Midnight Curse (Disrupted Magic Book 1) Read online

  I thought that over for a moment. “Humans with guns,” I concluded grimly. I didn’t like this one bit. This wasn’t how we did things in Los Angeles. We didn’t drag in humans, even as hired help, and we didn’t fuck around with guns.

  Then again, I realized, I’d never lived in any other supernatural community. What if using human goons with Uzis was completely normal everywhere else?

  “Even so,” I said to Jesse, “who were they?”

  “I might have an idea about that, but I have to check with some old contacts,” Jesse replied. “Meanwhile, we need to call Lex.”

  “Right now?” Whoops. My voice had come out a little whiny.

  “Scarlett, I’m just driving around in circles,” he said with great patience. “I need to know more so we can figure out where to take her.”

  “Right.” I shook my head. “Sorry. Of course you should call her. Use my phone; no one has the number yet. No way anyone’s tracing it.”

  Jesse connected my phone to the car’s Bluetooth and had me dial the number from his screen so he could watch the road.

  Lex answered after one ring. “Luther.”

  “It’s Jesse Cruz. I’m here with Scarlett Bernard.”

  “Cruz? What’s happening?” Wow. At least we didn’t have to bother with pleasantries.

  “We caught the boundary witch. She said her name was Katia.” He described the dead woman in the back of the car, down to the accent. “Do you know her?”

  “No, she doesn’t sound like anyone I’ve met thus far.” Her voice relaxed a bit. “But I’m glad you’ve got her. Is she talking?”

  “No, not exactly . . . she’s dead.”

  There was a long pause. Couldn’t really blame Lex for that one. Then I heard her talking to someone on her end of the line. “Charlie, honey, do you want to play on Daddy’s iPad for a minute?” Her tone was bright, which seemed like a foreign language coming from the Lex I’d met. “I know I said no, but now I’m saying yes, okay?” There was the sound of a door closing, and then she was back, as businesslike as before. “How?” she demanded.

  “I shot her in the heart,” Jesse said, sounding a little apologetic. “She gave me no choice.”

  Well, technically, he could have let her go, but that would have undoubtedly caused more damage in the long run. Plus she probably would have shot me. “I believe you,” Lex said. “How long ago was this?”

  “Five minutes? We need to know if she’ll come back, and when.”

  “If she’s strong enough to press vampires, then yeah, she should come back. But only if you get that bullet out quickly, get her a blood transfusion, and get Scarlett away from her.”

  “I can do that,” I blurted. There was another pause, and I winced. Lex was definitely a member of the We Hate Scarlett club. Charter member. In her defense, I’d sort of cremated her dead sister without asking. “Hi, Lex.”

  “Hi.”

  “Sorry. I just meant . . . yeah. I can set up a transfusion and stuff.” Great. Way to sound like a grown-up, Scarlett. I flushed, and Jesse shot me an amused look.

  “Fine.”

  “When do you think she’ll wake up?” Jesse asked Lex, trying to get the conversation back on track.

  “It’s hard to say. When I died from blood loss, EMTs were trying to revive me right away, and I think that almost . . . sort of interfered with the magic. But I can’t really remember what happened the time before that.” She cleared her throat. “I’ve seen a couple of boundary witches die since then, but I made sure they wouldn’t come back.”

  Even Jesse’s eyes widened a little at her tone. I wanted to scream, Why are you so scary? But I managed to keep my mouth shut as he asked, “Best guess?”

  “Mmm . . . maybe twelve to twenty-four hours. But that’s a guess,” she cautioned. “Listen, John gets back from his trip tomorrow, so I’ll hand off Charlie and catch a flight tomorrow night or early the next morning.”

  For a moment, I almost passed out from relief. An adult was coming! She could fix this for me! But then I realized how stupid that was. I couldn’t depend on someone else to fix a problem this big, and even if I could, it would look terrible. More important, it was unlikely that Lex would arrive in time to save Molly.

  Whoops, she was talking to me again. “Sorry, what?” I said.

  “I said, can you clear it with your people? Make sure it’s okay for me to enter your territory?”

