Dead Spots Read online

  It was a male gray wolf, thin but still unmistakably, unnaturally huge, and it ran at an angle pointing straight toward the bodies, probably smelling the meat. The cop swung his gun toward the new threat, looking frightened, and the wolf saw this and tried to reverse directions. But it was too late: with its last few steps, it skidded just a little too close to me. I felt it cross the edge of my whatever, my blankness, and then the change happened in midair. A wolf had taken the leap, and a man crashed to the ground, naked and tumbling. He fell facing slightly away from me, and I saw the cop actually drop his gun with the shock of it.

  This time I didn’t hesitate. I turned on my heel and raced back to the van. I threw open the driver’s side door and tossed my bag onto the passenger seat, trying to think over the sound of the police sirens. I started the van and threw it into drive, but instead of turning back toward home, I took the first left, across from the park entrance, and found myself in a small middle-class subdivision. Gotta love LA, where you can cross any street and be in a whole different town. The houses had bars on the first-story windows but not the second, which meant it was a decent, if not completely secure, neighborhood. I took two more quick turns and parked the van on the street near a house that still had its lights on. I turned off the motor and squashed myself down onto the floor in front of my seat. It wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t think I’d be able to get all the way to the highway before the cops came flying by. I tucked my hair under a dark baseball cap, opened the door, and darted around the van to slap on the big logo magnet I have that says Hunt Bros. Cleaning Service. Fake, but since my tax returns say that I am a professional housecleaner, I figured I could always piece together a story if needed. Any eagle-eyed insomniac neighbors wouldn’t have much to go on, just a cleaning service van parked outside a house where people were still awake. I just hoped that the cop at the crime scene hadn’t seen what kind of car I drove. I sent Dash a text message, shielding the phone’s glow with one cupped hand, and crammed myself down between the two front bucket seats to wait it out.

  My mind was churning, questions ping-ponging around the inside of my head. What on earth would have done what I’d seen in the clearing? In five years doing crime scenes, I’d never encountered that kind of brutality. With modern technology and modern cautiousness, it’s rare that I even get a complete dead human body anymore. That’s the thing about LA: it might be the second-biggest city in the country, but in the Old World, it has about the prominence of Tucson. This town is a pretty undesirable place for the supernatural to live: there’s not enough space for the wolves, who can’t afford to be stuck in traffic on full moon nights, and the city is too young and too spacey for the vampires. There are probably more witches than anything else, but so many of them are a joke, and most of the rest don’t play with the really dangerous magics. Sometimes one of the werewolves will lose a limb in a fight, or the witches will hex something wrong like that poor dove, but neither faction has many actual casualties anymore. Even the vampires, who regularly feed on humans, have had centuries to learn how to feed without crossing that line to where the victim will die. I’m occasionally called in when the new vamps accidentally kill, but even then, it’s all very obvious. Hungry vampire equals dead human.

  But what the hell would have done what I’d just seen? Thinking about the scene in the clearing, I realized that I’d never really had a chance: even if the cops had taken a little longer to get there, there was no way in hell I would have been able to clean up that...mess. It would have taken one person hours just to collect all the body parts. What could I have done?

  When thirty minutes had passed, I scooted up into my seat and stepped out to get my logo magnet. Then I tossed my baseball cap on the passenger seat and carefully steered the van farther into the subdivision. It took me a while to find my way back to a major street, but I finally pulled onto Pico and followed it west. When I was sure I knew my way home, I took a deep breath and called Dashiell.

  “What happened?” he demanded, before I’d said hello.

  “It was too late. There was a cop on scene before I could do much. He saw one of the wolves, Dashiell.”

  “He what?” I explained about the werewolf in the clearing. “Who is this cop?” he barked angrily, as though I had personally invited the guy along as my date.

  “Uh...I didn’t get a name.”

  As a rule, vampires do not sigh in seething annoyance, but Dashiell made a special exception for me. “This would not have happened if you had simply arrived on time, Scarlett.”

