Shadow Hunt

I waved it off. “I’m okay, really. Mostly they’re keeping me here to . . .” I trailed off, then shrugged to myself. What the hell? I trusted Wyatt. “To keep an eye on the baby,” I finished.

Wyatt’s enormous mustache spread into a smile. “The . . . Miss Scarlett, you’re expecting a child?”

“Well, it better not be a dinosaur,” I replied.

“I don’t know, I think a triceratops would be pretty cool,” Jesse commented.

For a second, Wyatt looked like he might cry. “That’s . . . golly, that’s just wonderful. Congratulations to you both.”

Jesse and I exchanged a look. We had already dealt with this from a dozen different doctors and nurses, and I, for one, was tired of it. “Thank you,” I said simply. I hesitated for a second, then forced the words out. “Are you angry with me? About . . . Katia?”

“That she saved my life?” He gave me a gentle smile. “I was, a bit. I still want to be with my Ellen. But . . .” He gave a little shrug. “I swore to Mr. Dashiell that I would look out for you for a year. I reckon I need to stick around for it.”

“You . . . wait.” I’d known that Wyatt had sworn loyalty to Dashiell, of course—every vampire in the city had to do that. “He asked you to look out for me?”

Wyatt’s smile widened. “I volunteered. He agreed that you seem to need some extra help.” He glanced wryly at the cane. “Or maybe just a straw man. I can work with that.”

Jesse squeezed my hand. I didn’t know what to say.

Wyatt started to shift his weight to leave, then gave a little start. “Oh! I almost forgot.” He leaned his cane against the bed so he could reach into his jacket pocket. “This is for you.” He handed me a set of keys. I looked at him in confusion.

“Dashiell, Kirsten, and Will all went in on it together,” Wyatt explained. “It’s a Mercedes Metris cargo van.” His eyes twinkled. “Now I know why they were so obsessed with getting all the safety features.”

I looked down at the keys, and back up at Wyatt. “I . . . I . . .”

“It’s all paid off,” Wyatt added. “They wanted you to know how grateful they are. And I imagine it’s something of a baby gift, too.”

I looked up at Jesse with tears in my eyes. He smiled and kissed the top of my head. “Thank you,” I said to Wyatt.

The following morning, I went through a whole series of tests on me and the baby, and eventually the doctors pronounced me well enough to go home. The ones not on Dashiell’s payroll were mystified, but they eventually decided that I’d caught some sort of weird flu bug that had caused high blood pressure and a seizure. I was too busy being grateful that the baby and I were healthy to care what they called it.

The next morning, Thursday, I was discharged. Jesse, who hadn’t left my side except to shower and fetch clean clothes, got to wheel me out of the hospital.

“Don’t get used to this babying-me thing,” I warned him.

“Yes, Miss Scarlett,” he sang.

I made a mental note to punch him when he wasn’t pushing my wheelchair.

Epilogue

December 25 (eight months later)

“Elizabeth,” I suggested, tossing a kernel of popcorn.

Jesse caught it in his mouth, because he was better at this game than I was. He had an unfair mobility advantage. “Too Victorian. How about Posy?” He threw a kernel of popcorn toward my mouth, which I completely missed.

I made a face. “How many times do I have to tell you, we are not going to be those LA people who give their kid a weirdo name just to be different.”

We were sitting in my living room at the cottage, on opposite ends of the sofa, attempting to catch red- and green-dyed popcorn in our mouths. Jesse’s Christmas playlist was on the stereo, and he’d put up a little tree that glowed in the corner. I hadn’t helped, because I was so huge by then that I felt like Jabba the Hut. It was seriously affecting my popcorn-catching game. There would have been kernels covering my lap if not for the helpful bargest making sure we kept the floors clean.

“So that’s a no on Khaleesi?” Jesse teased.

I grabbed a whole handful of popcorn and chucked it at his face, which was stupid because he caught most of it in his mouth and managed to give me a smug grin while he was chewing. Shadow happily snapped up the popcorn that had fallen on the floor. Half the time it didn’t even touch the ground before she got it.

Jesse was trying to keep me distracted, I knew. I’d tried to call Jack the day before to wish him and the kids a Merry Christmas, and my brother had let the call go to voice mail. In the last eight months, we’d had one phone conversation, in which he told me that he’d be happy to welcome me back into his life—whenever I quit working for Dashiell. Jack had quit his position with the cardinal vampire a few days after he’d learned about Dashiell’s “criminal activity.”

Jesse had tried to convince me to tell Jack about the baby, but I’d kept it to myself. I didn’t want my brother to compromise his (valid) principles because I’d extorted him with guilt. But I missed him and Juliet and my niece and nephew. I’d thought about sending gifts, but it seemed manipulative.

Jesse and I had exchanged Christmas gifts the night before. I was tired all the time now, so mine was lame—an enormous tin of popcorn and a book. But Jesse had surprised me with a thick manila file. He had hired a private detective in New York to investigate Jameson’s background. His mother had died three years earlier, it turned out, and afterward his father had moved down to Jamaica to help a distant cousin with a boat business. The file did include a phone number for Jameson’s older sister, Diana, who I planned to call in a few days, once the holidays were over. I just wasn’t sure yet what I would say.

The private detective had also managed to dig up several photographs of Jameson, which was a small miracle considering he’d worked for a security-conscious vampire. Jesse had framed the nicest one, and I’d already set it out in the baby’s room. I was deeply touched by his gesture, especially since he had every right to be jealous.

“What about your mom’s name?” Jesse suggested. “Sarah?”

“I like it, but it seems a little rough to name her after two, you know . . . dead people,” I said ruefully. I had already decided that the baby’s middle name would be Jamie, to honor her father. If I thought it wouldn’t make me want to cry every time I shouted at my kid, I would have made it her first name. But I wasn’t strong enough for that.

“You’ll figure it out,” Jesse assured me. “You’ve got another week and a half yet. Molly will be back tonight, right? You know she’ll want to add her two cents.”

Molly was visiting her friends in San Francisco again, bringing them some Christmas presents. I’d been seeing less of her the last month, since she’d been busy buying furniture and decorating her new place. The little guest cottage wasn’t big enough for three adults, a bargest, and a baby, and before I could even raise the subject, Molly had insisted on moving out.

I’d protested—I wasn’t ready to be far away from her, especially when I was feeling fat and useless. But Molly had a surprise for me too: she had contacted the vampire who owned the mansion adjoining the guest cottage, and arranged to buy it. Vampires are stupid rich. Anyway, she was going to be living just a few dozen feet away, and she had insisted on setting up a nursery in the big house, too, so she could babysit when I had to go out on jobs. In true Molly style, her nursery was ostentatious as hell.

I put a handful of popcorn in my own mouth and took the Batphone out of the pocket of my hoodie—which was actually one of Jesse’s that I’d taken to wearing around the house like a bathrobe. I checked the screen, but there was nothing to see.

Jesse was watching me. “Tonight is the thing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I kind of wanted to be there, but they didn’t invite me.” I tried to put the phone back in the hoodie pocket, but it fumbled and fell on the floor under the coffee table. I sighed, leaving it there for now. Reaching for it would make me fall off the couch, and I’d already done that many times. This was exactly why Jabba the Hut had so many servants around. Jesse didn’t pick it up either, having learned the hard way not to run around fixing things for me. “I guess I keep waiting for someone to change their mind and call me,” I admitted.