Authors: Melissa F. Olson
“Sounds good,” I managed. Hayne gave me a nod and turned to go. “Hayne?” I called after him. He turned back. “How do you know Kirsten?”
The guy was reasonably quick with the cheerful expressions, but the smile that spread across his face then was new and sort of mysterious. “She didn’t tell you?” he replied. “I was her first husband.”
The door clicked shut behind him before I could get my mouth closed again.
When Hayne’s footsteps had receded, I plopped down in the armchair and listened to the house. It was wonderfully quiet. I wished I had someone to ask about Hayne and Kirsten—I knew she was currently married to a guy named Paul Dickerson, a normal human who did…well, something with money. I had always sort of dismissed him as just the Darren to her Samantha, and I’d had no idea that she’d been married before. And to Hayne, who looked more than anything like a pleasant-mannered mercenary who smiled a lot. And had bite scars on both wrists.
After a few minutes, though, even the promise of good gossip couldn’t distract me, and my thoughts returned to my present situation. The library was gorgeous, but I was still irritated at being dumped in a safe room while everyone else went out and tried to stop Olivia and her partner. What could they be planning with the thing they’d stolen, the Transruah? Was I going to die? Would she just make me her slave, and I’d spend the rest of my life chained in her basement as her pet? I shuddered. That was worse than death. But Jesse would never let that happen…unless she convinced him that I was dead or something. Was it too much to hope that if she took me, he wouldn’t stop looking until he found a body?
I pulled out my phone and called Caroline on her cell phone. Obviously the bar is open late, but as the office manager Caroline works a pretty normal 9:00 to 6:00 schedule, so I figured she’d be up.
“Scarlett!” she said cheerfully. Then her voice lowered. “Will told me about Olivia and that car accident thing. I’m so sorry, babe. How are you holding up?”
This is what I love about Caroline: she’s just so warm. Everything she says, Molly might say too, but with Molly it’s like she’s testing the material, trying out a role, or trying to remember what a human should act like. Caroline is just naturally sunny and sincere. Or she’s the best actor in a town full of pretty good actors. Either way, there’s something comforting about her.
“I’m okay,” I lied. “What’s going on with the bar? Another fight?”
We chatted for a while about the latest werewolf drama, which involved two wolves getting into a brawl over something neither of them would admit to. “Eli and I have been discussing what the stupidest reason for a fight could be,” Caroline confided. “It’s hard for us”—meaning the wolves—“to get drunk, so it couldn’t be just ‘you looked at me weird’ or something. I’m thinking maybe local politics, like, school board–type stuff. Eli thinks it’s a reality TV show.”
I was enjoying the distraction, but the mention of Eli brought me back to my current situation. I wanted to ask Caroline if he’d said anything about our night together, but I couldn’t stand how stupid it sounded in my head, much less coming out of my mouth. But she picked up on my sudden silence. “Are you and Eli fighting again?” Caroline said softly.
“Fighting’s not the right word,” I said uncomfortably. I had absolutely no skill or experience at this kind of girlfriends-sharing thing. I’d been hanging out with Caroline some more, though, and was starting to get the hang of at least trying. “I just…wanted him to understand something, and he just doesn’t.”
“Let me guess,” Caroline predicted. “It has to do with Olivia.”
“Yup.”
“And him wanting to protect you.”
“Yup.” She of all people could understand: as the sigma, Caroline is the least-powerful werewolf in the LA pack, which means the rest of the wolves protect her like a baby sister. She understood the idea of being protected for what you are instead of being loved for who you are. But she didn’t pry, which is another reason I love her. “Hang in there, babe,” she said sympathetically. “It’s all gonna work out.”
It wasn’t necessarily that I believed her, but like I said, there was just something comforting about Caroline, and I suddenly felt just a little better. “Thanks, Caro.” We hung up, and I turned the phone over in my hands. It was weird, having a friend in LA who was so…normal. Of course, it was just like me that my most normal friend was a werewolf, but still, making friends with Caroline had been one of the more positive things I’d done in the last year.
