As soon as I had entered the address in my GPS and was on my way, I started to call Jesse to tell him where I was going. I had his number highlighted on my phone’s screen and everything, but then I abruptly pushed END and tossed the phone into my work duffel on the passenger seat. Vampire or not, this was a dead body. Jesse would feel obligated to call the police and turn it into an actual investigation; he was dense like that. I couldn’t involve him.
Then again, I wasn’t an idiot, either, and I knew this might also be a trap designed by Olivia. I doubted it, as the sun was still up. Whenever she unleashed her evil plan, she would do it at night, so she could see its horrors reflected on my face. But still…if I got killed because I didn’t tell Jesse where I was, I was going to feel really stupid.
I thought about it a moment, then pulled over and sent him a text that I would be delayed for a work errand. Then I called Molly’s cell phone and left her a voice mail: “Hey, babe. If there isn’t an ‘all clear’ voice mail on here when you get up, something bad has probably happened to me. Call Jesse and tell him I went to two five four Spring Boulevard in Silver Lake. Oh, this is Scarlett.”
Problem solved. I pulled back onto the road.
The address that Esther had given me was for a small, weathered-looking cottage on the outskirts of Silver Lake, currently one of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods. Wait, no, maybe that was last year. I can’t keep track. At any rate, Silver Lake had once been one of LA’s most dangerous areas, then had gone through urban renewal or whatever, so now it was a mix of excessively developed residential areas and neighborhoods that hadn’t quite gotten the memo about cleaning up their act. Spring Boulevard was somewhere in the middle: two blocks from a Coffee Bean but shabby enough to have bars on every window of every building, even the upper floors.
I don’t know what I was expecting Esther to look like—maybe a teenage runaway from a Lifetime movie, with big eyes and an artfully dirty face—but she wasn’t it. When the cottage door opened, the woman inside was plain, skinny as a rail, and bald as Daddy Warbucks. A dark-pink cotton scarf was wrapped around her head, and she didn’t have eyelashes or eyebrows. She looked like she was pushing fifty. Oh. I suddenly understood the situation.
“Thank you so much for coming,” she said, a little cough clutching at her words.
“Of course. Nice to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand. She shook it with a frail grip. Esther was one of the human servants who had hooked up with vampires in hopes that they would turn her. She was dying. Which also explained why she looked so miserable—if her vampire had died, she was out of luck. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“I’m a—well, I don’t know what you call it, but I sort of help out a, a vampire?”
A human servant. With the habit of ending every sentence with a question mark. This was just what my day had been missing. “What can I do for you, Esther?”
Her voice broke. “Well, he’s—he’s dead? I mean, he’s really dead. I just came over and he was here and I didn’t know that they even left bodies; I thought they went to dust or something—”
She kept rambling, so I broke in, trying to sound soothing. “It depends on the vampire, Esther. When they’re killed the magic leaves them, the years catch up with them, and their bodies revert to where they should be. So very old vampires do turn into dust, just like in the movies. But new vampires may just look like a slightly rotted dead body, and so on.”
When she answered her voice was very small. “I didn’t know that.”
“Can you take me to the body?” I said gently.
“Oh. Right. This way.” I followed her into the cottage, which was barely furnished at all: a couple of folding chairs and a cheap TV in the living room, a card table in the kitchen. There was no refrigerator, no signs of food. “I don’t eat much,” she said, catching my look. “He’s—the body is down here.”
She opened a door in the kitchen, revealing a set of wooden stairs. A basement. Great. Vampires have a talent for finding the few houses in LA that actually have basements. It doesn’t necessarily mean this is a trap, I told myself. I certainly didn’t feel anything Old World in my radius. But I motioned for Esther to go first.
The downstairs was the opposite of the first floor: wall-to-wall carpeting, gorgeously framed art prints on the walls, a flat-screen TV, couches. Everything was well kept but comfortable looking: someone spent time here. Esther continued toward the back wall, where another door led to a tiny bedroom. I could see the dead body lying in the doorway. “That’s him,” she said unnecessarily.