Malediction: An Old World Story (5 page)

“Did you tell anyone that you were framed?”

She gave me an impatient look. “Of course not. This is not a human matter.”

“We’re in a human prison,” I pointed out.

She sniffed. “My lawyer did not think the sentence would be so tough. He thought perhaps two years. But zee judge was a negro, and did not favor me.”

Um … right. Moving on. “Why would Cruz do this?” I asked. “Why go through all the trouble of stealing Belle and framing you?” Was that why he’d refused to talk to me? Afraid I’d poke holes in his cover story?

Her eyes flickered away for a moment, and then she gave me a disdainful little shrug, like she couldn’t be bothered to figure out why scum like Jesse would do anything. Another thought occurred to me. “Wait, why were you in the US with a werewolf-hunting dog in the first place?”

Again, her eyes slid away from me, but I saw her lips curl. I let the silence build between us, hoping she might give something away. “He is working with zem, you know,” she said finally, her voice barely more than a growl. “He helps zee filthy curs, plays slave to their tempers and their … what is zhis word”—she snapped her fingers again—“
perversions
.”

“What does—” I began, but I was interrupted by a loudspeaker, which warned us that the morning visiting hours would end in two minutes. Shit. I’d barely begun to understand what had happened to Sam. I tried to formulate a really good question, one that would clear up this whole mess, but Petra spoke first.

“Zhey will know you were here,” she warned. “Zhere are people watching zee prison, people who are … ahh … in his pocket.”

“Whose pocket?”

She waved a hand, frustrated with my incompetence. “Dashiell. Zee man in charge.” Glancing around warily, she crooked two fingers and held them against her teeth.
Vampire
. “He is going to be unhappy with you.”

I thought of Jesse’s not-so-warm reception on the phone and everything Petra had just accused him of doing. “Yeah, well, Dashiell might have to get in line.”

I drove all the way back to the hotel in a daze, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. I had this weird feeling of displacement. It seemed like I should be pleased with the interview, since I’d apparently caught Jesse Cruz in a massive lie, not to mention a hell of a lot of criminal behavior. And if Petra was telling the truth, I’d also discovered a pretty huge miscarriage of justice. She was, after all, in prison for a crime she didn’t commit. That should have galvanized me, but instead I just felt … confused. Even if every word Petra had said was true, hell, even if you discounted the weird gaps in her explanation, there was something
off
about the woman, and it wasn’t just her rampant racism. Whenever she talked about werewolves, her eyes had smoldered with fevered hatred. Were they really the abominations she seemed to think they were? And how did any of this connect to Sam’s death? I felt like I’d gone one step forward and about five steps backward. Or maybe sideways.

In the hotel parking lot, I turned the engine off and just sat there, staring ahead. What was I supposed to do now? Confront Jesse? He’d obviously done something shady, but he seemed pretty determined not to tell me the truth, and there wasn’t a lot I could do to force his hand. It wasn’t like I could take this to the police, and given how involved this Dashiell was supposed to be, he probably already knew the whole story. Hell, maybe he was the one who’d issued the orders. If that were the case, trying to find him would only lead to—

A sharp knock hit my car window, about four inches from my face. I jumped, adrenaline exploding into my bloodstream, my hands reaching for weapons that I hadn’t brought. Beside the car, I saw a pretty girl in her early twenties with unnatural bright green eyes. I remembered those eyes. This was the woman who’d told Cruz I wasn’t human. She’d found
me
.

She made a little rolling motion with one finger, and I buzzed down the window. “Hi, I’m Scarlett,” she said with a professional smile. “And I think we should probably talk.”

6. Lex

I’m not proud of what happened next.

I opened the car door hard enough to knock the girl backwards. She stumbled a few feet and then tripped over a curb, landing on her ass. “We need to
talk
?” I asked in indignation. “You think? Who the
fuck
are you?” I got out of the car. Fear replaced the glib smile on her face, and I couldn’t help but feel kinda pleased with that. “
What
the fuck are you? Another witch?” I stalked forward, closing the distance between us. My fists were clenched at my sides, and I squeezed them even harder so I wouldn’t hit her. Somewhere behind me, a dog began barking furiously.

