Authors: Jennifer Estep
I’d been expecting the bounty hunters to show up here now that the word was out about who the Spider really was. I just hadn’t thought they’d get here so quickly—or that there would be so damn many of them.
A dozen vehicles were haphazardly parked in front of the sprawling structure. The multitude of lights burning inside the house let me see exactly what I was up against. Several of the bounty hunters crouched behind their vehicles, using the open doors as shields. Every single one had their guns out and pointed at the house—or at each other. Half a dozen bodies littered the snowy landscape like forgotten Christmas decorations, blood spilling out from wounds instead of holiday cheer.
There had been one hell of a fight already, probably with the various bounty hunters gunning it out in front of the house to see who got to go inside and capture whatever prize was in there waiting for them. I was grateful for
the crowd. The bounty hunters slugging it out with each other in the yard was probably the only reason that they hadn’t collectively stormed the house yet and either captured or killed Finn and Bria.
My eyes scanned the ranks. Men, women, young, old, dwarves, giants, even a vampire or two—all with a hard, hungry, predatory set to their shadowy features. I recognized a few of the faces from Mab’s dinner party. I couldn’t tell if any of the bounty hunters had elemental power, though. No one’s eyes glowed in the semidarkness, and I didn’t feel any kind of magic stirring in the night air. Some elementals, especially those with considerable juice like Mab, continuously gave off waves of power, like heat radiating off a fire. As an elemental myself, I could sense that constant surge of magic. Even if there had been another elemental in the mix, it didn’t much matter. I was going to do whatever the hell I had to in order to save Finn and Bria—if they were even still alive.
One of the bounty hunters let out a low curse and started creeping around the hood of his pickup. He paused and looked over his shoulder. Three more men had taken refuge behind the vehicle. I couldn’t tell if they were all part of the same group, but the other three leveled their guns at him, a clear indication that he should go forward—or else. Looked like he’d drawn the short straw tonight.
The man eased out from behind the front of the truck and tiptoed through the snow toward the house, hunching over as much as he could. He stopped and swallowed once, clearly nervous about being out in the open. A minute later, when nothing happened, he straightened. He
stood there a moment, his body tense, expecting a shot from somewhere. Maybe from the other bounty hunters, maybe from the house. But it didn’t come, and he continued on his slow, careful journey.
I palmed my silverstone knives, my hands tightening around the hilts. Why wasn’t someone shooting at him? Fifty more feet, and the bastard would be at the front door. Once he made it up onto the porch, the others would follow in a sudden, violent swarm. Then, if Finn and Bria were still in the house, they’d be found, dragged outside, and hauled off to Mab.
The bounty hunter stopped again in the middle of the yard. Looking a little more sure of himself now, he turned and called out to his buddies behind the pickup truck. “They must finally be out of ammo, boys—”
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Last words he ever said.
Gunfire exploded in one of the downstairs windows of the house, and the bounty hunter dropped to the ground, his brains already blown out onto the snow behind him by the three bullets that had punched through his skull.
A grim smile curved my lips, and the knots in my stomach loosened. The Annie Oakley display told me that Finn was still alive, because my foster brother was the only person I knew who could shoot like that. If he was well enough to hold a gun, that meant Bria was still alive too. Finn would die before he let anything happen to my baby sister, just as I would.
I crouched there in the snow and waited until I was sure that no one else was going to try to bum-rush the
house. Then I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Finn’s number. This time, this fucking
time
, he finally picked up.
“Where the hell are you, Gin?” Finn growled in my ear.
“Me? You’re the one who hasn’t been answering the phone,” I snapped right back. “What have you been doing? Is Bria okay? How long have the bounty hunters been camped outside of the house?”
Finn let out a tense breath. “Bria’s fine. She’s right here with me. The bounty hunters have been outside for almost an hour now. As to why I wasn’t answering my phone before, Bria and I were, ah, engaged in something else.”