  “Oh.” Because boundary witches were so dangerous, Lex would need official permission to run around LA. Under the current circumstances, though, I couldn’t see Dashiell or the others objecting to it, especially if Kirsten vouched for her too. Although Kirsten was so busy preparing for the Trials tonight, I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to get her on the phone. “Yeah, I’ll figure it out.”

  “Meanwhile,” she added, “I’ve got some resources here. Feel free to call.”

  That reminded me. “Lex?” I blurted before she could hang up. “Have you ever heard the phrase midnight drain? Like as a noun?”

  Jesse shot me an approving look. We’d both almost forgotten.

  “No,” she said slowly, either because she was really thinking about it or because she had to force herself to speak to me. “But I can ask around after sunset.”

  Jesse thanked her and promised to call back if Katia woke up. When he hung up, he gave me a questioning look. “Where do we take her? Dashiell’s in-home jail?”

  “No, that’s the last place she should be. She could press the vampires to release her.”

  “Good point. Where, then?”

  I sighed. “I really only have one other idea, and it’s a terrible one.”

  Chapter 21

  “Wait, you want to bring her here?” Eli sounded flabbergasted, which is not a word I use lightly. Next to me, Jesse’s mouth twitched in what might have been amusement. I had taken the phone off Bluetooth, but Eli’s voice had been loud—not mad, just kind of shocked. I thought maybe he’d resigned himself to sitting this whole crisis out. Nope, sorry, honey. You get to tag in, too.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “But we need Shadow’s cell; it’s the only secure place with no vampires. Plus, you were a paramedic; you can do the transfusion, right?”

  “Well, yeah . . .”

  “Great. I already called Hayne; he’s sending blood bags.”

  Eli didn’t sound happy, but he understood the concept of “all hands on deck” as well as anyone. “I should probably check in with Will to let him know what’s going on,” he said warily.

  I understood the unspoken question, and for once, I didn’t have to worry about making Eli choose. “Please do,” I said. “If he has any questions or objections he can call me, but at this point Jesse and I are still operating under our pre-existing instructions.”

  Eli hung up, and I gave Jesse directions to our place in Marina del Rey.

  I love Shadow, but an enormous magical dog-monster does come with some logistical problems, especially in terms of her living situation. Behaviorally, she acted more or less like an ordinary dog—one who could understand most human speech—but she’d been bred and trained to kill werewolves, and that made her unpredictable. The bargest spell was also a very powerful, very rare form of magic, and it was possible that someone would come after Shadow to try to replicate it. We needed a place with decent security.

  Shadow, for her part, seemed happiest and most comfortable when she had plenty of exercise and a little buffer space from strangers, so it had to be a place with few neighbors and a large yard, where we could modify a small room—a walk-in closet, as it turned out—to contain Shadow when I needed to leave her home. At the same time, however, we needed to ensure she stayed well within LA County.

  Eli and I were never going to find anything that suited all those needs on our budget, so Dashiell had arranged a house for us. It was actually a small guest cottage on a property that belonged to one of Dashiell’s vampire friends, who hadn’t lived in the mansion for nearly a decade. Both the
mansion and the guest cottage had just been sitting empty that whole time.

  Eventually the vampire owner would come back and claim the mansion, and we would probably need to move, but it would be years before I had to worry about that. Meanwhile, we didn’t pay rent, but I had to cover the modifications to Shadow’s room, any damage she caused, and her extraordinarily expensive “dog food,” which was mostly raw buffalo steaks. Most months it amounted to nearly as much as Eli and I had paid for his last apartment.

  At any rate, the walk-in-closet-turned-bargest-cell would also hold our new prisoner. And no one would hear if she screamed.

  “Whoa, swanky,” Jesse said in an awed voice as I gave him the code to the gate.

  I rolled my eyes. “Don’t get too excited,” I told him. “We’re not allowed in the big house.” He drove the sedan past the mansion and around the back to the small parking area, which was too big to be called a driveway and too small to be an actual parking lot. One of Dashiell’s people had kindly delivered my van, as promised. Eli’s SUV was parked in his usual spot next to mine. The guest cottage was on the other side.