In need of a new distraction, I hopped up and made for the bookshelves. I don’t know what I expected Dashiell or Beatrice to read, but the selection on the shelves was surprisingly eclectic. There were a lot of history books, but only involving events before the nineteenth century, which was when Dashiell, anyway, had been turned. Maybe reading about historical events that had happened within his lifetime pissed him off. Or maybe he figured he already knew all of it. There was plenty of fiction, both Pulitzer Prize–type literature and some mass-market thrillers. I noticed that there weren’t any horror books, which I suppose made sense for the same reasons the lack of recent history did. Also missing were romance novels and erotica, but pretty much every other genre was represented. The fiction was organized by author’s last name, I noticed, but the nonfiction was organized chronologically by subject, so a book on the Black Plague that had been written in 2003 was placed before a book about the Revolutionary War written
in 1998. For a second I toyed with the idea of switching around a couple of books, just to mess with Dashiell, but I managed to resist the urge just in case Beatrice was the one who organized the reading material.
I suddenly thought of Kirsten’s book of magical history. I had seen dozens of other books on witchcraft and witch history at her house, and it occurred to me for the first time that perhaps Dashiell had an equivalent collection. Had anyone truly written about magic or history from the vampires’ perspective? I crossed back to the chronological beginning of the nonfiction section, hunting for anything that looked homemade or cheaply published, or anything with “magic” or “vampire” in the title. I worked my way down the shelves, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that if Dashiell collected rare books, he was keeping them somewhere else—there was nothing here that wouldn’t be in an ordinary library. With nothing better to do, I kept going, anyway—and was rewarded on the second wall with a single piece of brown paper, folded in half, that had been stuck between two books on the shipping trade in the late 1800s. I pulled it out carefully and took it over to the couch, opening it gingerly on the coffee table. I perched on the edge of the couch so I could lean over to examine it.
The paper wasn’t really brown; it was just very old, I realized. I was looking at a large map of the United States that had been crumpled and creased many times, like when you keep consulting the map of Disneyland and then shoving it in your pocket during the rides. The state lines were barely visible, and I squinted at the title at the top of the page. The first few words had been smudged or faded away, so that all I could make out was
Cities, 1910
. Obviously it was United States cities, but most of the ones pictured were along both coasts, and there were plenty missing, so these had to have some significance. There were light circles drawn around several cities in black ink: Baltimore, New York, Chicago. But the City
of Los Angeles, as it was called on the map, had a much darker line of ink circling it several times.
I knew that Dashiell had been turned in 1819 in Great Britain, but I had never really thought about when he’d come to the United States. Was this the map he’d used? And if so, why’d he choose these specific cities? I looked closer, and realized that all the cities that had been highlighted—even the ones that didn’t touch a coast—were on some kind of body of water. Which meant—
“Port cities,” said a voice by the door.
I very nearly fell off the couch. “Thanks, Will. Now I won’t need caffeine again. Ever.”
The alpha werewolf of Los Angeles smiled apologetically and made his way into the room, inside my radius. He paused to take a deep breath, in and out, and then dropped into the armchair next to the table. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to scare you. Kirsten texted me to let me know where you were, since Dashiell’s out for the day.” He said “out for the day” like Dashiell had run to a business meeting in Santa Barbara or something. Really he was just dead in the basement, however many stories below our feet.
“And you decided to check on me?” I said, keeping my voice even. I was beyond sick of the let’s-protect-Scarlett game.
But Will shook his head. “Not exactly.” He leaned over to look at the map. “Nineteen ten, huh? I think Dashiell immigrated here right around then.”
“That was my guess. But why these cities?”
Will shrugged. “These are vampire cities.”
I looked down at the map, and up at him. “Why?” Then I got it. “Oh. Because vampires had to travel to North America by ship.”
“Well, everyone did back then, but yes. Most vampires still travel by ship, if they have to go long distances. Unless they can afford a private plane, like Dashiell.” He traced a finger along the East Coast cities. “By default, this is also a map of vampire-controlled cities in the US.”
I looked at the browned paper with renewed interest. “Really? Still?”
