Someone had been in the house.
I edged around the table as if it might be booby-trapped and picked up a butcher knife from the block next to the fridge. We don’t use the knife set much—Molly rarely cooks, for obvious reasons, and I do more assembling than actual cooking—so it was plenty sharp. Keeping my back to a wall, I edged through the house to the staircase, ran up the stairs two at a time, and burst into Molly’s room, feeling a vampire presence enter my radius and praying that it was Molly. She had boarded over the windows in her room years ago, so I flipped the light on, holding my breath, and saw her lying on the bed, looking peaceful. I closed and locked the door behind me and went over to shake her shoulder. “Molls? Molly? Are you okay?”
Her eyelids fluttered, and I sighed with relief. She took one look at my face. “Yeah. What’s with the knife?” Her voice was perfectly calm. When you’re two hundred–odd years old, you’ve probably been through an emergency or two.
“Someone’s been in the house.”
We searched the house room by room, me with the butcher knife and Molly wearing her Sailor Moon nightie, and found nothing besides the flowers and a busted knob on the back door. When we were positive that nobody else was there, Molly put on her bathrobe—I waited at the bottom of the stairs to stay in range—and then I returned the knife to the kitchen and started the coffeemaker. There was no way I’d be going to sleep anytime soon.
Molly perched on one of the stools, looking livid, while I filled her in on my suspicion that the La Brea Park murders were somehow connected to me.
“I cannot believe,” she spat out when I had finished, “that some asshole was in my house while I was...sleeping.” I realized that the Welsh accent had crept back into her voice. Jesus. I’d never seen her this upset. She was still human, of course, but I could see the predator beneath the cheerful exterior. “When I find that fucker, I will rip his goddamned heart out, and I mean that literally.”
I said nothing, just huddled around my coffee, waiting for her to wind down. After a few minutes, she looked over at me. “What? What are you thinking?”
“I’m really sorry.”
She sputtered a little mid-sip, then put her cup down. “What for?”
“This is my fault. If you hadn’t let me move in here, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Molly looked at me like I’d lost it. “Well...duh.”
I blinked. “Huh?”
“Of course this never would have happened if you weren’t living here. But, Scarlett, I knew what I was getting into when I signed on. When Dashiell arranged for you to live here, I knew someday something might come looking for you. I just thought it’d be another vampire, because they wanted, you know, your help.”
“I don’t know what to do. I can’t put you at risk.”
She thought that over for a few minutes, then shook her head. “Scarlett...He’s given you an ultimatum, hasn’t he? A deadline?”
I hadn’t told her about that. It wasn’t paranoia; Molly really had been talking to Dashiell about me. I was hardly in a position to throw stones, though, since I’d just put her at risk. “Yes.”
“When is your time up?”
“At dawn.”
She winced, nodding. “Okay. There’s a Radisson downtown that has two basement floors. Drop me off there; walk me down into the basement. I’ll be safe there until all this is over. If you solve it before dawn, you can call me, and I’ll come home.” She hesitated. “I’m so sorry I can’t help you, Scarlett, but...”
“It’s okay,” I said miserably. “I understand.”
And I did.
It took almost an hour for us to get to the hotel, but I finally got her settled in a basement room. Molly paid for two nights in advance, telling the concierge she didn’t want to be disturbed, and I helped her duct-tape the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, just in case. When I finally got her down to her room, Molly hugged me so tightly that, for a second, I thought she still had vampire strength. “I really, really hope I see you tomorrow. I know you can figure this out.”
This one time, I let her hug me as long as she wanted.
As I pulled away from the hotel parking lot, the cell phone in my pocket began the opening chords of “Werewolves of London.” I fished the phone out of my pocket. “Hi, Will.”
“Scarlett.” His voice was grave. “I have this address. You need to get over there right now. It’s not a job, but—”
“Will...I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?” He sounded surprised. “I’ve never heard you say that.”
