She nodded, silently thanking him for the forgiveness. “I’ve never heard of a null. Well, I never heard of anything besides vampires, really, but I guess it makes sense.” She frowned. “It would have been helpful for Dashiell to introduce me to this girl. Maybe we could have worked together.”

“I think Dashiell plays his cards pretty close to the vest.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Glory stood up. “You better get going.”

“Will—”

“Yeah. I’ll cover.” She bit her lip and then added, “But, Jesse? Watch your back. I know you like this girl, but I don’t trust anyone from that world. You shouldn’t, either.”

Chapter 23

With time to kill before meeting Cruz, I had pulled away from Eli’s neighborhood and decided to cruise the few miles to the Santa Monica Pier, parking the van in one of the public garages attached to the nearby mall. Three hours of free parking—yippee. I didn’t have a towel or swimsuit or anything, but that was okay. I pulled a battered USC baseball cap out of the net pocket behind my seat, smeared a little sunscreen on my face, and began the hike to the pier.

This particular pier is sort of the dingy, sand-covered Disneyland of the Pacific Highway. It’s a tourist trap, big-time, and most of the locals who visit are showing off their exaggerated sense of irony. I genuinely love it, though. The first time my parents took me to the city, I was six, and we drove down to the Santa Monica Pier and listened to a reggae band perform a free concert. I sat on my dad’s shoulders, giggling and clutching his hair while he danced with my mom. She laughed and twirled in a blue cotton sundress with little pink flowers, her long dark hair swinging along behind her. This one memory has given the pier a free pass from me for life.

I trekked down Colorado Boulevard, onto the pier, and down the metal staircase that lead to the beach itself. It was only in the high sixties, and nobody really sunbathes at Santa Monica anyway, so I had a good stretch of beach to myself. I picked my way past the seaweed and snail shells that the ocean had spit up and plopped down on the sand about ten feet from the water’s farthest reach. I was wearing jeans and an ancient purple T-shirt that I keep in the back of the van for emergencies. I’d traded my practical sneakers for black flip-flops, and for the first time in days, I felt my body relax. I snuggled my head back into the sand and pulled the bill of my cap over my eyes. Thinking time.

My thoughts returned to Eli, and to males in general. My dating history isn’t what you’d call great. My last real, normal boyfriend had been when I was eighteen. Jacob Riley. Jake had had a crush on me all of senior year and finally got up the courage to ask me out on graduation night. We spent the entire summer together, lost our virginities to each other, and by August, I knew that he and I were real, that it was a relationship that could truly go somewhere. My eighteen-year-old mind was dazzled by this revelation: this could be the guy.

Maybe there was an alternate universe somewhere where Jake and Scarlett were married and had babies right now. But in reality, our lives had both taken turns. By September, Jake had decided to scrap his college plans and join the air force. He cried when he kissed me good-bye in front of my car as I was packing it for college. We were going to try the long-distance thing for a while, kind of feel out whether or not we could make it. Two weeks later, though, my parents were dead, and Jake didn’t exactly step up to the plate, boyfriend-wise. I got a sympathy card in the mail: Warmest Regards, Jacob Riley. He called once or twice after that, but I never called him back. By then I knew what I was, and the Scarlett who had loved Jake was as dead as her parents.

Since then, there’d been a sporadic string of one-night stands and dates that never numbered past three. Once a guy plumbed the depths of my trust issues, he never came back for more, and I was more than fine with that. That’s what I wanted. But now there was Eli...And, if I were being honest with myself, there was also Jesse.

Yeah, Jesse was growing on me. He was charming and laid-back and had really taken the whole Old World news like a champ. He was great-looking, of course, and kind of bashful about it, which was adorable. And most importantly, something about him was just so genuinely good. That’s the difference between him and Eli, or for that matter, him and me. Jesse was still untainted, and that was a little bit irresistible. He made me picture a world in which I was someone’s normal girlfriend, with movie nights and dinner with his parents and spending the holidays together. And I had to admit, that picture was...nice.

Ugh.

I scrubbed my hands over my face, dislodging my hat. What was I thinking? Eli wanted me for my body, so to speak, and I was already more than halfway to getting Cruz killed. I needed to get this whole park massacre thing over with, get the boys out of my head, and get back to my life before I’d met Cruz. Maybe I had just been going through the motions, but at least no one had gotten killed because of me.

At twelve fifteen, I stood up and dusted myself off, doing my best to shake the sand out of my hair and pockets. Then I climbed the stairs to the pier and hiked back up to the van. Time to go to work.

Van Nuys is kind of the gateway to the San Fernando Valley. Most of LA is in a basin—called, creatively, the Los Angeles Basin—which forms a big backward letter C, with the ocean as the open part of the letter. Because there are no mountains between LA and the ocean breeze, it stays cooler than most of the surrounding areas. The Valley is just northwest of the LA Basin, a separate, forward-facing letter C that touches Los Angeles. Mountains and foothills form the back of the Valley, so the air from the ocean can’t get inside. Which makes it much, much hotter than LA. The people who live in the Valley think of themselves as tougher and hardier than the Hollywood people, and the Los Angeles residents scoff at the poor people who can only afford to live inside an oven. I guess that’s probably how the haves and the have-nots cope everywhere.