Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel)

by Melissa F. Olson

  “Carling called me,” she said with distaste. The good doctor and Will had some kind of weird hostile relationship I didn’t understand, but she’d taken a couple of weeks off to come help me when he’d asked. He probably knew doctors who lived a little closer, but Noring was an oncologist, and she was familiar with the medication that Olivia had forced on me. Noring was also familiar with the Old World—she was a witch.

  In lieu of a doctor’s bag, she carried the biggest purse I’ve ever seen in my life, a black faux-crocodile hobo that was massive enough to make Mary Poppins salivate. She pulled out a blood pressure cuff and strapped it around my upper arm, squeezing the little hand pump thingy without mercy.

  “How’s the vertigo?” she asked accusingly, over the hiss off the cuff.

  I winced. “Mostly gone.”

  “And the edges of your aura?” She meant my radius, the sphere of nothingness that surrounded me. I hated the word “aura,” which was Olivia’s favorite term for what we could do. I didn’t correct Noring, though, because she was a teensy bit scary.

  “Still fuzzy,” I admitted. When I’d changed Eli, it had been because I’d developed a sudden understanding of my own abilities—I had figured out how to sense the borders of my own power, and how to channel the magic I cancelled out into myself, taking the magic from Eli. But afterward, I hadn’t been able to sense the borders of my power like that again. The problem was that I had no idea if losing that ability was due to the concussion, or the coma, or the Domincydactl, or the seizure. And Noring knew even less than I did about nulls.

  She nodded as if I’d confirmed her worst fears and resumed checking my vital signs, which were fine. Then she began running me through tests to see if I’d exacerbated the concussion. I nailed the vision, hearing, and memory portion, but failed the balance and coordination section. “That’s worse than it was two days ago,” Noring said disapprovingly. “Let’s see the leg.”

  I pulled up my pants leg so she could check on my knee. It was so swollen than she had a hard time sliding the brace off, and I held my breath to keep from gasping at the pain. Noring ignored me, either because she has a shitty bedside manner or to punish me for running around on my bad leg.

  I’m sorry; that was ungracious. It could also have been both.

  When the brace finally surrendered, I had the knee equivalent of cankles. I sucked in air through my teeth as Noring frowned down at it, testing the joint very gently with her fingers. I held my breath so I wouldn’t cry out.

  “This isn’t healing like we hoped,” she told me. For the first time since she’d arrived, her tone was mild, and possibly even sympathetic. Let’s call it sympathetic-adjacent. “There are physical therapies you can try, but nothing’s very effective until the swelling goes down. Meanwhile, I’ve got some med school friends in the city, so I’ll make some calls and get you an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon.”

  I winced. “Uh . . . I can’t really afford that.” I make okay money working for the Old World in LA, but I’d had to blow most of my savings to send Jack on a last-minute trip to Europe over Christmas.

  “Your insurance should cover most of it,” Noring said. When I didn’t respond, her lips compressed back into a line. “Let me guess. You don’t have insurance.”

  I shook my head guiltily, and she gave me her biggest, most long-suffering sigh yet. “Of course you don’t. What happened the last time you were in hospital?”

  “That time I was injured in the line of duty, or whatever, so Dashiell paid my medical bills. This wasn’t work-related, though.”

  Noring gave me a disappointed look and said, “Well, you can try giving it another few days to see if the swelling goes down, but I’m not optimistic. Something is wrong in there, more than a simple torn meniscus, and you need x-rays and an MRI. And you really should be using crutches instead of just the cane now.”

  “But then I couldn’t get around,” I protested.

  She arched her eyebrows in a way that effectively communicated my idiocy. “Yes, that’s kind of the idea.”

  My right hand was resting on my leg above the knee, and Noring suddenly looked down and took hold of my hand, turning it so she could see my forearm. “That’s a burn,” she said, puzzled.

  I pulled my hand back. “My God, did you go to medical school?” I said sarcastically. It’s possible that I’m not a morning person.

  Noring wasn’t deterred. “How did you get a burn?”

  “Making soup. For breakfast,” I lied. “Er, I mean a late snack.”

