Elemental Assassin 02 - Web of Lies (11 page)

The dwarf cracked his knuckles and advanced on her again. He picked her up and splayed her out on the hood of the pickup. The motion snapped Violet out of her daze, and she moaned and looked at her attacker. One of the dwarf ’s hands dropped to his pants. He wasn’t using a gun this time. The dwarf was going to beat Violet to death—after he raped her.

I was fifty feet away and closing fast. I wasn’t trying to be quiet, not anymore, but the dwarf was too intent on opening his fly to hear the
swish-swish
of my sneakers on the wet pavement.

But the deep, throaty roar of a vehicle rumbling to life somewhere behind me made him turn. The dwarf spotted me running at him, zipped up his pants, and stepped back. Waiting. Just waiting. Violet lay on the hood, her hands underneath her, trying to find the strength to push herself up, to run away. Blood covered most of what I could see of her face, and the bottom half of her nose was no longer in line with the top part. Her glasses barely clung to her face.

Since the dwarf was focused on me, I slowed my steps to a walk. When I was ten feet away, I stopped, palmed the knife hidden up my left sleeve, and studied the man before me.

Since he was a dwarf, he wasn’t quite five feet tall, but his shoulders were wider than a chair. His biceps looked like they’d been carved out of steel and attached to his barrel chest. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and a large tattoo showed on his left bicep—a lit stick of dynamite. A rune. One I’d seen somewhere before, although I couldn’t quite place it at the moment. Didn’t much matter. I could study it in further detail when he was dead.

“This isn’t your fight, lady,” he spat. “This is between the girl and me. Run along before I do you too.”

“Oh, but it is my fight,” I replied in a cold voice. I shifted the knife in my left hand, moving it into position.

“Why’s that?”

“Because you shot up my restaurant today.”

The dwarf ’s blue eyes narrowed. “So what if I did? What are you going to do about it?”

“For starters? This.”

I threw my knife at him. The dwarf didn’t flinch as the blade caught him in the chest and sank into his right pectoral. Damn. I’d missed his heart by at least an inch. Probably closer to two. I hadn’t been retired that long, but I hadn’t exactly been training every day either.

Looked like some rust had already gathered.
Use it or lose it, Gin.
Since I didn’t want to lose anything, since I knew I couldn’t afford to, I made a mental note to get in some throwing practice after this was over.

The dwarf stared at the knife in his chest. Then he smiled, pulled out the weapon, and let it clatter to the ground. He rolled his shoulders and cracked his knuckles again. The sound ricocheted like a gunshot off the concrete barriers around us. “I’m going to enjoy making you pay for that, bitch.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, palming the knife hidden up my right sleeve. “Let’s dance.”

The dwarf charged me. I waited until the last possible moment, then stepped to one side. My left foot lashed out, and I tripped him. But he was expecting it. The dwarf tucked into a ball, hit the ground, and rolled right back up. Bastard was quick. Bendy too.

“Nice.”

He smiled. “I take yoga.”

I smiled back. “Me too.”

He came at me again. And then we got down to business.

The dwarf swung his hard fists at me. I ducked his blows, not out of cowardice but practicality. No way I was letting his sledgehammer of a hand connect with my face. I’d had my nose and various other body parts broken plenty of times already. I had no desire to repeat that particular pain tonight.

The dwarf swung again, but his foot slipped on a chunk of broken asphalt and he overextended his arm. I came up inside his defense and stabbed him in the chest with my silverstone knife. The smell of coppery blood filled the night air, overpowering the rain. But he jerked back before I could shove the weapon into his heart. The blade skittered across his ribs and caught on one of them.

I grunted, but it was like trying to slice through frozen meat. His chest muscles were just too thick and dense for me to do enough damage to put him down quick.

The dwarf chopped at my knife hand with the edge of his fist. I let go of the weapon. A sharp blow like that would shatter my wrist into matchstick pieces. He swung at me again. I ducked back and plucked a third knife out of the small of my back.

“Knives? Is that all you got, lady?” he drawled. “You can cut me all night long, and I’ll stand right here and take it. All I need is one good punch, and you’re mine, bitch.”

