Trail of Dead (Scarlett Bernard #2)(56)

Esther nodded, biting her lip. “I think so. I think it was his…friend. She’s a vampire too, but she gives me the creeps.” She shuddered and wrapped her stick arms around herself.

“Know anything else about her?” I asked, mostly focused on spreading the body bag out next to the corpse.

“Just her name. He introduced her as Olivia.”





Chapter 20


Olivia’s name hit me like a slap, and I lost my balance, toppling over onto the carpet. Fully seated on the floor, I stared at Esther, and then back at the desiccated corpse. The shape was right, but just in case, I asked her for the vampire’s name.

“Albert,” she whispered. “His name was Albert.”

So Olivia had killed her accomplice. One of her accomplices. I had no idea what to say next, and I suddenly couldn’t stand being in the same room as the corpse. “Can we go up to the kitchen and talk for a second?”

Shrugging and biting at a fingernail, she led me back up the stairs. I sat down at the card table and nodded toward the other chair. Esther sat.

“How did you find me?” I began. “How did you know where I’d be?”

“I didn’t. But Albert gave me your phone number in case of emergencies. He said if something happened to him, I should call you.”

That seemed odd. Jesse had said that Albert was off the grid, on the run from Dashiell. Why would Albert direct Esther to call me, one of Dashiell’s employees? Unless…“Did Albert suspect something might happen?”

Esther hesitated, thinking it over. “I think…I think he loved Olivia? For whatever reason. But he didn’t really trust her.”

“Okay. Who owns this house?”

“Albert did. It wasn’t in his name, though. He said it used to be one of his former human servants?”

“And why do you think Olivia was the one who killed him?”

Her shoulders hunched. “It just seems like something she would do.”

Couldn’t argue with that. “Did they both live here? Albert and Olivia.”

“Sort of. Albert lived here all the time, in that room where his”—she winced—“his body is. Olivia has a room here, but she used to come and go when she wanted. When she was here, I tried to be somewhere else.”

“How come?”

“Like I said, she gave me the creeps. Albert and I, we weren’t, like, romantic, you know?” She seemed to be waiting for a response on that, so I nodded. “It was more of a business thing. But one time he let her feed off me, and she was…not gentle. And now Albert’s gone, and he promised to turn me before…” She swallowed hard, seeming to struggle with it. I could see her eyes filling. “Before I die.” Esther was crying openly now. “What am I gonna do?”

Awkward. I felt sorry for these people, the vampire hangers-on who just wanted to be able to live, on whatever terms necessary. Who knows, maybe I’d have more sympathy if I were the one dying. But you shouldn’t become a vampire out of fear of death. If anyone should become a vampire at all, it should be because that’s what you want to be. I felt like I should tell her I was sorry or ask how much time she had left or something, but I’m not good at that kind of thing. Besides, I had bigger fish at the moment. “Can you show me her room?”

“It’s in the basement too,” she sniffled. “But it’s locked.”

“Is she in there now?” This stupidly hadn’t even occurred to me. What if I was in the same house as Olivia? A flood of emotions ran through me: fear that she would get me, relief that she might have been found, and, of course, the urge to run away very quickly.

But Esther shook her head. “The lock is one of those heavy detachable ones, and it’s on the outside. She can’t be in there.”

I looked out the window, reassuring myself that the sun was very much out. Then I told Esther she could stay where she was and descended back into the basement. In the main living room, I turned in a circle until I spotted the skinny door against the back wall. The door and the handle had both been painted the same white as the sheetrock around it, which would have been pretty good camouflage if it weren’t for the heavy silver padlock dangling from the doorframe. I approached it cautiously, paying close attention to the edges of my radius, just in case. If Olivia was in there, she was currently dead, but proximity to me would bring her to life, and she was still plenty dangerous as a human. By the time I got to the door, though, I was satisfied that unless the room turned into a huge tunnel, there was nothing Old World inside.

Behind me, I heard Esther climbing partway down the stairs, where she sat down to watch. I ignored her and looked at the padlock. It was shaped like the kind you see at the gym, but three times the size, and I didn’t think even my heavy-duty bolt cutters could gnaw through it. I went back to my bag of tools and pulled out a simple flat-head screwdriver. There was no way I was getting that padlock off without a blowtorch, but the two metal loops that it locked together were another story: they were just screwed into the door and the doorframe with ordinary screws. Rookie mistake. I could have taken the time to take out all the screws, but instead I poked the screwdriver into the U of the bolt and levered it back. I put my weight into it, and was finally rewarded with a splintering snap as the whole setup came fumbling into my stomach. “Hey,” Esther protested, but her voice was even weaker than it had been. I dropped the padlock onto the floor and pulled the door open.