Outside, I spent a few minutes crawling around underneath the van, checking for listening devices—or, God forbid, explosives. This was one of those times when the security training from Hayne came in handy. But there was nothing there. Either Katia and her pal hadn’t thought to track me, or they hadn’t been able to find my van to do it. I wiggled out, brushed off my pants and top, and climbed into the van to head downtown.

Before I could even turn the key, however, my eyes caught a bright pink item in the footwell of the passenger seat. My hand froze on the ignition. Molly’s backpack. I had completely forgotten about it, and whoever had moved the van for Dashiell hadn’t touched it.

I reached down and pulled the pack onto the passenger seat. Every vampire I knew kept a “go-bag” handy, a habit left over from the time when it had been a legitimate possibility that villagers might show up with pitchforks and torches. But I’d never actually looked inside one before. The back compartment held a laptop, and I checked that first, but of course it was password protected. I have many skills, but breaking into a MacBook Air isn’t one of them. Abigail might be able to do it, but there wasn’t going to be time tonight, and even if I could convince Dashiell’s security team to let me talk to Molly, I didn’t want to raise too many alarms. We still didn’t know who might be working with the bad guys.

I unzipped the backpack’s main compartment. The first thing I found was a change of clothes and a pair of shoes. Beneath that, a brick of cash and a passport with Molly’s photo and current ID: Molly Arwen Greene. I dropped those on the seat next to the bag and kept digging. There were a few other items that would give Molly’s name to the police: her school ID, a lease agreement for her basement apartment, and a few receipts. A cosmetics bag with makeup and a small bottle of hair dye. There were also two small but high-quality pocketknives, probably what she used to cut the people she fed from—vampires could feed with their teeth, but the practice had fallen out of favor decades ago, after the police learned to distinguish between human and animal bites. I unfolded the blades and checked them. I didn’t see any blood, but Molly was probably careful enough to clean them, at least to the naked eye.

And that was pretty much it. It was a little disappointing, honestly. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but I’d sort of hoped for some kind of smoking gun, maybe a note that said, “Damn you, Molly, you’ll get yours!” with the name and address of her archnemesis at the bottom. That would have been handy.

The sky outside my window was beginning to darken. I needed to get on the road if I was going to be close to on time. I was about to pack everything back into the bag, but I reached in and felt around inside first, just in case. My fingers touched something small, cold, and metal, the size of a paper clip. I jerked my fingers back instinctively, but it wasn’t sharp, so I reached back in, pinched my fingers around it, and pulled. And kept pulling, until I lifted out a heavy gold chain. At the end was a gold medallion the size of a silver dollar. I turned the bag inside out and found a tiny hole in the lining. Molly had hidden the pendant inside.

I dropped the bag to examine the necklace. It was heavy, and definitely old: the markings on the medallion looked like it might have once been a coin, though they now just looked like a bunch of bumps. I flipped it over. This side had been purposefully worn smooth and shiny, and two dates had been inscribed on it in fancy calligraphy: May 1st, 1905 on top, and below it, May 1st, 1925. Hmm. She’d been turned in 1905, which made 1925 twenty years after she’d been turned. So that was the year her vampire apprenticeship had ended and she’d earned her freedom from Alonzo.

Below the inscribed dates, a third date had been added, but this one had been roughly scratched in by hand, with something like a pin. March 13th, 1996. I wasn’t sure about the significance of that one, but I could take a guess: the day Molly had killed Alonzo.

I weighed the medallion in my hand for a minute, frowning. It reminded me of the dog tags that soldiers wear. Had Alonzo made his prostitutes wear gold necklaces marking their ownership by him? It seemed like the kind of thing a controlling, abusive monster might do. But then why would Molly keep it?

I glanced at my watch, and realized I was going to be late if I didn’t get moving. I leaned sideways so I could shove the necklace in my pants pocket, but the medallion was too big—it would leave a lump in my pants that would look funny to a bunch of twitchy, suspicious Old World locals. Shrugging to myself, I put the necklace over my head and tucked it under all of my clothes. The chain was so long that it hung between my breasts, way beyond where anyone would be able to see it just by looking at me. Then I started the van and headed downtown.

Chapter 27

Traffic going downtown on a Friday night wasn’t for the faint of heart. While I waited to move the car forward, I called Jesse to check in, but he didn’t answer. Probably still meeting with his informant. I left a voice mail explaining that reception was bad inside the theater, but I would call him during the first break, at midnight.

I also checked in with Theo Hayne at 5:30, just to make sure there hadn’t been any fresh surprises at the mansion during the rest of the day. He promised me that everything was quiet. Molly had been given a blood bag in her cell, and Dashiell and Beatrice were currently dressing for the Trials. Hayne was going home to catch a few hours of sleep. I knew he was probably exhausted—he’d been working overtime on security for the Trials, including helping Kirsten test her humans-go-away wards. During the Trials was a good time for Hayne to rest, since he couldn’t get into the Trials themselves, but he would show up in person to lend a hand afterward, in case Count Asshat decided to make a move at the end of the night.

The sun dipped below the horizon a little after five, taking the golden tones out of the city and painting it in gray concrete twilight. I liked Los Angeles at this time of day. It was less bright and cartoony, less the sunny Hollywoodized LA that everyone sees in the movies. But it wasn’t yet nighttime LA, either, which conjured images of either glamorous women in slinky dresses and pin curls, or homeless people sleeping in noxious rags on Skid Row. I always thought LA was its most honest right after the sun fell. This was when you noticed the real people who made the city their home.

Then again, maybe I was just feeling romantic because of my destination. The Los Angeles Theatre was the last of the great downtown movie palaces built on Broadway, back in 1930, when everyone thought LA was going to have a theater district to rival New York’s. After World War II, the masses moved out of downtown and into the suburbs, and the Los Angeles Theatre and its brethren stood derelict for years. Some of the palaces were torn down, but a few had been resurrected and renovated in the past thirty years, when LA city planners realized that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to turn all of the local history into parking structures.

At first, I had thought the idea of hosting the Trials in a building that looked like it had been broken off from Versailles was ludicrous. The Los Angeles Theatre was stunning in its opulence, with a ballroom, a mirror-laden women’s lounge, and French Baroque furnishings that would make the phantom of the opera cry with envy. It wasn’t exactly what I pictured when I imagined listening to Dashiell hand out death sentences. Even after studying the binders and learning how dry and anticlimactic many of the trials were, a place like the Los Angeles Theatre seemed like a bizarre choice.

It was Kirsten who had pulled me aside and explained Dashiell’s reasoning. The whole point of having the Trials now was to appease the members of the Los Angeles Old World who were thirsty for drama, stirring up minor conflicts because they were bored with the peace. By holding the Trials in a theater, Dashiell was giving the people what they wanted: a show.

Moreover, he and the others were hoping that the grandeur of the Theatre would naturally inspire better behavior in the attendees. That might sound naive, but people are conditioned to adjust their behavior in settings like museums, state capitols, and historically significant buildings. Voices are lowered, attire is more formal, everyone is careful of where their elbows and handbags might be bumping. Hopefully this ingrained formality would extend to how the Trials attendees treated one another.

“Plus,” Kirsten had added, “it’s big enough to hold all of us.”