Authors: Jennifer Estep
I shrugged. “That would be my guess. But it’s not going to happen. I’m not going to
let
it happen. I promise you that, baby sister.”
Anger tightened her battered features. “I don’t need you to protect me, Gin. I’m a cop and an Ice elemental, remember? I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time now. I can handle a few bounty hunters.”
I snorted. “This is more than a few bounty hunters. This is every toothless old geezer with a shotgun in the back of his pickup coming to Ashland gunning for us. Me, they haven’t got much of a shot at, since I’m so good at being a ghost. But everybody in town knows your name, rank, and serial number, especially since the incident at the train yard right before Christmas. I’m just surprised it took them this long to get up enough gumption to come after a cop.”
Bria shifted on the bumper of the SUV. Her bloody lips clamped down, like she was afraid that if she opened them she’d spill her guts about something she wasn’t supposed to.
My eyes narrowed. “This is the first time that someone’s tried to kidnap you, right? Because I know you would have told me if something like this had happened before.”
For a moment, I thought that she wasn’t going to answer me. But my cold, accusing gaze weighed down on her, cracking her resolve.
Bria sighed. “There was a guy two days ago when I was getting coffee over at the Cake Walk. He pulled a gun
on me as I came out of the restaurant, forced me into a nearby alley, and told me that he was going to take me for a ride.”
“What happened?”
Bria shrugged. “I waited until I was sure that there was no one else around who could get hurt, then threw my coffee in the bastard’s face and took away his gun. While he was screaming from the pain and the second-degree burns, I cuffed his ass and hauled him down to the station. End of story.”
Finn gave my sister a warm, admiring look. “Nice takedown, detective. Even if you should have found another way to do it. Don’t you know that you never, ever waste a cup of coffee like that?”
Bria’s brows drew together in confusion. She hadn’t been around long enough yet to realize the dark, murky depths of Finn’s caffeine addiction. She shook her head, pressed his silk handkerchief to the wound above her eye, and turned to look at me.
“And what about Jenkins?” she asked. “I assume that you caught up to him, since you’re telling us all this.”
There was more that she wanted to ask me. The question burned like a flare in her icy eyes. A lesser woman would have left it at that, especially when dealing with someone like the Spider, even if I was her sister. But Bria wasn’t lacking for bravery or anything else in the toughness department.
“Did you kill Jenkins? After you questioned him?”
“Of course I killed him,” I said. “He was a threat to you. He’d already sold you out once, and he would have been more than happy to do it again. I couldn’t let him
walk away. Nobody hurts the people that I care about and gets away with it—
nobody
.”
Bria’s mouth flattened into a hard line, and more anger iced over her eyes, but she didn’t say anything else. She didn’t argue with me about how what I’d done had been so wrong. About how I’d just killed someone in cold blood. About how she could have taken care of Jenkins by arresting him and letting him cool his heels in jail. But I could sense her disappointment in me. The chill of it radiated off her, an arctic front blasting me with her cold displeasure.
Finn stepped in between us. “I hate to interrupt this little debriefing, but in case y’all have forgotten, we’re standing in a parking lot with several dead bodies. Something that would look a wee bit suspicious to even the most trusting soul. What do you want to do, Gin?”
“Yeah,” Xavier chimed in, getting to his feet. “You want me to call it in? You going to leave your rune here for Mab to find?”
After I’d declared war on Mab, I’d started leaving my spider rune at the scenes of my crimes whenever I ambushed and killed the Fire elemental’s men. Scratching the rune into the dirt, carving it into the side of a building, even drawing it in blood. I’d done all that and more because I’d wanted Mab to focus all her anger on me, and not think too much about the folks that I’d saved along the way, like Bria and Roslyn, and what their connection to me might be.
“I can do the whole song and dance,” Roslyn volunteered. “You know, say that everyone was in the nightclub and no one heard a thing. Just like always.”
I stared at the bodies that littered the parking lot. Ten minutes ago, the men had been full of vim and vigor. Now they were nothing, less than nothing, like yesterday’s newspaper all crumpled up and thrown away.
“No,” I said in a thoughtful voice. “I’m not going to leave my rune behind, and you guys aren’t going to call it in. We’re going to pretend like this never happened.”
Bria frowned. “But why? What’s different about tonight?”
