Blood Gamble (Disrupted Magic Book 2) Read online

  “Actually, I’m totally barren,” I said, keeping my voice pleasant. “Pass the bread, please.”

  That was the end of that conversation.

  When everyone was finished eating, Cliff came up to the table, as though he’d just wandered in from the casino. The suit wasn’t flashy or particularly expensive-looking, but it had been beautifully tailored. If I hadn’t known Cliff was carrying a gun, I’d never have suspected it.

  I introduced everyone—the others knew that we’d driven together, although I’d claimed it was because I got airsick—and he gave each of the women a polite smile. In that moment he reminded me of Lex, and Jesse when I’d first met him. All three of them had that cop thing where they were completely polite—friendly, even—while remaining so guarded that you never quite trusted their authenticity. Intense, that was the word. Intense people freaked me right the hell out.

  “Where are we heading this afternoon, ladies?” he asked after the introductions.

  Bethany frowned. “Didn’t Beatrice give you a copy of the itinerary?” she asked, in a tone that I recognized. It was the same voice LA women used when they addressed landscapers who spoke poor English.

  Cliff’s smile never wavered. “Yes, ma’am. As I recall, the next few hours are blocked off for shopping. Is that correct?”

  Bethany settled back, pacified. “Yes.”

  I fought the urge to wrinkle my nose. Personally, I’d glanced at the itinerary that Bethany had messengered to my house, like we were rich people in Manhattan or something, and then tossed it in the general direction of my suitcase. I hadn’t thought to take it out since.

  Juliet was looking at me, and I reminded myself that this weekend was supposed to be about her. Or at least, I was supposed to be pretending it was about her. Undercover was so confusing.

  But there were only, what, five hours until we had to be at the theater? How bad could this be? I put on a cheerful smile. “Sounds fun,” I said, in what I hoped was a bright voice. “What are we shopping for?”

  All four women chuckled, like I’d told a mildly amusing joke.

  Uh-oh.

  Chapter 8

  Four interminable hours later, I staggered into my room, feeling like I’d just done back-to-back training sessions with Marko. Groaning, I fell face-first on the hotel bed, trying to summon the strength to kick off my boots. I wore boots pretty much whenever I wasn’t training or out for a run, but for the first time ever, my feet were aching. I’d been betrayed by my own Fryes.

  The other women were doing a quick change and then getting drinks and appetizers in one of the restaurants on the Venetian’s shopping level, but I wanted to be away from people for a while more than I wanted food. There had just been so. Much. Shopping. The other four women had spent the whole time trying on clothes and giving one another opinions about the “cuteness” of each outfit. Molly liked to do that too. When had “cute” become the preeminent term to gauge the attractiveness of adult female clothing?

  Still, it’d been nice watching Juliet have so much fun. She didn’t buy much—I suspected this was because she and Jack were always saving money to put toward the hospital debt—but she was a good shopping buddy. She gave opinions in a way that was really sweet and supportive, gently nudging Laurel, Bethany, and even Tara away from unflattering choices. She’d encouraged me to try on a few things, too, but when it became clear that I was sick of it, she playfully recruited me to the opinion team. The whole thing was girly as hell, and I’d rather have been doing just about anything else, but . . . yeah. Juliet had clearly had a blast, and that was what mattered.

  A light knock on the door interrupted my thoughts, and I would have probably jumped if I weren’t too tired. “Who is it?” I mumbled into the pillow. No one answered, because no one would have been able to hear that. I extended my radius to reach the door.

  Witch.

  “Scarlett? It’s Laurel. Can we talk?”

  Oh. I didn’t know what she wanted, but I wasn’t really surprised, either. It was obviously that kind of day. I went to the door and looked through the peephole. The redheaded witch looked nervous, fiddling with her wave necklace, but she didn’t give off an “I’m going to murder you” vibe, so I shrugged to myself and let her in.

  Laurel stepped forward without waiting for an invitation. She glanced around the room. “Nice digs.”

