Trail of Dead

by Olson, Melissa F.

  I followed her through the glass doors and down a little hill to Kirsten’s wide backyard. I hadn’t actually been back there before, but even in the dark I could tell it was just as landscaped as the front. Runa sat down on a little bench next to a birdbath. I grudgingly perched myself on the other side.

  “How did you know who I was?” she asked.

  “I saw a picture on Jesse’s phone,” I said, fury in my voice. “I’m guessing he doesn’t know you’re a witch.”

  Her voice was low and miserable. “No.”

  Anger was making my head swim. I took a deep breath of the cool night air before I continued. “Please tell me you’re not dating him just because Kirsten ordered you to. Tell me you’re not part of some half-assed undercover thing to keep an eye on Jesse Cruz.”

  Her shoulders hunched down, but she looked up to meet my eyes. “I wish I could. But that’s how it started. Then I—”

  I held up a hand. “Stop. Spare me the then I fell in love with him crap. Of course you did, because he’s a good and honest man. And you’ve been lying to him this whole time.” Okay, I admit it. Part of me was rejoicing inside, because this meant Jesse wasn’t taken after all. He can be with me now, the voice said. But this wasn’t how I wanted to win him over. And I’d seen the goofy look on his face whenever he talked to this girl. I suddenly wanted very much to hurt her. “You know, you’re just proving everything he hates about the Old World,” I spat out. I was working hard to stay away from name-calling. “He doesn’t do this political crap, with the secrets and the backstabbing. He’s better than all of…this.” I’d almost said all of us.

  “You don’t understand,” she burst out, her face hardening with passion. “Kirsten, she’s my cousin. She brought me to LA, let me live here for months while I figured things out. I owe her everything. I couldn’t just say no! And she was so worried, after you brought him into our affairs—”

  “Wait, stop,” I interrupted. “She called you because of me? Because I brought him into the Old World?” I really, really wanted to be yelling at Kirsten. I’d known she was powerful, and I’d known she was capable of playing politics with Dashiell and Will. But I hadn’t expected something so underhanded. Not from her.

  Then I thought of her and Jesse going off to San Diego that morning, and how her attitude seemed to have changed. “Wait,” I said. “What happened yesterday? Why did Kirsten suddenly want to work with him?”

  “He passed a test,” Runa answered, her voice almost a whisper. “He erased my crime-scene photos from the car accident. Then we—then Kirsten knew he was for real.”

  Of course he was for real. Kirsten just hadn’t been willing to take my word for it. I thought of how she’d guilt-tripped me into partnering up with Jesse for the investigation and felt my hands clenching together. I took a deep breath and tried to relax them.

  “Why you?” I said. “You’re not powerful, so what’s your specialty? Seduction?” Believe it or not, that was the more polite version of that question.

  Her lovely face soured. “Locator spells. I’m great with finding people or things. If I know the person or I’ve handled the object, I can even do it without a focus.” She straightened herself with pride. “Not even Kirsten can do that.”

  “I get it. You’re human LoJack, which—wait, can you find Olivia?” I asked, momentarily distracted.

  She shook her head. “Kirsten had me try months ago, when Olivia attacked you. But I’d never met her, so I needed a focus, and everything we could find of hers was from when she was human. The magic…stalled out at finding her as a vampire.”

  I sighed. Of course it couldn’t just be that easy. “But you knew Jesse, so you could keep track of him. Which made you a great spy. Did you give any thought to how this might affect him?”

  “More and more every day,” she said softly. Tears slipped down her cheeks, and all of a sudden the fight went out of me, and I couldn’t hate her anymore. I just felt tired. Dammit.

  She bit her lip, and then asked, “You’re not going to tell him, are you?”

  I smiled grimly. “Nope. But you are. Right now.” I stood up. “He’s parked in front of the house.”

  ‘I can’t!” she cried, wringing her hands. “I’m not ready.”

  I sighed. That was the ironclad argument of every single person who’d ever done something bad and kept it a secret. I’m not ready. “When do you see yourself being ready, Runa? When he asks you to move in with him? When he proposes?”

