I picked up Eli’s keys and my wallet, started for the office door, and stopped again. I turned in a circle. The safe was in the janitorial room with Ana and her girlfriend, but Will had only been in and out for a second, and he wouldn’t have wanted to be puttering with the safe while he was trying to give the women privacy. I went back to his desk and started opening drawers. I found the big revolver in the right middle drawer, next to a bottle of very expensive whiskey. Will must have been planning to put the gun away later. I picked up the gun and clumsily popped out the thingy that stored the bullets. I hadn’t handled a gun like this before, but I’d seen plenty of Westerns with my grandfather when I was little. I counted two bright silver shells and snapped the thing shut again. I checked all the drawers one more time, but the extra bullets, if there were any, must have been locked in the safe. It was better than nothing.
My only real play here was to go the simplest route: get the bad guys in my radius and kill them. Mallory, whoever she was, couldn’t use any kind of spell on me, including her big clay toy, so the greatest danger was that one of them would be carrying a gun. I didn’t have my vest anymore, but I was guessing—well, betting my life, actually—that nobody was going to shoot me on sight. Olivia would try to convert me first, to get me on Team Evil. I just had to play along long enough to get close to both of them, shoot them, and be done. I took a deep breath. Piece of cake.
I looked down at myself, in the boots, T-shirt, and boxers. Where the hell was I going to put it? The boxers were too loose to hold the massive gun up, and my boots were too tight for it to fit inside. I sighed, wishing I’d kept the holster Jesse had given me. Out of ideas, I finally got a roll of duct tape from the desk and taped the gun to my lower back with a big X of tape. It hurt to bend my arms that way, and pulling the gun and tape off of my back would require an even more awkward position, but you couldn’t see the gun while I was moving around in the T-shirt.
And besides, it had worked for Bruce Willis in a movie once.
I left my cell phone on the desk and stepped toward the hallway, pausing in the doorway to listen. I could hear the low voices of Matthias and Will still talking in the other room. Just across the hall, Anastasia was crying softly next to her unconscious girlfriend. I turned the other way, walking straight out the back exit and into the night.
Chapter 26
“What do you mean, she never got here?” Jesse Cruz asked the intake nurse, seething with frustration.
The nurse flicked a few keys on her keyboard with long, scary-looking red nails. “I have no record of anyone with that name coming in this evening,” she reported. She gave him a professionally helpless look. “I’m sorry, Detective. There’s nothing else I can tell you.
Jesse fidgeted, unwilling to move away from the counter despite the three people in line behind him. He had hitched a ride with a squad car to get to the hospital, irritated but unsurprised that Scarlett had decided to drive herself to get checked out. When he’d finally arrived at the hospital, he’d been so angry, his thoughts focused on Runa and her betrayal, replaying all the conversations they’d had to see what he might have given away. After he’d learned that Scarlett never arrived at the hospital, though, the rage had suddenly drained away, replaced by worry.
Just then the doors to the emergency room exam area began to open on their hydraulic controls, and Runa herself walked through them, her left forearm wrapped in a bandage. Her eyes were unfocused, distracted, and she nearly ran straight into Jesse.
“Oh. Hey.” Her voice was uncertain and almost afraid.
Jesse looked her over. Even now, she was beautiful, with corn-silk hair falling out of her braids and sadness in her blue eyes. Jesse felt a sudden rush of grief for the person he had thought she was. He had been so wrong. “You got a second?” he asked. “I think you owe me a conversation.”
She nodded, and they trudged over to the ER waiting room. Runa sat down first, looking exhausted, and Jesse took the seat opposite her, half-afraid that if he sat too close she’d somehow…what? Lure him back?
Once they were seated, though, he didn’t know where to begin. “It’s been over an hour,” he said finally. “It took this long just for stitches?”
“I wouldn’t let them stitch me until I knew what was happening with Kirsten,” Runa explained. “She’s my cousin.”
“Oh.” Jesse leaned back, digesting this. “Is she gonna be okay?” he asked.
Runa nodded cautiously. “They think so. The bullet didn’t hit anything major, kidneys or lungs or whatever, but she’ll probably lose her spleen. Which I guess you can live without. She’s in surgery.”
She added, “I called her husband. He was at a Christmas party in the Valley. He’s probably with her by now.”
“Good.” Jesse felt his left knee jiggling up and down and made an effort to stop it. “So it’s true? She sent you to spy on me?”
Runa looked around with concern, but the only other people in the waiting room were two young men discussing something feverishly in the opposite corner. They wouldn’t be listening in. Runa relaxed an inch and met Jesse’s eyes, her voice even. “Yes. At first.”
“Did she tell you to sleep with me?”
Runa looked away, her strength already crumpled. Different from Scarlett, he thought.
“I deserve that,” she said. “But no. I was just supposed to get a job as a police photographer and keep an eye on you. Be your friend.”
“Explain to me, then, how you ended up being my girlfriend.” How you made me fall for you was what he wanted to say, but he had a little bit of dignity left.
Runa smiled ruefully at Jesse, wrinkling her nose in that way that he loved. Had loved. “Kirsten actually thought you were too in love with Scarlett to make a pass at me. We were both surprised when you first asked me out.” She began to lift her hands to gesture, but winced and settled her injured arm back onto her lap. “I wasn’t, like, this evil Bond girl out to seduce away your soul and betray you, or anything like that. I was just supposed to keep an eye on who you talked to, whether you seemed to be investigating the Old World on your own, if you were keeping lists of us, stuff like that. It was clear to me a while ago that you weren’t interested in exposing or arresting us, and I sort of…relaxed into our relationship.”