* * *
I made it back to my car and home to Fletcher’s house without incident. I checked in with all my friends again, trying to be casual about things, but everyone was still fine. Whatever Madeline was plotting, it wasn’t happening tonight.
I went to bed early, trying to put my worries out of my mind, but I tossed and turned for most of the night. Even in the small, fitful bouts I did sleep, I dreamed of Madeline, still looking angelic in her white suit, although the emerald in her crown-and-flame rune necklace flashed brighter and faster than a strobe light in warning. Her crimson lips lifted into a cruel smile, even as her eyes started burning neon green, and two balls of elemental acid formed in the palms of her hands. Then she reared back and threw her magic at me. The acid exploded like twin bombs against my skin, melting, melting every part of me it touched, eating through my muscles and tendons until even my bones began to bubble and dissolve. . . .
I woke up with a scream stuck in my throat, and I didn’t even try to go back to sleep after that.
Instead, I sat up, snapped on a light by my bed, and reached for the black velvet box sitting on the nightstand. I cracked open the top of the box, revealing a beautiful necklace. A pendant shaped like my spider rune was the centerpiece of the design, with each delicate link in the chain also shaped like my symbol. A birthday present from Owen, who had crafted the piece in his forge.
Other than its sentimental value, the most important thing about the necklace was that it was made out of silverstone, just like the ring on my right index finger, which was also stamped with my spider rune. Silverstone could absorb and store all forms of magic, and many elementals had jewelry made out of it so they could have an extra reserve of power in case they needed it for something important, like an elemental duel.
More than once, I’d thought about going over to the Monroe mansion, knocking on the front door, and challenging Madeline to a duel. That would be one way to settle our differences and end our family feud once and for all. But I didn’t know if I had more raw magic than she did, and it would be suicidal to fight her like that if I didn’t even have a chance of winning. Besides, she would never accept such a challenge. Madeline liked her machinations more than anything else.
Still, ever since Owen had given me the necklace, I’d been feeding my Ice and Stone magic into the spider rune pendant and links, along with my ring. Just in case Madeline did the unexpected and decided to attack me head-on.
I might not be able to stop my nightmares, but I could plan for the coming battle. Besides, Fletcher had always said that preparation was one of the keys to victory.
So I reached for my magic, watching the cool silver light flare to life in my palms, centered in my spider rune scars. Then I placed my necklace in one hand and my ring in the other, watching as the metal slowly soaked up all the light, all the power, like a dry sponge absorbing water. When the last of the light vanished, I knew that the silverstone had stored that first wave of magic, and I summoned up another one, then another.
I stayed in bed, funneling more and more of my power into my jewelry, until it was time to get up, take a shower, and head to the Pork Pit.
I got to my restaurant early, right after nine o’clock. After checking the front door and surrounding windows for rune traps and other explosives, I went inside and flipped on the lights. I stood by the entrance and looked out over the booths clustered by the windows, the chairs and tables beyond that, the long counter with padded stools that ran along the back wall, and the faded, peeling, blue and pink pig tracks that curled through all of it.
Normally, the sight of the restaurant with its simple, well-worn furnishings and cozy atmosphere was enough to lift even my darkest mood. Not today. Not given my nightmares. And especially not when I still had no idea what Madeline was up to.
But there was nothing to be done about my growing unease and dread, so I closed the door behind me and got to work. Turned on the appliances, wiped down the tables and counter, washed the pots and pans, mopped the floor, refilled all the ketchup bottles. I even whipped up a pot of Fletcher’s secret barbecue sauce, going a little heavy on the cumin and black pepper to give it an extra-smoky, spicy kick, and put that on one of the stovetops to simmer away.
By the time I finished with my morning chores, I felt much calmer. Madeline might be plotting against me, but I could handle whatever she dished out, just like I’d taken care of Mab all those months ago—by shoving my knife through her black heart. Like mother, like daughter would be just fine with me in that regard.
