Blood Gamble (Disrupted Magic Book 2)

by Melissa F. Olson

  If they’d stopped back at the hotel, my suitcase might be around here somewhere, too, but I’d get it later. Or never. Who fucking cared.

  I looked at the money for a long moment. I could feel Jesse practically vibrating with questions, but I just shook my head. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter 40

  Jesse let me borrow his phone so I could call Abby as we walked out to the parking lot where he’d left the White Whale. She crabbed at me for making her work on Sunday, but she promised to messenger over a new phone. In the meantime, she checked on my old phone and managed to retrieve a voice mail that had come in just before sunrise. She sent it right to Jesse’s phone with her technical wizardry, and I plugged one ear so I could listen.

  The message was from Silvio, the head vampire in Las Vegas. Apparently, the Venetian wasn’t Dashiell and Wyatt’s only stop after they were finished at the boardinghouse. They had also made a quick visit to the penthouse suite at the Mandarin Oriental.

  I didn’t know what Dashiell had said or done to Las Vegas’s leading vampire, but in the voice mail Silvio promised that by the time we landed in LA all footage from the hospital shooting would have gone missing, including everything from the waiting room. He ended by apologizing for any trouble I might have found in Las Vegas, and assured me that I was welcome back anytime. He sounded nervous as hell, which made me smile. Scary encounter with Dashiell aside, Silvio’s backers were dead, and now he was going to have to try to hold Las Vegas all by himself. I gave it maybe three months before some enterprising newcomer showed up to take him out. Served him right.

  I couldn’t reach my injury very well, so after we got home Corry helped me Saran Wrap and tape my stitches, then stood next to the shower to help me wash off the blood. To her credit, she didn’t say anything about all the bruises that decorated my body—several of which I didn’t even remember getting. Behind her, Shadow kept ducking in and out of the bathroom to check on us.

  “You’re a lifesaver,” I told Corry.

  She smiled. “Which is a nice change of pace. Usually you’re the one saving me.”

  With her help, I got dressed in some loose-fitting sweatpants and a soft bra that was designed for yoga, but which I saved for when I was lying around the house and couldn’t be bothered with underwire. I put a plain tee shirt on over that and Corry helped me into my favorite jacket, the one Jesse had bought me a few months earlier. He was waiting for us out front, swinging his keys around his finger. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” he said, looking me over. “You still look like shit, no offense, and that bruise on your cheek makes you look like you were pistol-whipped.”

  “That is only because I was, in fact, pistol-whipped.” I had told Jesse most of the story, leaving out my feelings for Jameson. Jesse and I weren’t romantic or anything; I just wasn’t ready to talk about that yet. Then again, Jesse used to be a detective with the LAPD. He probably figured it out by himself.

  “Do you even have a story prepared?” Jesse asked.

  “Nope.” I started shuffling out to the car with Shadow right beside me. “Are you coming or not? Because I could totally drive myself. Concussion be damned, you know?”

  Jesse sighed and followed me to the van.

  It had only been—what, a week?—since I’d been to Jack and Juliet’s place, but it felt like years. Or like a dream. Or maybe I was still kind of in shock. At any rate, when Jesse knocked on the door of their condo, I felt like a total stranger.

  The door popped open. “Scarlett!” Juliet rushed forward to hug me, moving fast enough to make Shadow twitch a little. I squeaked with pain. She pulled back, taking in my bruised face and the butterfly bandages on my forehead. “Oh my God! What happened?”

  “You really shouldn’t drive when you’re upset,” Jesse said with a smile, holding out his hand. “Hi, I’m Jesse Cruz.”

  Juliet automatically took his hand, blinking as she looked up at him. “Oh, okay. Wow. Um, hi, I’m Scarlett’s sister-in-law, Juliet.” She stepped to the side. “Come in, come in. Jack’s on the couch. Jack, honey,” she called. “Your sister’s here, and she looks like she has a better story than you.”

  I shuffled inside, with Jesse’s hand subtly resting on my back for support. Jack was sitting on one half of their L-shaped couch, holding an icepack to his head. A football game was playing on the flatscreen. When he turned his head to look I saw a bruised lump on his forehead that matched mine pretty well. We should take our Christmas card photos early.

