He’d finished all the phone calls, including doubling back on the people who hadn’t answered the first time, by just after ten. It was mostly a fruitless effort. The more he pressed, the less anyone seemed to know about Henry Remus. The guy was a ghost, one very lost soul in a whole city of them.
The last two on his list were Esmé Welch and Corbin Hurd, the werewolves. Hurd wasn’t home, and a quick text to Will revealed that he had a business meeting in Santa Barbara and wouldn’t be back until the following afternoon. Esmé wasn’t home either, but Scarlett had said she was picking up a few shifts at Will’s bar, and Jesse managed to get a hold of her there. When she answered he could tell she’d picked up the office extension, just based on the lack of bar sounds in the background.
He explained who he was and why he needed to ask her about Remus, and there was a long, pregnant pause. “Esmé?” he said cautiously. “Are you still there?”
“It was totally an accident!” she burst out.
“What was an accident?”
“Corbin and I were chatting a few months back, while we were waiting for the PAW meeting to start,” Esmé said, and now Jesse could hear tears in her voice. “And we were just talking about our weekend plans, you know, and some of the latest pack drama, and there was this guy, he’d overheard the whole thing, and we said . . .” She took a gulping breath.
“Let me guess,” Jesse interrupted. “You talked about being werewolves, and changing in between moons.”
“I didn’t see him,” Esmé wailed. “Then he was running away, and I was gonna call the vampires, you know, like you’re supposed to, but nobody remembered his name and nothing bad happened and I just kind of . . . forgot about it. I mean, who would believe a story about werewolves?”
Said the werewolf. Jesse managed to refrain from banging his head on the door frame. “What exactly were you guys talking about?”
There was another long silence. “Esmé, I can come down there, pitch a big fit, and demand some answers, right in front of Will. Or you can just tell me what I need to know right now and save us both the trouble.”
“There—there’s this place,” she whispered into the phone. “Up by the Sequoias. It’s like a three-hour drive, no chance of running into Will or any of the other pack members. Every month, on the new moon, some of the pack goes up there.”
“What about you, Esmé?”
“I went once,” she mumbled. “But I was too scared of disobeying Will. It wasn’t even any fun.”
Jesse sighed. Well, at least they knew how Remus had found out about the werewolves. Only a guy who desperately wanted to believe in wolves would overhear that conversation and think it was actually true.
“Why did you run out of the October meeting?” Jesse asked.
“How did you—”
“Esmé,” he said tiredly, “maybe you should just assume I know everything, and tell me the truth.”
“I—I realized that he was nuts,” she admitted. “That was the day the guy overheard us. I went to find Corbin, to tell him the guy might be nuts, because Corbin had missed his speech. By the time I got Corbin out of the bathroom and we came back, they were long gone.”
“Did you tell anyone else about this?” Jesse demanded.
“Just my friend Ana,” she insisted.
Jackpot.
Jesse asked Esmé a few more questions, but she didn’t seem to know anything else about Remus, especially not where he might hide. By the time he was finished talking to her, Jesse was exhausted, having fueled the last few days on too much coffee and not enough sleep. He texted Scarlett to let her know about Esmé, then went and laid down on the bed in his little studio apartment. Jesse’s thoughts were just spinning, stuck on finding the nova wolf. They knew how the nova had been made, but that didn’t actually get them anywhere.
Despite his churning mind, Jesse’s exhaustion tugged at him. After a few minutes, he gave up and set his alarm for seven, before giving in to it.
He awoke feeling just as stuck, but at least a little more capable of rational thought. He showered and dressed quickly before leaving for Scarlett’s. The LA morning was cool and overcast, with a heavy gray sky that seemed to be drifting slowly downward to cover the ground in haze. Jesse had to shake a sudden impulse to stomp on the gas, to see if he could outrun the weather. It was the weekend, and this early in the morning the streets were practically empty. He made it to Scarlett’s in record time.
To Jesse’s surprise, Scarlett answered her door quickly, with a phone to her ear and her cane tucked under the same arm. She was half hunched over to keep the phone from falling. “I’m on hold,” Scarlett said briefly, and gestured with a shoulder for him to come inside. “Come on in.”
Without another word she took hold of her cane and hobbled back to the couch. She looked better than she had in days, dressed in jeans and an oversized cowl-necked sweater that went to her fingertips. Her hair was damp and sweet-smelling from the shower. She’d wrapped it up in a bun, and when she turned back toward the room Jesse saw what looked like a blue pen stuck through it. He followed her, perplexed. “Who are—” he began, but she half turned to him and held up a hand.
“Yes. Yes, I’m still here,” she said into the phone. “Nobody? All right, I must have the wrong information. Thank you.” Ending the call, she collapsed onto the couch, careful to keep her knee free. Scarlett picked up a yellow pad of paper that was tucked into the couch between the arm and the cushion. She pulled the pen out of her bun. “There’s coffee in the kitchen if you want it,” she said through a yawn.
“I had some on the way. What’s going on?” he asked, still mystified. He perched in the armchair, more so he wouldn’t be looming over her than because he needed to sit.
She scribbled something on the pad before looking up. “You’re not going to believe this, but I came up with a plan. Well, Runa and I did.”
For a second he thought he must have misheard her. “My Runa?” Jesse said incredulously.
Scarlett stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes for a moment. “No, the other bearer of that globally popular name.”