He scoffed. “I just need them dead. I don’t need to brag about it beforehand like it’s some damn movie.”
“How are we going to be able to see them?” Laurel asked, looking at the map. “You said this place is out in the middle of nowhere, right?”
We all looked at Wyatt. “Are there electric lights?” Cliff asked.
“I don’t know. But I would assume so, if they’ve got a null running around.”
That made sense. If Jameson was making vampires intermittently human again, they would need to be able to see. “Besides,” Wyatt added, “I know the Holmwoods’ voices well enough. I’ll be able to recognize them. The only thing I’m not sure about,” he went on, “is the distance between the path and the ruins. We need to keep you far enough away that you won’t affect anyone walking by on the path, but stay close enough to see and hear them as they’re going by.”
Crossing my arms over my chest, I gave him a look and suppressed my radius. Wyatt was about three feet away from me in the big SUV, but I managed to drop it down to about two feet.
As he turned back into a vampire, his eyes widened, and—ironically—a flush of life seemed to overtake him, making him somehow more attractive and dangerous-looking. No, I can’t really explain how this works. Maybe it’s a pheromone thing, or maybe part of their magic creates some kind of physical illusion, like a filter in Photoshop. The bottom line is that vampires be hot.
“Damn, woman,” he marveled, shaking his head. “I’ve only met you and that Jameson fella, but I didn’t know you all could do that. Can you hold it?”
“For a little while, but it makes it hard to concentrate,” I told him. “I don’t think I could suppress it while I fight, for example, or while holding a really intense conversation. But if we’re sitting and waiting, yeah, I can keep it small for maybe a couple of hours. And I can expand it, too.”
I needed to conserve energy, so I released my radius, letting it encompass Wyatt again. He stiffened for a second, but his body hadn’t had enough time to forget how to breathe, so he adjusted quickly. “All right, that could be useful. How far can you go?”
“Um . . . I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Expanding is a hell of a lot easier than suppressing—it’s just a matter of willing it bigger, and keeping a little bit of my attention there.”
“Could you cover the whole ranch?”
I shrugged. “I really don’t know. If I get upset enough, it’ll expand on its own. I won’t be able to control it. Then it gets really big.”
“Huh.”
I looked at Laurel. “Did you get what you needed from the crystal store?”
Laurel nodded. “And I followed your friend’s instructions for cleansing them; that’s why I was late. Are you sure this is going to work?”
“No,” I said honestly. “But if Wyatt and I can pull this off, you won’t even need to get out of the car. You guys are plan B.”
She nodded, slowly pushing out a breath through her mouth in a whoosh sound, reminding me of the LA women I know who’ve done serious Pilates. Then she snapped her fingers. “Oh, before I forget.” She reached into a console between the seats and pulled out two small black handsets with belt clips on them. Walkie-talkies. “We use these when we go camping,” she explained, handing one to me. It was the size of a fist, but nicely sturdy. I could feel a few tiny nicks and scratches. I hooked it onto the side of my pants. “We’ve tested the range at like fifteen miles,” Laurel added.
“Just make sure you stay outside,” Cliff put in. “Or bring them outside, if you have to. There’s not a lot we can do to help if you’re deep in the building and we can’t see you.”
I nodded and checked my watch. If we were going to get in position before the Holmwoods finished their show, it was time to leave. As the de facto team leader—what a horrible thought—I tried to think of something to say. We were going into this thing to right a wrong, save Jameson, and get Wyatt his revenge. But that didn’t make it not scary. Instead, I just glanced at Wyatt, who looked intense and focused despite his overlarge cowboy mustache. “Let’s go.”
“Good luck, you guys,” Laurel said, making eye contact with Wyatt.
“Oh, almost forgot.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a stack of bills wrapped with rubber bands. I handed it to Cliff. “Just in case,” I told him.
Laurel’s eyes widened, but she didn’t say anything. Cliff just nodded and jammed the money into his pants pocket. Wyatt and I had locked the rest of the hundred thousand in the safe back at the Venetian. There was no way I was bringing it along tonight.