  Jack sat up as he saw us walk in, picking up a remote to flick off the television. “Holy shhhh-crap,” he blurted, and I heard Jesse snicker. I glared at him.

  “Sorry, you sound just like your sister. Hi, I’m Scarlett’s friend Jesse,” he said again, stepping forward to shake Jack’s hand, too.

  “I’ve mentioned him before,” I put in.

  “Yeah, but you didn’t say he looked like that,” Juliet said under her breath, so only I could hear her. “The kids are in their rooms,” she added. “I can get them, but . . . um . . .” She looked from Jack to me, totally uncertain. Would I want the kids to see me in this condition? We were a little bit beyond normal social protocol here.

  “Why don’t we sit down?” Jesse suggested. He led me toward the open half of the couch, while Juliet sank into the corresponding armchair.

  Jack watched as I lowered myself gingerly to the cushions. I’d taken a bunch of ibuprofen, but the bruised tailbone still hurt like a bitch. “Scarbo? What happened?”

  “I rented a car to come back this morning,” I said, using the story that Jesse had come up with on the way. He was really coming along nicely in the “make up lies” department. “I was worried about you, and excited, and I guess I drove too fast. I got into an accident getting off the freeway. Hit the steering wheel, and I fell on my tailbone climbing out of the car.”

  I had told Jesse that using a car accident story twice in two days was ridiculous, but he’d argued that that was exactly why it would work. It was too lame to be a lie.

  And he was right. Jack and Juliet made the appropriate exclamations of sympathy, and I assured them that I’d be fine.

  “You know, in like, a month, we’re going to be laughing about this,” my brother said, shaking his head ruefully. “I can’t believe we both had a crash in the same weekend!”

  “Yeah. It’s weird. How are you?” I asked, looking him over. My stomach twisted with guilt. I’d wanted him to walk away without a scratch, but Molly had insisted we needed a bump on the head to sell it. The bump seemed huge, but he didn’t look like he was in terrible pain . . . right?

  He gestured toward his forehead. “It’s nothing, honestly. Barely more than a fender bender. And insurance will take care of everything.” He glanced at his wife. “I’m just sorry there was a mix-up at the nurse’s station and they made my situation sound way worse than it was.”

  Juliet was wringing her hands in her lap. “And then I made it sound terrible to you, and look what happened.” She shook her head. “I should never have left you there to drive yourself back, knowing how upset you were. I just didn’t think—”

  “It’s not your fault, Jules,” I said, carefully leaning over to pat her hand. See, I could do casual touching if I had to. “Besides, I wasn’t just worried about Jack. I was excited. I’ve got some other news.”

  Jack instantly looked between me and Jesse, so I rushed to add, “I, um, won some money at the roulette table. And I want you to use it for Logan’s bills.”

  They started to protest, so I picked up the purse and upended it on the coffee table. The money from Wyatt fell out.

  As Jesse had pointed out in the car, stacks of falling cash was a pretty attention-grabbing visual aid. Both Jack and Juliet went totally silent.

  “It’s about a hundred grand,” I added. “I won ninety, after taxes, and there’s a check on the bottom with what I’ve been saving up from freelance jobs for the last couple of months. I want you to have it for Logan,” I said again, because t
hey both looked so stunned, I wasn’t sure how much was getting through to them. “Are, um, you guys okay?”

  Jesse, for his part, was grinning.

  There were tears, and denials, but eventually I convinced them to keep the damned money. I didn’t say it out loud, but if they’d refused it I would have made Jesse drive me to the nearest homeless shelter and pushed it through the mail slot. I didn’t want to have anything to do with that money, not after losing Jameson. His death hurt, and it was going to hurt for a long time, especially because I couldn’t help but agonize over whether I’d been responsible. Would he still have died if I hadn’t investigated the vampire disappearances? If I hadn’t pushed him so hard? Why hadn’t I understood Lucy’s warning just a little faster? Or driven faster, or tried to find a phone number for Cliff to warn him while I was driving . . . the list of my own bad choices went on and on. At any rate, I couldn’t look at that money without seeing the gaping holes in Jameson’s chest. It was hard enough trying to deal with the sight of Jack’s giant head bump.

