Midnight Curse (Disrupted Magic Book 1)

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Midnight Curse (Disrupted Magic Book 1) Page 25

by Melissa F. Olson


  She chewed on her lip. “Yes. There are two other vampires who have been spying for Oskar, and not because I pressed them. They knew Oskar the last time he was in Los Angeles, before I met him. There is a werewolf as well, although I don’t know his name.”

  Jesse and I exchanged a troubled look. “Do you know the vampires’ names?” I asked.

  Katia shook her head. “I did not need to press them, so Oskar kept their identities secret. As I told you, he never fully trusted me.”

  “Shit. Will they be with him?”

  “No. They are to go to the Trials as they normally would. They were to be part of the later plan to overtake Dashiell.”

  Well, that was one thing, at least. “Okay, you can go back to sleep,” I told her. “We’ll give Lex this address and tell her to come straight here.”

  She nodded and slipped back into unconsciousness.

  “So six of them, against only two of us,” I said, thinking out loud. “Even if I neutralize the supernaturals, that’s six men with probably at least four guns.”

  “Not to state the obvious,” Jesse said, “but we could really use some backup on this.”

  “Yeah, no shit. But who? Three more traitors isn’t as bad as I feared, but it’s enough that we can really only trust Dashiell and Will. And Beatrice,” I added, “but she’s not a fighter.”

  “Kirsten?”

  “Yes, we trust her, but she’s a little too messed up tonight to be playing with combat magic.”

  He winced. “Okay, I can see that.”

  “And as far as I know, she’s the only witch in LA with experience using magic to blow things up. So . . . we’re kind of fucked here.”

  “We could wait for Will and Dashiell,” he offered. “Do you think they’d fight?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Will, almost certainly. But Dashiell rarely wades into physical confrontation, especially with me around. It’s not a cowardice thing; it’s more like . . . you wouldn’t send the president to the front lines. Too big of a risk.”

  “On the other hand, Oskar’s gunning for his city,” Jesse said. “And Dashiell could squash him like a bug.”

  I pointed to myself. “I’m a mobile even playing field, remember? If you want Dashiell to vamp-kill all the humans and overpower Oskar, I’d have to stay home and watch from the cheap seats. Ordinarily that would sound fantastic, but if we send Dashiell in there alone, he could decide a dead Molls is a better political move than a live Molls.”

  “Yeah.” Jesse rubbed his face, looking as overwhelmed as I felt. “What time do the Trials end?”

  “They had a thirty-minute break at ten thirty, then another two-and-a-half hour session, and repeat,” I explained. “They’re done at four, and then it’s social time.”

  Jesse leaned back on the couch. “It’s too bad Lex isn’t here already,” he commented. “It would be pretty frickin’ awesome to have her on our team.”

  “You’re not wrong. Let me think for a second.”

  I leaned back, letting myself be more or less swallowed up by the couch. I was exhausted, but the pain in my arm and my churning brain meant I didn’t need to worry about falling asleep.

  Guns. Our problems pretty much all came down to guns. Very few people in the LA Old World used them at all, because guns were a hassle. They could malfunction, they needed to be serviced, you had to have special licenses and permits to carry them, and so on. Why mess with all that when you could rip someone’s throat out with your hands? Maybe they were a part of the Old World in a city that wasn’t more or less peaceful, but in LA the only real threat to any of us usually came from humans. And even the witches had mild defensive spells that could send a human flying.

  For a second I started daydreaming in James Bond levels of ridiculousness: A giant magnet that could suck in firearms, maybe, or bulletproof suits of armor. Maybe a pen that could disable all the firing pins in a given area—

  On the floor by my feet, Shadow whined, pawing at my foot. I looked down at her and sighed. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  Jesse raised his eyebrows. I pointed to the bargest. “We’re gonna need to bring our secret weapon.”

  Chapter 39

  I had been planning to leave Shadow at Will’s house to guard Katia, but there was just no way Jesse and I were going to be able to take down the MC crew without her.

