“Not nearly as bad as the leg wound,” the dwarf murmured. “These didn’t hit anything too important, at least.”
Once again, the feel of the dwarf’s Air elemental magic gusted through the room, and the needles started pricking me once more, now centered in my shoulder. But this time, the pain wasn’t as intense and didn’t last nearly as long. Two more thunks sounded as Jo-Jo used her power to fish the bullets out of my body.
“Good as new,” Jo-Jo pronounced a few minutes later.
I didn’t feel as good as new. Being healed, even by an Air elemental, took a toll on your body, as you suddenly went from knocking on death’s door to being in one piece again. The mind needed some time to play catch-up and realize what was going on. As close as I’d come to dying tonight, I could sleep for the next eight hours and still wake up feeling tired. In fact, I could have drifted off right now, but I forced myself to keep my eyes open.
“Thanks,” I murmured.
Despite Jo-Jo’s ministrations, my words still slurred a bit, probably from the blood loss.
“You’re welcome, darling,” Jo-Jo said. “But where’s Finn? Why isn’t he with you? Why didn’t he bring you in?”
“He didn’t go with me,” I mumbled.
Jo-Jo frowned. “Why not?”
It took some effort, but I raised my head up to look at her. “Because he didn’t know that I was going after Mab tonight, and I didn’t want him there while I did. I didn’t want him there in case things went bad, which they did.”
Jo-Jo and Sophia both stilled. They exchanged a glance over my head before the both of them looked back at me again.
“You went after Mab?” Jo-Jo asked in a soft voice.
“Alone?” Sophia rasped.
The scene replayed itself in my mind. My finger squeezing the trigger. The bolt leaving my crossbow on its perfect path toward Mab’s black eye. The giant getting in the way at the last possible second.
“I tried,” I muttered, my heart twisting with shame at the memory of my failure. “But one of her giant bodyguards took the bolt meant for her instead. So I missed her. I missed her.”
In a tired voice, I told the dwarven sisters everything that had happened tonight. As I finished the story, hot tears scalded my eyes.
“I had her too—dead to rights. She was right there in front of me. All I had to do was pull the trigger, and it would have all been over. No more Mab hunting the Spider, no more threats against Bria, no more danger for the people that I love. And I missed. Can you believe that? Me, Gin Blanco, the Spider, supposedly the best assassin around, or at least the best semiretired assassin around, and I missed her. I fucking missed her.”
Jo-Jo put her hand on my arm. “It’s okay, Gin. Everything’s going to be okay. You’ll see.”
The dwarf’s voice dropped to a low murmur, and once again her eyes took on a faint, milky white glow, as if she wasn’t even really looking at me. In addition to her healing magic, Jo-Jo also had a bit of precognition. Most Air elementals did. They could listen to and interpret all the emotions and feelings in the atmosphere the same way that I could hear the ones that had sunk into the stone around me. But where my magic told me of things that had happened in the past, Air elementals got glimpses of things that might be flashes of possible futures. Just another way in which our two elements, our two magics, were the opposite of each other.
But if Jo-Jo said that everything was going to be okay, I believed her. The dwarf had been right about too many things before for me to doubt her now. Her whispered words brought me some much-needed comfort. So much so that I let go of my anger at myself—let go of my shame and my miserable sense of failure. I wanted to ask Jo-Jo about her cryptic words, but I just didn’t have the strength left for that. Not tonight. My eyes drifted shut, and I felt myself falling into the darkness once more.
“Wake her?” Sophia rasped in a concerned voice.
“No,” Jo-Jo said. “Gin needs her rest now.”
Jo-Jo’s hand slid through my hair, untangling the snarled brown locks one by one. I might have only imagined it, but I thought that the dwarf leaned down and put her lips close to my ear.
“Don’t worry, darling,” Jo-Jo murmured. “You’ll get another shot at Mab. Sooner than you think.”
Comforted, I breathed in. The sweet smell of her perfume was the last thing that I remembered before the world went black.
