“What happened to the other two girls?”
She kept wheezing, and he stepped forward, as though he was going to throttle her again. She staggered back and snapped up her hand. Flames erupted on her fingertips, momentarily stopping him. But as fast as the vampire was, he could easily snap her neck before she even had a chance to blast him with her magic.
“I don’t know. They were still in the mansion when it all came tumbling down. I assume that they’re both buried in the rubble.”
Hugh looked back at the burning mansion. “But you don’t know for sure. You didn’t kill them yourself. You didn’t actually see them die.”
The Fire elemental cleared her throat and straightened up, trying to regain her composure. “I didn’t have time. But you’re right. We should check and make sure that they didn’t escape. We wouldn’t want any loose ends coming back to strangle us later, would we?”
She stepped behind a pile of rubble, out of my line of sight, but I heard her voice ring out loud and clear. “Barry! Chuck! Carlos! Get over here! Start searching the woods for survivors!”
“Sure thing, boss!” a male voice called back.
A few seconds later, three giants jogged into view. They stopped long enough to nod their heads respectfully at Hugh, the vampire, and then headed toward the tree line—toward me.
Heart pounding, I lurched to my feet, whipped around, and stumbled deeper into the woods. I had to hide. I had to run, or I’d be as dead as the rest of my family . . .
I woke up grinding my teeth, my fingers clenching the blanket, my spider rune scars itching and burning as though Mab Monroe had just freshly branded them into my palms, just like she had on that horrible night so long ago.
For a moment, I didn’t remember where I was, but then last night came rushing back to me. Finding the dead girl at Northern Aggression. The trip to the coroner’s office. All the ugly revelations about my spider rune and the Dollmaker. Driving Jade home and destroying her world with the news that the serial killer had her sister.
I forced myself to let go of the blanket and take deep, slow, calming breaths as I dug my fingers into first one scar, then the other, trying to massage the memories out of the marks, as well as my mind. But it didn’t work.
It never did.
I might have gotten some sleep, but it hadn’t been restful. Not at all. And the memory that it had brought along with it . . . So many awful things had happened that night, and I’d been in so much pain that it was hard to keep track of them all. Oh, I dimly remembered staggering away from our burning mansion, trekking through the woods in the dark, and eventually making my way down into the city. But I hadn’t remembered Hugh Tucker being there, talking to Mab, not until tonight. And he’d actually been upset that she’d murdered my mother. Distraught enough to consider killing Mab with his bare hands.
I thought back to how Damian Rivera had mocked Tucker by bringing up my mother. My memory seemed to confirm that the two of them had had some sort of relationship. I wondered exactly what had happened between them, what had gone so wrong that it had ended with my mother’s murder.
But that was a question for another day. There was no more time to rest, so I threw off the blanket, swung my feet over the side of the couch, and got up, ready to start the day and face whatever new danger, despair, and heartbreak it might bring.
15
Jade was still asleep, so I went into the kitchen and raided her refrigerator and cabinets, determined to make her a hearty breakfast. Even though she didn’t feel like it, she needed to eat to keep her strength up, and so did I.
But the kitchen was depressingly empty, except for all the containers of take-out food in the fridge, including several from the Pork Pit. I opened one and sniffed the contents. My nose wrinkled at the sour stench. Even I couldn’t do anything with two-week-old baked beans, so I tossed them into the garbage, along with some old Thai food, a couple of half-eaten burritos, and a lasagna that was pea-green with mold.
Luckily, Jade had some fresh eggs, milk, and cheddar cheese in her fridge, and I found a couple of potatoes tucked away in a cabinet, along with some dill weed and other spices. So I whipped up some cheesy scrambled eggs with a side of fried, seasoned breakfast potatoes.
I was dishing up a plate of food for myself when Jade stumbled into the kitchen. She looked slightly less exhausted than she had last night, and her eyes weren’t quite as red this morning. She hadn’t been crying today. Yet.
“Just in time,” I said, keeping my voice light. “Sit down, and eat up.”
Jade staggered over to the table, plopped down, and stared with bleary eyes at the plate that I slid in front of her. “How can you even function without coffee?” she mumbled.
I thought of my memory of Hugh Tucker and Mab Monroe watching my childhood home burn to the ground. “Trust me,” I muttered. “I don’t need a jolt of java to start my day.”
I poured Jade a cup of the coffee that I’d brewed and set it in front of her. She leaned over and breathed in the rich fumes, waking up a bit more, before grabbing the cup and taking a sip of the hot, dark liquid.
She gagged, almost spitting it right back out again. “What—what is this? Because it is most certainly not coffee.”
“Sure it is. Chicory coffee. I had a bag of it stashed in the emergency supplies in my trunk. You were out of your regular brew, so I had to use it instead.”
She frowned. “You keep coffee in your car?”
“Sure. Coffee, granola bars, bottled water, knives, healing ointment. The usual.”
“But why coffee?” she asked. “What kind of assassin emergency requires chicory coffee?”
“Finnegan Lane.”
Jade gave me a puzzled look.
“You do not want to talk to Finn in the morning before he’s had his coffee. It’s like trying to communicate with a bear that’s just woken up from hibernating. Glares, grumbling, and gnashing teeth. It’s not pretty, not pretty at all.”
I sat down with my own plate and nudged hers a little closer to her elbow. “Now, eat up.”
Jade stared at the food. After a moment, she shook her head. “Sorry, but I just don’t feel like eating. Not when I know that Elissa is out there somewhere, that she probably hasn’t had a meal in hours . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she blinked back the tears in her eyes. “So what’s our next move?”
“Our next move?”