Powell: It was like…she’d been training me, the whole time we were together. Changing who I was. At first I figured, well, a lot of guys feel like that when they get married. But this wasn’t just, like, buying me new clothes or making me get a haircut. A few months after the honeymoon, she was sort of…isolating me. She cut off my contact with my family, with my friends. She didn’t want me going anywhere without her—I worked from home, even then, so I was expected to be with her twenty-four hours a day, every day. If I tried to resist, she got real quiet, like I’d broken her heart, or she ran guilt trips, or she used…you know.
Investigator: Sex?
Powell: Yeah. It was like she had a box of tools, and she pulled out whichever one she needed to keep me in line…
Ouch. I flicked that page aside. I remembered the box of tools too.
Investigator: So how bad did it get before you asked for a divorce?
Powell: Well, first of all, I didn’t ask for a divorce. I begged her. Begged her. But that was later, after all the fertility testing. When Olivia found out she couldn’t have kids…look, I don’t want to talk about those days.
Investigator: Okay.
Powell: I mean, I wanted kids too, always did, so I said well, let’s adopt. No big deal, I had plenty of money for lawyers or whatever. But Olivia screamed at me; she said her kids needed to have something of her in them or they wouldn’t be hers.
I closed the packet. It was interesting, no doubt, filling in the blanks of Olivia’s inner life, but it wasn’t getting me any closer to finding her. Or to figuring out how she’d been turned into a vampire. I checked my watch: almost noon. What else could I do? I flipped impatiently through the file. Will’s investigator may have been good, but the timeline ended fifteen years ago, when Olivia had gone to work for Dashiell. There was no mention of me or the Old World, much less anything about her final days, when she had presumably planned her “death.”
Her final days.
That set off a bell in my head, but I was still chasing the thought when my phone buzzed on the table. I picked it up. Jesse.
“Hello?” I said absently. Something had been on the tip of my brain-tongue. What was it?
“Death spices?” Jesse yelled. “You decided that I didn’t need to know about death spices?!”
Oops. He had my attention now. I automatically glanced around, even though nobody was going to hear the yelling over the phone. Luckily, Kalista’s was more or less abandoned—everybody had gotten their coffee to go, so they could get back to their weekday jobs. The artsy-looking girl behind the counter raised her eyebrows when she saw me looking around, but I just gave her a brief smile and a thumbs-up. All good here. No refills needed.
I took a deep breath. “Uh, it was need-to-know basis, and you didn’t need to know?” I tried. But I could practically feel him seething on the other end. I couldn’t even blame him.
“Scarlett?” Kirsten’s voice rang out. “You’re on speakerphone; we’re on our way back to LA.”
“Oh, good,” I said, but my voice was limp.
“I tried to explain to Jesse that you were acting under standing orders not to talk about the herbs,” she said meaningfully, and I could picture her staring pointedly at Jesse as he drove.
“Yes. That’s right,” I said lamely. To be fair, no one had told me specifically not to tell Jesse about the Big Three. But I’d sort of figured out on my own that knowing that kind of thing could put his life even more at risk. And then by the time I had started to trust Jesse, it was too late to tell him without pissing him off that I hadn’t said anything right away.
During the seventeenth century, when witches were more or less hunted for sport, the vampires and werewolves had refused to help them. So the witches did the only thing they could: they started experimenting with their magic. And they discovered something very dangerous: the nightshades. Just as magic clung to the evolutionary lines of humans, it clung to a class of plants, as well, and those plants had a chemical reaction with magic. The whole subspecies was loaded with magic, which the witches began using in everyday spells, but there were three in particular that were treacherous: Atropa belladonna, Mandragora officinarum, and Lycium barbarum, which eventually became known as wolfberry. Belladonna, it turned out, was poisonous to vampires—you needed a lot to actually kill them, but a little bit worked as a paralytic. Mandragora, or mandrake root, was used by the witches in the really dangerous spells, the ones that toed the line between the living and the dead—a huge no-no in witch circles. And ingesting wolfberry caused the werewolves to completely lose control of their shifting, and often their minds.
