Authors: Melissa F. Olson
I was just mounting a really reasonable and articulate argument along those lines—really, I promise, it was inspiring—when Eli, who had been watching me flail for words, spoke up to stab me in the back. “It’s for the best, Scar,” he said woodenly, not exactly meeting my eyes. “You’ll be safe with Jesse.” My jaw may have dropped open a touch. After everything we’d talked about the night before, after I’d let him sleep in my bed sober, he was going all white knight on me? Hell, he was pushing me toward Jesse?
Bullshit.
As Jesse and I approached the car, he helpfully distracted me by humming the theme song from
The Bodyguard
.
I wanted to smack him, but I settled for a glare. “It’s not funny, Jesse. What the hell just happened in there?”
We were still in Dashiell’s makeshift parking lot, and he tilted his head to urge me to get into the car to continue this conversation. Fine. I opened the passenger door—and spotted my own gym bag sitting on the driver’s seat. I frowned. There was a yellow Post-it note stuck to the strap, secured by a couple of extra pieces of Scotch tape.
Thought you might need this. Molly.
Jesse leaned forward to peer at the note in the car’s dim interior light. “How did she—”
“Dashiell,” I said shortly, pissed all over again. “He had her pack up a bag and drive it over at sunset.”
“The car was locked,” he pointed out. I just shrugged. I’d seen vampires do much stranger things. “But that means…he knew all along we would have to stick together.”
“Old World politics,” I groused. “Never surprising, yet never predictable.”
Jesse looked pensive for a moment, like he was trying to decide whether or not he had been manipulated. Finally he just shrugged at me and started the car. “It’s okay,” he said. “At least this way I
can keep an eye on you. And you were going to help me with the investigation anyway, right?”
I thought for a long moment before answering. I didn’t owe Jesse anything—I’d asked around just like I’d promised, and he could no longer threaten to poke around in the Old World, since he’d basically been invited in. But Kirsten…she was another story. I thought about how her power had jumped erratically during the meeting, and how broken she’d seemed at the bar. Then I remembered her brave, trembling smile after she and Eli had taken down Jared Hess to rescue me three months earlier.
Yeah. I owed Kirsten.
“Where are we even going?” I said finally. “I’ve never been to your place.”
“My place is a shoe box with a hot plate.” He’d turned the car around and was coasting down Dashiell’s driveway. “So let’s go to my parents’ house. There’s more room, they’re out of town, and I have to let the dog out, anyway.”
I just nodded tiredly. I couldn’t believe it was only 8:00 p.m. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or the stress, or just jet lag, but time was starting to fuzz together for me. Had it really been less than a day since Jesse had picked me up at the airport? And here we were again, with Jesse driving and me falling asleep against the window like it had all been a dream.
“We’re here, Scarlett,” Jesse said softly. I sat up, blinking in the unfamiliar glare of a motion-sensor security light. We were parked in the driveway of a sprawling two-story house with well-tended landscaping lining the path toward the front door. There was a string of colored lights doodling over the shrubbery, and there were so many delicate white icicle lights lining the roof that for a second I almost believed we were somewhere truly cold. Then I recognized Jesse’s parents’ house.
“You sure they won’t mind?” I said sleepily.
“I’m sure. They’re with my mother’s people in Hermosillo. Mexico,” he added.
I sat up suddenly. “For the holidays, right? Oh, Jesse, I’m sorry. I’m keeping you from them.” Honestly, I kind of kept forgetting about Christmas. My parents had made a huge deal out of it every year, but now they were gone.
He shrugged. “It’s only the nineteenth. I wasn’t planning to head down there for a couple of days anyway. And if I don’t make it, I don’t make it.” Off my look, he said, “Christmas comes every year, Scarlett. And I’ve missed more than one because of work stuff. It’s no big deal.”
“I’m sorry.”
He waved it off. “Come on in, say hi to the pup.”
I brightened. When we’d worked together before, Jesse had brought me to meet his parents’ hyperactive pit bull mix, a muscled knot of energy named Max, who had introduced himself by knocking me down in an effort to show his undying love. Not because I was anyone special, but because I was there. I love animals in general, but dogs are the pinnacle of pet ownership, as far as I’m concerned.
