Dead Spots

“What?” he barked, harsher than he’d meant to.

“Um, am I just dropping you off here? I mean, there’s no way I’m gonna be allowed at the crime scene, right?”

He tried to focus. “No, I want you to come. You might see something I wouldn’t, something related to Ronnie being a werewolf.”

“But how am I gonna get that close to him?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. Do you know anything about photography?”

Chapter 17

My first dead body was a witch case.

It wasn’t as gruesome as what I would eventually see, and certainly didn’t compare to La Brea Park. I had been working and living with Olivia for about three months, and our days had settled into a routine: each morning we woke up late, ran for three miles, then drank a protein shake and made ourselves brunch. This was the one area where I’d actually shone. Olivia could barely boil eggs, and my mother had loved cooking, especially breakfast. She’d taught me how to do soufflés and perfect omelets. After brunch, we would talk about equipment—mostly what cleaning supplies worked best for what situations, but also what to keep in your vehicle that wouldn’t look too suspicious (like the bolt cutters), what to do with dead bodies, that kind of thing. I was already making a little Old World money as an apprentice, but Olivia helped me put a down payment on my van and paid for the custom freezer section to be installed. During dinner, she usually told stories that were funny and sometimes scary, but always instructive, and at night, if we didn’t have a job, I was free to do whatever I wanted, as long as I had a cell phone with a full battery and didn’t drink. We both stayed up late—most of our work was done at night, after all. I never went out much, though. I had no friends in the city, and I preferred to stay close to Olivia. I was like a scared little girl then, still adjusting to the sudden wrong turn that my life had taken, and Olivia was the only light left in my world.

She spent a lot of evenings trying to teach me about clothes—my mother hadn’t been a bad dresser, exactly, but LA and Esperanza standards are very different—and taking me shopping for the kind of clothes she wore: casual tailored dresses with high heels and earrings that matched the necklace. She dressed me up in the brands she liked best: Armani, Burberry, Christian Louboutin. Soon I was her perfect little clone—no, not like a clone. A daughter.

Olivia had inherited money from her husband, a banking consultant who’d died a decade earlier, though she never talked about him. I asked her once why she worked for the Old World if she didn’t need the money, and she just shrugged and said she enjoyed the challenge. That never seemed quite enough to me, but I wasn’t going to push. I never pushed Olivia, actually. If we got too close to certain subjects—her dead husband, her childhood, her education—she would get this hardness to her, a flashing steeliness that had me backing off quickly. It didn’t take very long for me to learn to keep my mouth shut.

That night, I had been planning to read for a while in my room, but Olivia took a call right after supper. She listened to Kirsten for a few seconds, nodded, and hung up, telling me to change and get in the van immediately. I ran to my room and pulled on the coveralls Olivia had given me—just like hers—and was delighted to find that I’d beaten her into the van by a few seconds. She gave me a weird little frown at that but got behind the wheel, driving us to a suburban area in Culver City where a bunch of sensible sedans and SUVs were parked in front of a little split-level house. It just looked like any other party. We backed the van into the driveway and strode through the door near the garage, Olivia in the lead like she owned the place.

There were five witches, plus Kirsten, waiting for us in a small kitchen. I had expected the women inside to look the part of the suburban mommies, but most of them were fairly young, mid-twenties, with a professional look. Like big-business interns who had the night off. There were six of them crowded around the modest kitchen table, which was piled with wads of used tissues. They had all been crying, except for Kirsten, who was leaning against the counter looking furious. Kirsten isn’t really pretty, exactly, but with her clear Swedish skin and tranquil blue eyes, you’d never really notice. She has what my high school drama teacher used to call presence. In the Old World, though, we just call it power.

“Death magics,” Kirsten said tersely, her calm eyes flashing now. She had on jeans and a black leather jacket over what appeared to be a pajama top. “They were playing with death magics.” She pushed herself off the counter and jerked her head so Olivia and I would follow. Kirsten stalked down the hall to a back bedroom, which looked like the morning after a Wicca-themed slumber party—lights on, used candles and spell books and chalk scattered around next to empty wine cooler bottles and an honest-to-goodness Ouija board. It could have all been fairly innocent, except for the corpse in the middle of the room—a man, stark naked, with no visible injuries, unless you counted the look of terror on his face. He wasn’t rotting, didn’t even smell yet, but no one would mistake him for alive. I looked away. I wasn’t a virgin, but I’d never actually seen a penis in full light before, much less a dead penis. My eyes fell on Olivia, as I waited for her to tell me what to do. She was already opening her black old-fashioned doctor’s bag, pulling out some surgical gloves and an extra-strength Hefty bag.

“Put these on,” she said, tossing me a pair of gloves. I fumbled the catch and had to pick them up, my hands shaking. The worst thing I’d seen up until then was a severed werewolf ear, but the wolf had grown it back quickly, and the detached ear looked more like a movie prop than anything else. But I wanted so desperately to impress Olivia with my cool.