I stubbed out my latest cigarette, walked into the parking lot, and left the pack and lighter on the hood of the closest car, along with my martini glass.
“They went out the west side,” Finn said. “Through the door next to the hall that leads to the VIP rooms.”
Following Finn’s directions, I headed through the parking lot, slipping past rows of cars, and moving at an angle past the long line of people still waiting to get into Northern Aggression. I finally rounded the side of the building and reached one of the far parking lots. Sure enough, I spotted a group of men up ahead of me.
Vinnie Volga stood in the middle of the group, a man on either side of him, their hands on his arms, forcibly walking him somewhere. Another guy in front led the way. Every few steps, Vinnie would jerk against his captors, trying to break free, but it was no use. Both men were giants, judging by their bulky, seven-foot frames, and giants were incredibly strong, with grips like steel vises. The only way that Vinnie could wrench free from them would be to tear his own arms off in the process.
They were about two hundred feet ahead of me. I let out a soft curse and quickened my pace. I needed to get to them before they got into a car. Otherwise, I’d never see Vinnie again — alive anyway.
To my surprise, the three men didn’t herd the bartender into a waiting vehicle. Instead, they reached the edge of the nightclub parking lot and kept right on walking down the street. I frowned. Where were they taking Vinnie?
“Gin? What’s happening?” Finn asked.
“They’re on foot,” I told Finn. “Still heading west. What else is out here?”
Through the phone, I could hear the roar of the club’s rocking music and Finn having some sort of muffled conversation. He must still be sitting in the booth with Roslyn.
“Roslyn says that there’s a park about half a mile down the road,” Finn said. “She’s taken Catherine there a few times.”
Catherine was Roslyn’s young niece, whom the vampire adored.
“Ask her what’s there,” I said.
Finn murmured something else to Roslyn. Ahead of me, the men kept walking, and I kept following them, moving from the shadow of one car to the next.
“Roslyn says there’s a playground with a swing set, a sandbox, and some other stuff for kids. Lots of trees, too. It wouldn’t be a bad place to have a quiet little chat with someone this late at night.”
“Especially if you didn’t want to get blood in your car,” I murmured. “Our new friends are headed in that direction. They don’t seem to be in a particular hurry, so I’m going to amble along behind them. It might be nice if you could come out and join the party.”
“Roger that,” Finn said. “On my way.”
We both hung up. I stuffed the phone back into my jeans pocket. When I reached the edge of the parking lot, I stopped, half-hidden behind a large SUV. The group of men herding Vinnie along had already crossed the street and were busy cutting through another parking lot on the other side that flanked two more industrial-looking buildings.
I shook my sleeve, and a silverstone knife slid into my hand. The hilt of the weapon rested against the spider rune scar branded into my palm. The blade was as familiar to me as my own face, and a natural extension of myself in so many ways. And now, it was time for the Spider to hunt with it once more.
A cold smile curved my lips as I stepped into the waiting darkness.
There wasn’t nearly as much cover as I would have liked, but it was easy enough for me to slide from shadow to shadow without the giants seeing me. Besides, they weren’t the most observant of men, more interested in making sure that Vinnie didn’t break free and bolt than worried about who might be watching them. The two giants holding the bartender shot a couple of cursory looks over their broad shoulders, but that was about it. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.
Their casual inattention was going to be the death of them — real soon.
After several minutes of walking, the men reached the edge of the park that Finn had mentioned. An iron gate curved over the entrance, and a maple tree rune set in the middle of the design denoted it as a park, along with the name Green Acres. Just the place that I wanted to be. Old-fashioned iron streetlights lined a cobblestone walk-way that led farther into the park.
I cocked my head to one side and reached for my Stone magic, listening to every part of the element around me, from the pavement and sidewalks that I’d just left behind to the cobblestones stretching out in front of me.
The pavement and sidewalks behind me only whispered of the steady grind of traffic, while the cobblestones ahead gave off low, quiet murmurs of the wind rustling in the trees, the pit-pat of small, eager feet, and the easy lope of animals across the grass. This was the sort of place that families came to enjoy a picnic lunch or an afternoon in the summer sun. Nothing else.
So I waited until the men were about two hundred feet in front of me, deep into the park, before following them.
I stayed off the well-lit path, instead moving from tree to tree, and keeping the men within sight. As I skulked, I also kept an eye out for LaFleur. Just because the assassin had gotten into a limo with Mab didn’t mean that she wasn’t meeting up with her men later. Hell, she could be on her way here right now. LaFleur might want the pleasure of killing Vinnie herself. Some assassins were twisted like that, and she’d certainly seemed to enjoy frying the dwarf with her electrical magic last night.
