Jesse rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands. “You gotta get your shit together,” he said aloud. On top of his agreement with Dashiell and Kathryn Wong’s body, he was worried about the fact that he would soon be questioning Old World suspects without Scarlett around as a safe zone. Only a day earlier he wouldn’t have found that to be quite so daunting, but after Dashiell had pressed Jesse’s mind, he was reluctant to be vulnerable around any Old World creatures.
The problem, he thought, is that I don’t have any weapons I can use against werewolves.
Unfortunately, the only person he knew who sold silver weapons was a dead serial killer—Jared Hess, who’d made silver handcuffs, silver chains, and presumably other silver weapons as well. But all of Hess’s stuff had been seized by the police, and Jesse wasn’t about to break into a police evidence locker to steal it.
Then an idea struck him—Noah is in town. He checked his phone’s calendar to make sure he had the dates right. Yes. A plan began to clink together in Jesse’s mind, as he started his sedan and headed for Los Feliz.
Jesse’s older brother, Noah, was a stuntman, currently working full-time on a network action-adventure show about an FBI agent who could speak telepathically to his guardian angel. He usually shot on a soundstage in Vancouver, but he’d left Jesse a voicemail a few days earlier saying that he was doing exteriors in LA for the next two weeks. Jesse dialed with his phone’s Bluetooth. Noah often filmed his show at night, so he was likely to still be awake, and maybe even up for a minor adventure.
His brother picked up on the second ring. “Hey, Ugly,” Noah said cheerfully, by way of hello. Jesse grinned as he drove.
“Hey, Meathead. Whatcha doing?”
“Throwing a tennis ball. Max and I are having an endurance contest.” Max was their parents’ energetic pit bull mix. Noah had an apartment in Vancouver, but stayed with their parents when he was in LA.
“Getting your ass kicked?” Jesse asked.
“Yes, I am,” Noah said airily. “What’s up with you?”
“Well, it’s after eleven on a weeknight, so I was just wondering if you wanted to go out and do something stupid.”
“Come pick me up,” Noah said immediately.
Jesse arrived at his parents’ home in Los Feliz fifteen minutes later. The cheerfully over-decorated house had been tiny when Rob Astin and Carmen Cruz had bought it, long before Noah was born. Since then, they had added a new addition every few years until the house had mutated into a stubby maze, with his father’s three-room mixing studio fixed to the back of the building, and his mother’s kitchen nearly twice its original size. Amidst the clutter, mementos, and family warmth, it was starting to look like a place where hobbits might live, but Jesse was fond of it.
When he pulled up, Noah was sitting outside on the front steps with their parents’ dog, Max, who was a strange combination of pit bull and greyhound. Noah let go of Max’s collar when Jesse stepped out of his car, and the big dog bolted toward Jesse’s knees, jumping up to lick his face. “Whoa, buddy,” Jesse said, darting to one side to keep the dog’s paws off his chest.
“Max, off,” Noah called from the stoop. “Come.” The dog immediately abandoned his greeting ritual and trotted back to Noah’s side. He sat patiently next to Noah while he and Jesse embraced.
Jesse shook his head in amazement. “He only listens like that to you,” he marveled to his brother. “Everybody else has to yell four times just to get his attention.”
“That’s because he knows I’m the alpha here,” Noah said casually. The word set off alarms in Jesse’s brain, and it took a moment for him to remember that his brother meant nothing by it.
Noah stretched lazily with a gracefulness that belied his size. Although their faces were different and only Noah could pass for fully Caucasian, the two brothers had almost the exact same frame: same height, same shoulder width, even the same shoe size. But while Jesse had some honest muscle on him, Noah was enormous, the result of spending twelve hours a week at the gym to keep his body up to the same standards as the actor he doubled. For Jesse, looking at his brother was always eerie, like being half of a before-and-after ad for steroids.
“So,” Noah drawled, “what are we doing tonight, little brother?”
Jesse plopped down on the stoop next to his brother. “Do you still hang out with that crazy girl?” he replied. “The one who works at the twenty-four-hour pawnshop?”
Noah Cruz had been a stuntman in LA for a decade before he’d gotten the gig in Vancouver, and he had long ago tapped into the industry’s network of semi-employed actors, stunt people, prop houses, makeup artists, and so on. Noah called this crowd the Hollywood Peripheral, and he stayed in contact with them even when he was in Canada.
“She owns the pawnshop,” Noah corrected amiably. “And yes, Tommy and I are still . . . friendly.” He grinned. Jesse’s brother considered casual hookups to be the best part of his semitransient lifestyle. One of Noah’s companions was Tomorrow “Tommy” Vrapman, a former stuntwoman who considered Amy Winehouse to be her personal style maven. Noah’s smile faded just a little bit. “At least, I think we are.”
“Well,” Jesse suggested, “let’s go find out.”
“What are you pawning, little brother?” Noah asked, eyebrows raised. “Because there are like three pawn shops in between here and there.”