“Seems like it. But I never met Olivia.”
“I only saw her once or twice. She was…I don’t know. Regal. Commanding.”
“Nuts?”
“Well, yeah. But not so you’d notice right away.”
Scarlett came running down the stairs, socks and boots in her hand. “I thought you’d be dragging ass. What’s the rush?” Jesse asked.
“We’re meeting Kirsten,” she told him. “And you need to be on your best behavior.”
Chapter 7
We stepped out of Molly’s house into my favorite kind of LA weather: cool and sunny. Sometime during the night, the wind had blown off a layer of smog, so it was even clear outside. We walked down the block to Jesse’s parking spot, and I noticed one of Molly’s neighbors had recently gone with the ultimate tacky Christmas decoration: four inches of cotton laid down over the grass to serve as snow. The scene was complete with Styrofoam snowmen and a gaudily decorated Christmas tree. Molly would love it.
On the way to the restaurant, Jesse told me about being approached by Dashiell and the meeting at his house that night, and I filled him in on what Kirsten had told me about Erin’s and Denise’s deaths: the frantic calls to Kirsten, the fact that both witches predicted the future. “So Kirsten and I think the two deaths have to be connected,” I finished.
“It’s not two deaths anymore. Now it’s four,” Jesse said grimly.
“Wait. What?”
“I’m not sure, and I can’t prove it, but I think the Reed car accident is related to all this. Remember I told you about that weird dirt that forensics found at Erin’s? Well, I think I found the same kind of mud inside the car last night. My friend in forensics is analyzing it for me.”
“But the car thing was Olivia. We still think that was Olivia, right?”
“Yes.”
I thought that over. “So you think Olivia killed the witches too?”
He hesitated. I glanced over. “What?” I asked.
“Is it possible that Olivia has…special powers? Like, since she was a null who turned, maybe she can go out in the sun or something?”
“No,” I said. This was something I’d thought about a lot. “Other nulls feel…different. In my radius. Olivia used to feel like that, but that day that I saw her at the hospital, she just felt like your garden-variety baby vampire.”
“Okay,” Jesse said. “Then she couldn’t have killed the witches by herself. The sun was still up during Erin’s time of death.”
It took a second for that to register with me. There was another possibility, besides Olivia working with a partner. Nulls, like me, were very rare—maybe six in the world, that we knew about. But I still wasn’t the only null in Los Angeles.
“Oh, God.” I checked the mirror and cut off an Audi on my right, screeching across two lanes to make the next exit.
“Scarlett,” Jesse yelped, reaching to grab what my older brother always called the “oh shit” handle. “What the hell?”
“Gas station. I need a big gas station, maybe a convenience store…” I scanned the street, but the neighborhood seemed mostly residential.
“Stop,” he ordered. “Pull over.” He used a very big cop voice, and I found myself wrenching the wheel to bring the van to a stop at the curb.
Jesse leaned forward and flipped on my hazard lights. He looked at me. “What is it?” he asked softly.
I met his eyes. Corry, I mouthed, and understanding struck his face. “I need a disposable cell phone,” I said, as calmly as I could manage. “Where can we get one?”
During our last case together, Jesse and I had encountered another null living in LA—only she was fifteen and had been forced into several dangerous situations by a psychopathic serial killer. We had gotten her out of the mess, and since then I’d done everything I could think of to keep her away from the Old World. But if Olivia had found out about Corry…all bets were off.
Jesse started to speak, and I shook my head. I knew I was being paranoid. The odds that anyone had bugged my phone or my van in hopes that I’d mention Corry were tiny. But my job—my life—is all about paranoia. Most of the crime scenes I clean up wouldn’t even appear suspicious to normal people, but there’s always the chance that somebody will be just bored or rich or angry enough to ask a lot of questions and make a lot of noise. I live on paranoia. And if there was even a tiny chance that being paranoid would keep Corry safe, well, sign me up for my tin hat.
After a moment, Jesse nodded, and his face relaxed in understanding. He had met Corry, briefly, and knew how I felt about keeping her safe. He pointed left. “There’s a Target a couple of blocks that way.”
I left everything in the van except my keys and some cash. Just in case.
A few minutes later we sat down in the little café area with an instrumental version of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” pealing out over the loudspeakers. Jesse showed me how to get the phone working, and I dialed a number I knew by heart. It wasn’t until the phone was ringing that I realized she might be in school.
But Corry answered. “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Scarlett,” I said.
“Hi,” she said cautiously. “I, um, thought you weren’t going to be calling me.”
The last time we’d spoken, I’d made it clear to Corry that she needed to stay away from me, for her own good. It had come out a lot harsher than I’d intended at the time, but she’d gotten the message. “There’s sort of a…situation…happening in my world right now. Is everything okay with you?”