Midnight Curse (Disrupted Magic Book 1) Read online

  “Of course it matters!” I protested. “They’re going to kill you.” And I’m going to have to do it.

  But she didn’t answer me. She wasn’t even looking at me. I glanced over at Jesse, but he looked as puzzled as I felt. I had thought learning that four of the girls might become vampires would . . . well, maybe not cheer her up, but at least help ease some of the pain. Instead, it had prompted Molly to basically go catatonic.

  Jesse held up his wrist, showing me his watch. We were running out of time, and so far we’d gotten nothing. I gave him a helpless look. “Molly’s gone bye-bye, Jesse,” I said under my breath. “What have you got left?”

  Jesse touched my hand in support and then stood up, stepping past me so he was looming right over Molly. He squatted down in front of her, like an adult trying to speak to a kid on their own level. “You gave Scarlett the key to your safety deposit box,” he reminded her. “You wanted us to help. You wanted to live. What’s changed?”

  Molly just shook her head, like maybe that would make us go away. Her expression was sort of strangled. I couldn’t say I was surprised. My former roommate was an expert at creating a blanket of happy energy and wrapping it around herself like a shield. She was always delighted to invite you into her blanket fort, but good luck prying her out of there. It was one of the reasons we’d gotten along so well—neither of us was skilled at emotional depth. Which was fine if you were watching reruns of Friends, but not so good when you were keeping secrets that could save your life.

  Two minutes that we didn’t have ticked by on my watch, and then Molly finally planted her shoulder blades on the wall and inched upward until she was standing with her chin raised, looking past Jesse to me. “You want to help me?” she said with new strength. “Find those girls. Find them before they wake up, and get them to Dashiell. That’s all that matters now.”

  Jesse and I exchanged a look. “Luckily,” he said to her, “the best way to find those girls is to figure out who did this to you.”

  Molly looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay. What do you need from me?”

  Jesse glanced at me, his eyes going to my jacket pocket. I pulled out the photos and the little address book, handing them over. Jesse showed them to her. “Who are these women?”

  Molly took the Polaroids from him very gently, as though they might disintegrate. She shuffled slowly through the photos, looking at each one. I was impatient, but Jesse covertly held up his hand where only I could see it.

  Finally, Molly handed the pictures back to me, her eyes newly wary. “They’re my friends,” she said with a shrug. “It was 1973, and the Polaroid SX-70 had just become commercially available. We were messing around with it.”

  “Then why did you keep the pictures in a safety deposit box for forty-odd years?” Jesse asked.

  “They’re vampires, aren’t they?” I said, before she could answer. “That’s why the photos were in the box. They’re technically proof that you all exist.”

  She started to nod, then caught herself. “I forgot how hard it is,” she said. “Being around you.”

  “Being human, you mean,” I said dryly. “Why did you keep these? What makes these specific women so special?” Vampires didn’t generally hang around in groups.

  “We worked together,” Molly said, dismissive. “A long time ago.”

  “Goddammit, Molly!” I yelled, surprising all three of us. “We don’t have a lot of time before the afternoon shift shows up and we have to go. You want us to find your friends, the ones who were taken? Answer the fucking questions!”

  Molly’s careless posture dropped away and her gaze hardened into a glare. She was human in my presence, sure, but no one looking at her in that moment would have mistaken her for a college student. “We were whores, okay?” she snapped, her eyes flashing between Jesse and me. “Actually, that’s probably too nice a term. ‘Sex slaves’ is closer.”

  Jesse subconsciously shifted backward, the knee-jerk response of a man in the presence of an abused woman. “Oh,” I said, my voice echoing with stupidity.

  The small room filled with uncomfortable silence. I had no idea what to say. Molly had always given me the impression that she’d been taken and turned into a vampire because of her looks, but I’d sort of thought she’d been abused by a single male vampire. That was horrific in itself, of course, but it had never occurred to me that she’d . . . I couldn’t even bear to think about it.

  “Your maker,” I said softly, as though keeping my voice low might magically make the question not hurt. “The one you killed. He turned you so he could . . . sell you?”