“We’ll wait to hear from you,” Cliff promised me.
I grinned at him. “On my signal, unleash hell.”
Chapter 30
Wyatt and I got back into the pickup, and he drove us out of the city. He was quiet, thinking his own thoughts about this mission. As for me, I knew I should be nervous, or at least hyper-focused. Instead, my thoughts kept snapping back to this one memory from New York, like a song stuck in my head.
It had been one of the nights when Jameson and I sat up watching action movies from the nineties, which we both had a serious fondness for. Jameson had just had his third beer, and I was enjoying a full-on buzz. I’d only had a couple of hard ciders, but I wasn’t used to being able to drink—in LA I was on call most of the time, and you have to drive everywhere—so my tolerance level was shit. We were watching Last Action Hero and giggling like little kids at a slumber party.
“You know Danny went back to school on Monday and immediately got a girlfriend,” Jameson declared, pointing at the twelve-year-old protagonist.
“What? No way. He’s still just a movie nerd. And the real world is harsh, remember.”
“Nuh-uh. The kid is confident now. Confidence is half the battle in middle school. No, like, two-thirds of the battle.”
“I thought knowing was half the battle.”
He sighed, shaking his head. “I’m just not sure you understand fractions, Scarlett.”
I tossed a throw pillow at him, which he easily dodged. He finished his beer, set the empty on the coffee table, and gave me a speculative look. “What were you like in middle school, Lady Letts? Did you know what you were by then?”
“No, I didn’t find out ’til I was almost nineteen.”
“Ah. The age of innocence,” he said with a wicked grin. At the time, Jameson was nineteen, and far from innocent. “So who were you back in middle school?”
I tried to make my expression enigmatic, but probably failed. “Guess.”
“Hmm.” He paused the movie and turned his whole body toward me, making a show of eyeing me up and down. “Well, let’s see. I can’t picture you as a cheerleader”—I snorted—“and God knows you’re too clumsy for sports.”
“Hey,” I protested. He just looked at me for a second, and I had to duck my head, conceding. “Okay, that’s fair.”
“You are way too pretty to sit at the losers’ table, though, so I’m gonna go with . . . band geek,” he decided. “That, or goth chick. I could see you in black lipstick and existential angst.”
I laughed. “Nope, neither.”
“What, then?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t belong to any particular group, I guess. I always had a few friends for sleepovers or going to the mall or whatever, but I didn’t have a . . .” I waved my hand, trying to find the right word through my alcohol-induced blanket of fog.
“A tribe?” Jameson offered with a little smile. “That’s what white people call it now, right? You never found your tribe?”
“I guess not. I always had people around, but I always felt alone, if that makes any sense. Maybe all nulls are like that, or maybe I was just a freak, I don’t know.” Suddenly my buzz seemed to be wearing off, and I was anxious to change the subject. “What about you? Who were you, before you were a null?”
“You gonna guess?”
“Oh, right.” I made a point of looking him up and down. Back then he was lean and tall and quick-looking
. “Jock,” I decided. “I’m gonna say . . . basketball.”
“Yeah, because you are racist as shit.”
I laughed. “Is that a no?”
His smile faded, and his eyes went distant. “I . . . honestly, I’m not sure I can remember who I was before Malcolm found me. I liked comic books and McDonald’s, I remember that much.” He leaned back against the couch, and for just a second, his eyes scared me. No one should look that old. Certainly not at nineteen. “That kid seems like a stranger now. More like a dream than an actual person.”
The movie was still paused, waiting for us to resume programming, but the atmosphere in the room had shifted. Our eyes met, and for just a second there was an opening, a moment where I could have said . . . something. Maybe I could have made him feel less trapped. Or at least less alone. Jameson never once said a bad word about Malcolm, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew that Malcolm was controlling him, that he made his pet null do terrible things. Sometimes Jameson would send me into the city to do touristy stuff, and when I returned to the apartment his knuckles would be skinned and bloody.
“Jameson . . .” I began.
He just looked at me, expectant and maybe even a little hopeful. He wanted to talk, I could see that.
