Blood Gamble (Disrupted Magic Book 2) Read online

  “But when I worked at the Flamingo there was this woman we called sometimes, when one of the guests got hurt and we couldn’t call the cops. Turns out she’s an outclan witch.” She said the phrase with disgust, the way people in Bel Air would say “homeless.” “She’s on retainer to all the big casinos,” Laurel added. “She specializes in thaumaturge magic. Healing.”

  “Do you still have her number?”

  “Yeah, they made us memorize it.”

  I got the number, thanked Laurel, and hung up. Then I called the thaumaturge witch.

  Sashi Brighton answered her phone on the first ring, saying “Hello,” with an English accent. I quickly gave her my name and explained the problem. There was a long pause.

  “I know I’m not with the casinos,” I added in a rush, glancing at Cliff. He was terribly pale, and his eyes were starting to glaze over. “But I’m Old World and I’ve got money. Please.”

  “It’s not that,” she said faintly. “Just . . . Scarlett Bernard from Los Angeles? The null?”

  “You’ve . . . heard of me?” What the hell? I could see Laurel or Silvio recognizing my name, because they were both deep in the Old World and had ties to LA. But I’d never heard of this woman, and she was outclan. It made no sense.

  “We’ve a mutual acquaintance,” she said. “Look, I’ll text you my home address. Just get him here as quickly as you can.”

  “Who—” I started, but she had hung up.

  I glanced over at Cliff, as though he might explain what the hell had just happened. His eyes were closed. Crap.

  “Cliff?” I pulled over and checked his pulse. Thready and weak, but there. His eyelids fluttered for a moment, but then he closed them again. “Hang on,” I muttered. I entered Sashi’s address into my phone’s GPS and peeled off as fast as I dared.

  Sashi Brighton lived in one of the suburban areas off the Strip. It seemed like a nice enough area, but I was barely paying attention to anything beyond the GPS and the labored breathing coming from Cliff’s seat. By the time we reached her house, Cliff was completely unconscious. She opened the garage door the minute I pulled into the driveway, motioning for me to park next to the lone vehicle, a late-model Prius. As soon as I did, she started closing the door again.

  Sashi was a stunning Indian woman in her mid to late thirties, with long shiny hair in a fishtail braid down her back, expensive jeans, and a canvas apron over a light sleeveless sweater. My mouth dropped open in surprise as she stepped into my radius. She was as powerful as Kirsten, or damned close.

  “Help me get him inside,” she said in the same urgent-but-calm tone you hear from ER doctors everywhere.

  She propped Cliff up under his good arm, and I sort of deadlifted his lower body, and between the two of us we managed to get him around the car and up the little steps leading into a clean mudroom. It opened directly into a kitchen, where Sashi had laid a pallet on the floor, along with a large and extensive first-aid kit. More of a first-aid suitcase, really.

  She pulled out scissors and began cutting away Cliff’s shirt. “You have to move away from him,” she ordered. “My room is at the end of the hall. Get cleaned up and grab some of my clothes to put on.”

  I looked down at myself. Cliff’s blood was smeared all over my jeans and tee shirt. “Really?” I said stupidly. She was just going to let me, a stranger, go into her personal space and raid her closet?

  “Go!” Sashi barked. A little softer, she added, “Trust me. This is what I do.”

  I kicked off my boots on the linoleum floor, where they wouldn’t make a mess, and bolted toward the bedroom in my socks.

  Sashi’s bedroom was beautiful: clean and sunny, with yellow curtains and an Indian-print bedspread that was a welcome explosion of color in the otherwise minimalist decor. Walking a little stiff-legged from the drying blood, I made my way into the adjoining bathroom and surveyed myself in the mirror. The blood hadn’t gotten in my hair, but it had soaked through my shirt and the side of my pants where I’d helped haul Cliff, and run down my leg under the jeans. I considered it for a moment and decided that taking a quick shower would be less of a violation than accidentally smearing someone’s blood all over Sashi’s house. I opened cabinet doors until I found a clean, fluffy towel, and then I got under the hot spray, trying to calm myself down. My radius had expanded a little when I was panicking about Cliff, and I needed to pull myself together so I didn’t turn Sashi into a human when Cliff needed her magic.