“Stop,” she said in a low voice. There was a tiny spot of blood on her lip. She’d bitten it when she tripped. “Think about it. You know what I am.”

That did bring me up short. I glared at her, confused, but Simon’s training finally kicked in. I breathed out, closed my eyes, and tried to drop into the mindset that allowed me to see the magical spectrum. It worked sort of like looking in thermal imaging goggles, only instead of body heat I could see peoples’ life sparks. I opened my eyes to look at this girl—but nothing had changed. My vision was the same. At the same time, I felt a little … calmer. Lighter.

The same way I always felt around Charlie.

“You’re a …”
Oh
. Subconsciously, I reached out a hand to steady myself on a nearby car. A null. Like Charlie. An adult null. I didn’t know much about them, but I knew they were rare. That’s what made Charlie a commodity. I hadn’t expected I’d ever meet another one.

“Yeah. Can I stand up now?”

Still in shock, I reached down and helped her up, feeling a little chagrined. I hadn’t actually meant to knock her down. The dog stopped barking and I realized the timing wasn’t coincidental. “Yeah, that’s, um, my dog,” Scarlett said, dusting off the back of her jeans. “She’s in the van, and she’s a bit protective.”

“How did you know where to find me?” I asked.

“Dashiell—he’s more or less in charge of Los Angeles—has people at the prison. They called his daytime security team, who called me. Then we tracked your phone,” she said unapologetically. Seeing my expression, she added, “Look, try to see it from our perspective. The Old World is very territorial, and you came sauntering into town—”

“Because Cruz wouldn’t answer my questions!” My voice had come out in a whine, which I hated. I squared my shoulders and glared at her.

She wasn’t exactly intimidated. “He couldn’t,” she countered. “Cruz is human, and on the periphery at best.” There was a note in her voice that gave me pause. Regret? Sadness? “I asked him not to tell you anything, so he didn’t.” She looked around. No one was listening to us, but a couple of shady-looking guys were just exiting the hotel. “Look, can we take this conversation somewhere
other
than the parking lot of your seedy hotel?”

I glanced at the building beside us, but her assessment was kind of fair. “Fine. But first, I want to know who you are.”

Her eyebrows furrowed. “I told you—”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re Scarlett Bernard, and you’re a null.” I waved a hand. “But who the hell
are
you? Why are you the one who came here to see me?”

“My job is keeping the Old World under wraps. I make sure we’re discreet. And walking into a prison to see Petra Corbett was
not
discreet.”

“What else was I supposed to do, if Cruz wouldn’t talk to me?”

“You were supposed to give up and go home,” she said, not unkindly. “The humans don’t know anything, and we figured that if you didn’t have any way of tapping into the Old World here in town, you’d give up.” She shrugged. “It didn’t occur to me that you’d go through the official channels to set up a visit with Corbett. Stupid of me, but I suppose I have a tendency to forget about the world outside of … us.”

“Aren’t I part of that
us
?” I countered. “Don’t I have an Old World membership card, just like you?” For a moment I considered dropping Maven’s name, but no, that was a terrible idea. If I claimed to be here as her representative, I would be bound to politics I didn’t fully understand. Besides, my position was way too new for me to start milking it.

She sighed. “Look, I don’t know what things are like in … Wyoming?”

“Colorado.”

“Sure. I don’t know what things are like in Colorado, but in LA the three Old World factions share fairly equal power. It’s rare for all three groups to get along in one city. It makes us very wary of people who come into our territory and start asking questions.” She tilted her head, assessing me. “That’s what I thought you were up until now, just some relative with a little witchblood who thought there was something off about the official story. But you’re more than that, aren’t you? You’re a
hell
of a lot stronger than you were last winter.”

I was surprised that she could tell, but then again, what did I really know about nulls? I had a thousand questions for her, except I couldn’t even think of one just then. I said numbly, “Boundary witch. I’m a boundary witch.”

Her eyes went round and the color drained from her face. She let out a shaky laugh, trying to cover the reaction. “Of course you are.
Fuck
. I gotta think a second.” She turned and paced a couple of feet away, but I could hear her still cursing under her breath, though I didn’t understand why. Finally, she paced back to me. “That changes things. Look, there’s a Coffee Bean down the street, let’s—”

She paused as we both heard the buzzing from the pocket of her canvas jacket. “Hang on,” she said, frowning. “That’s probably work.”

