Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel) (14 page)

The werewolf seemed calmer, like his burst of rage had helped him somehow, relieved a little pressure. “Ironically,” he added, “I have much better control as a wolf. But then it becomes worse, afterward. To come back.”

Jesse could see Whittaker giving in and changing between moons, even going against his alph
a . . .
but his reaction to Jesse’s question hadn’t been faked. He hadn’t turned someone between moons. However, there was still the problem of Terrence Whittaker’s interest in Scarlett.

“I believe you,” Jesse said finally. “And honestly, I don’t give a shit what goes on within the pack.” He stepped closer. “But you need to stay away from Scarlett Bernard.”

Whittaker’s eyes went hollow. “She has a cure,” he said feverishly. “She can make it all go away. She could give me my life back.”

“No,” Jesse said carefully, “she can’t.” It was the truth. Scarlett might be able to change people, but it also might kill her to try. And she could never give this man back what he had lost.

Whittaker looked at him just as Riddell had, searching for signs of a lie. Jesse stared him down. Finally, without breaking eye contact, Whittaker muttered, “We’ll see. You’re just a cop. You can’t keep us away from her.”

Jesse took a deep breath, letting his senses focus on the noise of the neighborhood. He made the calculation, and decided to take the risk. “Maybe I can’t,” he said. Then Jesse raised his gun and shot Whittaker through the meatiest part of the thigh. The werewolf howled and flew to the ground like he’d been knocked down with a wrecking ball. “But I can slow you down,” Jesse added.

If Whittaker heard this, he didn’t respond, because he was busy screaming as the silver bullet burned its way through his leg. As Jesse understood it, the wound would heal slowly, at a normal human rate, at least until Whittaker changed again. And it would hurt like hell.

Jesse got back in his car to head west, back toward the 10 freeway and Scarlett. A half mile away from Terrence Whittaker’s house, though, he had to wrench the wheel to the right, pulling the car across two lanes of angry traffic. As soon as he was off the main lanes he threw open the car door and vomited all over the pavement.

So much for calculated risk.

Chapter 19

“You
shot
a guy?”

My voice had been too loud, and Jesse made a shushing motion with his hand. Luckily it was four thirty in the afternoon, and nobody else was seated at the little outdoor taco stand on La Cienega. I hadn’t gotten lunch yet, so this was supposed to be a working meal to compare notes on the case. At least, I had
thought
we were working on the case. Apparently Jesse had decided to appoint himself my own personal assassin instead.

“Just in the leg,” Jesse muttered. “It was a perfect through-and-through. Just to slow him down, buy us a little time.”

“This is not a Johnny Cash song, Jesse. You can’t jus
t . . .
shoot
people who come after me,” I hissed at him. “You’re a cop.”

“I know,” Jesse said, his voice miserable. He was hunched over his untouched basket of chips and guacamole, his shoulders slumped in guilt or defeat or both.

“I didn’t ask you to step in,” I went on. I couldn’t seem to get my mouth to stop moving. “I didn’t need your help. Molly and I had it covered.”

Now Jesse looked up, his gorgeous eyes skeptical. “For how long, Scarlett? They were just going to come after you again while you weren’t with Molly. For all we know, Anastasia is waiting outside your house right now.”

“They don’t know where I live,” I retorted, trying to keep the uncertainty out of my voice. “But that’s not my point,” I added. “My point is: don’t shoot people.” I took a bite of my burrito and shook it at him for emphasis. “Use your powers for good,” I said, around a big mouthful of chicken and rice.

“It was a bad decision, okay?” he said tiredly. He poked lifelessly at the chips. “For a second there I thought I could play in their league, go on the offensive. But I didn’t become a cop so I could punish people for things they
might
do.”

We sat there for a few minutes in silence. I didn’t know whether to hug him or hit him. Whatever Jesse might say about the shooting, he’d done it to protect me. For obvious reasons, Terrence Whittaker was never going to press charges, but Jesse had still risked his entire career as a cop for me. And that fel
t . . .
big. Too big.

Jesse continued to stare gloomily at his food. I was eating ferociously, though, becaus
e . . .
well, I was hungry. And I’ve never been the type to lose my appetite easily. My basic philosophy regarding eating during an emergency breaks down along the lines of “Moral crisis: bad. Spicy chicken burrito: good.”

Jesse was looking at me with a complicated expression that I couldn’t interpret. Guilt? Resentment? “You were going to tell me what you learned from Leah and Kathryn’s people,” he stated.

“Yeah, but I got a little sidetracked by ‘I shot a guy.’” Jesse gave me a look that I could definitely interpret as annoyance, and I added in a softer voice, “Kate. She went by Kate.”

