Watching them die had been horrible enough, but it was all the other sensations that truly haunted me. My mother’s blackened, smoking husk of a body hitting the floor with a dull thud. Annabella’s nightgown crackling like a match that had just been lit. My mother’s skin crumbling to ash. The stench of their charred flesh filling my nose. The hot, acrid odor of fire, smoke, and cooked skin sliding down my throat, making my stomach heave, and poisoning me from the inside out as I realized that my mother and sister were dead, dead, dead—
My phone rang, snapping me back to the here and now.
My hand had fisted so tightly around Annabella’s ivy vine that her symbol pressed into the spider rune branded into my palm, another parting gift from Mab. I forced my fingers open and backed away from the rune pendants and matching drawings, trying to clear the morbid memories out of my mind and ignore the pain pulsing in my heart.
Easier said than done, but I went over to the coffee table and picked up my phone. The caller ID said that it was Finn.
“Please tell me that you found something on that cab Elissa got into,” I said immediately upon answering.
“What?” Finn said. “No hello? No small talk? No chitchat?”
“Not when a girl is missing. So what did you find out?”
“According to the cabdriver’s log, Elissa paid with a credit card,” Finn said. “Guess where the cabbie dropped her off at last night, around eight o’clock?”
“I have no idea,” I snapped, not in the mood to play along right now.
“Northern Aggression,” he said in a smug voice.
Well, that was actually a bit of good news. Unlike with Marco, I wouldn’t have any problems getting this security footage; Roslyn Phillips, the owner of Northern Aggression, was a good friend.
“Feel like calling Owen and going over there?” Finn asked.
“Absolutely.”
“Good,” he said. “Because I’ve already called Roslyn. So put on your dancing shoes, Gin. We’re going out tonight.”
? ? ?
An hour later, a sharp knock sounded on my front door, which I opened to find Finn standing outside on the porch.
My eyes widened. “What are you wearing?”
Instead of his usual dark, subdued banker’s suit, Finn was sporting a light gray coat over a powder-blue bow tie, shirt, vest, and pants, along with shiny, white patent-leather wing tips. His dark brown hair was slicked back into an artful style, he was freshly shaven, and a bit of spicy cologne wafted off him.
He grinned. “Isn’t it great? It’s winter chic, the newest style from Fiona Fine.”
“You look like a bad prom date.”
He arched his eyebrows, his green gaze taking in the boots, jeans, blue sweater, and black fleece jacket that I’d had on all day. “And you look like you beat up some guys earlier and forgot to wash their blood out of your jacket.” He stabbed his finger at the dime-size stains on the fleece. “I know what those dark spots really are.”
I shrugged. “It was only three guys, and they didn’t bleed all that much.”
Finn’s eyebrows rose a little higher in disbelief.
“Well, they didn’t bleed all that much on me,” I amended. “Certainly not enough for me to change jackets.”
He shook his head. “Your lack of fashion sense always confounds me. But blood-spattered jacket aside, there is another issue.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “And what would that be?”
He sniffed the air. “You still smell like barbecue from the restaurant.”
“You once told me that smelling like barbecue was a total aphrodisiac.”
“And it usually is,” Finn said. “Women and barbecue are two of my favorite things. But not when we’re going out clubbing.”
“We are not going clubbing. We’re looking for a missing girl. They are not the same thing. Not at all. Not even a little bit.”
He grinned. “You say potato . . .”
I rolled my eyes. “I know, I know. You say opportunity. Let’s go, Prom King. Owen is meeting us there. Bria has to work tonight, but she said that she’d call if she had any news.”
I shut and locked the front door behind me, then drove us over to the nightclub.
Northern Aggression was Ashland’s most decadent club, known near and far for its many hedonistic pleasures. You could get just about anything you wanted in the club—drinks, smokes, blood, sex—in just about any amount and combination, as long as you had enough cash or credit to pay your tab at the end of the night. Even though it was just after seven o’clock on a Wednesday night, dozens of people were already standing in line, waiting to get past the giant bouncers and the red velvet rope so they could go inside and get their party started.
The nightclub was located in a featureless building that looked like it could have housed a call center or some other anonymous corporate endeavor. The only thing that set the club apart from the surrounding Northtown buildings was the sign over the front door: a heart with an arrow shooting straight through it, Roslyn Phillips’s rune for her club and all the pleasure and pain that could be had inside. The sign glowed a bright neon red, then orange, and finally yellow, highlighting the eager faces of all the people milling around below.
Finn, being Finn, naturally strutted past everyone and went straight to the front of the line. Normally, I would have scoffed at his swagger and told him to wait his turn, but tonight I followed him. I wanted to get inside as quickly as possible and find out what had happened to Elissa.
Finn shook hands with first one bouncer, then the other. “Gerald, Tim, nice to see you guys again.”
The giants nodded and murmured their thanks, since Finn had just slipped each one of them a C-note to further expedite our entrance into the club. They undid the red velvet rope and let us pass, much to the muttered annoyance of everyone else still waiting in line in the cold.
I followed Finn inside, and we made our way to the main dance floor. The outside of Northern Aggression might be plain and featureless, but the inside was all luxe decadence. The dance floor was made of a springy bamboo, and thick red velvet curtains covered the walls. And most important to those partying hard, a large elemental Ice bar ran along one wall.
The bar had been updated a bit since the last time I’d been here, with the shapes of martini glasses, cherries, and other drink paraphernalia carved into the pale, glittering surface. Behind the bar, a guy mixed drink after drink, his eyes glowing a bright blue as he steadily fed his magic into the thick sheet of Ice to keep it frozen, solid, and in one piece amid the heat from all the bodies gathered around it and grooving out on the dance floor.