  We talked through it, but it was unlikely the MC knew about Shadow. They might have known we brought a dog to the trap at Frederic’s house—I couldn’t remember if she’d barked, but it was certainly possible—but the only biker who’d survived had been Carl, the guy with the greasy beard and the ventilated cowboy boot. And he’d been inside the garage for the whole fight. There was no way he could have seen Shadow.

  Having the bargest along, and a surprise, changed the odds from “we’re all gonna die” to “we have a slight chance of living.” Especially if Molly was functional enough to fight too. Now we just had to get there before Oskar killed her.

  Of course, this also meant leaving Katia without a guard, which I didn’t totally love. I believed her when she said she wanted to meet Lex and escape from Oskar, but what if she changed her mind? Lex already knew about Katia and was on her way, so if Katia sent us into a trap, she could still get what she wanted. Actually, it would be a pretty smart way for her to hedge her bets.

  On the bright side, she’d recently been dead, so I couldn’t see her physically coming after us. I just needed to make sure she couldn’t call anyone. Will had a landline at his house, so I went into his bedroom, feeling more than a little uncomfortable. Luckily, Will was so used to the werewolves coming over that the room was always spotless and impersonal, with no signs of creepy sex stuff or dirty underwear. I unplugged the phone to take with me. Then I went into his home office and took that handset, too. While I was in there I grabbed a couple of pieces of paper and a pencil to bring to Jesse. As I took the phones out to the van, Jesse looked up the Mock-Donald’s on Google Earth. In the time it would have taken me to figure out how to input an address, he had a rough sketch of the building and its entrances.

  “Okay, look,” he said, pointing with the pencil eraser. “Green Drive runs along the north and west sides of the building, see? There’s one entrance on the north side, two on the west side, and one each on the other two sides.” I leaned over him to look at the sketch. The Mock-Donald’s was basically a rectangle, with the shorter end at the north side. “I can’t be positive, but it looks on this map like the south entrance is the one leading into the kitchen.”

  “What about the inside?” I asked.

  “Hang on a second.” He did a little more searching and managed to come up with a website for the production company that owned the building. There was a whole page filled with big glossy photos of the interior.

  “Whoa,” I said, leaning forward to look at his little phone screen. “Why would they have so many pictures?”

  “It’s advertising,” Jesse said without looking at me. He was adding tables and counters to the sketch. “If they’re renting it out to anyone with the cash, they need to be able to show clients what they’ll get. Hey, look.” He moved his fingers to zoom in on a picture of a staircase. “There’s a basement.” I leaned over his shoulder to look. Sure enough, there was a downstairs with classrooms, offices, and a lounge area, sort of like a green room.

  I sighed. Up until recently, it was incredibly rare for buildings in LA to have a basement at all, but things had been changing, now that basements had better earthquake-proofing. I’ve even read about people who had basements dug under their existing houses to add space.

  “Well, that’s where the girls will be,” I said. “And where Oskar hides out during the day. But he’ll be torturing Molly . . .” I scrolled back through to the photo of a typical fast-food kitchen, with beverage machines, stoves, and fryers forming a sort of rectangle. There was a long, rectangular metal table in the middle of the space. I pointed to it. “Here.”

  “How do
you know?”

  I shrugged. “There aren’t any good surfaces downstairs for securing someone, for one thing. And I could see Oskar enjoying the theatricality of a big table. Plus . . . you know. There’s torture stuff right there.”

  Jesse took another look at the kitchen equipment and nodded soberly. “I think you’re right.”

  “But that’s just Oskar, Molly, and the girls. Where do you think he’ll have the human guards?”

  “Outside,” Jesse decided. “If I were a vampire, and I knew a null was on her way, I’d use the bikers like canaries in a coal mine. When they start shooting, Oskar will know you’re coming before he’s actually in your radius. That will give him time to grab a weapon or run or whatever.”

  We were both speculating, but there was enough logic in it for me to bet on us being right. Even if we were betting our lives.

  “What do we do if the neighbors call the police?” I asked.

