Shadow Hunt

by Melissa F. Olson

  She looked at me for another long, quiet moment. “Okay,” Molly conceded. “You make some solid points.”

  I sniffed a little, trying to calm myself down. “Besides,” I went on, swiping at my eyes with the back of a hand, “what do you think would happen if Dashiell and the others find out they’ve got the world’s only pregnant null?”

  Molly thought about that for a moment. “They’d try to keep it quiet,” she said finally. “They’d lock you away until the baby’s born, and then Dashiell would pressure you to give it up for adoption, for its safety and yours.”

  This was pretty much the same conclusion I had reached, but it didn’t help to have it confirmed. “Exactly. And if I give up my baby to strangers, I can’t protect it if it does turn out to be Old World.” I held out my hands. “I’m stuck.” Tears threatened to spill down my cheeks again. “Unless I get an abortion. Then this whole thing goes away.”

  She gave me a sympathetic look. “And you’ll never get another chance to have a kid.”

  That wasn’t true, of course; I could still adopt a baby someday. But I knew what Molly meant: I would probably never get another chance to have my own personal uterine miracle. I only knew of a handful of nulls on the planet, and the only other male of reproductive age was (a) in Scotland, and (b) married.

  “What do you want to do?” Molly asked softly. “I mean, you’re not very far along, right? You’ve got time.”

  I gave her a pitying look, and she shook her head, not needing me to say it. “No, you don’t. Because you told me, and Dashiell will expect me to report this to him ASAP. I don’t really give a fuck if I get in trouble for keeping your secrets, but I’m guessing you do care.”

  “Damn right. You can’t lie to him.”

  She slumped so her head was nearly level with the back of the couch. “Probably not, no.”

  We were being literal. Molly had sworn allegiance to Dashiell, the cardinal vampire of the city. That kind of oath had actual power in the Old World. If he really pushed her, and I wasn’t there to keep everybody human, he could actually force her to tell him the truth.

  A tide of hopelessness threatened to overwhelm me, and I felt myself trying to swallow back tears. This was too much. This was all way past too much.

  Molly saw the look on my face and pushed out a breath. She sat up again. “Okay. I think we need to figure out what you’re having. If it’s a normal human baby, that’s a very different prospect than . . . something else.”

  “Okay, but how do we find out?”

  “That, I don’t know. Ordinarily I’d ask the nearest cardinal vampire, but that’s Dashiell. Even if you were ready to tell him, I think he’s too young to know.”

  Most vampires get power with age, but every once in a while, a vampire is reborn with way more than his or her fair share. Dashiell was one of those anomalies, which meant he was powerful enough to hold a city, but not even two hundred years old.

  “Yeah, if he’s ever heard of a pregnant null, he would have at least hinted at it by now,” I reasoned. It would be just like Dashiell to dangle null secrets in front of me and make me bargain for them. If he hadn’t mentioned null reproduction, he didn’t know about it. “Same goes for Kirsten.” The witch leader of Los Angeles had a toddler, and I trusted her a lot more than Dashiell. If she’d known of a way I could have kids, she would have said something.

  We could ask Kirsten to do some research, but she’d have to talk to people, if for no other reason than to explain why she needed to access the witches’ library of magical knowledge. And I couldn’t afford to let any more people know about this than absolutely necessary. Besides, Kirsten, Dashiell, and Will were all my partners in the city’s leadership, at least in theory. Asking Kirsten was the same as asking Dashiell, and I was back to square one.

  Talking to a vampire wasn’t a bad idea in itself, though. I could claim I was in a relationship where the guy wanted kids, and I was curious if it was possible. But Molly was right—it would need to be someone a hell of a lot older than Dashiell, and I mostly just knew the vampires in LA, who were a fairly young group. There weren’t a lot of vampires willing to swear loyalty to someone who was younger than they were.

  “Who’s the oldest vampire you know?” I asked Molly.

  “Uh . . .” She held out her hands, palms up. “Most of my sisters were turned when I was.”

