“Um, okay,” Jesse said, pulling a little ring of keys out of his pocket. “I stopped at the precinct and signed these out. One of the vice detectives found this ring of handcuff keys years ago in an S and M shop, and the whole department adds to it whenever we find a weird one.”

They shifted around awkwardly for a few minutes, but after a little discussion, Eli found a position where he could rest one wrist on the arm of the couch, and Jesse pulled up a straight-backed chair so he could began fitting keys in the lock. It was still kind of uncomfortable, being this close to a guy—another werewolf, he remind himself—he didn’t know. It made Jesse talk too fast.

“So the silver thing is true? Poison to werewolves and vampires?”

The blond guy glanced at Scarlett, who gave an it’s up to you shrug.

“Magic does weird things to silver, or maybe vice versa,” he said. His voice was low and gravelly. “I don’t know why. Some magics are enhanced by it, some the opposite. For werewolves, it’s pretty much our kryptonite, yeah.”

“Not for the vampires, though,” Scarlett added. “Silver just makes them itch a little, so don’t go thinking silver bullets will do the trick there.”

Huh. “I meant to ask you about that. Exactly what would do the trick?”

“Oh. Um...sunlight. And fire, of course. Those are classics. Other than that, you have to detach the head or destroy the heart.”

“Wooden stakes?”

She held out a flat hand and wiggled it back and forth in a so-so gesture. “Mostly just a superstitious tradition. It technically works, but you have to really squash the shit out of the heart to destroy it. It’s a lot harder than it sounds.”

Eli glanced at her.

“So I’ve heard,” she added.

Eli said, “I heard once that the vampires spread a lot of rumors themselves, about what would kill them. That way when humans tried to test them, they would always pass.”

“I suppose that makes sense.” Jesse thought it over for a minute. What else had he heard about? “Crosses and holy water? Garlic?”

“Garlic’s also a little itchy,” Scarlett said. “No religious stuff, that’s a myth. There are also—”

Eli cleared his throat, cutting her off, and Jesse saw the two of them exchange a complicated look.

“Here,” Jesse twisted a key in the lock, and the cuff popped open. He unlocked the other and handed both rings to Eli. “Souvenir,” he offered.

“Thank you,” Eli said, looking very relieved. He quickly dropped both rings on the coffee table, as if they’d burned him. Which, Jesse realized, seeing the welts on Eli’s wrists, they had.

“You’re welcome.” Jesse turned to Scarlett, who had been sitting on the couch eating her burrito during the exchange. “Now, what the hell’s going on?”

The werewolf excused himself to get to a bartending job, and Jesse spent the next half an hour listening as Scarlett explained the call to the dog park, her kidnapping, and the “meeting” with Dashiell.

When she was finished, Jesse was almost in a daze. “That...is a lot to take in.”

“Yes.”

“The vampire boss, Dashiell—he thinks you’re behind it?”

“Yes.”

Her eye was already purpling, despite the frozen veggies, and the bruise on her jaw was one of the darkest he’d seen. And that was only from a few hours ago. Jesse felt his teeth grit together. They’d slapped her around for something she hadn’t done.

“Dashiell’s guys were the ones who did this to you?”

“Yes. To be fair, though, they don’t think about this kind of thing”—she gestured to her face—“as all that big of a deal. And I doubt that Dashiell actually ordered Hugo to hit me. I definitely got the feeling that Hugo just really enjoys hitting people. Probably a bad childhood.”

Jesse stared at her. He’d been on plenty of domestic abuse calls as a rookie, and most of the abused women tended to be either hopping mad or falling all over themselves making excuses for their piece-of-shit spouse. Scarlett, on the other hand, seemed so...casual. “Why aren’t you more upset about this?” he asked.

“About getting hit? Because in the Old World, the favored reaction to getting hit is to hit back. I did that, and now I’m over it. Bigger fish.”

She hesitated, and Jesse raised his eyebrows. “What?”

“Actually, there’s one other thing you should probably know about. If we can’t figure this out by the end of tomorrow night, Dashiell’s going to...um...kill me. And you, too, I assume.”

“What?”

Chapter 13

After my parents’ funeral, it took about a week for me to figure out that I had nowhere to go. I hung around Esperanza for a day or two, but the town was too small. Every time I stepped out of the house, I ran into someone wanting to hug me or hold my hands or tell me what wonderful people my parents were. I had been raised to be polite and accommodating, which made me defenseless to what I began to see as attacks of kindness. And every time I was inside the house, I was assaulted by memories, by the holes in the world. To make things even worse, Jack, my goofy, gentle, book-smart big brother, had become a stranger who couldn’t look me in the eyes or say anything that wasn’t businessy—what to have for dinner, what of Mom and Dad’s stuff I wanted, what to do with the house. Eventually, it all built up into a full-blown panic attack, and I threw my clothes into a garbage bag and took off for LA. I still haven’t been back to my hometown.