  “Twenty years,” she said bitterly, as though she’d heard a very different question than the one I’d asked. “That’s how long a new vampire’s ‘apprenticeship’ lasts. Every twenty years he took a new stable. Turned all at once. Like a . . . a graduating class.”

  Molly’s eyes flicked subconsciously to the pictures, and I put it together. “They’re like your sisters.”

  She nodded.

  A whole new thought occurred to me. “Wait, how many women did he kill trying to fill his stable? I thought . . . vampire magic isn’t always infectious.” I had always been told that for every five humans who tried to become vampires, only about three would actually turn.

  But Molly was shaking her head. “That was Alonzo’s gift,” she whispered. “Ten out of ten. Always ten out of ten. That’s why the council let him go unpunished for so long. Good for our numbers.” She handed me the photos. “Keep them safe, okay?” She gave me a pleading expression, wanting me to understand.

  And I did. I nodded and tucked the pictures back into my jacket pocket. Molly and her friends had been through hell—twenty years of fear, pain, rape, and misery. I couldn’t even fathom it, and now I felt so . . . young. Since I’d taken over as LA’s resident null, I’d been knocked around a little, and Jesse and I had found ourselves in some bad situations . . . but at the end of the day, I was a privileged middle-class white girl with no mental framework to understand the concept of two decades of torment.

  I had told Jesse there were no psychotic vampires. I was so tragically naive that it was almost funny.

  And yet, this explained so much about the Molly I did know. How she preferred to live on the surface of things. Why she kept to herself so much. The way she hated to talk about history, even though she’d been alive for so much of it. And, I realized suddenly, it also explained why she had moved in with those college girls. It wasn’t because they reminded her of me. It was because they reminded her of them. Being surrounded by young women gave her comfort.

  “I’m sorry, Molly,” Jesse said quietly. I had sort of forgotten he was there, but when I looked over he had a calm, resigned expression on his face. Of course, Jesse used to be a cop. He would have interviewed victims of many kinds of abuse. “I know you don’t want to talk about this. But someone used a boundary witch to make you kill your roommates, and that same person has them now. What happened to you and your sisters might be happening again.”

  Chapter 18

  And that was when Molly snapped.

  “He’s dead,” she shouted, her voice suddenly thunderous in the tiny space. She got up into Jesse’s face and shoved him with all her strength, which really only rocked him back a step. He made no move to stop her. “If I know anything in this life or any other, it’s that Alonzo is dead, dead, dead. I made sure of it.” Her clenched fingers jerked in a tiny tugging motion.

  “I believe you,” Jesse said calmly. “I believe you killed him, and you deserve a goddamned parade for it, at the very least. But you said that Alonzo was special, that he had a gift for turning new vampires, right?”

  She nodded, still glaring at him. “We call it bloodcraft,” she said, her voice cool. “The making of new vampires.”

  Jesse paused, giving us both a chance to process that. I hadn’t known that some vampires could be better at bloodcraft than others, but it made sense. Some witches specialized in certain types of
magic, and some werewolves were magically stronger than others. Why wouldn’t vampires have varying strengths, too?

  “Does that work like human genetics?” Jesse asked. Molly’s brow furrowed, but I saw where he was going with this. Witch specialties pass down from generation to generation.

  “Would Alonzo’s offspring be good at bloodcraft too?” I translated to Molly.

  “Yes,” she said tightly.

  “Then we need to investigate your sisters,” Jesse concluded.

  Before she could yell at him he rushed to say, “Molly, I’ve known more than one prostitute who was madly in love with her pimp, even though the guy beat the shit out of her every night. And this Alonzo must have turned hundreds of vampires over the years. If just one of them decided she needed to avenge him, maybe she came after your friends to get back at you.”

  Molly visibly flinched away from him. As for me, I had to clench my fists to keep from slapping Jesse across the face as hard as I could. In that moment I hated him—not because he was wrong, but because he was a man and he was standing there hurting my hurt friend even more.