“Yes. The wolves like medium-sized cities that are close to wild areas—we don’t have much use for the ocean. Actually, we don’t have a lot of use for controlling big cities, period. The cities that are werewolf-run mostly got that way because the local pack was tired of taking shit from the vampires. Or, in a couple of cases, the witches.”
Will had basically just tripled my knowledge of the US Old World scene, and I was momentarily diverted away from finding out why he was there. “Really? There are witch-run cities?”
“Sure.” He shrugged and gave me a conspiratorial grin. “But mostly because the wolves and the vampires didn’t want them anyway,” he stage-whispered.
“Are we the only big city where everyone has a say?” I asked.
“In America, anyway. We’re the only place with regular meetings, with a shared cleanup person, with a trial system to keep the peace. We get away with it because LA is such a joke in the Old World.” He looked up to study my face. “Olivia didn’t tell you any of this stuff?”
I blushed. “Olivia trained me pretty early not to ask too many questions.”
Will sighed and looked away. “What is it?” I asked him. When he didn’t answer right away, I pushed. “Will, if you’re not just checking up on me, why are you here?”
“There’s something you need to know,” he said. He stood up and began pacing a few feet in either direction, staying within my radius. Pacing is a wolf habit, and apparently it didn’t fade even when the werewolf in question was currently human. “I…I owe you quite the apology.”
Eli had told me once that Will felt guilty about how Olivia had treated me, like maybe he could have figured out what she was up
to and stopped it. “Will, if this is about how Olivia took me in, it wasn’t your fault.”
“But it kind of was.” He sat back down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. His head drooped like it was awaiting an executioner’s sword. “Dashiell, as you know, doesn’t exactly consult Kirsten or me before he does something,” he began. “Almost fifteen years ago now, he hired Olivia. He had heard of a cleanup crew in Europe that was run by a null and thought it seemed like a really practical idea.
“I believe he briefly checked her tax returns and didn’t find anything alarming, and she did very good work, so as far as Dashiell was concerned, that was that.” There was a skeptical tone in his voice.
“But you…didn’t like her?” I asked.
He sighed. “You have to understand, I was twenty-eight years old. I had been alpha for all of a year, and Dashiell and I had built this uneasy peace that was unheard-of in America. I wasn’t in any hurry to rock the boat.”
“But…” I prompted.
“But…yes, she gave me a really bad feeling, just as a person. There was something sort of…
hungry
about her. And empty. Dashiell didn’t pick up on it at all—vampires aren’t really intuitive. I tried to convince him to vet her better, but he blew me off. It’s funny; he’s usually very distrusting of humans, but it was like because she was a null, she was on the Old World side of his little us-them line.”
“What did you do?”
He spread his hands. “First I tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t just dismiss my instincts. So I went behind Dashiell’s back to check on her. My dad was in army intelligence. I pulled some strings, paid a little money, and had a background check done. Complete with psych evaluation from her graduate school program, which was not easy to get, believe me.” He reached into the messenger bag and pulled out a slightly rumpled manila folder. “This is it.”
I managed not to snatch it straight out of his hand, but it was a close thing. “Why didn’t you bring this out last night?”
He raised his eyebrows at me to say
are you kidding?
“You saw how tense everybody was last night. Dashiell was about ready to throw down for control of the city, for Pete’s sake. I didn’t think it was a good time to tell everyone that I’d gone behind his back fifteen years ago.” His face drooped. “Or that I could maybe have stopped all of this, back then.” Before I could address that, he added, “I tried to find you after the meeting, but you left pretty quickly, and then I had to deal with a fight at the bar.”
I wanted to ask him about the fight, but I was afraid if I started another line of questioning I’d stop getting answers, so I held my breath. Literally. I was afraid to move, or I might break the spell. I was finally getting answers.
“Do you know anything about her background?” he asked me. “Before she started working for us?”
“Not really. She did say that she’d once been married and the guy left her money.”
Will bobbed his head. “She grew up in Salt Lake City,” he said. “Her family was extremely poor. Olivia never knew her father, and her mother, when she wasn’t drinking, worked as a maid for a rich family in town.” He gave me a small smile. “Well, however rich they get in Salt Lake City, anyway.”