Midnight Curse (Disrupted Magic Book 1) Read online

  “No one’s going to buy your story,” Molly said from the passenger seat. She’d been so quiet since my arrival at the house that I almost jumped. “Twelve girls pass out at the same time and nobody wakes up when the fire starts?”

  “No, they’re definitely not going to buy it,” I agreed. “Especially if the bodies don’t burn all the way and the coroner doesn’t find any smoke damage in their lungs. But my job isn’t to conceal crimes, necessarily; it’s to conceal any Old World connections to crimes. Meanwhile, the evidence we added will confuse things, slow down the police.”

  She nodded, hugging the small backpack in her lap. Shadow gave her a quick sniff. The bargest had only met Molly once or twice, but it seemed like she instinctively understood that Molly was a friend. When it was clear no one was going to pet her or ask her to kill something, she yawned and went back to the dog bed.

  I wasn’t sure where we were going, so I cruised aimlessly down Adams Boulevard, watching my speed. Adams forms one of the borders of campus, and will take you halfway to the ocean if you let it. I drove west for a few miles, past all the campus activity, until I was sure we were too far to be spotted by the fire department or campus police. Then I pulled into the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour 7-Eleven. I looked at Molly, not sure what to say.

  I had so many questions—about the murders, of course, but also about how Molly had gone from living the life of a West Hollywood heiress to a punk college student. I searched for a place to start, and when nothing elegant came to mind, I blurted, “Did you sell the house?”

  “Rented it out. I had been there too long,” she reported, looking a little sad. I understood. Vampires can only stay in one place for a decade or so before someone starts asking why they never age. But Molly had loved her Hollywood bungalow. If she’d rented instead of selling, she probably intended to go back in twenty years or so and pose as her own daughter. It was a pretty common way for vampires to hang on to property. I felt oddly relieved—I kind of loved that house.

  “And USC?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to try college. I was taking film classes at night.”

  Molly had loved movies as long as I’d known her. “Why didn’t you get your own place?”

  “I had my own place,” she insisted, a little defensive. “There’s a little one-bedroom apartment in the basement. I told the girls I had EPP. Most college students are half-nocturnal anyway.”

  Erythropoietic protoporphyria is a very rare immune system disorder that made you basically allergic to sunlight. The few vamps who still tried to pass in human society often claimed to have EPP. For the longest time I’d actually thought the whole disorder was invented by vampires, but one day I saw a photo in the newspaper of a little girl with EPP smiling from beneath a beach umbrella.

  Photos. I thought about all the framed pictures in the foyer of Molly’s place. She wasn’t telling me something. “Dashiell knew about this plan?”

  A pause. “Dashiell knew most of it,” she said at last. “I told him about the night classes.”

  “But not how close you were to those girls, I’m guessing.”

  Molly’s shoulders hunched. “No.”

  I winced. Mass murder aside, Molly had obviously gone native—gotten so involved in leading a human-style life that she’d let herself get in too deep. As mistakes go, this was not small, especially for a fairly seasoned vampire like Molly. Once you hit a hundred years or so, you’re expected to follow the rules. And as long as I’d known her, Molly had kept her head down and followed the rules.

  I wanted to ask her why she’d suddenly let herself fall down the rabbit hole, but it seemed too much like an accusation, and this wasn’t the right moment for it. Besides, who was I to accuse her of screwing up? It wasn’t like I’d never messed up myself.

  But I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and the van filled with pregnant silence. Fidgeting, I tossed the baseball cap into the back and pulled my hair back into a loose bun with the hair tie on my wrist. “I didn’t mean to,” she said at last, her voice trembling. She was talking about the murders now. Her eyes were glued to the dashboard in front of her. “It’s like . . . it wasn’t me. I mean, it was me, I was doing it, but I didn’t . . . want to. I didn’t have control.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” I said stoutly. “I never actually thought you meant to kill those girls.”

  She lifted her head to look at me in surprise. “Really?”