  “No,” Molly said at last. “I don’t believe it. Maybe one of them would come after me on her own, but none of Alonzo’s villani would turn more women against their will.” Jesse looked like he wanted to argue, but she added, “Even if they did, none of my sisters live anywhere near Los Angeles. And I have no way of finding Alonzo’s other offspring.”

  Jesse absorbed that for about ten seconds and then moved on. “Okay, did Alonzo have friends or allies who could have done this?” he asked. “Someone else who would think you deserve to die for killing him?”

  Molly burst out laughing. It was not an amused laugh, and it definitely had an edge of hysteria. Jesse glanced my way, but I just shrugged.

  “I’m sorry,” Molly said once she’d calmed down. “I thought you knew. The answer is everyone. Most of the Old World thinks I should die for killing Alonzo. I’ve been a pariah since the day I took his head. I’ve had to run—” she cut herself off, shaking her head to say it didn’t matter anymore.

  And then I got it. This was why she’d moved in an unusual pattern across the US, why she’d laid low even though her tormenter was dead. Because people blamed her for it. “Seriously?” I cried, outraged. “Killing the abusive moth—”

  “You’re both human,” Molly interrupted, her voice so quiet that I was forced to shut up or miss her words. It was a kindergarten teacher move, but very effective. “But you have parents, or you did once. Can you imagine murdering them, violently and in cold blood? Even if they hurt you, even if they . . .” she trailed off.

  I went still, and I felt Jesse do the same, afraid to break the spell of her words. “And those are just your parents,” she said abruptly. “There are no magic bonds. Vampire magic evolved for loyalty. We are reborn needing to obey our master. We may kill another vampire for war, for territory, but your dominus, the one who sired you?” her voice broke. “You have no idea how hard that is, or how taboo. I was lucky”—she gave a bitter chuckle—“they didn’t kill me for what I did. If there was still a council, they might have. Dashiell was the only vampire in North America willing to take me in.”

  I stared at her with my mouth open for a second. No wonder Molly stayed on the fringes of even the small Old World society in LA. And Dashiell was . . . the good guy? I suppose it shouldn’t have surprised me—Dashiell was young for a cardinal vampire, and had a lot of ideas that didn’t necessarily fit with the old ways.

  “Alonzo was a monster, Molly,” I said, as gently as I could.

  “We’re all monsters,” she said matter-of-factly. “You know the funniest part? What he did, the way he treated us . . . that wasn’t even why I killed him. Not really. But it doesn’t matter now.”

  In the hall outside the door, I could make out heavy, deliberate footsteps. Hayne, letting us know our time was up.

  I darted forward and grabbed Molly’s hands. She squeezed them, looking surprised. I am not a touchy-feely person, but Molly was. Or at least, I had thought she was. The person in front of me wasn’t the bubbly, playful girl with whom I’d lived for so long. She was . . . deadened. No pun intended.

  “Give us something to go on here,” I begged. “Some way to find whoever did this.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Where would they stay?” Jesse pressed. “What would they need, to keep the girls? Who would they have to bring into their circle of trust?” She didn’t respond to any of the questions, but before she could say, “I don’t know,” Jesse added, “Who knew you were living by USC?”

  Molly paused. I could hear Hayne’s key fitting into the door lock. “Actually . . . only Dashiell, Beatrice, and Frederic,” she said slowly. “But that doesn’t mean they were involved. One of them may have told someone else.”

  Jesse and I exchanged a look. At least we had our next destination.

  Minutes later, with Shadow in tow, Jesse peeled out of Dashiell’s driveway so fast that I worried about leaving tire tracks. Not that I cared about Dashiell’s pretty tile driveway, but all our efforts to keep the visit a secret would be pretty futile if we left gigantic black marks behind.

  “Wow,” Jesse said absently.

  “Yeah.” I pulled out my phone. I hadn’t had time to ask Abigail for Frederic’s daytime address before Hayne hustled us out of there, so I sent her a text. She wouldn’t like helping me, but she’d do it on Dashiell’s orders. Or her brother would make her.

  “You didn’t know?” Jesse said, glancing over at me. “About Alonzo?”

