Trail of Dead

by Olson, Melissa F.

  The paper wasn’t really brown; it was just very old, I realized. I was looking at a large map of the United States that had been crumpled and creased many times, like when you keep consulting the map of Disneyland and then shoving it in your pocket during the rides. The state lines were barely visible, and I squinted at the title at the top of the page. The first few words had been smudged or faded away, so that all I could make out was Cities, 1910. Obviously it was United States cities, but most of the ones pictured were along both coasts, and there were plenty missing, so these had to have some significance. There were light circles drawn around several cities in black ink: Baltimore, New York, Chicago. But the City of Los Angeles, as it was called on the map, had a much darker line of ink circling it several times.

  I knew that Dashiell had been turned in 1819 in Great Britain, but I had never really thought about when he’d come to the United States. Was this the map he’d used? And if so, why’d he choose these specific cities? I looked closer, and realized that all the cities that had been highlighted—even the ones that didn’t touch a coast—were on some kind of body of water. Which meant—

  “Port cities,” said a voice by the door.

  I very nearly fell off the couch. “Thanks, Will. Now I won’t need caffeine again. Ever.”

  The alpha werewolf of Los Angeles smiled apologetically and made his way into the room, inside my radius. He paused to take a deep breath, in and out, and then dropped into the armchair next to the table. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to scare you. Kirsten texted me to let me know where you were, since Dashiell’s out for the day.” He said “out for the day” like Dashiell had run to a business meeting in Santa Barbara or something. Really he was just dead in the basement, however many stories below our feet.

  “And you decided to check on me?” I said, keeping my voice even. I was beyond sick of the let’s-protect-Scarlett game.

  But Will shook his head. “Not exactly.” He leaned over to look at the map. “Nineteen ten, huh? I think Dashiell immigrated here right around then.”

  “That was my guess. But why these cities?”

  Will shrugged. “These are vampire cities.”

  I looked down at the map, and up at him. “Why?” Then I got it. “Oh. Because vampires had to travel to North America by ship.”

  “Well, everyone did back then, but yes. Most vampires still travel by ship, if they have to go long distances. Unless they can afford a private plane, like Dashiell.” He traced a finger along the East Coast cities. “By default, this is also a map of vampire-controlled cities in the US.”

  I looked at the browned paper with renewed interest. “Really? Still?”

  “Yes. The wolves like medium-sized cities that are close to wild areas—we don’t have much use for the ocean. Actually, we don’t have a lot of use for controlling big cities, period. The cities that are werewolf-run mostly got that way because the local pack was tired of taking shit from the vampires. Or, in a couple of cases, the witches.”

  Will had basically just tripled my knowledge of the US Old World scene, and I was momentarily diverted away from finding out why he was there. “Really? There are witch-run cities?”

  “Sure.” He shrugged and gave me a conspiratorial grin. “But mostly because the wolves and the vampires didn’t want them anyway,” he stage-whispered.

  “Are we the only big city where everyone has a say?” I asked.

  “In America, anyway. We’re the only place with regular meetings, with a shared cleanup person, with a trial system to keep the peace. We get away with it because LA is such a joke in the Old World.” He looked up to study my face. “Olivia didn’t tell you any of this stuff?”

  I blushed. “Olivia trained me pretty early not to ask too many questions.”

  Will sighed and looked away. “What is it?” I asked him. When he didn’t answer right away, I pushed. “Will, if you’re not just checking up on me, why are you here?”

  “There’s something you need to know,” he said. He stood up and began pacing a few feet in either direction, staying within my radius. Pacing is a wolf habit, and apparently it didn’t fade even when the werewolf in question was currently human. “I…I owe you quite the apology.”

  Eli had told me once that Will felt guilty about how Olivia had treated me, like maybe he could have figured out what she was up to and stopped it. “Will, if this is about how Olivia took me in, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “But it kind of was.” He sat back down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. His head drooped like it was awaiting an executioner’s sword. “Dashiell, as you know, doesn’t exactly consult Kirsten or me before he does something,” he began. “Almost fifteen years ago now, he hired Olivia. He had heard of a cleanup crew in Europe that was run by a null and thought it seemed like a really practical idea.

  “I believe he briefly checked her tax returns and didn’t find anything alarming, and she did very good work, so as far as Dashiell was concerned, that was that.” There was a skeptical tone in his voice.

  “But you…didn’t like her?” I asked.

  He sighed. “You have to understand, I was twenty-eight years old. I had been alpha for all of a year, and Dashiell and I had built this uneasy peace that was unheard-of in America. I wasn’t in any hurry to rock the boat.”

  “But…” I prompted.

  “But…yes, she gave me a really bad feeling, just as a person. There was something sort of…hungry about her. And empty. Dashiell didn’t pick up on it at all—vampires aren’t really intuitive. I tried to convince him to vet her better, but he blew me off. It’s funny; he’s usually very distrusting of humans, but it was like because she was a null, she was on the Old World side of his little us-them line.”

