Jesse’s thoughts went back and forth like this for a while, while Beatrice and Dashiell waited patiently and Will began to look restless, his knee jiggling up and down again.
Finally Jesse took a deep breath. You’re overthinking it, he told himself suddenly. They needed him, and Scarlett needed him, and someone had to stop a werewolf who was probably going to kill again. That was what he had signed on for, wasn’t it? Stopping killers? He looked back at the three of them, forgetting not to meet their eyes. “I’ll work the case,” he said at last.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jesse saw Beatrice smiling widely, but in front of him Dashiell just gave a curt nod. “Good. One other thing.”
He closed the gap between himself and Jesse in an instant. Jesse tried to wrench his gaze away, but it was too late. Suddenly, a massive force like water from a fire hose slapped into Jesse, knocking his chair neatly backward and pinning Jesse and the chair to the floor. The pressure wasn’t crushing him, but Jesse couldn’t breathe, as though a thousand gallons of gelatin were flattening him. Panic and instinct screamed alarm bells in his body, but Jesse could only watch as Dashiell stood over him, hands casually in his pockets, and said, “Do not forget your place. You have spent too much time around the girl, and not nearly enough time being afraid.” He bent over a little and added conversationally, “I could make you do anything I wanted right now, bestow any humiliation or degradation. And you would beg me for it.”
He paused, a cold, inhuman intensity on his face. Even through his panic, the expression shocked Jesse. No one would mistake Dashiell for a regular man, not in this moment.
“Instead, though,” Dashiell continued, his voice perfectly conversational, “I am simply flexing a muscle. You will not challenge me again.”
He nodded to himself and turned away. As the eye contact broke, so did the magic, and Jesse rolled to one side, gasping for air, legs instinctively curling around his stomach. He used the motion to roll to his hands and knees, and when he looked up, Beatrice and Dashiell were gone and Will was standing next to him.
“What . . . the hell . . . was that,” Jesse wheezed.
Will crouched down next to him, elbows resting casually on his knees. “That was getting pressed by a cardinal vampire,” he said sympathetically.
“I thought . . . But that was physical,” Jesse sputtered.
Will tilted his head. “Mmm . . . yes and no. He told your mind to force your body backwards, and then to believe you couldn’t breathe or move. He pressed you; he just didn’t have to talk to do it.”
“That is scary as shit.”
“Yup.” Will held out a hand, and Jesse took it, allowing himself to be pulled to his feet.
“Suddenly I really miss Scarlett,” Jesse noted.
“Well,” the werewolf said, with exaggerated patience, “go get her then.”
Chapter 9
Dr. Noring insisted I take some more pain pills, and by the time she’d finished fiddling with my knee, I wasn’t exactly inclined to argue. The pills made me sleepy, though, so I decided to haul myself upstairs and go to bed for real.
It was the best sleep I’d had since first waking up with the knee injury. I was pretty sure the pills were the only thing keeping me from dreaming about the dead girl I’d destroyed, and I was pathetically grateful for it.
I was awakened hours later by an excessively cheerful vampire bouncing on the foot of my bed. “Ow,” I complained sleepily. “You’re trampling my bad knee.”
“No, I’m no-ot,” Molly sang. I opened my eyes. The clock beside me read 5:15, just after sunset. Geez. Apparently I’d been tired.
Molly was grinning like she’d just pulled off a heist. She wore her most pedestrian pajamas: a simple organic T-shirt and light flannel pants that I privately thought had been tailored. “You look happy,” I observed. “Kick some werewolf ass, did we?”
“Damn right,” Molly said smugly, in a weird foreign accent that I recognized. A couple of days earlier I’d talked her into watching Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey with me. “Man those guys can heal like nobody’s business,” she added in her normal voice. “Faster than us, even.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You didn’t actually hurt them, did you?”
“Me?” Molly fluttered her eyelashes innocently, then grinned again. “Nah, cuts and scrapes only. I just kept knocking them down while they were trying to change. It was hilarious.” Her face lit up as she recalled. “The bitch got madder and madder, she was stomping her little foot like a three-year-old, and she was stark naked the whole time!” She chortled, mimicking Anastasia’s petulant expression.
My spirits sank suddenly. “Go easy on Anastasia,” I said quietly. “She’s been through a lot.”
Molly snorted. “Maybe she has, but that doesn’t give her the right to go all cray-cray on my girl.” She reached over to tousle my hair, which was hanging loose down my back. And down my front, and sticking up in the air . . . I’d been asleep for a while.
“Stop it!” I protested, jerking my head away. “And nobody says cray-cray.”
“It was meant ironically,” Molly said loftily. “Besides, she totally was. Scarlett, she thought you had a cure! I mean, yeah, being near you is nice and all, but if that’s her deal, why not just send her friend to stalk you or whatever?”
“Will has a rule against it.”
She arched an eyebrow skeptically. “But kidnapping is cool?”
I sighed. “I don’t know, Molls. I don’t think Anastasia’s really thinking straight anymore.”
Molly’s face turned serious. “Uh—they don’t know where we live, do they?”