“Because of my job? It was just a stupid bar fight; everyone is fine.” I tried to keep the hurt out of my voice.

“Tonight everyone is fine. Tonight it isn’t a big deal,” he said, sounding sad. “But I can’t be around you and listen to you discussing crimes and bloodshed like they’re nothing. I’m not…wired like that.”

“Jesse—”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought I could get past it, but I don’t think I can. Every time your phone rings, I’m going to wonder if what you’re doing is even legal, or who might be getting hurt because of it.” He took my hand, squeezed it gently, and took a step back. “I think we should stop here, before we do some real damage.” Then he walked away from me, leaving me standing there with my mouth dropped open.

I went into the house, and for the first time since my parents had died, I cried. And the next time I’d seen Jesse, he was picking me up to take me to Erin’s murder scene.

At the gun range, I broke first, turning to face the table in front of me.

“Uh, thanks for doing this, Jesse,” I said, in the general direction of the gun.

“Yeah. Of course.” He stepped away from me, and I watched him back up to where he’d dropped his duffel bag. “Look, I have an extra gun and holster. I did your paperwork this morning, and I’m pushing it through as fast as I can—”

“Wait. What?” I said incredulously. “Look, I agree that it’s good to know how to do this, but I’m not actually going to carry a gun.”

“Come on, Scarlett. It’s a good idea. If you have a gun, and Olivia gets in your…zone, or whatever, you can keep her from taking you down. And even if she’s a vampire, it’ll slow her down a little, right? What’s the problem?”

“I don’t…guns just…” Words completely failed me, and I gestured helplessly. Using one very carefully in a controlled environment with an LAPD cop literally at my back was one thing. Carrying one with me in the real world was another.

Jesse saw my panic and held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, let’s drop this for the moment. Your paperwork’s not done, and I’ll be with you for a while anyway. But I do have something else for you.” He reached in the duffel and pulled out something long and black. I poked it and saw the little Kevlar logo.

“Merry Christmas.” He held it out to me.

“A bulletproof vest?” I said skeptically. “That’s completely pointless, Jess. Nothing Old World uses a gun. It’d be like…carrying a homemade machete to a British fencing match. Tacky.”

“There were plenty of guns last fall when we took down Jared Hess,” he pointed out. “They’re starting to think outside the box. Besides, Olivia is coming after you, specifically. She’s gonna know a gun’s the best way to kill you. It changes things.”

That scared me enough to consent. I slid out of my comfortable canvas jacket and let him pull the thing over my head. When he fastened the straps, though, the vest rode way too big, armholes hanging down to the sides of my breasts. The vest’s shoulders spiked out a couple of inches past the end of my own shoulders, giving me a Joan-Crawford-from-Hell look. “Jesse, I can’t raise my arms. Who does this belong to? Copzilla?”

“Hey,” he protested. “It is a woman’s vest.”

“She-Copzilla?” He snorted but let me tug the Velcro straps off. “I can’t wear this. And if we don’t go now, we’re gonna be late.”

He frowned at his watch, as if he could glare it into giving us more time, and finally shrugged. “Fine. But I’m getting you a better one tomorrow.”

“If we live that long.” I put the back of my hand mockingly against my forehead.

He took my tone as intended and gave me a light backhand on the shoulder. “Knock it off.”

Chapter 10

The freeway was already crowded when we left the shooting range, which made driving almost more dangerous. Instead of an inch-by-inch crawl, the freeway was full of assholes doing that annoying swooping-between-lanes thing. I know, because Jesse was one of them. I didn’t say anything, though, just held on tight to the door handle in Jesse’s little sedan. As my father had pointed out when I was seventeen and wanted to go to the city by myself, LA driving is not for weenies. We managed to arrive at Dashiell’s Pasadena residence at five after six, which counts as on time in LA, where everyone is usually either five minutes early or twenty minutes late.

There is this conception that vampires are loners who live by themselves until they have to go out and seduce a victim to be their dinner, and afterward they come back to their solitary home to…I don’t know, brood sexily. But on the contrary, Dashiell and his wife, Beatrice, own a gorgeous Spanish colonial mansion—sort of rectangular, with a huge open courtyard in the middle—where there are always people floating around, both with and without heartbeats. There are vampire bodyguards and servants, and plenty of humans too, since when you have as much money as Dashiell does you can afford to have food delivered. Tonight Dashiell’s parking area was full, thanks to his usual entourage plus my other Old World employers.

The vampire who opened the door was new to Dashiell’s in-house posse. He was on the short side, with that kind of muscular stockiness you see in retired wrestlers, though he’d only been about forty when he was turned. He wasn’t registering much wattage on the Scarlett Bernard Power Scale. We hadn’t met, but by the way he glared at me I was pretty sure he wasn’t a fan of being human again.