Despite the late hour, Jolene “Jo-Jo” Deveraux looked like she’d just finished getting ready to go out courting on Saturday night. A string of pearls hung around her throat, the same size as the pink polka dots on her fuchsia dress. Her bleached blond white hair curled around her head just so, and the perfect amount of understated makeup softened the lines of her middle-aged face. The smell of her Chantilly perfume filled the night air. I breathed in, enjoying the sweet, soft scent.
At exactly five feet, Jo-Jo was tall for a dwarf, with a figure that was still stocky and muscular despite her two hundred and fifty-seven years. Even though it couldn’t have been more than ten degrees outside, Jo-Jo’s feet were bare, showing off the raspberry pedicure that she’d given herself. The dwarf hated to wear socks, no matter how cold the weather got. One of the many quirks that I loved about her.
Jo-Jo stared at the five of us on her porch. The dwarf’s eyes were clear and almost colorless, except for the pinprick of black at the center of her irises. She raised a tweezed eyebrow. “Quite the crowd tonight, Gin. Usually, it’s just you and Finn.”
I shrugged. “What can I say? I seem to attract minions wherever I go these days. Kind of like the Pied Piper.”
Behind me, Finn huffed out his displeasure. “Minion? I am most certainly not a mere minion. Head minion, perhaps. At the very least.”
Jo-Jo let out a soft chuckle and stepped back. “Minion or not, why don’t y’all come on in and let me have a look at that fellow there with you — preferably before he bleeds all over my front porch. I just had it painted last week, you know.”
I entered the house first, trailed by Finn, Roslyn, and finally Xavier, still carrying Vinnie over his shoulder. Following Jo-Jo, we walked down a long hallway opening up into a room that took up the back half of the house.
Jo-Jo Deveraux made her living by being what she called a “drama mama.” That is to say, a purveyor of all things related to beauty. The dwarf used the back half of her antebellum house as a salon, offering every purifying, exfoliating, tweezing, plucking, dyeing, curling, cutting, perming, and waxing ritual known to Southern women. And even a few that the Yankees had invented. Jo-Jo also used her Air elemental magic to augment many of the treatments, which is what made her salon so popular. Oxygen facials and other Air beauty regimens were great for smoothing out unwanted crow’s feet and erasing stretch marks.
Beauty magazines, scissors, combs, curlers, hair dryers, and more filled the wide room, fighting for space on the tables and counters, along with more tubs of makeup and bottles of pink nail polish than you could find at Mab Monroe’s best-stocked Sell-Everything superstore.
At the sound of our footsteps, a dog sprawled in a wicker basket by the door raised up his head. Rosco, Jo-Jo’s fat, lazy basset hound. The brown and black beast gazed at us with dark, hopeful eyes. But when he realized that no one had any food that they planned on feeding him, he snorted once, put his head back down, and returned to his previously scheduled nap. Rosco didn’t like to overexert himself — ever.
“Put the poor fellow over there, Xavier.” Jo-Jo pointed to one of the cherry red, padded swivel chairs in the middle of the salon. “So I can take a look at him.”
Xavier put Vinnie down where Jo-Jo had instructed. The rest of us made ourselves comfortable in the other chairs scattered around the room, except for Finn, who headed into the kitchen on a coffee run.
I sat in the chair closest to Vinnie’s so I could keep an eye on the Ice elemental. Just because he’d been beaten to within an inch of death didn’t mean that he couldn’t rise up and do something stupid while Jo-Jo was healing him — like try to get away.
Once I was sure that Vinnie was out of it, I glanced around, half-expecting to see a dwarf dressed in all black come strolling into the salon. But Sophia, Jo-Jo’s younger sister, didn’t appear.
“Where’s Sophia?” I asked.
Jo-Jo went over to the sink and washed her hands. “She went out to see a Clint Eastwood film festival at that old theater over on St. Charles Avenue. She won’t be back until late.”
I nodded. In addition to Sophia’s Goth tendencies, she also happened to be a huge film buff.
Jo-Jo dried her hands, then clicked on a free-standing halogen light and angled it so that it illuminated Vinnie Volga’s bloody face. She let out a low whistle. “Giants?”
I nodded. “Some of Mab’s men. They were disappointed in Vinnie’s job performance and decided to show him exactly how much.”
Jo-Jo clucked her tongue and shook her head. Then she raised her hand up so that her palm hovered over Vinnie’s face, not quite touching his bloody, bruised skin. The dwarf’s eyes began to glow an opaque, buttermilk white, and the same sort of magical glow coated her palm. Jo-Jo’s Air magic crackled through the room like lightning, making me shift in my chair.
Jo-Jo was an Air elemental, which meant that her magic was the polar opposite of my Ice and Stone power. Two elements always opposed each other, like Fire and Ice, just as two elements always complemented each other, like Fire and Air. I always felt uncomfortable when I sensed so much of an opposing element being used, even if I knew that Jo-Jo was healing Vinnie instead of hurting him. Her magic just felt wrong to me, as foreign and alien as eating fried green tomatoes would to a Yankee.
Not only that, but Jo-Jo’s power also made the spider rune scars on my palms itch and burn, the way they always did whenever I was around so much elemental magic. The silverstone metal that had been melted into my flesh was highly prized for its ability to absorb and store all kinds of magic, and it always seemed to me that the silverstone in my hands actually hungered for power. That it was almost like a living thing, a parasite whose sole purpose was to soak up more and more magic until it just couldn’t contain another molecule of power. Sort of like a greedy vampire sucking down all the blood that he could get his fangs into.
Lots of elementals had rings, bracelets, or other jewelry made out of the metal for the sole purpose of containing bits and pieces of their power in the items — power they could then draw upon at a later time. Like when they were dueling another elemental. Wear your favorite silverstone ring, have that extra bit of juice handy when you needed it to destroy your enemy. It was all just a deadly form of magical batteries more than anything else.
“So who is this guy?” Jo-Jo asked in a soft voice.
The dwarf moved her hand back and forth across Vinnie’s face, not quite touching his battered features. With every pass of her hand, the swelling on Vinnie’s face went down a little more, the black bruises greened out and faded away, and the bloody cuts drew together and sewed themselves shut. Jo-Jo was using her Air elemental magic to force oxygen into Vinnie’s body, using her power to put all those broken molecules and blood vessels back together and make him whole once again. That’s how Air elementals healed — by using all the natural gases in the atmosphere, especially oxygen.
“He’s somebody who’s been spying on Roslyn for Mab,” I said.
Jo-Jo looked at me. “So why am I healing him?”
“Because he might have some useful information, and he seems to be in as much trouble as the rest of us.”
While Jo-Jo finished healing Vinnie, I told the others what I’d overheard in the park. Everything that the vampire had said about Vinnie spying on Roslyn, about the trap LaFleur had set for me with the fake rumor about the drug shipment, and how Mab had big plans for Vinnie’s daughter, Natasha.
“They said that about Natasha?” Roslyn asked. “That Mab was going to put her in some kind of whorehouse? She’s eight, maybe ten. She doesn’t deserve that.”