  After leaving Will’s house the night before, I’d still had to get rid of the body, and Molly was busy making sure the werewolves didn’t follow me. I’d driven straight to an art studio in the Valley where I have an arrangement with Artie Erickson, the studio’s slightly shady proprietor. In exchange for a small fee, he grants me no-questions-asked access to the industrial furnace that came with the building when he bought it. I had my own gate key so I could back the van right up to the door closest to the furnace room. Despite that, it had still taken me nearly twenty minutes to get the body from the van to the furnace. I would take a step with the cane, lift the knot of the garbage bag, and sort of swing the bag two feet forward. Then I’d take another step and repeat. My knee throbbed so much that as soon as I reached the interior doors I started resting against the wall every three steps.

  Getting the body to the furnace had been slow and made my knee hurt. Getting the body into the furnace was a completely different problem. Usually I toss and run, but I couldn’t move quickly now, and even a few seconds exposed to the heat would be dangerous. After some poking around, I had finally discovered a pair of big oven mitts on a hook behind the furnace room door. I put them on, along with a cracked, grimy welder’s helmet that I found in a pile of old junk. Then I opened the furnace door, planted my feet, and heaved the body through the opening, like a boss. My exposed ears had felt hot for a moment, and I’d gotten a mild burn on my arm where the mitten had gaped, but all in all I considered it a success.

  Apparently Dr. Noring didn’t agree, though. She frowned at me, but I just shrugged, sticking to my soup story. Noring shook her head and I suddenly felt witch power brush against me, the spell shorting out in my radius like a horsefly on a bug zapper.

  I looked at her indignantly. “Uh, can I help you?”

  “Sorry,” she said, slightly sheepish. “I wasn’t trying. Force of habit.”

  I’d assumed Noring was Old World the moment I’d met her, and I’d felt her power as soon as I concentrated. But we hadn’t discussed it until now. “You usually cast spells on your patients?”

  “I don’t call it that,” she said stiffly, “but yes, sort of.”

  “What kind of witch are you?” The majority of human magic users are trades witches—they can do a little bit of everything, from mild charms to enhance their appearance to (given the time and resources) complex rituals that can protect a building. A few witches have unique skills, though, not unlike how doctors have different specializations. I was guessing that Noring was one of these.

  After a moment of hesitation, she sat down on the couch next to me. For the first time since we’d met, her face smoothed into an expression that wasn’t a frown or a glare, and she said quietly, “I can sense what’s happening in a body and push it toward health.”

  “Like a healer?” I said, interested. I’ve heard of witches who can heal, but never met one in person.

  But Noring shook her head. “No, no, nothing that dramatic. The body tells me what’s happening inside it, and I . . . encourage it. To get better. Sometimes it works, and sometimes the body is just too sick to recover.”

  “And you were trying to get my body to talk to you just now?”

  “Yes,” she said briskly. “A reflex.” She leaned over to rummage in her enormous bag. “I believe I have something for that burn. But can I give you a piece of advice, Scarlett?”

  I doubted that she could be worse at running my life than I was. “Sure,”
I said with a shrug.

  She paused her purse expedition to look at me directly. “You need to stop fighting above your weight class,” Noring said simply.

  I blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Every day I take care of people who are crippled by a terrible illness, and what you’ve put your body through . . .” She shook her head. “You’re in worse shape than many of them.” She had located the burn cream, and she dabbed a generous dollop onto my wrist. Putting the cap back on, she added, “Other than these injuries, you’re in good health. That’s a gift. Stop squandering it on these”—she waved an arm absently—“these people.”

  Tears stung my eyes. Under ordinary circumstances I probably would have been angry, but I’d been caught off guard, and besides . . . that was exactly what my mother would say.

  “It’s not that easy,” I said helplessly. “There were people counting on me, and I had to help stop—”

  “Let someone else help,” she interrupted, voice firm. “You are getting your ass kicked.”

  It was such a coarse expression from such a cultured accent that I laughed out loud, a feeble, painful sound.

  “You have no idea,” I told her.

  Chapter 7

  Detective First Grade Jesse Cruz was very sick of people.

