Midnight Curse (Disrupted Magic Book 1) Read online

  And that was pretty much it. It was a little disappointing, honestly. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but I’d sort of hoped for some kind of smoking gun, maybe a note that said, “Damn you, Molly, you’ll get yours!” with the name and address of her archnemesis at the bottom. That would have been handy.

  The sky outside my window was beginning to darken. I needed to get on the road if I was going to be close to on time. I was about to pack everything back into the bag, but I reached in and felt around inside first, just in case. My fingers touched something small, cold, and metal, the size of a paper clip. I jerked my fingers back instinctively, but it wasn’t sharp, so I reached back in, pinched my fingers around it, and pulled. And kept pulling, until I lifted out a heavy gold chain. At the end was a gold medallion the size of a silver dollar. I turned the bag inside out and found a tiny hole in the lining. Molly had hidden the pendant inside.

  I dropped the bag to examine the necklace. It was heavy, and definitely old: the markings on the medallion looked like it might have once been a coin, though they now just looked like a bunch of bumps. I flipped it over. This side had been purposefully worn smooth and shiny, and two dates had been inscribed on it in fancy calligraphy: May 1st, 1905 on top, and below it, May 1st, 1925. Hmm. She’d been turned in 1905, which made 1925 twenty years after she’d been turned. So that was the year her vampire apprenticeship had ended and she’d earned her freedom from Alonzo.

  Below the inscribed dates, a third date had been added, but this one had been roughly scratched in by hand, with something like a pin. March 13th, 1996. I wasn’t sure about the significance of that one, but I could take a guess: the day Molly had killed Alonzo.

  I weighed the medallion in my hand for a minute, frowning. It reminded me of the dog tags that soldiers wear. Had Alonzo made his prostitutes wear gold necklaces marking their ownership by him? It seemed like the kind of thing a controlling, abusive monster might do. But then why would Molly keep it?

  I glanced at my watch, and realized I was going to be late if I didn’t get moving. I leaned sideways so I could shove the necklace in my pants pocket, but the medallion was too big—it would leave a lump in my pants that would look funny to a bunch of twitchy, suspicious Old World locals. Shrugging to myself, I put the necklace over my head and tucked it under all of my clothes. The chain was so long that it hung between my breasts, way beyond where anyone would be able to see it just by looking at me. Then I started the van and headed downtown.

  Chapter 27

  Traffic going downtown on a Friday night wasn’t for the faint of heart. While I waited to move the car forward, I called Jesse to check in, but he didn’t answer. Probably still meeting with his informant. I left a voice mail explaining that reception was bad inside the theater, but I would call him during the first break, at midnight.

  I also checked in with Theo Hayne at 5:30, just to make sure there hadn’t been any fresh surprises at the mansion during the rest of the day. He promised me that everything was quiet. Molly had been given a blood bag in her cell, and Dashiell and Beatrice were currently dressing for the Trials. Hayne was going home to catch a few hours of sleep. I knew he was probably exhausted—he’d been working overtime on security for the Trials, including helping Kirsten test her humans-go-away wards. During the Trials was a good time for Hayne to rest, since he couldn’t get into the Trials themselves, but he would show up in person to lend a hand afterward, in case Count Asshat decided to make a move at the end of the night.

  The sun dipped below the horizon a little after five, taking the golden tones out of the city and painting it in gray concrete twilight. I liked Los Angeles at this time of day. It was less bright and cartoony, less the sunny Hollywoodized LA that everyone sees in the movies. But it wasn’t yet nighttime LA, either, which conjured images of either glamorous women in slinky dresses and pin curls, or homeless people sleeping in noxious rags on Skid Row. I always thought LA was its most honest right after the sun fell. This was when you noticed the real people who made the city their home.

  Then again, maybe I was just feeling romantic because of my destination. The Los Angeles Theatre was the last of the great downtown movie palaces built on Broadway, back in 1930, when everyone thought LA was going to have a theater district to rival New York’s. After World War II, the masses moved out of downtown and into the suburbs, and the Los Angeles Theatre and its brethren stood derelict for years. Some of the palaces were torn down, but a few had been resurrected and renovated in the past thirty years, when LA city planners realized that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to turn all of the local history into parking structures.