  “Shit.” I thought about the vampires I’d met in Las Vegas, but other than Wyatt, who was only about two hundred, they all either hated me or had been killed. “Wait.” A memory nagged at me. Not a vampire, but I’d had a conversation with Sashi, a healing witch in Vegas. We’d been talking about Sashi’s friend Lex . . .

  I stood up. “I know what to do,” I said simply. “Get your overnight bag. We’re leaving in five.”

  Molly rose, too. “Where are we going?”

  “Boulder, Colorado,” I told her. “To see maybe the oldest vampire on the planet.”

  Chapter 2

  I threw clothes and toiletries into a small duffel bag, more or less on autopilot. My thoughts were still flying around faster than I could grasp them, but at least I sort of had a plan, however flimsy.

  “Can I drive?” Molly yelled from the other room.

  I started to say no, but paused to consider. Molly drove like a maniac. Or like a person who can heal from almost anything and has already faced down death once. But if she drove, we would get there a hell of a lot faster. Besides, I was already sick to my stomach.

  “Sure,” I called back, making a mental note to grab some of my heavy-duty ziplock bags. I was pretty much guaranteed to puke before we got there, but just in case, I went to the bedside-table drawer and popped a Dramamine.

  Molly leaned into my doorway, looking hopeful. “Can we take Eleanor?”

  I rolled my eyes. Eleanor was what Molly called her 1967 Shelby Mustang GT500, a muscle car she kept in a storage unit a few miles away. Molly rarely drove it, and I’d only been in it once. I didn’t know anything about cars, but it was very pretty. And very conspicuous.

  But Eleanor was fast, and it didn’t have GPS or LoJack, which meant Dashiell wouldn’t be able to track it. Besides, it wouldn’t matter if we had a flashy car between LA and Boulder. Everyone I was worried about was within the city limits. “Yeah, okay.”

  Her face lit up. “Yesssss!” She turned and disappeared back down the hall, closing my door behind her.

  “Let’s take a cab to the storage center, so it looks like we’re both still home,” I yelled after her. Then I stopped, my hands frozen in the act of zipping my bag. I hadn’t thought about how to cover my job. Or about Shadow, who was currently pressed against my right leg, doing her best to mirror my every movement. She was looking up at my face with obvious anxiety. Not about being left, I knew. Shadow didn’t get afraid of things like that. She was afraid I’d be hurt while I was away from her.

  “I’m sorry, but you know you can’t come,” I told her, starting toward the bedroom door. I’d left my cell phone out in the living room. I pulled the door open. “We’ll call Jesse—”

  At that moment, a familiar figure stepped into the hallway. “Somebody say my name?” Jesse leaned in my doorway, looking gleeful. Before I could answer, he added, “Oh my God, that was amazing. I’ve always wanted to have sitcom timing when I walked into a room. Now I can check it off my—oh. Hey.”

  I had thrown my arms around him, tears pricking my eyes. I don’t know which of us was more surprised. “Hey,” Jesse said again, awkwardly patting my back. “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re here,” I mumbled into his neck. He smelled the way he always did, of Armani cologne and oranges. It was immensely comforting.

  “Yeah, my dad is working late, so we had to postpone family dinner until Sunday. Molly let me in . . . what’s wrong?”

  Ignoring the question, I forced myself to pull back. I straightened my shirt, embarrassed, and glanced down at Shadow. “You didn’t feel the need to warn me about a visitor?” I asked
her.

  She looked at me and gave a huge, deliberate yawn, showing off a row of enormous, glittering white teeth. The message was obvious: Jesse didn’t count. He spent too much time here, and she loved him nearly as much as she loved me.

  “Scarlett?” Jesse had taken in the bag behind me, and the look on my face. “What’s going on?”

  “I need your help. Again,” I said, sniffling a little. Jesse had made a ton of money from writing a book about his time as a cop. He didn’t need to work for the time being, which made him conveniently available. This wouldn’t be the first time I’d taken advantage of that. “Can you stay here and take care of Shadow and the Batphone for a couple of days?” My cell phone number was the one the Old World leaders used when there was an emergency for me to clean up. It was also an easy way to track me.

