“Um . . . I’m not sure,” I admitted. “Expanding is a hell of a lot easier than suppressing—it’s just a matter of willing it bigger, and keeping a little bit of my attention there.”
“Could you cover the whole ranch?”
I shrugged. “I really don’t know. If I get upset enough, it’ll expand on its own. I won’t be able to control it. Then it gets really big.”
“Huh.”
I looked at Laurel. “Did you get what you needed from the crystal store?”
Laurel nodded. “And I followed your friend’s instructions for cleansing them; that’s why I was late. Are you sure this is going to work?”
“No,” I said honestly. “But if Wyatt and I can pull this off, you won’t even need to get out of the car. You guys are plan B.”
She nodded, slowly pushing out a breath through her mouth in a whoosh sound, reminding me of the LA women I know who’ve done serious Pilates. Then she snapped her fingers. “Oh, before I forget.” She reached into a console between the seats and pulled out two small black handsets with belt clips on them. Walkie-talkies. “We use these when we go camping,” she explained, handing one to me. It was the size of a fist, but nicely sturdy. I could feel a few tiny nicks and scratches. I hooked it onto the side of my pants. “We’ve tested the range at like fifteen miles,” Laurel added.
“Just make sure you stay outside,” Cliff put in. “Or bring them outside, if you have to. There’s not a lot we can do to help if you’re deep in the building and we can’t see you.”
I nodded and checked my watch. If we were going to get in position before the Holmwoods finished their show, it was time to leave. As the de facto team leader—what a horrible thought—I tried to think of something to say. We were going into this thing to right a wrong, save Jameson, and get Wyatt his revenge. But that didn’t make it not scary. Instead, I just glanced at Wyatt, who looked intense and focused despite his overlarge cowboy mustache. “Let’s go.”
“Good luck, you guys,” Laurel said, making eye contact with Wyatt.
“Oh, almost forgot.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a stack of bills wrapped with rubber bands. I handed it to Cliff. “Just in case,” I told him.
Laurel’s eyes widened, but she didn’t say anything. Cliff just nodded and jammed the money into his pants pocket. Wyatt and I had locked the rest of the hundred thousand in the safe back at the Venetian. There was no way I was bringing it along tonight.
“We’ll wait to hear from you,” Cliff promised me.
I grinned at him. “On my signal, unleash hell.”
Chapter 30
Wyatt and I got back into the pickup, and he drove us out of the city. He was quiet, thinking his own thoughts about this mission. As for me, I knew I should be nervous, or at least hyper-focused. Instead, my thoughts kept snapping back to this one memory from New York, like a song stuck in my head.
It had been one of the nights when Jameson and I sat up watching action movies from the nineties, which we both had a serious fondness for. Jameson had just had his third beer, and I was enjoying a full-on buzz. I’d only had a couple of hard ciders, but I wasn’t used to being able to drink—in LA I was on call most of the time, and you have to drive everywhere—so my tolerance level was shit. We were watching Last Action Hero and giggling like little kids at a slumber party.
“You know Danny went back to school on Monday and immediately got a girlfriend,” Jameson declared, pointing at the twelve-year-old protagonist.
“What? No way. He’s still just a movie nerd. And the real world is harsh, remember.”
“Nuh-uh. The kid is confident now. Confidence is half the battle in middle school. No, like, two-thirds of the battle.”
“I thought knowing was half the battle.”
He sighed, shaking his head. “I’m just not sure you understand fractions, Scarlett.”
I tossed a throw pillow at him, which he easily dodged. He finished his beer, set the empty on the coffee table, and gave me a speculative look. “What were you like in middle school, Lady Letts? Did you know what you were by then?”
“No, I didn’t find out ’til I was almost nineteen.”
“Ah. The age of innocence,” he said with a wicked grin. At the time, Jameson was nineteen, and far from innocent. “So who were you back in middle school?”
I tried to make my expression enigmatic, but probably failed. “Guess.”
“Hmm.” He paused the movie and turned his whole body toward me, making a show of eyeing me up and down. “Well, let’s see. I can’t picture you as a cheerleader”—I snorted—“and God knows you’re too clumsy for sports.”
“Hey,” I protested. He just looked at me for a second, and I had to duck my head, conceding. “Okay, that’s fair.”
“You are way too pretty to sit at the losers’ table, though, so I’m gonna go with . . . band geek,” he decided. “That, or goth chick. I could see you in black lipstick and existential angst.”
I laughed. “Nope, neither.”
“What, then?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t belong to any particular group, I guess. I always had a few friends for sleepovers or going to the mall or whatever, but I didn’t have a . . .” I waved my hand, trying to find the right word through my alcohol-induced blanket of fog.
“A tribe?” Jameson offered with a little smile. “That’s what white people call it now, right? You never found your tribe?”
“I guess not. I always had people around, but I always felt alone, if that makes any sense. Maybe all nulls are like that, or maybe I was just a freak, I don’t know.” Suddenly my buzz seemed to be wearing off, and I was anxious to change the subject. “What about you? Who were you, before you were a null?”
“You gonna guess?”
“Oh, right.” I made a point of looking him up and down. Back then he was lean and tall and quick-looking. “Jock,” I decided. “I’m gonna say . . . basketball.”
“Yeah, because you are racist as shit.”
I laughed. “Is that a no?”
His smile faded, and his eyes went distant. “I . . . honestly, I’m not sure I can remember who I was before Malcolm found me. I liked comic books and McDonald’s, I remember that much.” He leaned back against the couch, and for just a second, his eyes scared me. No one should look that old. Certainly not at nineteen. “That kid seems like a stranger now. More like a dream than an actual person.”
The movie was still paused, waiting for us to resume programming, but the atmosphere in the room had shifted. Our eyes met, and for just a second there was an opening, a moment where I could have said . . . something. Maybe I could have made him feel less trapped. Or at least less alone. Jameson never once said a bad word about Malcolm, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew that Malcolm was controlling him, that he made his pet null do terrible things. Sometimes Jameson would send me into the city to do touristy stuff, and when I returned to the apartment his knuckles would be skinned and bloody.
“Jameson . . .” I began.
He just looked at me, expectant and maybe even a little hopeful. He wanted to talk, I could see that.
But I was still piecing myself back together after learning the truth about Olivia: that she had killed my parents, that she wasn’t as out of my life as I had thought. I was sleeping with Eli, and half in love with Jesse, and so emotionally overextended that I didn’t have it in me to reach out to the one person I knew was maybe more broken than I was.
I saw that Jameson needed help, but I knew damned well that I was in no position to give it. “Uh, I’m getting kind of tired. Bedtime?”
The next day, we both pretended that the previous night’s conversation had never happened. I’d told myself that Jameson was a grown-up, that I couldn’t save everyone. And I’d gone back to LA to deal with my own shit.
Would things have turned out differently if I had said something else in that moment? Or was that just naive? Dashiell wasn’t wrong—Jameson had made his own choices, but it seemed so unfair that he’d had to pick between a shitty choice and a shittier one. It made me realize how lucky I was, despite Olivia, to have found myself in the one city on the continent where everyone in the Old World wanted peace more than they wanted power.