Her final days.
That set off a bell in my head, but I was still chasing the thought when my phone buzzed on the table. I picked it up. Jesse.
“Hello?” I said absently. Something had been on the tip of my brain-tongue. What was it?
“Death spices?” Jesse yelled. “You decided that I didn’t need to know about death spices?!”
Oops. He had my attention now. I automatically glanced around, even though nobody was going to hear the yelling over the phone. Luckily, Kalista’s was more or less abandoned—everybody had gotten their coffee to go, so they could get back to their weekday jobs. The artsy-looking girl behind the counter raised her eyebrows when she saw me looking around, but I just gave her a brief smile and a thumbs-up. All good here. No refills needed.
I took a deep breath. “Uh, it was need-to-know basis, and you didn’t need to know?” I tried. But I could practically feel him seething on the other end. I couldn’t even blame him.
“Scarlett?” Kirsten’s voice rang out. “You’re on speakerphone; we’re on our way back to LA.”
“Oh, good,” I said, but my voice was limp.
“I tried to explain to Jesse that you were acting under standing orders not to talk about the herbs,” she said meaningfully, and I could picture her staring pointedly at Jesse as he drove.
“Yes. That’s right,” I said lamely. To be fair, no one had told me specifically not to tell Jesse about the Big Three. But I’d sort of figured out on my own that knowing that kind of thing could put his life even more at risk. And then by the time I had started to trust Jesse, it was too late to tell him without pissing him off that I hadn’t said anything right away.
During the seventeenth century, when witches were more or less hunted for sport, the vampires and werewolves had refused to help them. So the witches did the only thing they could: they started experimenting with their magic. And they discovered something very dangerous: the nightshades. Just as magic clung to the evolutionary lines of humans, it clung to a class of plants, as well, and those plants had a chemical reaction with magic. The whole subspecies was loaded with magic, which the witches began using in everyday spells, but there were three in particular that were treacherous: Atropa belladonna, Mandragora officinarum, and Lycium barbarum, which eventually became known as wolfberry. Belladonna, it turned out, was poisonous to vampires—you needed a lot to actually kill them, but a little bit worked as a paralytic. Mandragora, or mandrake root, was used by the witches in the really dangerous spells, the ones that toed the line between the living and the dead—a huge no-no in witch circles. And ingesting wolfberry caused the werewolves to completely lose control of their shifting, and often their minds.
When the witches discovered all this, there was a very quiet, very horrible war. Finally, in the twentieth century botanists tinkered with all three plants, and they’d all but eradicated the specific strains that had magical properties. You could now buy perfectly safe, nonmagical belladonna at a farmers’ market in Wisconsin, if you wanted to. But those original strains still existed, and it was illegal for anyone in the Old World to even possess them. I’d been to a lot of crime scenes in my five years working for the Old World, and I’d never even seen any of the nightshades. Even Dashiell, Will, and Kirsten supposedly didn’t keep any, though I could see how it might be valuable to, say, paralyze a nutty vampire. The Big Three, as they so cleverly were called, were just too dangerous. Which was exactly why I’d kept Jesse from even knowing about them.
The fact that Olivia now had all three strains…that made this a whole new ball game. It was pretty much the equivalent of that scene in Jurassic Park where they realize that in addition to all their other problems, the velociraptors have now escaped.
There was a long, pregnant pause while Kirsten and I both waited for Jesse’s reaction. Finally he muttered, “We’ll talk about this later, Scarlett.”
So looking forward to that, I thought. Meanwhile, if ever anyone needed a subject change, it was me. “Um, what did you guys find out in San Diego?”
Kirsten filled me in on the basics: that Rabbi Samuel had been tortured for the location of the amulet, which had been stolen along with a box’s worth of the Big Three. Then she’d dragged him to the parking lot and drained him, dumping the body on the lawn.
We had wandered back into my field of experience. I tried to picture the crime scene, something I’ve had plenty of practice with. “Why drag him downstairs?” I asked, keeping my voice low. I probably didn’t need to bother—in this town anybody who overheard would probably assume I was running lines for my CSI audition. “Why not kill him up in the storage room and leave the body? It would have delayed anyone finding the body, and made a lot of trouble for the Old World in trying to explain what happened.”
Kirsten was silent, but Jesse piped up. “I thought about that. I think she did it for two reasons: first, she was trying to disguise the fact that she stole those…herbs. She made a big show of violence near where the amulet had been kept, but the area by that box looked undisturbed. If Kirsten hadn’t thought to check there, no one would have known they were missing.”
“Okay,” I said, processing that. “And the second reason?”
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think she’s fucking with us,” Jesse said. He explained that Olivia had drained Samuel’s blood and then gone to the trouble of covering up the wound. “You told me once that the Old World gets involved if a crime doesn’t look human,” Jesse added.