A minute later, we reached the end of this hallway, and Marco used a key card to open a door marked Security Personnel Only. He held out his hand, and the two giants shoved me through the doorway. I stumbled forward and hit a table, pretending to be far more off balance than I really was. All the while, my gaze flicked around the room, taking in the security monitors that lined the opposite wall, the poker cards on the table in front of me, and the half-full coffee cups that littered the messy desk in the corner. Three cups, to be exact, which meant that these three giants were probably the full extent of the club’s security force.
Excellent. Wouldn’t want any stragglers to miss this.
The two giants trooped into the room behind me, along with Marco and the third giant, who closed the door behind him. I grinned at the sound of the lock snicking home, then straightened up and turned to face the men.
Marco crossed his arms over his chest. “Not so mouthy now, are you?”
“Oh, sugar. I’ve always thought that actions speak far louder than words.”
He frowned at my cryptic comment, but I ignored him and stared at the three giants standing in front of me.
“I hope you boys didn’t pay too much for those fancy suits,” I drawled.
“Why is that?” one of the giants asked.
My grin widened. “Because I’m going to have a lot of fun splattering your blood all over that pretty, pretty fabric.”
The giant snorted. Another disbeliever. His loss.
“Enough talk,” Marco said in a bored tone. “I have a club to run, so get on with it. Slap her around and then throw her outside.”
“Yes, sir,” the giants said in unison.
The first two men came at me with outstretched arms, thinking that they could latch on to me again and hold me still while the third man hit me.
I actually did let the first giant grab my shoulder, just so I could snap up my fist and sucker-punch him in the throat. He choked and started to stagger backward, but I grabbed hold of his silk tie, yanked it down, and slammed his face into the table beside me. His nose busted open, and blood flew through the air, along with the poker cards. The giant screamed, but I whipped around and drove my knee into the side of his head. He collapsed to the floor unconscious.
The second giant growled, pissed that I’d hurt his buddy, and he too came at me with outstretched arms. I whirled around him, grabbed one of the coffee cups from the desk in the corner, and tossed the contents into his face. Luckily for him, the coffee had cooled, but it still blinded him. He yelped in surprise and batted at his face, as if he expected the liquid to start burning him at any second. I rammed my foot into the side of his knee, making it give way with a sickening pop! He yelped again, his leg buckling. I darted forward, dug my fingers into his hair, and slammed his head into the table. Once, twice, three times, until his screams cut off, and he too dropped to the floor unconscious, landing right on top of his friend.
Two down, two to go.
The third giant was a little smarter or had at least been in a few more fights than his friends. He raised his fists and gave me a wary look, but he didn’t actually attack.
“What are you waiting for?” Marco demanded, his voice sounding higher and more panicked with every word. “Get her! Now!”
The giant ignored his boss and stared at me, waiting for me to make the first move. With my left hand, I feinted like I was going for another cup of coffee on the desk. Even as the giant moved in that direction, I reached out with my right hand, grabbed the landline phone off the desk, and smashed it into the side of his head. The giant screamed and staggered away, but I grabbed his suit jacket, pulled him right back to me, and smashed the phone into his head again. The plastic broke apart in my hands, and the giant screamed again.
I tossed away the ruined phone and went low, sweeping my right leg out and catching the giant around his ankles. His legs flew out from under him, and his head hit the floor with a resounding crack. He didn’t move after that.
I straightened up and eyed the giants, but they were all out cold, sprawled all over the floor, and bleeding all over their fancy suits just like I’d warned. I could have palmed a knife and killed them, but that would have been a whole other headache to deal with, one that I just didn’t have time for right now. So I turned to Marco, who had pressed himself up against the wall, his eyes wide, his hand clamped over his mouth, as if he was going to be sick.
“Let me guess,” I drawled. “Your boys can dish it out, but you can’t take it yourself, right?”
