Eli flipped on the light switch and took hold of my jacket so I could twist out of it. I pulled down the covers and crawled onto the bed, unbuttoning my jeans, which he tugged down my legs, depositing them on the floor. He pulled off his own shoes and jeans, exposing blue cotton boxers that I’d never seen before. He lay down beside me on the bed, lifting his arm so I could snuggle under. I marveled again at how easily Eli and I fit together.
He fussed with my hair, picking loose strands off my face and smoothing them back toward the bun. Suddenly my hair felt too tight on my head. I reached back and pulled out the rubber band, and he made a soft noise of pleasure, winding his long fingers in my hair, spiraling it around and around. I looked up at him, tensing for a kiss, but he just planted a quick smooch on my nose and said, “Tell me about New York.”
I relaxed onto his chest. New York…was I really there just a few hours before? “It was cold. Very cold. And everything is decorated all to hell for Christmas. It was like being inside a snow globe.” He made a “go on” noise. “The New York null is nice. His name is Jameson, and he works mostly for the city’s master vampire.”
“Malcolm.”
“Yeah.” I tilted my head up at him. “How did you know that?”
“I met him,” Eli said soberly. “I moved here from New York, remember?”
“Oh. Right. Well, Jameson goes to a lot of daytime business meetings with him. I went along, got to know some of the vampires. There, um, weren’t a lot of werewolves.”
“No,” Eli said with some bitterness. “Malcolm doesn’t care for us. He forces the wolves out of the city.”
Which explained why Eli had moved to LA. Not that I’d ever thought to just ask. I felt like an idiot. Two minutes of trying to have a real, no-drama conversation, and I’d brought up a sore subject. “Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
I sometimes forget that for all the tension between Will, Dashiell, and Kirsten, we’re actually pretty lucky in LA. Most major cities are run by one group or another, and everyone else is encouraged to get the hell out of town. LA is the only city I know of where all three groups are welcome to live in peace, minus the occasional skirmish over who insulted whom.
It wasn’t always this way. Witches, werewolves, and vampires all evolved from the same group of people, thousands of years ago. For a long time, they’d all interacted more or less in peace, even helping each other out occasionally. Then there was an Inquisition or five, which was hard on all three groups, but particularly on the witches. Their leaders went to the vampires and werewolves and begged for help, but both groups turned them away, for different reasons. The desperate witches tried to strengthen their magic, and made an inadvertent discovery that changed everything—and led to even more tension. Four hundred-some years of fighting later, a werewolf gets kicked out of New York and begins tending bar in LA.
“Did you learn anything new?” Eli asked, changing the subject.
I shifted around, trying to buy time. Eli knew that I went to New York to find out more about nulls and what they could do, but he didn’t know about my apparent ability to permanently change a vampire back into a human. Unfortunately, when I’d hinted around during theoretical discussions, Jameson had been completely clueless.
I had to make sure Eli stayed that way too. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him to keep it quiet, but if he knew about my newfound ability he could be at risk too. Besides, if I could permanently turn a vampire, wouldn’t it be theoretically possible to change a werewolf back too? Things between Eli and me were complicated enough without something that big between us. Eli hated being a werewolf (the majority of them did), and part of him would always be hoping I would change him back.
“Sort of,” I said at last. “Jameson didn’t know much more than I did about the history of nulls. But I did pick up a new trick.”
“What trick?”
I rolled off him and sat up, folding my legs. “Go stand in the hall.”
He looked at me quizzically, but I just nodded. Shrugging, he got up and stood out in the hall. Still in my radius. “Farther,” I said. He backed up a few feet. “A little farther.” Realizing what I wanted, he backed up until he left my radius. “Okay, hold still.”
I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. When I was sure I was calm, I felt for the edges of my circle, or rather, my sphere, the same way you can focus on the feeling in one part of your body. I traced the edge of my circle all the way around, until I could hold the whole thing in my head. Then I exhaled and concentrated on the word expand. I felt the circle stretch.