  “What did you do?”

  He spread his hands. “First I tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t just dismiss my instincts. So I went behind Dashiell’s back to check on her. My dad was in army intelligence. I pulled some strings, paid a little money, and had a background check done. Complete with psych evaluation from her graduate school program, which was not easy to get, believe me.” He reached into the messenger bag and pulled out a slightly rumpled manila folder. “This is it.”

  I managed not to snatch it straight out of his hand, but it was a close thing. “Why didn’t you bring this out last night?”

  He raised his eyebrows at me to say are you kidding? “You saw how tense everybody was last night. Dashiell was about ready to throw down for control of the city, for Pete’s sake. I didn’t think it was a good time to tell everyone that I’d gone behind his back fifteen years ago.” His face drooped. “Or that I could maybe have stopped all of this, back then.” Before I could address that, he added, “I tried to find you after the meeting, but you left pretty quickly, and then I had to deal with a fight at the bar.”

  I wanted to ask him about the fight, but I was afraid if I started another line of questioning I’d stop getting answers, so I held my breath. Literally. I was afraid to move, or I might break the spell. I was finally getting answers.

  “Do you know anything about her background?” he asked me. “Before she started working for us?”

  “Not really. She did say that she’d once been married and the guy left her money.”

  Will bobbed his head. “She grew up in Salt Lake City,” he said. “Her family was extremely poor. Olivia never knew her father, and her mother, when she wasn’t drinking, worked as a maid for a rich family in town.” He gave me a small smile. “Well, however rich they get in Salt Lake City, anyway.”

  I looked down at the map I’d just found. Salt Lake City was a long way from any port cities. “Salt Lake City isn’t a vampire town,” I guessed.

  He pointed at me. “No. Actually, it’s one of the few biggish cities in the US that’s more or less Old World–free. I’m guessing that’s why Dashiell was so willing to hire Olivia—he knew she couldn’t possibly have any loyalties within the Old World already. To him it was like…” He paused, looking for
words. “It was like a carpenter coming out of his house one morning to find a brand-new power drill sitting on his front step, with nobody claiming it.”

  “Go on.”

  He nodded. “Olivia was dirt-poor, but smart—smart enough to leave home at fifteen and put herself through college, grad school, and a PhD program.”

  I felt my heart sink, but I asked anyway. “What field?”

  “Psychology,” Will said softly. He dropped the folder on the coffee table, opened it, and fanned the materials out so he could see them better. I was itching to comb through every page of the damned thing, but I held back—he’d tell me what was most important. Also, he was still my boss, and the idea of snatching up all the papers and locking myself in the bathroom to read them seemed slightly unprofessional.

  Finally, Will pulled out a Xeroxed packet that had DO NOT COPY stamped all over it. He scanned the sheet. “She was asked to leave the program before she completed her doctorate—I guess there was an incident with some other students and a thesis experiment. It didn’t matter to Olivia, though, because by then she’d found what she was looking for.”

  “New victims?”

  He smiled sadly. “One new victim. A husband.” He turned the packet around, handing it to me. “According to the psych evaluation, which she took as part of her program, Olivia’s big dream was to have a family. A rich family, to be specific.”

  I looked down the sheet, where the evaluator’s handwritten notes read subject feels an unnaturally strong drive to reproduce, possibly due to death of younger sister.

  “She lost a sister?” I asked, temporarily distracted by pity. I don’t care who you are; nobody deserves that.

  “When she was fifteen. The little girl was two, and Olivia’s mother was driving her to day care. It was eight in the morning, but she was stone drunk.” Will looked away miserably. “There’s a report in there somewhere, but that’s basically the important part. That was why Olivia initially left home, went to school.”

  I put the psych report down gently, as if that might somehow make the little girl’s death less tragic. “And she eventually found a husband,” I prompted.

  “Right. Or in this case, more of a sperm donor.” Now Will pulled a grainy photograph out of the materials. It was a head shot of a smiling man in his early forties. He had an expensive haircut and perfectly white teeth, with a weak chin and watery brown eyes. “Scott Powell. He was a video game programmer who also came from money. Olivia probably figured he’d be a good father, and she went after him hard. They got married when she was thirty-one, and that was right around when she left her doctorate program. She was going to start her family, do the whole fifties housewife thing.”

  “But nulls can’t have kids,” I said. Nobody really understood why. Being a null isn’t a hereditary trait, like the witches, it’s just sort of a random-selection anomaly that crops up here and there in the human species. And for some reason, as long as nulls have been known to exist, they’ve never been able to conceive or carry a child. Although I still have to deal with periods like every other woman, which strikes me as unfair.

  “No. I couldn’t get her actual medical files, but I know Olivia underwent all kinds of fertility testing. She wanted a family bad, Scarlett. When she found out she couldn’t have one…it destroyed her. She was already unbalanced, and this just broke what was left of her mind.”

  Sudden insight. “How did her husband die?”

