It wasn't hard to realize what Mab's reasoning was. Roslyn was at the center of Elliot Slater's death, and the press has painted her as the tragic victim, the way that she really was. All that meant that the Fire elemental couldn't touch Roslyn right now, not with the Ashland news media still focused on the incident. It would just be too messy, even for Mab, especially given the fact that she also had me, the Spider, to deal with. So the Fire elemental had decided to go after Roslyn another way-by destroying her business. And Vinnie and Natasha had been caught in the middle of it all.
"So you don't know where the club might be?" I asked Vinnie.
The Ice elemental shook his head. "No. Only that Mab plans to start it soon. From the way things sounded, she's hired LaFleur to run it, as well as oversee her men."
So LaFleur wasn't just in Ashland to find and kill me. It looked as though the other assassin was also coming on board as Mab's newest top lieutenant-a position formerly held by the late, unlamented Elliot Slater.
"Finn?" I asked.
My foster brother leaned against one of the salon walls. He'd put his gun away, but he was still sipping his coffee. The warm, fragrant, chicory blend drifted over to me.
I thought of his old man then and how he'd helped people on the sly for years, even when he was working as the assassin the Tin Man. My mind had already been made up, of course, but thinking of Fletcher comforted me. I could almost see him behind the counter at the Pork Pit, nodding his head in approval of what I was about to do.
"Yeah?" Finn asked.
"Start digging and see what you can find out about this new nightclub. The name, where it might be located, anything useful."
If there was anyone who could ferret out the information in a hurry, it was Finn. In addition to his banking skills, he also had a network of anonymous spies and sources that any clandestine agency would be proud of. And if his spies couldn't find something out for him, Finn was more than capable of hacking into whatever computer system contained the knowledge he needed.
Finn nodded. "I'm on it."
I turned to look at Roslyn and Xavier. "You two need to be extremely careful right now. We know about Vinnie, but there's no telling who else Mab and LaFleur might have bribed on your staff. You need to discreetly nose around and figure out who you can trust and who you can't."
Roslyn and Xavier both nodded.
"Don't worry, Gin," Roslyn said. "After what Elliot Slater did to me, anybody who's working on the sly for Mab is getting booted out on her ass."
Next, I looked at Jo-Jo. "You know that Vinnie's going to need a place to stay out of sight until we can get this thing sorted out."
The dwarf smiled at me, the lines deepening on her middle-aged face. "It's a good thing that I've got plenty of extra bedrooms then, isn't it?"
Vinnie glanced at me, then the others. "What's going on? What are you all talking about?"
I stared at him. "I'm talking about you staying here where you'll be safe, Vinnie. I'm talking about getting you out from under Mab's and LaFleur's heavy thumbs. I'm talking about rescuing your daughter from whatever hellhole Mab has got her stashed in. That's what I'm talking about."
Vinnie's mouth fell open in shock. He blinked several times, as though he was thinking about speaking but the words just wouldn't come to him.
"Do you want me to do that?" I asked. "Do you want me to find your daughter? Because I was under the impression that you cared about her-a lot."
"You-you would do that for me? Try to find Natasha?" Hope brightened Vinnie's pale blue gaze.
Hope. An emotion that always kept suckering me in, time after time, despite my supposed retirement from the assassin business. Hope. The one thing that always seemed to get me into more trouble than just killing people for money ever had. Ah, hope. Sometimes, I really hated it.
"Yes."
Vinnie blinked again, and suspicion darkened his eyes. "But why would you do that? Nobody does something like that for free, and I-I don't have any money to pay you. But I can get some," he hurried to add. "I can get however much you want. I promise you that I can."
"I don't want your money, Vinnie. I have more of my own than I can ever spend."
The Ice elemental frowned at the harsh tone in my voice, but I couldn't be any gentler with him. I couldn't get his hopes up any higher than they were. Not until I found Natasha and saw exactly what had been done to her.