  “Uh, thanks?” My room at the Venetian was palatial: an upper level with a king-size bed, and beyond it a whole lower level with a sitting area and windows overlooking the pool. Each separate area had its own television, and there was a third TV in the bathroom. A third television. Three. The whole thing was ostentatious to the point of discomfort, so I was trying to ignore it. “Um, do you want to sit?” I pointed down to the lower level.

  Laurel followed me past the bed and down to the sitting area, dropping onto the loveseat. “That was a lot of shopping, right?” she said with a slight smile.

  “For me, yes.” I shrugged. “But you didn’t come here to recap the day.”

  “No. I want to know why you’re really here.”

  I just raised an eyebrow. Laurel sighed. “You’re a null. I know you’re a null. I’ve heard about you—”

  “Wait, from who?” I broke in. This was so surreal, this merging of my identities. I’d just spent four hours shopping and making polite small talk with this woman, and now she was here talking about our mutual hidden lives.

  “Does it matter?”

  I didn’t reply. She watched me for a moment, then nodded. It mattered to me. “Someone in my clan knows someone in the LA clan.”

  “They don’t really call themselves that,” I said automatically. Outside of LA, most witches organize themselves by family. Each clan contains all the witch members of an extended family, plus a few others who live in the same town and know the family members. Los Angeles, on the other hand, doesn’t have a central family, so the witches organize themselves loosely under Kirsten in a sort of union or co-op.

  “You know what I mean,” Laurel said. “My clan is aware of the powerful Los Angeles null. I just never connected that Scarlett with Juliet’s new sister-in-law.”

  I watched her carefully, but I didn’t think she was lying. I was always sensitive about someone using my family to get to me—hence my fury at Dashiell—but Juliet had been friends with Laurel for years, well before she’d even met my brother. Of all the Old World factions, witches were probably the largest population, and they spent the most time with regular humans. So I didn’t doubt Laurel’s story . . . but I didn’t really trust her, either.

  “I’m here for Juliet’s bachelorette party,” I insisted. “It’s a real thing.”

  Her eyes narrowed just a little. “I’m sure that it is,” she replied, sounding just as careful as I had. “But from what Juliet says, it came together last-minute, less than a week after two famous vampires opened a show at the Bellagio. That can’t be a coincidence.”

  Okay, now I was getting nervous. Laurel wouldn’t tell Juliet anything—how could she?—but she could blow my bachelorette-party cover within the Old World, which would put Juliet and her friends at risk. So instead of answering the veiled accusation, I tried to throw her off-balance a little. “Who controls the Las Vegas Old World?”

  She reared back, just an inch. “The vampires.” She paused, reconsidering. “Well, sort of. The Strip and most of downtown belong to the vampires, and we don’t interfere. We do all our magic in the real Las Vegas, the actual city where regular people live and work. We leave them alone, and they leave us alone.”

  “Do they?” I was genuinely curious. In most of the vampire-controlled cities I knew of, the undead were pretty hands-on. Werewolf packs and witch clans had to pay dues, run errands, and generally serve the vampire ruling class. Not everyone held the reins as tightly as, say, Malcolm, but they all held them.

  Laurel shrugged. “It wasn’t always like this, but in the past five or six years, the vampires have been infighting. They haven’t had t
ime to mess around with us when they’re so busy trying to topple each other. But things are changing now.” Her eyes sought mine, and something clicked: She wasn’t here to figure me out. She was here to ask me for something.

  But it also seemed like she was being straight with me. The least I could do was reciprocate. “Dashiell, our cardinal vampire, encouraged me to see Demeter while I’m here,” I said, choosing my words with care. “He is concerned that the show is too revealing.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Has something else been happening?”

  Laurel pushed out a breath. “You don’t know?”

  Okay, that was enough. I was not the person you called for diplomacy and subterfuge. I was tired of playing games. “Not to overdo the Vegas puns here, but let’s put all our cards on the table, okay? Yes, Dashiell threw this bachelorette weekend together as a sort of cover story for me to come check out the show. And if you tell anyone that, or do anything whatsoever to put my sister in danger, I will shove a four-inch knife through your left eye socket.” I waved a hand. “Now you go.”

