I’m not sure who reached for whom, but suddenly she was clutching my hand. Then her face relaxed, just a little. She nodded at me. Hayne was alive. “Did you call an ambulance? Okay . . . okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Kirsten dropped my hand and slammed the phone down, turning to face the others as she rose. “We’re too late,” she told us. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but her face was impassive, a mask of regal resignation. “They came and exchanged Ted—Theo,” she corrected herself. Kirsten was the only one who could call him Teddy. “For Molly. It’s done.”

“He’s alive?” Dashiell said quietly.

Kirsten nodded. “Barely. He fought them, probably fearing that you would punish Abigail for her decision.”

“We’ll talk about that later.”

Kirsten’s hands fussed at her hair, her skirts. “I need to go. They’re taking him to Huntington—”

“You can’t,” Dashiell said, his voice still low and unnaturally calm. “The Trials must go on. Will,” he turned to the werewolf alpha, “would you please go upstairs and announce that we need ten more minutes to handle a technical problem with the wards. Make it sound small and boring, if you can.”

Will left, shooting Kirsten a sympathetic look that she didn’t see, because she was staring at Dashiell in outrage. They were all human at the moment, but if sparks had started shooting out of her eyes, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.

“There is no fucking way—” Kirsten began. Whoa. Had I ever heard Kirsten drop an f-bomb?

“There’s nothing you can do,” he told her. “I will have Lawrence make sure that the best medical staff in the city is available to Theodore, but right now there isn’t anything you can do that the doctors can’t.”

She was still glowering at him. “He’s human. There are healing spells—”

“For which you have no aptitude,” Dashiell interrupted again, but his voice was surprisingly gentle. “There are no thaumaturge witches in Los Angeles, and we both know that the trades spells that deal with healing can be unpredictable. You could wind up doing more harm than good, especially in your emotional state.”

Kirsten’s mouth shut with an audible snap, and she spun around, stalking a few steps away from Dashiell and muttering to herself. I winced, temporarily surprised into silence. There was a special branch of magic for healing? And Dashiell knew all about it? I was used to the vampire playing his cards close to the vest, but I hadn’t expected him to know so much about witch spells.

“Scarlett and I can go,” Jesse blurted, surprising me again. “If he’s conscious, Hayne may have learned something that will help us find these guys.” Kirsten turned back around to look at him, but Jesse’s eyes were on me, his eyebrows raised slightly. I nodded and stepped toward Kirsten.

“We’ll go check on him at the hospital, and Abigail too,” I told her, touching her arm. “Is there a number on that phone?”

Kirsten turned to look. “Yes. It’s taped to the handset.”

“Get one of your witches to sit by it. I’ll call as soon as we find out his condition.”

Kirsten bit her lip, clearly wavering.

But Dashiell turned toward me. “You are needed for the Trials, too,” he told me. “Let Mr. Cruz go alone.”

Of course. Of course Dashiell was only thinking about damage control. I shook my head. “Can’t do it. I’m not sending Jesse out there with a vampire running around. He’s my partner.” I made it a point not to look at Jesse’s face.

Kirsten left the phone and came back toward Dashiell. Then she laid a hand on his forearm. It was a completely innocent gesture, but I felt my eyes bulge. I couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone besides Beatrice touch Dashiell in any way. “We can handle this,” she told him. “The three of us can control our people enough to keep the peace.”

“You need us to find Molly,” I added firmly. “Everyone in that auditorium thinks you and I are conspiring to let her escape her trial. If this guy tortures her to death, we’ll never be able to prove what really happened.”

“Besides,” Jesse added with a brittle smile, “I bet you can spin this to your advantage. ‘We’re so confident in our people that we don’t even need a security null.’”

Dashiell looked at each of our faces in turn before finally nodding. “Go.” To Kirsten, he added, “You’ll need to redo the wards after Scarlett punches a hole in them. It’s possible that leaving an opening was part of their plan.”

She was already moving toward her spell materials, looking relieved to have something to do. “I can do that.”

“Are we taking Shadow?” Jesse asked me. We were already moving down the hall.

I hesitated. Bringing Shadow into the hospital wasn’t a good idea, and she was relatively comfortable in her little den . . . but I hadn’t forgotten how much she’d helped during the ambush earlier in the day. “Yeah,” I said. “I think we may need all the help we can get.”

Chapter 32

“Play it again,” I said.

Jesse raised his eyebrows. “You sure?”

“Do it.”

Jesse and I were in stiff chairs in the ICU waiting room, where he was holding one of the tablets that Abigail had brought to the hospital. Even dinged up and afraid for her job, she was dedicated as hell. She’d pulled up the exterior security camera footage from Dashiell’s mansion for us, handed it wordlessly to Jesse, and wheeled away to grab some coffee. Shadow, meanwhile, had been left sulking in the van, where she would probably eat one of the headrests again.

After a quick glance to make sure no one was watching us, Jesse hit Play again, and then touched a command to make the video full screen. The color footage was crisp as hell, but there was no audio. Dashiell’s policy, to prevent political issues.

The best footage came from a discreet camera in a tree well behind the wrought iron fence, facing the mansion. Onscreen, a large black SUV pulled up to Dashiell’s gate, which was basically decorative—most of the Old World would have no problem getting over or through it. The SUV stopped ten feet shy of the barrier, and all four doors opened at once, plus the back. Four beefy white men wearing balaclavas erupted from the car like a Chinese fire drill. They went straight to the back and did something we couldn’t see with a long black shape. Jesse had told me they were unzipping the body bag where they’d kept Hayne. A few of the MC thugs punched at the shape, and then the thugs stepped back and there was Hayne, tottering upright, his thighs leaning against the SUV for balance. He looked like hell already, his lower lip and one eye fat with swelling, and he moved his torso in a gingerly way that even I could recognize as broken ribs.

The MC guys’ leader stepped forward and took Hayne’s arm roughly. We couldn’t see his face because of the balaclava, but he had a slight limp, which I suspected had something to do with Hayne’s kidnapping. He certainly looked like he wasn’t a fan of Hayne, who said something to Limpy that earned him a new punch in the stomach. It was brutal to watch, especially if you suspected the broken ribs. I’d flinched the first time, but I knew Jesse was concerned about me so I made my face blank.

Limpy made Hayne shuffle over to the camera on the call box. Then the guy pushed the button and pressed the barrel of a fat-looking handgun to Hayne’s temple.

We couldn’t hear what they were saying, although Abigail had filled us in. Limpy was demanding that Abigail produce Molly and send her out alone, no tricks. They had clearly been warned to stay outside the wards, which had been set by Kirsten earlier in the afternoon, after Jesse and I had left the premises.

A few minutes passed as the MC guys waited for Molly to make her appearance. Hayne seemed to be swaying on his feet, like he was about to pass out from the pain, but since this was the third time we were watching, I knew he was actually preparing to make his move.

I didn’t know if he was really trying to win a fight against four armed men, or if he was just trying to force them to kill him. Either way, I watched it unfold again on the screen: Hayne’s slow swaying dwindled to a halt, and then Limpy turned his head to yell something at the three men behind him. Hayne, beaten though he was, seemed to suddenly pounce.