And then there was the problem of the Unktehila’s body. Vampires and werewolves returned to regular human corpses after death, which made body disposal fairly simple. But the Unktehila was something else, an ancient being fused with magic in a way that was intricately tied to its biology. After its death, it had stayed exactly what it was: a fifty-foot snakeoid creature with a diameter of more than six feet. Quinn and I had spent a very messy, very disgusting week sneaking it out of the building in pieces. A lot of pieces.
After months of this around-the-clock work, plus the holidays and a two-month stint as interim store manager at the Flatiron Depot while Big Scott had knee surgery, things had finally begun to settle down for me. I was really hoping that whatever Maven was bringing me into now would be minor. An errand, maybe. Yeah, an errand would be nice.
Chapter 3
Magic Beans takes up a funny little building on Pearl Street, right in the heart of busy downtown Boulder. There are plenty of coffee shops in the area, but Magic Beans is notorious for two things: being open all night and its weird layout. Instead of one huge room, it’s made up of many small ones connected together, like a rat maze with doors. This gives the patrons privacy and lets Maven conduct business without being overheard, but it’s a pain in the ass from a security standpoint. Then again, I’d seen Maven in action, and if anyone could handle a security risk, it was her. Vampires don’t spend much time worrying about thieves or vandals.
When I arrived, the building was crowded with intense-looking university students, many of whom wore pajama pants and looked like they had gone without a shower for even longer than usual. Although they were all holding still, they managed to seem frenzied, their faces hidden behind books and laptop screens. Everyone in Boulder has a rough idea of the university’s rhythms, and I remembered that finals started next week.
I followed the arrows spray-painted on the concrete floor, which wound a neon path through the rooms to the front counter. I didn’t recognize the college-aged kid behind the register—Maven must have hired a new guy—but when I asked for Maven he jerked his thumb toward her office without looking up from the open textbook in front of him.
The door to Maven’s tiny office was attached to the largest room, in the back of the building, which had a raised stage for open-mic nights and even small concerts. I gritted my teeth as I marched back there, doing my best to ignore the three ghosts that resided in the auditorium room. I was getting better at pushing the remnants to the back of my mind, but I felt a little guilty about it, like when you compartmentalize all the homeless people asking you for change.
Maven’s door was open a crack, so I stepped inside. “Hey, Lex,” came Quinn’s familiar voice. He was seated in one of the visitor chairs in front of Maven’s desk, which was at the back of the room. Quinn was tall and handsome in a beat-around craggy way, and like most vampires he usually wore an implacable expression. Maven herself was perched on her office chair, which she’d lowered so her legs wouldn’t dangle. She was a small woman who appeared to be eighteen or nineteen, with a shock of awkwardly cut orange hair and perpetually mismatched clothes that she wore in layers and layers, along with additional coatings of costume jewelry and a pair of hideous clear-framed glasses. It was an excellent disguise, but if you looked close, you could see that she was so beautiful it often took my breath away.
Tonight she was wearing her usual homeless-pioneer getup, but her face was harder than I’d seen it in a long time, and she seemed to radiate fury. My heart sank. No, I wasn’t there for an errand.
Impatiently, she motioned for me to close the door, and I dropped into the other visitor chair with a nod at each of them. I was pretty sure Maven knew about my relationship with Quinn, but we kept it professional in her presence.
“Thanks for coming,” she said, but her voice was stony. A thrill of fear ran through me. “We have a situation in Denver that needs your attention. Both of you.” She opened a laptop in front of her and spun it around to face us. The screen was taken up by a number of thumbnail photos. I leaned forward. Headshots, maybe fifty or so. At first glance, I didn’t recognize any of the faces. “Quinn, you remember the Denver vampires.”
Quinn and I exchanged a glance. Our first case together—the investigation of Charlie’s kidnapping—had sent us to Denver. We ended up killing the only vampire I met there.
“Tonight I received a call from Ford, the senior dominus in the city,” she continued. “Apparently several of his villani have been poisoned with belladonna.”
Vampires do not typically gasp, in my experience, but Quinn’s eyes widened nearly as much as they had the first time he was in Charlie’s presence. Maven pointed to several of the photos, and when I squinted I could see little names typed beneath the faces: Louis, Phillip, and Lara.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” I said, as calmly as I could. “Don’t they sell belladonna all over the place?”
Two pairs of cold vampire eyes focused on me. “Simon must have told you that magic bonds with certain plants,” Quinn said finally.
“Yeah . . .”
“Belladonna is one of them, and it’s poisonous to vampires,” he explained. “They spent centuries cross-breeding it until it was no longer tied to magic, but every now and then the original strain pops up somewhere. Like a controlled substance.”
I noticed that Quinn still used the word “they” when talking about vampires, where most of the others I knew would have said “we.” “But what does it actually do to them?” I asked.