The day I met Olivia was the day of my mom and dad’s funeral.
I hadn’t trusted my ability to drive, so I’d taken the train to Esperanza, feeling as if I were the main character in a movie that had suddenly switched genres. A week earlier, I’d been in a fun coming-of-age-in-college story. Suddenly, I was in a tragedy.
Jack picked me up at the station. He was obviously trying to look strong, but his eyes matched his scraggly red hair. At a little over six feet, my brother didn’t exactly tower over me, but he seemed huge and awkward as I walked up, unsure if he should go for a hug or a cheek peck or just take my overnight bag and march off. I dropped the bag and stepped into his arms. I’m all for feminism, but there’s something primal and comforting about being engulfed by someone bigger than you. When I pulled away, there were wet spots on his dark-blue button-down. I must have looked embarrassed, because he gave a little it’s nothing shrug and picked up my bag.
I can’t remember anything about the funeral home or the service, or how I got to the cemetery. It was like one minute I was leaving the station with Jack, then there was a blur of tears, and then we were looking down at the coffins as they were lowered into the earth. I kept thinking they weren’t just holes in the ground, they were holes in the world. Like once there was a space that was occupied by my mom and dad, and then that space had been violently punched out, leaving a raw hole with ragged edges. The whole world must be full of scars, I thought dizzily. I was only eighteen.
Then a pretty woman picked her way across the grass in very high heels and handed me an old-fashioned linen handkerchief. She was in her mid-forties, with long chestnut hair and elegant makeup. Her blue eyes looked sharp enough to cut through you, and she had a five-inch scar running across her collarbone, which was exposed by a gray dress that was simple, but extremely expensive-looking, and tailored to her lean, angular frame. She was neither pretty nor ugly, but sort of haunting. Someone you’d remember.
“Thank you,” I said. I remembered that I was supposed to be playing some sort of role. A hostess. “Um, did you know my parents well?”
She glanced around. Jack had carried a couple of pots of flowers to the car, and the gravediggers kept their respectful distance. We were alone. “I’m afraid I didn’t know them at all,” she said. “But I’m sure they were lovely.”
I stared at her, confused. “I’m sorry...Are you a friend of Jack’s or something?”
She smiled serenely. “No, Scarlett. I’m a friend of yours. Or I’d like to be.”
On another day, I might have called for help right then, but I just kept looking at her, befuddled. Was she from a church or something?
“You see,” she went on, “there are very, very few of us. I think we should stick together, don’t you?”
Very, very few. Five or six in the world.
Had Olivia just been full of shit? I wondered as Cruz and I walked back toward his car. It certainly wouldn’t be the only thing she’d lied about. But, no, that didn’t fit—Dashiell and Will had talked about the rarity of nulls, too, and I sort of suspected that if Dashiell had another null option, he wouldn’t be using me. If Olivia was right about us being rare, though, how was it possible that there was another null in the clearing?
“Scarlett?” Cruz asked, breaking into my thoughts. “What does this mean?”
I blinked. “Um...Well, for starters, it means we’ve been looking at the wrong victim pool.”
“Why?”
“Because if a null was there, then someone wanted to kill something from the Old World. It’s hard to kill both werewolves and vampires, even witches if they see you coming. But if you could turn them into humans first...”
He nodded. “If the werewolves run in that park, it could have been three of them.”
I thought about all the blood at the scene, spilled intentionally all over the clearing. “No. They were vampires. Or at least one of them was a vampire.”
“So can we go ask the...uh...vampire boss?”
I checked my watch. It was only three, which meant there were a good four hours until sunset. “We can, but he’s dead right now.”
Cruz didn’t laugh. “Can’t you just go near him, and he’ll come back to life and talk to us?”
I stopped and turned to look at him. “Whoa. We can’t just burst in there. You really think the cardinal vampire in LA doesn’t have daytime security? What would our story be? ‘Hi, it’s Scarlett, mind if I make your boss completely vulnerable for a few minutes? Along with this guy I brought who, by the way, has a gun?’ And that’s before we even find out what Dashiell would do if I stormed in there and made him vulnerable.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Well, we can start by tracking down the null, right? There are how many of you?”
“That I know of? A handful,” I said. I started walking again. “But who knows how many there are total. The theory is that there are some nulls who never find out what they are.” I explained the difficulty in discovering new nulls. “If the null lives in a city with a low Old World population, they might live and die without ever knowing. There’s another argument that says that doesn’t happen, because nulls evolved to be born near Old World populations, but that’s all theoretical.”