I lifted my hands. They were shaking. “I—can you—”Jesse nodded and began wiping clay and blood from my face. I shivered with cold, wincing a couple of times when he found one of my new bruises.
“Why did you do that?” Jesse asked me quietly. “Why shoot her?”
I shrugged. “Bitch deserved to die. Dashiell was going to do it anyway, so I figured I might as well have the privilege.” My teeth chattered as I spoke. When had it gotten so cold?
Jesse sat back on his heels and studied my face. “You’re lying,” he said simply. “You did it for me.”
“Pshaw,” I said scornfully. “That doesn’t sound like me at all—” And I stopped talking then, because he was kissing me. His lips were warm, and as he pulled me into his lap I discovered that the rest of him was too. He smoothed my wet hair from my face, and I moved past the surprise and kissed him back with a hunger that would have scared me if I was anywhere in the vicinity of my right mind.
Chills spread through my chest, but I wasn’t cold anymore. The kiss went on and on. I couldn’t get enough of him. Our first kiss, on Molly’s porch, had been like a bubble bursting, tension breaking into passion. This was something else, though. This was…connection.
Then I heard a familiar voice behind us. “I believe the word you humans use is ahem.”
We broke apart, gasping for breath. Dashiell stood in the same doorway Jesse had come through, leaning against the doorframe and looking amused. Goddamn vampires. I scooted off Jesse’s lap, trying to keep the embarrassment off my face.
“Hey,” I managed.
Dashiell raised his eyebrows. “I found a dead witch in the hallway. Would that be Mallory?”
“Yes,” Jesse said. He climbed to his feet, putting one hand against the wall to steady himself.
“Ah.” Dashiell came forward and looked down at Olivia’s body. It hadn’t yet rotted the way a vampire corpse usually does as it dies. She had been human when I’d shot her, and died as a human. We all go back to human in the end. Dashiell looked at Jesse. “I see you managed to take care of Olivia.”
Jesse opened his mouth, but I spoke first. “Yes.” I stood up shakily. Dashiell didn’t need to know that it had been me. He’d respect Jesse more if he thought Jesse was secretly ruthless. “I can get her to my furnace guy, if someone can help me load her in…” I realized I didn’t have my van and stopped short, uncertain of what to do. I felt myself swaying.
“Scarlett,” Dashiell said, the amused tone back in his voice. “You’re about to pass out, and you look like you just crawled out of the grave during a downpour. I think you can have the rest of the night off.” He looked around, taking in the clinic with a newly focused eye. “Consider this one on me.”
“That’s nice,” I said, a little loopy, and sagged against a counter.
“Detective Cruz, I trust you can get her out of here?” Dashiell asked. Jesse nodded and came over to put my arm around his shoulders. He walked me down the hall without another word to my boss.
There was no sign of the witch’s body in the hall, so Dashiell must have already put it in a car. We paused briefly so Jesse could put his shoes back on, and then began plodding forward again. “You can’t drive like this, you know,” Jesse said in my ear.
“Of course I can,” I protested. Then I stopped in my tracks. “Jesse, the Transruah…if Dashiell gets it, it could start this whole big thing—”
“It’s okay,” he said. He reached into his jacket pocket and showed me the little piece of Jerusalem stone on its leather cord.
I turned it over in my hands, shocked. I must have shorted it out when Jesse had come in to help me fight Olivia and the golem, but I hadn’t even felt it. “Jesse, you brought it too close to me. You shorted it out.”
“I know,” he said, taking it gently and putting it back in his pocket. “I made the decision. I’ll take the responsibility.” He grinned. “Or I’ll just tell Kirsten it was unavoidable, and she’ll have to understand.”
My mouth was working like a fish’s. “It was too powerful, Scarlett,” he said gravely. “I’ll return the book and the amulet tomorrow, and the witches can keep them as historical artifacts. But no one should have that much power. Think what would have happened if Olivia and Mallory had made it to Kirsten.”
I shuddered and nodded. I wasn’t really opposed to shorting out the Transruah, I was just…surprised. It was a bold move.
