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.”
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.