  He’d spent all of the last two days conducting interviews on a hit-and-run homicide just off Fairfax. A dark red—or maybe brown, or maybe purple—minivan had sped off after clipping a nineteen-year-old actress/waitress who had been rushing across the intersection to get to her shift at IHOP. The van had sped off, and the teenager had bled out at Cedars-Sinai after seven hours of surgery. The intersection was within view of three different high-rise apartment buildings, and Jesse and his squadron had been going door to door, asking the same useless questions of useless people. He was tired and defeated, and as he headed back to his department-issued sedan Jesse wanted nothing more than to not speak to anyone for a few hours.

  But it didn’t work out that way.

  A late-model Mercedes S-class was parked illegally at a fire hydrant directly behind Jesse’s vehicle. As he neared it, the Mercedes’s door opened and an enormous black man began to climb out of the vehicle, his movements purposeful and efficient but not aggressive. Jesse froze on the sidewalk, marginally aware that his right hand now rested on his weapon. The stranger wore a black polo shirt, pressed chinos, and what looked like an empty shoulder holster. He closed the car door gently and held up both hands in the universal gesture for “I mean you no harm.” A business card was trapped in the fingers of his left hand. “Detective Cruz?” the man rumbled. A pleasant, professional smile was tacked on his face.

  “Yes?” Jesse said cautiously.

  “My name is Hayne.” The black man extended his arm, holding out the business card. “Mr. Dashiell sent me to get you.”

  Jesse automatically reached out to accept the white paper rectangle. It was his own card, with the department’s official logo and his name, title, and contact info. He flipped it over. On the back was an all-too-familiar address, and the name Dashiell in elegant cursive.

  Jesse dropped his hand from his gun and looked up at Hayne in disbelief. “He’s just . . . summoning me? Right now?”

  “Yes, sir.” Hayne opened the back door and looked expectantly at Jesse, who only gaped.

  “I can’t come now; I’m working,” Jesse protested.

  “Your shift ended twenty minutes ago, sir,” Hayne said easily.

  Anger rippled across Jesse’s back, tightening his shoulders. “He’s keeping tabs on me? Screw that. I’m not at his beck and call.”

  He started away, toward his own car, and Hayne’s professional smile wavered. “He said you’d say that, sir,” Hayne said quietly, forcing Jesse to stop so he could hear the other man. “He said to tell you it’s about Miss Bernard.”

  The manipulation was obvious, but effective. “What about Scarlett?” Jesse asked sharply. “Is she going to be there?”

  When Jesse made no move toward the car, Hayne closed the door again and leaned against it, probably trying to look harmless. Instead, the man seemed about to dent the car door. “I don’t have that information, sir. But Mr. Dashiell said to tell you that she’s in trouble.” He stood and reached for the door behind the driver’s again, holding it open, and Jesse stared at him for a long moment, trying to read intent in the bigger man’s expression. Finally Hayne sighed. “It’s not a trick,” he said quietly. “Not a trap. Dashiell just genuinely needs to talk to you. Sir.”

  “I have a phone,” Jesse reminded him, trying not to sound sullen. Something about Dashiell always made him feel like an insolent teenager, and it apparently happened whether or not the vampire was actually present.

  Hayne broke into a grin, and for the first time his expression seemed real. “And Mr. Dashiell has a way of doing things, sir. You’ve survived this long, you must have figured that out by now.”

  Jesse stared at him for a second more, then relented. Ignoring the open door to the backseat, he walked around the Mercedes to the passenger door and climbed in.

  Smog hung low over the city’s skyline, but the temperature had dropped so low that Jesse could almost pretend it was a nice clean fog instead of man-made airborne poison. The sunlight had faded behind the city by the time they pulled up to Dashiell’s Spanish-colonial mansion in the old-money portion of Pasadena. Hayne bypassed the main part of the driveway and pulled the Mercedes into a four-car garage at the back of the property. He hopped out of the Mercedes, but Jesse was faster, getting out of his own side before the man could open his door. Smiling benignly, Hayne guided Jesse toward a service entrance that lead into a Spanish-tile kitchen that he had seen before. They went through the kitchen, and Jesse suddenly found himself back in the same living room area that led out onto the patio.