We made it outside, finally. Jesse took my keys and went around the side of the building to pull Eli’s truck up so I wouldn’t have to walk any farther. As soon as he was gone, though, I stuck my head back inside the building. “Dashiell?” I called. There was a flash of vampire speed, and then Dashiell hit my radius and walked toward me casually.
“Yes?” he inquired.
I took a deep breath. “There’s someone I still need to talk to. I need an address, and I would appreciate”—I chose my words carefully—“if I could get it from you, no questions asked.”
“Whose address?”
I told him. “Just to talk, right?” he asked warily.
I nodded. “I swear.”
He met my eyes for a long moment, judging, and gave me the address.
It took almost ten minutes to convince Jesse I was well enough to drive. But we had two cars at the clinic, and Jesse still had to go back in for the Book of Mirrors, and…what can I say, I whined my way into it. Finally Jesse reached over to hand me back the keys. As I took them, he leaned forward and kissed me on the mouth, gently. “I’ll call you tomorrow; we’ll figure out getting the cars back,” he told me, and I just nodded.
Chapter 34
Jesse watched Scarlett pull away, making sure that the truck’s headlights were on and it was moving in a straight line. When she was finally out of sight, he trudged back into the clinic.
He headed for the desk he’d climbed on to hide the Book of Mirrors. It would only take a moment to retrieve the book from the ceiling tile. He would turn the book and the dead amulet over to Runa the next day. She’d know what to do with them.
Before he climbed up, though, Jesse sat down on the desk, intending to rest for just one second. He knew if he thought too hard about the events of the day, much less the last few days, his brain would melt into a puddle. Only a few days ago, Scarlett had been out of the picture, Runa had been his girlfriend, and his biggest problem was that his dream job wasn’t quite as challenging as he’d wanted. And now…he shook his head, trying to clear it.
Then, too tired to look for him, Jesse simply called, “Dashiell?”
The vampire was suddenly there. “Dios,” Jesse muttered, grabbing his heart. “I had forgotten about that.”
“Did you need something else, Detective?” the vampire asked politely, but Jesse thought he saw a twinkle in Dashiell’s eye. Maybe startling humans was just the kind of thing that never got old. Or something.
“We need to talk,” Jesse said.
“What about?”
“Your system,” Jesse said frankly. “This way that you have, of covering up crimes and crime scenes and then getting the police to cover what Scarlett misses. It’s not working for me.”
A look of annoyance flickered on Dashiell’s face. “Continue,” he said shortly.
“Right now, you’re trying to have it both ways,” Jesse began. “You’re trying to work outside the law but also use the law—including me—in illegal ways, whenever you think it’s useful. What I’d like to discuss is the possibility of streamlining this a little more. I think there may be a way that the police force can be involved in Old World crimes without you having to press a lot of minds or bribe anyone.”
Dashiell stared at him for a long moment, and Jesse fought the instinct to look away, to protect himself from having his mind pressed. After Scarlett left he had found one of the vampire amulets in Kirsten’s car, and he was prepared for that eventuality. But let Dashiell think that Jesse was just brave enough to face him.
They stayed like that for a long moment, until
the amusement left the vampire’s face and he tilted his head slightly, as if considering Jesse for the first time.
“I’m listening,” Dashiell said at last.
Chapter 35
I stopped at Molly’s house for a quick shower and to get dressed in a clean T-shirt and jeans. I was now delighted that I hadn’t been able to wear my favorite canvas jacket to Kirsten’s party. It greeted me, whole and unstained, from the back of a chair, where I happily shrugged it on. The T-shirt and boxers I’d taken off went directly in the garbage can, but I was sorry I had to throw away the boots, an old birthday gift from my mom. At least Molly would have fun making me shop for new ones. While I was thinking of it, I called and left her a voice mail to let her know it was safe to come home.
I followed Dashiell’s directions all the way east to the Palisades, until I found a tiny stretch of beach with a small house that faced the ocean. It was after two in the morning, but I knocked hard on the back door and then went over to lean against the porch railing to wait, giving him time to get dressed and come out. I felt, rather than saw, when the man came up to lean against the railing next to me.