  Laurel’s eyes widened, and for the first time I felt her magic flare as she instinctively tried a spell against me. She was pretty weak, but she probably could have thrown someone into a wall if she really pushed it.

  Not me, though. Nothing happened.

  Having her magic fail unnerved her, and Laurel jumped up, looking almost dazed. “Wow. So that’s . . . real.”

  “Yeah. I am,” I said matter-of-factly. “Now, what did you really come here to ask me?”

  She blinked hard for a moment, easing herself back down onto the couch. “My clan has a good relationship with two of the vampires,” she said after a moment. “A married couple. They’re not particularly old or powerful, but they were close to my great-great-grandparents, and they’ve stayed connected to our family in a friendly way. I would call them allies, but they don’t really do anything for us. We just . . .” She paused, searching for the right words to explain the relationship, but came up empty and shrugged. “We like them. They come to some of the family events, and they spoil our kids rotten. Sort of like godparents.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Last week, one of them, Ellen, went missing. Wyatt—that’s her husband—was frantic. The vampires are always struggling for power, but Ellen and Wyatt are so weak that nobody ever bothered them before. Now Ellen has just . . . vanished.”

  “And you think the Holmwoods are connected?” I guessed.

  She held her hands out, palms up. “I don’t know. But Wyatt says that Ellen isn’t the first vampire to have vanished in the last few weeks, or the last. Something like thirty vampires have gone missing.”

  “Thirty?” I blurted. “Well . . . shit.” I thought of Margaret, the vampire whom Dashiell had sent to check out the show before me. Was it possible that she hadn’t been killed because she worked for Dashiell? What if she’d just been killed for being a vampire? Or maybe that was jumping to conclusions. They could have been kidnapped or something, but why would anyone want a . . . gaggle of vampires? Coven of vampires? Murder of vampires? How had I gone this long without looking up the group name for vampires?

  “When I figured out who you are, I sort of thought you were here to figure out what’s happening to the vampires,” Laurel said, and I forced my attention back to her.

  “Well, who’s the cardinal vampire in Vegas right now? Shouldn’t he or she do something?”

  Laurel shrugged. “There isn’t one, as far as I know. The last I heard a couple of vampires were fighting over it, but neither was really powerful enough to win.”

  Uh-oh. That was bad all on its own. No cardinal vampire meant a whole bunch of invisible killers were running around the city without any oversight. Crap. “Does this Wyatt have a theory?” I asked instead.

  Laurel nodded. “He thinks there are skinners in town.” At my confusion, she added, “Hunters? Human assassins who kill vampires and werewolves for money.” Her face darkened. “Some of them even hunt us, although they usually restrict themselves to boundary witches.”

  Skinners. The idea rang a bell, even if the specific term did not. Years earlier, I had spoken to a very bad man who had hinted about something like this. I’d never heard about any of these skinners in Los Angeles, though. “Why are they called—” I began, then held up a hand. “No, wait, I don’t want to know. Look, all of this is interesting, and I’m sorry about your friend, but I’m not sure what you want me to do about it.”

  Laurel chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “I thought . . . I thought you might be here to help. Maybe that was naive.”

  I had to hold in a sigh. “I’m not not here to help, but I’m just the scout. My assignment is to see tonight’s show, assess the situation, and tell my boss what I learn. If I happen to get information about your missing vampires, I’m happy to pass it on to you, but that’s not exactly my mission.” Mission? Great, I was starting to sound like Lex.

  “Fine.” Laurel stood up, looking a little pissy. “I haven’t seen the show, either. Maybe it’ll give both of us some insight.”

  Now why did that sound so ominous?

  After I closed the door behind Laurel, I started pacing my enormous room. I felt like I’d handled the confrontation more or less okay, but the news about the missing vampires troubled me. And I was also a little weirded out that Laurel saw me as someone who could do something about it. Most of the time I felt like the best I could do was project an image of competence—and I never did a particularly good job of it.