Marco made a choking sound and ran for the door, but I beat him to it. I wrapped my hand around the knob and blasted it with my Ice magic, further sealing us inside the security office.
“Now, now,” I said. “We wouldn’t want anyone to interrupt us. We have important business to discuss. That private conversation you were so eager to have with me—remember?”
Marco stumbled away and tripped over one of the unconscious giants. I reached out and grabbed the back of his suit jacket so that he wouldn’t fall down and accidentally knock himself out. The manager quickly regained his balance, although he scuttled away from me, pressing his tall, thin body into the corner, as if that would somehow protect him.
“What—what do you want?” he whispered.
This time when I stepped forward, I did finally reach under my jacket and pull out my silverstone pendant. Marco’s eyes locked onto the spider rune symbol, and his mouth gaped open. Now he knew exactly who I was. What a nice surprise.
“Now that the pleasantries are over with, I want to look at your security footage.”
8
Marco was so much more helpful after that.
He spent the next thirty minutes downloading the club’s security footage from last night onto some DVDs, along with emailing me the information. I used my phone to forward the footage on to Silvio, Bria, and Finn so they could review it too. DVDs in hand, I used another round of my Ice magic to blast open the office door and left the Five Oaks Country Club.
By this point, it was after four o’clock, and I headed home to plan my next move. Beating down giants was hard work, so I grabbed some dark chocolate brownies from the kitchen, put them on a napkin, and carried them into the den. While I ate, I popped the first DVD into the TV.
These security cameras showed the outside of Five Oaks, and the footage was exactly what I’d expected: limos, sedans, and SUVs pulling up to the front of the club and dropping off rich, important, powerful, and dangerous folks. The low resolution on the cameras made the images a bit grainy, but I still recognized several faces, including some underworld bosses. People got out of their cars, handed off their keys to the valets, and hurried into the waiting warmth of the club. Nothing unusual or suspicious.
Finally, a yellow cab pulled up to the club, and Elissa Daniels got out, paid the driver, and headed inside. I stopped the footage so I could get a better look at her. Elissa was just as pretty on camera as in the photo Jade had shown me, and she’d dressed up for the dinner. Her blond hair hung in loose waves around her shoulders, and she was wearing a long black coat over a short, fitted red dress, along with matching red stilettos.
I looked at the time stamp on the bottom corner of the video. Six fifty-five. Right before Elissa was due to meet Stuart Mosley at seven. I scanned through the rest of the footage on the disc, but Mosley never appeared. It looked as if he’d been telling the truth about being sick and skipping the dinner. So I switched DVDs, moving on to the footage from inside the club.
Once I knew what time Elissa had arrived and what she was wearing, it was easy to track her through the footage on the other discs, specifically as she entered the country club ballroom, since several security cameras were trained on that area. She looked around the ballroom, searching for Mosley, then headed over to the bar and ordered a glass of champagne. She sat there sipping her drink for about ten minutes before she got a
call, most likely from Mosley. Elissa nodded and talked for about a minute before ending the call.
After that, she snapped a photo of her champagne glass and texted it to someone, most likely asking her sister to come have a drink. Of course, Jade didn’t come, but Elissa continued to sit at the bar, sip her champagne, and people-watch, content to enjoy the rest of the evening just as Mosley had told her to.
Until she got a message, apparently.
Elissa had just finished her champagne when her phone lit up. She stared at the screen for a moment, then signaled the bartender that she wanted to pay her tab. Five minutes later, she left the ballroom, so I popped in another DVD that showed the outside of the club again. Sure enough, Elissa was standing by the entrance, pacing back and forth, and checking her phone over and over again.
A cab arrived just after seven thirty, and Elissa slid into the backseat. I froze the footage again so I could get the cab’s number—227—and texted it to Silvio and Finn, asking them to find out who the driver was and where he’d taken Elissa. I also sent them both another text asking if they could hack into Elissa’s phone records. I wanted to know what message had gotten her upset enough to rush out of the country club and head off to parts unknown.
