“I’ll see you at the restaurant in the morning,” I said, giving in to the inevitable.
“Of course. And I’ll have an update for you first thing. See you then.”
We both hung up, and I looked over at Phillip.
He frowned at me. “Eyes only on Jonah? That’s not your usual style. I’m surprised that you’re not storming back in there right now and asking him some more pointed questions with your knife at his throat.”
Maybe that’s what I should have done, but I just didn’t have the energy to be intimidating tonight. Not when the Circle had already outsmarted me again. Besides, I wouldn’t trust a word that McAllister said right now, and there was no way to be sure how much he would try to play me just to keep on breathing.
“What can I say?” I drawled. “It’s a Christmas miracle.”
Phillip laughed as I put the van in gear and drove away into the cold, icy night.
3
I dropped Phillip off at the dock to the Delta Queen, his home and riverboat casino, then drove along the river until I reached a paved lot that fronted a small park and a wooded area. I pulled in there and stopped, peering out the windows.
I was only a few miles away from the Delta Queen, but I might as well have driven to the moon, given the startling differences. Instead of a gleaming white riverboat, high-end shops, and gourmet restaurants, abandoned buildings, cracked sidewalks, and busted-out streetlights dotted the landscape. I was squarely in Southtown now, the part of Ashland that was home to gangs, hustlers, and other violent, dangerous folks.
Normally, I would have expected to see a couple of homeless guys huddled over the trash cans at either end of the parking lot, burning the garbage inside to stay warm. But it was too wet and cold for that tonight, so the area was completely deserted. Good. I didn’t want anyone to see me or especially to realize where I was going.
Silvio could—and did—track my phone, so I turned it off and left it in my car, which the vamp could also track, thanks to the GPS locator he’d hooked to the undercarriage. He might be home working, but I had no doubt that Silvio was checking his phone every so often, just to see where I was. I admired the vampire’s efficiency and dedication, but knowing that he could keep tabs on me so easily creeped me out a little. Besides, a girl had to keep some secrets to herself.
Especially when it came to the Circle.
I got out of my car. It had finally stopped raining, but the ice accumulations made the air even colder than before, so I pulled up my jacket collar, yanked down my toboggan, and stuck my gloved hands into my coat pockets, trying to seal in all my body heat. That worked for about five seconds, then the first gust of wind slapped me across the face and sliced through all my many layers of clothes. I shivered, put my head down, and started walking.
I left the parking lot behind and headed over to a winding path that ran along the river. During the warmer months, the wooded area was popular with walkers, joggers, and cyclists, but no one in their right mind would be out here tonight, given the weather. Then again, I was rarely in my right mind, according to Phillip, Silvio, and the rest of my friends.
The path was covered with ice, so I walked through the grass to the side, judging that to be safer. I kept an eye out, but everyone had taken what shelter they could find for the night, and I was the only person hurrying through the dark.
It took me about thirty minutes to reach the end of the path, which fed into another small, wooded park. I stood in the shadows of a weeping willow, scanning this area as well, but it was also deserted. So I trudged through the piles of wet, slick leaves and over to the ten-foot chain-link fence that cordoned off the park from the industrial area next door.
Despite the ice that crusted the metal, I easily scaled the fence, swinging my legs up and over the top, and dropping down to the other side. I crouched in the shadows, just in case anyone was on this side of the fence, but I was as alone as before, so I straightened up and darted forward.
I sprinted across a hundred feet of open space until I reached a large metal container, the first of many housed in this sprawling shipping yard. I plastered myself up against the side of the container, looking in all directions, but no one appeared, and no shouts broke the cold quiet. No one had seen my initial trespassing, so I felt safe enough to keep going.
I rounded the far end of that container only to be greeted by hundreds more, all stacked on top of each other in neat rows. During the day, the metal boxes would have shown their true colors of dull, rusty reds, yellows, and oranges, but they were all a washed-out gray in the semidarkness. Lights had been rigged up throughout the shipping yard to deter trespassers like me, but they cast more shadows than they banished, and I was easily able to move from one pool of darkness to the next. In the distance, I could hear the steady rush of the Aneirin River, but that was the only sound that echoed through the night.
I moved through the area until I reached the end of the container maze, then stopped. More open space stretched out in front of me, leading to a large warehouse in the center of the shipping yard. Lights blazed in the warehouse, and I spotted a giant guard sitting in a small wooden shack by one of the loading-dock doors. He was as bundled up as I was and seemed to be watching something on his phone, although he did glance around every minute or so, checking on things.
I looked around, but I didn’t see any more guards, so I slipped back into the container maze, moving through the rows until I came to a lone container set off by itself underneath a large maple tree. This container was battered and dented in several places, as though it had been dropped on its sides more than once, and looked to be abandoned, a discarded piece of junk that the workers hadn’t yet gotten around to taking to the scrap yard.