“Beautiful view,” I commented, although it was hard to make out much in the dark besides the flash of white water in the breaking waves.
“It is.”
“Kind of a long commute, though.”
“True.”
I turned around to face the house, leaning my elbows against the rails and turning my head to look at him. “Dashiell gave me your address, in case you were wondering. He knows that I’m here.”
Hayne frowned. “Miss Bernard, you say that like you think I’m going to murder you.”
I shrugged casually. “Just letting you know.”
“I see.” He looked back out at the ocean. “What is it you wanted to talk to me about?” he asked calmly. Which I suppose was a lot more polite than “What the fuck are you doing at my house at two a.m.,” which would have been my reaction.
“I’ve been on this case,” I began, “and I don’t know how much you already know about it, but it’s kept me awfully busy the last few days. I had this little thought sometimes, though, at the back of my mind, and every time I tried to chase it down it just escaped me. Then today I realized it was actually a question.” I looked at him and waited until he turned his head to meet my eyes. “How did Olivia and Mallory know where to find the Book of Mirrors?”
Hayne flinched. It was small, but it was there. He looked away again, without speaking. That was okay. I could do the talking for both of us. “After all,” I said, “Mallory was never really part of Kirsten’s society. And I doubt Kirsten told any of her witches about a secret that big, because that’s just not what leaders do. You don’t give the governor of Hawaii the code to the nuclear weapons stash, for crying out loud. But if you had to be traveling back and forth to San Diego and you had to explain your absence to, say, a spouse…”
“Miss Bernard,” Hayne said, and then sighed. There was a long silence, and we stared at the ocean some more.
When Hayne showed no signs of speaking again, I said, “Okay, I’ll keep going. At the same time, I couldn’t help noticing the scars on your wrists.” Automatically, Hayne turned his hands palms-up, looking down toward the old puncture wounds. I couldn’t see them in the dark, but maybe he could. “It didn’t seem like Dashiell’s style to feed off his daytime security guy, not when he has regular volunteers for that. But I figured, what the hell, maybe he does it to keep you in line or something.
“If that were the case, though, why are those scars so old? Why wouldn’t he still be feeding off you? There’s more than one bite there, so it wasn’t just some weird initiation ritual or something. You were fed on, a bunch of times, a while ago. And not by Dashiell.”
When he still didn’t speak, I opted for a more direct route. “Tell me, Hayne: Why did you and Kirsten split up?”
After a beat, Hayne finally answered me. “It wasn’t Dashiell, though I imagine that’s what anyone would think. He’s a lot of things, but he knew I was in love with her, and he didn’t stand in our way. She met him because of me—that’s how she was able to campaign for the witches to have rights, to share a cleaner, all of that.” His voice had a tinge of pride.
“It was Kirsten who eventually…she just couldn’t accept that I trusted Dashiell, that I wasn’t worried that he’d kill me or feed from me.” He gave me a sidelong glance. “I knew that he pressed me sometimes, you know? I’d overhear a phone call, or he’d have secret guests over, or whatever, and he’d take the memory from me. It didn’t bother me, but it drove Kirsten crazy. She offered me a way to protect myself, protect my mind from him, but I refused.” He shrugged. “Eventually it came down to a choice. I loved her, but…anyway.”
“And the bites?” I prompted.
He sighed heavily. “Yes, the bites. We split up, and she eventually got remarried. I was in a rough place. I let my guard down. And then Albert asked me for a favor, just delivering some package to his friend on my way home from work, at sunset. No big deal.” Hayne stared down at his hands, miserable. “Olivia didn’t take all of it, all of the memory. I was there too long for that. And I think she and Mallory enjoyed having me know that I’d given up secrets—I knew some of Kirsten’s and some of Dashiell’s, you see. If I’d said anything to Dashiell about it…”
“Didn’t Dashiell see the marks?”
He nodded. “I told him I’d met a lady vampire at one of Gregory’s parties and things got out of hand. I was so messed up about Kirsten, still, that it made a lot of sense.”
Gregory was a creepy, powerful vampire who threw weekly parties for the vampire hangers-on. I had to agree, it was a great place to go for some recreational self-destruction.