  “Yeah, the big house and the landscaping are really nice,” I continued, “but our place is pretty utilitarian. Plus we have to deal with making sure Shadow doesn’t eat any of the gardeners.”

  “That’s a full-time job right there,” he said in a solemn voice.

  Shadow and I went right for the front door while Jesse got Katia out of the backseat, gathering up her flopping limbs. I had to look away, because although she wasn’t smelly or rotting or anything, she seemed very, very dead.

  The door popped open before I could even put my key in, and suddenly Eli was wrapping me in his arms.

  Mmm was the noise that came out of my mouth. I allowed myself a moment to just breathe him in. His hair smelled like saltwater—he must have gone surfing that morning—and when I pulled back he kissed my lips briefly.

  “I was worried,” he said.

  “I know.” I stepped back and held my arms out. “But see? Completely fine.”

  He gave an audible sigh of relief.

  “Hi, Eli,” Jesse said as he approached, lugging the witch. “Where am I going?”

  “Down the hall to the right,” I directed.

  As Jesse passed us, he gave me a mischievous look and called over his shoulder, “Did Scarlett tell you she got shot?”

  “Dick!” I yelled after him.

  Eli rounded on me. “Shot?”

  “It’s nothing.” I held up a finger and shrugged out of the new jacket so he could see the bandage on my arm. “It was just a tiny graze,” I promised. But lifting my arm had caused my shirt to shift in the front, and Eli raised an unhappy eyebrow at the wound there. His hands moved toward my collar to look, but I gently pushed them away. “Just a teeny bit of shrapnel. From my cell phone, not a bomb,” I added hurriedly. “I got a clean bill of health at the ER and everything.” There was no reason to mention the part where I’d left against doctor’s orders.

  “You had to go to the ER?” Eli shook his head, hands gripping my shoulders well above the wound. “I don’t like this. I’m away from you for less than twenty-four hours, and someone shoots you. Here. In LA. What the hell is going on?”

  “I will tell you the whole story,” I promised. “But we need to take care of the boundary witch first.”

  His lips turned downward, but the pack’s beta werewolf understood priorities. “Fine. I put a bedroll in there, and your buddy Hayne dropped off a couple of bags of O neg and some IV equipment. He left about thirty seconds before you got here.”

  “Would you please start the IV?” I asked. “I’m supposed to stay away so her boundary magic can bring her back from death. Or whatever.”

  Eli paused, probably fearing if he let me out of his sight I was gonna ninja-sneak out to get hurt again. “I’m headed straight for the fridge,” I told him reassuringly. “I’m starving.”

  While Eli was getting Katia—or rather, Katia’s lifeless body—set up with a transfusion, I sent Kirsten a quick text explaining that we would probably need to allow Allison Luther access to LA for a couple of days. She returned the text immediately, to my surprise, saying that was fine and promising to make sure Dashiell and Will were on board. That surprised me a little, but if Kirsten had met Lex before, she probably trusted her. Lex might be really intense, but she was also sort of reassuring. If she was there to help, things would be better.

  That done, I took Shadow out back and used the hose to rinse off the worst of the blood. She hated this process, but I promised her a fresh steak from the fridge, so she bore it with only minimal resentment. Which involved her waiting until I turned off the hose and then shaking her body a foot away from me. “Jerk,” I said, wiping a line of water off my face. She opened her mouth in a giant doggy grin.

  Afterward we went into the kitchen, where I delivered the promised steak. As Shadow inhaled her meat reward, I washed my hands and began slapping together sandwiches. It was half past two, and Jesse and I hadn’t eaten anything since our donut breakfast. We hadn’t wanted to hit a drive-thru while we had a bargest and a dead body in the backseat. For some reason.

  Jesse found me a moment later and pulled a chair up to the counter, leaning over to watch me. “No mayo on mine,” he said.

  “I remember.” I pointed the butter knife at him. “You were gonna tell me your idea about where those guys came from.”

  “Where I suspect they’re from,” he corrected, reaching out to snake the first finished sandwich. At my feet, Shadow made a longing noise, so I tossed her some roast beef, which she caught out of the air with a snap that made Jesse’s eyes widen.

