It was a very good question, and it doubtless had something to do with how this Oskar was connected with Molly, but Katia shrugged. On a hunch, I asked, “Does the name Alonzo mean anything to you?”
She gave me a look like I might be a little thick. It really did seem like I got that look a lot. “Of course. Alonzo was Oskar’s father.”
Okay, maybe I did deserve the look. I glanced at Jesse, who must have been thinking pretty much the same thing. “Well, his maker,” Katia corrected herself. “He turned Oskar into a vampire so he would have an heir. Oskar calls him Father.”
“Of course he does,” Jesse said, sounding more tired than anything else. “We’ve been so focused on Alonzo making new female vampires, we never considered that he might have made a male. An heir.”
“Did you ever meet Alonzo?” I asked Katia.
She shook her head. “He died the year before I met Oskar.” Her lip curled a little. “But Oskar worshipped him. I think he had to. The bonds between a vampire and his maker are strong.”
“We’ve heard,” I muttered.
“So back in the nineties, Molly killed Alonzo,” Jesse said, thinking aloud. “Not knowing he also had a son, Oskar. Twenty years later, Oskar tracks down Molly in Los Angeles and kicks off this elaborate revenge scheme.”
Katia’s eyes widened as she looked up at me, but she didn’t speak, just processed the new information. She was probably used to staying quiet.
I wondered how Molly was going to feel when she found out that Alonzo, her worst nightmare, had basically recreated himself. That although Molly had stopped Alonzo, his legacy had lived on, and his “son” had continued selling the young women he kidnapped and turned.
So many women. So many years.
“How could you work for him for so long?” I blurted to Katia. “How could you stand to?”
For a moment I didn’t think she was going to answer, but she’d promised Lex to give us any information we wanted. “Do you know,” she said slowly, “how a boundary witch activates her powers?”
“No.”
“She has to die. And I did. I was stabbed”—she touched her side, though I doubted she was conscious of it—“and buried. Oskar, he dug me up. He saved me from being buried alive, then demanded twenty years of service as repayment.” Her face hardened. “It was only many years later that I learned Oskar had ordered my attack in the first place.”
And I think that was the moment when I joined Team Katia. I no longer cared if she walked away from this scot-free. In fact, I wanted her to.
“When was this?” Jesse asked.
She smiled. “Nineteen years, ten months, and two days ago.”
“That’s why he came for Molly now,” I said, understanding. “He needed you for his revenge.”
She nodded. “I did not suspect it then, but you must be right. I thought we were just on another mission to get new girls, and start over in a new city. We did this before. He likes to get new girls every ten years, so there is never a time when he has only new people or only veterans.” She sounded disgusted. “This is also probably why he has not yet come to ‘rescue’ me from you. My time is almost up, and the one thing that you could say for both Oskar and Alonzo, they always keep their promise to release their . . . employees.” She touched her chest, right where the necklace would have hung if it hadn’t been stuffed in my pocket at the moment. “They don’t want to anger what little vampire authority remains.”
“That’s a pretty damned complicated revenge,” I pointed out. “He could have just killed Molly.”
“The woman who killed his precious Alonzo?” Katia shook her head. “No. That would not be a fitting tribute. Alonzo himself was very into drawn-out, elaborate revenge. Sometimes, I believe, he would set his revenge in motion even before he had been betrayed. And Oskar’s greatest wish is to be just like his father.”
And this was the guy who now had Molly’s friends—four fresh-faced young women who had barely tasted human life before it was taken away from them for darker purposes. Jesse and I exchanged another look. I’m not even sure what it meant, but he inclined his head a little, as if to say I’m with you.
“Okay, I’m officially fucking decided,” I announced. “One way or another, we are tearing it all down.”
Jesse glanced my way, but Katia was nodding. “This is what Lex said you would do. She said you are clumsy and immature, but also as stubborn as she is.” There was a smile in her voice. “And you’ve gone up against bad things before. So I will help you take down Oskar. And you will help me meet my niece.”
