“All right, well, forget the accomplice for a second,” Jesse said. “What do you think Olivia’s endgame might be? What does she want?”

“When we speak to Dashiell tonight he may have other insights, but my suspicion is that she wants Scarlett.” When Kirsten looked at me, it was chilling. “I’ve known that woman for more than a decade, and I’ve never seen anyone as obsessed with anything the way she was with you. But I don’t know if Olivia wants to kill you, or maybe toy with you first, or something.”

I looked sadly at my empty baskets of onion rings. “Three would probably be too many, right?”

“Scarlett.” Jesse’s voice was quiet. “This isn’t a joke. This is your life.”

“And maybe I should just give it to her.” When I said it, I was thinking aloud more than anything else, but I turned the thought around for another moment, realizing I was right. They were both staring at me. “Come on, you guys. How many more people have to die—”

“Shut up,” Jesse said fiercely. I stopped short. “I never want to hear that crap from you again. If you so much as think about giving yourself up to her, I will know, and I will throw you in jail. I’m still a cop, and I can make it happen.”

My mouth dropped open a little. Kirsten was looking at Jesse with a small, amused smile. It was the first look I’d seen her give him that wasn’t cold and untrusting.

Reindeer Headband bopped up to our table. “More onion rings?”

Chapter 8

After the meeting with Kirsten, Jesse dropped Scarlett off at home so she could catch up on a few weeks’ worth of laundry and run some errands. Jesse was planning to spend the afternoon reading the files for the two witches’ deaths and making calls from his apartment: nothing Scarlett could really help with, anyway. Or that was what he’d told Scarlett. Privately, Jesse figured they were both a little raw from the morning’s conversations and could use some time apart.

On the way home, he called Glory and asked her to e-mail him the case file for Denise’s “suicide,” and she promised to do it during her 1:00 p.m. lunch break. He almost asked her to make an excuse for him to his supervisor, Miranda, but remembered that he wasn’t actually on duty. Jesse was used to switching shifts around, but it still felt weird, being off from work in the middle of a weekday. Especially since he was technically working.

When he had first realized that Erin’s murder was likely tied to the Old World, Jesse had been…well, more than a little excited. The thing was, during the La Brea Park investigation, he’d felt so integral. It had started with him just trying to cover his ass, but then he’d gotten invested, and then suddenly he was playing an important role in finding Jared Hess. And he’d even gotten the credit back in the real world. Jesse had thought his resulting promotion to detective would give him a better shot of keeping that sense of relevancy—he had thought he’d be doing more or less the same thing he’d done with the La Brea Park case, but with human perpetrators and human crimes. Jesse had been disappointed to discover that D1s did nearly as much scut work as the uniformed officers. During all the witness interviews and phone calls and paperwork of the last two months, he’d begun to long for that feeling of knowing you were actually contributing to something.

Now he should be thrilled: he was less than twenty-four hours into a new Old World investigation, and Dashiell had flat-out handed him that same importance. As far as Jesse knew, he was the only cop who had the slightest idea what Erin’s death might really be about. And besides, he’d worried about Olivia since she’d first turned up as a vampire; it’d be good to finally be hunting her down. So why did he feel this dread hanging over him, fogging up his thinking? Maybe he was just spending too much time with Scarlett, worrying about her safety and remembering why he’d had such a crush on her. She was beautiful, of course—those bright-green eyes just got to him—but he loved her spirit, her attitude. And her attempts to use that attitude to hide how much she was hurting.

He needed to talk to Runa, Jesse decided, and switched lanes to get off the freeway. The files could wait a little longer. He was craving even just a few minutes of the tentative new normalcy they’d been building together. Besides, he needed to talk to her anyway, to make sure she hadn’t told anyone about the hand marks on the Jeep. He just had to figure out a way to do that without making her suspicious or giving away anything about the Old World. How do you ask someone to keep something quiet without revealing its importance?

It took him forty minutes to get from Scarlett’s home in West Hollywood down to Runa’s third-floor efficiency in Venice Beach, which she shared with a one-eyed white cat she’d named Odin and a mountainous pile of photography equipment. Jesse had called ahead, so when he pushed the button for her apartment Runa buzzed him straight in. She was standing in the doorway when he came out of the elevator, leaning against the frame in a purple tank top and a flowing skirt that Jesse knew was just one piece of fabric draped around her waist and tied in a knot. Her white-blonde hair was parted and pinned back into two little buns, one behind each ear. “Hey, friend,” she said merrily, turning her face up for a kiss.

“Hey yourself.” Jesse put his hands on Runa’s waist, taut from yoga, and backed her into the apartment, craning his neck to plant kisses along her throat.

She giggled. “Oh, boy. Cover your eye, Odin.” They both looked at the white cat, who just bared his teeth in response. Cats tended to dislike Jesse, a dog person, and Odin was no exception.