I let out a soft curse. I should have known. Finn could never be in the same room with a beautiful woman without trying to seduce her, especially someone like Bria, whom he had some genuine feelings for. I’d always thought that Finn’s womanizing ways would get him into trouble one day. I just hadn’t realized that it would be this much trouble—and that Bria and I would be caught in the middle of it.
“You mean that the two of you were busy screwing around instead of waiting for my phone call like you were supposed to,” I snarled. “What the hell were you thinking, Finn? You know better than that. Fletcher taught you better than that.”
I could almost hear him wince through the phone. “I know, Gin. Believe me, I know. The two of us were arguing, I don’t even remember about what, but I was texting, and Bria grabbed my phone and threw it across the room. After that, one thing just led to another, and we ended up in one of the downstairs bedrooms…”
His voice trailed off in shame, but he didn’t have to tell me the rest. I knew what had happened. Finn and Bria had finally given in to their simmering attraction, and the rest of the world had just fallen away—including my mission to kill Mab.
Finn cleared his throat. “Anyway, neither one of us heard your calls. We were right, ah, in the middle of things, when I hear someone roar up the driveway. Then another car, then another car, followed by a series of gunshots. By that point, we’re out of bed, looking out the windows, and realizing that we’re in deep trouble. The bastards just kept coming, and they surrounded the house before we could slip out the back. Some of them took out each other, but we didn’t know how many more of them might show up, so Bria and I got out our guns and settled in to wait for you.”
I wanted to scream at Finn for being so sloppy, for being more interested in seducing my sister than keeping her safe. But it took two to tango, and Bria was just as much to blame as he was. They’d both known what was going down tonight, and they’d given in to their emotions instead of staying sharp like they should have.
I could—and would—yell at them later. The most important thing right now was getting Finn and Bria out of the house and away from the bounty hunters.
“All right,” I said, my tone a little calmer. “All right. I’m here now, and I’m not leaving without the two of you. We can discuss everything else later.”
“Agreed,” Finn said, the relief apparent in his voice. “What do you want us to do, Gin?”
I stared out at the assortment of bounty hunters before
me. “You made a good choice staying in the house. There’s no way you can break through the ring of them. They’ve got the whole front of the house surrounded, and there’s too much ice and snow on the rocks to try to get out the back and rappel down the cliffs. You’ll have to use the old tunnel.”
Finn knew as well as I did that there was a secret passage in Fletcher’s office that led from the house into an underground tunnel. The tunnel snaked under the yard before opening up about a half mile away in the woods—well out of the tight ring of bounty hunters that circled around the house like pioneers on a wagon train heading west.
“I thought of that,” Finn said. “But Bria spotted some flashlights in the woods, and I didn’t want to risk stepping out of the tunnel and right into a couple of bounty hunters’ line of fire.”
He’d made the right decision. Fletcher had designed his house to be almost impregnable, and there was enough food, water, and ammo stored inside to last for weeks. But there was also strength in numbers, which the bounty hunters had, and Finn couldn’t shoot them all, not if they decided to attack all at once. He and Bria needed to get out of the house as soon as possible.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll make sure that the tunnel is clear and take care of any stragglers in the woods, then come in and get you. You keep them busy thinking that they’ve got a couple of shooters still inside. I want them focused on the house as long as possible and not thinking about our escape route. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Good. And answer your fucking phone next time.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Finn said, actually sounding chastised for once in his life.
I hung up and stuffed the phone back into my jacket pocket. Then I slipped away from my perch at the edge of the woods. I headed deeper into the gloom, skirting around to the west of the house, although I kept the bounty hunters in sight through the screen of trees. If a group of them made a move toward the house, I’d come out of the woods and cut my way through them until I got to Finn and Bria. But the bounty hunters weren’t that brave—or stupid. They stayed close to their cars, muttering to each other about how best to get inside the house without getting dead. I took advantage of their inattention, moving quickly and quietly, slipping from tree to tree, shadow to shadow, all the while heading toward the secret tunnel.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
More gunshots rang out, along with something that sounded like rusted metal creaking, although the noise was mostly drowned out by the whine of the bullets. I’d almost reached the entrance when I heard voices—loud voices with a distinctive southern twang. Knives still in my hands, I paused behind a tree and peered around the ice-crusted trunk.