What did I have to lose? “Dashiell gave me until dawn to solve the La Brea Park thing, or he would assume I was involved. I’m sorry; I have to work on this right now.”
There was silence on the line, and I knew Will was thinking about the ultimatum. He could theoretically challenge Dashiell on my behalf, but as much as Will seemed to like me, he knew full well what a war with the vampires would do to this town. If he went to bat for me, there’d be casualties, and plenty of them. Not to mention the fact that the Old World’s LA experiment—allowing all three factions control in the same city—would be a resounding and bloody failure. On the other hand, if Dashiell killed me...Well, it’d be sad, but it was just one death, and I wasn’t even a werewolf.
I wasn’t even mad about it.
Finally, he spoke. “Scarlett, I didn’t know. But I think I might have someone who can help you. You need to get to this address as fast as you can.”
I rubbed my eyes. I knew Will probably wasn’t being deliberately cryptic, but I was all out of patience. “Please, Will, could you just tell me what’s going on?”
“I found the second null. Or actually, she found me.”
Chapter 26
When I really stopped and thought about it, I realized that, all along, I had assumed that the other null was evil.
Obviously, he or she was a bad guy, a murderer, and when we found him/her, I would call Jesse and he would do some really inspired cop-threatening, and then we’d know everything we needed in order to go to Dashiell.
I certainly hadn’t expected her to be a fifteen-year-old rape victim.
Will had sketched in the details for me: Until a few months ago, Corrine Tanger was a cheerful, well-adjusted teenager from an ultra-religious family—her father was a Pentecostal minister, and her mother was the church secretary. Two months earlier, however, Corrine had been attacked by her slimy biology teacher. She hadn’t gone into too much detail with Will—understandably—but the impression he’d gotten was that Corrine had been raped. The girl was too ashamed to tell her parents, and then the teacher started hinting about another “get-together” after school. Desperate and haunted, Corrine thought she’d found a way out when a stranger had approached her and offered a deal—if she accompanied him to kill the vampires in the park, he would make the teacher stop. The girl had seen it as the only way out of her own nightmare. She was not exactly the mustache-twirling villain I had been picturing since the case began.
As I drove to Corrine’s house in Glendale, I was so nervous that I had to clutch the steering wheel hard to keep my hands from shaking. What had happened to her was twisted and tragic and just so wrong, and I had absolutely no idea what to say to her. It wasn’t as if I would be showing off a model new life for her to step into. In fact, I realized, there was very little I could even tell her about what we are. My knowledge about nulls as a group is limited to pretty much what I’d told Cruz that night on the way to Dashiell’s.
Not for the first time, I deeply wished I had asked Olivia more questions. What would I do when Corrine had questions I couldn’t answer? And I’d never really known anyone who had been assaulted like that—should I mention how sorry I was? Avoid the topic all together? I felt a sudden flood of grief. I missed my mom. She always knew the right thing to say in any situation. I never do.
Get out of your head, Scarlett, I told myself sternly. It’s not about you right now. One thing I knew, beyond he
sitation or doubt, was that I had to help this girl. The way Olivia should have helped me.
The Tanger family lived in one of those Wisteria Lane–type suburbs, where the houses are all tidy and large and nearly identical. These lots were small, but every single house on her street looked well cared for, like the people who lived there took pride in their homes. It was a lot like Kirsten’s neighborhood, actually, but with less money thrown around. I took two wrong turns trying to distinguish the different streets, and finally pulled into the Tangers’ driveway a little after seven. When the van was off, I took a deep breath, flexing and unflexing my aching fingers. Will had helped Corrine work up a cover story: I was a math tutor for one of her friends. The friend was sick, so I was picking up her homework and hearing about the day’s lesson. Will said the father is pretty overprotective, but I am young, white, and female. Hopefully it would be enough to get a few minutes alone with Corrine. And hopefully no one would ask me anything about math.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The woman who answered the door was about fifty and had dark hair shot through with silver and the kind of crinkles around her eyes that meant she smiled all the time. She introduced herself as Mrs. Tanger and invited me into the foyer.
