When we finally left the condo, I had to lean on Jesse a little for support. Shadow kept pace with me, but she was constantly glancing up at me with worry. I couldn’t really blame her.

In the elevator, Jesse eyed me and said, “I know what you’re thinking, you know.”

“Oh, really?”

“You think you fucked up, both by going along with the bachelorette party cover story in the first place and by using Jack to end it. You’re blaming yourself for his injury, for Juliet being worried, all that. But they’re fine, Scarlett. Hell, they’re elated. You’ve taken a tremendous weight off their shoulders.”

I didn’t answer. He was right, of course. But . . . “It could have been so much worse,” I whispered. “If anyone else found out we were connected, Juliet and her friends could have been killed.” Bethany sucked, but Tara was a genuinely nice person. And neither of them deserved to die. “Jameson was killed. I feel like . . .” I shook my head.

The elevator dinged. We got out, but Jesse stopped in the lobby, turning to face me. “Like what?”

“Poison.”

Not so long ago, Jesse had accused me of something similar. I’d pushed that idea away, and our friendship had gotten past it, but . . . “Maybe you were right about me,” I whispered.

Jesse sighed and wrapped his arms around me. “You’re not poison,” he said into my hair. “You just have a complicated life.”

I accepted the hug, but inside, I was thinking that I needed to stay away from Jack and Juliet for a while. Maybe forever. They didn’t deserve the risks that I carried.

It was ironic, of course: not so long ago, I’d missed my brother terribly, and resented him for pushing me away while he was grieving for our parents. Now he was doing everything he could to make room for me in his life, and I was going to put distance between us again. And Juliet, and Riley and Logan, too. At the end of the day, they were too nice, too normal, to be a part of my life.

How sick was that?

Chapter 41

When we returned to the cottage house Jesse decided to stick around, watching a movie with Corry while he set up my new phone for me. I told him I could have done it myself, but he rolled his eyes and shooed me off to my room to sleep.

By the time I woke up, stiff and hurting, Jesse was gone and night had fallen. Shadow was lying on the bed next to me, and started thumping her tail when she saw that I was awake. I took four Advil from a bottle on my nightstand and lay back down, staring at the ceiling for a long time. Then the doorbell rang.

Shadow jumped up and sort of pointed at the door, but I ignored it. Molly would be awake by now, if Corry hadn’t woken her early to hang out. My null apprentice wasn’t returning to college until tomorrow. “They probably ordered pizza or something,” I told Shadow. The bargest gave me a hopeful look. “We’ll get you some later, okay?”

Someone knocked on my door. I pretended not to hear it. “Uh, Scarlett?” came Corry’s voice. “You should probably get out here.”

She sounded afraid. I sat up, nearly crying out at the pain in my tailbone, and started moving toward the door. “What’s wrong?” I said as I jerked it open.

She was wearing flannel pajama pants and a Berkeley tee shirt. Her eyes were wide. In a low voice, she said, “Um . . . Dashiell is here.”

I stared at her dumbly. “Dashiell is here? Like, at the house?”

The cardinal vampire did leave his mansion to handle his business affairs, but in all the years that I had known him, he’d never come to me. I always went to him. Corry nodded. “What do I do?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” I said, which was honest. I led her back down the hall to the front door. Dashiell was standing just inside the house, talking to Molly in low tones. My roommate had her head bent down, looking submissive and meek. I hated that.

I would have to take charge, goddammit. I decided to treat Dashiell like any other guest. “Hi, guys,” I said to them, but I looked at my roommate. “Molls, would you and Corry take Shadow outside for a bit?” I asked.

Molly scrutinized my expression for a moment and then nodded. Shadow gave me a look that said, I know what you’re doing, and I don’t like it. “It’s fine,” I told the bargest. She didn’t look like she believed me, but when Molly and Corry stepped into flip-flops and went out into the yard, Shadow reluctantly followed.

Dashiell was looking around the cottage, with its funky paint colors and pieces of Hollywood memorabilia that Molly had hung on the walls. He was wearing a gray suit with a narrow black tie, and he looked about as out of place as a time traveler from the future. “Would you like something to drink?” I asked him.

He shook his head, stifling his amusement. “Thank you, but no. I simply wanted to check on you. Cliff reported that you were injured. We should sit.”

For once, I didn’t have a snarky comment. I just ushered him into the living room, lowering myself carefully onto the couch. Dashiell perched on the edge of the armchair, his eyes searching me like he was doing inventory. “Are you all right?” he said quietly, his eyes lingering on the bruises on my face and wrist.

I thought about it for a moment, and decided to be honest. “Not really.” Then I told him everything that had happened after I’d hung up on him, leaving out only the parts about Jameson and me, as I had with Jesse. Dashiell listened quietly until I got to my conversation with Lucy Holmwood, and then he wanted every detail. When I was finished, he leaned back in the chair, looking pensive. “I hadn’t realized just how much damage she did,” he said.

“Claire or Lucy?”

Rueful smile. “Well, both, but I was talking about Claire.”

It was a good opening for the question that had been nagging at me. “Did her plan work?” I asked him. “Did Claire really unite the vampires with Dracula?”

He sighed. “It was a complicated time. The vampire council had fallen a century earlier, and many of us were getting reckless.” He shook his head. “I know you’ve seen jostling for power, but this was on a different level. Vampires stopped caring how many human bystanders were killed in their machinations. In a way, yes, the book did force us to put aside our differences and create the loose feudal system we have now. But it caused as many problems as it solved, because for the first time, humans organized themselves to hunt us.” He chuckled. “Claire did at least manage to build a few fail-safes into Stoker’s narrative—the garlic, the holy objects, walking around in daylight—but still. There were many vampires who called for her head on a pike, and that’s not a metaphor.”

I studied him. “You helped her get away, didn’t you?”

His gaze slashed over at me, and I immediately regretted my words. “I withdraw the question,” I said quickly, but I’d seen in his face that I was right: Dashiell had helped Claire escape from the mess she’d made in Europe.

I had to wonder if that was the real reason he’d sent me to Las Vegas to look into the Holmwoods’ actions. If he’d suspected that the Holmwoods were after Claire, he might have felt responsible, since he’d prevented Lucy and Arthur from getting the revenge they needed. It might have stopped all of this. And that was on top of him killing the last cardinal vampire, and him turning Claire into a vampire to begin with.

“We live long lives. We cannot know how a single choice we make might ripple out,” Dashiell said quietly. “But, for what it’s worth, Scarlett, I am sorry if any of my actions contributed to Jameson’s death.”

I stared at him, surprised. I didn’t think Dashiell had ever apologized to me before, unless it was in a sorry for your loss kind of way. He looked away from me, which was another first. “I had a weakness for Claire once,” he went on, his eyes wandering around Molly’s artistic contributions to the living room. “I felt sorry for her because of her circumstances, and I thought I had the power to reshape her life as I saw fit.”

His meaning wasn’t lost on me. “Jameson wasn’t Claire,” I said, angry.

“No, he wasn’t. But my point, Scarlett, is that, like it or not, some people are beyond saving.”