  When I was sure I was reasonably okay, I got out, put on my own bra and underwear, and dressed in the first clothes I found: yoga pants and a workout tank. I saw the labels as I pulled them on, and almost took them off again. The top and pants combined probably cost more than a night at my hotel. But they were clean, and I had the feeling that if I kept digging through Sashi’s clothes I wasn’t going to find anything cheaper anyway.

  When I was dressed, I wasn’t sure what to do next. I had my cell phone, since it had been in my jeans pocket, but I was effectively trapped in the bedroom until Sashi helped Cliff. If she could help him. I didn’t know anything about thaumaturge magic.

  I took my phone out of my jeans pocket, intending to fold the bloody clothes. A wad of paper fell out of the pocket, too. The list of missing vampires, with their last known locations. Right.

  Relief flooded through me: I couldn’t help Cliff now, and I didn’t even have a way of contacting Jameson. But this was something I could do. I left the pile of stained clothes on top of a magazine and carried the list to a small armchair in Sashi’s bedroom. I’d glanced over the list earlier, but I hadn’t taken the time to actually study it yet. I sat on the floor with my back against the chair and spread the list out on the carpet in front of me, studying the names of the missing vampires.

  I didn’t recognize anyone, and I wasn’t familiar with a lot of the locations, either, so I started googling, using a pen from Sashi’s dresser to make little notes. I kept an ear out, but although I could hear movement in the kitchen, I didn’t want to risk getting any closer, even just by peeking my head out of the doorway. The thaumaturge witch had shown me a lot of trust by letting me into her house like this; it seemed only fair that I try to trust her with Cliff.

  When I’d gone through the whole list, I saw that of the thirty-eight vampires who had gone missing, fifteen had last been seen on the Strip. Thirteen had vanished from downtown, and three from apartment buildings in the residential districts. The rest of the locations were unknown, at least in the little time Wyatt had had to investigate. He had said he would dig into it some more when he woke up that night.

  I leaned back against the chair, thinking it over. The locations made sense, since Laurel had told me that the vampires in Las Vegas pretty much stuck to downtown and the Strip, but knowing that wasn’t particularly helpful, as far as I could see. I turned my attention to the dates, opening up the calendar on my phone so I could get a sense of any pattern.

  Minerva, the vampire who had been fighting Silvio for control of the city, had disappeared January 19, along with three others. The following week, four vampires had disappeared, then four more, then five, then seven, always on a Friday or Saturday. The numbers might be slowly escalating, but it was hard to tell with the amount of data I had.

  I pulled up the Demeter performance schedule to see if there was any correlation, but the show was on two times every night except Tuesday, so I couldn’t see how it was related. But why did the vampires always disappear in multiples? And why on the weekends?

  When I couldn’t really see any big shiny clues in the information, I decided to call Jesse for a consultation.

  “Hello!” he said in a shout. Loud eighties rock was playing in the background.

  “Whoa, hi. Everything okay?”

  “Hang on.” There was some fumbling of the phone, and I could clearly hear him saying to someone else, “Look, man, don’t let him rile you up like that, okay? . . . I know what he said, but violence is never the answer. I gotta take this.”
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br />   Another moment, and the music died down. “Hey, Scarlett,” he said, a little breathless.

  “Werewolf fight at the bar?”

  “Yep.”

  This wasn’t surprising. Half my job consisted of cleaning up after a bar fight went too far at Hair of the Dog. I’d had to get rid of fingers, toes, arms—and once, seven rabbit corpses. Don’t ask.

  “And your solution was ‘violence is never the answer’?” I said, amused.

  “Well, it isn’t,” he said defensively.

  “Unless the question is, ‘What is never the answer?’” I pointed out.

  There was a pause, and then Jesse said, “Did you actually need something?”

  I explained the list of missing vampires, and told him the little I knew about their disappearances, including Ellen and Margaret.

