Trail of Dead (21 page)

“Oh, God.” Kirsten said. “I hadn’t even gotten that far. I have no idea; there are too many variables, and it depends a lot on what kind of witch you are…death magics,” she said suddenly, paling in the midday sun.

“What?”

“A golem to be your henchman, and possibly take the lightning strike if something goes wrong. The Transruah, which collects the energy of life.” Jesse got the feeling Kirsten wasn’t entirely aware of his presence anymore, and fought the urge to hurry her along. “With the right magics, the right specialty, you could live forever, like I said before…kill someone remotely…even bring someone back from the dead…”

“Slow down,” Jesse said, before she could speculate any further. “This is getting too big, and there’s too much we still don’t know about what Olivia and this witch are planning, or when. What do we focus on first?”

“The golem,” Kirsten said immediately. “That’s their muscle. If we could dismantle the golem right away, it would cripple them and make the witch much more hesitant to begin the Transruah spell.”

“Okay, how do we kill the golem?” Jesse asked, feeling like an idiot as the words left his mouth.

He looked across at Kirsten, who was frowning. “I’m not sure…I need to consult some texts. A golem is one of those creatures that has many different legends and stories. Most of it is folklore, some of it is truth.”

Jesse couldn’t resist. “You mean like witches?”

She smiled. “Touché.” The smile faded from her face as quickly as it came, and she gasped with a sudden realization.

“Kirsten?”

“It’s tonight,” she said solemnly, turning in her seat to face him. “Whatever Olivia and her witch are doing, it’s going to happen tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the winter solstice,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“The longest night of the year, right? What does that have to do with anything?”

Kirsten gave him an incredulous look. “You don’t…the solstice is a holy night for many religions and pagan rituals. I usually have a big party for all the witches, sort of like a multi-holiday party. I canceled this year because of Denise and Erin.”

What did a canceled party have to do with the bad guys’ plan? “Does that really matter for Olivia and her partner?”

“It could,” Kirsten said, excitement in her voice. “The solstice has particular relevance for Lilith, and for the connection between life and death, though I don’t know all of the specifics. Jewish magic has never been a specialty of mine. But if I were summoning power for a big spell, using Lilith’s amulet, involving the dead, and I didn’t have a coven to back me up…yes, this is the night I’d do it.”

Jesse tried to follow this line of thought. “You’re saying it’ll make the witch even more powerful?”

“Yes,” she said simply.

“Can you narrow down the time frame any, based on those rituals?”

Kirsten chewed on her lower lip as she considered his question. “If she were worried about us finding her, she’d go a little early, like ten o’clock, to throw us off. But I’m guessing this witch wants every bit of power she can grab. She’ll cast at midnight.”

Jesse checked the dashboard clock. It was barely noon. “So we’ve got twelve hours.” He restarted the car and turned it back
toward the freeway. “Does knowing it’s a golem help us find the witch who made it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said distractedly. “Animation magic is a very unique specialty, and animating and controlling a golem would require an enormous amount of power. I’m not even certain that I could do it. I certainly don’t see any of my witches having that kind of…muscle.”

She sounded so trusting when she talked about her witches, and Jesse raised his eyebrows. “Would you necessarily know?”

Kirsten snapped to attention, looking across the seat at him. “A very good question. A few weeks ago I would have said yes, of course, I know all my witches. But now…” She turned up her palms in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. If one of them really wished to, I suppose she could be hiding her level of power from me.”

They drove in silence for a few minutes. Jesse was trying to process the new information. This golem thing sounded like a cop’s worst nightmare. Even assuming Kirsten could figure out how to kill it, they had to find it first. And if they couldn’t find Olivia, and they had no way of figuring out which of Kirsten’s witches was secretly helping her…“Scarlett,” Jesse said aloud.

“What?”

“Scarlett can gauge power.” He took his eyes off the traffic long enough to meet Kirsten’s. “She told me once she gets a sense of how powerful the vampires and werewolves are, when they come into her…aura, or whatever. I asked her about you guys”—Kirsten gave a short nod, understanding that he meant the witches—“and she said…how did she put it? That you all have a low-level buzz when you’re not trying to use magic, and when you do use it the buzz flares up. She said your buzz is stronger because you’re more powerful than the other witches she’s met.”