I woke up the next morning in one of the guest bedrooms on the second floor of Jo-Jo’s house. For a moment, I just lay there in my warm, soft cocoon, staring up at the swirls of blue and white in the cloud-covered fresco that decorated the ceiling. Then I started replaying the events of last night in my mind—again.
Missing Mab. Running through the forest. Stabbing giants left and right. Facing down Gentry and the girl. Stumbling through the snow and driving over here to the salon. Not the best or most successful night that I’d ever had as the Spider, but I supposed it had turned out all right in the end.
Because I should have been dead.
Everything that could have gone wrong had. At the very least, I should have bled out from that gunshot wound in my thigh. Maybe I would have, if I hadn’t tied that tourniquet around my leg and used my Ice magic to numb it.
But what really bothered me were my emotions. I’d been melancholy last night, moody, and frustrated that I hadn’t managed to kill Mab. Jo-Jo might have healed my body, but the dwarf hadn’t eased my anguish. Even now, the melancholy, the frustration, the sense of failure, gnawed at me, bothersome termites burrowing deeper and deeper into my black heart, chipping away at the coldness there.
I forced my thoughts away from my epic failure. After all, this was another day, as Scarlett O’Hara would say, and here I was, still alive, still breathing, and still determined to do what needed to be done. Jo-Jo had patched me up, made me whole and healthy once more, which meant that I still had a chance to kill Mab—
“Ahem.” Someone cleared his throat.
I raised my head and spotted Owen Grayson sitting in a rocking chair at the foot of the bed, an open book in his lap and a mug of coffee on the table beside him.
“I see that you’re awake now,” he rumbled in his deep voice.
I smiled at him. “Once more, it seems.”
Instead of responding to my teasing, rueful smile, Owen put his book aside, crossed his muscled arms over his chest, and speared me with a hard stare. Uh-oh. Someone was not pleased, and I didn’t have to guess why. I hadn’t told Owen what I was doing last night—especially that I was going after Mab.
Early morning sunlight slanted in through the window, bathing Owen’s chiseled features in a pale golden glow. Blue-black hair, violet eyes, slightly crooked nose, a white scar that slashed underneath his chin. Interesting enough features by themselves, but put them all together, and you had one hell of an attractive man.
And the rest of Owen was just as appealing. My gaze drifted over his solid, muscled body. In many ways, he had a dwarf’s sturdy physique, although at six feet one, Owen was more than a foot taller than most dwarves. Unlike so many businessmen of his wealth and position, Owen didn’t spend hours in the gym to keep his body lean and trim. No, he’d gotten his physique the old-fashioned way—through years of hard, physical labor. He’d started out as a blacksmith, turning one small shop into a vast business empire that had made him one of the wealthiest men in Ashland, even though he was only in his thirties.
Being a blacksmith had been a natural fit for Owen, who had what he considered to be a minor elemental talent for metal. He could manipulate it the same way that I could Stone, since metal was an offshoot of that element. But his talent was anything but small, given the exquisite sculptures and weapons that he created, including the matched set of five silverstone knives he’d given me as a Christmas present. The ones that had my spider rune stamped into their hilts.
But perhaps the thing that most appealed to me about Owen was his personality—and complete acceptance of me. Unlike a previous lover of mine,
Owen didn’t judge or condemn me for being the Spider. He knew exactly what kind of dark, violent city Ashland was, and he didn’t look down on the things I’d done over the years to survive. Mainly, because he’d done some of them himself to protect his younger sister, Eva.
Strong, confident, capable, sexy, caring. Owen was everything that I’d ever wanted in a lover—everything that I’d ever wanted in my life. Too bad I was too much of an emotional coward to tell him so—or let him know exactly how much I cared about him.
I kept staring at Owen, and he looked right back at me, not saying anything. Up to me to get the ball rolling then.
I sighed. “Okay. Let me have it. I know you’re angry. Your eyes are practically glowing with it. Jo-Jo called you, I take it, and told you about my little adventure?”
Owen gave me the hard stare a moment longer before nodding. “She did. What I really want to know is what the hell were you thinking, going after Mab by yourself? We’ve talked about this, Gin. We’ve all decided that it’s too dangerous.”
