Dead Spots (Scarlett Bernard #1)(24)

“Thank you,” I said. I remembered that I was supposed to be playing some sort of role. A hostess. “Um, did you know my parents well?”

She glanced around. Jack had carried a couple of pots of flowers to the car, and the gravediggers kept their respectful distance. We were alone. “I’m afraid I didn’t know them at all,” she said. “But I’m sure they were lovely.”

I stared at her, confused. “I’m sorry...Are you a friend of Jack’s or something?”

She smiled serenely. “No, Scarlett. I’m a friend of yours. Or I’d like to be.”

On another day, I might have called for help right then, but I just kept looking at her, befuddled. Was she from a church or something?

“You see,” she went on, “there are very, very few of us. I think we should stick together, don’t you?”


Very, very few. Five or six in the world.

Had Olivia just been full of shit? I wondered as Cruz and I walked back toward his car. It certainly wouldn’t be the only thing she’d lied about. But, no, that didn’t fit—Dashiell and Will had talked about the rarity of nulls, too, and I sort of suspected that if Dashiell had another null option, he wouldn’t be using me. If Olivia was right about us being rare, though, how was it possible that there was another null in the clearing?

“Scarlett?” Cruz asked, breaking into my thoughts. “What does this mean?”

I blinked. “Um...Well, for starters, it means we’ve been looking at the wrong victim pool.”

“Why?”

“Because if a null was there, then someone wanted to kill something from the Old World. It’s hard to kill both werewolves and vampires, even witches if they see you coming. But if you could turn them into humans first...”

He nodded. “If the werewolves run in that park, it could have been three of them.”

I thought about all the blood at the scene, spilled intentionally all over the clearing. “No. They were vampires. Or at least one of them was a vampire.”

“So can we go ask the...uh...vampire boss?”

I checked my watch. It was only three, which meant there were a good four hours until sunset. “We can, but he’s dead right now.”

Cruz didn’t laugh. “Can’t you just go near him, and he’ll come back to life and talk to us?”

I stopped and turned to look at him. “Whoa. We can’t just burst in there. You really think the cardinal vampire in LA doesn’t have daytime security? What would our story be? ‘Hi, it’s Scarlett, mind if I make your boss completely vulnerable for a few minutes? Along with this guy I brought who, by the way, has a gun?’ And that’s before we even find out what Dashiell would do if I stormed in there and made him vulnerable.”

He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Well, we can start by tracking down the null, right? There are how many of you?”

“That I know of? A handful,” I said. I started walking again. “But who knows how many there are total. The theory is that there are some nulls who never find out what they are.” I explained the difficulty in discovering new nulls. “If the null lives in a city with a low Old World population, they might live and die without ever knowing. There’s another argument that says that doesn’t happen, because nulls evolved to be born near Old World populations, but that’s all theoretical.”

“How many do you know about?”

I counted in my head. “Six. But we’re all really spread out, geographically. There’s one in New York, two in Europe, one in Japan, one in Russia, and me. That’s it.” From the corner of my eye, I saw his eyebrows furrow and his mouth open. I held up both palms in a stop gesture. “No, I have no idea why. We just seem to be born spread out like that. The Old World doesn’t spend a lot of time trying to solve those kinds of questions—at least not with modern scientific methods—so nobody has many answers.” To her credit, Olivia had at least tried to make connections between the nulls, spending most of one summer working on an online network between us. I’d corresponded with a couple of people at one point, the ones who spoke good English, but I hadn’t heard from anyone in more than eight months. Since she’d died.

“Well, can we find those nulls? Find out where they were the other night?”

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But do you really want to spend time trying to track down international alibis when there could theoretically be unknown nulls right here in the US?”

He looked unhappy. “It’s a cop thing. I have to cover all the bases, even the unlikeliest ones. Can you get me a list of names and phone numbers?”

“I only have e-mail addresses. But it’d be better coming from me.”

He thought that over for a moment. “Okay.” He shook his head. “Man, this stuff is weird.”

“Tell me about it.”

We were back at Cruz’s car. Cruz checked his watch. “Scarlett, look...I have to get to the airport, solidify my alibi for this afternoon. Could you maybe find your own way home?”

Molly’s place was only a couple of miles north, but it was still annoying. “Fine,” I grumbled.

“Great,” he said, undeterred. “I’ll come and get you when I’m done with my shift.”