  I grinned. She wasn’t even hungry at the moment. “You were saying?” I said.

  “Right. The guy in the garage had a tattoo, here”—he touched his breastbone above his heart—“I saw it when his shirt got twisted after he fell. It was sort of a stylized D. It looked like MC ink.”

  I raised my eyebrows, swallowing a bite of my sandwich. “Master and Commander? Mortal Combat? Mitochloridian Carnage?”

  He made a face at me. “What the—no. A motorcycle club tattoo. Biker gang. I just can’t remember which one.”

  I snorted, not bothering to keep the skepticism out of my voice. “You think bikers are behind this?”

  “No,” he said with great patience, “I think whoever’s behind this is paying the MC for muscle. And if Shadow hadn’t been with us, it probably would have worked out for them.”

  Well, I couldn’t argue with that—Shadow had definitely saved our lives.

  I considered his theory while we finished the first sandwiches and started making more. My life is so focused on supernatural crime scenes that sometimes I forget there are so many classes of human criminals out there. I didn’t know much about bikers, other than what you see on TV shows. And that was just it, I realized—“biker gang” felt like something you saw on television, not actual, flesh-and-blood people you might encounter. Then again, I worked for vampires and werewolves, so who was I to talk about plausibility?

  Meanwhile, voluntarily bringing humans into an Old World matter seemed ludicrous to me, but maybe that was exactly why Katia and her vampire buddy had done it. It was a move I hadn’t seen coming, and one I had no defense against. I have no special healing skills, and I’m not a soldier like Lex. Even when I use knives and the Taser, I’m pretty much counting on the idea that my opponent isn’t used to being human, and will be a little disoriented.

  “Okay, so, if the MC really is trying to kill me,” I said slowly, “do you think we’re safe here?” I gestured around the house.

  Unfortunately, Eli chose that moment to walk into the kitchen. “Say what now?” he demanded, looking alarmed. “Did you just say a biker gang wants to kill you?”

  “See?” Jesse said to me. “He knows what MC means.” I tossed a slice of bread at him. Jesse ducked, and Shadow pounced on it like a cat.

  “To answer your question,” Jesse s
aid loftily, “who else knows you live here?”

  “Only the other Old World leaders and Abigail,” I said, glancing at Eli. He nodded, confirming it. His lips were pressed in a tight line. Uh-oh.

  “Then I think this place is as safe as any,” Jesse finished.

  “Scarlett, can we talk?” Eli broke in, giving me a relationship look.

  “Yeah. Of course.” I put down my sandwich. Shadow licked her lips, hoping I was about to make a donation. “Jesse . . .”

  He nodded and picked up his paper plate. “I’m going to step outside and call one of my contacts about the MC. Katia’s secure, right?”

  “Yeah,” Eli said. “She’s got the IV going, and there’s no handle on the inside of that door.”

  “Okay, thanks.” Jesse gave me a look that said good luck and left the room.

  Eli turned to me, and I could see him practically shaking with the effort not to run over and grab me. Werewolves rely on touch a lot, and it had become such a habit for Eli that even though he was currently human, he needed to hold me to know I was okay. At the same time, we’d had a few conversations about how I am not a touchy-feely person, and he was trying to respect my space.

  It was sweet. I went around the counter and threw my arms around him, hugging him tight. It hurt both of my injuries to raise my arms like that, but he needed to see that I was okay. “I’m fine, really,” I told him. “Sit down, and I’ll tell you everything.”

  And I did.

  Chapter 22

  Okay, I soft-pedaled the part where I got shot, and I conveniently left out throwing a knife to scare Jesse’s brother and most of the gunfight at Frederic’s. Without outright lying, I may have made it sound like the bikers had been armed with fists and harsh language.

  “The cops were coming, so Jesse shot the boundary witch, figuring she might come back from the dead like the one he knows in Colorado,” I finished. “And we brought her here because we needed a place to contain her where the bad guys wouldn’t find us. Bad guy,” I corrected myself. “Hopefully there’s only one archvillain left. If you don’t count the bikers, who are probably just hired muscle.”