Trail of Dead (Scarlett Bernard #2)(75)

She wanted me to beg for her. Fine. I could beg. “Please, Livvie?” I pleaded. In a very small voice, I said, “I don’t know where else to go anymore.” Thanks to you, you deranged harpy.

Another long pause. I was still calming down from my earlier crying jag, and I made no attempt to hide my jagged breathing.

“Well…maybe it’s a good night after all,” Olivia said, her voice a little smug. She had won, and she knew it. “Things are going to change now, Scarlett. The way this whole city works is going to change. Would you like to see it happen?”

I waited a beat, and simply said, “Yes.”

“Everything’s going to be better now, Scarlett,” she said soothingly. “We’ll be together again. I have so many new things to teach you.” She rattled off an address. “But you must come alone,” she added.

“I will.”

Olivia hung up without another word. I set the phone down on Will’s desk. She didn’t actually care if I brought backup or not—in her mind, there was nothing that could stop her and Mallory now. Kirsten would have been the biggest problem, and Kirsten had been shot. But it didn’t matter—I wasn’t going to bring anyone with me. Olivia was not going to hurt anyone else.

I was going to stop her first. Or die trying.

I looked around the office, and spotted Eli’s jacket hanging on the back of Caroline’s chair. I dug in his pockets until I found his keys. He wasn’t going to need his pickup anytime soon, and I was guessing that Jesse’s car had the GPS-LoJack thingy. And apparently it was my day for cruising around in half-borrowed, half-stolen vehicles. After a long moment of indecision, I picked up the handset of Will’s office phone and dialed Jesse’s cell phone number. He didn’t pick up, which was a relief, really. I waited for the voice mail tone.

“Hey, it’s Scarlett,” I began. “Listen, I know where she is, and I’m going after her. By myself. Nobody else is going to die because Olivia wants me, and I’m not going to spend one more day as a bargaining chip, or a toy, or bait.” I paused. “I know you think I’m just going to surrender and let her kill me, Jesse, but I promise, I’ll fight. You…you make me want to fight. So thank you for that, I guess. I…I’m sorry it didn’t work out between us.” I rubbed my eyes, thinking about the broken werewolf in the other room. “I’m sorry about a lot of things. But not about this. Good-bye, Jesse.”

I picked up Eli’s keys and my wallet, started for the office door, and stopped again. I turned in a circle. The safe was in the janitorial room with Ana and her girlfriend, but Will had only been in and out for a second, and he wouldn’t have wanted to be puttering with the safe while he was trying to give the women privacy. I went back to his desk and started opening drawers. I found the big revolver in the right middle drawer, next to a bottle of very expensive whiskey. Will must have been planning to put the gun away later. I picked up the gun and clumsily popped out the thingy that stored the bullets. I hadn’t handled a gun like this before, but I’d seen plenty of Westerns with my grandfather when I was little. I counted two bright silver shells and snapped the thing shut again. I checked all the drawers one more time, but the extra bullets, if there were any, must have been locked in the safe. It was better than nothing.

My only real play here was to go the simplest route: get the bad guys in my radius and kill them. Mallory, whoever she was, couldn’t use any kind of spell on me, including her big clay toy, so the greatest danger was that one of them would be carrying a gun. I didn’t have my vest anymore, but I was guessing—well, betting my life, actually—that nobody was going to shoot me on sight. Olivia would try to convert me first, to get me on Team Evil. I just had to play along long enough to get close to both of them, shoot them, and be done. I took a deep breath. Piece of cake.

I looked down at myself, in the boots, T-shirt, and boxers. Where the hell was I going to put it? The boxers were too loose to hold the massive gun up, and my boots were too tight for it to fit inside. I sighed, wishing I’d kept the holster Jesse had given me. Out of ideas, I finally got a roll of duct tape from the desk and taped the gun to my lower back with a big X of tape. It hurt to bend my arms that way, and pulling the gun and tape off of my back would require an even more awkward position, but you couldn’t see the gun while I was moving around in the T-shirt.

And besides, it had worked for Bruce Willis in a movie once.

I left my cell phone on the desk and stepped toward the hallway, pausing in the doorway to listen. I could hear the low voices of Matthias and Will still talking in the other room. Just across the hall, Anastasia was crying softly next to her unconscious girlfriend. I turned the other way, walking straight out the back exit and into the night.





Chapter 26


“What do you mean, she never got here?” Jesse Cruz asked the intake nurse, seething with frustration.

The nurse flicked a few keys on her keyboard with long, scary-looking red nails. “I have no record of anyone with that name coming in this evening,” she reported. She gave him a professionally helpless look. “I’m sorry, Detective. There’s nothing else I can tell you.

Jesse fidgeted, unwilling to move away from the counter despite the three people in line behind him. He had hitched a ride with a squad car to get to the hospital, irritated but unsurprised that Scarlett had decided to drive herself to get checked out. When he’d finally arrived at the hospital, he’d been so angry, his thoughts focused on Runa and her betrayal, replaying all the conversations they’d had to see what he might have given away. After he’d learned that Scarlett never arrived at the hospital, though, the rage had suddenly drained away, replaced by worry.