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.
Meanwhile, Dashiell had a few updates from Las Vegas. All upcoming productions of Demeter had been canceled. There was a rumor floating around that the Holmwoods had left town with the show’s profits, though the Bellagio declined to press charges. A new Cirque du Soleil show was announced for the Bellagio theater a few days later, and after a couple of weeks of speculative newspaper articles, everyone moved on.
The hospital shooting in Boulder City was blamed on one of the orderlies, who had, the story went, killed a bunch of his colleagues before turning the gun on himself. I felt a little bad about that, but ultimately I had too many other things to feel guilty about.
I spent a couple of days resting and healing, and then my life got more or less back to normal, at least on the outside. I cleaned up supernatural messes, worked on Dashiell’s security with Hayne and his team, trained with Marko, and watched TV with Molly. I went through all the motions, but I couldn’t help but feel different. Older, mostly.
The one bright spot that came out of the whole mess was Wyatt’s surprisingly smooth transition into life in LA. Dashiell had offered him a job on a security team at one of his companies, but Wyatt turned him down and got his own part-time gig, as a bartender at a gay cowboy bar in West Hollywood. The job kept him busy and distracted, and gave him somewhere to go every night. And after decades in Las Vegas, there was nothing the homosexual cowpokes of Los Angeles could do that would so much as raise an eyebrow on the old vampire. When he wasn’t working, Wyatt stuck close to the mansion, running nighttime errands for Dashiell or working on Beatrice’s garden under floodlights. I saw him fairly often, and every time Laurel called me to check on him, I could truthfully say he seemed at peace with his new life.
At least for the next year or so.
As for me, grief seemed to have taken root in my chest again. I’d lost people before, God knows, but Jameson’s death hit me harder than I would have expected. Maybe it was because he was a null too, or because I had seen a romantic future for us, but I began having nightmares about him that rattled me. In the dreams I saw him dead, or bleeding out, or—worst of all—perfectly fine and laughing, in bed with me. There were nightmares about Malcolm, too. In those dreams, it was me he found, me he shaped into what he wanted. There were many nights when Molly shook me awake, her eyes wide with alarm, because I’d extended my radius in my sleep.
After a couple of weeks of this, I started researching what it would take to go to New York and assassinate Malcolm. He may not have pulled the trigger himself, but in so many ways, he had orchestrated Jameson’s death. I wanted him to pay for that.
Dashiell somehow figured out what I was doing, though, and warned me off. Actually, he didn’t warn me off, which was sort of refreshing. He just told me I needed to work on my timing. “You’re not ready,” he said sternly. “And he’ll be expecting it now. Better to wait a bit, and let him think he’s won.”
So I put the idea on hold, but the nightmares persisted. Eventually I wondered if my subconscious might be tormenting me because we’d never held a funeral. Jameson’s body was buried in a mass grave in the Nevada desert, but it wasn’t like the lack of a body made it impossible to pay my respects. When my friend Caroline had died, we’d at least had a memorial service. I guess I just hadn’t realized how important it was to say a real goodbye until the opportunity was taken from me. Which was another terrible irony, because getting rid of dead bodies was part of what I did for a living. For years, I had refused to think about what destroying bodies did to the victims’ loved ones. Now it was me.
I could have asked Beatrice to put together a memorial service, of course, or maybe even done it myself . . . but who would I invite? Who was left to remember Jameson besides me and the horrible Malcolm, who was responsible for his death? That was the worst tragedy of all. Jameson had lived a short life filled with pain and bitterness, and now he was gone, with almost no evidence that he’d ever lived.
Well. That was what I thought, anyway.
It was Shadow who clued me in. She went from her normal level of “attached and protective” to suddenly giving me the full Secret Service treatment. She stuck to my side even in our own yard, where she’d always enjoyed roaming around, and even came into the bathroom when I showered, standing guard just outside the tub. Sometimes she would paw and whine at me for no apparent reason, getting frustrated, like she was trying to tell me something that I was just too oblivious to understand.
Until, with a growing sense of terror, I did.
“Scaaaaaaaaaaarlett,” Molly yelled. It was a Thursday night, three weeks into April, and we were all set up for house movie night. It was Molly’s turn to pick what we watched, but she had surprised me by eschewing the usual romantic comedies in favor of an Ingrid Bergman mini-marathon. Jesse had promised to come by for the second feature, Notorious, after he finished family dinner at his parents’ house.
“Are you coming or what?” Molly called. “I know humans spend a lot of time in the bathroom, but this is getting ridiculous!”
Dazed, I swung the bathroom door open and shuffled into the living room like the living dead. Shadow, who had managed to wedge herself into the small bathroom with me by standing in the dry tub, followed at my heels, keeping to my slow pace like she was spotting me for a fall. Which maybe she was.
“Scarlett?” Molly asked, her eyes filling with concern. “Have you been crying?” When I didn’t answer, she rushed to add, “Uh, I didn’t mean to hassle you about the bathroom; you can stay in there as long as you want.”
I just shook my head. “I don’t know how to . . . this is so . . . so . . .” I didn’t have the words.
Looking panicked, Molly vaulted off the couch and rushed over to me, grasping my arms. “What happened?” she asked, searching my face. “Did someone hurt you?”
In answer, I held up my fist, clenched so tightly that my knuckles ached, so Molly could see the test.
“I’m pregnant.”