Hunter's Trail

Then there was a sudden knock on the door right behind me, and I jumped, heart suddenly ping-ponging around my rib cage. I hobbled back to the window and peeked through the curtain before opening the front door.

“Hey,” Jesse said. His face was expressionless. “We need to go talk to Henry Remus’s parents.”

I blinked at him. A lot had happened in the few hours since we’d spoken, but not enough for me to forget how hard he’d come down on me. “That’s it?” I said, my voice hard. “No ‘I’m sorry, Scarlett?’ ‘I shouldn’t have yelled at you, Scarlett?’ ‘My sincerest apologies for being a dickweed, Scarlett?’”

Jesse shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Last night wasn’t your fault,” he began. “I was angry about the nova getting away, and it was wrong to take it out on you.”

There was a telltale little catch in his voice. “But?”

“But . . .” He paused, choosing his words. “I’m not sorry that I got upset. That seeing those women affected me. I’m not sorry that it bothers me when it doesn’t bother you.”

Images bombarded my thoughts: Leah. Kate. Ruanna and Sam.

Anastasia.

I sagged against the door. Sometimes I think pushing those thoughts away is my one real superpower. “You really think that seeing those dead women didn’t affect me?” I whispered.

Jesse stared at me, unrelenting. “Did it?”

I gritted my teeth. What did he want me to do, put on a play for him? I was too tired and too strung out to continue this fight. I glanced down at my sweats. “If we’re gonna interview the parents, I should change,” I said tightly. “You can wait out here.”

I swung the door closed.

It was a very tense ride to the Remuses’ apartment. I had decided to take the “if you can’t say anything nice” approach, and Jesse probably had too, because neither of us spoke the whole way there. The only non traffic sound was the voice in Jesse’s phone’s GPS, telling him when to change directions. I sat and played with the dark green scarf that I was wearing to hide the bruises on my neck.

The Remuses lived in Temple City, one of a small cluster of towns just outside the border of the city of Los Angeles. I forget sometimes how big Los Angeles County really is. I had lived there for more than five years, and it seemed like I was always running into huge swaths of the area that I’d never seen before. Temple City was fairly nondescript in a Southern California kind of way: palm trees, decent houses on tiny lots, signs everywhere in a multitude of languages. I saw a lot of Asian women chattering in clusters outside store windows, often with a small child tugging at one of their hands.

The Remuses lived right on the border of the North San Gabriel area, in a big stucco hive of a building with cactuses (cacti?) instead of flowers planted along the walkways. We went into the lobby only to discover that the Remus apartment was garden-level, so Jesse decided we should find the exterior door rather than warn them that we were coming. I may have done some grumbling as I hobbled after him around the side of the building, but then I’d never promised anyone I would be gracious about it.

After a couple of false starts, and one of us threatening to smack the other with her cane if there was any more walking, Jesse and I found the right door. He held up his fist to knock, and I reached out without thinking and grabbed his wrist. He gave me a questioning look.

“Let me feel first,” I whispered, and closed my eyes. When a null spends as much time as I do around the Old World, the supernatural can start to feel like background noise in the way regular Los Angeles residents can stop noticing traffic, or creepy people on the public transportation. I would feel really stupid if I got distracted and didn’t notice that we were walking right into the nova. But I didn’t feel anything. I focused on the edges of my radius and pushed them outward again, but still didn’t pick up anything nonhuman. I opened my eyes and nodded at Jesse, who drummed his knuckles on the door. Nothing happened for a moment, but we could hear the sound of the television blaring through the door, so Jesse knocked again, harder.

The door was jerked open by an annoyed-looking man in his sixties. He was very tall, with deep vertical creases in each cheek that gave the impression of gauntness, although he had a pretty average build. “Ezekiel Remus?” Jesse asked, authority hardening his voice. He held up his badge. “I’m Detective Jesse Cruz. This is a civilian consultant, Scarlett Bernard.” Now that Jesse was investigating for the department semi-officially, I could no longer pretend to be Laverne Halliday. Which was fine with me. “May we have a few minutes of your time? It’s about your son,” Jesse continued.

The tinny cheers of a football game jumped in to fill the silence Jesse’s words left behind. Ezekiel Remus’s face didn’t change as he absorbed who we were, but his rigid shoulders slumped a little bit. For a second, I thought he was going to slam the door in our faces, but instead he abruptly swung it open. “Well, come in, then,” he muttered, like a pouting kid. “I guess I’ll turn that down.”

The door opened straight into a small living room decorated in Martha Stewart for Kmart. There was an afghan-covered yellow couch along one wall and a blue velvet easy chair sitting adjacent to it, both facing a modest flat-screen television mounted on the wall. The chair was still rocking a little from when Ezekiel Remus had stood up to answer the door. There were three beer bottles on an IKEA-style side table between the couch and chair, one still mostly full.