My breath caught in my throat, and I felt very unfamiliar pangs of conscience poking at me. I know I spend most of my time concealing other people’s crimes, including murders, but I had never actually known about someone’s death in advance. Besides, I was the one who’d been too slow to get to the crime scene, and I was the one who’d been stupid and left the garbage bag. This guy was just doing his job. I thought about his face when that werewolf had changed. Without really meaning to, I imagined him having a family—kids, even. I looked back up at Cruz, but I couldn’t see his left hand to look for a wedding ring. “But this kind of thing has happened before, right?” I argued. “And then you just pay him off or whatever?”
There was a growl of warning in his voice now. “It has happened, but each time, it has been so much simpler to just remove the obstacle. Besides, I am not convinced that your policeman will be willing to work with us.”
To my own surprise, I heard myself pushing. “Dash, I know that I’m not your favorite person right now, but I’m respectfully asking for you to let me try to fix this. I think I can get through to this guy. Let me tell him the history. If that doesn’t work, you can always kill him later.”
Dashiell was quiet again, and I waited, glancing out the window at the cop in question, who was glaring at me with his arms folded across his chest.
Finally, Dashiell said, “All right, Scarlett. I’ll let you follow your instincts on this matter, but I still need you here. And if Officer Cruz tells even one person about the Old World, I won’t be killing just him. That’s not a threat, Scarlett. It’s a promise.” And he hung up the phone.
I leaned forward and rested my head against the wheel. Not. Good.
Cruz opened the passenger door next to me, and I jumped. “Well?” he said. “Let’s go.”
I shook my head. “I have permission to fill you in on some stuff, but you can’t go with me tonight.”
He held up my keys, letting them jingle. “You sure about that?”
Crud. Way to think ahead, Scarlett. I held out my hand. “Give me the keys.”
He shook his head, looking mulish. “I’m risking my job just by letting you walk around free. I’m not leaving until I get some answers.”
It probably wouldn’t be a great idea to Tase the nice police officer. I ran through my other options—get out of the van and run, call the powerful angry vampire to reschedule, or just take the damned cop with me. While I was thinking, Cruz rolled up his jacket sleeve and looked pointedly at a silver Fossil watch.
“Fine,” I sighed. “Here’s the deal. You can come with me, and we’ll talk on the way, but when we get there, you will stay in the car.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said casually.
Crap, crap, crap. I started the van and pulled out of the garage, heading west toward the 101 freeway entrance on Sunset. I felt Cruz staring at me the whole time.
“Okay,” I finally said, “what do you want to know?”
“That guy was a...a...”
“Werewolf,” I supplied. I couldn’t blame him for the hesitation. Pop culture has built this whole supernatural thing up to the point where it’s practically a cliché. Even the werewolves think it sounds silly to say werewolves. “Yes. I haven’t met him, I don’t think, but he must be part of the local pack.”
“There’s a pack?” He was already beginning to sound dazed.
“Yes. Our pack is small in proportion to the city’s population, but this isn’t the most werewolf-friendly town, as you might imagine. Better than New York, though.”
“Okay...I’m assuming if werewolves are real, there’s other stuff, too.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“How does it all work?”
“Dude, I don’t know. It just does.”
His voice was skeptical. “Please don’t make me threaten you again. It’s just kind of tacky.”
I sighed. How had Olivia first explained this to me? “Fine. Back up a second. The first thing you need to know is that there’s magic in the world. Not bunnies-being-pulled-out-of-top-hats magic—I mean like this completely wild, powerful force. The second thing is that Darwin got a lot of stuff right. Thanks to evolution, every species in the world is part of an enormous family tree, the fossil record. It would take up, like, the side of a mountain, but in theory, you could map it all out. Are you still with me?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. At certain points on that enormous family tree, when a species branched into two, it was actually branching into three. So, there would be the first branch, the second branch, and the magical branch.”
“You’re talking about speciation,” Jesse said.
I pointed at him. “Yeah, that’s the word I can never remember. Anyway, it didn’t happen all the time, and nobody really knows why it chose certain species to branch out, but that’s magic for you.” Even the smartest people in the Old World barely understand the surface of it. “At the beginning of the world, there was an imbalance—the energy of the world contained too much magic, not enough non-magic. Then those creatures who were built entirely of magical energy—spirits, mostly—began to die away, and magic started to settle down.”
I was half expecting him to fight me on it, but he just looked at me patiently, so I went on. “Okay. At some point, evolution led to man, but there was a whatchamacallit, a magical speciation. There were humans, and then there were also humans who had the ability to manipulate the magic itself. Conduits.”
“Like what? Wizards?” His voice was skeptical.
“Don’t give me the face. I’m just telling you what was told to me. Those conduits were powerful—almost too powerful. Some of them decided the power was too much, and they made a point to use as little of it as they could. Eventually, their magic...diminished and changed. Those people eventually were called witches. Wait, shit, that’s my exit.” I jerked the van onto the Pasadena Highway.
“And the other conduits?” he prompted.
“I’m getting to it. You have to understand that these were spectacularly powerful beings. Magic was part of their blood itself. And the remaining conduits divided into factions. There was a group of them who kept craving more and more power, and they eventually discovered that they could use magic to steal power by stealing one another’s blood. Something to do with blood symbolizing life force in spells. Then they all got afraid of getting killed by each other, so they started to experiment with the line between life and death.”