Hayne went quiet for a few minutes, and I let him stew.
“You’re going to tell him now, aren’t you,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “He’s gotta know that Olivia and the witch know things.”
“They’re dead, Hayne,” I said. “Both of them. And Albert was killed too. There’s no one left to know what you told them.”
He stared at me without blinking, for so long that I was beginning to worry. Finally, he said, “And?”
I looked at him levelly. “And Dashiell and Kirsten aren’t stupid. When the dust settles it may occur to them to ask questions. For now, though, I’m planning to keep it to myself.”
He eyed me warily. “In exchange for what?”
I shrugged. “You’ve seen The Godfather, Hayne, you know the drill. ‘Someday I may call upon you for a favor’ and all that. You owe me one.”
“I won’t betray any confidences,” he said stubbornly. “Not again.”
I shook my head and stepped off the porch. “Hayne, my man,” I said over my shoulder, “I wouldn’t ask you to.”
By the time I left the little beach house, I was so tired my bones felt rubbery, and the morphine had completely worn off. I hurt everywhere, and it seemed like too much trouble to try to remember any of the specific injuries. My night still wasn’t over, though, not yet. There was one more thing I had to do, and it couldn’t wait.
I called ahead, and Will met me at the front door of Hair of the Dog. He looked exhausted, but still smiled at me the way he always does, part pleasure at being human again and part general good cheer at seeing me. I followed him through the bar and toward the back hallway.
“Ana took her girlfriend back to my place,” he explained as we went. Will had been busy since I’d left: the bodies, glass, and blood were gone, and the floor was still slick with cleaner. It was a little funny that everyone was cleaning up crime scenes today except for me. “I turned a spare bedroom into a secure room for my wolves a few years ago. Lydia will be safe there.”
“Has he woken up yet?” I asked.
Will shook his head. “I check on him every few minutes. The wolfberry is long gone from his system, according to Matthias, but I think he’s still sleeping off the aftereffects from the sedatives.” We arri
ved at the door to the little janitorial closet, and Will unceremoniously flipped the light switch.
Eli was laid out on the cot, dressed in a clean-looking pair of sweatpants that had been cut off at the knees, and nothing else. The room was warm, and he didn’t even stir when the light went on. I concentrated on my radius. I knew how Eli’s magic felt better than anyone, and the sense of wrongness had vanished.
“Is it okay if I stay with him tonight?” I asked Will.
He nodded immediately. “Of course.” He checked his watch. “If you’re here, I’m going to go home and catch a couple of hours of sleep. I’ll come in an hour or so before opening to finish the cleanup.” He looked up. “But, Scarlett, call me if you need anything. Or if he wakes up and wants to talk. Don’t hesitate, seriously.”
I nodded dully. I was already shrugging out of my jacket. Will waved and took off, turning off all the other lights as he went. I went over and closed the door, but left the lights on, in case one of us had nightmares. I untied my Chuck Taylors and took them off too.
The cot that Will kept in the janitor’s closet wasn’t very big, but I did the best I could to shove Eli over and make room for myself. Instead of lying down, however, I sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed, looking at Eli. Expressions danced across his face in his sleep, and I felt a little guilty when it reminded me of a dog kicking its legs as it dreamed. When I was sure I was calm and relaxed, I closed my eyes.
And this time, when I called, the circle was there. No searching, no grasping at edges. I was immediately relieved—some part of me had worried I’d need to be high to do it again. Then I concentrated, not on the circle, but on Eli and his magic, the magic that bonded to his blood and made him a werewolf. It was blocked from him while he was in my radius, but it wasn’t blocked from me. It was there, waiting for Eli to move away from me. Or, I finally realized, waiting for me to do something with it.
I called the magic to me. Or at least, that’s the best way I can describe it. I called the magic past the part of my radius where it was waiting, closer and closer until I could feel it come into me. I held it for a moment, in perfect balance, and there was potential there, potential to do…something? It wasn’t important. Instead, I let Eli’s magic dissolve slowly, bit by bit like sand through my fingers, until it was gone. When I finally opened my eyes, Eli no longer pulsed with magic.
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