Trail of Dead (31 page)

I knew she was baiting me on purpose, but I couldn’t help but take it. “Please, Olivia, what do you mean by system? Like, circulatory and digestive, that kind of thing?”

“Exactly.” She stepped back, spreading her hands. “If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Your aura fights magic, fights to keep you normal and healthy and untouched by outside infection like vampirism or lycanthropy.” She looked at me expectantly, but I just shook my head. Behind Olivia, Mallory had returned wheeling an IV stand. A bag of unidentified fluid with a long IV tube attached hung from one of the pegs at the top, and Mallory had already hooked two more bags on the opposite peg. She was making her way toward us, pulling the stand as she hobbled along on the cane.

Olivia was shaking her head, and I turned my attention back to her. “You never were a very good student. It’s the immune system,” she announced. “Your immune system suppresses invading disease, and your null aura suppresses invading magic. They’re tied together.” I’d spent months hanging around the cancer ward; I knew what the immune system did. I also knew that many cancer treatments—specifically chemotherapy and radiation—killed the immune system along with cancer cells. It was why cancer patients had to avoid being around sick people or little kids. “And when you
abandoned
me”—her eyes darkened—“I just happened to make a surprising discovery.”

My mind raced.

“Domincydactl,” I said softly.

Olivia took another step back to examine my face. She looked a little annoyed, like I’d ruined her punch line. “Perhaps you’re not such a bad student after all,” she said airily.

Mallory finally appeared at Olivia’s elbow. “I have to begin in fifteen minutes,” she told Olivia sternly.

My old mentor waved her hand dismissively. “You’re all prepared, it’ll be fine.”

Mallory’s mouth set in a frown, but she nodded and began tying a small rubber tube around my upper arm.

And it finally hit me. Olivia wasn’t planning to keep me around as her pet, and she wasn’t planning to kill me. She was going to do both.

She wanted to make me a vampire.

“What about Eli?” Jesse asked, desperation seeping into his voice. “Does he know anything? Can I talk to him?”

Silence. Then Will said, “Eli is unconscious. It’s a long story, but he’ll be out at least until morning. I’m sorry; he can’t help.”

Jesse thought that over for a second. “Maybe you better tell me the long story.”

When he hung up a few minutes later, Jesse realized he was sitting down again, his head in his hands as he stared absently at his cell phone. What was Scarlett thinking? Scratch that, he decided. He knew exactly what she was thinking. In that moment, he realized that the little voice mail icon on his phone’s screen was blinking. Jesse frowned. When had that happened? His reception was terrible in the hospital, so it must have popped up when he’d finally gotten close to the windows. He pressed the screen and listened to the message.

“Shit!” he yelled, not caring that the two arguing men, the clawed intake nurse, and his newly minted ex were all staring at him. He couldn’t believe she was really going to just hand herself over to the vampire. Jesse jumped up and beelined for Runa. “I need a car,” he said bluntly. “You’re staying here with Kirsten and her husband, right? Can I borrow their car?”

“Did you find her?” Runa asked, without moving.

He shook his head. “She went after Olivia by herself. I have to go look for her.”

Runa raised her white-blonde eyebrows. “Do you know where she is?”

“No.” He shifted his weight, anxious to be moving.

“So you’re just going to drive around aimlessly and hope you find her?”

“Do you have a better idea?” he snapped.

“I might.” Runa gave him a strange, speculative look. “Does
she
have a car?”

“She’s driving Eli’s.”

“The bartender at Hair of the Dog?”

Jesse was surprised. He’d been under the impression that the different Old World factions didn’t mix much. “You know him?”

“Kirsten does.” She stood up from her seat, dug in her pocket, and dangled her keys. “I have a spare key for their car. You can drive. But I’m coming along. I can help.”

His brow furrowed. “I’m not trying to start a fight, but how can you possibly help me?”

She straightened her back, squaring her shoulders. “First of all, I was the one who spent all afternoon researching the golem for Kirsten. She delegated to me so she could get ready for the party. I explained everything to her while we were making the appetizers, but I’m guessing she didn’t have time to tell you or Scarlett before everything went to hell.”

“No,” Jesse said sheepishly. “Um, is there a second of all?”