  “Molly, remember when you came along with me to clean up that body that was left on Will’s doorstep? She’d been mauled by a werewolf. And you . . . mourned for her. For the cavalier loss of life.” I gave a little headshake. “I’ve seen you be a little callous about pressing humans or even hurting someone, but I know you, Molls. That wasn’t you.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered, her voice breaking. Brushing the tears from her eyes, she cleared her throat. “But Dashiell’s not going to see it that way.”

  “I know.” Willingly or not, Molly had committed a very splashy mass murder, no pun intended. It would be all over the news in a few hours, and Dashiell knew where Molly had been living. He would immediately make the connection, and then buy the simplest explanation: that Molly had lost control and killed her roommates. Even if Dashiell did believe someone had forced her, he was the leader of the supernatural community in an enormous city; his priorities were containment and politics, not justice.

  Then I remembered the Trials. They were supposed to start in less than twenty-four hours, and the whole Old World would be watching to see how our weirdly peaceful city handled this mass murder. Dashiell would have to lay down a death sentence . . . unless Molly could prove what had really happened.

  But even if there was a way to do that, there was no time.

  “It’s not a coincidence, is it?” I said, thinking aloud. “This happening the night before the Trials?” Whoever had forced Molly to kill her friends wanted her to get caught, go on trial, and be executed before she had a chance to prove her innocence. It wasn’t a bad plan, if you wanted Molly dead and didn’t think you could do it yourself. Oh, and if you didn’t object to the brutal deaths of twelve human kids. A lot of vampires wouldn’t mind that at all. They didn’t kill for sport, but they didn’t spend a lot of time mourning the loss of human life, which was fleeting by definition.

  “No. It’s not,” Molly agreed.

  “Do you have any idea who did this to you?” I asked, my voice coming out desperate. “Who hates you this much?”

  She shook her head. “I can only think of one person, and he’s been dead for years.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Her face darkened, and though she was human next to me, I could still see the predator lurking in her eyes, reflected in the neon lights of the store. It shouldn’t have been creepy, but it very much was. “Believe me,” she said. “I’m absolutely positive.”

  Shit. “So what do you want to do?”

  “I have to run,” she said bitterly. “I don’t know where I can even go at this point, but if I want to live, I have to run again.”

  Her voice broke, and her shoulders hunched. I reached over and laid a hand on her arm. She was right, of course: there was no way we were going to find out what had forced her to kill those girls before Dashiell heard about it.

  I’d had to restart my life once, and at the time, it was the hardest thing I’d ever done. I couldn’t fathom how vampires went through it over and over, especially considering how complicated it was for them to travel.

  “You should just let me out here,” Molly added, her voice still trembling. “You haven’t crossed a line yet.”

  She was right, I realized. Aside from lying to Eli about where I’d gone, I hadn’t technically done anything wrong . . . as long as I took Molly straight to Dashiell now. Or, at the very least, called him to report her transgression. I could say she’d left before I arrived at the house, and no one would question it—after all, capturing wayward vampires wasn’t part
of my job. Cleaning up after them was.

  Moreover, not one person in the Old World would judge me harshly for breaking my ties to Molly right now. Especially considering how she’d asked me to move out after I’d gotten into my own dangerous misadventures. I couldn’t exactly blame her, even then, but I didn’t owe her anything now.

  But I could still hear Jesse’s voice in my head, as clearly as if he were in the back seat. She’s your friend. You have to help her.

  “What do you need?” I asked.

  Molly’s lip trembled for a moment, but she just nodded at me, too overwhelmed to speak for a moment. Her eyes darted to the clock on the dashboard. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet, although it seemed hours later. She cleared her throat. “Can you give me a ride to Thousand Oaks?” I frowned, trying to review my mental list of Los Angeles neighborhoods. “North on the 101,” Molly added, seeing my confusion.