  “Of course, but why? Where are you going?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him—after all, Lex was really his friend—but snapped it shut again. That was thinking like a null. But Jesse was just a human.

  “I can’t say,” I said, my voice pleading. “If you don’t know, they can’t make you tell.”

  He took a step closer. “Who can’t make me tell?”

  “Dashiell.”

  “Scarlett . . .” His painfully handsome face clouded over. “Is this about curing Hayne? Did it . . . do something to you?”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “Then what kind of trouble are you in?”

  I almost laughed at his phrasing. In trouble. I was definitely in at least three kinds of trouble. “It’s going to be okay. I think. I’m not, like, staging a coup or anything. But I need to go ask someone for help, and it means leaving the county, which is against the rules for Shadow. I should be back . . . day after tomorrow? I hope?” Okay, I was starting to sound loopy as hell, even to me.

  Looking worried, Jesse pulled me close again so he could plant a kiss on my forehead. “Okay. What do I do if someone calls the Batphone?”

  “Tell them . . . tell them I still have the flu,” I answered, brightening. Sometimes I went nearly a week without getting called in to clean up some kind of supernatural mess. “I’ll text Dashiell and tell him you’re helping me because I’m sick again.” With luck, I might actually get away with this.

  But I needed to do it either way.

  Jesse looked in my eyes, and whatever he saw made him nod and step back. “Molly!” I yelled. “Do you still have extra burner phones?”

  A brief pause, then: “Does the pope shit in the woods?”

  “Uhhh . . .”

  “Of course I do!”

  “Great.” I picked up my cell phone off the nightstand and handed it to Jesse, who put it in his pocket. “I’ll get you the burner number before we leave. That way you can call me if there’s a serious issue.” One of the vampires would also be able to press Jesse to get my new cell number, but if it came to that, we’d already be screwed.

  “Okay. What about Shadow?”

  “Right.” I glanced down at the bargest, who was glaring at me again. I had never left Shadow with anyone but another null, at least not for more than a couple of hours. I sat back down on the bed, which put my face more or less at eye level with hers. “I know you’re not happy with me,” I told her, “and I know why. But can you please try to be good for Jesse?” The one thing I absolutely couldn’t do was leave Shadow alone during the full moon. She was magically driven to pursue and kill werewolves, thanks to the spell that made her a bargest, and during the full moon, the werewolves in LA had to change. Luckily, that was almost three weeks away.

  Shadow kept the glare going for a few more seconds, but then her clubbed-off tail lifted and slowly began to wag. She dipped her head and gave my hand one regal lick. I scratched her ears. “Thank you.” I looked back up at Jesse. “And thank you.”

  He nodded, still looking worried. “Go do what you need to do.”

  Chapter 3

  Jesse drove Scarlett and Molly to a storage unit a couple of miles away, where Molly supposedly kept a muscle car. Under normal circumstances, he would be interested in seeing it, but he was too worried about Scarlett. She had been off ever since she’d returned from Las Vegas, her eyes distant and haunted. Then the flu, and now whatever this was. It was a lot of stress.

  The ride was quiet, with only the low buzz of the radio and Shadow occasionally shifting around in the back seat, where she was scrunched in next to Molly. When they arrived at the storage facility, Molly got out of the back seat with a quick, “Thanks, Jesse,” closing the door behind her. Scarlett put her hand on the door handle, then paused, looking over at him. She looked worried and pale, and she’d lost weight during her illness. Jesse had to stop himself from nagging her to eat regularly and drink lots of fluids.

  “You look . . . um . . . not back to full strength,” he said instead. “Are you sure about this?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “But I don’t know what else to do.” He opened his mouth to ask what she meant, but Scarlett just shook her head. “I’ll explain everything when we get back, I promise.”

  She leaned over and kissed his cheek before exiting the car.

  As he drove back to the cottage, with Shadow now comfortably stretched across the back seat, Jesse had to wonder about that kiss. It hadn’t been romantic or anything, but Scarlett was so rarely affectionate, and that was the second time she’d touched him in one night, as though she was seeking comfort. Something had to be really bothering her, and it made him crazy that he didn’t know what it was.

