Trail of Dead (3 page)

“That’s not good enough,” he said heatedly, switching tactics. “What if I just go over your head? I could stop at that bar and ask the werewolves. Hell, I know where Dashiell lives. How about I go knock on his door and see what he says?”

Jesse started to push past me, toward the door, and I skittered sideways, trying to block his path and still avoid the blood. “Stop! Are you
trying
to get dead? You know better than to screw around with these people, Jesse. You don’t want to so much as remind Dashiell that you’re
alive
, much less start poking around in Old World business again. Last time you almost got—” I stopped, but we both knew what I had been about to say:
got yourself killed
. Dashiell had threatened Jesse’s life, and only his good behavior and silence had kept him alive. And it hadn’t hurt that I’d just saved Dashiell’s wife, Beatrice, from being killed for good.

“So help me.” He folded his arms and stared at me defiantly.

My mouth dropped open. “
This
is your plan? You’re going to bet your life that I care enough about you to keep you from getting killed? You’re an idiot.”

He took the last step toward me, the one that put him all the way in my personal space and forced me to turn my head up to see him. His dark eyes searched my own, and I felt heat flutter in my stomach. “I’m still right, though, aren’t I?” he said quietly.

I glared at him. “I hate you.” I took a step back, putting more space between us. “You could have just asked for my help, you know.”

His smile turned sad. “I was hoping that when you saw her room…you’d offer.”

Ah. I’d failed another of his little morality tests. I felt the old gulf between us settle back into place. Jesse still believed in always doing the right thing. I believed in survival on whatever terms necessary. I wouldn’t say that there were no lines I wouldn’t cross, but in Jesse’s eyes I was willing to do a lot of things that were neither legal nor ethical. Like not get involved with this case. Jesse, on the other hand, still practically radiated integrity and goodness. Maybe it was proof that I was just a soft touch, but I
would
get involved for him. And he knew it, the bastard.

“I’ll make a couple of calls,” I allowed.

He smiled at me, for the first time that night. Then the smile faded, and he cleared his throat. “Listen, um…there’s something else I should tell you. I’m sort of seeing someone.”

I blinked. “Oh,” I said stupidly. I don’t know why I was surprised. Jesse was a kind, cheerful, gorgeous man living in Los Angeles. Women had to be throwing themselves at him every day. I tried to keep the sting off my face.

“Yeah, well, it’s only been a couple of dates, but she’s…very sweet. Gentle.”

Ouch. I knew that probably hadn’t been a direct shot at me, but sweet and gentle were definitely two things that I wasn’t. I pushed the thought away. Jesse had paused, looking at me nervously.

“What?” I said finally.

“Are you still going to help me?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, Captain Ego. You’re still my friend. Or whatever.” He had the decency to look embarrassed.

I checked my watch. It was almost 5:00 a.m. in New York, and a half-assed catnap on the plane wasn’t enough to clear my head for thinking. “Okay, look, you have to give me some time to make some inquiries. Can we get together for lunch?”

His eyebrows furrowed with irritation. “Breakfast.”

“Jesse…” I said. Okay, maybe it was more of a whine.

“I’ll pick you up for brunch at ten. Final offer.”

“Ugh. Fine.”

“And I want the body,” he pressed.

I shook my head. “I can’t do that.”

He was fuming. “Knock it off, Scarlett. This isn’t the time to be cute.”

“No, I mean, I literally can’t do it. If—again,
if
—this is really my kind of thing, the body is gone. Like,
gone
gone.” If Eli had cleaned the scene, he would have gone straight to my incinerator guy in Van Nuys. Jesse’s sudden glare was full of ferocity and something like betrayal. “Jesse, it was gone before I got off the plane. Giving me the stink-eye isn’t going to change anything.”

Jesse sighed, and the glare collapsed into something sadder. “Sometimes…I just don’t know how you do what you do.”

I couldn’t help it. I flinched.

We got back on the freeway, and Jesse dropped me off at Molly’s house in West Hollywood less than twenty minutes later. It’s amazing how fast you can get around LA at two in the morning.