  The witch hung her head, suddenly silent. Dammit, Scarlett! Stop feeling sorry for this person, I thought. I couldn’t help it, though. I’m such a softie. I dropped back down onto the bench. “Could you…I don’t know, choose him somehow?” I asked gently. “Tell Kirsten you want to be with him?”

  “If I went against Kirsten, I’d have to leave the society,” she said mournfully. “They’re, like, my home. Nobody leaves, once you’re in.”

  I rolled my eyes at that particular Godfatheresque comment, but something about it made a little spark in my brain. Runa began to say something else, but I held up both hands like a traffic cop. “Wait. I may be having some kind of thought here.” Once you’re in…“I need to go,” I said suddenly. “I need to talk to your cousin.” I gritted my teeth. “About a couple of things.”

  Before I could even step forward, my cell phone rang, the ordinary ring-ring sound again. I dug it out of my pocket, but it was already silent. Who calls and only lets it ring once? I checked the display.

  Kevin.

  “Oh, shit.” I broke into a sprint, Runa yelling a question behind me, but I hadn’t even made it around the corner of the house before I heard the screams.

  Chapter 23

  I had made it about six steps around the house when I pulled up short. Think it through, Scarlett. Jesse was out front; he would have heard the screaming. He was probably approaching the front of the house right now, gun in hand. If I burst into view, I was going to distract him, and if I wasn’t close enough to cancel out the witch’s magic right away, she’d have the perfect opportunity to hurt him. If she hadn’t done so already. Choking on my frustration, I reversed direction and raced back toward the sunroom door. If I could come up behind the witch, I could neutralize her, and Jesse could cover her with the gun. Simple.

  As I raced toward the sunroom doors, witches were pouring out, and I had to shoulder them aside to push my way into the house. It wasn’t like the mob stampedes you see in the movies: some of the witches weren’t running with the others; they milled around asking questions, halfheartedly letting themselves be pulled toward the doors. Nervous laughter mixed in with shouts and screams. “What happened, though?” someone hollered. “Where are we all going?” It felt like I was pushing against water out of a fire hose. And then I heard another witch yell, “Vampire! It’s a vampire!”

  Olivia. She was here.

  Of course, there was the possibility that the whole supervillain team had shown up: Olivia, the witch, and the golem. That didn’t feel right, though. They’d worked separately this whole time, with Olivia doing most of the legwork, and if they really didn’t know I was here, this wasn’t their big endgame. No, it had to be Olivia alone. I knocked over one of the Narnia witches but didn’t slow down to apologize. I headed straight for the front of the house, desperately wishing I knew where Jesse was. The little fireplace room had emptied, as had the kitchen and the entryway—but the front door stood open, and a man lay sprawled half in, half out of the house. There. I skidded to a stop as I recognized Kevin, the bouncer witch—and saw the spreading pool of blood below him. I crouched to check his pulse, but I wasn’t very surprised when I felt none. His eyes already stared upward, his face completely blank. Too late, too late. I heard a crunch as I shifted my weight, and I looked down and saw bits of his cell phone under my boot. She had crushed it.

  Instinctively, I rose and threw myself against the wall next to the front door, panting. I could hear shouts outside, but I couldn’t make out the words or voices�
��there was music playing somewhere in the house, and still plenty of screaming. I closed my eyes, took a few deep breaths, and concentrated on my radius. This was it, my first real test. I felt for the edges of my circle. It took longer than it had before, but eventually I was able to hold it all in my mind. I breathed in, breathed out, and thought expand.

  And then all hell broke loose, because the first thing my circle found on the porch was Kirsten.

  The second I felt her, I opened my eyes and dropped the expansion, but it was too late. I stepped awkwardly over Kevin’s body and burst onto the porch just as Jesse began firing at Olivia.

  I took it all in in an instant. I’d made the wrong call. Olivia must have been on the porch when Kirsten came running out. The witch had managed to hold Olivia in place with a spell while Jesse advanced on her from the street, presumably to try to put handcuffs on her until I arrived. When I’d expanded my radius, I had killed Kirsten’s magic and cut the cord holding Olivia still. And the first thing the vampire had done was race farther away from me—and straight toward Jesse.