  Back at the cottage, Jesse wandered around the living room, straightening couch cushions and folding up throw blankets while Shadow draped herself across the couch, watching him with what might have been amusement. Jesse wasn’t a particularly neat person, but the night’s events had left him with too much nervous energy. Really, he should get his gym bag out of the trunk of his car and take Shadow for a run. It’d be good for her—Scarlett hadn’t exactly been a marathoner during her illness—and on the off chance that someone from the Old World spotted him, it would be easy to use the excuse that he was exercising Shadow while Scarlett was sick.

  But the cop in him was tugging at his attention. Scarlett thought she was protecting him by keeping him out of whatever was happening, but that just wasn’t like her. She had called on him for help plenty of times, and Jesse knew that she trusted him. So why was she suddenly afraid that Dashiell or one of his vampires was going to press him?

  Then Jesse realized, too late, that he had a way around that.

  Scarlett was a null; she never remembered that there were other ways to block vampire mind control. Months ago, Jesse had asked Kirsten for a stash of witch bags, which could protect him against different Old World species.

  This had been while Scarlett was still recovering from healing Hayne, and Jesse was helping her. Kirsten had been so grateful that a few days later she’d given him a small box of witch bags, no questions asked. He had it hidden in his old bedroom at his parents’ house, where there was no chance that Scarlett would come close to it and negate the magic.

  Jesse could collect one of the witch bags to protect himself from being pressed, so there was no reason Scarlett had to keep whatever this was from him. He picked up his phone, where he’d programmed in the burner number—but then he stopped himself.

  “She’s still not going to tell me, is she?” he said to Shadow. He was mostly just thinking out loud, but she lifted her head from her paws, watching him attentively. “She’s spooked, so she’s going to keep it from me on reflex. But what if I can help her?” He stood up, pacing the length of the small cottage. Then he went back into the living room and looked at Shadow, who hadn’t moved.

  He felt a little ridiculous, but he went over and sat next to her on the couch, scratching her ears. “Okay, I’m never sure how much of this you’re getting, but . . . is it okay if I search the cottage?”

  She tilted her head back to study his face. “It’s just, I want to help Scarlett,
and I can’t do that if I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  Shadow just looked at him for a long moment, making Jesse feel like even more of an idiot. What was he doing? Shadow was smart, sure, but she was a dog. A very protective dog. She wasn’t going to understand the nuances of human—

  But before he could even finish that thought, Shadow shifted gracefully off the couch—she was too big to jump down, so she just slid her paws off—and padded toward the kitchen. Jesse followed her to the cupboard next to the sink, where Scarlett and Molly kept a small garbage can. The cupboards didn’t have any handles, but Shadow looked up at him and pawed at the door a little.

  Jesse opened the cupboard, but Shadow continued to stare at him until he pulled the can out. The garbage was about half-full, with a wad of tissues on top. “What?” he asked the bargest.

  Had she actually rolled her eyes?

  She hooked the edge of the can with one big paw and tipped it over. “Hey,” Jesse protested, but the spill revealed what was hidden under the tissues: a piece of blue plastic the size of a Magic Marker. He crouched down and flipped it over. “No fucking way,” he breathed.

  It was a digital pregnancy test, the kind that had actual words instead of plus and minus signs. And it said PREGNANT.

  Jesse toppled sideways, landing hard on his butt. “She’s pregnant?” he said stupidly. “How is that . . . I thought she couldn’t . . .” He closed his mouth and swallowed hard, grateful that Scarlett couldn’t see his face just then.

  His first thought was, That’s why she’s been sick. His second was, Who’s the father? To his genuine surprise, jealousy bubbled up within him.

  Then the implications hit him. Oh, God, no wonder she was freaked out. Would the baby be a regular human? Even if it was, nulls were valuable, and a baby would be an easy lever to control Scarlett. That had to be why she didn’t want Dashiell to know. But it didn’t explain her leaving town . . . unless she was going somewhere to abort the baby. Why would she need to leave LA to do that, though? Humans in LA terminated pregnancies all the time, and it was unlikely to get back to anyone in the Old World.