Trail of Dead (6 page)

“Stop, stop.” He held up his hands. “Cut the crap, Scarlett. Olivia is crazy, and you don’t know what she might think to do to you. I’m staying until the morning.”

Now it was my turn to raise an eyebrow. He actually blushed. “On the couch. Or on the back porch, if you prefer.” He gave me a tentative grin. “If you really want to get rid of me you’ll have to have me arrested, and Cruz already said he’d bail me out.”

“No,” I said stubbornly. “I don’t need help. You’re not a werewolf around me, remember? You’re just a guy. What can you do that I can’t?”

His eyes hardened, but he didn’t rise to the bait. “If it helps, don’t think of it as me protecting you. Think of it as me helping you protect yourself.”

“I can handle it without you,” I said, looking away.

“But you don’t have to.”

I shook my head, unable to think of a thing to say.

“Scarlett,” he said softly, stepping closer. “What happened with us? You’ve barely looked at me since the basement.”

Ah, yes. The basement where a mass murderer had chained me to the floor and felt me up, until Eli had literally dropped into the room to rescue me. That basement. “I’ve looked at you,” I protested feebly. “We talk almost every day.”

“We talk about work stuff. But things aren’t the same between us. Even Caroline has noticed.” Will’s assistant, Caroline, had recently become a friend. She’s also a werewolf, and the pack’s sigma, its weakest member. I think that makes her sensitive to other people’s moods. Or maybe that’s just Caroline. “Is it Cruz? Are you guys together?”

“No.”

“Are you in love with him?”

Oh, jeez. I shied away from the question and the door. “I don’t know how I feel about Jesse.” I swallowed. “Look, if you want to sleep on the porch I can’t stop you. Just leave me alone.”

This was usually the moment when Eli backed off, gave me space, and my hand was already moving toward the doorknob. But this time he surprised me. With no warning he bent from the waist and scooped me up, throwing me over one shoulder and marching into the living room. Werewolf or not, he was
strong
. “Hey!” I sputtered. “Knock it off! This is not a John Wayne movie!”

He sat down on the sofa, swinging me easily to straddle his lap so we were face-to-face. “Do you want it to be?” he said, grinning again. “I could kiss you, and you could beat your tiny fists against my chest until you’re just too overwhelmed with love to resist.”

“That’s not funny,” I said, annoyed.

“Talk to me,” he said firmly, the smile gone. “Talk to me, and I’ll head to the porch. And if you tell me you never want us to be more than colleagues, I promise you I’ll respect that. But this evasion thing has got to stop.”

I stared at him, openmouthed. Eli was always gentle, quiet. “Tonight? You’re picking
tonight
to throw ultimatums at me? This is bullshit.” I leaned back, trying to wiggle off his lap without dumping myself on my head.

Eli caught my wrists, very gently, and held me in place. “Scarlett,” he began, but I didn’t hear what he said next. I felt a sharp rush of panic, and salt water stung my eyes. I couldn’t take his hands off my wrists. Eli’s fingers were warm, but they still made me think of the cold silver handcuffs in Jared Hess’s basement.

“Let go,” I whispered. “Please let me go.”

He followed my gaze and immediately released my wrists, looking stricken. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t think.”

I scrambled off his lap, nearly tripping over the coffee table, and dropped into the opposing armchair. I pulled my knees to my chin and hugged them, hating the gesture but unable to stop. “It’s fine. It’s fine.” Good Lord. My body chemistry couldn’t take much more of this night.

“No, it’s not.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and scrubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I’m sorry, Scarlett.” He looked so tired. All of a sudden I felt like a terrible person.

“Look,” I began haltingly, “I know I’m not—good at this. The talking stuff.” He looked at me. “I do, um, care about you. But you deserve someone who can do the talking stuff.” He opened his mouth, and I held up a hand, shaking my head. “No, please don’t. Not tonight, okay? Tonight could you just drop it and…come to bed with me? To sleep,” I added hurriedly. “For sleeping.” Stop talking, Scarlett.

He stood up slowly, so I could see him coming, and came around the coffee table to take my hand. I let him pull me up. He studied my face, but when I kept my eyes trained over his shoulder he just kissed my forehead. I led him up to my room.

