take me to Hollywood parties,” he’d explained sheepishly. I wanted to roll my eyes, but I had to admit, he looked amazing. Well, he’d looked amazing before; now he looked downright criminal. Pun intended.
“This building is owned by one of the vampires. He lets the human servants party here every weekend, and when he feels like it, he and his friends come up, and he’s treated like a king—a king at a really big buffet,” I said, speaking quietly as we threaded through the crowd. I didn’t see any sign of our host. Gregory was nearly three hundred, old enough to have a number of lackey vampires working for him. I’d done business with him a few times, cleaning up their messes. All I really know about Gregory himself is that he works on the international stock exchange, he doesn’t keep his own human servant, and he throws these parties. And that he’s kind of an ass, but that’s often par for the course with vampires. Sometimes I think if you live long enough, anyone will become an asshole.
There was an actual buffet, stocked with vitamin-rich foods. At the end of the table, there were rows of little cups, and Cruz peeked inside. Each one held a condom and an iron tablet.
“Charming,” he said, wrinkling his nose in disgust. “So what’s our plan?”
“You keep your mouth shut, at least until you get the lay of the land. Don’t tell anybody you’re with the police. We’ll ask around quietly until they start to recognize me. Then we go try somewhere else.”