“But how does that help us?” Kirsten asked sensibly.

“If we could get the witches together in one place, and if we put Scarlett among them, she’d be able to tell who was hiding power,”
he said excitedly. “And she’d be able to neutralize the witch at the same time, and we could use her to find Olivia.”

“That…could work,” she said slowly, her face creased in concentration. “It’s a bit of a long shot.”

“I know,” Jesse admitted, “but the only other things I can think of would be to dig through Olivia’s background to see if we can find a witch connection, or run background checks on all your witches. And we’d need more time for either of those options.”

Kirsten’s mouth turned down at the words
background checks
. “Let’s do it.”

“Do you have any way of getting the witches together?” Jesse asked. “Do you guys have meetings or something?”

“Not until the first weekend of next month. I could
call
an emergency meeting, but then whoever it is might just not show up.”

“If she thought the meeting was about something else?” Jesse asked. “Like, you say there’s news about the killer, or something?”

He glanced at the witch and saw that Kirsten’s face had brightened. “I have an even better idea,” she said, with sudden cheerfulness. “I’ll just uncancel the party.”

I let Sadie hug me again before I left the hospital. As soon as I got out of the building, my cell phone began to ring, the regular old
ring-ring
sound that meant it wasn’t one of my bosses. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?” I said cautiously.

“Oh, thank God. I’ve been calling and calling. Is this Scarlett Bernard?”

I glanced back at the hospital building. I’d forgotten that I couldn’t get reception inside.

“Yes, this is Scarlett.”

“I have a—a problem? Is that the right word?”

I frowned. Most of my cleanup calls happened at night, but a daytime crime scene wasn’t unheard-of. “You’re calling about my cleaning services?”

“Yes, I’m Esther, there’s this vampire and…” She took a sobbing breath. “I think he might be dead.”

I opened my mouth to say that she should call Eli and give him the job, but then I remembered he was dealing with a big cleanup at Hair of the Dog. I shrugged to myself. There wasn’t anywhere I needed to be just then, and it
was
still my job. “Give me the address. I’ll be right there.”

As soon as I had entered the address in my GPS and was on my way, I started to call Jesse to tell him where I was going. I had his number highlighted on my phone’s screen and everything, but then I abruptly pushed
END
and tossed the phone into my work duffel on the passenger seat. Vampire or not, this was a dead body. Jesse would feel obligated to call the police and turn it into an actual investigation; he was dense like that. I couldn’t involve him.

Then again, I wasn’t an idiot, either, and I knew this might also be a trap designed by Olivia. I doubted it, as the sun was still up. Whenever she unleashed her evil plan, she would do it at night, so she could see its horrors reflected on my face. But still…if I got killed because I didn’t tell Jesse where I was, I was going to feel really stupid.

I thought about it a moment, then pulled over and sent him a text that I would be delayed for a work errand. Then I called Molly’s cell phone and left her a voice mail: “Hey, babe. If there isn’t an ‘all clear’ voice mail on here when you get up, something bad has probably happened to me. Call Jesse and tell him I went to two five four Spring Boulevard in Silver Lake. Oh, this is Scarlett.”

Problem solved. I pulled back onto the road.

The address that Esther had given me was for a small, weathered-looking cottage on the outskirts of Silver Lake, currently one of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods. Wait, no, maybe that was last year. I can’t keep track. At any rate, Silver Lake had once been one of LA’s most dangerous areas, then had gone through urban renewal or whatever, so now it was a mix of excessively developed residential areas and neighborhoods that hadn’t quite gotten the memo about cleaning up their act. Spring Boulevard was somewhere in the middle: two blocks from a Coffee Bean but shabby enough to have bars on every window of every building, even the upper floors.

I don’t know what I was expecting Esther to look like—maybe a teenage runaway from a Lifetime movie, with big eyes and an artfully
dirty face—but she wasn’t it. When the cottage door opened, the woman inside was plain, skinny as a rail, and bald as Daddy Warbucks. A dark-pink cotton scarf was wrapped around her head, and she didn’t have eyelashes or eyebrows. She looked like she was pushing fifty. Oh. I suddenly understood the situation.