  I shook my head. “I figured Molly had been through something, but . . . no.”

  “So why do you think she killed him?”

  “No idea. And aside from Frederic the Likely Dipshit, I can’t think of anyone to ask, at least until after sunset,” I said. “It would be great if we could get five minutes with Dashiell, but I’m not sure he’ll have time, at least not until after tonight’s trial. Maybe I could get Beatrice alone—”

  My phone beeped. Abigail had texted me an address in Sylmar. I had no idea where that was, but when I told Jesse he made a face and put the address into his GPS.

  “What?” I asked. “Bad neighborhood?”

  Jesse rolled his eyes. “I hate that phrase. No neighborhood is completely bad. But yeah, crime’s been picking up in Sylmar the last couple of years. Drugs and gang violence, mostly.”

  “Makes sense,” I mused. “Vampires tend to congregate at the edge of chaos. Neighborhoods where people go missing or lose time on a regular basis, but not so crime-ridden that police are knocking on doors all the time.”

  Sylmar was way to the east of Dashiell’s Pasadena mansion, almost all the way back to the storage facility. I was getting pretty sick of crisscrossing the county. At least we were traveling in the middle of the day, when we could avoid the worst of the traffic.

  Jesse made a little conversation about the traffic—the go-to topic of any Los Angeles small talk—but soon I was barely listening. The closer we got to Sylmar, the more nervous I became about breaking into Frederic’s place. I rarely worked at all during the day, and if I did, it was usually to check in with Abigail and Hayne, not deal with the riskier parts of my job. At the very least, I was about to commit breaking and entering, in broad daylight. Much as I complained about him, Dashiell’s influence in LA—both vampiric and political—was my safety net, and if I got myself into trouble during the day, I was working without that net. If I got caught, I would have to try talk my way out of it, because spending the rest of the day in jail would mean burning through what little time I had left to help Molly.

  I was also worried about Frederic himself. The vampire would lose his strength and speed the instant he entered my radius, but he would still be unpredictable. As a general rule, formidable beings such as vampires do not like to be made vulnerable by a twenty-something who can barely dress herself. Waking them up during the day, with no warning, just emphasized how much power I had over
them. Frederic wouldn’t be the first vampire to react to it violently.

  All too soon, we were cruising past Frederic’s condo. Despite what Jesse had said about this part of town, the condo complex seemed nice to me. It was basically one large, two-story square building that someone had quartered into four units, with driveways facing out on opposite sides of the square. Like most LA residences, the emphasis was on maximizing living space rather than creating a yard, so the building was as wide as it could be, framed by a narrow sidewalk running along each side. The sidewalk led to a small side door, although the residents would probably enter and exit through the garage.

  Abigail had said that all four units were owned by vampires, so the bedrooms would probably be at the back corner of each unit, where there were no windows. I saw no visible signs of life as we drove by, which wasn’t surprising, given the daylight.

  “Something’s off,” Jesse said quietly, making a left to go back around the block.

  “Really?” I twisted in my seat, trying to get another glance at the building. “It looked okay to me.”

  “The side door was cracked open on Frederic’s unit,” he reported. “If you’re a vampire and this is basically your fortress, wouldn’t you close and lock the door during the day?”

  “Maybe the air conditioning is broken and he wanted the breeze,” I offered. “Or maybe his cleaning lady is coming in. Or he just forgot to close it before he died for the day.”

  “Maybe,” Jesse said, but he was obviously unconvinced. “Did you see the shrubs? They’re big enough to hide a person. Like maybe a boundary witch.”

  “Oh. Right.” Another common LA landscape choice: the designer had tried to make up for the lack of yard by planting some huge, thick green plants in the narrow space between the sidewalk and the fence delineating the property. There were birds-of-paradise, a flower that’s always kind of creeped me out, along with some big, Jurassic Park–looking ferns. I hadn’t even really noticed the plants, which were all over the place in Los Angeles, but once Jesse pointed them out, it was obvious that the row of foliage was wide enough to hide even a large man.