"As for why I would do something like this, well, there are a lot of reasons," I continued. "But mainly, because it seems to be what I do now. Don't get me wrong; I'm not promising you kittens and rainbows. Mab's men have had Natasha for hours already. There's no telling what kind of shape she's in. Do you understand what that means? How hurt she could be? Inside and out? Even if we find her, even if we get her back, she might never be the same little girl that you knew and loved before. Can you handle that? Can you give her the help that she's going to need?"
Vinnie closed his eyes a moment, but he slowly nodded.
"All right then," I said. "I'll find your daughter. I'll find Natasha. And if I can't do that or if she's already dead when I get to her, then I promise you one thing-that the people who took her will wish for their own deaths long before I am through with them. How does that sound to you?"
Vinnie stared at me with his pale blue eyes. Emotions swirled in his gaze. Fear. Grief. Anger. Anguish. Worry. Slowly, he nodded his head once more.
"Good," I said. "Then we have a deal."
Chapter 10
Two hours later, I drove my Benz up a long, steep driveway lined on either side by thick stands of pine trees. Gravel churned under my wheels, but eventually my car crested the hill and rolled out onto the flat plateau on top of this particular ridge, one of many in the Appalachian Mountains that cut through Ashland like jagged teeth on a saw.
I stopped my car in front of the large, three-story clapboard house that perched on top of the steep hill. Gray stone, red clay, and brown brick all mishmashed together on the sprawling structure, along with a tin roof, black shutters, and blue eaves. At first glance, it looked like the house wasn't quite finished or perhaps that someone had run out of building materials and had just decided to use whatever was handy. Still, the uneven shapes and styles pleased me, because this was my home now.
The enormous house had been in Fletcher Lane's family for years, and the old man had left it to me in his will, along with a sizable amount of cash. Not that I'd really needed either one, as I'd put plenty of my own money away for a rainy day. The ramshackle structure was much too large for just me to live in by myself. Half a dozen people could have comfortably roomed inside and never run into each other if they didn't want to. I probably should have boarded up the structure and moved out into a smaller apartment or town house in the city, somewhere closer to the Pork Pit. That's where I'd been living before Fletcher had been murdered. But the house was one of the few things that I had left of the old man, and I planned on staying here as long as it-and I-were both still standing.
Despite my sentimental feelings, I still parked my car and approached the front door with my usual, wary caution. LaFleur might not have trapped me the other night down at the docks, but that didn't mean the assassin wasn't still looking for me. If her resources were as good as mine were, she'd find me-sooner rather than later. And then we'd dance. But I wasn't about to give her the upper hand by doing something sloppy, like not paying attention to my surroundings. Not even here, at my sanctuary from the world.
As I walked toward the house, my eyes scanned over what I could see of the yard in the darkness. The smooth lawn stretched out for about a hundred feet before nose-diving into a series of jagged cliffs that even some mountain goats would have had a hard time climbing. Heavy clouds obscured the silver moon and twinkling stars tonight and cast the landscape in almost coal black darkness, especially up here on this high, forested ridge. The lights of Ashland gleamed in the valley below, like fireflies hovering across the surface of a quiet, murky pond.
I also cocked my head to the side and reached out with my elemental magic, listening to the stones around me-everything from the gravel under my feet in the driveway to the falling cliffs off to my right to the brick that made up part of the house itself.
The stones only whispered with their low, usual murmurs, telling me of the cold whip of the wind around the ridge, the soft scurry of animals to and fro, and the slow, crumbling passage of time. No one had been near the house all day. I would have sensed the vibration, the disturbance, in the stones otherwise, especially if it had been someone like LaFleur here to murder me in my own bed. Dark intentions like that always found their way into their stone surroundings, and the blacker your desire, the sooner it happened.