  I swallowed. Right. Thousand Oaks was just outside the county line, which I was absolutely not supposed to cross with Shadow. The bargest was with me as a sort of . . . mmm . . . exchange student from a group of evil, werewolf-hunting European witches. They had agreed to stay out of North America as long as Shadow never left LA County. If anyone inside their organization had connections to the Old World, it could theoretically get back to them that I’d broken the rule.

  But helping Molly was already breaking the rules. Would it really matter that I was bringing Shadow too?

  “Are you sure?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “My friend Frederic works at a twenty-four-hour storage facility. I have reserves there.”

  Vampires kept cash and IDs stashed here and there in case they had to flee town. Either it was Molly’s closest stash, or any other supplies she had were too close to Dashiell’s home base.

  I nodded and restarted the van, but before I shifted into Drive, I did something I never do: I turned off my phone. Technically, this made me unavailable for other crime scenes, which was breaking my contract with the Old World leaders. But “business” had been slow for over a year, thanks to the relative peace. Besides, I’d never done it before, and I was betting I could get away with it once by claiming a dead phone battery.

  I was betting a lot.

  Chapter 5

  The first part of the drive was very quiet. Molly stared out the window, her face empty. I couldn’t imagine what she must be feeling. Forced or not, she’d killed her friends, and now she was going to have to burn down the life she’d spent years building. Every now and then, when I glanced over, I saw fresh tears running down her cheeks.

  The pile of framed pictures was still on her lap, and after a while she began lifting each one, carefully removing the photo, and dropping the frame on the floor by her feet. When she was finished, she tucked the small stack of photos into a pocket of her backpack.

  “I can’t believe they’re really gone,” she said softly. “Harper and I were supposed to study for our final tonight. I can’t stop thinking of how they—” Her voice broke into a sob, and she sniffed hard, turning to face me. “Can we, like, talk about something else? Tell me how you’ve been.”

  This was dancing very close to the subject of how our friendship had fallen apart, but of all people, I understood the value of distraction. “Work’s been pretty good,” I offered. “Corry went off to college in the fall—Berkeley—but I’ve had fewer crime scenes, so I’ve been able to handle things on my own.” Corry was the only other null on this side of the Mississippi, and sort of my protégé, although that word felt weird. “I’ve also been working more with Will on security for the bar, and with the Haynes.”

  Dashiell’s security was overseen by a single family that had served him for hundreds of years. Until I was a partner, I hadn’t realized that Theodore Hayne, the head of security, wasn’t the only Hayne currently on Dashiell’s payroll. Theo’s brother, a CPA, handled some of Dashiell’s finances, and his sister, Abigail, took care of all of Dashiell’s electronic security—cell phones, computers, etc. She was the person you called if a vampire’s picture appeared on Facebook, or the werewolves were caught changing on a public security camera. And for a human, she was pretty scary.

  Molly’s face broke out into a smile. “You’re working with Abby? How’s that going?”

  “Uh . . . you know.” I waved it away. Abigail hated me, but I didn’t want to discuss it.

  “What about your brother? How’s Jack doing?” Molly said hurriedly, before a really decent silence could get going.

  “Jack is good. He’s doing his internship at the hospital now. He actually got married last weekend.”

  Molly brightened. “He did? That’s fantastic!”

  I smiled a little. “Her name is Juliet, she’s a guidance counselor at an elementary school, and she’s got two kids. I don’t see them that much, but they’re pathologically adorable.”

  “Were you a bridesmaid?”

  Of course that would be Molly’s first question. “Yes,” I grumbled. “Eli was an usher. We managed to survive the formalwear, but it was a close thing.”

  “That’s right, you’re still with Eli.” For a second I was startled, but then I remembered she would have figured that out in order to find me at the art walk. Was I crazy, or was there a sort of skepticism in her voice? Like she was surprised.

  “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?” My voice came out a little defensive. Before she could answer, a half-dozen insecurities flashed through my mind. Because you two have nothing in common. Because he likes being around people and you don’t. Because he’s dependent on you to keep him human. And so on.