  “What neighbors? Look.” He went back to Google Earth and zoomed out, pointing to an aerial view of the Mock-Donald’s. “There are big parking lots on either side, probably for when they bring in filming equipment. On the other side of the lots there are just office buildings.” He checked his watch. “It’s almost four in the morning; even the cleaning staff will have gone home.”

  We spent a little more time with Jesse’s sketch, working out a plan for how to handle the MC guards. I was hoping we weren’t going to have to kill them. It didn’t sound like any of these guys were stellar citizens, but criminals or not, they were just a bunch of dudes following their leader into vampire hell. I had to kind of feel sorry for them.

  We could prepare for the humans, but other than torturing Molly I had no idea what Oskar was planning now that we had Katia. So far he had demonstrated an uncomfortably shrewd gift for thinking on his feet: hiring humans with guns to take me out, using Hayne to get Molly from Dashiell’s, preparing a second hidey-hole in case something went wrong—like us capturing Katia. It made me nervous. I hadn’t been up against a genuinely smart asshole since . . . well, since Olivia.

  But we did have two things going for us: first, there was no way he could know that Jesse had an informant within the MC who would be able to point us to the Mock-Donald’s and, of course, Shadow. I was hoping the element of surprise would be enough, because I was shit out of other ideas.

  When we’d made all the plans we could, I knelt down by Shadow. She had, of course, been listening to everything, but it was impossible to know exactly how much she’d absorbed, so I said, “Shadow, do you remember Molly? The girl we picked up the other night?”

  Shadow paused for a moment, then licked the air in front of her face, a yes. “Jesus,” Jesse muttered. I glared at him, although I couldn’t entirely blame him for being unnerved. Shadow’s intelligence was almost as scary as her teeth; I was just so used to it now that I found other dogs boring.

  “She’s in trouble,” I said to the bargest. “Jesse and I are going to go rescue her from some bad guys. They’re probably going to try to hurt us. Do you want to help save Molly?”

  No hesitation this time: she licked the air and wagged her tail with great enthusiasm. If she could speak English, that would have translated to “Killing people? Where do I sign up?!” A big, glorious doggie grin was spreading across her face, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Jesse scooting back a little.

  Oh, boy.

  Chapter 40

  I didn’t know City of Industry that well, but Jesse had been right about the area around the building: it was completely deserted. In fact, the streets were so empty that something about it made my thoughts itch. When the GPS said we were about two blocks away from our destination, I finally figured out what felt off: there were no homeless people on the streets. I didn’t expect anyone to be panhandling at 4 a.m., but usually you see them all over the city, camped out in doorways and alleys. Around the Mock-Donald’s, there was nobody—either because the area was too void of people for them to bother sleeping here, or because they’d been eaten by vampires needing snacks.

  I decided not to pursue that line of thought any further.

  We had talked about doing a drive-by to scope it out, like we did at Frederic’s place, but with no other cars on the street my van would be way too obvious. Instead, we parked on Gale Avenue, almost a full block away, and the three of us crept up Green Drive like we were competing for Most Silent Walker. Shadow won, of course, but Jesse and I held our own. I was glad my boots didn’t have heels, or I would have had to tiptoe. It was fairly cool, in the low fifties. Jesse had put on his leather jacket, and I was glad for the drapey top I’d worn over my weapons.

  Green Drive was just a little offshoot of Gale, shaped like a big staple, with the Mock-Donald’s at the corner. There wasn’t much cover—too many big empty parking lots—but we made it to a clump of trees just outside the Mock-Donald’s lot without incident. The streetlights were out, just like Jesse had predicted, but it’s never fully dark in Los Angeles, where smog reflects all the light of the city back down into it.

  Jesse and I paused for a second, looking at the building, checking how it lined up with Jesse’s sketch. I could make out the big golden arches and the building’s south entrance, which faced the road. Overall, the Mock-Donald’s was so eerily perfect that I had a sudden, serious craving for a Quarter Pounder. Not even joking. It shouldn’t have surprised me—after all, this was LA, the city that brazenly celebrated the concept of fakery. But it was still jarring to see the familiar golden arches in connection with vampires. Two things that just did not go together.