I sidled up to the container, crouched down, and reached for my Stone magic, examining and listening to all the rocks that I’d strategically placed around the container. The rocks were in the same places as before, and they only whispered back to me about the cold, along with faint, steady rumbles from all the cranes, forklifts, and other heavy machinery that moved through the area daily. No dark mutters of malice or murder rippled back to me, which meant that no one had been near the container since the last time I’d been here a few days ago. Good. I got to my feet, pulled a key out of my jacket pocket, opened the padlock, and slipped into the container, pulling the door shut behind me.
The inside of the container was pitch-black, but I moved along the wall until I came to a small table. I pulled off my gloves, reached down, and flipped the switch on the battery-powered lantern that I’d brought in here several days ago, along with some other supplies.
Light flooded the inside of the container, and I blinked several times, trying to get my eyes to adjust to the sudden, harsh glare. Instead of being barren, the inside of the container featured a couple of tables, several chairs, and a metal rack with a bottle of gin and some plastic cups perched on the shelves. All put together, it looked as though some homeless person had wandered in here and made this place his new home.
In a way, that’s exactly what I’d done.
According to Hugh Tucker, the Circle knew all about me, which meant that they knew about the Pork Pit, Fletcher’s house, and where the rest of my friends lived and worked. They might even know about the various safe houses that I used around Ashland from time to time. So I’d wanted some place that they couldn’t possibly know about, some place new, some place secure, some place where I could sit, think, and compile all the information that I had on them. I’d stumbled across this container several days ago. Since I’d killed Dimitri Barkov, the previous owner of the shipping yard, this had seemed like a perfect spot to make my supersecret Circle headquarters.
It wasn’t any warmer in here than it was outside, and my breath frosted in the air, but at least the thick metal walls blocked the wind. I could have turned on the small heater that was sitting next to one of the tables, but I decided not to. Ma
ybe being cold and uncomfortable would motivate me to figure out the answers to all my questions. Worth a shot, anyway.
I switched on a few more lanterns, then turned my attention to the large dry-erase board that was pushed up against one of the walls. I’d gotten the idea from Bria, who’d had something similar in her house back when she’d first returned to Ashland and had been trying to find me, as well as take down Mab Monroe. She’d had photos, papers, and more tacked up to her board, a visual display of all the leads she was running down.
But my board was depressingly empty.
Oh, it had a photo of Hugh Tucker, and underneath that I’d written the few facts I knew about the vampire. But that was all the concrete information I had. The rest of the board was covered with questions.
Oh, the questions.
Who belongs to the Circle? Number of members? Are they only in Ashland? Who’s the leader? What’s the power structure? What illegal activities are they involved in?
The questions went on and on, all scribbled in my horrible handwriting. According to Tucker, the Circle had let Mab be the head of the underworld so that all the other criminals would focus solely on her. So I was guessing that all the tribute—all the money—from the bosses’ activities had flowed through Mab to the Circle on the sly. I wondered how much that missing income stream was hurting the group. Probably not much, if they were as rich and powerful as Tucker claimed, but I had no way to know for sure. Only one thing was certain—Mab had only been one head on this monstrous hydra, and I’d have to cut off all the others to finally kill the Circle for good.
I stalked back and forth in front of the board, looking at all the questions in turn, and massaging the cold, aching scars embedded deep in my palms—each one a circle surrounded by eight thin rays. Spider runes, the symbols for patience—something that I was in short supply of these days.
My fingers crept up to the ring on my right hand, which was also embossed with my spider rune, and I twisted it around a few times before grabbing the spider-rune pendant around my neck and sliding it back and forth on its chain. The silverstone ring and pendant both pulsed with my Ice and Stone magic that was stored in the metal, but all my elemental power hadn’t helped me solve the riddle of the Circle.
The more I looked at the questions, the more depressed I became. But the fidgeting certainly wasn’t helping anything, so I dropped my necklace, stepped forward, and grabbed a dry-erase marker from the shelf that ran along the bottom of the board.
I made a new box on the board and drew a crude hat in it. Fedora, I wrote under the box. Assassin. Acrobatic. Good with guns.
And . . . and . . . and that was all that I knew about her. Those were the sum total of facts I had about the woman. Once again, I cursed myself for not being faster, stronger, smarter. For not being able to at least capture and question her.
As an assassin, information was key. Who your target was, where he lived, the number of bodyguards he had, his family, friends, pets, habits, even his hobbies. All of that was important and useful in planning a hit on someone. But I didn’t have any of that when it came to the Circle.
I didn’t have anything.
I glared at the stupid hat I’d drawn, more disgusted than ever before. Part of me wanted to swipe my marker across it and the rest of the board, until I’d blotted out Fedora, Tucker, and all my damn questions. But that would have been childish, and I would just have had to erase everything and start all over again.
I still drew devil horns on top of Tucker’s head, though. Just because I could. I put them on top of the hat too.
It actually made me feel a little bit better, and I stared at the board, wondering how else I could mark up Tucker’s photo—
Creak.
I whipped around to the container door. That sounded like someone had taken hold of the handle and tried to yank the door open but hadn’t quite succeeded, given how thick and heavy the metal was.
