Blood Gamble

“Yes, and it was fine.” I followed her lead, sitting on the other side. The water felt deliciously warm as it hit my feet, which were still a little sore from all the walking yesterday. Between that and my recently unkinked back muscles, I was going to have a hard time staying upright through this conversation. They didn’t hand out caffeinated beverages at the spa, unless you counted unsweetened green tea, which I most certainly did not. “But he wants me to help him interview cleaning companies after we’re done here,” I said in my most regretful tone. I’d come up with this particular lie on the cab ride back to the Venetian the previous night.

I checked my watch, which I’d insisted on keeping even during my massage. I needed to get going if I was going to meet Jameson. “I’m afraid I’m going to miss dance class, and possibly more than that.” I hung my head, trying to look contrite.

The others all voiced their sympathy, even Bethany, who was obviously faking it. “Are you sure you need to?” Juliet said anxiously. “I feel terrible that we’re having so much fun, and you’re stuck at work.”

Oops. Maybe I’d overdone it a little. I gave her a smile. “Don’t worry, Jules. I’m sure he’ll take me out to a nice brunch, and although I’d much rather be with you guys”—not exactly the truth—“it won’t be so bad.”

“Well, it’s great that Dashiell trusts you so much,” Juliet replied, looking more or less pacified. “Will you call me when you’re done, so we know when to expect you?”

I agreed to do so, and fled the relaxing utopia for something more familiar.

Chapter 18

Vegas Vic, as it turned out, was a massive neon sign in the shape of a waving cowboy, which currently presided over a souvenir shop on Fremont Street in downtown Vegas.

When I’d come with my family, years earlier, we hadn’t actually gone to the downtown area, but I’d gotten the impression that it was pretty seedy—not the kind of place tourists would want to visit. Either I had been wrong or something had changed, because when my cab dropped me off at the corner nearest Vic, I saw that part of Fremont Street had been blocked off into a perfectly nice outdoor mall area, but instead of stores there were casinos, bars, and restaurants. Some enterprising committee had also decided to hang an enormous, circus-tent-like tarp over the whole plaza, providing much-needed shade from the Nevada sun.

It must have still been fairly early for Vegas, because as I walked down the sidewalk there were very few people out there with me, and most of them looked like they’d been out all night. I hadn’t been totally wrong about the seedy factor: there was nothing overtly trashy, but an element of glitzy sleaze lingered in the air, as though the whole place had just been power-washed after an all-night orgy.

Jameson was already at Vegas Vic, leaning against the side of the building, just below the sign. He had on jeans and a black tee shirt, and despite the shade overhead, his eyes were hidden behind wraparound sunglasses. The part of his face that I could see seemed frozen in an inscrutable expression, and overall he looked like the world’s scariest bouncer, inexplicably hired to guard a garish souvenir shop.

When he saw me coming, he pushed off the wall and gestured toward the pedestrian mall. “Come on, let’s walk. There’s a good coffee shop a couple of blocks down.”

Good morning to you too, I thought, but I followed his lead. The two of us began strolling on the pedestrian mall, where we had to circle around a couple of different families taking photos with the dreaded selfie sticks.

“A few years back there was a major push to revitalize the downtown district,” Jameson told me. “They installed that”—he pointed to the blocks-wide shade above our heads—“and tried to pull the area together with the Neon Museum, the Mob Museum, and so on.”

“You sound like a tour guide,” I remarked.

He shrugged. “This is my town now. It’s important to know the place where you live.”

It was hard to read his expression, but he seemed . . . troubled. I tried to figure out a place to start, and settled on, “So I met Silvio. He seems like kind of a joke.”

Jameson didn’t deny it, just said, “He serves a purpose.”

“Leaving the Holmwoods alone? That purpose?”

He gave me the side-eye. “Something like that. How did you meet him?”

Wondering if he already knew the answer, I said, “I went to see him last night. I wasn’t impressed. I don’t think he’s up to stopping the skinners.”

“I’m not even convinced there are skinners in town,” Jameson contended. “There’s not much evidence. Sure, vampires are missing, but it’s not like we’re finding any bodies. If ancient bones had been discovered in the city limits, I’m sure we would have seen something about it on the news.”

When a vampire dies, the magic leaves their body, and their remains revert back to whatever age they would have been if they’d never become a vampire. So very old vampires do, in fact, turn into dust, but younger vampires might leave behind a skeleton or even a desiccated corpse. Unless they died in the presence of a null, in which case they would look like any other recently deceased. Jameson didn’t do the same kind of cleanup work I did, but he knew this as well as I did.

“Yeah, because no one has ever made a body disappear in the desert outside Vegas before,” I said sarcastically. “What about your bosses? Don’t Lucy and Arthur care that someone is killing vampires in their town?” Jameson didn’t respond. “Don’t you?”

“Scarlett . . .” His voice was weary. “Please go home. There’s nothing you can do here.”

This again. “I’m pretty frickin’ sick of you saying that,” I said, letting the frustration leak into my voice. “I can at least find the skinners.” And get justice for Wyatt was the unspoken part of that thought, but I wasn’t going to mention him. Or the fact that I wasn’t really sure I was up for this kind of work.

When he didn’t relent, I added, “Look, how about we speak hypothetically for a second?”

“Okay . . .” He looked wary.

“Hypothetically, if skinners really are in town killing vampires, what’s their endgame? What’s the point?”

He shrugged, uncomfortable. “Hypothetically, they would probably be here on a species bounty. Someone pays them to kill a certain number of vampires, and when they hit the goal they go back to where they came from. This would be the easiest hunting ground in the US.”

“Is that seriously a thing that happens?”

“Sure. If you’re rich and you’ve got a grudge against vampires, you can pay to thin the herd. Which means that even if you stop these hunters, more will just take their place.”

I threw up my hands in frustration. “I still don’t get it. Who are these people? Humans who kill vampires and werewolves, fine, but are they, like, a union? A club? One family with a serious grudge and excellent fertility rates?”

He smiled. Finally. “Nothing that dramatic. Killing the supernatural isn’t a full-time gig, like in the movies. Generally, skinners are private security guys who have found out about the Old World somehow and are put to use. They’re run through a firm that takes the occasional ‘specialty’ job.”

“So they’re mercenaries,” I said, not really as a question.

“You could say that,” he agreed. “Malcolm uses a company in New York, for when he needs to kill someone outside the five boroughs.”

Of course he did. God, Malcolm was a tool. “Why don’t we have them in LA?”

“Because until recently, LA was a podunk town in the Old World,” Jameson replied. “You probably do have the occasional contractor here and there, but they don’t do enough damage for anyone to notice.”

Touché.

Then I stopped dead. “Wait. If the skinners are just killers for hire . . . who’s paying them?”

He stopped, too, turning to point at me. “Now that is a great question, but I don’t know how you’d find the answer, short of capturing one of the skinners alive and torturing him for information.”