But I was still piecing myself back together after learning the truth about Olivia: that she had killed my parents, that she wasn’t as out of my life as I had thought. I was sleeping with Eli, and half in love with Jesse, and so emotionally overextended that I didn’t have it in me to reach out to the one person I knew was maybe more broken than I was.
I saw that Jameson needed help, but I knew damned well that I was in no position to give it. “Uh, I’m getting kind of tired. Bedtime?”
The next day, we both pretended that the previous night’s conversation had never happened. I’d told myself that Jameson was a grown-up, that I couldn’t save everyone. And I’d gone back to LA to deal with my own shit.
Would things have turned out differently if I had said something else in that moment? Or was that just naive? Dashiell wasn’t wrong—Jameson had made his own choices, but it seemed so unfair that he’d had to pick between a shitty choice and a shittier one. It made me realize how lucky I was, despite Olivia, to have found myself in the one city on the continent where everyone in the Old World wanted peace more than they wanted power.
“Miss Scarlett,” Wyatt said, breaking the long silence. I jerked upright, turning to look at him. His expression was troubled and serious beneath the cowboy hat. “I need to know that you’re going to hold up your end of our bargain.”
I blinked. “You’re expecting me to have a big ethical panic over killing Arthur and Lucy? Man, you’ve got the wrong girl.” If the only way to save Jameson was to see two murderous vampires dead, I could handle it. Besides, they wouldn’t be the first deaths on my hands. I couldn’t afford to get sentimental about it.
“That’s not what I meant,” Wyatt said. “I want to make sure you have your priorities straight, that’s all. Killing the Holmwoods needs to come before saving your friend.”
“Uh, my hope is that those two things pretty much go hand in hand.”
“Yeah, but has it occurred to you that Jameson might not choose you over them?” he contended. “He might want to kill as many of us as possible, just like the Holmwoods.”
“Then I’ll change his mind,” I said stubbornly.
“And what if he puts himself between us and the Holmwoods?” Wyatt argued. “What will you do then?”
I hated to admit it, but he had a point there. “It’s not going to come to that,” I insisted, trying to believe it.
“And if it does?”
“Then I’ll try to wound Jameson so you can get to the Holmwoods. Or lure him out of the way. Something. We can make this work.”
There was a long moment of silence, and then Wyatt said cautiously, “If you don’t mind me asking, why are you so hell-bent on saving him, after . . . what he’s done?”
There was a sort of implicit understanding there that I had slept with Jameson, but Wyatt was too much of a gentleman to mention it. Maybe I should have been embarrassed, but I just didn’t have it in me.
I thought about not answering the question, but like it or not, Wyatt and I were in this together. We were going into a dangerous situation, and he deserved to know the truth. “Because he’s me,” I said quietly. “If a few things in my life had gone a little differently . . . he’s me.”
There wasn’t a lot more to say after that.
We were out in the desert, on dirt roads that stretched for miles and miles of uninterrupted nothingness. Finally, Wyatt pulled the truck off the road, seemingly at random. He killed the headlights and pointed forward. “The station is about a half mile up that road,” he explained. “We can’t park too close without giving ourselves away, and even driving past might look suspicious. We should walk from here.”
I tucked the Glock in its holster into my jeans and checked my knife belt, then waited as Wyatt strapped on five different guns: one on his ankle, two in a belt holster, and a shotgun and a rifle on straps that crisscrossed his chest. Then he filled the pockets of his coat with ammunition, and handed me several spare magazines for the Glock, which I managed to tuck into my knife belt. It seemed kind of like overkill to me, but at the same time, it was kind of comforting.
Wyatt led me about fifty yards from the road, and we began to walk parallel to the road, sticking to the desert. He stayed twenty feet ahead of me so he could see better, but the area was surprisingly well-lit, thanks to the three-quarter moon. “What about snakes?” I said to him as we started out. I didn’t need to raise my voice; he had enhanced hearing as a vampire. “I’m not a huge fan of death by cottonmouth.”
“Cottonmouths live in Florida and Texas,” he called over his shoulder. “Around here we have sidewinders and rattlesnakes.”