  I was picturing Olivia pushing him off a cliff or poisoning his cereal or something, but Will said, “That’s the thing, Scarlett. He didn’t. At least, not then.”

  Chapter 15

  My jaw dropped. “What?”

  Will pulled out a photocopy of some handwritten notes. “My guy found him hiding out in a little town in the Inland Empire, about ninety miles away. Esperanza. Powell begged the investigator not to tell Olivia where he was. He was terrified of her…Scarlett? Are you okay?”

  My brain had stopped. Everything had stopped, actually, except my mouth. “What did she do to him?”

  “He wouldn’t say, just that he threw money at her, got a divorce, and moved to Esperanza without telling her.

  “She found him, didn’t she?”

  Will’s eyebrows raised, but he just handed me a newspaper clipping with a familiar-looking masthead. “I found this a couple of months ago, after you spotted Olivia at the hospital.” It was an obituary from the Esperanza Herald, the twice-weekly paper my little hometown published. Scott Powell had died of an apparent suicide eight months earlier. I counted back on my fingers. Right after Olivia had “died” and been turned into a vampire. Will added, “I don’t know how or when she found him—”

  “Years ago,” I broke in. I hardly recognized my voice. “Probably seven or eight. But she didn’t bother killing him then, because she’d found something else to interest her.”

  I could feel Will studying my face. “What are you saying?”

  I stabbed the clipping with an index finger. “This is my hometown, Will. She came for Scott, and somehow bumped into me.”

  I didn’t actually remember bumping into Olivia or anything. Before I’d come to LA and had it all explained to me, I’d just assumed the weird feelings I got every now and then—my null thing—happened to everyone, the way everyone gets dizzy when they stand up too fast or gets a charley horse when their legs are cramped up. But I could still guess at when she had found me: after all, Olivia hadn’t taken me as a child, when I would theoretically have been more docile. She’d waited until I’d turned eighteen and come to LA to take out my parents. I was guessing that meant she hadn’t actually found me until late high school or so, and she’d decided to bide her time.

  Although seriously, what the fuck did I know?

  “Scarlett? Scarlett!” Will shook my arm, and I focused on the room again. When he saw I was all right, he released me right away.

  “What did you do?” I demanded.

  He blinked in confusion. “Huh?”

  I waved my hand over the papers that were scattered across the coffee table. “With all this. You had the fancy background check; you knew she was broken in the head, so what did you do?”

  “I—I didn’t do anything,” he admitted, hanging his head. “The background check set off plenty of alarm bells, from a psychology point of view, but nothing that would convince Dashiell that Olivia was wrong for the job.” He scratched the back of his neck absently. “If I had showed him all of this back then, his takeaway would have been ‘oh, her mom’s a maid, she probably already knows a lot about cleaning.’ That’s how his mind works.” Will looked up to meet my eyes, and probably saw my jaw hanging open. “I’m so sorry, honey,” he said very gently, the way you’d talk to a child. “Are you all right?”

  I might have been, if he hadn’t called me honey. Insistent tears prickled at my eyes, but I blinked them away. “No, Will. I am not all right. I am not. And you…you’re worse than Dashiell!” His eyes went wide, shocked. “You knew what she was, you knew she was out of her mind, and you had the humanity to care. You had to figure she was a loaded gun of crazy, but you just let her go about her nutjob business. You’re right, you could have stopped all of this. My parents—”

  He held up his hands defensively. “Whoa, whoa! She was crazy, but she hadn’t done anything yet, then! And I had no idea she was going to kill your parents—”

  “Really?” I snapped. “It didn’t seem awfully convenient that this woman who always wanted a family suddenly had a cute little null orphan following her around? That didn’t raise any goddamned flags?”

  I was shouting now, and Hayne came striding into the room. “Miss Bernard, you need to calm down.”

  “The hell I do,” I said, trembling.

  Hayne’s face stilled, so that only his mouth moved when he spoke. “If you can’t calm down, you’re going to wake Dashiell, and that would be very bad for everyone,” he said, unfazed. “One of the upstairs vampires has already awoken, and she is very confused.�
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  My radius was expanding. Gee whiz, I must be upset or something.

  I was breathing heavily, looking from Hayne, with his unflappable expression, to Will, who wasn’t meeting my eyes. “I need some air,” I whispered. Before either of them could respond, I scooped up the file, jamming it into more of a pile than anything else. I hugged it to my chest and marched down the long hallway. By the time I hit the front door I was running.

  “Scarlett,” Will called after me. “Wait!” I felt him leave my radius, then enter it again as he caught up with me on Dashiell’s porch. Damned werewolf speed. “Goddammit, Scarlett, slow down!”

  I whirled on him. “You know what this is? This is like those domestic abuse cases where the cops and the friends and the family and the shrink all know he’s about to kill her and she can’t save herself, but everybody just figures someone else will do something before that happens. Then they’re all surprised when she’s dead.”

  That stopped him short. “What can I do?” he pleaded. “How can I make it up to you?”