When the witches discovered all this, there was a very quiet, very horrible war. Finally, in the twentieth century botanists tinkered with all three plants, and they’d all but eradicated the specific strains that had magical properties. You could now buy perfectly safe, nonmagical belladonna at a farmers’ market in Wisconsin, if you wanted to. But those original strains still existed, and it was illegal for anyone in the Old World to even possess them. I’d been to a lot of crime scenes in my five years working for the Old World, and I’d never even seen any of the nightshades. Even Dashiell, Will, and Kirsten supposedly didn’t keep any, though I could see how it might be valuable to, say, paralyze a nutty vampire. The Big Three, as they so cleverly were called, were just too dangerous. Which was exactly why I’d kept Jesse from even knowing about them.
The fact that Olivia now had all three strains…that made this a whole new ball game. It was pretty much the equivalent of that scene in Jurassic Park where they realize that in addition to all their other problems, the velociraptors have now escaped.
There was a long, pregnant pause while Kirsten and I both waited for Jesse’s reaction. Finally he muttered, “We’ll talk about this later, Scarlett.”
So looking forward to that, I thought. Meanwhile, if ever anyone needed a subject change, it was me. “Um, what did you guys find out in San Diego?”
Kirsten filled me in on the basics: that Rabbi Samuel had been tortured for the location of the amulet, which had been stolen along with a box’s worth of the Big Three. Then she’d dragged him to the parking lot and drained him, dumping the body on the lawn.
We had wandered back into my field of experience. I tried to picture the crime scene, something I’ve had plenty of practice with. “Why drag him downstairs?” I asked, keeping my voice low. I probably didn’t need to bother—in this town anybody who overheard would probably assume I was running lines for my CSI audition. “Why not kill him up in the storage room and leave the body? It would have delayed anyone finding the body, and made a lot of trouble for the Old World in trying to explain what happened.”
Kirsten was silent, but Jesse piped up. “I thought about that. I think she did it for two reasons: first, she was trying to disguise the fact that she stole those…herbs. She made a big show of violence near where the amulet had been kept, but the area by that box looked undisturbed. If Kirsten hadn’t thought to check there, no one would have known they were missing.”
“Okay,” I said, processing that. “And the second reason?”
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think she’s fucking with us,” Jesse said. He explained that Olivia had drained Samuel’s blood and then gone to the trouble of covering up the wound. “You told me once that the Old World gets involved if a crime doesn’t look human,” Jesse added.
I nodded, and then remembered that he couldn’t actually see me nodding. “Yes. There’s a cleanup person like me in San Diego. He’s not a null, though, and I haven’t met him.”
“Well, Olivia didn’t even try to hide the fact that she murdered Samuel and drained his blood, but she still went to the trouble of shredding that spot on his neck with a serrated blade, to cover the bite marks. It’s like Olivia wants to shove this murder in Dashiell’s and Kirsten’s faces, teach them that they can’t protect their own. She would know how much that would bother them. At the same time, though, she doesn�
�t want anyone else to be too motivated to hunt her down.”
Kirsten’s voice said, “You think she’s just trying not to piss anyone else off, besides us?”
“Something like that,” Jesse said. “She’s deliberately poking you and Dashiell, though. If nothing else that thing with the Reeds would have made it clear that she was starting something.”
“It’s all misdirection,” I said softly, and Jesse asked me to repeat myself. “She’s jerking us around. We look at Erin; she does the Reeds. We look at the Reeds; she steals the amulet.”
“So?” Jesse asked.
“So the question isn’t what’s the next logical step in the investigation, Jesse. The question is what are we not paying attention to?”
There was a long pause, and my gaze wandered down to the file. Her final days. I hadn’t been paying any attention to the week or so between the last time I’d visited Olivia and her actual death. But there was somewhere I could go to find out. “I gotta go, Jesse.”