“Whoa,” said Eli from the hall. He returned to my room. “You figured out how to make it bigger.”
Opening my eyes, I shrugged. “Null circles generally expand when we get really emotional or upset. I just learned how to do it without freaking out first. It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s totally a big deal,” he argued, and I felt a little pleased. It had taken me a while to learn it. Meditation techniques don’t exactly come easily to me. For some reason.
He came back to bed, wrapping me up in his arms and the covers. “Very cool,” he pronounced, and he kissed the top of my head. “Get some sleep.”
But I lay still for a few more minutes, listening to his heart and the way he breathed. “Eli?”
“Mm.”
“I don’t want to be a victim,” I whispered. “I don’t want to be her victim. Or her prize, or whatever. I don’t want to be a piece in a game.”
He loosened his arms, scooting his body down in the bed so his eyes could meet mine. He kissed me on the lips, but a warm, chaste kiss with no need to it. “You won’t be.”
Chapter 6
After he’d hung up with Scarlett, Jesse Cruz had turned back to face the bustling activity at the crime scene. The Jeep was an early 2000s model, painted an unfortunate dark red that set off the blood on the windshield. It was standing upright, but looked crumpled, as though it had been rolled like a boiled egg. Which was more or less what had happened. Inside the car, the Reeds still sat upright, pinned in place by their seat belts. Liam Reed was a middle-aged business type with a sharp salt-and-pepper haircut. Sara Reed was a decade younger, with tan skin and laugh lines around her mouth and eyes. She was wearing a navy cashmere sweater with a snowman stitched into the chest. The only visible blood on either of them was a small dark circle that turned the snowman red.
The driver and passenger doors had been opened and the crime-scene photographer, Runa, was snapping shots of the bodies, completely focused on the digital camera. The two uniformed cops who had responded to the call were interviewing, separately, the couple who had discovered the body. A forensic investigator named Walter Benson was crouched next to the Jeep, collecting a sample of leaked oil. The other forensic technician saw that Jesse was off the phone and trotted over, clipboard clutched to her chest.
Gloria “Glory” Sherman was one of the nighttime forensic pathology technicians and the only other human Jesse knew who was aware of the Old World. Generally, Glory was a lab rat, but budget cuts had forced more and more of the lab technicians to spend part of their time in the field. Which had worked out in his favor tonight, because she had placed the call to get him here.
“Sorry about that,” Jesse said. “What do we know?”
The night was fairly warm, but she hugged the clipboard against her body, shoulders clenched up to her ears with worry. The silver streaks in her short, ash-blonde hair seemed to stand out against the Jeep’s single remaining headlight. “Well, the physics guys will do a little calculating, but it looks like the car flipped off the embankment and landed upside down. Windows and one headlight were crushed. Then something”—she swallowed, and took a step closer, eyes darting—“flipped it back over sideways.” He followed her to the passenger side of the Jeep, where she pointed at two hand-sized dents at the bottom of the window, pinching closed the seam where the glass used to be. “The two driver’s-side wheels popped with the impact.”
Jesse glanced at Benson, a stocky black man in his midfifties with an unlit cigarette tucked behind one ear and an excited expression on his face, like he’d woken up to an early Christmas. He had torn Runa’s attention from the camera and was pointing at the marks on the victims’ wrists, gesturing wildly. “He knows about the bodies, I take it?” Jesse asked. “The lack of blood?”
Glory nodded. “He’s the one who told me. I…recognized the signs.” Glory had met Dashiell years earlier, when the master vampire had shown up to collect a newly turned vampire. Over the years he’d occasionally asked her to drop a beaker or lose a sample, always right after making polite inquiries about Glory’s two children. “Listen, Jesse, I did something—”
“Hey, guys.”
Jesse and Glory both jumped as the petite photographer appeared beside them. She had white-blonde hair tied in shoulder-length pigtails and three different cameras and bags strapped onto her slim shoulders. “Whoa,” Runa said, laughing a little at their shock. “Just wanted to see if you needed any other shots. Oh, hey, we haven’t actually met.” She held her hand out toward Glory, and Jesse remembered his manners.