“It’s so nice of you to stop by,” she said kindly. “I’m sure Amanda will appreciate getting a head start on the work she’s missed.”
“Um, yeah,” I mumbled.
Mrs. Tanger wore a pale-pink J.Crew sweater set and an actual pearl necklace on top of dark tailored pants. I tugged self-consciously at my dark-green hoodie. There were bleach stains on my jeans. I’d been going for “college student,” but now I just felt like a homeless person.
“My husband is on an overnight retreat to Palmdale, but Corry’s upstairs in her room,” she told me. “It’s straight up the stairs, second door on the left. I’ll be in the kitchen if you girls need anything.” She rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “Corry’s little brother Jonah needs two dozen cupcakes for the school bake sale tomorrow, and of course he just told me now.” She gave me a hurried wave and headed deeper into the house.
Huh. Kind of anticlimactic.
I took a deep breath and climbed the stairs, knocking on the designated door. Just before it opened, I felt an old familiar tug, the water-bending-through-glass feeling of another null in my radius.
Corrine—Corry—must have felt it, too, because her brown eyes were wide when she opened the door. “You feel different,” she said breathlessly. “Like them.” She was a couple of inches shorter than my five foot seven, with a sweet face, a neat blonde bob, and modest teenager clothes—jeans and a simple long-sleeved purple top. She was pretty in an all-American general way, but her eyes were different. There was something tired and broken about them, as though she had resigned herself to just going through the motions, probably forever.
I swear, it didn’t remind me of anyone.
“Uh...Hi, I’m Scarlett. You must be Corrine. Can I come in?”
“Oh, sorry, yeah.” She stepped aside, letting me into the bedroom. I don’t know what I’d been expecting—maybe posters of boy bands and stuffed animals—but the room’s personality seemed to be in transit. There were dark spots on the violet wallpaper where posters had recently been removed, and in the middle of the room, there was a plain cardboard box nearly filled with the kind of junk kids acquire—trophies and battered paperbacks and photo albums. “Everybody calls me Corry.”
“Cool...Are you guys moving?”
“What? Oh, no. I’m just putting some stuff in the basement, for storage. Here, you can sit down at my desk.” She cleared a stack of binders off the desk chair and perched at the foot of her bed. When we were both seated, there was a long awkward moment while I worked up what to say.
Finally, I said, “Corry...Maybe this would be easiest if you told me how much you know. About what you are and what you can do.”
She nodded eagerly, her fingers twisting together in her lap. This girl was just bursting to talk to someone. “Okay, yeah. Um, all I really know is what Jay—that’s the guy—told me.” She took a deep breath. “He said there are evil things in the world, and I can, like, turn off their evil. Sort of save them. He would kill them when they were like that so they could go to heaven...And he said if I helped him, he’d keep Mr. Herberts from ever hurting me again.” Her voice was shaking by the time she finished, and she’d hugged her arms around herself.
I ached for her. “Is there something else?” I asked softly.
“I thought Jay would just, you know, go beat him up, threaten him or something,” she blurted. “I didn’t know...”
“What happened?” I asked, although I knew the answer.
“Jay killed him,” the girl said quietly. “He made it look like an accident in the woodshop classroom, but he died just like all the others.” She paused, and I could see her thinking about the people she’d helped Jay kill. “Were they...Were they really evil?” she asked me, with something like hope in her voice.
Corry was trembling now, and I felt completely incompetent. She needed me to tell her that she’d done the right thing, that she’d helped slay the monsters, but it just wasn’t that simple. And now I was going to make her a murderer. “Oh, honey...What Jay said isn’t exactly right. There are creatures in the world that you maybe didn’t know about, but they’re not all evil or all good, just like regular people.” I was about to say that the vampires were mostly evil, but I thought of Beatrice and held my tongue.
I froze as Corry hugged her knees to her chest and began to cry. My fingers twisted helplessly in my lap. I wanted to touch her but didn’t know how she’d take it.