This time when Jesse opened the front door, I was braced and ready. The dog shot out onto the porch, ridiculously fast in the poor lighting, and came right over to put his two front paws on my stomach, trying to lick my face. “Goofball,” I said, laughing. I scrubbed at his neck and ears with my short fingernails until he dropped down to go greet Jesse.
“Oh, so you do remember me,” Jesse said, mock offended. Max’s whip-tail wagged hard enough to sting as it hit my leg. Jesse scratched his back for a minute and then bent down to grab a long cord that was fixed to the porch. He ran it through his fingers until he found the metal clasp at the end and fixed it to Max’s collar. “Go run, boy.” To me, he said, “Come on in.”
I hadn’t been inside his parents’ house before, so I stopped just inside the doorway while Jesse walked to an adjoining wall
to hit the lights. The two-story foyer lit up with a warm glow, the light stretching into what looked like a living room on the left and a sunken dining room on the right. “Watch your step,” Jesse advised as he led me through the dining room, which featured a huge, ten-foot Christmas tree with a neat row of gorgeously wrapped presents under it. Jesse pointed. “Those are just the fake ones,” he said, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. “They took a big carful with them when they left.”
“My mother used to wrap empty boxes and leave them under the tree too,” I said absently. I stepped closer to look at the ornaments. There were a lot of the nice Hallmark ones—I pressed the button on a Muppets trinket that made Waldorf and Statler holler belligerently—and even more of the homemade kind. I touched a small, neat frame made out of popsicle sticks. There was a picture inside of a handsome, smiling boy of about eight. “You?” I asked.
“Nope, that’s my brother, Noah. This one’s me.” He pointed to another frame a few inches lower. This one was haphazardly glued together, with messy red coloring along one side of the popsicle stick.
“Not much of an artist, huh?”
“Hey,” he protested. “I was six! That’s damn good for six.”
“Remedial,” I informed him. “Remedial arts-and-crafts work.”
He grumbled, but gave me a few more minutes to study the tree before saying, “Hey, I heard you say something to Corry before, but I forgot to ask. Is it really true that vampires need to be invited into a house?”
I turned around, forgetting the ornament I’d been examining. “Yes.”
His brow furrowed. “Why? I mean, what’s stopping them.”
“Magic,” I said briefly, but he made a rolling gesture with his index finger to indicate I should keep going. “Honestly? I have no friggin’ clue. Something to do with families and blessings and faith. You could ask Kirsten about it.”
He held up his palms in surrender. “Okay, okay. So that means vampires can’t come into this house, right?”
“Uh…yeah, that’s my bad.”
“The null thing again?”
I nodded. “The protective magic forms a bubble around the house, covering every possible entrance—all the doors, the pipes, the vents, the windows, even a damn chimney. It’s actually kind of like my radius.” I pointed in the direction we’d come from. “But anytime I get within ten feet of an exterior wall, I short that section out. Not the whole thing, it’s not built that way, but that specific area that touches my power.” Concern had spread across his face. I added, “As soon as your family comes back, living in the house and loving each other, it’ll come back, though. Don’t worry.”
He sighed. “I’m not worried about
that
, Scarlett. Hang on a minute.” He looked around the living room, eyes narrowed with concentration, and finally turned back to me. “Wait right here.”
“Jesse—” I started, but he’d disappeared back the way we had come. I heard the front door open, and a heartbeat later Max came bounding toward me, panting happily and doggy grinning like he’d just accomplished something amazing. I bent down to sit cross-legged on the floor, and Max put his front paws on one side of me and his back paws on the other, collapsing gleefully across my lap. He had to weigh sixty pounds. I laughed and petted him again, his tail whipping back and forth against a coffee table. If it hurt him, he didn’t seem to notice.
Jesse came back a few minutes later with a big armful of pillows and what looked like sleeping bags.
“What are you doing?”
“We’re going to have a campout,” he announced.
I gave him a dubious look. “Excuse me?”
“Look,” he dropped the pile next to Max and me—Max craning his head at an impossible angle to lick Jesse’s face, as if not wanting him to feel excluded—and sat down. “We came in the
front door, and walked
into
the house. We’re not within ten feet of an exterior anything, as far as I know, and the bathroom is farther in still. As long as we stay here, there’s only one way they could possibly come in, right?”