  “I know it’s bad. I just couldn’t make it there.” I bit down on any further excuses, not bothering to point out that I wouldn’t have had the time to clean up that mess anyway. I’d known Dashiell long enough to know that he was not a big fan of apologies. Apologizing is weak, and weakness tends to make vampires think of prey.

  “Scarlett, now is not a good time,” he said. I automatically glanced at the clock on the dashboard. I keep track of the dawn, for obvious reasons, and it was only twenty minutes away. That was going to hurt us: if I can’t get to a crime scene for some reason, Dashiell has to throw his weight and money around to get things buried, and now he wouldn’t be able to do so until after sunset. Why hadn’t I thought of that earlier? “You will come to the estate tonight at eleven thirty to discuss this further.”

  I chewed on my lip, deciding what to say. Screw it. “Dashiell, could you please just tell me if you’re gonna try to kill me?”

  He actually laughed, but it was a dry, grave chuckle that made me shiver. “Scarlett, I am very displeased. But if I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t invite you politely. And there would be no trying.” The line went dead.

  I tossed the phone into the baseball cap on the seat next to me. This was very bad. I’d skated by for eight months with only a handful of incidents each week. Of course it figured that the one time I got two scenes in one night, it would be the most gruesome murder I’d ever seen. That kind of killing was going to get a lot of attention—enough that I suspected even Dashiell wouldn’t be able to keep a lid on it. He would be furious with me, and that was not good for either my professional reputation or my personal safety. He might not be able to bite me, but despite our ability to extinguish magic, nulls like me aren’t invulnerable. We’re just as fragile as any other human being, and all Dashiell really had to do was buy a gun or have one of his personal goons beat me to death. I heard myself chortle, an edge of hysteria escaping my throat. Who would they get, I thought, to clean up my body?

  It was ten minutes to dawn when I dragged myself through the back door of the compact West Hollywood house that I share with my housemate and landlady, Molly. Who, I should mention, is also a vampire.

  “You’re home!” she squealed, rushing toward me at much-faster-than-human speed. She had on designer sweatpants and a Paul Frank T-shirt with a picture of an angry-looking kitten biting a dog. Molly looks about twenty, with shoulder-length hair (currently red) and the body of a high school tennis star, but she’s really a hundred and twenty-something years old, born in Wales the same summer that Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the East End of London. She was turned into a vampire at the age of seventeen. I’ve never heard the full story on how it happened, but I get the impression that it wasn’t accidental—that was right around the time when skirmishes between the vampires and the witches led to the vampires becoming much more thoughtful about who they let into their undead club. They went after a lot of poor, pretty girls, like Molly had been.

  Molly doesn’t hate what she is, exactly. Unlike some vampires who deliberately try to spend time with me, she doesn’t really want to be human—ugh, humans, am I right? She just doesn’t want to look like a teenager anymore, which is understandable. Seventeen was pretty much an adult in her own time, but in the twenty-first century, she couldn’t even buy a lottery ticket. So a few years ago, she offered me a deal, through Dashiell: in exchange for spending as much time around her as possible, I could have the spare bedroom in her house practic
ally for free. Since my weird little ability doesn’t cost me anything, or even tire me out, I thought that sounded like a pretty good deal. Molly and I have sort of become friends, too, though sometimes I can’t believe she’s older than me, let alone older than, say, automobiles or World War I.

  As she stepped into my radius, she did the little halting gasp that vampires always take when they’re around me—it’s the feeling of going from immortal back to mortal, and a vampire once told me it’s like waking up from a coma, only to find you have been beaten nearly to death. Molly’s skin lost its luminous glow, and she jerked as her heart restarted. She wiggled her jaw absentmindedly, poking her tongue at her teeth. Vampires don’t actually have fang fangs, but their canine teeth have evolved to be much sharper than a regular human’s. It has to feel weird to have your teeth get more and less pointy when I’m around. Then Molly went back to smiling beatifically at me, wringing her hands from a few feet away. Molly is a hugger—I know, who’s ever heard of a hugging vampire?—and though I have finally trained her not to touch me, she does tend to hover two feet away.