As she finished those words, we pulled into tonight’s safe house of choice—Will’s house.
I hadn’t had a whole lot of options for where to stash Katia, but the alpha werewolf’s place was isolated, it had a security system, and Will had a guest room that was always ready for a werewolf who might need a place to lay low. I figured as long as no one but us and Will knew she was there, she would be safe for the night.
We carried Katia inside, and when we had set down the cot in the living room, I sat down on the couch, near Katia’s head, and finally asked the big question. “Where is he, Katia? What else is he planning?”
“I am not sure on either question, though I have a few guesses,” she said. Her voice was weakening from exhaustion. “I can tell you what he was planning, but not what he will decide to do now that I am no longer helping him.” Her expression soured. “He will have moved the girls by now, knowing I have been captured. He does not trust me much.”
“Okay, well, what was the plan before?” Jesse said.
“Take the patsy,” she said without hesitating. “Sorry, I mean, Molly. Kill her—though now that I know the details, I am sure he will take much time to do this.” She shot me an apologetic look. “Sorry, again.”
I shrugged. It wasn’t like I was surprised. But I was doing everything I could not to think about Molly being tortured. “Then, once she is dead,” Katia went on, “I was to sneak into your Trials and begin whispering in ears, sowing seeds of mistrust among the vampires. Dashiell is corrupt, Dashiell let Molly escape to please his pet null—sorry, again,” she added to me. “We would let that simmer until the girls woke up, hoping that the rumors would destabilize the community. Then, perhaps a few nights after, I would go to some of Dashiell’s lieutenants, and if necessary, press them into committing . . . mmm . . .” She searched for a word, and finally settled on “mutiny.”
I gaped at her. “You were going to kill Dashiell?”
She spread her hands. “Not me, no. I was just supposed to induce some of his loyal followers to turn against him. We would leave it up to them whether they chose to kill him or exile him.”
“Why?” I burst out.
She looked at me strangely again, like she couldn’t believe I was this far behind on the chain of logical events. “Because,” she said, “Oskar is planning to take Los Angeles.”
Chapter 37
Jesse and I just stared at her.
On the one hand, in that moment, I felt really fucking justified. No one—not Kirsten, not Will, not Dashiell—had taken Molly’s frame job seriously. They had all assumed it was just a little isolated revenge plot, and they’d been willing to let Molly die to keep her from spoiling their goddamn Trials. If they had thrown resources into finding Oskar in the beginning, he would never have gotten this far.
On the other hand, I felt like a fool. How had I not seen this coming? Jesse’s informant had said the man giving the orders was setting up a new business with the MC. And I’d just told Jesse about how vampires loved to live on the edge of chaos. What could be more chaotic than a power vacuum? Neither Will nor Kirsten was strong enough to hold the city alone, and the vampires would fight amongst themselves for leadership. Dashiell’s stance on peace—that it was okay to share power with witches and werewolves—wasn’t as popular as he would like, and there was a great chance that whoever stepped into his role would declare dominance over the others—or war. It might last
for years. And while they all fought, Oscar would be making a killing in the sex industry. So to speak.
Before either of us could form words, Katia held up one hand. “Let me clarify,” she said. “He does not want to run the city. He knows he does not have enough natural power for that, at least not now. But he wants to take down your structure, to create anarchy. That will allow him to run his new brothel undisturbed.”
“He’s going to an awful lot of trouble,” Jesse pointed out. “Couldn’t he just build his brothel somewhere else?”
It was a good point. “I actually asked him that,” Katia said wryly. “In a respectful manner, of course. He loves Los Angeles, but more importantly, he has connections here, both in the criminal world and the movie industry. I believe he wants to start a side business in snuff films.”
Vampire snuff films. Goosebumps broke out on my arms. Oskar wanted to use his new vampires—Molly’s friends—in films where they’d be subjected to human death over and over again.
No. Just a great big no.