His voice was immediately on alert. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” I frowned. How much to tell him? If I didn’t explain that I wasn’t at the mansion, they were going to make a wasted trip out there, and that would just piss him off more. Then again, if I did tell him I’d left, he would yell at me until I explained where I was. But he would do that whenever he found out I’d left. I might as well save them the trip to Pasadena. I asked to be taken off speakerphone, and Jesse switched me to his hands-free thing so we could talk somewhat privately. “Listen, Jesse, I’m not at the mansion anymore,” I started, then rushed to add, “but I’m safe, and I’m not anywhere I go regularly.”
There was a very long silence, and I held the phone away from my ear for a moment to make sure I hadn’t dropped the call. Still had the signal. “Hello? Jesse?”
“We’re here,” Jesse said flatly. “But I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“I know. I had to.”
“Did something happen?” he said, his voice concerned now.
“Not the way you mean. But I’ve gotten some background information on Olivia, and I’m going to follow up on something by myself.”
“You can’t just do that,” he protested. “Dashiell said—”
“Jesse,” I said tiredly, “since when do you give a shit about Dashiell’s orders?”
There was a pause, and then to my surprise, he laughed. “You know, you’re absolutely right. You’re a big girl. Just tell me where you’re going to be,” he said. “No, wait, don’t tell me.”
I blinked. “You think she bugged the phones?” I said skeptically.
“Hey, you’re not really the person to accuse anyone of paranoia.”
“Fair enough,” I admitted.
“Just promise me it’s somewhere really safe.”
“I promise,” I said. “Lots of cameras, lots of people, security guards. Won’t take more than an hour. I’ll be fine.”
“Call me after?”
“You bet.”
Even in the strange car, my body remembered exactly how to get to the cancer ward at UCLA’s Medical Center. On autopilot, I took a ticket, got a parking spot, and trooped up to the same floor where Olivia had spent months getting treatments. You could practically follow the sense of grief to find the place: sadness lingered on this floor like a bad decoration. The staff overcompensated by garnishing every flat surface with cheerful holiday decor. If I hadn’t just seen similar decorations at Kalista’s, I would have assumed that everything red and green in the city had escaped and taken sanctuary here on the oncology floor. There was even a twelve-foot Christmas tree, trimmed like a damn magazine photo, just before the nurse’s station. I didn’t stop to look at the ornaments or read the names on the presents under the tree. It would just make me sad.
Instead, I beelined for the nurses’ station, and only had to loiter next to a nearby drinking fountain for about three minutes before I spotted a nurse I recognized: a thin black woman in her sixties with a half-inch Afro and a perpetual look of busy concentration. She hadn’t been Olivia’s favorite, but she’d been mine.
“Sadie?” I said tentatively.
She looked up sharply, and her face broke into a pleased smile. “Why, Scarlett!” she cried, rushing around the counter to throw her thin arms around me. “How you doin’, sugar?”
“I’m good,” I said lightly, returning the hug and taking a step back when it was polite to do so. I’m not really a hugger.
Her face creased in concern. “Sorry about your mom, sugar. I’m sure you had a tough year.”
“Yeah.” When she’d started treatments, Olivia had told the hospital that I was her daughter, so I would be able to visit during non–visiting hours. Or that was what she’d told me, and at the time it had made perfect sense. Silly Scarlett. “I know I wasn’t around, that last week,” I began, with an apology in my voice. I had a perfectly good reason for blowing off Olivia during her last days as a human—I had found out about her murdering my parents. But I couldn’t exactly explain that to Sadie.
The nurse just waved her hand like she was getting smoke out of the air. “Don’t even worry about it. I have seen every reaction a person can have to death. Disappearing for a week or so is nothing new.”
Even though I hadn’t done anything wrong, Sadie’s forgiveness was kind of touching. “Listen, I know how busy you are, but would you have a few minutes today to talk about her last week? There are just a few things I wanted to know…you know, with the holidays coming and all.” I gestured helplessly at the decor. Okay, maybe working undercover was not my best skill. But people took stock of their lives at Christmas, right? Or maybe New Year’s?