  “While You Were Sleeping is on, and Peter Gallagher just fell on the tracks. Want to watch with me?”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.” Again, I thought. Molly’s favorite technological advancement is movies, and she’s been there for every step: from their birth through the spread of theaters, home video, then DVD, and now Blu-ray and 3-D. When they bring back Smell-o-Vision, she’ll be the first in line at Best Buy. She adores film, which is probably why she bought the West Hollywood house to begin with—supposedly, Marilyn Monroe once threw up in the downstairs bathroom during a party. I would have a lot more respect for this passion if her absolute favorite genre wasn’t romantic comedy.

  “I’m just going to go up to my room, I think. Maybe read a little and go to bed. Are you working tonight?” I asked.

  “Nah, I’m good,” she said happily. Molly doesn’t really have to work—I’ve learned that vampires always seem to have a mysterious source of income, the result of being alive long enough to acquire, say, gold doubloons or fist-sized jewels—but she has a low-key part-time job transcribing interviews and meeting notes online. At home, she can type at lightning speed, having no trouble finishing in moments what would take me an hour. But she likes to go to coffee shops and work in the middle of people.

  I’m guessing this is also where she gets her victims, but she and I don’t really talk about that. Vampires need to feed anywhere from every night to every four or five days, depending on how active they are and how much they take. Older vampires, like Molly, have the practice and control to feed a little bit from a victim, then take their memory of the event away completely, which is called “pressing their minds.” Most of the time, the victims are left feeling a tad weak and fluttery, as if they’ve just made out with a stranger. No harm, no foul, right? The messing-with-memory thing gives me the creeps, and I am very grateful that Molly is old enough to control herself—and also that she could never feed from me personally.

  “Okay!” Molly crossed the living room and pulled the blackout drapes, then settled herself in the easy chair on the back wall by the window. It’s the farthest seat from the TV, but after some experimentation, we had discovered that it was directly under my bedroom. Molly never misses a chance to age, especially this close to dawn. Vampires die when the sun comes up, but in my radius, Molly can stay up and finish her movie. Of course, that meant she’d die when I left the radius again to come downstairs, but we’re both used to lots of transitioning back and forth. It happens. I sometimes wonder what Molly’s ideal age is—twenty-two? twenty-eight? thirty-five?—but I haven’t got the guts to ask. Whenever she gets there, I’ll have nowhere to live.

  I stripped off my work clothes, pulled on the ancient XL Chicago Bears jersey I inherited from my father, and crawled into bed. But the adrenaline hadn’t yet faded enough for me to sleep. I stared at the ceiling, thinking about my all-time worst crime scenes. Once, a witch had burned to death—I know, the irony—when a spell had gone wrong. There had been a dead child once, too; that had given me months of nightmares. But both times had been accidents, witch magic or vampire feeding gone too far. This was deliberate. It had looked like the battlefield in one of those medieval war movies. Barbaric. I pulled the blankets tighter. At this point, it takes quite a bit to rattle me, but that scene had done it. I closed my eyes, willing sleep to come.

  It took a long, long time.

  Chapter 3

  As he knelt in the clearing, Officer Jesse Cruz really wished he could just go back to a couple of weeks ago.

  It had only been nine days since his promotion, to plainclothes office third grade, and there were times when he imagined he could still feel the starchy itch of his uniform collar, the poky little Officer Friendly pin he used to wear to all the schools. His first week at the new precinct had featured a lot of cracks about his looks and his Officer Friendly gig, and Jesse had been shy enough as a kid that he had never really learned how to make friends by teasing back. But his mother was an old-school Mexicana, convinced that the greatest troubles of the world could be fixed with food bribes, and apparently Jesse had inherited this viewpoint. At 2:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, he had been standing in a twenty-four-hour bakery picking out donuts for the rest of the night shift. He had felt awkward in his sport jacket, unable to shake the feeling that everyone in the bakery knew he was a cop. And being a cop buying donuts...Well, it’s embarrassing.