“How do we find him?” I said to Jesse, who had dropped down next to me on the couch. He looked as grim as I felt.
“If Katia is sure that Oskar would have moved the girls after we took her”—beside him, she nodded—“I don’t really know. Wait.” He looked at the boundary witch. “What is Oskar driving?”
“A black Hummer H2,” she replied.
“Rental?” he asked, a little hopeful. Even I knew that rental cars had LoJack.
But she shook her head. She seemed to be fading fast, and I wondered how much longer she could talk to us before her body would demand sleep. “It is specially modified to contain a vampire. I drove it here from our current base in Reno.”
“Damn.”
I turned back to Jesse, who was staring very thoughtfully at the ceiling. To let him keep concentrating, I resisted the urge to dramatically crane my neck and pretend I could see what he was seeing. “The SUV that I saw at Hayne’s house—which was the same one they used at Dashiell’s—was a Ford, not a Hummer,” he said finally. “I can’t ask anyone to run the plates, because he swapped them with stolen ones, but . . .” He made a face.
“What?”
“The SUV must belong to the Kings,” he concluded. “They would have driven Molly to wherever Oskar is.”
I checked Katia. Her eyes had drifted closed. “Can you call that CI?” I asked Jesse.
“No. Jimmy wouldn’t give me his direct number.”
I grunted, which must have sounded like annoyance, because Jesse added, “She was just protecting him. I’d have done the same thing, if I was on the job and he were my informant. But I can call her and beg her for it.”
“Will that work?”
Jesse was starting to look like he was doing some pretty serious long division. “It might,” he said at last. “If I can figure out the right story.”
Oh. Well, now I could pretty much read his thoughts. I touched his shoulder. “I know you don’t like lying to her,” I said in a low voice. “She’s a cop, like you were. But if we can’t find them, Molly dies, and God only knows what Oskar will do next.”
He nodded. “I know. In these weird circumstances, lying to Jimmy is the right thing to do. But it still feels shitty.” Without another word, he got up and went into the other room to make the call.
I flopped back on Will’s couch, which was both comfortable and sturdy enough to withstand werewolf tantrums. A few minutes later, Katia’s eyelids began to flutter open. “I fell asleep?” she asked, sounding surprised.
“Yeah. Jesse is making a phone call, trying to find Oskar.”
She rubbed her eyes with one hand. “Do you mind if I ask you a question while we wait?” she asked.
I gestured for her to go ahead, figuring it was about Shadow. I always got plenty of questions about Shadow.
But I was wrong this time. “Who are you?” she said. “I mean, I know you are a negator; I have heard of these. But you are not just doing this to save your friend, are you? What is your role here? And the pretty guy?” She tilted her head after Jesse. “The human.”
The questions surprised me, though they shouldn’t have. From Katia’s perspective, I was blundering around the Old World with an alarming degree of power and influence, yet I obviously wasn’t the one in charge. “I don’t have a title, not really,” I told her. “But my job is to make sure the Old World stays secret. And Jesse helps me sometimes. You know that we share power in LA, right?” She nodded, though she had the same polite-but-dubious expression I wear when someone says raw vegan diets are delicious. “Well, when someone messes up, and we risk exposure, I come in and clean it up. I would try to stop Oskar just for Molly’s sake, but it actually does fall within my job description. At least now that we know he wants to pull apart our whole way of life.”
She considered this. “You are like . . . a custodian,” she said at last. “Part janitor, part protector.”
I grinned at that. “I’ve been called worse.”
We talked a little longer, mostly her asking me questions about Lex and me doing my best to answer them tactfully. I did ask Katia a few things about boundary magic. We didn’t have any boundary witches in Los Angeles, though I had cleaned up more than one scene where some trades witches had decided to dick around with death magic. It usually involved at least one dead trades witch.