  At first, I had thought the idea of hosting the Trials in a building that looked like it had been broken off from Versailles was ludicrous. The Los Angeles Theatre was stunning in its opulence, with a ballroom, a mirror-laden women’s lounge, and French Baroque furnishings that would make the phantom of the opera cry with envy. It wasn’t exactly what I pictured when I imagined listening to Dashiell hand out death sentences. Even after studying the binders and learning how dry and anticlimactic many of the trials were, a place like the Los Angeles Theatre seemed like a bizarre choice.

  It was Kirsten who had pulled me aside and explained Dashiell’s reasoning. The whole point of having the Trials now was to appease the members of the Los Angeles Old World who were thirsty for drama, stirring up minor conflicts because they were bored with the peace. By holding the Trials in a theater, Dashiell was giving the people what they wanted: a show.

  Moreover, he and the others were hoping that the grandeur of the Theatre would naturally inspire better behavior in the attendees. That might sound naive, but people are conditioned to adjust their behavior in settings like museums, state capitols, and historically significant buildings. Voices are lowered, attire is more formal, everyone is careful of where their elbows and handbags might be bumping. Hopefully this ingrained formality would extend to how the Trials attendees treated one another.

  “Plus,” Kirsten had added, “it’s big enough to hold all of us.”

  Shadow and I were pulling off the freeway onto 6th Street a little over an hour after we left the cottage. Downtown LA used to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland every night after dark, when all the proletarian worker bees vacated the skyscrapers, leaving empty streets that were well suited to vandalism, assaults, robberies, and worse. A decade and a half of serious effort by the city government had finally begun to resuscitate downtown nightlife, and it showed. The whole area was bustling with food trucks, neon lights, and young Hispanic men waving flashlights at passing cars, trying to direct everyone into their parking lots.

  I turned the White Whale off 6th and onto Broadway itself, where Hayne had stationed some of his people, guarding sawhorses that blocked off the street. They recognized me immediately—between the van and the bargest, I was not exactly difficult to identify—and waved me through into eerie stillness. Every food truck, trinket kiosk, and newspaper stand on Broadway between 7th and 5th was conspicuously absent tonight. Unlike the street I’d just turned from, there were no pedestrians heading for happy hour at the downtown restaurants. No groups of girls in cheap dresses and wobbly heels, no slouching young men with darting eyes and whistles at the ready. I didn’t even see any homeless people. It was like driving into a ghost town.

  Dashiell had, of course, arranged all this with the police and local businesses, through his customary blend of mind control and bribery. It actually wasn’t as hard as you might think—LA is the one city in the world where you can throw up sawhorses and block off intersections, and if pedestrians complain, you just say the two magic words: “movie shoot.” Hayne’s people, posing as film studio security, would keep people from entering the street until Kirsten could set up her various protection spells.

  I parked in one of the shockingly vacant public lots, and fastened on Shadow’s service dog cape. There was an hour to go before the Trials officially began, and I figured there was a good chance that humans would be
around delivering food and drinks. I clipped a leash on her collar, purely for appearances, and checked my phone again. Jesse hadn’t called. I frowned, not liking it. But Count Asshat would only have been awake for about forty-five minutes, and it would probably take him a little while to realize the boundary witch was missing. How much trouble could Jesse be in?

  As if to answer, my phone buzzed in my hand. I managed not to drop it and saw an unfamiliar number with a 303 area code. Where the hell was 303? I answered it with a cautious “Hello?”

  “Scarlett, it’s Allison Luther. Lex,” came a brisk voice. “Cruz isn’t answering his phone.”

  “Oh. He’s meeting with someone,” I said. To my own ears, I sounded like an eighth grader who’s been called on in class and doesn’t know the answer. “Can I, um, take a message?”