Molly, my landlady, roommate, and pseudofriend, is also a vampire. She and I have a deal: she lets me live there practically free, and I help her age. Molly was turned in Victorian Wales at only seventeen, and although she was considered an adult when she was alive, in the twenty-first century she couldn’t legally vote, have sex, drink, etc. When she’s around me, Molly becomes human
again, and ages like any normal person. She also has to use the bathroom, sleep, and eat while she’s near me, which is a constant source of wonder and amusement for her, since apparently toilet habits have changed in the century since she was alive. At this point she looks like a college student, about twenty, and I’ve often wondered what age she wants to get to before she’ll kick me out. I love her house, which is old and cute and filled with carefully chosen things, but I’ve never really thought of it as my home.

“Scarlett!” Molly squealed, and ran up to hug me. Molly is surprisingly touchy-feely for a vampire. I usually beg off the hugging, but it had been a while since we’d seen each other, so I allowed myself to be enveloped. She was wearing supertight jeans that probably cost more than all the clothes in my suitcase, and a T-shirt with a skull and crossbones. Only the skull had a little pink bow where its hair would have been. She also had on one of those fancy phone headsets, the kind where the microphone wraps around to be in front of your mouth.

“Hi,” I said when she’d let go. She paused to straighten the headset around her hair, which had recently been dyed blonde and cut into sort of a long bob. I have no idea why vampires’ hair continues to grow. Chalk it up to magic. “What are you up to?” I asked cautiously.

She pointed toward the laptop that had been plopped on the couch. “Online gaming.”

“Oh, Molly.”

“What?” she said, defensive. “Geeks are in now, remember? And it’s soooo addicting.”

“I remember. Last time you started that stuff I barely spoke to you.”

She shrugged. “You were gone for like a
month
. I got bored.” She crossed her legs. “Besides, they’ve got this new one that’s all about vampires, see?” She pointed to the little screen, where an avatar woman with tight jeans and a black T-shirt was frozen, waiting
for her real-life counterpart. Sure enough, she had comically long fangs pointing out of her mouth and a little wooden stake in one hand.

I rolled my eyes and picked up a stack of my mail that Molly had deposited on a side table. “I wonder what Dashiell would think of this.”

“He’d probably love it. Well, not ‘love,’ exactly, but he would find it amusing. I think he likes when American pop culture makes fun of vampires. It makes it all the less likely for anyone to actually believe in us.”

This was true. I’ve often wondered if there are vampires working in Hollywood, actually setting up the schmaltzy stuff to make the existence of vampires seem all the more ridiculous. I know that in the past they’ve started rumors about themselves—the whole “vampires fear religious objects,” for example, is bullshit designed to help real vampires pass as human—so that kind of modern PR blitz doesn’t seem unlikely.

I flicked through envelopes. “Except for maybe a coalition of teenage girls, who are of course known for their discerning intelligence,” I said absently, then looked up in time to see Molly’s face darken with sudden memory. I winced. Oops. “Sorry, Molls, exhaustion has reunited my foot and my mouth.”

She shrugged again and sat back down on the couch. “Did you learn anything in New York?”

“Yes and no. I learned a couple of new tricks, but not…what I was looking for.”

This was a somewhat dangerous subject. New York had been a fact-finding mission, though Molly didn’t actually know the whole story behind my going. A few months earlier, the first time I’d helped Jesse with an investigation, I had accidentally turned a vampire named Ariadne back into a human—permanently. Until it had happened, I hadn’t even known it was possible, and I was keeping it under wraps: so far only Dashiell knew what I had done.
But the whole thing had made me realize that I didn’t know much about what I was. Hence the trip to meet the only other known null on this continent. Unfortunately, he had never heard of a permanent turn, either.

“What was the other null like? Was he yummy?”

“Molly! He’s nineteen years old!” But I thought of Jameson, and may have blushed just a teensy bit.

“Yeah, yeah.” She gave me a smirk. “You’re twenty-three, Scarlett. It’s not exactly May–December. Maybe May–late June.”

I pretended to stare at the ceiling, whistling innocently, until Molly laughed. “Fine. Be that way. Are you off to bed?”

“I wish. I have to go see Eli to, uh, get my van back,” I said. So smooth, Scarlett. Theoretically, I could just call Eli and ask about the Studio City scene, but I’m extremely paranoid about discussing certain things on the phone. And besides, I really did need to get my van back.

“Tonight? Now?” Her eyes sparkled. Molly didn’t really know how involved Eli and I had become, but she at least knew I had slept with him. “And perhaps get a little something-something else?”
Laid
, she mouthed, with a smug nod. Molly likes to pretend our lives are more
Sex and the City
and less Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
. The book, not the atrocious Keanu Reeves movie.