“Oh, sorry. Glory Sherman, this is Runa Vore, the new night-shift photographer. Runa, this is Glory.” The two women shook hands, and Glory shot him an anxious look. Does she know? He shook his head imperceptibly.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Runa continued, “but I’ve got all the initial shots. Did you want anything from the surrounding area?”
“Uh, sure. Why don’t you do some perspective shots from the car to the witnesses’ house. And, um, whatever else you can think of. Go crazy.”
Runa gave him a funny look, but she turned back to the Jeep.
“Go crazy?” Glory said, the second Runa was out of earshot.
“Shut up.”
“That’s the girl you’re dating?” Glory’s eyebrows were raised to her hairline. “She’s pretty.”
“How did you—never mind. Stupid office grapevine.”
“Hey. We’re the cops. We’re nosy by nature. Do you think she overheard us?”
“I’ll find out later. What were you going to say?”
“Oh, right.” Glory straightened her back, drawing up to her full five foot one. “When I saw the car and the blood”—she tilted her head to the writing on the windshield—“I called you first, but then I…did something.”
“Spit it out, Glory.”
She sighed. “He gave me this number, for emergencies. I called it.”
“Who ga—”
But before he even finished the word, Jesse saw the black Bentley parked on the hill across from the crime scene; a blandly handsome fortyish man stepped out from the driver’s side and sauntered toward the Jeep. His suit was expensive and fit like it had come into existence only for him, but there was something not quite modern about it too. The closest uniformed cop jogged toward him, waving a hand, but the driver just smiled, touching the cop’s shoulder and looking straight into his eyes. Jesse watched as the driver spoke a few words and continued walking toward the Jeep, while the uniform stood slack and staring forward, like a marionette hung on a peg. The driver approached the little knot of witnesses and the other uniform, speaking to them in the same calm, reassuring manner. Jesse looked away, an icy thrill of fear spreading through his chest. This was Dashiell, the master vampire of Los Angeles, and he was pressing the minds of everyone on site. Jesse had never been near him without Scarlett around for protection. He felt a flare of irritation at Glory for calling the vampire, but at the same time he could hardly blame her—Dashiell had threatened her kids. He himself wouldn’t have done any different, under the circumstances.
“Look down,” he muttered to Glory. The vampire could probably hear him, but that was a risk Jesse had to take. “When he comes close, don’t look him directly in the eyes, understand?” She nodded, hugging her clipboard even tighter.
Jesse looked around for Runa, but the photographer was on the far side of the Jeep, shielded from Dashiell. He couldn’t call to her without exposing her position, so Jesse just prayed she’d stay put.
When he was done speaking to the witnesses, Dashiell continued toward Jesse, the smile still tacked onto his face. The couple turned at a ninety-degree angle and marched back toward their home in eerie synch. The uniformed cop who had been interviewing them strode to his partner, herding him toward the patrol car. By then Dashiell was in earshot, fifteen feet away by the Jeep. “Excuse me,” he said to Benson, who looked up, surprised. Jesse had to tear his eyes away from what Dashiell was doing. He clenched his fists, but there was nothing he could do to stop the vampire, short of emptying his clip into Dashiell’s chest. Even if Jesse did succeed in destroying the vampire heart with a gun, though, he would have been left with a lot of explaining to do.
Beside him, Jesse felt Glory shiver. “This was a simple car accident,” Dashiell was saying, his voice warm and practically visible, it was so potent. With his peripheral vision Jesse saw Benson nodding mechanically. “There was nothing unusual about the bodies. You will take them directly to the morgue, where you will begin the paperwork to have them cremated.” He named a crematorium on the West Side. Dashiell paused, maybe to make sure the command had hit home, and then concluded, “You may go now.”
Jesse thought of his threat to Scarlett earlier that night. Would he really have gone through with knocking on this creature’s door? Suddenly he doubted it. As Benson stumbled away, Dashiell finally made it to Jesse.