Good. I was in no mood to kill unwanted company. Not after everything that had happened tonight. Not when I knew that there was a young girl out there somewhere who might be dying at this very moment. While Jo-Jo had tucked Vinnie into bed in one of her guest rooms, Finn and Xavier had gone over to the bartender's house to confirm whether Natasha had actually been kidnapped. The news wasn't good. They'd found the baby-sitter tied up and stuffed in a closet. She'd told them the same story Brown had spouted at the park-that some men had stormed in, roughed her up, grabbed Natasha, and left. I had no doubt that the men had taken the little girl straight to the mysterious new nightclub that Mab was building-and all the potential horrors that awaited there.
But there was nothing that I could do to help Natasha tonight, not when I didn't even know where to start looking for her. If she made it until morning, if Finn found out something useful from his sources, things might be different. But not tonight.
Once I was certain that everything was as it should be, I stepped up onto the porch and approached the front door. Given the many additions that had been slapped onto the house over the years, bits and pieces of stone ran throughout the entire structure, including the front door, which was composed of black granite so hard that even a giant would have a tough time punching his way through it. As added insurance against unwanted intruders, rich veins of silverstone also swirled through the stone.
The magical metal would absorb a fair amount of elemental power before it began to soften, weaken, and melt, which should give me plenty of time to be somewhere else other than a sitting duck inside waiting for whoever was huffing and puffing and blowing down my door. It would take someone with major elemental magic to get through that much silverstone. Not the kind of person that I wanted coming inside the house and catching me unawares.
My security check done, I unlocked the door and stepped into the house.
I toed off my bloody boots just inside the door, then padded in my wool socks to the kitchen in the back. So many rooms had been added to the house that it was a bit like navigating through a labyrinth, except there was no Minotaur in the middle waiting to gobble me up. Halls crisscrossed this way and that, while even more passageways curved around them and led to completely new areas-or dead ends. You could wander around in here for days and still not find every room, something that was a tactical advantage for me, should someone unsavory ever come calling after-hours.
I was too tired to even think about going into the kitchen and making myself something to snack on, even though it had been hours since I'd grabbed a quick dinner at the Pork Pit. After the night I'd had, I should have showered, gone to bed, and rested up for what was sure to be a long day of searching for Natasha tomorrow.
But instead, I found myself in the den, the way that I always seemed to late at night when I had something on my mind and trouble dogging my footsteps.
The den was a comfortable room, with a couple of recliners and a worn sofa that had been around so long that each section was perfectly grooved to fit someone's ass. I plopped down on the sofa, letting my tired body sink into the thick, soft cushions, and propped my socked feet up on the scarred coffee table.
As always, my eyes lifted up to the mantel on the fireplace across from me-and the series of framed drawings that were propped up there.
I'd done the first three drawings a while back for a class that I'd taken over at Ashland Community College. I was one of the college's perpetual students, taking any and every course that appealed to me, especially those that dealt with cooking or literature, two of my passions. One of the projects in the art class that I'd audited had been to create a series of drawings, all different but linked together by a common theme.
I'd drawn a series of runes-the symbols of my dead family.
A snowflake, a curling ivy vine, and a primrose. The symbols for icy calm, elegance, and beauty. The snowflake had belonged to my mother, Eira, being the main rune for the Snow family, the one that had identified us to other elementals. The other two symbols had been fashioned into medallions that my sisters had worn. The ivy vine for my older sister, Annabelle, and the primrose for my younger sister, Bria.
But the fourth rune was relatively new. I'd done it only a couple of months ago, after Fletcher had been tortured to death by an Air elemental. That drawing was shaped like a pig holding a platter of food. An exact rendering of the multicolored neon sign that hung over the entrance to the Pork Pit. Not a rune, not exactly, but I'd drawn it in honor of the old man. Fletcher had been the only father I'd ever really known, and I'd wanted to honor him, just the way I had the rest of my family.
I stared at the runes for another moment. Then I rubbed my hands over my face, took my feet off the coffee table, leaned forward, and picked up one of two manila folders lying there. The first file had been on the table for weeks now, since it dealt with my sister Bria, but I'd retrieved the second folder earlier today from Fletcher's cluttered office in another part of the house. That was the one I was interested in tonight.