“You’re not wrong. Let me think for a second.”

I leaned back, letting myself be more or less swallowed up by the couch. I was exhausted, but the pain in my arm and my churning brain meant I didn’t need to worry about falling asleep.

Guns. Our problems pretty much all came down to guns. Very few people in the LA Old World used them at all, because guns were a hassle. They could malfunction, they needed to be serviced, you had to have special licenses and permits to carry them, and so on. Why mess with all that when you could rip someone’s throat out with your hands? Maybe they were a part of the Old World in a city that wasn’t more or less peaceful, but in LA the only real threat to any of us usually came from humans. And even the witches had mild defensive spells that could send a human flying.

For a second I started daydreaming in James Bond levels of ridiculousness: A giant magnet that could suck in firearms, maybe, or bulletproof suits of armor. Maybe a pen that could disable all the firing pins in a given area—

On the floor by my feet, Shadow whined, pawing at my foot. I looked down at her and sighed. “Yeah, you’re right.”

Jesse raised his eyebrows. I pointed to the bargest. “We’re gonna need to bring our secret weapon.”

Chapter 39

I had been planning to leave Shadow at Will’s house to guard Katia, but there was just no way Jesse and I were going to be able to take down the MC crew without her.

We talked through it, but it was unlikely the MC knew about Shadow. They might have known we brought a dog to the trap at Frederic’s house—I couldn’t remember if she’d barked, but it was certainly possible—but the only biker who’d survived had been Carl, the guy with the greasy beard and the ventilated cowboy boot. And he’d been inside the garage for the whole fight. There was no way he could have seen Shadow.

Having the bargest along, and a surprise, changed the odds from “we’re all gonna die” to “we have a slight chance of living.” Especially if Molly was functional enough to fight too. Now we just had to get there before Oskar killed her.

Of course, this also meant leaving Katia without a guard, which I didn’t totally love. I believed her when she said she wanted to meet Lex and escape from Oskar, but what if she changed her mind? Lex already knew about Katia and was on her way, so if Katia sent us into a trap, she could still get what she wanted. Actually, it would be a pretty smart way for her to hedge her bets.

On the bright side, she’d recently been dead, so I couldn’t see her physically coming after us. I just needed to make sure she couldn’t call anyone. Will had a landline at his house, so I went into his bedroom, feeling more than a little uncomfortable. Luckily, Will was so used to the werewolves coming over that the room was always spotless and impersonal, with no signs of creepy sex stuff or dirty underwear. I unplugged the phone to take with me. Then I went into his home office and took that handset, too. While I was in there I grabbed a couple of pieces of paper and a pencil to bring to Jesse. As I took the phones out to the van, Jesse looked up the Mock-Donald’s on Google Earth. In the time it would have taken me to figure out how to input an address, he had a rough sketch of the building and its entrances.

“Okay, look,” he said, pointing with the pencil eraser. “Green Drive runs along the north and west sides of the building, see? There’s one entrance on the north side, two on the west side, and one each on the other two sides.” I leaned over him to look at the sketch. The Mock-Donald’s was basically a rectangle, with the shorter end at the north side. “I can’t be positive, but it looks on this map like the south entrance is the one leading into the kitchen.”

“What about the inside?” I asked.

“Hang on a second.” He did a little more searching and managed to come up with a website for the production company that owned the building. There was a whole page filled with big glossy photos of the interior.

“Whoa,” I said, leaning forward to look at his little phone screen. “Why would they have so many pictures?”

“It’s advertising,” Jesse said without looking at me. He was adding tables and counters to the sketch. “If they’re renting it out to anyone with the cash, they need to be able to show clients what they’ll get. Hey, look.” He moved his fingers to zoom in on a picture of a staircase. “There’s a basement.” I leaned over his shoulder to look. Sure enough, there was a downstairs with classrooms, offices, and a lounge area, sort of like a green room.

I sighed. Up until recently, it was incredibly rare for buildings in LA to have a basement at all, but things had been changing, now that basements had better earthquake-proofing. I’ve even read about people who had basements dug under their existing houses to add space.

“Well, that’s where the girls will be,” I said. “And where Oskar hides out during the day. But he’ll be torturing Molly . . .” I scrolled back through to the photo of a typical fast-food kitchen, with beverage machines, stoves, and fryers forming a sort of rectangle. There was a long, rectangular metal table in the middle of the space. I pointed to it. “Here.”

“How do you know?”

I shrugged. “There aren’t any good surfaces downstairs for securing someone, for one thing. And I could see Oskar enjoying the theatricality of a big table. Plus . . . you know. There’s torture stuff right there.”

Jesse took another look at the kitchen equipment and nodded soberly. “I think you’re right.”

“But that’s just Oskar, Molly, and the girls. Where do you think he’ll have the human guards?”

“Outside,” Jesse decided. “If I were a vampire, and I knew a null was on her way, I’d use the bikers like canaries in a coal mine. When they start shooting, Oskar will know you’re coming before he’s actually in your radius. That will give him time to grab a weapon or run or whatever.”

We were both speculating, but there was enough logic in it for me to bet on us being right. Even if we were betting our lives.

“What do we do if the neighbors call the police?” I asked.

“What neighbors? Look.” He went back to Google Earth and zoomed out, pointing to an aerial view of the Mock-Donald’s. “There are big parking lots on either side, probably for when they bring in filming equipment. On the other side of the lots there are just office buildings.” He checked his watch. “It’s almost four in the morning; even the cleaning staff will have gone home.”

We spent a little more time with Jesse’s sketch, working out a plan for how to handle the MC guards. I was hoping we weren’t going to have to kill them. It didn’t sound like any of these guys were stellar citizens, but criminals or not, they were just a bunch of dudes following their leader into vampire hell. I had to kind of feel sorry for them.

We could prepare for the humans, but other than torturing Molly I had no idea what Oskar was planning now that we had Katia. So far he had demonstrated an uncomfortably shrewd gift for thinking on his feet: hiring humans with guns to take me out, using Hayne to get Molly from Dashiell’s, preparing a second hidey-hole in case something went wrong—like us capturing Katia. It made me nervous. I hadn’t been up against a genuinely smart asshole since . . . well, since Olivia.

But we did have two things going for us: first, there was no way he could know that Jesse had an informant within the MC who would be able to point us to the Mock-Donald’s and, of course, Shadow. I was hoping the element of surprise would be enough, because I was shit out of other ideas.

When we’d made all the plans we could, I knelt down by Shadow. She had, of course, been listening to everything, but it was impossible to know exactly how much she’d absorbed, so I said, “Shadow, do you remember Molly? The girl we picked up the other night?”

Shadow paused for a moment, then licked the air in front of her face, a yes. “Jesus,” Jesse muttered. I glared at him, although I couldn’t entirely blame him for being unnerved. Shadow’s intelligence was almost as scary as her teeth; I was just so used to it now that I found other dogs boring.

“She’s in trouble,” I said to the bargest. “Jesse and I are going to go rescue her from some bad guys. They’re probably going to try to hurt us. Do you want to help save Molly?”