  I checked my watch. The vampires would be waking up for the night in fifteen minutes. Surely Dashiell would know what to do. I would call and run all of this by him.

  I took a quick shower to get rid of the signature Las Vegas smell: cigarette smoke and consumerism. Then I put on a green jersey dress and my black boots, complete with holsters for two of my throwing knives. The very tips of my knife handles were visible when I wore a dress, but you’d have to be looking for them. And there was no way I was going out in the city unarmed.

  When I was as ready as I would get, I made the call to Dashiell, who didn’t answer. I resisted the urge to swear on his voice mail, and instead left a message explaining Laurel’s visit and the missing vampires. I told him I’d call again after the show, or at midnight if I got held up.

  While I was at it, I called Corry to check in on Shadow, who was doing fine—although she’d shredded my comforter to protest my absence. I just shook my head at that. Shadow was so weird. And, of course, the reason why I can’t have nice things.

  A little after six, I was alone in the elevator, heading downstairs to meet Juliet and her friends. I tried to give myself a pep talk about being normal and human, not just for my sister-in-law, but also in case anyone else from the Las Vegas Old World figured out what I was. Laurel had been onto me pretty quickly. I would need to be ready to convince people that my being here was just a coincidence.

  In any other city, this probably wouldn’t have worked—Dashiell would have needed to contact the established cardinal vampire and inform him that a null would be traveling through town. But since Vegas didn’t have a confirmed cardinal, at least not one that we knew of, there was no one for Dashiell to call. It was a loophole, but I was gonna cling to it.

  Chapter 9

  I was supposed to meet Juliet and her friends on the second floor of the Venetian, in the shopping area where the indoor gondolas turned around. It was crowded with people on their way to restaurants and shows, and as I walked out of the elevator bank and joined the throng, I actually staggered, needing to grab the canal railing to steady myself.

  There were vampires everywhere.

  It wasn’t that there were thousands of them in my immediate vicinity, but as soon as one passed through my radius, another seemed to follow from a different direction, and then two more, and so on. It was disorienting, like being invisible in a crowd of moving people. I had a knife in each boot and a third in the small black clutch I’d
borrowed from Molly, but I still felt practically naked with the need to protect myself.

  The vampires were beginning to look around, too, because they felt themselves switching in and out of humanity. Nulls are rare, but at least Las Vegas did have another null hanging around. Hopefully these guys were looking for Jameson. I didn’t want to blow my cover this soon, so I concentrated on shrinking my radius down to about two feet around me. I retreated to a less-crowded area a few feet away and tried to look innocuous.

  “Hey, Scar!” Juliet’s voice came ringing down the hall. I turned to see her walk up with the others—and immediately felt like a heel.

  Juliet was wearing a tight white sheath that made her olive skin seem to glow. A bright pink sash that read The Bride was draped across her front. Tara, Bethany, and even Laurel were wearing black dresses that only made Juliet stand out more. All of them had on high-heeled pumps in bright colors—Juliet’s were royal blue, and the others varied from red to purple. Even Tara tottered on four-inch spikes, one hand on her belly. They all looked so together, so coordinated. So . . . bridesmaidy. Hashtag squad goals.

  With an effort, I did not glance down at my own casual dress and knee-high boots, which had seemed fine back in the room. “Hi,” I said, accepting Juliet’s light hug. “You look amazing.” I glanced at Bethany. “Did I miss a memo or something?”

  Bethany’s thin lips were pursed with disapproval. I was starting to think that was just her go-to face. “I guess you didn’t read through the itinerary,” she sniffed.

  My sister-in-law pulled me forward, steering us down the hallway. “I know it’s dorky,” Juliet said in a low voice. “But Bethany really wanted to, and I couldn’t say no. You look great, by the way.”

  “I could go back up and change . . .” I said distractedly. I was still trying to keep my radius tight around me, a difficult task that only got harder with someone talking to me.

  “No, no. Don’t even worry about it. I’m just happy you’re here.” She gave me a little squeeze and released me, which nearly made me stumble.