He was right. We’d barely started, and my heart was already racing. My lungs hadn’t started to burn yet, but it was only a matter of time. I just didn’t have the stamina he had. Never would. The dwarf wasn’t even sweating, and the wounds I’d inflicted on him were nothing more than paper cuts. I had to find a way to end this. Now.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large, dark shape creeping up the parking lot. The shape stopped. Waiting.

I slashed at the dwarf with my knife, forcing him toward a sedan a few feet away. He laughed, backed up, and crooked his index finger at me.

“Come on, bitch,” he said. “I’m just getting warmed up.”

I smiled at him. “Me too.”

I braced my hands on the car hood and pushed off.

He wasn’t expecting me to change tactics, and he paused, just for a second. All the opening I needed. My feet hit the dwarf in the chest with enough force to make him stumble back. His shoe caught on another break in the pavement, and he fell on his ass.

And that’s when Finn ran him over with the truck.

While I’d been fighting the dwarf, Finn had made himself useful. He’d broken into and hotwired the monster truck that had been parked next to Violet Fox’s Honda. Then he’d pulled the vehicle up into range, waiting for me to notice.

The dwarf
thump-thumped
under the truck’s massive, oversize wheels. But Finn wasn’t finished. He put the truck in reverse and backed over the dwarf. He went back and forth over the man three more times before I held my hand up, signaling him to stop. Finn pulled the truck forward.

He stayed inside the cab, waiting to see if I needed him again. I picked up my dropped knives and walked across the pavement to the dwarf.

The wheels had flattened out the man’s thick, strong, compact body until now it resembled a fleshy, bloody pancake that had been pressed into the asphalt. Greasy black tire tracks covered his torso, and his arms and legs lay by his sides, crushed and useless. But Finn hadn’t hit his head, and the dwarf was still alive. His blue eyes burned with pain and hate as he watched me come closer.

“Want to tell me who you’re working for before I kill you?” I said.

The dwarf spat blood on my jeans.

“I’ll take that as a no.”

I leaned down and cut his throat. His eyes bulged, and he gurgled once, twice, three times before his head lolled to the side and the light leaked out of his irises. I gave him a minute to bleed out, then put my fingers against his lacerated neck to make sure. No pulse. As dead as dead could be. I wiped off my bloody hand on my jeans and gestured at Finn.

Finn killed the engine, got out of the truck, and walked back to me. His green eyes flicked to the dwarf ’s body. “You still had to cut his throat? Tough little bugger, wasn’t he?”

“He’s a dwarf,” I replied. “They usually are. Now, give me your cell phone.”

Finn dug into his jacket pocket and handed me a slim, silver phone. I used it to snap a picture of the dwarf ’s frozen face, along with the tattoo on his bicep, the one that resembled a lit stick of dynamite. It had been flattened by the truck tires, but there was still enough flesh there to get an idea of the original shape of the rune. I handed the phone back to Finn, then stuck my hand into the dwarf ’s front pockets. No wallet, no money, no ID. Probably in his back pocket, but I wasn’t going to peel him up off the pavement to look for them. Messier than I wanted to get tonight.

“Get the car,” I told Finn. “We need to take the girl to Jo-Jo’s.”

Finn nodded and trotted off to retrieve his Aston Martin.

I walked over to Violet.

Sometime during my fight with the dwarf, Violet Fox had slid off the hood of the pickup. She sat propped up against the tire. Her fingers were stuck in her purse, as though she was trying to get her cell phone out to call the cops. I crouched down until I was eye level with her.

“You’re safe now,” I said in a soft voice. “He’s not going to hurt you anymore.”

Violet Fox’s face was a mess. Her nose had been pushed halfway across her face, while her jaw reached out in the other direction. Her skin looked like putty that had been stretched to the breaking point over her distorted features.

Blood covered the bottom half of her ruined face like a mask, and thick drops of it slid down her neck, staining her coat. Her glasses had been snapped in two in the middle. The glasses were still hooked around her ears, but the two halves dangled like earrings against her bloody cheeks.

Pain filled her brown eyes, and for a moment, I didn’t think she’d heard me. But Violet turned her head and stared at me. She squinted, and recognition flickered in her dull gaze.

“You…” she mumbled.

“Don’t try to talk, sweetheart,” I said. “We’re going to get you patched up, and then you can tell us all about why somebody wants you dead and how you know about the Tin Man. Okay?”

Violet Fox didn’t answer me. She’d already passed out.