“Detective Cruz,” Dashiell said cordially. “How nice to see you again.”
Jesse swallowed. He could have sworn he felt waves of power radiating off Dashiell, but that was probably his imagination. “Wish I could say the same,” he said, eyes on Dashiell’s loafers. He had been to enough Hollywood parties to recognize Prada. “But it does seem like there are more dead bodies when you’re around.”
There was a little surprise in Dashiell’s laugh. “Think of it as job security. Thank you for your call, Ms. Sherman.” Glory nodded again, keeping her eyes down.
“You suspect Olivia?” Dashiell asked Jesse, as though he were leading the detective toward the obvious answer.
“Yes,” Jesse said, fighting to keep an automatic “sir” out of his voice. However scary Dashiell was, Jesse still didn’t have to answer to him. At least, he hoped not. “Aside from the message, the victim’s first names were the same as Scarlett’s parents’. And the Jeep was flipped by hand.” He pointed to the dents. He was burning to look at Runa, to make sure she stayed back, but didn’t want to give her away, either. Surely Dashiell had heard her moving around the far side of the Jeep? Or were the traffic sounds enough to drown out any noise? He prayed that she wasn’t about to use the camera’s flash.
“I see,” Dashiell said thoughtfully. He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and began tapping the screen so quickly that Jesse half expected it to start smoking. He risked a glance over at Runa, now visible on the far side of the Jeep. She had been packing up her gear. She hoisted her camera bag onto her shoulder and glanced his way. She must have figured he was interviewing a witness, because she just mouthed, “Anything else?” He shook his head, fast and tight. She smiled and gave a little wave and a head tilt to say see you at the station.
As Runa stood, Jesse tried to think of something to say to mask the sound of her footsteps. “What happens now?” he blurted. “I mean, do we investigate the crime as usual, or what do you want me to do? I’m guessing I probably can’t just file a regular report, right?”
Dashiell looked up with a bemused expression, and Jesse dropped his eyes back down. “No,” Dashiell said mildly. He pocketed the phone. “It’s all arranged. This file is being closed as a simple car accident.” He turned back to Glory. “I assume you can file any additional paperwork? You’ll receive full cooperation with the medical examiner’s office.”
“Uh, yes, sir.”
“Wonderful.” He held out a business card. “My tow services will take care of
the vehicle personally. They’ll be here within the hour.” Glory took the card. “Thank you, Ms. Sherman. If you would give me a moment with Detective Cruz?”
Without another word, the forensics specialist scurried toward her department-issued van, and Jesse risked a look at where Runa had been. The photographer was gone. “And Olivia?” Jesse prodded.
“Yes. Olivia. I’m afraid you’ve suffered quite a loss, Detective.”
“What?”
Dashiell stepped over to the car, examining the dents on the window. He placed one hand in either corner of the window and pulled outward, snapping the handprint out of the metal with a flick of his wrists. “Your grandmother in San Bernardino has just passed away,” he continued, and Jesse relaxed an inch. His last surviving grandparent had died in Mexico three years earlier. “You’ve been given a week of bereavement leave with full pay. A little generous for the department, I admit, but your supervisors were feeling quite sympathetic.”
“Oh,” Jesse said lamely. He felt suddenly like Dashiell was pitching baseballs at his chest, and Jesse was dropping every one.
“Use the week to find Olivia. Whether you destroy her personally or call me to destroy her is up to you, but I suggest you bring Scarlett Bernard along. She can help protect you, and she knows Olivia better than anyone.”
“I’m not just going to destroy her—” Jesse began.
There was a deep chuckle. “Please. You plan to, what, arrest her politely? Have Scarlett stand next to her while Olivia is tried, convicted, and imprisoned? Maybe they could share a cell.”
“I—I hadn’t really gotten that far,” Jesse sputtered.
Another white card appeared in Dashiell’s hand, which was suddenly extended toward Jesse. “My number. If you don’t have the stomach to kill her, just call.” He raised a bemused eyebrow. “You do know how to kill a vampire?”
Trail of Dead Page 5