I just looked at him, my arms crossed over my chest. Abruptly, he stood and picked the rest of his clothes up off the floor. He started yanking them on as he spoke. “Besides, now that you’ve gotten the skinners’ attention, what do you think is going to happen to Juliet? And Bethany, and poor pregnant Tara? Not to mention the local witch, Laurel Nash.”
I jerked back, stunned.
He knew. He’d known all along about my sister-in-law and her friends. I scooted to the far side of the bed, but that wasn’t far enough away from him. I pushed off the bed, yanking the sheet around me, and stalked down to the seating area, trying to rein in my temper. I looked out the window and took a few deep breaths. Behind me, I could hear him putting on the rest of his clothes. Then the movements stopped.
“Scarlett . . .”
I spun around. “First,” I said coldly, “it’s TAR-uh, like the sticky stuff in parking lots. Second, how the fuck did you know about them?”
Jameson kept his voice perfectly calm, but he didn’t exactly look repentant. “I told you, this is my town now. I’ve been here long enough to know people at all the casinos.” He held up two fingers. “It took me two calls to the Venetian staff to figure out who you were here with, and why. Imagine how fast the skinners could find them. What were you thinking, coming here with civilians?”
I stared at him for a long moment. “You’ve been checking up on me?” He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. “For who? Yourself, or the Holmwoods?”
“They still don’t know you’re here,” he said, his voice flat. “I’ve made sure of it.”
“Oh, so you just . . . what? Didn’t trust me?”
“It’s been years, Scarlett,” he answered. He had to sit on the bed to put his sneakers on. “You said it, too: we’ve both changed.”
I couldn’t help feeling betrayed. Had I been wrong to trust him? Had I been stupid to sleep with him? Probably and probably. I hugged my arms against my body. “Yeah, well, I think one of us changed more than the other.”
“Don’t be a child, Scarlett,” he snapped, tying his shoes like he was hoping to hurt them. “Go home. Back to your nice little life. This is my problem, and there’s no reason to get your humans caught up in it.”
Anger and hurt boiled up in me, but I didn’t trust those feelings, either. Was he pushing me away because he thought it would keep me safe, or did he actually think I was useless?”
Either way, the rational part of my brain knew that he was right: I’d taken a hell of a risk bringing Juliet and her friends here, especially after I’d agreed to take up Wyatt’s cause.
“Okay, you win,” I said flatly. “I’ll shut down the bachelorette party. Today, now.”
His shoulders sagged with relief. “Thank you,” he said, looking surprisingly not smug.
I turned back to the window. After a few seconds, I heard the hotel room door open and shut.
Chapter 25
I sat on the couch for a long time after Jameson left, trying not to look at the clock. I was probably supposed to be somewhere right then, celebrating life and love with the rest of Juliet’s friends. I knew my cell phone had buzzed a couple of times, probably Juliet wanting to know how my “meeting” had gone, or just to check up on me. She was really nice, my sister-in-law. A hell of a lot nicer than me.
Nice people probably don’t sit around in bedsheets ignoring everyone while they stare at dark television screens. But I stayed that way for a long time, weighing my shitty options.
I’d made a promise to Wyatt. I wanted the money for Logan, but I also wanted the vampire to get the answers he needed. No one else was going to help him—not Silvio, not the Holmwoods. If they cared about the skinners, it was only in terms of protecting themselves. No one was looking out for the vampires of Las Vegas. And no matter what Jameson said, they weren’t monsters, at least not all of them.
But Jameson had been right about one thing. It was time to stop risking Juliet and her friends. I hadn’t lied when I’d told him I would shut down the bachelorette party. When I couldn’t put it off any longer, I heaved a sigh and went to get my phone.
Molly answered on the first ring. “Wasssup,” she drawled. “Remember those commercials? Weren’t they annoying?”
“Molls, what time will you be back in LA tonight?”
She must have picked up on the urgency in my voice, because she dropped the goofy tone immediately. “Actually, I’m just passing Panorama City. I decided to drive as far as Bakersfield last night so I’d have time to hang out with Corry. What’s wrong?”