Finally, the men reached their destination — the playground that Finn had told me about. Since this was Northtown, the playground was a monstrous, elaborate affair, with at least ten swings, several seesaws, a large merry-go-round, and a sandbox that was almost big enough to be its own private beach. The metal gleamed a dull silver underneath the white glow of the streetlights, while the sand glinted like gold. I slithered behind the thick trunk of a maple tree so that the swing set stood between me and the men.
The giants slung Vinnie down in the middle of the sandbox. The Ice elemental bartender did a header into the ground, his face plunging into the loose sand like he was an ostrich. After a moment, he flailed up onto his knees, coughing, choking, and trying to spit out the sand all at once.
And that’s when the fun started.
The giants yanked Vinnie up and started hitting him, while the third man stood back and watched. Thwack-thwack-thwack. The giants held Vinnie up between them, so he couldn’t even curl up tight and try to protect himself. Their massive, meaty fists slammed into his chest, his face, even his balls once or twice. Vinnie groaned with every blow.
After thirty seconds, Vinnie was in bad shape. At the minute mark, he looked like he’d been hit by a bus. By the time two minutes had passed, the bus had been joined by a couple of tractor trailers.
I thought about intervening, about jumping into the mix and stopping the torture. After all, I had questions for Vinnie — questions that he couldn’t answer if he was dead. But the giants weren’t going for broke just yet. They could easily have killed Vinnie with one blow to the head. Quick, efficient, mostly bloodless. But instead, they concentrated their fists on his chest, hitting him hard, but not with enough force to kill. Which meant that they only wanted him bleeding and broken, not dead. Not yet, anyway.
Finally, the giants finished beating Vinnie and dropped him into the sandbox. Vinnie let out another low groan and coughed up several mouthfuls of blood. The thick gobs gleamed like wet rubies against the gold, glittering sand. The giants moved back a few steps and stared down at him with their oversize, buglike eyes. Their ham-size fists hung loose and ready by their sides, just in case Vinnie had any misguided bit of fight left in him.
The third man, the one who’d been leading the way to the playground, stepped in front of Vinnie. I mentally dubbed him Mr. Brown because everything about him was a dark sable color, from his hair, skin, and eyes to the suit, tie, and shoes that he wore. He was much shorter than the other two goons, only about six feet tall, which meant that he wasn’t a giant. He smiled, and I saw the fangs in his mouth. A vampire, then. One who wasn’t big on personal hygiene, judging from the yellowish tint to his teeth.
“Vinnie, Vinnie, Vinnie,” Brown drawled, pacing a loose circle around the bartender, his wingtips sinking into the blood-spattered sand. “What are we going to do with you? You know, you really disappointed LaFleur tonight.”
“But I did exactly what she said,” Vinnie sputtered. A thick Russian accent colored his voice.
Somehow, Vinnie pushed himself up onto his knees, swaying from side to side as he tried to maintain his balance and not pass out from the excruciating pain that he had to be feeling. Blood trickled down the left side of his face, where the giants had opened a cut high on his cheek, while his right eye had already started to blacken and swell from their hard blows. Sand crusted in his dark goatee and hair, and he had his arms wrapped around his middle, as if that would ease the pain in his sure-to-be-broken ribs.
“I told everyone at the bar about the shipment of drugs coming in. And I gave you the names of all the people who seemed interested, just like you asked. Every single one of them, I swear.”
“Well, Vinnie, you must not have been convincing enough because the Spider didn’t show last night like LaFleur thought she would,” Brown said. “Which means that LaFleur couldn’t kill the bitch like she’s being paid to do. Like she promised Mab Monroe that she would.”
Despite the blood, bruises, and sand covering his features, Vinnie’s face paled a little more at the mention of the two women. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bouncing up and down like a yo-yo in his throat.
“Let me try again,” he pleaded. “I will tell more people. Many more people. I swear it.”
The vampire crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. “I don’t know that I believe you, Vinnie. I mean, look what happened tonight. LaFleur comes by to have a little chat with you, to tell you that no one showed up, and what do you do? Wait five minutes, and then bolt for the nearest door. Your actions don’t inspire a lot of confidence.”
Vinnie didn’t say anything, but his face took on a greenish tint underneath the bruises. So he’d tried to run after LaFleur had come by. And, in doing so, he’d brought about this little smackdown and hastened his own death. At least, that’s what he would think.