Eli flipped on the light switch and took hold of my jacket so I could twist out of it. I pulled down the covers and crawled onto the bed, unbuttoning my jeans, which he tugged down my legs, depositing them on the floor. He pulled off his own shoes and jeans, exposing blue cotton boxers that I’d never seen before. He lay down beside me on the bed, lifting his arm so I could snuggle under. I marveled again at how easily Eli and I fit together.

He fussed with my hair, picking loose strands off my face and smoothing them back toward the bun. Suddenly my hair felt too tight on my head. I reached back and pulled out the rubber band, and he made a soft noise of pleasure, winding his long fingers in my hair, spiraling it around and around. I looked up at him, tensing for a kiss, but he just planted a quick smooch on my nose and said, “Tell me about New York.”

I relaxed onto his chest. New York…was I really there just a few hours before? “It was cold. Very cold. And everything is decorated all to hell for Christmas. It was like being inside a snow globe.” He made a “go on” noise. “The New York null is nice. His name is Jameson, and he works mostly for the city’s master vampire.”

“Malcolm.”

“Yeah.” I tilted my head up at him. “How did you know that?”

“I met him,” Eli said soberly. “I moved here from New York, remember?”

“Oh. Right. Well, Jameson goes to a lot of daytime business meetings with him. I went along, got to know some of the vampires. There, um, weren’t a lot of werewolves.”

“No,” Eli said with some bitterness. “Malcolm doesn’t care for us. He forces the wolves out of the city.”

Which explained why Eli had moved to LA. Not that I’d ever thought to just ask. I felt like an idiot. Two minutes of trying to have a real, no-drama conversation, and I’d brought up a sore subject. “Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

I sometimes forget that for all the tension between Will, Dashiell, and Kirsten, we’re actually pretty lucky in LA. Most major cities are run by one group or another, and everyone else is encouraged to get the hell out of town. LA is the only city I know of where all three groups are welcome to live in peace, minus the occasional skirmish over who insulted whom.

It wasn’t always this way. Witches, werewolves, and vampires all evolved from the same group of people, thousands of years ago. For a long time, they’d all interacted more or less in peace, even helping each other out occasionally. Then there was an Inquisition or five, which was hard on all three groups, but particularly on the witches. Their leaders went to the vampires and werewolves and begged for help, but both groups turned them away, for different reasons. The desperate witches tried to strengthen their magic, and made an inadvertent discovery that changed everything—and led to even more tension. Four hundred-some years of fighting later, a werewolf gets kicked out of New York and begins tending bar in LA.

“Did you learn anything new?” Eli asked, changing the subject.

I shifted around, trying to buy time. Eli knew that I went to New York to find out more about nulls and what they could do, but he didn’t know about my apparent ability to permanently change a vampire back into a human. Unfortunately, when I’d hinted around during theoretical discussions, Jameson had been completely clueless.

I had to make sure Eli stayed that way too. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him to keep it quiet, but if he knew about my newfound
ability he could be at risk too. Besides, if I could permanently turn a vampire, wouldn’t it be theoretically possible to change a werewolf back too? Things between Eli and me were complicated enough without something that big between us. Eli hated being a werewolf (the majority of them did), and part of him would always be hoping I would change him back.

“Sort of,” I said at last. “Jameson didn’t know much more than I did about the history of nulls. But I did pick up a new trick.”

“What trick?”

I rolled off him and sat up, folding my legs. “Go stand in the hall.”

He looked at me quizzically, but I just nodded. Shrugging, he got up and stood out in the hall. Still in my radius. “Farther,” I said. He backed up a few feet. “A little farther.” Realizing what I wanted, he backed up until he left my radius. “Okay, hold still.”

I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing. When I was sure I was calm, I felt for the edges of my circle, or rather, my sphere, the same way you can focus on the feeling in one part of your body. I traced the edge of my circle all the way around, until I could hold the whole thing in my head. Then I exhaled and concentrated on the word
expand
. I felt the circle stretch.

“Whoa,” said Eli from the hall. He returned to my room. “You figured out how to make it bigger.”

Opening my eyes, I shrugged. “Null circles generally expand when we get really emotional or upset. I just learned how to do it without freaking out first. It’s not a big deal.”

“It’s totally a big deal,” he argued, and I felt a little pleased. It had taken me a while to learn it. Meditation techniques don’t exactly come easily to me. For some reason.

