“Because those four are the prettiest.”

Jesse and I exchanged another look, but he seemed as confused as I was. “What does that mean?” he asked. “And what’s the midnight drain?”

Molly didn’t answer him. She just leaned sideways to rest her forehead against the wall. “Molls?” I asked. “We can’t help you if you don’t talk to us.”

She turned, her eyes still wide with shock. “Help me?” she echoed.

“Of course.” I put a little force into the words. “Listen to me. With a boundary witch running around the city, Dashiell doesn’t know who he can trust. Jesse and I need to find whoever’s really behind this, or . . .” I forced myself to push on. “Or Dashiell’s going to let you take the fall.”

That didn’t have the effect I’d expected. She just shrugged, looking completely unsurprised. No, not just that, she looked . . . detached. Uncaring. “Dashiell has always cared more about appearances than justice,” she said in a wooden voice. “Twelve murdered or missing girls on the news, plus the Trials tonight? Of course he’s going to set me up.” Her eyes cut back over to me. “The irony is not lost on me, you know,” she added. I winced. Molly had evicted me because I kept getting involved in dangerous messes, and now here she was in a mess of her very own. “Not that it matters now.”

“Of course it matters!” I protested. “They’re going to kill you.” And I’m going to have to do it.

But she didn’t answer me. She wasn’t even looking at me. I glanced over at Jesse, but he looked as puzzled as I felt. I had thought learning that four of the girls might become vampires would . . . well, maybe not cheer her up, but at least help ease some of the pain. Instead, it had prompted Molly to basically go catatonic.

Jesse held up his wrist, showing me his watch. We were running out of time, and so far we’d gotten nothing. I gave him a helpless look. “Molly’s gone bye-bye, Jesse,” I said under my breath. “What have you got left?”

Jesse touched my hand in support and then stood up, stepping past me so he was looming right over Molly. He squatted down in front of her, like an adult trying to speak to a kid on their own level. “You gave Scarlett the key to your safety deposit box,” he reminded her. “You wanted us to help. You wanted to live. What’s changed?”

Molly just shook her head, like maybe that would make us go away. Her expression was sort of strangled. I couldn’t say I was surprised. My former roommate was an expert at creating a blanket of happy energy and wrapping it around herself like a shield. She was always delighted to invite you into her blanket fort, but good luck prying her out of there. It was one of the reasons we’d gotten along so well—neither of us was skilled at emotional depth. Which was fine if you were watching reruns of Friends, but not so good when you were keeping secrets that could save your life.

Two minutes that we didn’t have ticked by on my watch, and then Molly finally planted her shoulder blades on the wall and inched upward until she was standing with her chin raised, looking past Jesse to me. “You want to help me?” she said with new strength. “Find those girls. Find them before they wake up, and get them to Dashiell. That’s all that matters now.”

Jesse and I exchanged a look. “Luckily,” he said to her, “the best way to find those girls is to figure out who did this to you.”

Molly looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay. What do you need from me?”

Jesse glanced at me, his eyes going to my jacket pocket. I pulled out the photos and the little address book, handing them over. Jesse showed them to her. “Who are these women?”

Molly took the Polaroids from him very gently, as though they might disintegrate. She shuffled slowly through the photos, looking at each one. I was impatient, but Jesse covertly held up his hand where only I could see it.

Finally, Molly handed the pictures back to me, her eyes newly wary. “They’re my friends,” she said with a shrug. “It was 1973, and the Polaroid SX-70 had just become commercially available. We were messing around with it.”

“Then why did you keep the pictures in a safety deposit box for forty-odd years?” Jesse asked.

“They’re vampires, aren’t they?” I said, before she could answer. “That’s why the photos were in the box. They’re technically proof that you all exist.”

She started to nod, then caught herself. “I forgot how hard it is,” she said. “Being around you.”

“Being human, you mean,” I said dryly. “Why did you keep these? What makes these specific women so special?” Vampires didn’t generally hang around in groups.

“We worked together,” Molly said, dismissive. “A long time ago.”

“Goddammit, Molly!” I yelled, surprising all three of us. “We don’t have a lot of time before the afternoon shift shows up and we have to go. You want us to find your friends, the ones who were taken? Answer the fucking questions!”

Molly’s careless posture dropped away and her gaze hardened into a glare. She was human in my presence, sure, but no one looking at her in that moment would have mistaken her for a college student. “We were whores, okay?” she snapped, her eyes flashing between Jesse and me. “Actually, that’s probably too nice a term. ‘Sex slaves’ is closer.”

Jesse subconsciously shifted backward, the knee-jerk response of a man in the presence of an abused woman. “Oh,” I said, my voice echoing with stupidity.

The small room filled with uncomfortable silence. I had no idea what to say. Molly had always given me the impression that she’d been taken and turned into a vampire because of her looks, but I’d sort of thought she’d been abused by a single male vampire. That was horrific in itself, of course, but it had never occurred to me that she’d . . . I couldn’t even bear to think about it.

“Your maker,” I said softly, as though keeping my voice low might magically make the question not hurt. “The one you killed. He turned you so he could . . . sell you?”

“Twenty years,” she said bitterly, as though she’d heard a very different question than the one I’d asked. “That’s how long a new vampire’s ‘apprenticeship’ lasts. Every twenty years he took a new stable. Turned all at once. Like a . . . a graduating class.”

Molly’s eyes flicked subconsciously to the pictures, and I put it together. “They’re like your sisters.”

She nodded.

A whole new thought occurred to me. “Wait, how many women did he kill trying to fill his stable? I thought . . . vampire magic isn’t always infectious.” I had always been told that for every five humans who tried to become vampires, only about three would actually turn.

But Molly was shaking her head. “That was Alonzo’s gift,” she whispered. “Ten out of ten. Always ten out of ten. That’s why the council let him go unpunished for so long. Good for our numbers.” She handed me the photos. “Keep them safe, okay?” She gave me a pleading expression, wanting me to understand.

And I did. I nodded and tucked the pictures back into my jacket pocket. Molly and her friends had been through hell—twenty years of fear, pain, rape, and misery. I couldn’t even fathom it, and now I felt so . . . young. Since I’d taken over as LA’s resident null, I’d been knocked around a little, and Jesse and I had found ourselves in some bad situations . . . but at the end of the day, I was a privileged middle-class white girl with no mental framework to understand the concept of two decades of torment.

I had told Jesse there were no psychotic vampires. I was so tragically naive that it was almost funny.

And yet, this explained so much about the Molly I did know. How she preferred to live on the surface of things. Why she kept to herself so much. The way she hated to talk about history, even though she’d been alive for so much of it. And, I realized suddenly, it also explained why she had moved in with those college girls. It wasn’t because they reminded her of me. It was because they reminded her of them. Being surrounded by young women gave her comfort.