Sadie nodded sympathetically. “Of course, sugar.” She checked her watch. “I have a break coming up anyway. Why don’t you go sit in the chapel? I’ll meet you there in a few minutes. You know the way.”
“Yeah, I know the way.”
After the busy decorations in the hallway, the cancer ward chapel seemed plain and refreshing. There was no religion in here, so no actual decorations, not even a cross or Star of David. Instead, the small room had a simple stained-glass window, an empty altar, and two rows of short wooden pews. The room was always empty, except when it was needed. In my experience, though, when it was needed, it was really needed. I had personally spent hours here during Olivia’s last months, praying for some kind of a miracle, which was funny, since Olivia more or less got one.
I sat down in the back-row pew, my usual seat. It had only been a year or so since Olivia had “died,” but it felt like ten. I felt like a different person from the girl who’d prayed in this room. My parents had been regular churchgoers, but my brother and I were raised to make up our own minds whether or not we believed in God. It had taken me a few years to sort out my feelings, but I’d eventually decided I believed in God but didn’t believe in religion. I would keep faith on my own terms. It’s funny, but finding out that Hollywood movie monsters were real never shook my convictions. If God could create a platypus, why couldn’t he create a vampire? If AIDS could exist in God’s kingdom, why not lycanthropy?
No, it took Olivia to really make me wonder if there was a God.
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the pressure-controlled door opening and closing. Sadie settled into the pew beside me, reaching over to pat my hand.
“Thanks for talking to me, Sadie.”
She patted again. “Don’t worry about it, Scarlett. You’re not the first relative to come back after it’s all over, wanting answers to more questions. Our perspective of death, of our family member’s death, it changes with time.”
You got that right, Sadie.
“Did you ever see a guy with Olivia, at the end?” I asked. “Average height, sort of weaselly looking?”
Sadie blinked at me, and there was suddenly a glint in her eye. “You found out about Al, did you?” she said coyly. “I figured you might. They tried so hard to keep it secret.” She shook her head. “I alwa
ys figured they were just getting a kick out of that, sneaking around. Wasn’t like you’d mind, that your mom had a beau in her last few months.”
I had been right—Albert had been visiting Olivia at the hospital. I had about a thousand questions, but no idea where to start. “Was she…did she say how they met?”
Sadie frowned. “I never got a full story on that, but I assumed it was through the radiology specialist, Dr. Barton. Did you meet him?”
“There were so many specialists…”
“He stood out, though—had a scar going down his lip, right here”—she touched her lower lip like she was making a vertical mark on it. “Fell off a motorcycle, he told me once. He’s a very big deal in experimental oncology, though he’s based in New York, usually.”
A vague image of a sandy-haired guy with squinty little glasses came to mind. “I think I met him once or twice. Albert…Al…he knew Barton?”
“Worked for him, I think.” She shrugged. “At any rate, every time I saw Dr. Barton, Al was with him. Stayed real close, like he needed to hear every word Barton said.”
Or like Barton needed to hear every word Albert said. Albert had found a specialist for Olivia and pressed his mind to get her the treatment. “What did Barton do for…my mom?”
Sadie shook her head sadly. “He gave her some new experimental drug…Domincydactl, I believe it was called. It was a Hail Mary pass, sugar, and it didn’t work. They’ve discontinued the drug since then. Didn’t work for anyone, I guess.”
“Why didn’t I know about this?”
“Your mom asked us to keep it private. She said she didn’t want you getting your hopes up about a one-in-a-million chance.”
Or she didn’t want me to know what she was planning. Had she suspected that I was on to her? Or was she just hedging her bets in case it really didn’t work? Whatever this drug was, it had either turned her or made it possible for Albert to turn her. It had honestly never occurred to me that nullness could be tempered chemically; I had assumed Olivia’s transformation had had something to do with magic. We all had.
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