After that, there was nothing for me to do but wait, so I called Sophia, checking on how things were going with Jade.
“She’s wearing a path in the floor,” Sophia rumbled. “Woman won’t sit still. She’s making me dizzy.”
“Just keep an eye on her. Try to get her to eat something and lie down for a few minutes. She needs to rest. She’s no help to anyone if she’s an exhausted bundle of nerves.”
“Will do.” Sophia paused. “I feel sorry for her. Hard to lose your sister. Hard to be the one who’s lost too.”
Sympathy and sadness rippled through her raspy voice. Years ago, Sophia had been kidnapped by a couple of sadistic Fire elementals who’d delighted in torturing her, and they had come back and taken her again last summer. The things that she’d endured . . . They made me sick to think about, and I still didn’t know how she’d found the strength to survive them not once but twice. Sophia knew better than anyone how horrifying it was to be ripped away from your family, with no hope of escaping or ever seeing them again. I wondered if that was what Elissa was feeling right now. That sickening misery, that dark despair, that utter hopelessness.
But more than that, I wondered if she was still feeling anything at all—or if she was already dead.
“Gin?” Sophia asked, breaking into my turbulent thoughts.
“Yeah,” I murmured. “It is hard to lose your sister.”
The two of us hung up, and I got to my feet and walked over to the rune drawings on the mantel. Sophia’s comments made me think about my own lost sister, and I ran my fingers over the ivy vine pendant that was draped over the matching drawing. My sister Annabella’s rune, the symbol for elegance.
I wondered what Annabella would be like today if she’d gotten the chance to grow up. She would have been thirty-six, five years older than me, maybe married, maybe even with a kid or two. I could almost picture her standing before me, with the same blond hair, blue eyes, and pretty features that Bria and our mother had.
My gaze moved over to my mother’s snowflake pendant and drawing. Eira would have been in her fifties now, no doubt with some gray hair and a few wrinkles, but still a distinguished beauty.
But I would never know the answers to my questions.
Mab Monroe had burned my sister and mother to death, right in front of me, and I hadn’t been able to do a damn thing to save either one of them. Even now, all these years later, I still remembered the intense heat of Mab’s elemental Fire searing the air. The red-hot flames of her magic streaking toward Eira, almost in slow motion. My mother mouthing the words I’m sorry to Annabella and me before disappearing into that ball of Fire. Then Annabella rushing downstairs to meet the exact same fate.
Watching them die had been horrible enough, but it was all the other sensations that truly haunted me. My mother’s blackened, smoking husk of a body hitting the floor with a dull thud. Annabella’s nightgown crackling like a match that had just been lit. My mother’s skin crumbling to ash. The stench of their charred flesh filling my nose. The hot, acrid odor of fire, smoke, and cooked skin sliding down my throat, making my stomach heave, and poisoning me from the inside out as I realized that my mother and sister were dead, dead, dead—
My phone rang, snapping me back to the here and now.
My hand had fisted so tightly around Annabella’s ivy vine that her symbol pressed into the spider rune branded into my palm, another parting gift from Mab. I forced my fingers open and backed away from the rune pendants and matching drawings, trying to clear the morbid memories out of my mind and ignore the pain pulsing in my heart.
Easier said than done, but I went over to the coffee table and picked up my phone. The caller ID said that it was Finn.
“Please tell me that you found something on that cab Elissa got into,” I said immediately upon answering.
“What?” Finn said. “No hello? No small talk? No chitchat?”
“Not when a girl is missing. So what did you find out?”
“According to the cabdriver’s log, Elissa paid with a credit card,” Finn said. “Guess where the cabbie dropped her off at last night, around eight o’clock?”
“I have no idea,” I snapped, not in the mood to play along right now.
“Northern Aggression,” he said in a smug voice.
