Midnight Curse

No hesitation this time: she licked the air and wagged her tail with great enthusiasm. If she could speak English, that would have translated to “Killing people? Where do I sign up?!” A big, glorious doggie grin was spreading across her face, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Jesse scooting back a little.

Oh, boy.

Chapter 40

I didn’t know City of Industry that well, but Jesse had been right about the area around the building: it was completely deserted. In fact, the streets were so empty that something about it made my thoughts itch. When the GPS said we were about two blocks away from our destination, I finally figured out what felt off: there were no homeless people on the streets. I didn’t expect anyone to be panhandling at 4 a.m., but usually you see them all over the city, camped out in doorways and alleys. Around the Mock-Donald’s, there was nobody—either because the area was too void of people for them to bother sleeping here, or because they’d been eaten by vampires needing snacks.

I decided not to pursue that line of thought any further.

We had talked about doing a drive-by to scope it out, like we did at Frederic’s place, but with no other cars on the street my van would be way too obvious. Instead, we parked on Gale Avenue, almost a full block away, and the three of us crept up Green Drive like we were competing for Most Silent Walker. Shadow won, of course, but Jesse and I held our own. I was glad my boots didn’t have heels, or I would have had to tiptoe. It was fairly cool, in the low fifties. Jesse had put on his leather jacket, and I was glad for the drapey top I’d worn over my weapons.

Green Drive was just a little offshoot of Gale, shaped like a big staple, with the Mock-Donald’s at the corner. There wasn’t much cover—too many big empty parking lots—but we made it to a clump of trees just outside the Mock-Donald’s lot without incident. The streetlights were out, just like Jesse had predicted, but it’s never fully dark in Los Angeles, where smog reflects all the light of the city back down into it.

Jesse and I paused for a second, looking at the building, checking how it lined up with Jesse’s sketch. I could make out the big golden arches and the building’s south entrance, which faced the road. Overall, the Mock-Donald’s was so eerily perfect that I had a sudden, serious craving for a Quarter Pounder. Not even joking. It shouldn’t have surprised me—after all, this was LA, the city that brazenly celebrated the concept of fakery. But it was still jarring to see the familiar golden arches in connection with vampires. Two things that just did not go together.

There were lights on inside, but only toward the back of the building, which didn’t help us. We could, however, see the beefy guy leaning against the wall a foot from the south door. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, and had an enormous handgun hanging loose from one hand. After a few seconds of letting my eyes adjust to the dimmer light, I saw the walking cast on his leg and recognized the guy: Greasy Beard, the lone survivor from Frederic’s condo.

“You ready?” Jesse asked in a low voice.

“Almost.” I looked down at the bargest. Shadow had a big, goofy doggy grin, the same look you’d see on a golden retriever on her way to the dog park. I crouched down next to the bargest, scratching the scaly bald area on her neck. “Okay, girl,” I said, and her attention whipped to my face. I grabbed Jesse’s hand, tugging him down next to me. “Jesse’s our friend, and Molly is our friend. You’re not going to hurt them, right?”

I don’t know if it’s physiologically possible for a regular dog to roll its eyes, but Shadow gave me a look that said, Duh, of course not as clearly as if she’d said it out loud. Why hurt your friends when there were plenty of other people here to hurt? “Good. Just like we talked about, okay? If you can keep them silent without killing them, do it.” She licked the air near my face. “Go,” I whispered.

Without the slightest hesitation, Shadow seemed to slip into the nearest . . . well, the nearest shadow. I knew from experience that watching the bargest at night was like watching a shell game: you sure as hell needed to keep your eyes glued to the target, or you were going to lose track of it instantly. Even so, my eyes couldn’t stay with her once she neared the building, so I started watching the MC idiot instead. He was checking something on his cell phone—and then Shadow was on him. She had somehow circled and raced directly toward the guy, face to face, so that by the time he looked up and opened his mouth to scream, she was ripping out his throat with a single jerk. He didn’t even have time to lower the cell phone, and we saw the chunk of flesh come loose in the light from the little glowing screen.

Beside me, Jesse started swearing in Spanish, and even I flinched. So much for trying to let them live.

Mission accomplished, the bargest came prancing back to me, as proud as if she’d just taken out a particularly pesky neighborhood squirrel. Tail wagging, she thrust her muzzle into my hand, looking for praise. Wet blood smeared into my palm. I sighed.

“Yes, that was very well done,” I told her, “but did you really have to kill him?”

Shadow just pranced in place.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Jesse remarked, “the guy called you the c-word earlier.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. At Frederic’s house.”

“Well, okay,” I muttered under my breath. “Good girl. Let’s move.”

We circled the building to the west side. The east side entrance would be closest to where we thought Oskar was keeping Molly, but there were also two doors and two guards there, which increased the likelihood of one of them getting a shot at us. So we went left, and repeated almost the exact same pattern: Jesse and I hung back, Shadow went in and killed the unsuspecting biker, a short, chubby guy who was at least ten years younger than any of the other bikers we’d seen. Then I nodded to Jesse, and he and Shadow trotted toward the south side of the building, while I slipped to the door.

As I moved, I did my best to shrink my radius. This particular trick was actually more difficult than broadening the circle of non-magic around me, but I’d been practicing for months, hoping to make the vampires more comfortable being in a room with me. More than any other Old World creature, vampires hated being near nulls. I hadn’t told anyone I’d been working on contracting my radius, because I wasn’t that great at it yet. But the longer I could keep my radius small, the longer I could go without Oskar sensing my presence. My record was getting it down to about two feet around me instead of the usual ten to fifteen, but I couldn’t hold that for long.

The Mock-Donald’s had a lot of windows, so I went in low, moving as quickly as I could. Silently, I pulled a knife with one hand and wrapped the other around the glass door, tugging it slowly. The door was locked, which actually relieved me: an unlocked door would have probably indicated a trap.

I never could learn how to pick locks, which was why I’d stolen a big-ass geode paperweight from Will’s home office. I took it out of my pocket, held it carefully so my fingers wouldn’t impact, and swung it as hard as I could toward the lower half of the glass doors. Never underestimate the power of hitting something with a big fucking rock.

The door didn’t shatter dramatically, like in a movie. The first swing made it crack into a thousand spiderwebs, with a small chunk falling out of the middle. Quickly, I aimed one more shot at the worst of the spiderwebs, and the entire pane of glass collapsed.

Then I expanded my radius.

I felt them right away: two vampires, one much weaker than the other. Only one of them was moving around; that had to be Oskar. He was the weaker of the two, which explained why he’d arranged such an elaborate revenge against Molly: he wouldn’t be able to beat her in a straight-up fight.

I could have theoretically stood there and tracked his movements inside my expanded radius, but that would have required so much concentration that he could probably saunter up and kill me with my own rock. Instead, I ran inside.

The counter—fake counter, I reminded myself—was on my left, so I ducked low. The “restaurant seating” portion of the building was dark, with chairs sitting up on tables, but light glowed through the window and door from the “kitchen.” I edged along the counter, closer to the door with the light.