  When we finally left the condo, I had to lean on Jesse a little for support. Shadow kept pace with me, but she was constantly glancing up at me with worry. I couldn’t really blame her.

  In the elevator, Jesse eyed me and said, “I know what you’re thinking, you know.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “You think you fucked up, both by going along with the bachelorette party cover story in the first place and by using Jack to end it. You’re blaming yourself for his injury, for Juliet being worried, all that. But they’re fine, Scarlett. Hell, they’re elated. You’ve taken a tremendous weight off their shoulders.”

  I didn’t answer. He was right, of course. But . . . “It could have been so much worse,” I whispered. “If anyone else found out we were connected, Juliet and her friends could have been killed.” Bethany sucked, but Tara was a genuinely nice person. And neither of them deserved to die. “Jameson was killed. I feel like . . .” I shook my head.

  The elevator dinged. We got out, but Jesse stopped in the lobby, turning to face me. “Like what?”

  “Poison.”

  Not so long ago, Jesse had accused me of something similar. I’d pushed that idea away, and our friendship had gotten past it, but . . . “Maybe you were right about me,” I whispered.

  Jesse sighed and wrapped his arms around me. “You’re not poison,” he said into my hair. “You just have a complicated life.”

  I accepted the hug, but inside, I was thinking that I needed to stay away from Jack and Juliet for a while. Maybe forever. They didn’t deserve the risks that I carried.

  It was ironic, of course: not so long ago, I’d missed my brother terribly, and resented him for pushing me away while he was grieving for our parents. Now he was doing everything he could to make room for me in his life, and I was going to put distance between us again. And Juliet, and Riley and Logan, too. At the end of the day, they were too nice, too normal, to be a part of my life.

  How sick was that?

  Chapter 41

  When we returned to the cottage house Jesse decided to stick around, watching a movie with Corry while he set up my new phone for me. I told him I could have done it myself, but he rolled his eyes and shooed me off to my room to sleep.

  By the time I woke up, stiff and hurting, Jesse was gone and night had fallen. Shadow was lying on the bed next to me, and started thumping her tail when she saw that I was awake. I took four Advil from a bottle on my nightstand and lay back down, staring at the ceiling for a long time. Then the doorbell rang.

  Shadow jumped up and sort of pointed at the door, but I ignored it. Molly would be awake by now, if Corry hadn’t woken her early to hang out. My null apprentice wasn’t returning to college until tomorrow. “They probably ordered pizza or something,” I told Shadow. The bargest gave me a hopeful look. “We’ll get you some later, okay?”

  Someone knocked on my door. I pretended not to hear it. “Uh, Scarlett?” came Corry’s voice. “You should probably get out here.”

  She sounded afraid. I sat up, nearly crying out at the pain in my tailbone, and started moving toward the door. “What’s wrong?” I said as I jerked it open.

  She was wearing flannel pajama pants and a Berkeley tee shirt. Her eyes were wide. In a low voice, she said, “Um . . . Dashiell is here.”

  I stared at her dumbly. “Dashiell is here? Like, at the house?”

  The cardinal vampire did leave his mansion to handle his business affairs, but in all the years that I had known him, he’d never come to me. I always went to him. Corry nodded. “What do I do?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” I said, which was honest. I led her back down the hall to the front door. Dashiell was standing just inside the house, talking to Molly in low tones. My roommate had her head bent down, looking submissive and meek. I hated that.

  I would have to take charge, goddammit. I decided to treat Dashiell like any other guest. “Hi, guys,” I said to them, but I looked at my roommate. “Molls, would you and Corry take Shadow outside for a bit?” I asked.

  Molly scrutinized my expression for a moment and then nodded. Shadow gave me a look that said, I know what you’re doing, and I don’t like it. “It’s fine,” I told the bargest. She didn’t look like she believed me, but when Molly and Corry stepped into flip-flops and went out into the yard, Shadow reluctantly followed.

  Dashiell was looking around the cottage, with its funky paint colors and pieces of Hollywood memorabilia that Molly had hung on the walls. He was wearing a gray suit with a narrow black tie, and he looked about as out of place as a time traveler from the future. “Would you like something to drink?” I asked him.