“Because Mab has hired subcontractors,” I said. “These aren’t her men. Not really. But if I leave my rune behind and they realize that I stepped in to protect you, Mab will know that she’s right about our connection. She’ll tell the bounty hunters, and then there’ll be a feeding frenzy, even more so than there is already. No, our friends here are going to disappear quietly. And I know just the Goth dwarf to make it happen.”
Thanks to a call from Finn, Sophia Deveraux showed up about fifteen minutes later, driving her classic convertible.
As usual, the Goth dwarf wore black from head to toe. Only tonight, her ensemble consisted of a pair of work boots and long, heavy coveralls. The perfect outfit for disposing of a dead body. Or six in this case. While we’d waited for Sophia to show up, Xavier and I had walked over, retrieved Jenkins’s body from the alley, and brought it back here to the parking lot. No need to make the dwarf trudge all that way, especially when the alley was still coated with the slippery elemental Ice that I’d created. She’d be busy enough here as it was.
“As you can see, things got a little more hectic than I expected tonight,” I told Sophia.
“Hmph.” The dwarf grunted in agreement as she surveyed the bodies.
“You need help with anything?”
Sophia rolled her black eyes and huffed, like I’d just insulted her. I suppose that I had. Like me, Sophia preferred to work alone, and she was damn good at her job. The Goth dwarf had been getting rid of bodies for Fletcher for years before I’d come along and taken over the assassination business from the old man.
Sophia was incredibly strong, even for a dwarf, but what really set her apart was the fact that she had the same elemental Air magic that her sister, Jo-Jo, did. The older dwarf used her magic to heal, but Sophia did something different with hers. In addition to putting blood vessels and broken bones back together, Air magic was also great for tearing them apart—and sandblasting bloodstains, DNA, and brain matter off doors, floors, walls, and wherever else it happened to spatter. Sophia wouldn’t bother getting rid of the tacky pools of blood in the parking lot, since the harsh winter elements would soon erode them. But she would take care of the dwarven bounty hunters’ bodies for me, disintegrating them with her Air magic and hauling off whatever pieces were left to parts unknown.
“We’re going to Jo-Jo’s to get Bria patched up,” I told Sophia. “See you there?”
“Mmm-hmm,” she said in a distracted tone, already pulling on a pair of gloves, probably so she wouldn’t ruin her manicure. Her nails gleamed pearl pink in the semi-darkness, the soft, girly color looking decidedly at odds with her stark black coveralls.
“I’ll stay with her,” Xavier said. “Just in case anyone wonders what she’s doing and comes over to investigate.”
I nodded. There was a slim chance anyone would venture by at this late hour, at least someone who was still sober and not soused from their time inside Northern Aggression. But if they did, the giant would flash his police badge and send them on their way. Good. Sophia could take care of herself, but it never hurt to have someone around watching your back.
“Thanks,” I told the giant. “I owe you one.”
Xavier grinned. “Nah, you don’t owe me anything. At least not for this. Although I wouldn’t be opposed to another free lunch or two. That was one fine meal we had today.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Better be careful talking about how good my cooking is. Roslyn might get jealous.”
The vampire madam let out a soft laugh. “Oh, I’ll freely admit that your cooking is much better than mine, Gin. But I have certain skills you don’t, especially in the bedroom. I think that Xavier far prefers those, even over a plate of the Pork Pit’s best barbecue.”
Roslyn gave Xavier a sly look, and the giant’s grin widened.
“Well played, Roslyn,” I murmured. “Well played.”
Xavier gave Roslyn a hot, lingering look that told me exactly what the two of them would be doing later on. Then the giant moved over to stand by Sophia, who had pulled a measuring tape out of her coveralls to see how many of the bounty hunters’ bodies she could squeeze into the trunk of her convertible. Despite its swooping fins and clean lines, the black vehicle always reminded me
of a hearse. Tonight, the dwarven mobsters would take their last ride in it.
Roslyn went back inside Northern Aggression to continue circulating through the crowd and keep up appearances. Finn and I helped Bria limp over to his Aston Martin, which was parked in the nightclub’s east lot.
Bria and I didn’t speak while we rode over to Jo-Jo’s house. My sister was still pissed that I’d killed her informant, even though Jenkins had sold her out. Finn tried to fill in the silence, cracking wise and telling a few jokes, but even his antics couldn’t defrost the tension between us.