  Not that trying to buy friends with baked goods isn’t kind of embarrassing in itself, he had thought as he walked back out to the unmarked car. Jesse was buckling his seat belt—Officer Friendly always does—when he had heard the call come over the radio, the code for a multiple homicide. Jesse listened as the dispatcher described a clearing in La Brea Park, and he felt a thrill in his stomach when he realized just how close he was already. He started up the car, sticking the little domed flasher on the roof with one hand, and felt a shiver of excitement as he sped out of the parking lot. Maybe he’d even be the first one there.

  The second that he would replay, over and over, was the moment when he’d actually dropped his gun. The girl with the bright-green eyes had startled him, and obviously the body...parts...in the clearing were beyond gruesome, but he was doing okay at that point, he’d thought. Then Jesse caught movement out of the corner of his eye and glanced over in time to see the giant dog bound toward them. He’d felt a pang of regret as he clicked off the safety—Jesse loved dogs—but before his finger could even tighten on the trigger everything had changed.

  Not a dog. A naked man.

  Working on autopilot, he had swooped down and picked up the service weapon, aiming for the guy’s chest, but the guy had remained motionless, curled up on the ground. Let’s try this again, Jesse had thought, loopy with shock, as he rose and began to circle around the blood again, toward the naked man. “Police! Don’t move!” he’d shouted, keeping a few feet away as he got far enough around to see the guy’s face. It was a normal human face, sort of wispy and pinched-looking, and if the guy hadn’t been stark naked, Jesse almost might have convinced himself that he hadn’t just seen a giant husky change into a person. No way had he seen a giant husky change into a person, right?

  The guy—who was actually kind of little and scrawny when you saw him up close—finally opened his eyes and started to pull himself to a sitting position. “Stop!” Jesse had ordered, and the smaller man sort of shook himself and met Jesse’s eyes. Then his gaze darted around the clearing, and when he looked back to Jesse, there was an almost mischievous grin spreading across his face. Before Jesse could open his mouth to speak again, the guy pulled himself into a ball and rolled forward, a look of intense concentration on his face. Jesse stared, completely speechless, as limbs started to move under the man’s skin, as if they were stretching in two directions. His skin started to sprout tiny hairs, but before Jesse’s eyes could even adjust to this development, the dog—not a dog, Jesse thought
numbly, a wolf—was back. It had taken maybe twenty seconds.

  The animal shook its fur, panting a little, and without a glance back at Jesse, it turned and raced off into the darkness. Jesse had fallen back to his knees, and for the first time, he really looked at the carnage in front of him. What the hell?

  That was how the next cops on the scene found him—Officer Friendly on his knees in the bloody mud, looking stunned. And for the first time, he wanted nothing more than to go back in time and undo his promotion. Officer Friendly never had to deal with wolves that were sometimes naked guys.

  When the first-response team joined Jesse at the scene, they attributed his stunned, wide-eyed look to shock and the gruesome arrangement of the bodies. If they could even be called “bodies” at this point. It was a perfectly reasonable response, and nobody even hassled him much over it, to his surprise. Jesse figured that even the most hardened veterans hadn’t seen anything like this before; everyone looked subdued and shocky. A couple of the rookies had run into the woods to vomit, though Jesse had managed to keep his coffee down. He was glad he hadn’t gotten the chance to eat any donuts.

  When asked to describe his arrival at the scene, Jesse heard his own voice telling the story without any mention of the girl with the green eyes or the naked...man. Lying about witnesses and withholding information were pretty much fireable offenses for a cop, but it was over and done with before he’d stopped to really weigh the consequences. He couldn’t describe the woman without describing the man—Jesse still wasn’t using the word werewolf, even in his own head—and he couldn’t describe the man without explaining how everyone had gotten away from him. So Jesse kept his mouth shut, stuck to the sidelines, and watched the bustle and activity all around him.