Dead Spots (Scarlett Bernard #1)(5)
He actually laughed, but it was a dry, grave chuckle that made me shiver. “Scarlett, I am very displeased. But if I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t invite you politely. And there would be no trying.” The line went dead.
I tossed the phone into the baseball cap on the seat next to me. This was very bad. I’d skated by for eight months with only a handful of incidents each week. Of course it figured that the one time I got two scenes in one night, it would be the most gruesome murder I’d ever seen. That kind of killing was going to get a lot of attention—enough that I suspected even Dashiell wouldn’t be able to keep a lid on it. He would be furious with me, and that was not good for either my professional reputation or my personal safety. He might not be able to bite me, but despite our ability to extinguish magic, nulls like me aren’t invulnerable. We’re just as fragile as any other human being, and all Dashiell really had to do was buy a gun or have one of his personal goons beat me to death. I heard myself chortle, an edge of hysteria escaping my throat. Who would they get, I thought, to clean up my body?
It was ten minutes to dawn when I dragged myself through the back door of the compact West Hollywood house that I share with my housemate and landlady, Molly. Who, I should mention, is also a vampire.
“You’re home!” she squealed, rushing toward me at much-faster-than-human speed. She had on designer sweatpants and a Paul Frank T-shirt with a picture of an angry-looking kitten biting a dog. Molly looks about twenty, with shoulder-length hair (currently red) and the body of a high school tennis star, but she’s really a hundred and twenty-something years old, born in Wales the same summer that Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the East End of London. She was turned into a vampire at the age of seventeen. I’ve never heard the full story on how it happened, but I get the impression that it wasn’t accidental—that was right around the time when skirmishes between the vampires and the witches led to the vampires becoming much more thoughtful about who they let into their undead club. They went after a lot of poor, pretty girls, like Molly had been.
Molly doesn’t hate what she is, exactly. Unlike some vampires who deliberately try to spend time with me, she doesn’t really want to be human—ugh, humans, am I right? She just doesn’t want to look like a teenager anymore, which is understandable. Seventeen was pretty much an adult in her own time, but in the twenty-first century, she couldn’t even buy a lottery ticket. So a few years ago, she offered me a deal, through Dashiell: in exchange for spending as much time around her as possible, I could have the spare bedroom in her house practically for free. Since my weird little ability doesn’t cost me anything, or even tire me out, I thought that sounded like a pretty good deal. Molly and I have sort of become friends, too, though sometimes I can’t believe she’s older than me, let alone older than, say, automobiles or World War I.
As she stepped into my radius, she did the little halting gasp that vampires always take when they’re around me—it’s the feeling of going from immortal back to mortal, and a vampire once told me it’s like waking up from a coma, only to find you have been beaten nearly to death. Molly’s skin lost its luminous glow, and she jerked as her heart restarted. She wiggled her jaw absentmindedly, poking her tongue at her teeth. Vampires don’t actually have fang fangs, but their canine teeth have evolved to be much sharper than a regular human’s. It has to feel weird to have your teeth get more and less pointy when I’m around. Then Molly went back to smiling beatifically at me, wringing her hands from a few feet away. Molly is a hugger—I know, who’s ever heard of a hugging vampire?—and though I have finally trained her not to touch me, she does tend to hover two feet away.
“While You Were Sleeping is on, and Peter Gallagher just fell on the tracks. Want to watch with me?”
“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.” Again, I thought. Molly’s favorite technological advancement is movies, and she’s been there for every step: from their birth through the spread of theaters, home video, then DVD, and now Blu-ray and 3-D. When they bring back Smell-o-Vision, she’ll be the first in line at Best Buy. She adores film, which is probably why she bought the West Hollywood house to begin with—supposedly, Marilyn Monroe once threw up in the downstairs bathroom during a party. I would have a lot more respect for this passion if her absolute favorite genre wasn’t romantic comedy.
“I’m just going to go up to my room, I think. Maybe read a little and go to bed. Are you working tonight?” I asked.
“Nah, I’m good,” she said happily. Molly doesn’t really have to work—I’ve learned that vampires always seem to have a mysterious source of income, the result of being alive long enough to acquire, say, gold doubloons or fist-sized jewels—but she has a low-key part-time job transcribing interviews and meeting notes online. At home, she can type at lightning speed, having no trouble finishing in moments what would take me an hour. But she likes to go to coffee shops and work in the middle of people.
I’m guessing this is also where she gets her victims, but she and I don’t really talk about that. Vampires need to feed anywhere from every night to every four or five days, depending on how active they are and how much they take. Older vampires, like Molly, have the practice and control to feed a little bit from a victim, then take their memory of the event away completely, which is called “pressing their minds.” Most of the time, the victims are left feeling a tad weak and fluttery, as if they’ve just made out with a stranger. No harm, no foul, right? The messing-with-memory thing gives me the creeps, and I am very grateful that Molly is old enough to control herself—and also that she could never feed from me personally.