Twenty minutes later, the three of us were in the warm, familiar confines of Jo-Jo’s salon. Bria sat in one of the cherry red salon chairs, while Jo-Jo examined her face with a critical eye.
“That’s a nasty cut you’ve got there, darling,” the dwarf told Bria. “The bastard walloped you good, didn’t he?”
Bria grimaced. “That he did.”
Jo-Jo held her palm up close to Bria’s face and reached for her Air magic. The dwarf’s power filled the salon, once more making the spider rune scars on my palms itch and burn. Jo-Jo leaned forward, and Bria hissed like an angry cat. Not because Jo-Jo was hurting her, but because she could sense the dwarf’s Air magic, just like I could—and it felt nothing like our cool Ice magic or even my similar Stone power.
“I don’t like the feel of it either,” I said in a quiet voice, coming to stand beside her. “The Air magic.”
Jo-Jo passed her hand over Bria’s face, forcing oxygen into all the cuts that marred her features. I watched while the gash above her eye knit itself together, and the ugly bruising faded from her skin.
Bria gritted her teeth. “It’s not the most pleasant sensation, but I’ll live.”
“Sometimes, it’s better if you hold on to something,” I said, stretching out my hand. “It helps distract your mind from the pain.”
Bria looked at my hand hovering in midair, my fingers curled up; then her blue gaze flicked up to my face. I know what she saw when she looked at me. A woman dressed in black. A woman covered in blood. A killer. A murderer. A monster. No matter how she tried to hide it, Bria couldn’t forget who and what I was—and how conflicted she felt about it.
Finally, she sighed and grabbed my hand. Her palm felt cool and soothing against mine. Bria might not like my past as an assassin, might not like my being the Spider now, but she also knew that part of me would always be Genevieve Snow—the big sister she’d loved so much as a child.
“You squeeze as hard as you need to.”
Bria just nodded, her hand tightening around mine.
Besides the cuts on her face and a few cracked ribs, my sister wasn’t that banged up from grappling with the bounty hunter, so it took Jo-Jo only a few minutes to heal her. Then the dwarf did the same to me, taking care of the injuries that Don had inflicted on me. Afterward, the three of us trooped into the kitchen.
Most people preferred the salon, but the kitchen was my favorite room in the house, maybe because I loved to cook so much. A long, skinny table sliced the kitchen into two pieces, while appliances done in a variety of pastel colors hugged the walls. Fat, fluffy clouds dotted the
fresco-painted ceiling like marshmallows. More clouds could be found everywhere you looked, from the pot holders stacked next to the stove to the dishcloths piled beside the sink. Like other elementals, Jo-Jo also used her personal rune—a puffy cloud that symbolized her Air magic—in her decorating scheme.
Finn stood by the counter, having just finished making his thirteenth cup of coffee of the day. As always, the chicory fumes warmed me from the inside out and made me think of his father. I wished that the old man were here tonight. Fletcher would have known exactly what to do about the mess we were in—the mess I’d dragged us all into by declaring war on Mab in the first place.
Finn stared at me with his green eyes. “Any chance of getting something sweet to go with my coffee?” he asked in a hopeful voice.
I arched an eyebrow at him. “You mean all those pieces of strawberry pie that you ate for lunch weren’t enough?”
“I’m a growing boy,” Finn said in a sincere tone. “I need my vitamins.”
Bria snorted. “The only thing that’s growing on you, Lane, is your ego.”
Finn sidled up to my sister and gave her a dazzling smile. “Well, other things of mine also tend to swell up in your presence, detective.”
I rolled my eyes at Finn’s attempt at witty banter. Jo-Jo just chuckled, amused by his antics.
Bria returned Finn’s smile with a syrupy sweet one of her own. “Oh, really? So it’s gone from what, pencil eraser to cocktail sausage by now?”
Finn sputtered and almost spit out a mouthful of coffee.
His face flushed, and he glared at Bria. He opened his mouth, probably to come up with some biting retort, but I cut him off.
“Enough,” I said. “We have more important things to worry about right now than what you two think of each other and your various appendages. Like what we’re going to do about the bounty on your head, Bria.”
She shrugged. “I don’t see why we have to do anything about it. Now that I know about the bounty, I can protect myself.”