Katia told me she was okay at pressing weaker vampires—someone like Dashiell would be well beyond her abilities—but she could not, she said, do the big scary move that boundary witches were best known for: sucking the life out of humans and using their life force to do trades magic. “If I had the right supplies, performed the right rituals, I could take the life of chickens or goats,” she said gravely. “I have done this a few times, when Oskar demanded it. I do not like to do it, though. It feels . . . too good. I have never done hard drugs, but I imagine it’s like that.”
I felt her magic flex just a tiny bit within my radius, but I’d been around witches enough to know she wasn’t trying to perform an active spell. It was more like she was remembering one, the way your hand automatically rises to your ear when you talk about being on the phone.
When her voice started to drift again, I shut up, letting her get some rest. The woman had been dead only two hours earlier; she deserved some sleep.
After nearly half an hour, Jesse came back into the room. He looked . . . well, nearly as tired as Katia. But it was the bone-deep, my-soul-hurts kind of tired. “We’re on,” he said. “I know where the girls are.”
Chapter 38
When you live in Los Angeles, you eventually acclimate to living alongside and within the film industry. In LA, big movie theater complexes often host way-in-advance screenings, complete with security and celebrities. Actors are everywhere, and screenwriters fill every coffee shop and diner in the county. It’s perfectly ordinary to have streets or businesses closed for filming, and now and then you’ll see cryptic signs with vague code names directing crew members to shoots.
This is our thing, and to residents it becomes part of the landscape, like the skyways that connect buildings in downtown Minneapolis so residents don’t have to go outside in subfreezing temperatures, or the gas stations overflowing with Disney merchandise in Orlando. But every now and then, something reminds me that I live in a movie industry town, and it suddenly seems surreal all over again.
Case in point? Forty-five minutes away from where we sat, there was a McDonald’s that didn’t serve food. Did not, in fact, serve anything at all.
“So it looks like a fast-food restaurant, but it exists just for filming?” I said skeptically.
“No, it looks like a McDonald’s, complete with the big golden arches out front,” Jesse corrected. “Everything’s just like a regular restaurant, but it sits empty until the McDonald’s corporation needs to film new commercials. It can, however, be rented out to other companies for filming. Which is what Oskar did.”
“That is just so LA,” I said, shaking my
head. “And your new CI buddy told you this?”
He nodded. “That’s where they drove Molly. Oskar has no reason to suspect we’ve got an informant within the MC, so he also has no reason not to trust them. I’m guessing he’s pressing their leader, Lee, into giving these orders, and the rest of the gang follows them.” Jesse seemed troubled. “My guy wasn’t actually there, but he called one of his friends and got the location out of him.”
Ah. I didn’t know how much Jesse had to blackmail or bully the guy to make him do that, but I’d seen enough movies to know that if we went in there with guns—or knives, in my case—blazing, and the rest of the MC figured out how we found them, the CI wouldn’t have much of a life expectancy. We needed to do everything we could to prevent that.
“What a weird fucking place to have your hideout,” I said.
Jesse shrugged. “I checked a map on my phone. It’s a good location for vampires—an office park where most businesses are only open nine to five. I’m guessing the security is pretty good, and if they need to film at night sometimes, there must be pretty high-quality blackout shades.”
I checked my watch. It was a little after three in the morning. “If he’s as smart as everyone says he is, he’s going to kill Molly at dawn,” I guessed. “Or kill her with the dawn. That’s a little less than four hours from now. How many of the MC guys stayed at Mock-Donald’s?”
That got a little smile out of him. “Four. Plus Oskar, and God knows who else.”
I laid a hand gently on Katia’s shoulder. “Katia! Can you wake up for just a minute?”
Her eyes opened again. “Is Lex here?” she croaked.
“Not yet. But there’s something we really need to know. Are you with me?”
She didn’t exactly sit up, but she shifted a little on the cot. “Yes. What is the question?”
“We know that Frederic was working with you guys. Is there anyone else in the LA Old World who works for Oskar?”
Midnight Curse (Disrupted Magic Book 1) Page 24