  He blinked. Dashiell was in the living room, having a quiet conversation with Will Carling, the leader of the Los Angeles werewolf pack, and a stunning woman who appeared to be in her late thirties. His wife. Jesse had seen her before.

  Dashiell broke off what he was saying as Jesse entered. The vampire was a blandly handsome man who appeared to be in his late thirties, with dark hair and eyes. He wore a perfectly pressed shirt and black slacks. “Thank you for coming, Detective,” Dashiell said, turning toward Jesse, who shrugged noncommittally. Like he’d had a choice.

  “Detective Cruz,” the woman said warmly, rising from her place next to Dashiell on an overstuffed sofa. She stepped toward him, holding out a hand. “I’m Beatrice. It’s so nice to finally meet you.”

  “Right,” Jesse said awkwardly. She was a knockout, with long dark hair spilling across a cream-colored sundress that set off her olive skin. Spanish, he figured, which connected to the decor. He automatically took the vampire’s hand as it was offered, half expecting it to be icy cold. But no, whatever magic animated vampires kept them room temperature as well. “We’ve sort of met before.” The last time he’d been in this room, he and Scarlett had stopped Jared Hess and a vampire named Ariadne from killing Dashiell and Beatrice.

  Beatrice’s smile smoothed over into a solemn nod. “Of course. But we weren’t exactly introduced then, were we?” she asked, with a little twinkle in her eye.

  “No, ma’am.”

  Jesse realized that Will and Dashiell had gotten up too, fast enough that he hadn’t even seen it. Despite the demonstration of speed, Will looked exhausted. After shaking Jesse’s hand, the alpha sank immediately back down in an armchair, as though the handshake had been the only thing keeping him on his feet. Dashiell did not hold out a hand to shake, but simply gestured for Jesse to take the last remaining seat in the living room, an ornately carved dark wooden chair. They all sat back down, and Will was the first to speak.

  “Have you heard from her?” he asked quietly.

  “Scarlett? Yeah.” Jesse’s hand automatically touched his phone in his pocket, as though it might conjure the girl out of thin air. “She stopped by my apartment about a week a
go, to tell me she was gonna join her brother in the UK for a few days to recover from the mess with Olivia.” Will’s eyes slid over to Dashiell, who smoothed down the front of his spotless shirt. No one said anything for a long moment, and Jesse felt like he had missed something. “What?”

  Beatrice finally spoke up, her voice warm and thick like sap running down a tree, smothering everything in its path. “Detective, can I offer you something to drink? Or perhaps a sandwich? We have a well-stocked refrigerator.”

  Cold realization gripped Jesse, and he jerked his eyes toward the floor. Stupid, he cursed himself. Stupid of him to meet their eyes. He’d spent so much time around Scarlett while he was talking to these people that he’d forgotten to be afraid.

  And that wasn’t the only thing he’d forgotten.

  “I’ve never told Scarlett where I live,” he said flatly. “And now that I try, I can’t remember what she was wearing or her words. She wasn’t really at my apartment, was she?”

  “No.” Even in that one word Dashiell’s calm voice held something, a weight, and despite his resolve, Jesse’s gaze flicked hungrily toward the vampire. He suddenly wanted Dashiell to speak again, to ask him for something, a favor maybe that Jesse could—

  “Enough,” Will’s voice was ice-pick sharp, and the spell broke. Jesse’s breath rushed into his lungs with a sudden ferocity, and he knocked over the chair as he scrambled away, unconsciously searching for a wall he could put his back against. The glass patio doors were behind him, though, and he had to work on calming the panic.

  “You pressed me,” he said, hating the tremor in his voice. Terror gripped his body, and Will and Dashiell both turned their heads sharply in his direction, smelling the fear. “You pressed me to think . . .” He shook his head, trying to clear it. One of the vampires had pressed him to believe Scarlett had stopped by his place. But if that hadn’t been real . . . He looked up. “Where is she?” Jesse demanded.