“Second,” Runa said, with sudden confidence, “I think I can find her.”

Within a few minutes, they were speeding down the freeway to Santa Monica, where Eli had an apartment a few blocks from the beach. Christmas songs played on the radio in Paul Dickerson’s
BMW, but Jesse was too distracted to pay attention. He had called and gotten Eli’s home address from Will. Runa was texting Kirsten’s husband to let him know she’d taken the car.

“Explain this to me again,” Jesse said, glancing over at Runa. “I get the thing about you being good at finding things, but I thought you couldn’t use that kind of spell on a null.”

“I can’t,” she replied, looking up from her phone. “But I can find the car. This would be easy if I’d ever actually touched it myself, but because I haven’t, I need a focus.”

“Which is like a smaller part of what you’re trying to find?”

He saw her nodding out of the corner of his eye. “With a person, a stranger, I need something of theirs. Hair or fingernails work the best—that’s how Kirsten does it—but I can use pretty much anything they’ve owned and cared about for a long time.”

“Wait,” he objected. “So we can’t just use one of Eli’s T-shirts, or something, because that would just lead to Eli himself, right? What exactly are you planning to use as your focus?”

“A spare key,” she pronounced. “The key might belong to Eli, as does the whole car, but a key is also
part
of the car itself, at least in the eyes of the spell. They belong together. It’s a little different from ownership, but what should happen is I’ll get two locations off the key: one for Eli, one for the car. And we already know where Eli is.”

“What if he doesn’t have a spare key? What if we can’t find it?”

“It’s LA. Everyone has a spare car key. Don’t you?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “But still…”

“Look, it’s better than driving around the city, yelling Scarlett’s name out of an open car window like she’s a lost puppy.”

“Fair point,” he conceded. They drove in silence for a second, and then he couldn’t help but ask. “So you, like, never lose your keys, huh?”

When he glanced over, she was smiling. “You don’t know the half of it,” she said demurely. “Think of what I could do with a missing murder weapon.”

“Whoa,” he said, eyes wide.
Stick to tonight’s problem
, Jesse told himself. “Okay, so what do I need to know about this golem thing?”

He felt Runa looking at him. “What did Kirsten already tell you?”

“That the golem is animated by a witch, and then runs on her commands,” he recited.

“Right.”

“And Kirsten said it was indestructible. If you chop it into bits, the bits would keep trying to complete the command.”

She nodded. “And that’s assuming it will hold still and let you chop it. Golems have incredible strength, and if the witch commands it, they can hurt or kill anything that comes between them and their goals. Besides, this is a
massive
chunk of clay. You could take an ax to its arm and only make it halfway through on your first swing.”

“But wouldn’t the golem just fall apart when it gets near Scarlett, anyway?” He was really hoping Scarlett’s radius, as she called it, would encompass the witch, the vampire, and the golem, leaving him to face down just two humans and a pile of dirt. That seemed doable.

But Runa was shaking her head, looking solemn. “This is important. Scarlett won’t be able to neutralize the golem.”

“
What?
That’s…how is that possible?”

She sighed. “I don’t completely understand it. Something about animation as a permanent change, rather than a temporary spell. Think of it like…a loophole.”

“That must be why Olivia wanted to work with Mallory in the first place,” Jesse concluded. “Because she knew Mallory had a way around Scarlett’s ability.”

“Yes.”

He thought that over for a minute. “You said ‘if the witch commands it.’ So it’s sort of about careful wording for the commands?”

“Exactly. If the witch says, ‘Go get me that banana,’ the golem will go over to the banana and pick it up. She would have to specifically instruct it to bring it back to her. And, if she were so inclined, she’d have to tell it to destroy anyone who gets in its way,” Runa said. “That’s the really tricky thing about the golem magic. Once the clay is animated, there are plenty of witches who have the juice to push a command like ‘Bring me Denise Godfry’ into the golem. But only a really powerful witch can hold the golem long enough to give it a complicated command like, ‘Bring Denise Godfrey to the end of the Santa Monica Pier and throw her in the water. Keep her quiet and still the whole time, and kill anyone who gets in your way,’ or something like that.”