“Yeah, but, Jesse, we don’t have to sleep on the
floor
. I haven’t been in a sleeping bag since, like, high school. My people are not camping people.”
He was already shaking his head. “I thought about it. All of the upstairs bedrooms are against exterior walls.” He pointed to the couch at the far end of the living room. “That’s an exterior wall. I’ll move the couch closer, and you can sleep on that. I’ll take the floor.”
“You really think Olivia’s going to, what, dynamite your parents’ wall to get to me?” I said skeptically. “Ninja-jump through a second-story window?”
“No, I don’t,” he said primly, mock offended. “I think that sounds ridiculous. She shouldn’t know where my parents live. And I personally don’t think she could get within two hundred feet of the house without this mutt”—he pointed at Max, who was still panting and looking from one of our faces to the other like he was in heaven—“sounding the alarm, which is an impressive one. But the two things we know about Olivia for sure are that she’s motivated and that she’s completely nuts. I don’t want to risk it.”
“But—”
“Scarlett, for all you know, she could be working with a witch who can cast a spell to get them close to the house without making a sound, and to remove a damn chunk of the building.” My mouth snapped shut. That was kind of a good point. I’d once seen Kirsten drop a section of flooring down to rescue me when I was trapped in a basement. “Besides,” he overrode me, “I don’t want to not be able to sleep all night, imagining her and her crony creeping up on the house. This way they can only come at us from one possible
direction, and that feels a lot safer to me than having the whole house exposed.”
I sighed and looked down at my lap. “What do you think?” I asked the dog, who focused on my face and wagged his tail hard enough for his butt to wiggle. He licked the air in front of his face a few times, having probably been trained that people didn’t want face kisses. I laughed. “Fine. Max says campout.”
I went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. To my surprise, Molly had played nice and just packed flannel pants and a gray T-shirt as my pajamas. She ordinarily wouldn’t miss an opportunity to dick around with my wardrobe—it would be just like her to pack me, say, a negligee or something involving a thong—but she probably felt bad about being in on Dashiell’s plan to shanghai me. Well, good.
When I came out, Jesse was standing in the living room holding a big armful of quilts, with a cell phone tucked between one ear and his shoulder. When he saw me, he said into the phone, “Me too. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He dropped the blankets so he could hang up the phone.
“The girlfriend?” I said, in what I hoped was a casual manner.
“Yeah.” He fidgeted with the blankets for a second, making them into a nest on the floor.
“Is she…upset?” I asked, not even sure how I would feel about it if she was.
“No. I was a little vague on the details, I guess,” he said uncomfortably. “I’m just gonna run to the bathroom.”
While he was gone, his phone made a little ping, and I impulsively picked it up. New text message from Runa. I didn’t open the message, but I couldn’t help but see the picture that popped up on the screen for Jesse’s new girlfriend. The woman was even more beautiful than I had feared: all white teeth, glowing tan, and white-blonde hair. She was standing on the beach with a camera strapped around her neck and one hand shielding her eyes. The hand was
attached to a very tanned, toned arm. She looked happy and lively, just
bursting
with good health and enthusiasm for life.
Of course.
I put the phone back where I’d found it. When Jesse came out we finally got settled, me on the couch and him on the floor with Max stretched on his tummy against one of Jesse’s legs. I listened to the silence for a few minutes. It was quieter here than at Molly’s Hollywood bungalow, and darker too. You could almost believe we were out in the country somewhere, instead of in the heart of Los Angeles.
“What about her background?” Jesse asked suddenly. “What do you know about Olivia’s personal life?”
I blinked at the new topic and hung my head over the couch to squint at him. “Why do you ask?”
His blankets moved in a shrug. “I don’t know what else to ask about her.”
I lay back and stared into the darkness, thinking it over. “She was married once, but her husband died a long time ago. He left her some money. She didn’t really need the job cleaning for Dashiell, but I think she got off on the power. On knowing secrets.”
“What else?” Jesse prompted.
“I don’t know…she never really talked about her childhood or her family or anything. I got the impression that her parents were dead, and she never mentioned siblings.”