  He shook his head, stifling his amusement. “Thank you, but no. I simply wanted to check on you. Cliff reported that you were injured. We should sit.”

  For once, I didn’t have a snarky comment. I just ushered him into the living room, lowering myself carefully onto the couch. Dashiell perched on the edge of the armchair, his eyes searching me like he was doing inventory. “Are you all right?” he said quietly, his eyes lingering on the bruises on my face and wrist.

  I thought about it for a moment, and decided to be honest. “Not really.” Then I told him everything that had happened after I’d hung up on him, leaving out only the parts about Jameson and me, as I had with Jesse. Dashiell listened quietly until I got to my conversation with Lucy Holmwood, and then he wanted every detail. When I was finished, he leaned back in the chair, looking pensive. “I hadn’t realized just how much damage she did,” he said.

  “Claire or Lucy?”

  Rueful smile. “Well, both, but I was talking about Claire.”

  It was a good opening for the question that had been nagging at me. “Did her plan work?” I asked him. “Did Claire really unite the vampires with Dracula?”

  He sighed. “It was a complicated time. The vampire council had fallen a century earlier, and many of us were getting reckless.” He shook his head. “I know you’ve seen jostling for power, but this was on a different level. Vampires stopped caring how many human bystanders were killed in their machinations. In a way, yes, the book did force us to put aside our differences and create the loose feudal system we have now. But it caused as many problems as it solved, because for the first time, humans organized themselves to hunt us.” He chuckled. “Claire did at least manage to build a few fail-safes into Stoker’s narrative—the garlic, the holy objects, walking around in daylight—but still. There were many vampires who called for her head on a pike, and that’s not a metaphor.”

  I studied him. “You helped her get away, didn’t you?”

  His gaze slashed over at me, and I immediately regretted my words. “I withdraw the question,” I said quickly, but I’d seen in his face that I was right: Dashiell had helped Claire escape from the mess she’d made in Europe.

  I had to wonder if that was the real reason he’d sent me to Las Vegas to look into the Holmwoods’ actions. If he’d suspected that the Holmwo
ods were after Claire, he might have felt responsible, since he’d prevented Lucy and Arthur from getting the revenge they needed. It might have stopped all of this. And that was on top of him killing the last cardinal vampire, and him turning Claire into a vampire to begin with.

  “We live long lives. We cannot know how a single choice we make might ripple out,” Dashiell said quietly. “But, for what it’s worth, Scarlett, I am sorry if any of my actions contributed to Jameson’s death.”

  I stared at him, surprised. I didn’t think Dashiell had ever apologized to me before, unless it was in a sorry for your loss kind of way. He looked away from me, which was another first. “I had a weakness for Claire once,” he went on, his eyes wandering around Molly’s artistic contributions to the living room. “I felt sorry for her because of her circumstances, and I thought I had the power to reshape her life as I saw fit.”

  His meaning wasn’t lost on me. “Jameson wasn’t Claire,” I said, angry.

  “No, he wasn’t. But my point, Scarlett, is that, like it or not, some people are beyond saving.”

  Fuck you was what I really wanted to say. I needed him to get out of there before I actually did. “Was there anything else?” I said sharply.

  He shook his head and stood up. “We’ll have a meeting with Kirsten and Will tomorrow night, to discuss the Las Vegas situation. For now, I can see that you need rest. I’ll see myself out.”

  He took a few steps toward the door, paused, and turned back. “I am glad you’re back,” he said simply. And then he was gone.

  Epilogue

  Life is funny. Wait, scratch that. People say that all the time, but what they really mean is that life is cruel, tragic, and unfair—but not without a sense of humor about it.

  On Monday night, I made the drive up to Pasadena for the follow-up “state of the union” meeting with all three Old World leaders. I did not say anything to Will about seeing Sashi. Part of me longed to, but who was I to interfere in someone else’s personal relationships? Mine were a mess. I hoped that Sashi would find a way to tell Will about his daughter, but it wasn’t my decision. If I didn’t hear anything about it, I promised myself I’d try calling her in a month or two, just to check in.