  When I was finished, Jesse said, “Hmm. The locations, is that where you know for a fact they were, or where they were last spotted?”

  “Uh . . .” I thought over what Wyatt had told me. “Last known locations, so where they said they were going, or where the last person to see them alive saw them.”

  “Okay, look. I’m not there, and I don’t have all the details, but my guess would be that each of these missing vampires got a phone call to come to a party.”

  I blinked. “Why a party?”

  “Because that’s what happens on Friday and Saturday nights,” he said sensibly. “And because of the whole Vegas culture. If someone said you could go to an exclusive party or a new club opening or whatever, but you had to keep it a total secret, wouldn’t you go?”

  “Hell no,” I said. “I’d laugh and put on my jammie pants.”

  “Well, yeah, but that’s you. To the average Vegas resident, an invitation like that would be irresistible.”

  I thought that over for a moment. “Wyatt didn’t say anything about Ellen going to a party . . . except for the big public reception that the Holmwoods held on opening night, but the skinners wouldn’t have killed her right there in public.”

  “Maybe not, but if one of Ellen’s friends pulled her aside at the reception and invited her to come to a post-show after-party, would she have told her husband about it beforehand?”

  Huh. “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I never met Ellen, so I’m just going from what Wyatt told me, but I got the impression that he’s sort of the curmudgeonly homebody, and she was the social butterfly. They’ve been together forever, and vampires stay up all night. She might not have felt like she needed to tell him exactly where she was going after the show.”

  “Especially if they’re from a time before cell phones,” Jesse pointed out. “Not all couples feel the need to know where their spouses are at all times.”

  “Okay, I can buy that. But who lured her to the after-party?”

  “Say you’re a skinner, and you want to kill a whole bunch of vampires,” Jesse went on. “You find the names of one or two, maybe by asking around at the show. You call that vampire and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this great club opening just for your kind. We’re doing an exclusive party in two hours, and we want you to come.’”

  “Wouldn’t that seem awfully suspicious?”

  “If you knew the skinners were in town, maybe. But what if the person on the phone said you could bring a friend? Or two friends? I bet if you dig deeper, you’ll find that most of the people who disappeared knew at least one other person who vanished on the same night. People think there’s safety in numbers, and I would imagine vampires already see themselves as bulletproof.”

  “Huh.” Based on what I knew about the Old World . . . he had a point. The vampires in question would probably have felt comfortable enough to let their guards down, confident that no one would try to take on two or three of them at once. “Damn,” I said, half-admiringly. “That’s a hell of a trap.”

  “Can you get the phone records for the missing vampires?” Jesse asked. “If we’re right about this, they would probably point you right at the skinners.”

  Could I? I didn’t see how. Silvio might have access, but even if I hadn’t stabbed two of his bodyguards, he’d made it clear that he wasn’t going to admit to a problem.

  Wait. I could probably get Ellen’s records from Wyatt, when he woke up. And before that . . .

  “Scarlett?” came Sashi’s voice from the kitchen. “You can come out now.”

  She sounded tired, but otherwise I couldn’t read her tone. Was Cliff better? Worse? Dead? “Okay,” I called. Into the phone, I said, “Jesse, I’ve got to go, but I need a favor. Can you call Abby and see if she can get the phone records for the vampire that Dashiell sent, Margaret?”

  “Yeah, I’m on it.”

  We hung up, and I hurried into the kitchen.

  Chapter 21

  Cliff was still spread out on the floor, with a large white bandage covering his abdomen. Sashi was sitting on the floor next to him, her back leaning against the cupboard. Neither of them moved as I approached, which brought me up short. “Is he . . .”

  She gave me a weak smile. “He’s going to be fine. You got him here just in time.” She gestured to the piles of bloody towels on the floor all around them, like wounded soldiers after a battle. “He really should have a transfusion, but if he rests a lot and gets plenty of iron and sugar, he can recover without it.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Unless you happen to be O positive?”

  “Actually,” I said, surprised, “I am.” It wasn’t the world’s rarest blood type or anything, but still. Every once in a while, things do just kind of work out. It was sort of encouraging to be reminded.