The sun had only set forty-five minutes ago, and Bakersfield to Panorama City was usually an hour and a half, which tells you everything you need to know about Molly’s driving habits. “I need a favor,” I said. “A terrible, terrible favor.”
“Name it,” she said promptly, her voice immediately losing its mirth. “It’s yours.”
I felt sick with self-loathing, but I pushed past it. “Remember that time you pressed Jack for me?” I began.
When I’d hung up with Molly, I called Wyatt’s cell phone. “Do you have access to Ellen’s cell phone records?” I asked, and explained Jesse’s theory about the missing vampires being invited to a secret event.
“We use prepaid cells,” he said. “I think you can still look up the call history online, but I’ve never tried it. Give me a few minutes to figure it out and I’ll call you back.”
“Fine.”
I took a long, hot shower, washing the smell of Jameson off me. I tried not to think too much about our last conversation. Then I got dressed in what I usually think of as my work clothes: jeans, tee shirt, boots. I’d already gotten Cliff’s blood off the soles, thanks to way too much practice. I was still toweling my hair when the phone rang. It was Dashiell.
“I’ve heard from the cardinal vampires in several cities that the Holmwoods have visited,” he began. “The results were mixed. A handful of vampires did go missing in Barcelona, Prague, and Rome, around the same time the Holmwoods appeared, but I’m not sure one could prove a connection. This was four or five vampires, not thirty. And we do move around.”
I slumped on the bed. No leads there. “Okay, thank you.”
“You are being careful, aren’t you, Scarlett?” he asked.
You mean like having sex with untrustworthy men? “Sure I am.”
A few minutes later, Juliet called. Cringing, I took a deep breath and answered the phone. I deserved this.
“Scarlett?” I could already hear the tears in her voice. “Jack just called. He’s been in a car accident.”
“Oh no!” I said, trying to sound appropriately shocked. “Is he okay? Were the kids in the car?”
“No, they were at after-school stuff, but Jack hit his head, they think, because he can’t remember anything and the car is totaled and I’ve got to get back there,” she said, sobbing. “Can I borrow Cliff’s SUV? I don’t have his number . . .”
“He’ll drive you,” I said promptly. “Bethany and Tara should go, too.”
“No, you don’t have to stop the party . . .”
“Jules, of course we do. We can’t have a bachelorette party without the bachelorette.”
“What about you? Aren’t you coming?”
“If you need me, or if Jack’s in serious danger, of course I’ll come,” I said, crossing my fingers that she wouldn’t call the bluff. “But it’ll be hard to pack us all into Cliff’s car, and I’m supposed to sign the contracts for Dashiell tomorrow morning. I’ll try to move them to tonight, and get the first flight out tomorrow. If that doesn’t work, I’ll rent a car. Is that okay?”
“Yeah, of course,” she sniffed. Lucky for me, she was too upset to wonder why anyone would sign business contracts on a Sunday morning. We talked for a few more minutes about logistics, and I hung up hating myself. If I’d had more time, I would have tried to come up with a gentler way to get Juliet to rush back to LA, but with short notice I had few options.
Molly hadn’t really hurt Ja
ck, I knew, but he was in for a night of tests at the hospital, and Juliet was facing hours of worry—not to mention the hassle of dealing with a wrecked (but insured) car. And all of that was my fault. I had played with their lives to get us here, and now I was playing with them even more to dig my way out of it. As the weight of that washed over me, I wanted to curl up and hide from the shame.
But I couldn’t. Dashiell had promised this was the last time we would drag my family into the Old World messes. It was a small consolation, but it was all I had. And one thing was for sure: I was not going to put my family through all this and not get a resolution. One way or another, I would finish this.
I was just gathering my things to leave when there was a knock at my door. I extended my radius and felt a single vampire, not particularly strong. I went to the peephole and saw Wyatt, in full cowboy getup, holding a handful of papers.
I opened the door. “Hi. You could have just called.”
“Yeah, I could have,” he said easily. “But then you might have made a move without me.”
