Midnight Curse

“Hey, Scar, I think you dropped this,” came Jesse’s amused voice. In my peripheral vision I could see him standing at the picket fence, tugging my knife free. Without taking my eyes off Noah, I reached out a hand and felt Jesse slap the knife handle into it.

“Everything okay, big brother?” Jesse said cheerfully. He’d obviously seen the whole thing, and was enjoying the hell out of the moment.

“Yeah. Fine.” Breaking the eye contact—ha, I won the staring contest—Noah straightened his shirt, brushing sidewalk grit off the back of his pants. “I gotta get going. Good luck with your . . . whatever.”

“Same to you,” Jesse practically chirped. His grin was as wide as I’d ever seen it.

In the car, Jesse silently entered the storage facility’s address into his GPS and pulled into traffic. He was waiting for me to speak first, but I could see his lips struggling to contain a smile.

“I’m sorry,” I said eventually. “That was childish.”

He gave me a little eh shrug. “How much of that did you hear?” I asked.

“Refreshingly helpful?”

I slunk lower in my seat. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” His voice turned serious. “Look. I figured he wanted to do some sort of ‘don’t hurt my brother’ speech, and we might as well get it out of the way. But he took it too far.”

My eyes lifted. “Yeah?”

Jesse nodded. “What happened between us back then . . . it hurt me, but I also know it was a hell of a lot more complicated than you using your feminine wiles to Postman Always Rings Twice me. That’s just insulting to both of us. Noah was out of line, and he deserved to have his ass handed to him.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

Jesse’s face lit up again. “But can we talk for a second about how you just knocked down my enormous brother like he was a cardboard cutout? Have you been taking martial arts lessons or something?”

I settled back in my seat. “Nah. That kind of thing takes years and years to master, and I’m too clumsy to be a quick study. Also, lazy.”

“So?” His eyebrows were still raised.

I tried to shrug it off, but it was obvious he was curious as hell. And he’d stuck up for me. He deserved a real answer. “I wanted to be able to protect myself better, and everyone underestimates me anyway, so I decided to cheat,” I explained. “Instead of learning a whole martial arts discipline, I learned a few tricks. Throwing a knife isn’t that complicated; it just requires a little technique and a lot of practice. While I was doing that, I practiced a handful of aikido throws. Plus how to throw a punch and a couple of kicks.” I shrugged. “If I ever went up against someone with serious training, I’d get my ass kicked, but most of the time when someone Old World gets in my radius, they don’t know how to handle themselves physically. They’re used to using werewolf strength or spells or whatever to defend themselves.”

“Who taught you?”

I told him about my lessons with Marko, and how I’d had plenty of time to practice because there had been fewer crime scenes to clean up. “Hayne’s been showing me some security stuff, too, like how to look for a bomb under your car or how to cuff somebody.” I shrugged. “I’m still shit at lockpicking, though.”

“I’m impressed, Scarlett,” Jesse said. I wanted to laugh it off, but his face was serious. “You’ve learned a lot in the past three years.”

“In some ways,” I said, looking out my window. I was thinking of Eli again. “And in some ways I feel dumber than ever.”

Chapter 15

We made a quick stop to fortify with coffee and donuts—Shadow ate six—before we got on the freeway toward Thousand Oaks. As predicted, Jesse hit rush hour traffic, but it was much worse going west to east than in our lane. He managed to keep the car at a nice 45 mph clip. Basically an LA miracle.

We rode in silence for a while. Exhaustion from the night before was seeping back into me after my little adrenaline rush, and I was content to stare out the window at the miles of passing freeway. The smog doesn’t usually terrorize LA as much in the winter, but it was overcast in a way that seemed to make everything dingy. Or maybe that was my mood talking.

After half an hour, however, Jesse broke the silence. “How much do you know about Molly’s history?” he asked.

“Not much,” I confessed. “You remember what it was like when I lived with her. She didn’t like to talk about the past or future, just the now. It was like we were characters in a sitcom who only came to life when the TV was on.”

“She must have given you some kind of impression,” he insisted. “Maybe not details, but something.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. I know she was born in Wales, and she sometimes talked about living on a farm in her human life. I got the impression that her family was poor, with lots of kids.”

He nodded. “What about after she was turned?”

“She mentioned living in New York and New Orleans.” I frowned. “Come to think of it, her movements did strike me as a little weird. Vampires prefer cities, for the most part, and they do move around a lot, but it’s usually pretty . . .” I searched for the right word. “Migratory?”

“What do you mean?”

“Say you’re turned into a vampire in Seattle,” I explained. “You might move down to Portland first, and after a few years go to San Francisco, then San Jose, Los Angeles, San Diego. If you dislike a certain place you might not stay there for long, but vampires usually move in a straight line. It’s more efficient, especially since travel is hard for them. You proceed in a line for decades, and then maybe you make a big jump, like to a new continent. But once you get there, you start the line again.”

“That makes sense,” he said. “So how did Molly break the pattern?”

“If I’m remembering right, she went from Europe to New York, which is typical, but instead of proceeding in a line, she went to New Orleans, then LA.”

“Like she was running from something,” Jesse remarked.

“I guess.”

“Anything else?”

I searched my memory. “She never talked about the vampire who made her, but she gave me the impression that he was a serious asshole. He must’ve been, because Molly killed him a couple of decades back. She and Dashiell both verified it.”

Jesse’s eyes sparked with interest. “Is that common? For vampires to kill their maker?”

“Not at all. From what I’ve seen, most of them are grateful to their makers, if not outright worshipful. Molly’s must have been a bad dude for her to turn on him. But again, he’s definitely dead.”

“Hmm.”

By 9:30 a.m. we were pulling into the storage unit. In the harsh light of day, the place didn’t look quite as nice as it had the night before. There were plenty of cars in the lot now. Despite the risk, I made the decision to bring Shadow inside as my service dog. This was a vampire hangout, which made it very unlikely that the daytime people knew anything about witches, werewolves, or the bargest. Taking her with us seemed like less of a risk than leaving her in the car to scare people who walked past. If someone called the police, we would get into a whole new kind of trouble.

Inside the lobby, a young Armenian woman stood at the front desk, holding an open book with one hand while she took notes with the other. She wore a pressed white button-down shirt and an engraved name tag that read Anush. She didn’t so much as look up as we approached. I glanced at the title of the book: Writing Your First Screenplay. Oh, Los Angeles, I love you.

By unspoken agreement, I hung back a bit and let Jesse take the lead. He was better at the whole investigation/talking to strangers thing, and it didn’t hurt that he was . . . aesthetically pleasing. “Hello,” he said to Anush, turning his smile up a few degrees. “We need to get into one of the safety deposit boxes.”

“Be with you in just a sec,” she said distractedly. At my feet, Shadow let out a loud, almost theatrical yawn. The woman paused and leaned forward to peer over the desk. “Whoa,” she breathed. “That is . . .”