“Jay said we were doing good,” she sobbed, “and in the park, I just shut my eyes and stayed still, and he did these things and...” Her voice broke off. “It was so horrible. But the guy in the parking lot, he was even worse. He was crying and...and begging. And I knew something wasn’t right, so I ran away.” She rolled across the bed, pulling a tissue off her nightstand and blowing her nose. She took a moment to collect herself and then held up a red cell phone with a beat-up Hello Kitty sticker on it. For some reason, the sticker broke my heart. “And like I told Mr. Carling, Jay sent me this text today, and he wants to do it again. When I said no, he...He tried to blackmail me. That’s why I called Mr. Carling.”
“How did you find him?” I asked, trying to follow the story.
She blushed under her tears. “My parents block a lot of websites, but I can still read the LA Times online. I saw the article on the parking lot guy, Ronnie? And it said he had a mother, and I looked her up. I called her and said I worked with Ronnie and I wanted to set up a memorial. She read me the contacts on his cell phone.”
“That was very smart,” I said. “Back up a second—you said Jay tried to blackmail you. Blackmail you with what?”
“He has a recording that Mr. Herberts made,” she said simply. “A DVD.”
Aside from Hugo the vampire, I’d never really hurt anyone in my life. But if that teacher weren’t already dead, I would have seen to it myself.
When I was sure I was calm, I said, “Look, I need to stop this Jay, and for reasons that are long and complicated, I don’t have much time. In fact, I have almost no time. You know how you felt when I came into the room?”
She nodded.
“Well, I’m something different, too—the same thing you are. We’re called nulls. And we need to have a very long talk, soon, about what it all means. But right now, I need to find Jay. Can you help me?”
She looked uncertain, and I tried to imagine what she’d been through recently. First the pedophile teacher, and then a man who swooped in and promised to fix everything only to turn out to be just as depraved. No wonder the girl wasn’t buzzing with eagerness. I looked around the half-packed room. This was a girl who had lost her inner compass. I took a deep breath. “Corry, what happened to you was wrong. Twice. People have been through a lot less than that and barely survived, so the fact that you’re
even walking and talking is amazing. And I swear to you that I will help you in every way I can. Do you think you can believe me?”
She hesitated, then nodded, and I prayed that I would have the strength to be everything this girl needed. “Good. Now tell me, what has Jay got planned for tonight?”
She told me about the meeting time and the bus stop while I scribbled down directions on a Hello Kitty pad of paper, which had probably come with the sticker set. When I was sure I knew where I was going, I shoved the Hello Kitty page in my pocket and stood up.
“Okay, Corry, this is really important. I need you to get your family out of here tonight. All night. Right now. Tell them anything you need to—you’re in trouble, you saw a ghost, there’s asbestos, anything. It doesn’t matter. Just get them out of here, and go somewhere safe. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going.” She opened her mouth, but I shook my head. “No, not even me, just in case. I just want you to promise me you’ll go. Promise?”
She nodded, eyes big and scared.
“Okay.” I scribbled on the pad again. “This is my number. You call me if anything goes wrong, okay? And in a couple of days, when my current crisis is over, you and I can have that talk.”
Ten minutes later, I was driving toward the Coffee Bean closest to Jesse’s precinct. He was sitting in the very back of the shop, blushing furiously while a blonde barista with comically large breasts stood by the table, flirting.
“Sweetheart!” he cried, as I walked up. He stood and kissed my cheek, giving me a begging look that clearly said, Please, please, please, play along.
I tried not to roll my eyes. The guy was just too handsome for his own good. “Hi, babe. Sorry I’m late. Oh, hey!” I said to the waitress. “I didn’t know they had table service here. I’d like a chai tea latte, please. Skim.” I shrugged out of my hoodie and sat down like I owned the place.
The blonde’s mouth snapped shut long enough for her to glare at me. She turned and stomped back behind the counter, large breasts wobbling with indignation.
Dead Spots Page 20