His attention returned to me, and he tapped his fingers along the antique blotter on his desk. “Not yet. You may thank Beatrice for that; she seems unusually fond of you. I have promised her that I would let you be until our deadline. In, what? Ten hours.”

As I left Dashiell’s and hurried for my van, I worked to push aside my panic and concentrate. What had I learned? Jesse’s theory was probably correct—Jared Hess had to be the killer. But so what? How did that help me? I glanced at my watch: 10:00. I still had an hour and a half to go before the meeting with Jay at Corry’s place. I tried Jesse’s phone again, but this time it didn’t even ring, which probably meant that the phone was off. So now what was I supposed to do?

I needed Jesse, I decided. If he wouldn’t answer his phone, then I would just have to go get him. I would go to the precinct. Just as I started the van, though, my cell phone began to howl “Black Magic Woman.” Kirsten. I answered, because even in the middle of the most frightening crisis of my life, Olivia’s training still stuck, damn her.

“Hey, Kirsten—”

“Is this Scarlett Bernard?”

I blinked in surprise. The voice was panicked, frightened—and unquestionably male.

“Uh, yeah. I’m sorry, who is this?”

“My name is Paul Dickerson. Kirsten is my wife.”

My heart sank through the floor of the van and into the freeway. “Tell me what’s happening, Mr. Dickerson.”

His voice raised an octave, hysterical. “He took her. He had a thing, a...a stun gun, and he took her. I found your number in her phone. It said, Emergencies. This is a fucking emergency. Can you come?”

I suddenly understood. Jared Hess didn’t just hate Joanna or the vampires, he hated the Old World. That was why he’d killed Ronnie, who really hadn’t seen anything in the clearing. The vampires, the werewolf...And now he had Kirsten. God.

But then I remembered how Hess had used Ronnie’s cell phone to text Will, and I hesitated. “Mr. Dickerson, what does Kirsten keep on her kitchen counter? The big granite counter by the sink?”

“What?”

“Please, just answer.”

“It’s a...What do you call it? A pestle and mortar. She has two.”

“I’m on my way.”

For the first time since I’d started my new life in the Old World, I was shattering my speeding rule.

As I raced toward Kirsten’s, I tried calling Corry’s cell, but the recorded operator’s voice informed me that the voice mailbox was unavailable. I tried Eli, who was working and must not have heard his cell, and Jesse, who still didn’t answer. He couldn’t be that mad at me, could he? With our lives on the line? I pounded the steering wheel in frustration. Where the hell was my backup, dammit! I was not a detective! I did not carry a gun! This was bullshit!

I sped on.

At ten fifteen, nearly all of the lights were off in the houses on Kirsten’s street. A single lamp was lit in Kirsten’s front window, and I felt a chill as I pulled the van into the driveway. If Paul Dickerson was freaking out, why weren’t all the lights blazing? As a matter of fact, why hadn’t he called the rest of Kirsten’s coven? I would think they’d be in full witch mode, working tracking spells. Unless he didn’t know about the coven? I switched off the engine nervously and sat for a moment peering at the house. Then I looked at the clock and shrugged. Fuck it. I did not have time to play Suzy armchair detective. I stepped out of the van, strode up the driveway, and rang the doorbell. Kirsten’s door has a little window at eye level in lieu of a peephole, and I saw the curtain behind it move. A man’s eye looked me over, and then the eye disappeared and I heard the doorknob turn. As the door opened, I peered into the dark house.

“Mr. Dickerson?”

“Not exactly.”

The voice was wrong. I knew right away and took an instinctual step back, turning to run. But before I’d even shifted my weight, a hand shot up and I smelled a harsh chemical like burned cinnamon, and suddenly, I was in terrible, agonizing pain. I gasped, and my overloaded senses put it together—mace.

My eyes were instantly streaming, and I let out a wail of pain, which was the man’s cue to seize my arm, dragging me into the house. I kicked wildly in his direction, but it was like fighting in the dark, and he easily evaded me. Amid the burning pain, I felt another—a sharp prick in my arm. By the time I was able to assemble my thoughts around the word needle, I was out.

Chapter 28

Jesse Cruz was feeling extremely stupid.

He’d stormed out of the coffee shop like a kid throwing a tantrum, and realized within about ten minutes that he was being ridiculously shortsighted. The revelation that Scarlett was willing to help disappear murdered kids had really thrown him, partly because he really had seen the kind of devastation that unsolved murders wreaked on a family, and, if he was being honest with himself, partly because he was just disappointed that his crush would do something like that. That moment in the coffee shop had made him realize, for the first time, just how attracted he was to the damaged girl with the green eyes. And so he’d lost his temper.

Even though it was a much better time to be making sure both of them lived through the night. Back at his desk, Jesse had pulled out his cell to call Scarlett but realized the battery was dead. And, of course, he hadn’t actually written down her number, just programmed it into his phone. Sighing, he had trooped downstairs to the parking garage to get the phone charger out of his car, only to realize that he’d left it at his parents’ house over the previous weekend. He rolled his eyes. Vampires and werewolves were running amok in the city, and he couldn’t remember a cell phone charger.