Ahead of me, two women and a man stood in the middle of the woods—right in front of the opening of the tunnel.
Somehow, they’d found it in the snow. They’d even been bright enough to pull back the metal hatch to reveal the dark hole leading down into the ground, which
was no doubt the creaking sound that I’d heard. Fuck. I’d wanted to do this quick, clean, and quiet, and get Finn and Bria out of the house before the bounty hunters even realized that they were gone. Probably not going to happen now. Oh, it didn’t bother me, the thought of killing the three people in front of me, but it meant more precious seconds wasted, more precious time when Finn and Bria were in danger of being overrun by the other bounty hunters.
“What do you think it is, Liza?” one of the women asked, shining a flashlight into the dark space.
“What do you think it is, Celia? Because it looks like some kind of tunnel to me, genius,” Liza sniped.
“See?” The guy grinned. “I told you that an assassin like the Spider was sure to have some sort of escape hatch from that ugly-ass house of hers.”
“Yeah, Connor,” the first woman, Celia, chimed in again. “But we don’t even know that the Spider’s in the house. According to that info bulletin that went out, the last time anyone saw her, she was still at the country club.”
“Well, someone’s in that house, and they’re picking off the other hunters like flies,” Connor replied. “If the Spider is as good as everyone says she is, then I’m sure that the shooters have plenty of ammo to spare. Besides, did you see all that silverstone in the doors and the matching bars over the windows? They could hold that house for a week. We go through this tunnel here, we can come up in the house behind them and surprise them. They’ll never even know what hit them.”
The two women stared at the tunnel, then at each other. Liza shrugged.
“Might as well see where it goes,” Liza said. “Connor’s right—we’re not getting in through the front door. At least not until someone gets the bright idea of trying to burn them out. Even then, someone would have to get close to the house to do that. I don’t think that whoever is inside is going to let that happen.”
No, Finn knew better than to let anyone breach the house, especially anyone carrying a flaming torch or a can of gasoline.
I scanned the rest of the area, but I didn’t see any more bounty hunters in the shadows. If I was lucky, these three were the only ones who’d given up on a full-scale frontal assault and had decided to go poking around in the woods. But I doubted it. For one thing, my luck could never be that good. For another, I hadn’t noticed Ruth Gentry or Sydney among the crowd circling the house. If the old bounty hunter had received the same kind of bulletin that the others had, she was sure to be lurking around here somewhere with her apprentice in tow.
Right now, though, I had a more immediate problem—the three people in front of me and how to kill them as quickly and quietly as possible.
The man, Connor, had a gun like all the other bounty hunters, but the two women had gone in for more exotic weapons. Celia had a sword strapped to her belt, while a leather whip coiled around Liza’s waist. I grimaced. That whip was going to hurt, especially since Mab had already blasted my skin with her Fire magic tonight. Nothing I could about it now, though, which meant that it was time to get on with things—
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Another barrage of shots echoed through the trees, as Finn mowed down whichever fool had been stupid enough to step out from behind his vehicle.
Knives in my hands, I moved forward. By this point, snow crusted my boots an inch thick in places, so my footsteps made little noise. I crept up until I stood at a right angle with the three bounty hunters, who were dickering about who should lead the way into the tunnel. Despite their weapons, none of them wanted to come face-to-face with the Spider in her own house.
They just didn’t realize that it was too late for that already. Way too late.
The three bounty hunters continued to mill around the tunnel entrance, still arguing. When it was apparent that they couldn’t come to a decision by themselves, they held out their hands and decided to go rock-paper-scissors for it. They slapped their hands together, and I used the noise to tiptoe even closer to them. I stood in the woods and waited, but all three of them picked paper, so they had to do it again.