  There were lights on inside, but only toward the back of the building, which didn’t help us. We could, however, see the beefy guy leaning against the wall a foot from the south door. He was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, and had an enormous handgun hanging loose from one hand. After a few seconds of letting my eyes adjust to the dimmer light, I saw the walking cast on his leg and recognized the guy: Greasy Beard, the lone survivor from Frederic’s condo.

  “You ready?” Jesse asked in a low voice.

  “Almost.” I looked down at the bargest. Shadow had a big, goofy doggy grin, the same look you’d see on a golden retriever on her way to the dog park. I crouched down next to the bargest, scratching the scaly bald area on her neck. “Okay, girl,” I said, and her attention whipped to my face. I grabbed Jesse’s hand, tugging him down next to me. “Jesse’s our friend, and Molly is our friend. You’re not going to hurt them, right?”

  I don’t know if it’s physiologically possible for a regular dog to roll its eyes, but Shadow gave me a look that said, Duh, of course not as clearly as if she’d said it out loud. Why hurt your friends when there were plenty of other people here to hurt? “Good. Just like we talked about, okay? If you can keep them silent without killing them, do it.” She licked the air near my face. “Go,” I whispered.

  Without the slightest hesitation, Shadow seemed to slip into the nearest . . . well, the nearest shadow. I knew from experience that watching the bargest at night was like watching a shell game: you sure as hell needed to keep your eyes glued to the target, or you were going to lose track of it instantly. Even so, my eyes couldn’t stay with her once she neared the building, so I started watching the MC idiot instead. He was checking something on his cell phone—and then Shadow was on him. She had somehow circled and raced directly toward the guy, face to face, so that by the time he looked up and opened his mouth to scream, she was ripping out his throat with a single jerk. He didn’t even have time to lower the cell phone, and we saw the chunk of flesh come loose in the light from the little glowing screen.

  Beside me, Jesse started swearing in Spanish, and even I flinched. So much for trying to let them live.

  Mission accomplished, the bargest came prancing back to me, as proud as if she’d just taken out a particularly pesky neighborhood squirrel. Tail wagging, she thrust her muzzle into my hand, looking for praise. Wet blood smeared into my palm. I sighed.

  “Yes, t
hat was very well done,” I told her, “but did you really have to kill him?”

  Shadow just pranced in place.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” Jesse remarked, “the guy called you the c-word earlier.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. At Frederic’s house.”

  “Well, okay,” I muttered under my breath. “Good girl. Let’s move.”

  We circled the building to the west side. The east side entrance would be closest to where we thought Oskar was keeping Molly, but there were also two doors and two guards there, which increased the likelihood of one of them getting a shot at us. So we went left, and repeated almost the exact same pattern: Jesse and I hung back, Shadow went in and killed the unsuspecting biker, a short, chubby guy who was at least ten years younger than any of the other bikers we’d seen. Then I nodded to Jesse, and he and Shadow trotted toward the south side of the building, while I slipped to the door.

  As I moved, I did my best to shrink my radius. This particular trick was actually more difficult than broadening the circle of non-magic around me, but I’d been practicing for months, hoping to make the vampires more comfortable being in a room with me. More than any other Old World creature, vampires hated being near nulls. I hadn’t told anyone I’d been working on contracting my radius, because I wasn’t that great at it yet. But the longer I could keep my radius small, the longer I could go without Oskar sensing my presence. My record was getting it down to about two feet around me instead of the usual ten to fifteen, but I couldn’t hold that for long.

  The Mock-Donald’s had a lot of windows, so I went in low, moving as quickly as I could. Silently, I pulled a knife with one hand and wrapped the other around the glass door, tugging it slowly. The door was locked, which actually relieved me: an unlocked door would have probably indicated a trap.

  I never could learn how to pick locks, which was why I’d stolen a big-ass geode paperweight from Will’s home office. I took it out of my pocket, held it carefully so my fingers wouldn’t impact, and swung it as hard as I could toward the lower half of the glass doors. Never underestimate the power of hitting something with a big fucking rock.

 

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