“This is my fault. If you hadn’t let me move in here, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Molly looked at me like I’d lost it. “Well...duh.”
I blinked. “Huh?”
“Of course this never would have happened if you weren’t living here. But, Scarlett, I knew what I was getting into when I signed on. When Dashiell arranged for you to live here, I knew someday something might come looking for you. I just thought it’d be another vampire, because they wanted, you know, your help.”
“I don’t know what to do. I can’t put you at risk.”
She thought that over for a few minutes, then shook her head. “Scarlett...He’s given you an ultimatum, hasn’t he? A deadline?”
I hadn’t told her about that. It wasn’t paranoia; Molly really had been talking to Dashiell about me. I was hardly in a position to throw stones, though, since I’d just put her at risk. “Yes.”
“When is your time up?”
“At dawn.”
She winced, nodding. “Okay. There’s a Radisson downtown that has two basement floors. Drop me off there; walk me down into the basement. I’ll be safe there until all this is over. If you solve it before dawn, you can call me, and I’ll come home.” She hesitated. “I’m so sorry I can’t help you, Scarlett, but...”
“It’s okay,” I said miserably. “I understand.”
And I did.
It took almost an hour for us to get to the hotel, but I finally got her settled in a basement room. Molly paid for two nights in advance, telling the concierge she didn’t want to be disturbed, and I helped her duct-tape the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, just in case. When I finally got her down to her room, Molly hugged me so tightly that, for a second, I thought she still had vampire strength. “I really, really hope I see you tomorrow. I know you can figure this out.”
This one time, I let her hug me as long as she wanted.
As I pulled away from the hotel parking lot, the cell phone in my pocket began the opening chords of “Werewolves of London.” I fished the phone out of my pocket. “Hi, Will.”
“Scarlett.” His voice was grave. “I have this address. You need to get over there right now. It’s not a job, but—”
“Will...I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?” He sounded surprised. “I’ve never heard you say that.”
What did I have to lose? “Dashiell gave me until dawn to solve the La Brea Park thing, or he would assume I was involved. I’m sorry; I have to work on this right now.”
There was silence on the line, and I knew Will was thinking about the ultimatum. He could theoretically challenge Dashiell on my behalf, but as much as Will seemed to like me, he knew full well what a war with the vampires would do to this town. If he went to bat for me, there’d be casualties, and plenty of them. Not to mention the fact that the Old World’s LA experiment—allowing all three factions control in the same city—would be a resounding and bloody failure. On the other hand, if Dashiell killed me...Well, it’d be sad, but it was just one death, and I wasn’t even a werewolf.
I wasn’t even mad about it.
Finally, he spoke. “Scarlett, I didn’t know. But I think I might have someone who can help you. You need to get to this address as fast as you can.”
I rubbed my eyes. I knew Will probably wasn’t being deliberately cryptic, but I was all out of patience. “Please, Will, could you just tell me what’s going on?”
“I found the second null. Or actually, she found me.”
Chapter 26
When I really stopped and thought about it, I realized that, all along, I had assumed that the other null was evil.
Obviously, he or she was a bad guy, a murderer, and when we found him/her, I would call Jesse and he would do some really inspired cop-threatening, and then we’d know everything we needed in order to go to Dashiell.
I certainly hadn’t expected her to be a fifteen-year-old rape victim.
Will had sketched in the details for me: Until a few months ago, Corrine Tanger was a cheerful, well-adjusted teenager from an ultra-religious family—her father was a Pentecostal minister, and her mother was the church secretary. Two months earlier, however, Corrine had been attacked by her slimy biology teacher. She hadn’t gone into too much detail with Will—understandably—but the impression he’d gotten was that Corrine had been raped. The girl was too ashamed to tell her parents, and then the teacher started hinting about another “get-together” after school. Desperate and haunted, Corrine thought she’d found a way out when a stranger had approached her and offered a deal—if she accompanied him to kill the vampires in the park, he would make the teacher stop. The girl had seen it as the only way out of her own nightmare. She was not exactly the mustache-twirling villain I had been picturing since the case began.
As I drove to Corrine’s house in Glendale, I was so nervous that I had to clutch the steering wheel hard to keep my hands from shaking. What had happened to her was twisted and tragic and just so wrong, and I had absolutely no idea what to say to her. It wasn’t as if I would be showing off a model new life for her to step into. In fact, I realized, there was very little I could even tell her about what we are. My knowledge about nulls as a group is limited to pretty much what I’d told Cruz that night on the way to Dashiell’s.
Not for the first time, I deeply wished I had asked Olivia more questions. What would I do when Corrine had questions I couldn’t answer? And I’d never really known anyone who had been assaulted like that—should I mention how sorry I was? Avoid the topic all together? I felt a sudden flood of grief. I missed my mom. She always knew the right thing to say in any situation. I never do.