Creak.
Sure enough, that person tried again, and this time, the door started swinging open.
Someone was outside—and they were coming in.
* * *
I dropped the marker, palmed a knife, and darted over to the door, plastering myself up against the metal wall beside it.
A second later, a woman wearing dark clothes and a toboggan slipped into the container, her head moving back and forth as she looked around.
“What in the blue blazes is she up to now—”
I didn’t give the woman time to finish her muttered sentence. In an instant, I grabbed her shoulder, spun her around, shoved her up against the wall, and raised my knife to her throat.
Lorelei Parker looked back at me, her pale blue eyes steady on mine. “Is this how you greet all your guests, Gin?” she said.
I hissed out a breath. “Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
“Don’t be. I came prepared.”
Something jabbed into my side. I looked down. Lorelei had one of her elemental Ice guns pressed up against my stomach. Even though the weapon was only loaded with a single bullet, it would still do plenty of damage, especially in that spot.
“Touché,” I murmured.
I dropped my knife from her throat and stepped back. Lorelei slid her Ice gun back into the holster on her belt.
“How did you know that I was in here?”
“I was doing a final check of the yard before leaving for the night, and I noticed that the padlock was open on the container. So I figured that you were probably in here.” She jerked her head at the door, which was wide-open now. “You might want to close that. And lock it from the inside next time, if you don’t want people sneaking up on you.”
I gave her a sour look, but Lorelei merely arched her eyebrows in a chiding response. So I shut the door and slid the metal bar down, locking us in the container.
Lorelei Parker was the smuggler supreme of the Ashland underworld, ready, willing, and able to get anything for anyone at any time. Weapons, cash, gold bars, art, designer fashions, exotic animals, fancy food and wines. If there was a black market for it, then Lorelei knew where to get it and how to best bring it into Ashland on the sly. She was also one of the few allies that I had in the underworld, despite the gun she’d just pulled on me.
Lorelei glanced around, taking in the tables and chairs that dotted the inside of the container. “You’ve been busy since the last time I was in here.”
“Well, I just had to decorate my new fancy digs,” I snarked back.
“Assassin chic. I like it.” She grinned. “You should come do my office in the warehouse while you’re at it.”
Given her smuggling interests, Lorelei had coveted the shipping yard for a long, long time. With Dimitri Barkov dead, she’d quickly and quietly taken control of it, paying off what was left of his crew to vacate the premises and bringing in her own people. Since I was the head of the underworld, such a move needed my approval, and I’d been happy to give it. All I’d asked in return was for one shipping container to call my own.
Lorelei was the only one who knew about my container. Not because I didn’t trust my other friends, but because Tucker and the Circle could be spying on all of us, and I hadn’t set up shop here just for them to realize what I was doing. More than that, I actually wanted to have something concrete to show my friends before I brought any of them here. Especially Bria and Finn, who wanted—needed—answers as badly as I did. Sometimes, I thought that we were like the three blind mice, desperately running around, searching for answers about our dead mothers, and all of us likely to get chopped to pieces by Tucker and the rest of the Circle.
Lorelei wandered over to the board, staring at all my scribblings and fiddling with the end of her black braid, which trailed out from underneath her royal-blue toboggan.
She snorted and pointed at the devil horns on Tucker’s photo. “I didn’t realize that you were such a ta
lented artist.”
“I just wish that I could get my hands on him in person,” I muttered. “I’d paint his face all interesting shades of bloody then. Better than Picasso.”
Lorelei eyed me, hearing the anger and frustration in my voice. “You’ll find Tucker eventually, and the rest of the Circle too. I have faith in you.”
“And why is that?”
She shrugged. “Because you, Gin Blanco, are the single most stubborn, determined person I know.”
My eyes narrowed. “That sounded suspiciously like a compliment. Why are you being so nice to me all of a sudden?”
“Because we’re friends, sort of, and that’s what friends do, right?” Her voice was casual, but she didn’t look at me as she said the words, and her mouth was set into a tense line, almost as if she was afraid that I would dismiss her soft sentiment outright.
“We are friends, sort of,” I said in a strong voice. “And do you know what else friends do?”
“What?”
I walked over and picked up the marker that I’d dropped on the floor. I handed it to her, then grabbed another one for myself, along with a bottle of gin and a couple of plastic cups from the metal rack.
“They have a drink and draw really bad caricatures of all their enemies,” I said. “What do you say to that, friend?”
Lorelei looked at the gin, the marker in her hand, then at me. Her pretty features creased into a grin. “I say that sounds like a grand old time, friend.”
4
Lorelei and I spent the next hour doodling on the dry-erase board before she finally put her marker down, saying that she needed to go home and check on Mallory, her grandmother. We said our good-nights, and I turned off the lanterns, locked up the shipping container, and drove home myself.
I took a shower and went to bed, although I spent a good portion of the night glaring at my bedroom ceiling, still cursing myself for letting Fedora get away. Once again, the Circle had been three steps ahead of me the whole time, and I still had no new information about them.