He came back to bed, wrapping me up in his arms and the covers. “Very cool,” he pronounced, and he kissed the top of my head. “Get some sleep.”

But I lay still for a few more minutes, listening to his heart and the way he breathed. “Eli?”

“Mm.”

“I don’t want to be a victim,” I whispered. “I don’t want to be
her
victim. Or her prize, or whatever. I don’t want to be a piece in a game.”

He loosened his arms, scooting his body down in the bed so his eyes could meet mine. He kissed me on the lips, but a warm, chaste kiss with no need to it. “You won’t be.”

After he’d hung up with Scarlett, Jesse Cruz had turned back to face the bustling activity at the crime scene. The Jeep was an early 2000s model, painted an unfortunate dark red that set off the blood on the windshield. It was standing upright, but looked crumpled, as though it had been rolled like a boiled egg. Which was more or less what had happened. Inside the car, the Reeds still sat upright, pinned in place by their seat belts. Liam Reed was a middle-aged business type with a sharp salt-and-pepper haircut. Sara Reed was a decade younger, with tan skin and laugh lines around her mouth and eyes. She was wearing a navy cashmere sweater with a snowman stitched into the chest. The only visible blood on either of them was a small dark circle that turned the snowman red.

The driver and passenger doors had been opened and the crime-scene photographer, Runa, was snapping shots of the bodies, completely focused on the digital camera. The two uniformed cops who had responded to the call were interviewing, separately, the couple who had discovered the body. A forensic investigator named Walter Benson was crouched next to the Jeep, collecting a sample of leaked oil. The other forensic technician saw that Jesse was off the phone and trotted over, clipboard clutched to her chest.

Gloria “Glory” Sherman was one of the nighttime forensic pathology technicians and the only other human Jesse knew who was aware of the Old World. Generally, Glory was a lab rat, but
budget cuts had forced more and more of the lab technicians to spend part of their time in the field. Which had worked out in his favor tonight, because she had placed the call to get him here.

“Sorry about that,” Jesse said. “What do we know?”

The night was fairly warm, but she hugged the clipboard against her body, shoulders clenched up to her ears with worry. The silver streaks in her short, ash-blonde hair seemed to stand out against the Jeep’s single remaining headlight. “Well, the physics guys will do a little calculating, but it looks like the car flipped off the embankment and landed upside down. Windows and one headlight were crushed. Then something”—she swallowed, and took a step closer, eyes darting—“flipped it back over sideways.” He followed her to the passenger side of the Jeep, where she pointed at two hand-sized dents at the bottom of the window, pinching closed the seam where the glass used to be. “The two driver’s-side wheels popped with the impact.”

Jesse glanced at Benson, a stocky black man in his midfifties with an unlit cigarette tucked behind one ear and an excited expression on his face, like he’d woken up to an early Christmas. He had torn Runa’s attention from the camera and was pointing at the marks on the victims’ wrists, gesturing wildly. “He knows about the bodies, I take it?” Jesse asked. “The lack of blood?”

Glory nodded. “He’s the one who told me. I…recognized the signs.” Glory had met Dashiell years earlier, when the master vampire had shown up to collect a newly turned vampire. Over the years he’d occasionally asked her to drop a beaker or lose a sample, always right after making polite inquiries about Glory’s two children. “Listen, Jesse, I did something—”

“Hey, guys.”

Jesse and Glory both jumped as the petite photographer appeared beside them. She had white-blonde hair tied in shoulder-length pigtails and three different cameras and bags strapped onto her slim shoulders. “Whoa,” Runa said, laughing a little at their shock. “Just wanted to see if you needed any other shots. Oh, hey,
we haven’t actually met.” She held her hand out toward Glory, and Jesse remembered his manners.

“Oh, sorry. Glory Sherman, this is Runa Vore, the new night-shift photographer. Runa, this is Glory.” The two women shook hands, and Glory shot him an anxious look.
Does she know?
He shook his head imperceptibly.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Runa continued, “but I’ve got all the initial shots. Did you want anything from the surrounding area?”

“Uh, sure. Why don’t you do some perspective shots from the car to the witnesses’ house. And, um, whatever else you can think of. Go crazy.”