He nodded. “What did you learn about Leah and Kate?”

I passed him my shoddy notes and filled him in on everything I remembered. “So I have a list of names of people that were connected to them—Leah’s boyfriend, Kate’s sister, and so on. And I know of a few activities each one liked. But I couldn’t find any obvious connection between them. The only thing that even comes close to a match are the animal rights groups, but Leah was in this PAW group and Kate’s a member of Humans for the Protection of Animals.”

Jesse sighed. “Because that would have been just too easy, wouldn’t it.” It wasn’t really a question, but I nodded anyway. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “we’ll widen the circle. You should talk to the parents, if you can find them, and friends, and so on. I’ll try to get some membership rosters for the animal rights groups, too—it’s possible that Leah was in PETA or Kate was in PAW and their roommates just didn’t know about it.”

“True,” I said, brightening a little.

“And I’ll keep talking to the werewolves,” Jesse added. I began to protest, but he overrode me. “I know you want me to stay out of your business. But we need to stay on top of the threat against you, and we need to find out if there are any more connections between the nova wolf and the rest of the pack, aside from one of the pack members accidentally attacking someone.” He finally picked up a chip, dunked it liberally in the guacamole, and chewed. “I just
know
that there’s another connection here. I know it.”

I sighed. “So who are you going to talk to next?”

Jesse’s eyes gleamed. “Anastasia.”

Oh shit. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t bother to protest. I doubted that Anastasia was involved in the nova wolf debacle, but she had certainly proven herself willing to go against the alpha’s orders before. I texted Will to get Ana’s address.

When my phone chimed I used my hand to shield the screen from the afternoon sun and squinted at it. “Huh.”

“What?” Jesse asked. Traffic was picking up on La Cienega, and we had to nearly shout to hear each other.

“Anastasia’s working at the bar tonight.”

I glanced across the table at him. His eyes were practically bugging out of his head with surprise. “Will’s letting her work, after all the shit she’s stirred up?” he said indignantly.

I shrugged. “I guess he’s just too short-handed.” Since both Caroline and Eli wer
e . . .
off the payroll.

“Oh, yeah,” Jesse said, remembering. Then he added, “And I suppose the bar gets busy on New Year’s Eve.”

“That’s today?” I said stupidly. I had completely forgotten.

Jesse snorted with laugher. “You forgot?”

“Hey,” I protested. “I lost track of the days because I was
in a coma.
” I reached across the table and stole one of his chips. Just out of spite.

“To be fair,” he admitted, “it may have slipped my mind for a minute there too.” His eyes drifted away into what I think of as his “Pensive Cop Face.”

“There’s not much point in trying to interview more people today,” he concluded. “Everybody’s going to be getting ready for New Year’s Eve stuff.”

“What do you want to do, then?” I asked. He was still staring off into space, so I picked up another chip and threw it at his nose.

“What? Hey,” he sputtered.

“Just getting your attention, Detective,” I said sweetly. “What’s the plan? Go home and ice our extremities?”

“No,” he said slowly. “I have another idea.”

Of course he did. “What’s that?”

“Let’s go stake out Will Carling’s house.”

Chapter 20

We knew the nova wolf had changed two days ago, Jesse explained, because Leah Rhodes had died not long after he had attacked her. The nova should need twice as much time before he could change again, but according to Will, he was already more powerful than he should be. “You people are always telling me magic is unpredictable,” Jesse finished. “So it seems possible that the nova wolf can change faster than we expect.”

“Even if he can,” I argued, “and even if he attacks someone else, there’s no guarantee she’l
l . . .
” I winced. “You know. Die right away.
And
there’s no guarantee that he’ll dump the body at Will’s again.”

“I think he’s going to keep leaving the women at Will’s,” Jesse contended. “It’s too good of a ‘fuck you’ to the werewolf pack. And you—I mean,
we
,” he amended, “keep helpfully disposing of the dead bodies for him.”

“Still,” I said, unconvinced.

“Do you have something better to do?” Jesse asked, innocently raising his eyebrows. I glared at him, not speaking. We both knew I have essentially no life. “I’ll buy you a great big bag of ice,” he wheedled.

“You can get ice free at any fast food place.”

Jesse held up two fingers. “Then I’ll buy you two bags of ice,” he said playfully.

I rolled my eyes and reached for another chip to throw, but he pulled the little paper carton out of my reach. “Is that a yes?” he persisted.

“No, that’s a ‘fine, I give up.’ Totally different thing.”

