When I returned to the dorms, though, I realized I didn’t belong there, either. I didn’t go to class, which no one cared about, but my new roommate couldn’t look at me, and everything about college seemed so pointless and alien. Frat parties? Free concerts in the quad? A rally to protest some unjust new amendment? I couldn’t understand how anyone could expect me to be even a tiny bit interested in college when my mom and dad were rotting in boxes in the ground.

That Sunday night, I got a phone call from Olivia, the woman who’d approached me in the cemetery. With nothing better to do, I agreed to meet her at the Starbucks near campus, and she continued trying to explain what I was, what we were. I still thought she was probably crazy, but I was at least a little more able to listen now.

What I didn’t realize until after Olivia died years later was that I had never given her my phone number.

“I’m sorry,” I finally had said that day, after she’d gone over it all again, “but you expect me to believe that some wacky branch of evolution created vampires and werewolves, and nulls are people who can neutralize all their powers and basically undo evolution?”

“Not exactly how I would put it, but yes.” She took a ladylike sip of her tea. Olivia, I had already realized, was very ladylike. I tried to sit up straighter.

“If even some of what you’re saying is true, what makes you think I can do that? That I’m one of them?”

“Scarlett, honey...One of the professors at Santa Monica is a werewolf. Last Monday at exactly eight fifty-four a.m., you learned that your parents died, correct?”

Stunned, I nodded. I remembered the time.

“When you lose control of your emotions, your power intensifies. Your radius, the area in which your power works, widens. Dr. Madchen was almost a mile away, but she felt you, felt herself change back to a human, briefly. She called me to see if I was in the area, and eventually, we...traced the signal, I suppose you could say, back to you.” When I said nothing, she went on. “Haven’t you ever been in a public place and had a strange feeling brush over you, as though something had pressed against you without touching you?”

I was suddenly frightened, not because I thought she was a crazy person or because I thought she’d been stalking me, but because I realized I was starting to believe her. What she was describing had never happened to me in Esperanza, but whenever I was in LA, I felt it fairly often. And if what she was saying was true, then the world had just become very, very frightening.

“Why did you call me tonight? What is it you want from me?”

She smiled. “Oh, Scarlett, I don’t want anything from you. In fact, I’d like to offer you a job. And a place to live, if you need it. The hours are fabulous—you get full-time wages for what amounts to about ten hours per week, give or take. It can be messy, which is unfortunate, but you’ll learn quickly, and being what you are, you’ll be perfectly safe. I promise. And I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

It took a little while to calm Cruz down. He was all for having Dashiell arrested or me shipped out of town, and we went back and forth for a while on why both of those plans would end with people getting hurt or killed. Eventually, I managed to convince him that the best thing we could do was just keep working on the case. I tried not to think too hard about what would happen if we hadn’t found the killer by Dashiell’s deadline. No pun intended. Would I try to run? To fight?

I had very little money, and nowhere to go. How would I possibly stand a chance? Besides, Dashiell knew about Jack. I wasn’t going to let anyone else die just for knowing me. Not ever.

Denial, Scarlett, I thought. Denial is your friend. Focus on the case. Before I’d left, Dashiell had given me the names of the dead vampires’ human servants: Victoria Grottum, Thomas Freedner, and Jason Myles. When I asked him for more information, he’d just waved a hand dismissively. Why would you need the home addresses of your employees’ food supply?

Cruz got on my computer and logged in to the LAPD database to check out the names. The news was not good: Grottum and Myles didn’t have California driver’s licenses, so neither of them had a home address listed with the DMV. That was weird in itself, since LA is a driving city, but maybe they had moved in from other states or something. Neither of them paid taxes or had registered cell phones. They were, for all intents and purposes, off the grid. I guess when a vampire pays all your bills and fills all your needs, so to speak, you don’t worry too much about legalities.

Thomas Freedner, the third human servant, did have an LA license and an address listed, but when Cruz followed up with the building’s landlord, it turned out Freedner had moved two years earlier. No forwarding address, no phone number listed.

So we weren’t going to get an easy assist from the LAPD computers. That made things more complicated, but I did actually have a plan. In my job, you learn a lot about where everyone spends their downtime. Werewolves, by and large, hang out at Hair of the Dog when they want to socialize with other wolves. The witches have get-togethers in their homes, like really twisted Tupperware parties. The vampires have their own places to gather, places that are dark and underground and, at best, ethically questionable. But there’s another Old World group in LA—the human servants. And they go clubbing.

“So these people are like voluntary food?” Cruz asked me as we drove east on the 10 Freeway toward downtown.

“Yes and no. Human servants belong to a specific vampire. Like going steady, I guess. They’re under the vampire’s protection, and if another vampire feeds off them, that vamp gets in trouble. But there are plenty of people who offer themselves to the vampires who aren’t human servants,” I told him. “There’s a lot of voluntary food.”