Okay, that did sound like something I’d do. I stepped aside so he could come in. “Does that mean you found something?”
Wyatt swept past me, the tails of his long coat brushing against my shins. “I’m not sure. Hoping you can help.”
He raised an eyebrow at the unmade bed, which looked . . . well, it looked like I’d recently had sex with someone, but Wyatt didn’t comment. He went straight past it to the sitting area and began spreading the three pages across the coffee table. They were lists of phone numbers, and Wyatt had highlighted many of the lines in yellow and a few in light blue. “Yellow are the numbers I know,” he explained. “Me, Laurel, a couple of her family members, a few friends in other cities that we keep in touch with.” He tapped a line of blue numbers. “The blue ones are numbers I was able to look up right quick, and they’re all easily explained. A hair salon, the dry cleaners, that kind of thing.”
“Okay.” I turned the last page toward me. It had a lot of yellow lines and a couple of blue ones. The last three numbers had no highlights.
Seeing my gaze, Wyatt pointed to the bottom number, an outgoing call. “This is an LA area code. Could that be your friend Margaret?”
“We weren’t really friends,” I said, “but yeah, I think so. I know that the last call Margaret received was from Ellen’s number.”
“Which would make sense, if your theory is that Ellen invited Margaret somewhere with her. So the second to the last number—”
Ignoring him, I picked up the page and studied the number right above Margaret’s. And I froze.
“I don’t know the area code,” Wyatt was saying. “Six-four-six? Where is that?”
“Manhattan,” I heard my voice say. “Midtown.”
Wyatt went on speaking to me, but suddenly it was like I was underwater. With shaking fingers, I grabbed my own phone and compared the phone number on the paper to the one Jameson had used to call me.
They were the same.
“No,” I said out loud. “No, it can’t be.” But the pieces were slamming into place whether I wanted them to or not. Jameson’s reluctance to talk to me about the situation. His insistence that I stay out of this mess and leave town.
Jameson, who I had trusted, who I had slept with, was working for the skinners.
Chapter 26
They’re all monsters. That’s what he had said.
When I reviewed every conversation we’d had in the last two days, I could see that he’d been putting me off the whole time, pushing me away from the conflict. He’d told me to go home, that there was nothing I could do, but I wouldn’t listen. God, you’re still just as stubborn, aren’t you?
So he’d saved a trump card: Juliet and the others. He’d played on my guilt to get me away from all of this. I had thought he was protecting me. And maybe he was, a little, but really he was making sure I couldn’t stop him.
“I’m such a fool,” I whispered. I had slept with him. I was now every girl in every crime drama ever.
“Scarlett!” Wyatt was shaking my shoulder now, bringing me back to myself. “What is it?” he demanded. “What did you just figure out?”
I swallowed hard. “I think my friend Jameson may be working for the skinners. He’s a null, too.”
“Jameson?” he repeated. “Black guy? Really tall?”
I nodded. Wyatt dropped down onto the chair nearest me. “Hell, I met him,” Wyatt said in a daze. “Ellen was helping him put together a list of local vampires so they could promote the show . . .”
His voice trailed off as we both realized the implications. That was how the skinners had found local vampires to kill. And if Ellen had unwittingly helped Jameson find vampires to destroy, it made sense that she’d end up on his list, too. “Did she trust him?” I asked quietly. “That is, if Jameson called Ellen and invited her to a party or meeting or something, would she have gone?”
Before he could respond, the room filled with the sound of an old-fashioned piano riff. Wyatt’s cell phone. He reddened slightly, which was possible because he was still within my radius, and dug it out of the pocket of his duster. “One second,” he said, frowning down at the screen. He turned away to answer it, pacing back toward the hotel room door.
As for me, I just sat there with my arms and legs collapsed around me, like a rag doll set on a shelf. In my entire life, I had never wanted to be wrong about anything as much as I wanted to be wrong about Jameson, but too many things fit: his hatred of vampires, born out of years of abuse by Malcolm, the way he’d insisted on keeping me separate from Arthur and Lucy, his evasiveness, his demands that I leave Las Vegas.