“That wasn’t exactly reassuring.” I didn’t have a particular phobia about snakes, but I am naturally opposed to anything that snaps toward me real fast with fangs. Thank God I was immune to vampires.
He laughed. “I should hear them first, and if one does attack, the venom wouldn’t kill me. You just walk where I walk.”
After that, I stayed quiet, so I wouldn’t distract him, and made an enormous effort to follow his path as closely as possible. A couple of times he paused and suddenly veered to one side, circling an area, and I was careful to do the same. He might have been messing with me, but I’d rather be the butt of a joke than snake food.
After about fifteen minutes of walking, I could make out a brightly lit building just off the road. Wyatt motioned for me to catch up with him. “That’s the boardinghouse,” he murmured. I didn’t know much about architecture, but it actually sort of reminded me of those big plantation buildings you see in the Deep South: white, rectangular, with a big second-story porch held up by Grecian columns. The lights were on inside and out, and as we got closer, I could see a few shadows moving around in front of the windows. It wasn’t the Holmwoods, I was certain: it was only nine thirty, and the second Demeter show was just starting, an hour away from us. But it would make sense for the Holmwoods to send ahead a couple of guards and maybe a few humans to help with setup and provide snacks. Literally.
At this distance, there was no way to know if I was looking at humans or vampires, but I wondered idly if the Holmwoods were also planning to offer the vampires actual food and drink, which they could consume thanks to Jameson. That would be just the kind of novel gesture that would build trust. Get a bite to eat, then venture back behind the building for a nice moonlit walk and bang! Twice-dead vampires.
We were approaching from the side, but the plan was to avoid the boardinghouse entirely for now, taking up positions in the ruins behind it. I clamped down on my radius and let Wyatt get ahead of me again, so he could use his vampire senses to guide us. He paused, listening hard for a moment, and then eased us around the side of the building, going slow and leaving lots of space between us and the
brightly lit windows.
For one surreal moment it felt just like I was a kid playing Ghost in the Graveyard again, only this time the threat wasn’t just being caught by one of my brother’s friends and having to go wait on the front porch with the other losers. This time we could die. Well, Wyatt could die again, I guess.
We crept all the way around behind the boardinghouse, where there was pretty decent lighting coming from a few miniature lampposts. At an angle to the building, I finally spotted the remains of a tiny structure—maybe a smokehouse or outhouse. Something ending in -house. At any rate, Wyatt had been right: there were now three standing walls.
He led the way to the shadows behind the ruins, where we could keep an eye on the building. We were far enough from the light that no humans would be able to see us if we peeked out. Vampires would be a different story, but with all the lights on in the mansion we’d at least see their silhouettes. I hoped.
I could just barely see Wyatt give me a nod and lean back against the ruins, cradling his rifle. I crouched down next to him, getting comfortable, and then slowly released my radius. No one else was back here, and I didn’t want to tire out too quickly.
Now all we had to do was wait until Lucy and Arthur showed up. Hopefully they would come out back before the party really got going, but if not, we would wait until we saw a bunch of shadows moving and go peer in the windows until we spotted them. Then I could extend my radius and Wyatt could shoot them through the windows with his little arsenal.
It wasn’t the most sophisticated plan, I admit, but one thing I’d learned from my misadventures in LA was that a loose plan was often the best plan.
While we waited, I took occasional quick peeks at the rest of the property. The whole place was a lot bigger than I’d imagined from Wyatt’s little sketch. The back of the boardinghouse opened onto a neat gravel patio area that was probably rented out for receptions—I saw stacks of small tables and chairs leaning against the side of the building. At the far edge of the gravel, there were a few feet of green lawn and then the kind of loose wooden fencing used for cattle. I couldn’t see the ends of the fence—they just stretched out into the darkness—but in the center was a small metal gate, sized to fit a golf cart or ATV. I could just make out the two paths beyond that. One would go left, meeting up with the dirt road, which was probably how they used to get livestock back there when the place was a hunting club. Hopefully Cliff was working the SUV around to that area right now.
Blood Gamble (Disrupted Magic Book 2) Page 20