The we in question being myself, Owen, Finn, the Deveraux sisters, and my sister, Detective Bria Coolidge. All of us had a vested interest in seeing Mab dead. We just couldn’t figure out how to make it happen without all of us going down in flames with her.
“I know,” I snapped. “But I’m tired of hiding from Mab and her minions. I’m tired of worrying what she might do to Bria. I want the bitch dead.”
Owen wasn’t the only one who was angry. I felt it too, sinking its hot, gnashing teeth into my heart, along with the rest of the emotional termites. Most of it was directed at myself because I’d missed last night. But part of it was because I was scared too—scared of how much it had meant to wake up and see Owen sitting next to my bed. We’d been together for a few months now, but it always surprised me just how very much I cared about him, especially when I’d been so badly burned by a previous lover.
Owen was far more important to me than he realized—so important that it frightened me a little bit. Okay, a whole hell of a lot. Enough to make me want to keep him at arm’s length, even though I knew it was too late for that. Too many people that I’d loved over the years had been murdered for me to easily open up my heart to others. My mother, my older sister, Fletcher. All dead and gone before their time—all because of me and my mistakes.
Somehow, Owen had stormed his way into my heart whether I’d wanted him there or not, and now I’d do anything to keep him safe—even sacrifice myself like I almost had last night on my self-imposed quest.
“I don’t see why you care so much anyway,” I muttered in a harsher, colder voice than I would have liked. “It was my ass on the line last night, not yours. I made sure of that.”
Owen’s eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched, and his arms tightened across his chest. “Why? Why do I care so much, Gin? Because I—”
He bit off his words, but they hung in the air between us like a ghost, writhing and twisting, just like my heart was right now.
Because I love you. That’s what he’d been about to say. The shock of his almost uttering the words drove the air from my lungs. Owen—loved me? Really? Truly? I didn’t know what to make of it. I didn’t know what to make of anything anymore—especially not the softness for him that had wormed its way down into the deepest, darkest, blackest part of my heart. Into my very soul, even. If I hadn’t killed it long ago by being the Spider.
Owen looked away and drew in a breath. “Because I care about you, Gin. That’s why. I don’t want you going off on a suicide mission to try to kill Mab. I’d rather have you alive any day than her dead, even if she did murder your family and my parents.”
I wasn’t Mab’s only victim. Far from it. Part of the reason Owen understood my obsession with killing the Fire elemental was that she’d murdered his parents when he’d been a teenager. Mab had burned Owen’s house to the ground because of a gambling debt that his father owed, killing his parents in the process, and leaving him homeless and to fend for himself and his sister, Eva, who’d been little more than a baby then.
“Better me go by myself than drag the rest of you down with me,” I pointed out in a quiet voice. “And you know that’s what would have happened. Mab is too well protected at her estate for a full-frontal assault. You and Finn both know that. So do Jo-Jo, Sophia, and even Bria. I had to go in by myself. That was the only way I could even get close enough to Mab to take my shot.”
I closed my eyes. The anger, melancholy, and frustration welled up in my chest again, until they coated my mouth and throat like bitter, burning acid. “Too bad I blew it and missed.”
“I know,” Owen said in a gentler tone. “Finn called me this morning. Seems that his phone started ringing last night and hasn’t stopped since. All his contacts are buzzing with the news. He was a little upset about it himself. Said he’d catch up with you at the Pork Pit later today.”
I groaned. “What Finn really means is that he’ll lambaste me six ways from Sunday while he eats a free lunch at the counter.”
Some of the anger softened in Owen’s violet eyes, and a sly grin lifted up his lips. “Something like that, I imagine.”
I groaned again and returned Owen’s smile. More of the anger melted out of his gaze, and the tension between us lightened, like a dark cloud being blown away by a stiff gust of wind. For now, anyway.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You know I’m a little irrational where Mab’s concerned. I saw an opportunity to take her out, and I couldn’t pass it up.”
“I know, Gin,” Owen said. “I know.”
