The smart thing to do would have been to walk away. To melt into the shadows. To disappear the way Fletcher had taught me. The way we'd always planned if something went wrong. I had enough fake IDs and credit cards in my vest to get me started, and more than enough cash hidden in various overseas accounts to live a life of anonymous luxury. It would have been easier than eating peach pie.
But I couldn't do that. I couldn't push Fletcher and Finn out of my mind. Couldn't turn my back on them. Couldn't disregard them and walk away like they would have wanted me to. Not when there might be a chance of saving one or both of them. I owed them that. They'd taken me in off the streets when I'd had nowhere else to go. I owed them everything. And they would have done the same for me. The father and son would have come for me as soon as they could, despite their own vows to the contrary. No, I wasn't walking away from them. Not now, not ever.
Besides, I'd never been one to take the easy path in life. Easy was for people too weak to suck it up and do what needed to be done.
And I wasn't weak. Not anymore.
I approached the Pork Pit from the back, slipping into the alley that ran behind the building. My eyes caught on a black crack across from the back of the restaurant, a narrow space just big enough for a child to squeeze into.
A hard smile curved my lips. An old hiding spot of mine, back when I'd been living on the streets. Empty and much too small for me now. Besides, I didn't need to hide. I'd become what I was so I'd never have to run and hide again.
But that didn't mean I still shouldn't be cautious. So I hunkered down beside one of the metal Dumpsters. Looking. Listening. Waiting.
Nothing. Not even a rat digging in the container beside me. Something very, very bad must have happened to scare the rats away.
I put my hand on the building, listening to the stone. The clogged contentment of yesterday had taken on a harsh, strident note. Something had upset the brick, intruded on its usual peace. Something sudden. Unexpected. Bloody. Violent. The low, sharp, vibrating rasp pounded in my skull like a dirge for the dead.
Fletcher.
My hand reached for the back door of the restaurant. I stopped. The door stood ajar just a tiny crack, hardly enough to be noticeable, but I'd spent the last seventeen years noticing everything and everyone around me. The kitchen knives slid into my hands. I backed away from the door and peered at it. A thin, black wire wrapped around the doorknob and led inside, hence the crack. Using one of the knives, I sliced the wire, careful not to jiggle it. Then I stood to one side of the door and pulled it open.
A shotgun had been erected inside the back room, rigged to fire when the door was opened. Turn the knob, step inside, and get two barrels to the chest. A crude but effective trap.
I waited and listened. Silence. Cold, cold silence.
Fletcher should have been puttering about the kitchen or doing inventory in the stockroom. Should have been brewing his chicory coffee and reading his latest book.
The quiet chilled me far more than the river had, soaking into my bones like an icy rain, despite the chemical hand warmers in my pockets.
I eased into the restaurant, checking the floor and ceiling around the door for more traps. Nothing. I paused after every step. Waiting, looking, searching. Nothing moved, not even the granddaddy long-leg spiders in their cubbyholes in the corners.
Finally, in front of the counter in the storefront, I found him.
Fletcher Lane sprawled across a crimson pool of blood on the floor. Several jagged stab wounds and spatters of blood marred his ripped, torn, blue work apron, almost like a bottle of ketchup had exploded on him. His clothes lay in tatters around him, defensive cuts blackened his hands, and his knuckles were swollen and bruised, as though he'd hit someone repeatedly. Money spilled out of the busted cash register, sticking to the tacky, bloody floor, along with the battered copy of Where the Red Fern Grows he'd been reading. Pieces of a broken cup dotted the floor beside him, along with the dregs of his chicory coffee. Caffeine fumes lingered in the air. The faint aroma made my heart twist.
Fletcher had also been tortured-by an Air elemental.
Long pieces of skin were missing from his face, arms, hands. The stomach-turning stench of raw meat overpowered the pancake pools of copper-scented blood on the floor. The Air elemental had used his fingers like they were fucking sandblasters, forcing oxygen under Fletcher's skin. Making it blister and burn and bubble up before he ripped it off, muscles, tendons, and all. A small strip here, a thumbprint-size indentation there, a fist-shaped mark right over his heart. None of the wounds immediately lethal, but all of them excruciatingly painful. The wounds were so deep I could see Fletcher's bones in places. Sticks of dirty ivory floating in a red, soupy mess of ripped flesh.
