He held up his hands defensively. “Whoa, whoa! She was crazy, but she hadn’t done anything yet, then! And I had no idea she was going to kill your parents—”
“Really?” I snapped. “It didn’t seem awfully convenient that this woman who always wanted a family suddenly had a cute little null orphan following her around? That didn’t raise any goddamned flags?”
I was shouting now, and Hayne came striding into the room. “Miss Bernard, you need to calm down.”
“The hell I do,” I said, trembling.
Hayne’s face stilled, so that only his mouth moved when he spoke. “If you can’t calm down, you’re going to wake Dashiell, and that would be very bad for everyone,” he said, unfazed. “One of the upstairs vampires has already awoken, and she is very confused.”
My radius was expanding. Gee whiz, I must be upset or something.
I was breathing heavily, looking from Hayne, with his unflappable expression, to Will, who wasn’t meeting my eyes. “I need some air,” I whispered. Before either of them could respond, I scooped up the file, jamming it into more of a pile than anything else. I hugged it to my chest and marched down the long hallway. By the time I hit the front door I was running.
“Scarlett,” Will called after me. “Wait!” I felt him leave my radius, then enter it again as he caught up with me on Dashiell’s porch. Damned werewolf speed. “Goddammit, Scarlett, slow down!”
I whirled on him. “You know what this is? This is like those domestic abuse cases where the cops and the friends and the family and the shrink all know he’s about to kill her and she can’t save herself, but everybody just figures someone else will do something before that happens. Then they’re all surprised when she’s dead.”
That stopped him short. “What can I do?” he pleaded. “How can I make it up to you?”
Without a second of hesitation, I held out my hand. “Give me your keys.”
He blanched. “What?”
“Forget Dashiell, forget Olivia, and for two minutes pretend I’m an adult who can make sensible decisions and take care of herself.”
He stared at me, both of us breathing hard, and I saw him understand that I knew exactly what I was asking from him. Dashiell had given explicit orders to keep me guarded every minute until Olivia was caught. Will wouldn’t go against Dashiell’s orders once, when he might have stopped a train wreck, and I was daring him to do it for me now.
He dug in his pocket and dropped the keys in my hand. “Where will you go?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Where she won’t think to look for me.”
Will drove one of those massive four-door pickup trucks that looks like it could be dropped off a cliff with no damage. In fact, I may have seen that in one of their commercials. It was dark red and well-worn, with nicks and scratches all over the outside and suspicious tears in the inside upholstery. There was one of those big toolboxes welded into the truck’s bed, and it was covered in dents too.
Ah, werewolves. Hell on wheels.
The minute I pulled away from Dashiell’s, I felt better. It felt good just to be by myself again, for one thing, and to be doing something, even if I had no idea what I was actually going to do. My first impulse was to head to the beach, where I do my best thinking, but I decided that might be too predictable of me. If Olivia’s partner really was gunning for me in the daytime, there was no sense making it easy for her. Besides, I’d promised Will I was going to take care of myself, so I would damned well make the effort and stay away from my regular haunts. Which ruled out Hair of the Dog and Molly’s house too.
I pulled over a few blocks before the freeway exit to figure out where the hell I was going. What I really wanted, I decided, was to do something. Make something happen. I was tired of being the bait. But what could I do that wasn’t already being done? Jesse and Kirsten were following up on the witchcraft stuff. I had learned a lot about Olivia’s background, but was there anything that would actually help us find her? I looked at Olivia’s file, which I’d unceremoniously dumped on the passenger seat. Well, at least that was a place to start. I headed for the nearest coffee shop.
Chapter 16
Jesse had been picturing a storage center like all the ones in LA—a grouping of warehouse-sized buildings that had been divided into large spaces with sliding metal garage doors. But he’d never seen anything like the monstrosity Kirsten directed him toward. Instead of warehouses, it was a single building the size of an enormous parking garage, surrounded by a small, nearly empty blacktop that reminded Jesse more of a moat than a parking lot. There were six double-sized sliding garage doors lined up along each side of the building’s exterior, but no indication of where the internal dividers might be, so the building might have been divided into twenty-four identical cubes or any lesser number of units with more than one entrance. The building was also three stories tall, which made Jesse wonder if there were additional storage units on the second and third floors, or if each unit actually needed to be three stories tall. Surely the witches wouldn’t need to store anything that huge, right?
Right?
“That one, the third door from the left,” Kirsten said, pointing, but Jesse could see the crime-scene tape still squared off around a large patch of blacktop. There were three uniformed police officers loitering around, and he recognized the behavior: they were waiting for the all clear to head back to the station.