———

Finn brought the car over, and we stuffed Violet Fox into the backseat. I took her broken glasses off her face and passed them to Finn for safekeeping. Then I used one of my knives to cut a strip off the bottom of my long-sleeved T-shirt. I wound the cotton around the girl’s face to catch the blood oozing out of her broken nose. She didn’t stir.

“She’s going to bleed all over the backseat,” Finn muttered.

“Do you know how much I paid for this car?”

“Too much,” I said. “And don’t worry about your precious leather seats. I’m sure Sophia can get the blood out.”

“You going to call her to get rid of the dwarf ’s body?”

Finn asked.

“Of course. Don’t want to scare the coeds by leaving Pancake where he is and having them drive over him in the morning.”

I grabbed Finn’s cell phone again and hit 7 on the speed dial. Three rings later, she picked up.

“Hmph?” Sophia Deveraux let out her usual grunt of a greeting. The dwarf didn’t like to strain her vocal cords with things like conversation.

“It’s Gin. There’s something you might find interesting over in one of the parking lots near Ashland Community College.”

“Hmm.” Her interested grunt.

I waited a moment to see if she’d say anything.

“Number?” Sophia asked, referring to the number of bodies I wanted her to come dispose of.

The Goth dwarf ’s voice came out in a harsh rasp, like she’d spent the last fifty years chain smoking and knocking back jugs of mountain moonshine. I didn’t know why Sophia’s voice was the way it was, especially since I’d never seen the dwarf light up or drink anything stronger than iced tea. Another mystery I wasn’t sure I wanted to solve. Because I had a feeling that there was something real bad in Sophia’s past. Some sort of horrific accident, trauma, or even torture. Those were the only things that I could think of that would so completely ruin her vocal cords.

I also wondered why Jo-Jo had never healed her sister.

Maybe she’d wanted to and Sophia wouldn’t let her.

Maybe it had just been too late by the time Jo-Jo had reached her. Whatever it was, whatever had happened to the Goth dwarf, I knew that it couldn’t be good.

“Only one, but you might have a little trouble scraping him up off the ground,” I replied. “There was a very large truck involved. Think you can handle it?”

“Hmph.” Sophia’s grunt was more guttural this time.

I’d offended her.

“Well, I have faith in you,” I replied in a breezy tone.

“Are you at Jo-Jo’s?”

“Um-mmm.” That was a
yes
.

“Tell her to get ready. Finn and I are bringing over someone who needs her help. Badly. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Sophia hung up without another word. I did the same.

Finn drove out of the parking lot. He took great care to steer his car around the dwarf ’s smushed body.

“You could just run over him,” I said. “He’s already dead, and it’s not like you haven’t done it before.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want bloody bits of dwarf stuck in my wheels for the next two weeks.” Finn sniffed. “This is an Aston Martin, Gin. You don’t run over dead bodies in an Aston Martin.”

“Tell that to James Bond.”

Finn shot me a dirty look as he pulled out onto the street.

———

It took Finn about twenty minutes to drive over to Jo-Jo’s house. Jolene “Jo-Jo” Deveraux was Sophia’s big sister—a two-hundred-fifty-seven-year-old dwarf and Air elemental of significant power, wealth, status, and social connections.

Given all that, Jo-Jo made her home in a ritzy subdivision by the name of Tara Heights. Within a few miles, we left the downtown grit and grime behind and entered an elegant area of carefully landscaped trees and spacious homes fronted by cobblestone sidewalks and yards big enough for the pros to play football in.

Finn eventually steered the car onto a street marked Magnolia Lane, and a few seconds later, Jo-Jo’s house came into view—a three-story, plantation-style home straight out of
Gone With the Wind.
The sprawling, white structure perched at the top of a grassy knoll and featured a series of tall, round columns that supported the rest of the building the way a high-backed chair might prop up an old lady.

Finn parked the car and helped me drag the still-unconscious Violet Fox out of the backseat, up three steps, and onto the porch that wrapped around the spacious home. Thick, ropy tendrils of ivy and kudzu covered a trellis attached to the porch, along with the bare brown thorns of several rose bushes. A lone bulb burned on the porch. Out in the sloping yard, the cold, drizzling rain picked up, making the air smell of metal, dead leaves, and wet earth.