Fletcher had been flayed alive by magic.
And the Air elemental had kept right on torturing Fletcher, even after he was dead.
That was the only way to explain all the missing skin. All the gruesome blisters and horrid bubbles of flesh. There were so, so many of them. All causing more pain than most folks experienced in a lifetime.
It turned my stomach.
I might have killed people, but I usually ended their lives quickly. A single wound.
Two at the most. Quick, sure, accurate. This ... somebody had taken extreme pleasure in this. Glee. Joy, even.
My vision blurred. Something burned in my eyes. Crying. I was crying. Something I hadn't done in seventeen years. I drew in a breath and exhaled a sob. My body shook.
My lips trembled. A curious lightness filled my head. I couldn't look at Fletcher. Not now. Not when I was so close to losing control. To giving in to this emotional weakness.
I hunkered down on my ankles and forced myself to take deep breaths. To focus on drawing the air deep into my lungs and down into the pit of my roiling stomach. As though that was the most important thing in the world. As though Fletcher wasn't lying a foot in front of me. Dead.
When I'd come back to myself, I opened my gray eyes and stared at the repulsive wounds. Not as a person who'd just discovered a horrific murder. Not as the woman who'd just lost her mentor, the old man she'd loved. And definitely not as Gin, whose shredded heart had just been sliced up and dumped onto a plate like shoestring french fries.
No, I examined the wounds as an assassin, as the Spider. Cold. Clinical. Detached.
Determined to learn what I could from them.
And I found something. The elemental who'd burned Fletcher was a woman, someone with slender, delicate hands, judging from the dainty size of the fist over Fletcher's heart. I balled up my own hand in comparison. Hers was smaller.
The fact that a woman had tortured Fletcher didn't surprise me. I'd learned long ago the fairer sex was much more vicious than men-and much more patient. This one, this sadistic bitch ... she'd reveled in torturing Fletcher. In using her magic to hurt him. In slowly flaying him alive. In hearing him scream for mercy until his throat was as red as his raw skin.
And she was going to pay for it. More than she'd ever fucking imagined.
Whatever else happened tonight, whether Finn was dead or alive, I wasn't running.
Not from this. Not from her. I wasn't skipping town and lying low in some foreign country for a while. Ashland might not be the most pleasant place, but it was home.
More importantly, the Pork Pit was home, as crazy as that sounded. I wasn't leaving it behind. Not like this. Not with Fletcher's blood covering the floor like a fresh coat of wax.
I held my breath, waiting for Fletcher to turn his head, open his dull green eyes, and grouse at me for keeping him waiting. But he didn't do that. And he never would again.
The bitch who'd done this was going to pay for that.
I needed to go. Needed to move. Needed to get to Finn, if it wasn't already too late.
But I couldn't tear myself away from Fletcher's body.
He was the one who'd taken me in off the streets when I'd had nowhere else to go.
Who'd rescued me from fighting the rats for garbage to eat. Saved me from selling my body to the vampire pimps. Taught me how to be strong. Showed me how to survive-and live with what I had to do to stay that way.
As I crouched there over Fletcher's bloody body, a faint scuffle sounded. A slight, scraping noise that intruded upon my grief. More than enough to snap my cold, calm control back into place. A shadow fell over the pools of Fletcher's drying blood, turning the crimson puddles an inky black.
Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
My fingers tightened around the knife in my hand. I turned and whirled it at the man behind me. The metal flashed through the air and sank into his right arm. He howled in pain and lunged at me, slashing with a switchblade. I sidestepped his clumsy, awkward blow. Using his own momentum, I shoved the man forward. He crashed into the counter and fell to the floor. I leaped on him and knocked the blade out of his hand. I straddled the man, crushing his ribs between my knees.
I didn't care about the wound throbbing in my shoulder or the burning nick on my arm. Didn't think about the cold that just wouldn't leave my body or the exhaustion slowing my movements. I just hit him-over and over and over, smashing my tight knuckles into his face until the skin on my hands broke and bled.
