Molly hadn’t really hurt Jack, I knew, but he was in for a night of tests at the hospital, and Juliet was facing hours of worry—not to mention the hassle of dealing with a wrecked (but insured) car. And all of that was my fault. I had played with their lives to get us here, and now I was playing with them even more to dig my way out of it. As the weight of that washed over me, I wanted to curl up and hide from the shame.
But I couldn’t. Dashiell had promised this was the last time we would drag my family into the Old World messes. It was a small consolation, but it was all I had. And one thing was for sure: I was not going to put my family through all this and not get a resolution. One way or another, I would finish this.
I was just gathering my things to leave when there was a knock at my door. I extended my radius and felt a single vampire, not particularly strong. I went to the peephole and saw Wyatt, in full cowboy getup, holding a handful of papers.
I opened the door. “Hi. You could have just called.”
“Yeah, I could have,” he said easily. “But then you might have made a move without me.”
Okay, that did sound like something I’d do. I stepped aside so he could come in. “Does that mean you found something?”
Wyatt swept past me, the tails of his long coat brushing against my shins. “I’m not sure. Hoping you can help.”
He raised an eyebrow at the unmade bed, which looked . . . well, it looked like I’d recently had sex with someone, but Wyatt didn’t comment. He went straight past it to the sitting area and began spreading the three pages across the coffee table. They were lists of phone numbers, and Wyatt had highlighted many of the lines in yellow and a few in light blue. “Yellow are the numbers I know,” he explained. “Me, Laurel, a couple of her family members, a few friends in other cities that we keep in touch with.” He tapped a line of blue numbers. “The blue ones are numbers I was able to look up right quick, and they’re all easily explained. A hair salon, the dry cleaners, that kind of thing.”
“Okay.” I turned the last page toward me. It had a lot of yellow lines and a couple of blue ones. The last three numbers had no highlights.
Seeing my gaze, Wyatt pointed to the bottom number, an outgoing call. “This is an LA area code. Could that be your friend Margaret?”
“We weren’t really friends,” I said, “but yeah, I think so. I know that the last call Margaret received was from Ellen’s number.”
“Which would make sense, if your theory is that Ellen invited Margaret somewhere with her. So the second to the last number—”
Ignoring him, I picked up the page and studied the number right above Margaret’s. And I froze.
“I don’t know the area code,” Wyatt was saying. “Six-four-six? Where is that?”
“Manhattan,” I heard my voice say. “Midtown.”
Wyatt went on speaking to me, but suddenly it was like I was underwater. With shaking fingers, I grabbed my own phone and compared the phone number on the paper to the one Jameson had used to call me.
They were the same.
“No,” I said out loud. “No, it can’t be.” But the pieces were slamming into place whether I wanted them to or not. Jameson’s reluctance to talk to me about the situation. His insistence that I stay out of this mess and leave town.
Jameson, who I had trusted, who I had slept with, was working for the skinners.
Chapter 26
They’re all monsters. That’s what he had said.
When I reviewed every conversation we’d had in the last two days, I could see that he’d been putting me off the whole time, pushing me away from the conflict. He’d told me to go home, that there was nothing I could do, but I wouldn’t listen. God, you’re still just as stubborn, aren’t you?
So he’d saved a trump card: Juliet and the others. He’d played on my guilt to get me away from all of this. I had thought he was protecting me. And maybe he was, a little, but really he was making sure I couldn’t stop him.
“I’m such a fool,” I whispered. I had slept with him. I was now every girl in every crime drama ever.
“Scarlett!” Wyatt was shaking my shoulder now, bringing me back to myself. “What is it?” he demanded. “What did you just figure out?”
I swallowed hard. “I think my friend Jameson may be working for the skinners. He’s a null, too.”
“Jameson?” he repeated. “Black guy? Really tall?”
I nodded. Wyatt dropped down onto the chair nearest me. “Hell, I met him,” Wyatt said in a daze. “Ellen was helping him put together a list of local vampires so they could promote the show . . .”
His voice trailed off as we both realized the implications. That was how the skinners had found local vampires to kill. And if Ellen had unwittingly helped Jameson find vampires to destroy, it made sense that she’d end up on his list, too. “Did she trust him?” I asked quietly. “That is, if Jameson called Ellen and invited her to a party or meeting or something, would she have gone?”
Before he could respond, the room filled with the sound of an old-fashioned piano riff. Wyatt’s cell phone. He reddened slightly, which was possible because he was still within my radius, and dug it out of the pocket of his duster. “One second,” he said, frowning down at the screen. He turned away to answer it, pacing back toward the hotel room door.
As for me, I just sat there with my arms and legs collapsed around me, like a rag doll set on a shelf. In my entire life, I had never wanted to be wrong about anything as much as I wanted to be wrong about Jameson, but too many things fit: his hatred of vampires, born out of years of abuse by Malcolm, the way he’d insisted on keeping me separate from Arthur and Lucy, his evasiveness, his demands that I leave Las Vegas.
It all made sense . . . except for one thing. I had personally witnessed those skinners attack him, and that hadn’t been faked. Those bullets were real.
Okay, I was calling it. This was officially above my pay grade.
Wyatt was still on the phone, so I picked up my own mobile and called Dashiell.
“Hello, Scarlett,” came his smooth voice over the line. “I was just about to call you. What—”
“I need you to listen,” I interrupted. That was a little disrespectful even for me, but this was too important. I explained my suspicion as quickly as I could, the words tumbling out of my mouth with an edge of hysteria attached. Dashiell, to his credit, listened quietly as I laid out my case against Jameson. It all seemed pretty circumstantial when I said it out loud, but the phone number thing was damning. “But there was a group of skinners who came after us, for real, so now I’m confused,” I added. “Could there be two groups of skinners in town?”
“Yes and no,” Dashiell replied heavily. “As I said, I was going to call you. I heard from another friend in Europe a few minutes ago, someone I called last night to ask about the Holmwoods. After some cajoling, he mentioned a very strange rumor. One or two people have suggested that Arthur and Lucy are killing vampires.”
I didn’t get it. “Like, in duels? Is that still a thing?”
“No, Scarlett,” he said patiently. “I’m saying that Arthur and Lucy Holmwood are the skinners you’ve been seeking.”
It took another heartbeat, and then the penny dropped. “Holy fucking shit of shits,” I blurted.
“Indeed,” Dashiell said dryly.
On the other side of the room, Wyatt had finished his phone call and was pacing back toward me. He gave me a puzzled, slightly alarmed look. I held up a finger, turning away from him.
“I believe they may be hunting their own kind,” Dashiell continued. “There’s no proof, of course, but if people were starting to talk, that could explain why Arthur and Lucy decided to leave Europe and come to America, after all this time.”
For a moment, I was too stunned to speak. All along, I had been making assessments based on my understanding of what vampires do and do not do, and they definitely don’t kill each other, except maybe in a serious power struggle. It draws too much attention.
But I had made a mistake. I should never have expected the Holmwoods to think like normal vampires—after all, they’d spent decades proving they were anything but.