  “The heart,” I screamed. “Shoot the heart!” Jesse’s face was frozen in concentration as he emptied his gun at the vampire—but she was too fast. She veered away from her direct course toward Jesse, and I saw bits of skin explode on her arms, her abdomen, her thigh. She had reached the line of cars when his gun clicked empty, and Olivia paused, a wicked smirk spreading across her face. Why was she pausing? Jesse moved to reload, and Kirsten started toward Olivia, probably trying to get far enough away from me to freeze Olivia again. I tensed to throw myself backward to get Kirsten out of my radius faster, but Olivia’s face changed again, and her hand moved into the nylon jacket she was wearing.

  And I just…knew what she would do. Somehow.

  “No!” I screamed, and lurched forward again. And as fast as everything had happened up until then, it sped up even more. I took the two steps it took to close the gap between Kirsten and me, and I grabbed at her roughly, getting a handful of her hair and one shoulder. I pulled her backward with everything I had, moving around her left side to cover her just as Olivia began firing the gun she’d pulled from the jacket. I heard two bursts, and in the same instant my back seemed to explode, and I was on the ground with Kirsten under me.

  “Scarlett!” Jesse screamed, and everything went spacey for a moment. I hadn’t had the wind knocked out of me since I was a little kid on the playground, but I recognized the sickly frozen feeling as though it had been yesterday. Seconds passed, or maybe minutes. I heard the police sirens wailing toward us, and then Jesse was rolling me over, off of Kirsten. I was gulping for air, unable to do too much to help him move me—but as I finally flopped onto the ground I could feel the horrible lifelessness of Kirsten’s body.

  “Olivia’s gone?” I gasped. My back ached with an agonizing, rippling pain that made it hard to think. I stayed where I was, with it pressed into the cool ground. Jesse nodded. “And Kirsten?” Jesse was frantically pushing loose strands of hair away from my eyes so he could search my face. As though there might be pieces missing. “I’m fine, check her,” I managed to say to Jesse. He ignored me until I added. “It hit the vest.” I wiggled a little so my back wasn’t against the ground. I’d never been shot before, but it felt like a major-league pitcher had fired a baseball into the muscles next to my spine.

  Jesse met my eyes again and nodded quickly, shifting his attention to the witch next to us. I stared at the streetlight for a second, rejoicing in my now-working lungs, until Jesse reported, “She’s been shot in the side. I can’t tell how bad, but the ambulance will be here soon. She bumped her head when you tackled her, but it doesn’t look too bad. Maybe a minor concussion.”

  “Is she gonna live?” I asked, panicked.

  “I think so,” he said, using his professional cop voice. “But you need to stay calm. You did everything you could.”

  “I should have come running around the outside of the house instead of running through it.”

  Jesse gave me a sharp look. “And you were supposed to know that how? Olivia shot Kirsten, Scarlett. Not you. You took a bullet for her.”

  I managed to roll myself over, onto all fours. I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and checked the screen. The little LCD face had a crack through it, but when I started pushing buttons everything else seemed to work fine. Beside me, Jesse was applying pressure to the bullet hole on Kirsten’s side. Blood covered his hands and stained the torso of her beautiful gown. It seemed like a really good time to call Dashiell.

  He picked up immediately. “What’s happened? Did you get them?”

  “No.” I told him about Olivia showing up at the party instead of the witch. “She brought a gun; she was prepared in case I showed up. Dashiell, you’ve gotta get people over here to press minds,” I said. “There’s a dead body, and Kirsten’s been shot, and some other witches may have been hurt, and the police are gonna be here in a second—”

  “Scarlett, you’re babbling,” he said with exaggerated patience. “Don’t worry about Kirsten. I’ll come myself.”

  I sighed with relief. That was kind of what I’d been hoping for. Dashiell was arrogant, pushy, and controlling, but this was exactly the kind of situation that made me glad to have him around. “Thank you.”

  “I’ll talk to you more when I arrive. For now, just don’t say anything to the police.” He hung up.