It felt good to hurt him. So fucking good.
The man moaned and mumbled with pain. I forced myself to stop before I killed him.
Not yet. I drew in a ragged breath. The metallic scent of his blood pooled in my mouth like saliva, making me hunger for more. I yanked my knife out of the man's arm. He snarled. I leaned forward and pressed my forearm against his throat, cutting off his oxygen.
I brought the bloody tip up where he could see it. "You will tell me everything that happened in this room tonight. You will tell me who you're working for, what her plans are. You will tell me anything I want to know and be glad to do it."
"And why ... is that ... bitch?" the man spat out.
I leaned forward until my gray eyes were directly over his.
"Because the first cut won't kill you," I said in a calm, dead voice. "Nor the second, nor the third, nor even the tenth. But you will wish to all the spirits you pray to that they had."
Chapter Seven
I didn't get a specific name or much useful information out of him. I was too angry and in too much of a hurry to use the finesse needed for those sorts of things. Besides, he was just the help, dispatched to do one final check to see if I'd show up at the restaurant. He'd seen the open back door and followed me inside. But the man confirmed my suspicion-Finnegan was next. Which meant I had to move if I had any hope of saving him.
As much as it hurt, I left Fletcher's body where it was behind the counter. Sophia Deveraux, the dwarven cook who came in early every morning to bake the sourdough bread for the day's sandwiches, would find Fletcher. She'd call the cops. Given the debris and overturned cash register, the police would think it was a robbery gone wrong. That's what they thought every crime was in Ashland. Fletcher would be just another statistic, another case file, another unsolved murder among hundreds every year.
Before I left the restaurant, I washed the blood off my hands and face, along with my tears. I also dragged the dead man's body to the cold storage room and dumped him in one of the empty freezers. I taped a pink sticky note to the top of the appliance to catch Sophia's eye. She'd know what to do with the body. The dwarf was Fletcher's go-to gall for disposal work.
I reached behind a different freezer and pulled out a black duffel bag, one of several I had stashed in various spots throughout the city. Money, cell phones, credit cards, weapons, fake IDs, makeup, a few clothes. Everything I needed to make a quick getaway, change my appearance, or do an unexpected, dirty job.
I stepped back into the front of the restaurant and crouched beside Fletcher. A few more tears gathered in my eyes as I looked at his still, brutalized form. I let the stinging, salty wetness trickle down my face. There wasn't time to properly mourn Fletcher, to let myself grieve. The time to do that would come later-when the bitch who'd killed him was as dead as he was.
Cold comfort. Because no matter what I did to her, no matter how much I tortured her, no matter how slowly I killed her, it wouldn't bring Fletcher back. Nothing would do that.
"Good-bye, Fletcher." My voice cracked on the words.
A tear dripped off my cheek and mixed with the blood and burns on his face. I straightened and wiped the rest of the moisture away, composing myself once more.
Then I smashed the glass and lock on the front door, stepped outside, and walked away.
It took me twenty minutes to reach Finnegan Lane's place. Like me, Finn lived in an apartment building near the restaurant. Except his place made mine look like a hobo's wet cardboard box. The metal behemoth towered twelve stories into the air, topped by an elegant spire, like it was a real skyscraper instead of a piss-poor southern substitute.
I headed around to the side entrance for the tenants, tastefully hidden behind two tall magnolia trees. A minute and two Ice picks later, the door opened, and I slid inside. Despite the late hour, folks still prowled the halls, as the businesspeople who lived in the building brought their nightly conquests back for a few more drinks and some alcohol-fueled fumbling and fucking in the dark.
I got into one of the elevators on its way up. A man in his eighties wearing a rumpled tux and a shaggy toupee slobbered on the ear of a blond hooker, while another rubbed his burgeoning crotch. A third girl, a brunette, stood off to the side, not involved or not caring to become so in the menage a trois. Four really was a crowd.
The two hookers gave me a hard stare. Their red lips drew back, and they flashed their fangs at me. Vampires. Upscale ones, from the pearl white color of their pointed teeth. But when they realized I wasn't horning in on their action, they went back to telling the old guy how much they were going to enjoy getting screwed by him.