  But Molly just shrugged. “No ring on your finger. I always figured Eli for the settling-down type.”

  I went quiet, but despite the years we’d spent apart, Molly knew me too well not to pick up on it. “He asked you, didn’t he?” she guessed.

  “No! Well, not in so many words. He just sort of brought it up. At Jack’s reception. As a . . . possibility.”

  I couldn’t really blame him—there we were, all dressed up, the shiniest possible versions of ourselves, surrounded by evidence of love and commitment. Of course it had crossed his mind. I shouldn’t have been surprised . . . but the thing is, I was. I had never really expected us to get married . . . no, that wasn’t right. I hadn’t even considered marriage as a viable option in my life. I was happy with the way things were—living with Eli and Shadow, working my job and my side projects, taking a few college classes on things that interested me. In fact, I’d spent the last three years living in the here and now, trying not to think too much about where I would be in five years, ten years. The marriage conversation had been a rude awakening.

  Molly spread her hands wide, impatient for me to continue. “And?”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I told him I wasn’t sure.” I was nearly twenty-seven, plenty old enough for marriage, and Eli and I loved each other. We lived together, we shared expenses, and we were even kind of raising an abominable dog-monster together.

  The trouble was, even if you set aside Eli’s maddening overprotectiveness, there were a dozen small reasons not to marry him. Part of it was that Eli wanted kids, and for reasons no one can really explain, nulls can’t have them. We could adopt, of course, but I wasn’t sure that I could be a mom, or sure that I even wanted to anymore. Back when I’d thought I was just a regular human being, I’d always figured that I’d have children eventually. But now . . . just thinking about it terrified me, and I didn’t really know why.

  There was also the problem of Eli’s loyalty to the pack. In a life-and-death situation, I knew he’d choose me first, but in a hundred small ways, he had to take them into account. They were a constant drain on his time and attention, for one thing, and everything Eli did had to be run past Will, which meant I had to be very careful about what I told him. If I didn’t want Will to know something, I couldn’t tell my boyfriend about it without putting him in a terrible position. Most of the time there was no reason why Will couldn’t know
what I was doing, of course, but having to report to someone, even by proxy, chafed me.

  And then there was the quiet tension that always simmered beneath Eli and me because being close to me gave him humanity. He was, in a way, dependent on me. And that was sort of my own fault. Years ago I had managed to cure him of his werewolf magic, but it had landed me in a lot of trouble, since nulls weren’t supposed to be able to do that. To keep me safe, Eli had accepted a second werewolf curse. Which wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t put him in the position of needing to do so to save my life . . .

  It was complicated.

  Molly was studying me. “How did you leave it?” she asked quietly. “After Jack’s reception, I mean.”

  I chewed on my lip for a moment. “We decided to put a pin in it,” I said finally. “Since then, I’ve . . .”

  “Been on your best behavior?” she suggested.

  I wrinkled my nose at the wording, but she was right. I nodded.

  “I’m sorry that I asked you to lie to him tonight,” she said earnestly. “I thought he might need to say something to Will.”

  “I know.” I didn’t need to say, “He probably would have.” We both already knew.

  I’d seen plenty of LA storage facilities from the freeway, but they were always dingy beige buildings with lights missing in the signs. The Hollywood Storage Center was something else. It was an attractive stucco building with beautiful landscaping and a surprisingly tasteful sign, surrounded by blooming flowers. Through the glass windows we could see a big open reception area with one wall taken up by security camera monitors. The floors were a beautiful glowing hardwood, setting off the lifelike statue of Marilyn Monroe off to one side. The place was classier than a storage center had any right to be.

  “Nice digs,” I said, turning off the van. Shadow’s enormous upper body was thrust between the seats again, her tail wagging a little with curiosity.

  “Lots of vampires keep containers here,” Molly said, her voice subdued. “I have a large one with some things from the house, but I also keep a safety deposit box.”