We split up for a couple of hours. Jesse wanted to stop at his place to shower and change, and I wanted to restock my cleaning supplies from my big stash at Molly’s, just in case. At six, we met up on Temescal Canyon Road, which was completely deserted. I left my van on a side street and rode with Jesse in his sedan the rest of the way. On Will’s street we parked as far away from Will’s house as we could while still keeping it in view. I wanted to keep the White Whale close by so we could get to it easily if the nova showed up, but we also wanted it to look like there was nobody around, so the nova would feel like he could get away with dumping another body. And if he’d done any research about the LA Old World, he might know my van.

We were settled into our stakeout by six thirty. I was sitting in the passenger seat with the promised ice packs above and below my bad knee. They were wrapped in place with an old flannel scarf I’d brought from my van. Jesse had stopped for snacks at a 7-Eleven on his way over, and he was subjecting me to a lesson in the art of the stakeout food.

“It has to be able to stay in the car for hours,” he explained very seriously, “but not go bad. And it can’t make you have t
o . . .
you know, go to the bathroom right away. So salt is good, because it helps you retain water.” He handed me a small package of pretzels.

“I thought for sure there would be doughnuts,” I complained. I could not get a friggin’ doughnut on this case.

“Doughnuts are bad for you,” Jesse said around a mouthful of pretzel shards. “These are naturally fat free.” He swallowed and dug through the plastic grocery bag between us. “But I’ve also got apples, granola bars, let’s se
e . . .
peanuts, Naked Juice, and Diet Coke.” He looked up at me expectantly.

“
Naked Juice
? Do the other cops know you’re a closet health nut?” I grumbled.

“Plenty of cops eat like this,” Jesse said, with great dignity. “You’re just prejudiced. Against the fuzz.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at that.

Time passed slowly. We got on the topic of car games—as it turned out, both of our families had taken us on road trips as kids—and for a while we played Twenty Questions and My Mother Owns a Grocery Store, which turned out to be basically the same game. After a couple of hours, though, I started to fidget, flipping the compartment between our seats open and closed. I peeked inside—nothing there but CDs. “Do you have any gum?” I asked, and without waiting for an answer I opened the glove compartment. When the little interior light turned on, I saw a glossy black pistol resting in a specially contoured piece of foam. “Whoa. How many guns do you need?”

“That should have been locked,” Jesse grumbled. He reached over my lap to close the glove compartment, locking it with the ignition key. “And no, no gum. But I’ll put it on your stakeout wish list for next time.” He put the keys back in the ignition, eyeing my face. “You look cold,” Jesse commented.

I nodded. It was chilly in the car, and though rotating the ice packs on and off my knee felt great, the ice wasn’t doing me any favors when it came to body heat. I put the ice packs on the floor of the car, and Jesse twisted around to dig in the backseat. He handed me a fleece pullover that smelled like oranges and Armani cologne. I thanked him and spread it over my lap.

“So
did
you have any plans for New Year’s Eve?” he asked.

“Nah,” I admitted. “I was just going to stay up and watch TV or something.”

“With Molly?”

“No, she usuall
y . . .
goes out.” Party holidays like New Year’s and St. Patrick’s Day are big feeding opportunities for the vampires, especially the ones like Molly who can pass for young people.

It’s not that I don’t know anyone else in Los Angeles. I know a few people from my hometown who’ve ended up here too, and one of Jack’s ex-girlfriends—not to mention Jack himself, who lives in the city and works at a blood lab owned by Dashiell. But, even aside from the fact that knowing me can be hazardous for one’s health, for the most part I don’t trust myself around humans anymore. It’s too easy to start talking about my day and accidentally let something slip about th
e . . .
peopl
e . . .
I spend my time with. Then I’d have to go begging Dashiell or Molly to press someone’s mind for me, which would put that person on the Old World’s radar. So I just keep to myself, mostly. It’s not that hard, in a city this big.

“What about you?” I asked Jesse. “Are you missing any big New Year’s plans right now?”

“My parents usually throw a big party,” he said. “My brother Noah’s usually in town for it, and we team up and assault the food table.”

“Noah’s the stunt double, right?”

Jesse smiled. “Yes.”

“Is it weird for you, that they all work in Hollywood and you don’t?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “Mostly because they don’t understand why I wanted to be a cop. My mom, especially, was sort of hurt by it. She doesn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to work in the movies.”

“So why
did
you become a cop?” I’d brought up the topic idly, but I realized it was a pretty good question.

Jesse looked away for a moment, thinking. “There was this detective,” he said slowly. “When I was a kid.”

“Did he, like, solve the murder of your best friend or something?” I asked lightly.

“It was my cousin,” Jesse said gravely.

I must have looked horrified, because he laughed out loud, his face brightening. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding.” I smacked his arm, and he picked up the story. “No, I used to go to movie sets with my folks once in a while, you know, and once on a teacher in-service day, my dad had to take me to this preproduction meeting with him.