Jesse tried to concentrate. He needed to ask the right questions. “So if I can’t destroy the golem physically, how do I stop it?”

He glanced at Runa. “That’s the interesting part,” she said, tucking loose strands of blonde hair behind her ears. “Channeling magic is all about symbolism—this stands in for that, this spell symbolizes that activity. A golem needs more than just words in the air. It needs a word on
itself
.”

“You lost me.”

Runa reached up and touched her own forehead. “Here. The witch carves a word in the clay right here, and it’s like the stamp of the command spell. In the example I used before, the witch would carve the word
banana
. If the task is directed at a person, it’s a name, like Denise or Scarlett. The word is the permanent change; it’s what allows the golem to act even in Scarlett’s radius. If everyone is standing next to Scarlett, Mallory wouldn’t be able to give the golem a new command. She needs to channel magic for that. But if she gives the golem a command outside Scarlett’s radius, the golem can follow through within it.”

“Unless I remove the word?” Jesse said.

“Exactly. Take away the word, you take away the command. No command and no magic means no golem. In theory the thing would just…collapse.”

“In theory.”

“Just keep in mind, the thing is made out of hard clay that’s dry on the outside. You can’t just rub your hand across it a couple of times.”

“Okay.”

“I think we’re here,” she said abruptly.

Jesse checked the GPS on his phone. “You’re right.” He parked the car at a legal spot on the block next to Eli’s, and the two of them got out and walked casually toward the outdoor stairs that led up to his place. “Will said it’s on the third floor,” he said quietly to Runa. “There’s an interior door into the building, but you need a key to get in.”

“This is so weird,” she whispered back. “I’ve broken into my friends’ houses before, with a hide-a-key or whatever, but never someone I haven’t actually met.”

“Me neither,” Jesse growled. He was getting more and more nervous as they climbed the stairs. He was a
cop
, for crying out loud. It helped a little that he knew Eli would approve, if he were conscious, but that would still be hard to explain to the Santa Monica patrol cops. A West LA detective committing a B and E at 11:00 on a school night didn’t look good, no matter how you spun it.

“You sure you want to do this?” Runa whispered, reading his expression.

He nodded. “Let’s just get it over with.”

They finally reached the right door, and Jesse peeked around, seeing no obvious witnesses. There was a bit of noise from some clubs on the next street over. He glanced at Runa, who nodded that it looked all clear to her too. Then Jesse pulled the minicrowbar out of his jacket sleeve.

It was a nice, solid chunk of metal that they’d purchased at a twenty-four-hour convenience store along with two candy bars, a hammer, and some nails to divert suspicion. Jesse fitted
the crowbar into the crack of the door, closest to the lock. They didn’t have time for finesse. He nodded at Runa, and she began knocking. “Eli?” Jesse called. “It’s Jesse, man, you around?” The noise from the knocking and yelling almost masked the sharp
crack
of the wooden door as it splintered open. Jesse and Runa slipped in quickly, closing the broken door behind them, and Jesse turned on all the lights. He immediately wiped the crowbar on his shirt and dropped it on a chair near the front door. If they got caught, he would simply say the door had been broken when they’d arrived.

The apartment was more or less one big room, with two doors jammed in the back. Jesse figured they probably led to a bedroom and bathroom, not the kind of places where one usually kept a spare key. “If you were a spare key, where would you be?” Runa mused.

Jesse checked the walls and tables nearest the door, in case he kept it conveniently in plain sight. No such luck. Eli had decorated the walls with bits and pieces from the ocean, shells and starfish and things, and the main wall space near the front door was taken up by an enormous surfboard. “Usually people go for a kitchen drawer or desk drawer,” he said absently, taking in the rest of the room. It was sparse: a couch, an armchair, a television, and a small card table that was covered in some sort of woodworking project. Runa peeked into the two doors at the end of the room. “No desk,” she reported.

The kitchenette was tiny, but he gestured that way with a nod. “Let’s start there.”

They worked quickly through the drawers and cupboards, shifting through utensils and hard plastic dinnerware that looked like it could take a bullet before cracking. Eli must not eat in very often, Jesse thought, or he only ate sandwiches and fruit, because there weren’t enough dishes for real cooking. In this case it worked to their advantage: less stuff to go through.