  “That phrase you mentioned,” she said. Was her voice always wary, or did I bring out something special in her? “Midnight drain? I asked my boss about it. It’s a vampire term. It comes from a poet named Lord Byron.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “If you’re talking about two vampires, a midnight drain is taking a very specific and horrible revenge on your enemy,” she explained. “Say you have two vampires, John and Jane Doe. If Jane hates John, or feels that he wronged her in a big way, then Jane might find all the living humans that John cares about most in the world. Maybe they’re John’s current food source, or maybe they’re actual human family from when he was alive. Are you following?”

  “Yes.” And I felt like my heart may have stopped beating, but I didn’t say that part out loud.

  “So Jane has all of John’s favorite living people,” Lex went on. “She turns them into new vampires, whom she can control and torment however she wants for the next twenty years. Because new vampires have to obey their makers. So it’s not just about killing the people that John loves. It’s turning them against him through torture and mind control.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah,” Lex said, and for once, she sounded like a regular human person. “It’s basically using vampirism as a curse, in order to enact personal revenge. And in the Old World, it’s all technically legal. That’s the midnight drain. It’s . . . pretty dark stuff.”

  I almost laughed. Lex was probably the most powerful boundary witch alive; she literally trafficked in death. And she was calling my situation dark. Suddenly Molly’s reaction to the news about her friends made more sense. Whoever took them wasn’t just going to turn them into vampires, or try to use them as prostitutes. They were going to torture those girls simply for knowing Molly, and the whole time, the girls would know exactly why it was happening. And so would Molly.

  “Scarlett? Are you there?”

  Right. Lex was talking to me. “Sorry, what?”

  “I said, any changes with the boundary witch?”

  “Still dead.” I needed Katia to wake up and give us some answers. I just had no idea how I was going to get them.

  “I’ll be there tomorrow night. If anything changes before then, let me know, okay?”

  I said goodbye, and, still reeling, Shadow and I headed into the theater.

  Chapter 28

  As I’d expected, the lobby was a bustle of activity: human delivery people and caterers, who would be leaving before most of the Old World arrived, plus a number of witches and werewolves who’d been hired to work as bartenders and waitstaff. Before and after the actual proceedings there would be a sort of cocktail party in the downstairs ballroom, run by Dashiell’s wife, Beatrice. My only job down there was to circulate at the party, making sure that everyone knew I was around, and capable of removing their powers at any time. Of course, I was also supposed to dissolve any actual altercations before they could escalate into violence.

  At eight o’clock, the Trials would begin in the ornate two-thousand-seat auditorium. Afterward, I would need to go back down to the after-party for more peacekeeping. It would be a very long night, requiring a lot of nice manners and diplomacy, two things at which I perpetually sucked. But I was all too aware of how many eyes would be on our corner of the Old World tonight, and on me, especially. I was determined to do a good job even if it meant personally kissing the ass of every single person in the theater until my lips bled.

  It’s funny; only the previous day, the Vampire Trials had seemed like the most important thing in my personal universe. Now all I wanted was to rush through the next few hours of litigation hand-holding, and then Jesse and I could get back to saving Molly.

  And damn the consequences, rang a voice in the back of my mind. It sounded suspiciously like Eli. I told the voice to fuck off.

  I wandered around a bit with Shadow, giving a nod of hello as we passed Will, who was addressing a small group of his werewolves. When Shadow had gotten a good look at the whole building, I led her to a small dressing room that had been outfitted to my specifications. Inside was a beanbag chair the size of a Mini Cooper, a buffalo thighbone, several of the world’s biggest Kongs, and a tablet that had been rigged by Abigail to play the Nature Channel.

  Shadow bounded toward the bone, then stopped, midpounce, and turned to stare at me accusingly. Smart bargest meets obvious bribe.

  “We talked about this, remember?” I said, keeping my voice calm and soothing. “You can’t be onstage with me during the Trials; it would look bad. But Will, Kirsten, and Dashiell will be right there. I’m not going to be in any danger.”