  “Brilliant!” Sashi said, turning to dig in her first-aid case.

  “But how do you know that’s Cliff’s blood type?”

  “He woke up for a few minutes, from the pain. I asked him then,” she said, pulling out some tubes and needles. “Here, let’s get a transfusion going, shall we?”

  A few minutes later, I was settled on the other side of Cliff’s prone body, watching the red fluid flow out of my arm and into his.

  “Better,” Sashi said, looking at him with satisfaction. “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” I said earnestly. I was a little amazed. In LA we had a human doctor who catered to supernatural clients, but he didn’t have actual magic on his side. I wasn’t sure Cliff would have survived even in a regular hospital. “How soon can I get him out of here?”

  She checked her watch. “Let’s give him at least another hour, just so I can make sure the stitches stay closed.”

  “He has stitches?” I said without thinking.

  She smiled. “Yes. I spent most of my time on the internal bleeding, and encouraging his body to regulate his blood pressure. His skin can heal from the puncture without any trouble, so there was no need to use magic for that. I try to give the body a chance to heal naturally when it’s not life-threatening.”

  I nodded. She stood up, wobbling just a tiny bit but steadying herself on the counter. “If you want to stay with him for a moment, I’ll go get cleaned up.”

  I was limited in how far I could move with the tube in my arm, but I did what I could to pile up the bloody towels and pick up the trash from the bandage packets while Sashi was in the shower. She’d only used the supplies in the suitcase, which suggested to me that Sashi usually treated her patients somewhere else. She had made a special exception for me.

  I was grateful, but also . . . why? Why would she allow me into her home, much less into her bedroom and her clothes?

  When Sashi came padding back into the living room, still rubbing her damp hair with a towel, I finally asked the question that had been bugging me. “You said we had a mutual acquaintance.”

  Sashi grinned—not the well-bred, polite smile I’d seen earlier, but a full-on, amused grin with teeth that were just a little crooked. It made me like her more. “Allison Luther is a friend of mine,” she explained.

  “Lex?” I said, stupidly. “How did you meet Lex?”

  “Through mutual witch acquaintances
, same as you. The witch clans dislike me, but they can’t deny my usefulness. I’ve picked up something of a reputation. I even—” She cut herself off, as though she’d changed her mind about adding to that. “Anyway. I’ve known Lex for years.”

  “And she told you about me?”

  Sashi’s face grew somber. “She mentioned you when she told me about her sister’s death. And again later, when Katia came to live with her. Lex says you’re a magnet for trouble.”

  “Yeah, she doesn’t think much of me,” I admitted.

  Sashi looked surprised. “That’s not the impression I received at all. I think you . . .” She paused, her eyes going out of focus for a moment as she looked for the right words. “You worry her. Because of Charlotte.”

  “Lex’s niece?” I’d never actually met the little girl, who had to be four or five by now, but apparently she was a null, like me.

  Sashi nodded. “When Lex looks at you, she sees Charlie’s future. And since every time you see her you’re destroying a body or in mortal danger . . .” She spread her hands. “Look, Lex and her niece are under the protection of probably the oldest vampire on the planet, and there have still been a couple of kidnapping attempts, from people who wanted to take Charlie and use her to do bad things. I think Lex worries that even as an adult, the threats won’t stop.”

  Oh. I hadn’t really thought of it like that. I kind of wanted to think that over when I was alone, but for right now I was ready for a change in subject.

  “I saw the pictures in your living room, and on the fridge.” I tilted my head toward the studio shot of Sashi posing with a young woman, around Corry’s age. “Is that your sister?”

  “My daughter,” she corrected. “Grace.” A darker look spread over her face for a second, and then she said carefully, “I had her rather young. She’s away at college now.” Sashi glanced at the fridge photo, a little wistful. “She’s studying at the University of Colorado in Boulder, so now Lex sees her more than I do. But I visit.”

  Sashi seemed to remember herself, and her face shut down, closing me out. And then I saw it.