Finally, the only thing left to do was to take out the trash, a far more dangerous endeavor than it should have been. I swung the plastic bag over my shoulder and cautiously opened the back door of the restaurant.
More than one person had tried to kill me in the alley that ran behind the Pork Pit. All of the crime bosses wanted me dead because whoever accomplished my murder would have a clear claim on Mab’s vacant throne as the head of the Ashland underworld. Hence all the minions they’d sent to jump me these past several months.
But things had been quiet ever since I dispatched Beauregard Benson a few weeks ago on the street right in front of his Southtown mansion. I’d only had to drop two bodies back here since then. The quiet was another thing that worried me. Because if the underworld bosses weren’t sending folks to attack me, that meant they were scheming other ways to mess with me. I had enough problems with Madeline already. I didn’t need any more.
But no one was clenching his fists and lying in wait for me beyond the back door, clutching a gun and crouching down beside a Dumpster, or cupping a ball of elemental Fire in his hand, eager to rush forward from the far end of the corridor and roast me alive.
I lingered in the alley, looking left and right, but it was deserted, and I didn’t even hear the usual rats, cats, and stray dogs scurrying across the pavement, looking for whatever garbage they could eat that had oozed out of the overflowing trash cans.
So I dumped my bag of garbage, went back inside the restaurant, and pushed through the double doors, stepping back out into the storefront—
A cast-iron skillet zoomed toward my head.
I ducked, and the skillet slammed into the wall behind me instead of plowing straight into my skull. I whirled up and around, turning to face my attacker. It was a woman, about my size, five-seven or so, with murder in her eyes and bright red hair that was pulled back into a bun.
I looked past her and realized that the front door was partially open. I’d been so worried about Madeline that I’d forgotten to lock it behind me when I came in to work this morning, giving my would-be killer easy access to the restaurant. I cursed my own sloppiness for a moment before focusing on my attacker again.
Her white, button-up shirt, black pants, and black sneakers were as anonymous as her plain features were. My gaze kept going back to her copper-colored hair, her only distinguishing trait. I’d seen that hair, that sleek, tight bun, somewhere before, sometime very recently, although I couldn’t quite remember where. But it didn’t much matter who the woman was, whom she worked for, or why they both wanted me dead. She’d come in here intent on killing me, and she was only going out one way—bloody.
“Die, bitch!” the woman screamed.
“You first!” I hissed back.
She’d been rifling through the cookware while I’d been dumping the garbage because she’d dragged out all of the pots and pans and had lined them up on the counter in a neat row. She grabbed the closest one to her—an old cast-iron skillet of Jo-Jo’s that I baked corn bread in—and came at me again.
It was one thing to be attacked in my own restaurant. I expected that these days. But using my favorite skillet against me? That was just plain rude.
I sidestepped the woman’s second blow, but instead of whirling around for a third one, she kept going all the way over to the end of the counter where a butcher’s block full of knives sat. She grabbed the biggest blade out of the block, then whipped back around and waggled the utensi
l at me.
“I’m going to carve you up with one of your own knives,” she growled.
I rolled my eyes. Like I hadn’t heard that one a hundred times before. Folks really needed to be more creative with their death threats.
The woman let out a loud battle cry and darted forward, brandishing both the blade and the pan at me this time. No one had ever attacked me with my own cookware before, so it was a bit of a new experience to be dodging knives and skillets, instead of bullets and magic. But I managed it.
With one hand, I blocked her overhead blow with the skillet. With my other hand, I chopped down on the woman’s wrist, making her lose her grip on the knife. For an extra punch, I grabbed hold of my Stone magic at the last second, using it to harden my hand so that it was as heavy as a concrete block slamming into her wrist. Her bones snapped like carrot sticks. The woman howled with pain and staggered back, giving me the chance to dart forward and kick the dropped knife away, sending it flying up under the counter.
