“But how does that help us?” Kirsten asked sensibly.

“If we could get the witches together in one place, and if we put Scarlett among them, she’d be able to tell who was hiding power,” he said excitedly. “And she’d be able to neutralize the witch at the same time, and we could use her to find Olivia.”

“That…could work,” she said slowly, her face creased in concentration. “It’s a bit of a long shot.”

“I know,” Jesse admitted, “but the only other things I can think of would be to dig through Olivia’s background to see if we can find a witch connection, or run background checks on all your witches. And we’d need more time for either of those options.”

Kirsten’s mouth turned down at the words background checks. “Let’s do it.”

“Do you have any way of getting the witches together?” Jesse asked. “Do you guys have meetings or something?”

“Not until the first weekend of next month. I could call an emergency meeting, but then whoever it is might just not show up.”

“If she thought the meeting was about something else?” Jesse asked. “Like, you say there’s news about the killer, or something?”

He glanced at the witch and saw that Kirsten’s face had brightened. “I have an even better idea,” she said, with sudden cheerfulness. “I’ll just uncancel the party.”

Chapter 19

I let Sadie hug me again before I left the hospital. As soon as I got out of the building, my cell phone began to ring, the regular old ring-ring sound that meant it wasn’t one of my bosses. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?” I said cautiously.

“Oh, thank God. I’ve been calling and calling. Is this Scarlett Bernard?”

I glanced back at the hospital building. I’d forgotten that I couldn’t get reception inside.

“Yes, this is Scarlett.”

“I have a—a problem? Is that the right word?”

I frowned. Most of my cleanup calls happened at night, but a daytime crime scene wasn’t unheard-of. “You’re calling about my cleaning services?”

“Yes, I’m Esther, there’s this vampire and…” She took a sobbing breath. “I think he might be dead.”

I opened my mouth to say that she should call Eli and give him the job, but then I remembered he was dealing with a big cleanup at Hair of the Dog. I shrugged to myself. There wasn’t anywhere I needed to be just then, and it was still my job. “Give me the address. I’ll be right there.”

As soon as I had entered the address in my GPS and was on my way, I started to call Jesse to tell him where I was going. I had his number highlighted on my phone’s screen and everything, but then I abruptly pushed END and tossed the phone into my work duffel on the passenger seat. Vampire or not, this was a dead body. Jesse would feel obligated to call the police and turn it into an actual investigation; he was dense like that. I couldn’t involve him.

Then again, I wasn’t an idiot, either, and I knew this might also be a trap designed by Olivia. I doubted it, as the sun was still up. Whenever she unleashed her evil plan, she would do it at night, so she could see its horrors reflected on my face. But still…if I got killed because I didn’t tell Jesse where I was, I was going to feel really stupid.

I thought about it a moment, then pulled over and sent him a text that I would be delayed for a work errand. Then I called Molly’s cell phone and left her a voice mail: “Hey, babe. If there isn’t an ‘all clear’ voice mail on here when you get up, something bad has probably happened to me. Call Jesse and tell him I went to two five four Spring Boulevard in Silver Lake. Oh, this is Scarlett.”

Problem solved. I pulled back onto the road.

The address that Esther had given me was for a small, weathered-looking cottage on the outskirts of Silver Lake, currently one of the city’s trendiest neighborhoods. Wait, no, maybe that was last year. I can’t keep track. At any rate, Silver Lake had once been one of LA’s most dangerous areas, then had gone through urban renewal or whatever, so now it was a mix of excessively developed residential areas and neighborhoods that hadn’t quite gotten the memo about cleaning up their act. Spring Boulevard was somewhere in the middle: two blocks from a Coffee Bean but shabby enough to have bars on every window of every building, even the upper floors.

I don’t know what I was expecting Esther to look like—maybe a teenage runaway from a Lifetime movie, with big eyes and an artfully dirty face—but she wasn’t it. When the cottage door opened, the woman inside was plain, skinny as a rail, and bald as Daddy Warbucks. A dark-pink cotton scarf was wrapped around her head, and she didn’t have eyelashes or eyebrows. She looked like she was pushing fifty. Oh. I suddenly understood the situation.

“Thank you so much for coming,” she said, a little cough clutching at her words.

“Of course. Nice to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand. She shook it with a frail grip. Esther was one of the human servants who had hooked up with vampires in hopes that they would turn her. She was dying. Which also explained why she looked so miserable—if her vampire had died, she was out of luck. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“I’m a—well, I don’t know what you call it, but I sort of help out a, a vampire?”

A human servant. With the habit of ending every sentence with a question mark. This was just what my day had been missing. “What can I do for you, Esther?”