“I was waiting in the reception area, with my Spider-Man comics, you know, and this guy walked in. You could just tell right away that he was somebody important. He had thi
s . . .
mm
m . . .
”

“Presence?” I offered.

Jesse snapped his fingers. “Yes, exactly. I just figured he was a movie star at first, but there was something different about him. A vibe, I guess. Anyway, he came and sat down with me, asked me about my comic books, and chatted with me a little bit. He was a homicide detective.”

“What was he doing at the movie studio?”

“Oh, he was there as a consultant. The movie Dad was working on was this cop drama, and this guy had come to advise them on the real-life procedures and things. They do it all the time.”

There was a loose strand of black hair on his forehead, and for a second I could picture exactly what he’d looked like as a little boy, waiting for his dad with a big stack of comic books. “What did this guy say to you?”

“H
e . . . 
,” Jesse trailed off, caught in the memory, and started again. “It was something he said, exactly. The thing was, I had already seen so many cool things on movie sets: fake car accidents and space aliens and exploding buildings. And I figured out pretty early that there wasn’t anything you could do or imagine that couldn’t be faked by good filmmakers. And if anything could be faked, how did you know if something was real?” He looked at me for a moment.

“And that detective wasn’t fake,” I prompted gently.

Jesse took a breath. “No. He was real. And I wanted to do something real too.” Even in the streetlight, I could see his face color a little. “Of course, now I know that
magic
is part of the world, so I guess I don’t know what’s real anymore.” He looked forlorn for a moment.

I leaned back in the seat. “Sounds like the guy made quite an impression on you,” I said gently.

Jesse smiled wistfully. “He wa
s . . .
he was absolute. He just gave off this confidence and certainty, like there wasn’t anything that he couldn’t handle. He was really nice to me, friendly. But at the same time his eyes were jus
t . . .
scary.”

“Would you say,” I began, straight-faced, “that he had lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes?”

Jesse laughed out loud, and I felt the thrilling click of connection that you get when someone understands your movie reference. “You know, I might. Which I thought was cool.” He shrugged. “It’s just how cops look sometimes, I think. When you’ve seen enough of the things people do to each other, it just kind of takes over your face.”

I studied him for a long moment. “You don’t look like that,” I mused. “Not yet, anyway.”

“You do,” he said softly, and then looked surprised, like he hadn’t known he was about to say it. “Except sometimes, when there’s nobody from the Old World around, and you don’t think anybody is trying to get something from you, and you forget who you are.”

My mouth dropped open, and tingles of surprise prickled through my nervous system as a long silence passed between us. Jesse was staring at me with just a hint of defiance, like he was daring me to say something real, certain that I couldn’t do it. But this time he was wrong.

“I’m not a lost soul, Jesse,” I said quietly. “And I’m not an innocent. Nobody has done anything to me that I didn’t invite.”

He looked indignant, which was sort of adorable if you thought about it. “Dashiell—” he began, but I held up a hand.

“Dashiell is a vampire and he plays vampire games. Olivia was a psycho who made it her mission to fuck with my life. But it’s the scorpion and the frog story, Jesse.”

“The scorpion kills the frog,” Jesse pointed out. “It isn’t the frog’s fault.”

I sighed. “The dumbass frog should’ve just run like hell. Well, hopped like hell. Swam like hell? Whatever frogs do to get away, but really quickly,” I amended. “Instead he agrees to give a scorpion a ride across the river. He definitely deserves some of the blame.”

“He didn’t choose to be a frog. And you didn’t choose to be a null,” Jesse reminded me.

“True.” I fidgeted in my seat, unable to find a position that felt comfortable for my knee. I pretty much needed to give up on the idea that a comfortable position was even possible.

Jesse was still looking at me expectantly. I sighed. “Look, when I was eighteen, something happened to me that wasn’t fair. But I
chose
to fuck around with the wolf pack. I invited all this.” I waved a hand.

A shadow passed over his face, and I was about to ask him about it when my phone began vibrating in my pocket. I pulled it out and squinted at the screen, which seemed extra bright in the dimness of the car. It was Jack. I pushed the button to ignore the call. He was probably just calling to wish me a happy New Year’s, but he’d want to know what I was doing, and I couldn’t tell him.

I turned my head and saw Jesse regarding me with a frown.

“What?” I said.

“Do you ever get sick of hiding things from him?” Jesse asked.

“Yes,” I said wearily. “Do you ever get sick of poking me about how I live my life?”

“No,” Jesse answered promptly.

There was silence in the car for a long time after that.