It all made sense . . . except for one thing. I had personally witnessed those skinners attack him, and that hadn’t been faked. Those bullets were real.
Okay, I was calling it. This was officially above my pay grade.
Wyatt was still on the phone, so I picked up my own mobile and called Dashiell.
“Hello, Scarlett,” came his smooth voice over the line. “I was just about to call you. What—”
“I need you to listen,” I interrupted. That was a little disrespectful even for me, but this was too important. I explained my suspicion as quickly as I could, the words tumbling out of my mouth with an edge of hysteria attached. Dashiell, to his credit, listened quietly as I laid out my case against Jameson. It all seemed pretty circumstantial when I said it out loud, but the phone number thing was damning. “But there was a group of skinners who came after us, for real, so now I’m confused,” I added. “Could there be two groups of skinners in town?”
“Yes and no,” Dashiell replied heavily. “As I said, I was going to call you. I heard from another friend in Europe a few minutes ago, someone I called last night to ask about the Holmwoods. After some cajoling, he mentioned a very strange rumor. One or two people have suggested that Arthur and Lucy are killing vampires.”
I didn’t get it. “Like, in duels? Is that still a thing?”
“No, Scarlett,” he said patiently. “I’m saying that Arthur and Lucy Holmwood are the skinners you’ve been seeking.”
It took another heartbeat, and then the penny dropped. “Holy fucking shit of shits,” I blurted.
“Indeed,” Dashiell said dryly.
On the other side of the room, Wyatt had finished his phone call and was pacing back toward me. He gave me a puzzled, slightly alarmed look. I held up a finger, turning away from him.
“I believe they may be hunting their own kind,” Dashiell continued. “There’s no proof, of course, but if people were starting to talk, that could explain why Arthur and Lucy decided to leave Europe and come to America, after all this time.”
For a moment, I was too stunned to speak. All along, I had been making assessments based on my understanding of what vampires do and do not do, and they definitely don’t kill each other, except maybe in a serious power struggle. It draws too much attention.
But I had made a mistake. I should never have expecte
d the Holmwoods to think like normal vampires—after all, they’d spent decades proving they were anything but.
“They hate their own kind,” I whispered. “They want to wipe out vampires, and they’re using Jameson to do it.”
What I really wanted in that moment was for Dashiell to laugh at me. I wanted him to come up with an easy explanation for all this that would make me feel like an idiot. I wanted him to be snide and condescending. I wanted to feel guilty for ever suspecting Jameson in the first place.
But life doesn’t really work like that, not when you want it to. Instead, what Dashiell said was, “I’m sorry, Scarlett, but I think you’re correct. It’s the only way this whole mess makes sense.”
Fuck.
I collapsed onto the couch, unable to speak. I kept the phone pressed to my ear, but I dropped my head into my free hand, squeezing my eyes shut so I didn’t have to look at Wyatt, or anything else. Dashiell, to his credit, was silent, giving me the moment I needed.
If I started looking at the situation knowing that the Holmwoods wanted to kill as many vampires as possible, so many things suddenly made sense. In Europe, they had traveled from town to town, killing a few vampires here and there, where they were sure they wouldn’t blow their cover. Vampires were notoriously hard to kill, after all, and if the Holmwoods were only in town for a few days, a handful was probably the best they could do.
Eventually, however, that would get frustrating. They would want to go bigger. Like setting up shop in a touristy city and getting the vampires to come to them. By putting on a big splashy show, the Holmwoods made sure that vampires from all over North America would make the pilgrimage to Vegas. And if they never came home again, well, who would be the wiser? Any cardinal vampires who noticed would assume that those vampires had just decided to stay in Vegas. This town was, after all, vampire heaven.
It was a great way for the Holmwoods to take out lots of vampires, but one thing could make it even better: having a null to help you do the dirty work. A null could reduce the vampire victims to human again, making them very easy to kill.
Blood Gamble (Disrupted Magic Book 2) Page 17