“Dashiell’s guys were the ones who did this to you?”
“Yes. To be fair, though, they don’t think about this kind of thing”—she gestured to her face—“as all that big of a deal. And I doubt that Dashiell actually ordered Hugo to hit me. I definitely got the feeling that Hugo just really enjoys hitting people. Probably a bad childhood.”
Jesse stared at her. He’d been on plenty of domestic abuse calls as a rookie, and most of the abused women tended to be either hopping mad or falling all over themselves making excuses for their piece-of-shit spouse. Scarlett, on the other hand, seemed so...casual. “Why aren’t you more upset about this?” he asked.
“About getting hit? Because in the Old World, the favored reaction to getting hit is to hit back. I did that, and now I’m over it. Bigger fish.”
She hesitated, and Jesse raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“Actually, there’s one other thing you should probably know about. If we can’t figure this out by the end of tomorrow night, Dashiell’s going to...um...kill me. And you, too, I assume.”
“What?”
Chapter 13
After my parents’ funeral, it took about a week for me to figure out that I had nowhere to go. I hung around Esperanza for a day or two, but the town was too small. Every time I stepped out of the house, I ran into someone wanting to hug me or hold my hands or tell me what wonderful people my parents were. I had been raised to be polite and accommodating, which made me defenseless to what I began to see as attacks of kindness. And every time I was inside the house, I was assaulted by memories, by the holes in the world. To make things even worse, Jack, my goofy, gentle, book-smart big brother, had become a stranger who couldn’t look me in the eyes or say anything that wasn’t businessy—what to have for dinner, what of Mom and Dad’s stuff I wanted, what to do with the house. Eventually, it all built up into a full-blown panic attack, and I threw my clothes into a garbage bag and took off for LA. I still haven’t been back to my hometown.
When I returned to the dorms, though, I realized I didn’t belong there, either. I didn’t go to class, which no one cared about, but my new roommate couldn’t look at me, and everything about college seemed so pointless and alien. Frat parties? Free concerts in the quad? A rally to protest some unjust new amendment? I couldn’t understand how anyone could expect me to be even a tiny bit interested in college when my mom and dad were rotting in boxes in the ground.
That Sunday night, I got a phone call from Olivia, the woman who’d approached me in the cemetery. With nothing better to do, I agreed to meet her at the Starbucks near campus, and she continued trying to explain what I was, what we were. I still thought she was probably crazy, but I was at least a little more able to listen now.
What I didn’t realize until after Olivia died years later was that I had never given her my phone number.
“I’m sorry,” I finally had said that day, after she’d gone over it all again, “but you expect me to believe that some wacky branch of evolution created vampires and werewolves, and nulls are people who can neutralize all their powers and basically undo evolution?”
“Not exactly how I would put it, but yes.” She took a ladylike sip of her tea. Olivia, I had already realized, was very ladylike. I tried to sit up straighter.
“If even some of what you’re saying is true, what makes you think I can do that? That I’m one of them?”
“Scarlett, honey...One of the professors at Santa Monica is a werewolf. Last Monday at exactly eight fifty-four a.m., you learned that your parents died, correct?”
Stunned, I nodded. I remembered the time.
“When you lose control of your emotions, your power intensifies. Your radius, the area in which your power works, widens. Dr. Madchen was almost a mile away, but she felt you, felt herself change back to a human, briefly. She called me to see if I was in the area, and eventually, we...traced the signal, I suppose you could say, back to you.” When I said nothing, she went on. “Haven’t you ever been in a public place and had a strange feeling brush over you, as though something had pressed against you without touching you?”
I was suddenly frightened, not because I thought she was a crazy person or because I thought she’d been stalking me, but because I realized I was starting to believe her. What she was describing had never happened to me in Esperanza, but whenever I was in LA, I felt it fairly often. And if what she was saying was true, then the world had just become very, very frightening.
“Why did you call me tonight? What is it you want from me?”
She smiled. “Oh, Scarlett, I don’t want anything from you. In fact, I’d like to offer you a job. And a place to live, if you need it. The hours are fabulous—you get full-time wages for what amounts to about ten hours per week, give or take. It can be messy, which is unfortunate, but you’ll learn quickly, and being what you are, you’ll be perfectly safe. I promise. And I’ll be with you every step of the way.”
It took a little while to calm Cruz down. He was all for having Dashiell arrested or me shipped out of town, and we went back and forth for a while on why both of those plans would end with people getting hurt or killed. Eventually, I managed to convince him that the best thing we could do was just keep working on the case. I tried not to think too hard about what would happen if we hadn’t found the killer by Dashiell’s deadline. No pun intended. Would I try to run? To fight?