  Shadow, who rarely vocalized above a growl, let out an unhappy woof that communicated long-suffering disapproval. Sometimes she reminded me so much of one of the unnaturally prescient dogs in family movies in the eighties and nineties, like Beethoven or Hooch. But then I’d see her absolutely slaughter one of the few squirrels dumb enough to stop by our yard, and I’d remember what I was actually dealing with.

  Bringing Shadow anywhere was akin to bringing out the big guns. If I took her into the Trials, it would look like a declaration of aggression, the equivalent of pointing a rifle at the defendant during a court trial. But at the same time I wanted to keep her close in case there was trouble, especially werewolf-related trouble. So she couldn’t come in, but she needed to stay on site.

  Which worked out, since her cell at home was currently occupied.

  I crouched down—not very far—and scratched at her ears and sides. She leaned her head forward to rest on my shoulder. “I know,” I whispered. “You hate being left behind. But it’s just two nights, and you’re right here in the same building, see?”

  I gave her one last hug and left, feeling guilty. Then again, I also had no doubt that Shadow could break down the ancient door if she really wanted to. I was just hoping she’d choose to destroy the beanbag chair if she needed to punish me. Dashiell had paid for it.

  I found Kirsten downstairs in the largest dressing room, tapping thoughtfully on her lower lip as she looked over a pile of spell materials that was spread over the vanity counter. She was dressed in a cream-colored silk blouse, loose but cropped at the waist, covered in itty-bitty sequins. Her satin skirt was an earthy brown, tight at her waist and flaring out at her thighs, and her white-blonde hair was braided around her head, with tiny blue rosebuds embedded in the braid. They were the same blue as her eyes.

  I suddenly felt greasy and poor, like I’d wandered into the Oscars in yoga pants. “Wow,” I said without thinking. “You look amazing. And very . . . you.”

  Kirsten glanced up and gave me a frazzled smile. “Thank you.” She eyed my outfit, her lips twitching in a “not bad, could be better” kind of look. I fought the urge to look down at what I was wearing. “I like your necklace,” she offered. “What’s happening with the boundary witch? Any change?”

  I’d left Kirsten a voice mail after we captured Katia, but I hadn’t known if she’d actually gotten it. I gave her an update about Katia, and Lex’s prediction that she’d be dead through the night. As Kirsten listened, her eyes kept flicking back down to the spell materials. It was a big-ass ward, and I knew she wa
s a little nervous about it.

  “Where do you want me?” I said when I finished explaining.

  She directed me to the downstairs ballroom, where a few early arrivals were already starting to mill around. I didn’t know anyone there, so I went over to the refreshment table. Because all of the staff had to be from the Old World, and most of them wanted to see the Trials, we had decided to forgo waitstaff in favor of one long table of hors d’oeuvres and pre-poured beverages, which could be supervised by one or two people trading off. The setup was a lot like a high school dance refreshment table, if your high school had a lot of money, expensive tastes, and access to beer and wine. We had discussed serving blood for the vampires, but it was eventually decided that they could eat before they arrived. Tonight was about keeping the peace, and watching vampires drink blood isn’t exactly a peaceful experience.

  I nodded at the petite witch behind the table, who was currently making sure the little rows of food were lined up with a precision that would make any OCD sufferer proud. I actually felt kind of bad about grabbing a small container of popcorn, but I did it anyway, because it was the fancy kind dipped in white fudge. And if a fight broke out, I might not get a chance later.

  While I was snacking, Kirsten was setting up the wards outside. They involved two complex pieces of magic: first, a go-away-humans spell on the entire block, which would also compel any humans who still lingered to want to leave. Then there was a second, more protective spell that would prevent anyone from entering the building with intent to take a life.

  During our planning meetings, I’d asked if she could block anyone who intended to hurt someone else, but Kirsten said that was nearly impossible. It was already very difficult and complicated to determine the difference between someone who wanted to do something and someone who intended to do something. Plenty of the attendees would sort of want to hurt one another, and a few of them would maybe even be planning on it, and the difference was particularly slippery. It was much easier to block murderous intent, because that would hopefully be rare.