“Thank you so much for coming,” she said, a little cough clutching at her words.

“Of course. Nice to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand. She shook it with a frail grip. Esther was one of the human servants who had hooked up with vampires in hopes that they would turn her. She was dying. Which also explained why she looked so miserable—if her vampire had died, she was out of luck. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“I’m a—well, I don’t know what you call it, but I sort of help out a, a vampire?”

A human servant. With the habit of ending every sentence with a question mark. This was just what my day had been missing. “What can I do for you, Esther?”

Her voice broke. “Well, he’s—he’s dead? I mean, he’s
really
dead. I just came over and he was here and I didn’t know that they even
left
bodies; I thought they went to dust or something—”

She kept rambling, so I broke in, trying to sound soothing. “It depends on the vampire, Esther. When they’re killed the magic leaves them, the years catch up with them, and their bodies revert to where they should be. So very old vampires do turn into dust, just like in the movies. But new vampires may just look like a slightly rotted dead body, and so on.”

When she answered her voice was very small. “I didn’t know that.”

“Can you take me to the body?” I said gently.

“Oh. Right. This way.” I followed her into the cottage, which was barely furnished at all: a couple of folding chairs and a cheap TV in the living room, a card table in the kitchen. There was no
refrigerator, no signs of food. “I don’t eat much,” she said, catching my look. “He’s—the body is down here.”

She opened a door in the kitchen, revealing a set of wooden stairs. A basement. Great. Vampires have a talent for finding the few houses in LA that actually have basements.
It doesn’t necessarily mean this is a trap
, I told myself. I certainly didn’t feel anything Old World in my radius. But I motioned for Esther to go first.

The downstairs was the opposite of the first floor: wall-to-wall carpeting, gorgeously framed art prints on the walls, a flat-screen TV, couches. Everything was well kept but comfortable looking: someone spent time here. Esther continued toward the back wall, where another door led to a tiny bedroom. I could see the dead body lying in the doorway. “That’s him,” she said unnecessarily.

The body had a sort of mummified look: most of the flesh had wasted away, but a few tendrils of hair and skin still clung to the skeleton—male, judging by the clothes. He was wearing a simple button-down men’s shirt and dark slacks that weren’t new but still contrasted heavily with the decrepit skeleton. He’d also been wearing black loafers, but they’d fallen off when his body shriveled up and were lying on the floor near his feet. In the middle of his chest, a gaping hole had ruined the nice line of the shirt. I looked closely and saw the little wood splinters. He’d been staked. Vampires die when their heads are detached from their bodies, or when their hearts are destroyed, or by fire. You don’t technically need a wooden stake to destroy a heart; that’s just something that worked well in the Middle Ages. We have better weapons now, but the stake is a classic, and a lot of people believe that its long history makes it more powerful.

I looked around, but didn’t see anything stake shaped. I didn’t really smell him, just the faintest whiff of old decay. The vampire had been a vampire for a couple of years, at least. I was pretty confident now that this wasn’t a trap, but I was still glad when Esther hovered near the stairs, staying in my line of vision. I dropped my
oversize duffel bag of supplies and crouched down, balancing on my heels as I pulled out a thick, disposable plastic body bag and my surgical gloves. “You found him like this?” I asked. “You didn’t pull the stake out?” Vampires don’t die very often in LA, and when they do, Dashiell has to know about it. If it had been after sunset I would have called him immediately after my first conversation with Esther, but since he’d be unavailable for a few more hours I’d have to remember all the details myself and fill him in later that night.

“No, I think she took it with her.”

“She?” I said. “Do you know who did this?” Excellent. I could simply tell Dashiell and be done with the matter.

Esther nodded, biting her lip. “I think so. I think it was his…friend. She’s a vampire too, but she gives me the creeps.” She shuddered and wrapped her stick arms around herself.

“Know anything else about her?” I asked, mostly focused on spreading the body bag out next to the corpse.