I rolled my eyes good-naturedly. “It’s not like that. I’m officially back on duty, is all.” I turned to go, but stopped and looked back at Molly, who had unpaused her video game. “Uh, Molls? You didn’t hear anything else from Olivia, did you?”

The last time I’d seen her, Olivia had stalked me outside the hospital, shortly after I’d turned the vampire human again. For whatever reason, the effort to turn Ariadne had almost killed me—and resulted in me temporarily losing my radius. That moment outside the hospital was the perfect opportunity for Olivia to kill me, but she hadn’t done it—which made me believe she wanted to toy with me first. Trying to get to Molly would be just her style.

“Nope,” she said cheerfully, her little vampire avatar leapfrogging over what appeared to be an undead bodybuilder. “Besides, I don’t think she’d mess with me. I’ve got a lot of years on her. And I’m scrappy.”

“Yeah, I know…thanks. You gonna be around later?”

“Nah,” she said, and gave me one of her wicked, not-human smiles, which she managed to pull off even though she was currently human. “I’m probably gonna go check out the after-hours scene.” Ugh. Feeding. Molly had more than enough control to keep from killing her food, and as far as I knew she always left them happy and satisfied, pressing their minds so they would believe whatever story she wanted. I suppose there are worse things in the world, but it still leaves me feeling sort of icky.

I left her there and rounded the corner toward the stairs. “Hey, you put up the tree,” I called back to her. There was a modest four-footer in a little alcove next to the stairs.

“Yup. Did you see the new ornaments?” came Molly’s voice from the living room. I bent closer, squinting past the thick colored bulbs that Molly preferred to see what she’d used for decorations. The long, pointy-looking things weren’t icicles, as I’d originally thought, but tiny wooden stakes dipped in red nail polish to look like blood. In addition to the
Nightmare Before Christmas
line she’d brought out last year, she also had the Hallmark Keepsake versions of Dracula and Edward Cullen. I shook my head at them. “eBay!” she yelled before I could ask.

Rounding the tree, I dragged my suitcase up the stairs to the bedroom I use. Then I dropped the peacoat on the bed, unbound my long, almost-black hair, and tugged a brush through it. I pulled on fresh jeans and a T-shirt and got out my toiletry bag, heading into the bathroom across the hall to brush my teeth. As I raised the toothbrush to my face, though, I paused, caught off guard by my reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror. With my hair down I looked more and more like my mother every year.

The old grief burrowed back into my chest like a hungry tick. My parents had been killed five years earlier, when Olivia had tampered with the brakes on their Jeep. In a dark, twisted way, she’d wanted me for her surrogate daughter, and my mom and dad had been in the way of her dream. They were dead, and it was always going to be my fault. Seeing my mother’s face in the mirror was the least I deserved.

Knock it off, Scarlett.
I dropped the toothbrush in a plastic cup and tugged at the mirror, popping the medicine cabinet open at an angle so I was no longer reflected. Then I took off, rolling my hair into a bun as I walked. I pulled my favorite canvas jacket out of the closet—well, off the floor of the closet—and deposited keys, phone, and wallet in its various pockets. It was a lot warmer than New York, but still only fifty degrees, so I wore a hoodie underneath the jacket. Ready. Well, as ready as I was going to get.

I usually drive an enormous white van, which Molly has affectionately nicknamed “the White Whale.” It’s equipped with all my cleanup stuff—solvents, sponges, ziplock baggies that are big enough to hold body parts, a mop, et cetera—as well as a whole assortment of random stuff that had been handy at crime scenes in the past—a bag of dirt, air freshener, extra light bulbs. There’s even a refrigerated section for when I have to transport dead bodies. While I was gone, however, Eli had been driving the van, so it was missing from my usual spot in the parking garage down the street from Molly’s. Instead I had Eli’s battered blue pickup truck. I retrieved the spare key from one of the tire wells and turned the engine over. Success. I backed out of my spot and turned the truck’s nose south.

On the way, I finally checked my voice mail. Sure enough, there was one from Eli, sounding panicked and rushed. “Scar, it’s me. I had a really tough job tonight and I’m worried about the results. Call me when you get this, okay? Please?”