He got up from his rocking chair and came over to the bed. He sat down and opened his arms to me, and I scooted into his embrace. The warmth from his body mixed with my own, and I breathed in, enjoying his rich, earthy scent, which always made me think of metal, if metal could ever have any real smell.
“I hate that she’s after you,” Owen murmured, his lips against my hair. “But what I hate more is that you went after her alone. That no one was backing you up. Promise me you won’t do that again. Okay, Gin? Promise me that the next time you go after Mab, you’ll take someone with you. Me, Finn, Sophia. Someone, anyone, to help you.”
I could have lied to him. Maybe I should have. Because I had no intention of stopping until Mab was dead—even if she would probably take me down with her. But I didn’t want to lie to Owen and ruin this fragile peace between us.
“All right,” I said in a wry tone. “The next time I go after Mab, I’ll take a buddy along to hold my knives. Happy?”
“For now,” Owen rumbled, tucking me in even closer to his body. “For now.”
We sat there on the bed for a long time, just holding each other.
Owen had to get to work, since his business empire didn’t run itself, and I had a barbecue restaurant to run, so we made plans to hook up later. But Owen was quieter than usual as he left Jo-Jo’s, and I couldn’t think of what to say to him without the words coming out wrong. So we left things as they were, unspoken and unresolved, with neither one of us knowing how to deal with the other.
By the time I showered, threw on some spare clothes that I kept at Jo-Jo’s, and made my way to the Pork Pit, it was after two o’clock.
The Pork Pit barbecue restaurant was located in downtown Ashland, close to the unofficial Southtown border. It wasn’t much to look at, just another hole-in-the-wall, but it was mine—my gin joint. The sight of the multicolored neon sign of a pig holding a platter of food over the front door brought a smile to my face. The Pit was the only real home I’d known since Fletcher had taken me in off the streets when I was thirteen. The old man had started the restaurant years ago, and I’d inherited it after his murder last year.
As I walked toward the front door, I brushed my fingers against the battered brick of the restaurant and reached for my Stone magic. As always, slow, sonorous notes rippled through the brick, whispering of the clogged, contented hearts, arteries, and stomachs of so many diners after eating at the restaurant. The familiar whispers soothed
away the rest of my frustration. I might have screwed up last night, but I was still alive. I’d plotted more than one murder inside the Pork Pit. I’d go inside and get started on Mab’s lickety-split.
I scanned the interior of the Pit through the storefront windows. Clean, but well-worn blue and pink vinyl booths. Matching, faded, peeling pig tracks on the floor that led to the men’s and women’s restrooms. A counter running along the back wall with an old-fashioned cash register sitting at one end. A battered, blood-covered, framed copy of Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls hanging on the wall opposite the cash register, along with a faded photo of Fletcher in his younger years. Everything was as it should have been.
The lunch rush was over, and only one person sat at the long counter. I stepped inside, making the bell over the front door chime, and he swiveled around and fixed me with a cold glare.
“It’s about time you showed up, Gin,” Finn snapped.
Finnegan Lane was just as handsome as Owen, but in a more polished, classical way. Finn wore one of his many power suits, since as an investment banker, he spent most of his daylight hours swindling people out of their money. Today’s color choice was royal blue with the faintest houndstooth check pattern running through the expensive cloth, topped off by a silver shirt and blue-and-silver striped tie. Finn’s thick, walnut-colored hair was styled just so, and his eyes were as slick, shiny, and green in his ruddy face as the glass of a soda pop bottle.
Finn crossed his arms over his chest and glared at me, much the same way that Owen had done earlier. Time for round two of the Gin Blanco firing squad.
I sighed and walked over to my foster brother. “Let me guess. You want to have a little chat about what happened with Mab last night.”
“Why, whatever gave you that idea?” Finn drawled in a deceptively light voice. “Perhaps it was because I was awakened at an unseemly hour this morning only to learn that someone tried to kill Mab last night while she was entertaining guests in the main dining room of her mansion. The very part of the mansion that I distinctly remember getting you the blueprints for just last week.”