Well, that was actually a bit of good news. Unlike with Marco, I wouldn’t have any problems getting this security footage; Roslyn Phillips, the owner of Northern Aggression, was a good friend.
“Feel like calling Owen and going over there?” Finn asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Good,” he said. “Because I’ve already called Roslyn. So put on your dancing shoes, Gin. We’re going out tonight.”
• • •
An hour later, a sharp knock sounded on my front door, which I opened to find Finn standing outside on the porch.
My eyes widened. “What are you wearing?”
Instead of his usual dark, subdued banker’s suit, Finn was sporting a light gray coat over a powder-blue bow tie, shirt, vest, and pants, along with shiny, white patent-leather wing tips. His dark brown hair was slicked back into an artful style, he was freshly shaven, and a bit of spicy cologne wafted off him.
He grinned. “Isn’t it great? It’s winter chic, the newest style from Fiona Fine.”
“You look like a bad prom date.”
He arched his eyebrows, his green gaze taking in the boots, jeans, blue sweater, and black fleece jacket that I’d had on all day. “And you look like you beat up some guys earlier and forgot to wash their blood out of your jacket.” He stabbed his finger at the dime-size stains on the fleece. “I know what those dark spots really are.”
I shrugged. “It was only three guys, and they didn’t bleed all that much.”
Finn’s eyebrows rose a little higher in disbelief.
“Well, they didn’t bleed all that much on me,” I amended. “Certainly not enough for me to change jackets.”
He shook his head. “Your lack of fashion sense always confounds me. But blood-spattered jacket aside, there is another issue.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “And what would that be?”
He sniffed the air. “You still smell like barbecue from the restaurant.”
“You once told me that smelling like barbecue was a total aphrodisiac.”
“And it usually is,” Finn said. “Women and barbecue are two of my favorite things. But not when we’re going out clubbing.”
“We are not going clubbing. We’re looking for a missing girl. They are not the same thing. Not at all. Not even a little bit.”
He grinned. “You say potato . . .
”
I rolled my eyes. “I know, I know. You say opportunity. Let’s go, Prom King. Owen is meeting us there. Bria has to work tonight, but she said that she’d call if she had any news.”
I shut and locked the front door behind me, then drove us over to the nightclub.
Northern Aggression was Ashland’s most decadent club, known near and far for its many hedonistic pleasures. You could get just about anything you wanted in the club—drinks, smokes, blood, sex—in just about any amount and combination, as long as you had enough cash or credit to pay your tab at the end of the night. Even though it was just after seven o’clock on a Wednesday night, dozens of people were already standing in line, waiting to get past the giant bouncers and the red velvet rope so they could go inside and get their party started.
The nightclub was located in a featureless building that looked like it could have housed a call center or some other anonymous corporate endeavor. The only thing that set the club apart from the surrounding Northtown buildings was the sign over the front door: a heart with an arrow shooting straight through it, Roslyn Phillips’s rune for her club and all the pleasure and pain that could be had inside. The sign glowed a bright neon red, then orange, and finally yellow, highlighting the eager faces of all the people milling around below.
Finn, being Finn, naturally strutted past everyone and went straight to the front of the line. Normally, I would have scoffed at his swagger and told him to wait his turn, but tonight I followed him. I wanted to get inside as quickly as possible and find out what had happened to Elissa.
Finn shook hands with first one bouncer, then the other. “Gerald, Tim, nice to see you guys again.”
The giants nodded and murmured their thanks, since Finn had just slipped each one of them a C-note to further expedite our entrance into the club. They undid the red velvet rope and let us pass, much to the muttered annoyance of everyone else still waiting in line in the cold.
I followed Finn inside, and we made our way to the main dance floor. The outside of Northern Aggression might be plain and featureless, but the inside was all luxe decadence. The dance floor was made of a springy bamboo, and thick red velvet curtains covered the walls. And most important to those partying hard, a large elemental Ice bar ran along one wall.