  I looked over at Jesse. “Dashiell’s on his way,” I said—thus speaking to the police. Then I groaned. “Oh, shit.”

  He looked up from Kirsten in alarm. “What? Are you hurt somewhere else?”

  “She shot Molly’s sweater. Molly is gonna kill me.”

  He looked at me, and we both sort of…giggled. Before I could say anything else, though, three police cars came screaming up to the house, and I froze. I’d seen this in the movies a thousand times, but it was still kind of terrifying when you were the one lit up in the headlights. “Just be still,” Jesse murmured. “Keep your hands visible.”

  I’d just been shot in the back. What was I gonna do, run a five-minute mile? “No problem.”

  The cops from the first squad car, a man and a woman, came boiling out of the car with their guns drawn, just like in the movies. They began to shout at us, but Jesse shook his head and yelled, “Detective Jesse Cruz, Southwest Homicide. My badge is in my inside jacket pocket. I don’t want to move my hands from this wound.”

  The uniformed officers exchanged a glance, and then the female cop holstered her gun while the male kept his trained on us. Jesse and I held perfectly still while she approached and reached into the pocket of Jesse’s leather jacket, pulling out his identification. She nodded at the male officer, and they both relaxed visibly. “She’s with me,” Jesse said, tilting his head my way. I waved limply.

  The three of them began to chatter at each other in cop codes, which I made no effort to sort out. After a few minutes, the other cops went inside to check the rest of the house. The ambulance arrived and two female EMTs jumped out, beelining straight for Kirsten. One of them was older, maybe sixty, with gray hair cropped short. The one who’d been driving was younger and moved with more energy. She had a ponytail pulled through a baseball cap with the name of the ambulance service printed on it. I scooted back a few feet so they could work, and Jesse was finally able to lift his bloody hands off Kirsten’s side. I looked away. I could handle the sight of blood, but there was no point in giving myself this memory of Kirsten.

  “She’s waking up,” the older EMT reported. She leaned forward with a little flashlight, checking Kirsten’s pupil dilation. “Ma’am, please try not to move. Do you know where you are?”

  Kirsten blinked against the light. “Yes.”

  There was a wave of bustling activity, and Jesse helped the two EMTs get Kirsten onto one of those backboard thingies, and then a gurney. I managed to get to my feet while they were folding the wheels and getting her in the ambulance, although it probably didn’t look very graceful. By the time Kirst
en was settled in the ambulance, she was out again. “Her too,” Jesse ordered, pointing at me. “She needs to go along and get checked out.”

  I don’t know why I was surprised. “Me? I’m fine. The vest caught it.”

  “She got shot in the back,” Jesse explained to the younger EMT.

  The woman with the ponytail went around to my back and unceremoniously lifted the sweater. “Hey,” I protested mildly. At least it was a woman.

  “I’ve got a bullet here,” the ponytailed woman yelled to her colleague. To me, she said, “He’s right, Miss. You need to come with us. There could be internal bleeding or cracked ribs.”

  One of the uniformed cops opened a downstairs window and stuck his head out. “We’ve got a few more injuries in here. You guys want to take a look now or call for another bus?”

  The younger EMT raised her eyebrows at the older woman, who said, “She’ll be stable for a few minutes. Run and look quick so we can at least give them a heads-up.”

  The young driver nodded briskly and jogged inside, letting a cop guide her around Kevin’s body. Poor Kevin. Even in death, he was just a backdrop.

  “Come on, I’ll help you climb up,” Jesse said, taking my hand and steering me toward the back of the ambulance.

  “We don’t have time for this,” I protested. He ignored me, and I pretty much had to allow him to pull me along. Digging my heels in would hurt too much.

  “We’re making time,” he said, and I knew from his tone that further arguments would be pointless. Jesse helped me climb carefully into the rig. I scooted around the older EMT, who was working over Kirsten, and settled down in the seat across from the witch.

  “You should get back in there,” I called to Jesse, who was still on the ground. “Dashiell will be here any second.” I gave him a meaningful look that I hoped said and you guys have to figure out what to tell everyone.