She swung the skillet at me again with her uninjured arm, but this time, I stepped up, turned my hip into her body, and jerked the heavy iron from her hand as she stumbled past me. But I didn’t let her go too far. I darted forward, grabbed her shoulder, and yanked her back toward me, even as I brought the pan forward as hard as I could.
CRACK!
You could do a lot more than just cook with a cast-iron skillet, and that one blow was more than enough to cave in the back of the woman’s skull. All of the movement in her body just stopped, and she dropped to the floor like a brick someone had tossed out a window.
Thud.
Blood poured out from the deep, ugly wound I’d opened up in her skull, like water spewing out of a freshly cracked coconut. Gravity lolled her head to the side, turning her empty hazel eyes toward the front door, almost as if she were still seeing it and wishing that she’d stayed on the other side, instead of venturing in here and meeting her death so bright and early in the morning.
I let the pan slip to the floor, then put my hands on my knees, trying to get my breath back. The fight hadn’t been all that long, but the cast-iron skillet was heavier than it looked, and it had taken quite a bit of muscle to use it so viciously.
But even as I bent over, my gaze flicked to the windows, and I wondered if anyone had seen my fight to the death with the woman. But the commuters were already at work, and it was still too early for most folks to be thinking about lunch yet. The few people who did pass by on the street had their heads down, more interested in checking their phones than paying attention to their surroundings.
So I straightened up, went over, and shut and locked the front door before closing the blinds on all the windows. Then I turned my attention back to the woman. Blood continued to ooze out of her skull, painting the blue and pink pig tracks on the floor a glossy, garish crimson. More blood had spattered all over the skillet too, along with the woman’s hair, skin, and bits of bone and brain matter.
I sighed. Damn. Why couldn’t she have just jumped me in the alley like usual? Now I’d have to wash all the skillets and knives and mop the floor—again.
Sometimes, it just didn’t pay to come in early.
4
Normally, I would have hauled the woman’s body out to the alley, piled some garbage bags on top of it, and waited for Sophia to come in so she could dispose of it during one of her breaks. But I didn’t want to leave a corpse lying outside the restaurant, not now, with all my worries about Madeline. It would be just my luck that today would be the day that she finally put her grand scheme into motion. So I needed a better hiding place for the body. At the very least, it would be one less thing to worry about. Out of sight, out of mind, and all that.
So I grabbed the dead woman under the arms and dragged her into the rear of the restaurant, all the way over to the freezer against the back wall. Then I dropped to my knees and patted her down, but she wasn’t carrying a wallet or any sort of ID, and no rune tattoos were on her hands, arms, or neck to tell me what gang she might have belonged to, if any. She didn’t even have a cell phone stuffed into one of her pants pockets.
I frowned. Weird. No one went anywhere without her phone these days. So I had no idea who she was or whom she might have been working for. But on the bright side, no ID and no phone meant that there wasn’t anything else for me to get rid of.
So I opened the freezer lid, then hoisted the dead woman up and over the side into the frosty depths below. I even went the extra step of piling several bags of ice and a couple dozen boxes of frozen peas on top of her, to further hide the body. I absolutely hated peas, and I never, ever served them in the restaurant, but I kept the boxes around for just these sorts of occasions. Because, really, who would ever want to see what was underneath piles of frozen peas?
After the body was stowed away, I retrieved the knife that had slid under the counter and washed it, along with all the pots, pans, and skillets that the dead woman had dragged out.
I wiped down everything with bleach to destroy any minute traces of blood and was mopping the floor again when a key turned in the front-door lock, and Sophia Deveraux stepped inside.
I might be somewhat grungy and anonymous with my jeans-and-T-shirt ensembles, but Sophia always stood out in a crowd. She had on the same sort of black boots I did, although her jeans were actually white today, and paired with a black T-shirt with a pair of fuchsia puckered lips in the center of it. The words Kiss off, fool! arched over the lips in silver sequins. Matching fuchsia streaks shimmered in Sophia’s black hair, along with silver glitter, while pale pink shadow and silver mascara made her eyes seem even blacker than usual. Silver cuffs adorned her wrists, and a black leather collar studded with silver hearts circled her neck, completing her chic Goth look.