“What do you do?”

“I clean up after the rest of them,” she said in a clipped voice. Before I could ask anything else she put the phone to her ear. “This is Bernard.”

As she listened, her face clouded over with something like irritation. She had to be a terrible poker player. “Again? Who was supposed to be watching her? … Okay, fine. I’ll be right there.”

Stuffing the phone back into her jacket pocket, she looked at me. “I have to go, unfortunately. It should only take an hour or two, and we can pick this up later.”

I planted my feet. I wasn’t about to let another null—one who seemed to know about what I could do—out of my sight. “I’m coming with you,” I said firmly.

“Um, no. I have a job.”

Fuck
this. I’d had enough of being shut out. I crossed my arms over my chest. “I could just follow you, you know.”

She stared at me, and I let the hardness seep into my eyes. I could win a staring contest with a petulant twenty-something, no problem. Finally she sighed, held up a finger and walked a few feet away, toward a nearby street lamp, to make another phone call. I let her go, but I watched carefully in case she tried to run off.

This call lasted a little longer, and when it started to get heated, I stepped closer to hear. Scarlett didn’t seem to notice.

“You
know
why I can’t,” she was saying. She listened a moment, then began, “Jesse, you don’t understand, she doesn’t—argh!”

So she was talking to Cruz. To my surprise, she actually banged her head against the light pole in frustration. Her voice got low again, and I missed the rest of the call.

She came rushing back toward me a few moments later. “Look, Lex, we need to cut a deal.”

I crossed my arms over my chest again. “I’m listening.”

“You can ride with me and I will tell you everything you want to know about your sister. In exchange, you need to get out of LA by sundown.”

I suddenly felt like we were in an old Western. I wasn’t offended, exactly, but I was definitely confused. “Why sundown?”

“Because,” she explained impatiently, “the prison called Dashiell’s daytime security team and they’re the ones who called me. When the sun sets, Dashiell’s guys will fill him in and he’ll call me for a status update. I’ll have to tell him you’re a witch and you’re poking into the Remus thing—that much I can’t keep from him—but if anyone in my Old World actually meets you and finds out what you
really
are”—she gestured helplessly—“they’re gonna be pissed, Lex. Boundary witches can fuck with people, and they won’t like that. They’ll think you’re a threat.” She smiled wryly. “You’re a lot like nulls that way.”

I actually opened my mouth to explain that I worked for Maven in Boulder and was therefore not a threat, but I snapped it shut almost immediately. For all I knew, she and Dashiell might have some sort of rivalry. He could consider my presence an insult. Or a message of some kind. It was too risky. Scarlett led me toward a white van where the world’s ugliest dog was pressing its nose out a cracked window, snuffling at the glass. It was enormous.

I told myself to focus. “How do I know you’ll tell me everything?”

“My story will be corroborated.” She looked sad, which confused me. Why would she look sad?

“By who?

“Lizzy Thompkins.”

7. Jesse

Jesse was in his third meeting of the day when his phone screen lit up with Scarlett’s number.

The consulting firm that employed him usually lent him out to the same specific show, but they were on hiatus this week, so he’d been asked to attend meetings with producers for the upcoming pilot season. At his request, Jesse’s assistant had scheduled them back-to-back on the studio lot. Getting them all over with at once had seemed like a great idea at the time, but after the third time one of the producers asked what it felt like to shoot someone, Jesse was about ready to flip a table and storm out of there. And he had another two meetings to go.

He ignored Scarlett’s call, but a moment later she texted him.
9-1-1
. He tried to suppress the little rush of excitement, but when she called again a moment later, he couldn’t resist excusing himself to step out into the hall.

“What the hell is going on?” Jesse asked, instead of “hello”.

“Remember your new friend Lex?” she said, her voice too sweet. “Well, she’s here, and she’s been to see Petra Corbett—”

Jesse interrupted her to curse in Spanish. “I knew I was missing someone! I forgot they put her here in So Cal.”