Midnight Curse

Shadow and I were pulling off the freeway onto 6th Street a little over an hour after we left the cottage. Downtown LA used to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland every night after dark, when all the proletarian worker bees vacated the skyscrapers, leaving empty streets that were well suited to vandalism, assaults, robberies, and worse. A decade and a half of serious effort by the city government had finally begun to resuscitate downtown nightlife, and it showed. The whole area was bustling with food trucks, neon lights, and young Hispanic men waving flashlights at passing cars, trying to direct everyone into their parking lots.

I turned the White Whale off 6th and onto Broadway itself, where Hayne had stationed some of his people, guarding sawhorses that blocked off the street. They recognized me immediately—between the van and the bargest, I was not exactly difficult to identify—and waved me through into eerie stillness. Every food truck, trinket kiosk, and newspaper stand on Broadway between 7th and 5th was conspicuously absent tonight. Unlike the street I’d just turned from, there were no pedestrians heading for happy hour at the downtown restaurants. No groups of girls in cheap dresses and wobbly heels, no slouching young men with darting eyes and whistles at the ready. I didn’t even see any homeless people. It was like driving into a ghost town.

Dashiell had, of course, arranged all this with the police and local businesses, through his customary blend of mind control and bribery. It actually wasn’t as hard as you might think—LA is the one city in the world where you can throw up sawhorses and block off intersections, and if pedestrians complain, you just say the two magic words: “movie shoot.” Hayne’s people, posing as film studio security, would keep people from entering the street until Kirsten could set up her various protection spells.

I parked in one of the shockingly vacant public lots, and fastened on Shadow’s service dog cape. There was an hour to go before the Trials officially began, and I figured there was a good chance that humans would be around delivering food and drinks. I clipped a leash on her collar, purely for appearances, and checked my phone again. Jesse hadn’t called. I frowned, not liking it. But Count Asshat would only have been awake for about forty-five minutes, and it would probably take him a little while to realize the boundary witch was missing. How much trouble could Jesse be in?

As if to answer, my phone buzzed in my hand. I managed not to drop it and saw an unfamiliar number with a 303 area code. Where the hell was 303? I answered it with a cautious “Hello?”

“Scarlett, it’s Allison Luther. Lex,” came a brisk voice. “Cruz isn’t answering his phone.”

“Oh. He’s meeting with someone,” I said. To my own ears, I sounded like an eighth grader who’s been called on in class and doesn’t know the answer. “Can I, um, take a message?”

“That phrase you mentioned,” she said. Was her voice always wary, or did I bring out something special in her? “Midnight drain? I asked my boss about it. It’s a vampire term. It comes from a poet named Lord Byron.”

“What does it mean?”

“If you’re talking about two vampires, a midnight drain is taking a very specific and horrible revenge on your enemy,” she explained. “Say you have two vampires, John and Jane Doe. If Jane hates John, or feels that he wronged her in a big way, then Jane might find all the living humans that John cares about most in the world. Maybe they’re John’s current food source, or maybe they’re actual human family from when he was alive. Are you following?”

“Yes.” And I felt like my heart may have stopped beating, but I didn’t say that part out loud.

“So Jane has all of John’s favorite living people,” Lex went on. “She turns them into new vampires, whom she can control and torment however she wants for the next twenty years. Because new vampires have to obey their makers. So it’s not just about killing the people that John loves. It’s turning them against him through torture and mind control.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Lex said, and for once, she sounded like a regular human person. “It’s basically using vampirism as a curse, in order to enact personal revenge. And in the Old World, it’s all technically legal. That’s the midnight drain. It’s . . . pretty dark stuff.”

I almost laughed. Lex was probably the most powerful boundary witch alive; she literally trafficked in death. And she was calling my situation dark. Suddenly Molly’s reaction to the news about her friends made more sense. Whoever took them wasn’t just going to turn them into vampires, or try to use them as prostitutes. They were going to torture those girls simply for knowing Molly, and the whole time, the girls would know exactly why it was happening. And so would Molly.

“Scarlett? Are you there?”

Right. Lex was talking to me. “Sorry, what?”

“I said, any changes with the boundary witch?”

“Still dead.” I needed Katia to wake up and give us some answers. I just had no idea how I was going to get them.

“I’ll be there tomorrow night. If anything changes before then, let me know, okay?”

I said goodbye, and, still reeling, Shadow and I headed into the theater.

Chapter 28

As I’d expected, the lobby was a bustle of activity: human delivery people and caterers, who would be leaving before most of the Old World arrived, plus a number of witches and werewolves who’d been hired to work as bartenders and waitstaff. Before and after the actual proceedings there would be a sort of cocktail party in the downstairs ballroom, run by Dashiell’s wife, Beatrice. My only job down there was to circulate at the party, making sure that everyone knew I was around, and capable of removing their powers at any time. Of course, I was also supposed to dissolve any actual altercations before they could escalate into violence.

At eight o’clock, the Trials would begin in the ornate two-thousand-seat auditorium. Afterward, I would need to go back down to the after-party for more peacekeeping. It would be a very long night, requiring a lot of nice manners and diplomacy, two things at which I perpetually sucked. But I was all too aware of how many eyes would be on our corner of the Old World tonight, and on me, especially. I was determined to do a good job even if it meant personally kissing the ass of every single person in the theater until my lips bled.

It’s funny; only the previous day, the Vampire Trials had seemed like the most important thing in my personal universe. Now all I wanted was to rush through the next few hours of litigation hand-holding, and then Jesse and I could get back to saving Molly.

And damn the consequences, rang a voice in the back of my mind. It sounded suspiciously like Eli. I told the voice to fuck off.

I wandered around a bit with Shadow, giving a nod of hello as we passed Will, who was addressing a small group of his werewolves. When Shadow had gotten a good look at the whole building, I led her to a small dressing room that had been outfitted to my specifications. Inside was a beanbag chair the size of a Mini Cooper, a buffalo thighbone, several of the world’s biggest Kongs, and a tablet that had been rigged by Abigail to play the Nature Channel.

Shadow bounded toward the bone, then stopped, midpounce, and turned to stare at me accusingly. Smart bargest meets obvious bribe.

“We talked about this, remember?” I said, keeping my voice calm and soothing. “You can’t be onstage with me during the Trials; it would look bad. But Will, Kirsten, and Dashiell will be right there. I’m not going to be in any danger.”

Shadow, who rarely vocalized above a growl, let out an unhappy woof that communicated long-suffering disapproval. Sometimes she reminded me so much of one of the unnaturally prescient dogs in family movies in the eighties and nineties, like Beethoven or Hooch. But then I’d see her absolutely slaughter one of the few squirrels dumb enough to stop by our yard, and I’d remember what I was actually dealing with.

Bringing Shadow anywhere was akin to bringing out the big guns. If I took her into the Trials, it would look like a declaration of aggression, the equivalent of pointing a rifle at the defendant during a court trial. But at the same time I wanted to keep her close in case there was trouble, especially werewolf-related trouble. So she couldn’t come in, but she needed to stay on site.