At the sight of me mopping the floor, Sophia stopped and eyed the pink water sloshing around in my bucket.
“Problem?” she rasped in her low, eerie, broken voice.
I shrugged. “Not anymore. She’s in the freezer with the peas.”
Sophia nodded, knowing exactly what I was talking about. After she got rid of the body, I’d have to defrost the freezer and scrub all of the bloodstains and smears out of it, as well as order some more frozen peas. I sighed. Sometimes, killing people just wasn’t worth cleaning up the mess afterward.
While I finished mopping, Sophia started cooking, and we opened up the restaurant. Catalina Vasquez came in to wait tables and help with the lunch rush, followed by her uncle.
Silvio Sanchez was a short, lean, quiet man who tended to blend into the background with his subdued gray suits and ties. Unlike Jonah McAllister, Silvio’s silvery hair was cut short and neatly brushed, and he didn’t try to erase the faint lines that had grooved into his middle-aged bronze skin. I thought that the vampire was still a bit too thin, given how much of his blood and emotions Beauregard Benson had drained out of him a few weeks ago, but so far Silvio was resisting all of my attempts to fatten him up with the Pork Pit’s home cooking.
As was his custom now, Silvio perched on a stool three spots down from the cash register, opened his silverstone briefcase, and pulled out his cell phone and tablet. He was always texting, typing, and making notes about something, although I couldn’t imagine what he found so interesting about the comings and goings at the restaurant to so thoroughly record them all daily.
“Hello, Gin. I’m here for the morning briefing,” Silvio said, swiping through several screens on his tablet.
I bent down and grabbed a dish towel from a slot under the counter so he wouldn’t hear me sigh. I didn’t think that my life was busy or complicated enough for a morning briefing, much less the afternoon briefings that Silvio had been making noises about adding to our so-called schedule, but I perched on my stool and listened as he told me about all the various information he’d gleaned from his contacts. Who was looking to expand into running drugs, guns, and other illegal products; who was trying to muscle in on a rival’s territory; who had threatened to kill the competition
in retaliation for some perceived slight.
When he finished, I shared the information I’d overheard in the woods yesterday about the name Dobson and the party Madeline was throwing.
“See what you can find out about it please,” I said. “Especially when it is and who’s been invited. I want to know if it’s another flower-themed tea for the society ladies or something more important.”
He gave me a sharp look. “And where did this information come from? I haven’t heard a peep about Madeline hosting or attending any kind of party, not counting that library dedication later today.”
I waved my hand. “Oh, a little bird told me.”
Silvio frowned, his gray eyes narrowing in accusation. “You haven’t taken it upon yourself to spy on Madeline, have you? Because that would be a very foolish thing to do, Gin, directional microphone or not. I believe we addressed this during last Friday’s morning briefing.”
He might have found that microphone for me, but he’d also realized exactly what I wanted it for. Last Friday before the restaurant opened, Silvio had made me turn off the lights so he could set up a projector and give me a presentation, listing bullet point by bloody bullet point all the ways I could get captured and killed if Madeline caught me spying on her.
I’d smiled and nodded through the whole thing, but I hadn’t told him about my tree house in the woods outside the Monroe mansion. I didn’t want to add to his lecture about what a foolish risk I was taking—and how he should be the one doing the spying instead. Silvio took his self-assigned duties rather seriously that way. He’d even offered to help Sophia get rid of bodies, although the Goth dwarf had just snickered and gone on about her business solo as usual.
Apparently, Silvio didn’t want to have to find a new boss because he was always chiding me about spying, proper body disposal, and other things like that, as if I hadn’t spent my entire adult life being an assassin and careening from one dangerous situation to the next. His concern was touching, really, it was, but I’d been on my own for so much of my life that it also felt a bit . . . smothering. Most of the time, I felt like a wayward baby duck that Mother Silvio was trying to wrangle back in line.