“No. I was a little vague on the details, I guess,” he said uncomfortably. “I’m just gonna run to the bathroom.”
While he was gone, his phone made a little ping, and I impulsively picked it up. New text message from Runa. I didn’t open the message, but I couldn’t help but see the picture that popped up on the screen for Jesse’s new girlfriend. The woman was even more beautiful than I had feared: all white teeth, glowing tan, and white-blonde hair. She was standing on the beach with a camera strapped around her neck and one hand shielding her eyes. The hand was attached to a very tanned, toned arm. She looked happy and lively, just bursting with good health and enthusiasm for life.
Of course.
I put the phone back where I’d found it. When Jesse came out we finally got settled, me on the couch and him on the floor with Max stretched on his tummy against one of Jesse’s legs. I listened to the silence for a few minutes. It was quieter here than at Molly’s Hollywood bungalow, and darker too. You could almost believe we were out in the country somewhere, instead of in the heart of Los Angeles.
“What about her background?” Jesse asked suddenly. “What do you know about Olivia’s personal life?”
I blinked at the new topic and hung my head over the couch to squint at him. “Why do you ask?”
His blankets moved in a shrug. “I don’t know what else to ask about her.”
I lay back and stared into the darkness, thinking it over. “She was married once, but her husband died a long time ago. He left her some money. She didn’t really need the job cleaning for Dashiell, but I think she got off on the power. On knowing secrets.”
“What else?” Jesse prompted.
“I don’t know…she never really talked about her childhood or her family or anything. I got the impression that her parents were dead, and she never mentioned siblings.”
“What did she like? I mean, what did she do for fun?”
It took me a long moment to answer. “She didn’t care about most of the things people do for fun—drinking, television, hobbies. She liked going out to fancy dinners, I guess, and shopping. But mostly she just liked playing with her favorite toy.”
“You,” he said softly.
I didn’t answer, and after a moment he said, “What? What’s bothering you?”
“That couple in the Jeep,” I said. “The ones she killed for me.”
“Scarlett, that wasn’t your fault.”
“That’s not what I mean…it’s just, killing them really doesn’t fit Olivia’s style. She does everything on purpose, for a reason. Killing those two witches theoretically makes sense, to hide what she and her partner were going to do,” I said. “But I don’t see the point of killing the Reeds.”
“Can’t they serve a purpose as a scare tactic?”
“That’s just it,” I said, getting frustrated. I couldn’t explain why, but something about the Reeds’ deaths felt wrong. “The thing about Olivia is that she doesn’t do threats or scare tactics. She’s already scary because she just does these things. Killing the Reeds, it’s like a taunt, but that’s all. It’s an empty gesture.”
“You think maybe they have a different significance? Like they knew Olivia somehow, or knew what she was planning?”
“No, not exactly,” I said. “I just…have a bad feeling about this. I think we were supposed to make the connection between Olivia and the witch murders. Then we were supposed to have a big meeting tonight to worry about her. I think she’s pulling our attention in one direction, on purpose.”
“That’s starting to sound kind of paranoid, Scarlett,” he said, not unkindly. “And even if you’re right, there’s not much we can do about it tonight. We should get some sleep.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said absently. But I couldn’t turn off my brain. This thing we were all apparently doing, where I was the bait or the trap or whatever, that was an awful feeling—after all, how was being a tool for Dashiell any different from being a toy for Olivia?
I rolled onto my stomach, cuddling into the quilt. Olivia had always treated me like I was this vaguely human-shaped piece of clay, and she got to be the master sculptor who made me into whatever she wanted. I was her confidante, her apprentice, her foster daughter, her servant. I’ve always thought brainwashing is a stupid word—this isn’t the Cold War—but it was something along those lines.
And I was the perfect plaything for Olivia. She made me start running every day, and fussed over my clothes and my grammar and my food until I could hardly pick between soup or salad without consulting her. It took me years to wake up. It was like one of those Lifetime movies where the wife finds a lipstick stain on the collar and suddenly these pieces fall into place—the late nights at “work,” the mysterious phone calls, the sudden disappearances. Then the wife always feels colossally stupid. That was me, only instead of a cheating husband I had a bat-shit crazy homicidal mentor who’d wormed her way into being my only connection to life.
Luckily, when I finally did realize all that, she was dying. Or she was supposed to have been dying. My employers seemed to have dismissed the problem of how Olivia, a null, had managed to get herself infected with vampirism, but it bothered me. No vampire should have been able to get near her without becoming a human again. I was used to not understanding things in the Old World, but I was also used to having someone to ask for the answers I needed.
I thought back to when I’d permanently turned Ariadne. The effort had caused my radius to weaken, leaving me vulnerable to magical attack for a few days. Was it possible that Olivia could do the same thing? No, she’d been way too weak at the end to channel that kind of energy.