But I knew that LaFleur had just been playing with the Ice elemental. She’d come by the club with the sole intention of spooking him into doing something stupid like running just so her men could beat him. I hadn’t had a chance to read Fletcher’s file on her yet, but I recognized the type of person, the kind of assassin, that LaFleur was — a sick, sadistic bitch who enjoyed playing with her food before she killed it.
“It’s a real shame,” Brown continued. “We all know what’s at stake for you Vinnie — namely, your continued existence. I just never thought that you’d do something like this, especially given that sweet little daughter of yours at home. What’s her name again?”
Vinnie’s face tightened. “Natasha.”
The vampire snapped his fingers. “Natasha. I have to say, the first time I saw her, I wasn’t exactly concentrating on her name, if you know what I mean. But then again, I like them young like that.”
The vampire let out a low, evil chuckle that told everyone exactly what he’d been thinking about doing to Natasha. The harsh sound made even my skin crawl. I’d been around the block more than my share of times. I’d seen a lot of bad people do a lot of bad things, myself included. But men like Brown, who got their rocks off hurting and abusing kids, well, there was a special place in hell for them. My hand tightened around the hilt of my knife. Despite my being an assassin, I’d never taken any real pleasure in killing my targets. They were just jobs to me, obstacles to overcome, nothing more. But tonight, part of me was going to enjoy sending Brown on his merry way. I’d consider it a public service, like putting down a rabid animal before it could hurt anyone else.
“Please, I—” Vinnie started to plead for his life, but coughs racked his body. The Ice elemental doubled over, spewing up more blood.
The vampire’s eyes tracked the blood, and he licked his lips at the sight. All vamps needed blood to live, of course. To them, it was just another form of food, nutrition, something that they craved the way that normal people did potato chips. If a vamp had a hankering for a cheeseburger, he’d get a frosty glass of O positive to wash it down with, instead of a triple chocolate milkshake like the rest of us.
And that wasn’t all that drinking blood did for them; vamps could also siphon strength and magic out of it. Regular, old-fashioned human blood was enough to give any vampire a little something extra, like enhanced hearing and superlative eyesight. Those who drank giant and dwarven blood on a regular basis got the inherent strength that both of those races had. Just like vamps who sucked down elemental blood got the Air, Fire, Ice, or Stone power to go along with it, depending on whom they were drinking from. Then there were vamps who were elementals themselves, who already had the magic flowing through their veins, instead of having to steal the power from someone else’s blood.
But Brown wasn’t ready to sink his fangs into Vinnie just yet, because he waited until the Ice elemental quit coughing and straightened back up before he continued his speech.
“Forget it, Vinnie,” the vampire said. “It’s too late for all that now. Tell me, what did you think you were going to do? Go home, get Natasha, and get out of Ashland? We’ve had men watching your apartment all night long. And once you tried to do your disappearing act, I took the liberty of calling my men and having them scoop her up, despite her babysitter’s protests. You fucked up big-time, Vinnie, by trying to run.”
The bartender didn’t respond, but anguish and tears filled his pale eyes.
“We came to you with a simple plan,” Brown said. “Be Mab’s eyes and ears inside Northern Aggression. Watch Roslyn Phillips. See who she hangs out with. Make a list of any woman close to Roslyn who could possibly be the Spider. Pass along the information about Mab’s drug shipment in order to help us trap the Spider. But you just couldn’t do that, could you, Vinnie?”
My eyes narrowed. So Mab had wanted Roslyn watched. Not surprising. As the Spider, I’d publicly taken credit for killing Elliot Slater, even though Roslyn was actually the one who’d pulled the trigger, using a shotgun to finish off the giant. But Mab must have reasoned that since I’d supposedly saved Roslyn that night, I must care about the vampire. That maybe even I was her friend — or at least someone who knew her. All of which meant that the Fire elemental was getting closer to learning who I really was, if she didn’t know already.
Oh, Mab didn’t know that Gin Blanco was the Spider. Otherwise, she would have tried to kill me herself by now. But I often wondered if she remembered Genevieve Snow, the little girl she’d tortured seventeen years ago — and the spider rune medallion that she’d melted into my palms. The jury was still out on that one. Mab had tortured and killed a lot of people since then. Must be hard for her to remember every single one of them. Still, the Fire elemental was hunting for me now, which just gave me more reason to off Mab and her minions sooner, rather than later.
Starting with the men in front of me.
“You didn’t ask. You threatened me,” Vinnie said in a low voice. “Threatened to kill me if I didn’t do what you wanted. Natasha too.”
Brown shrugged. “Details. But you owed Mab, remember? Through our mutual Russian friends, you approached her organization for a favor, and we helped get you and your little girl into the country, green cards and all.”
“But I paid her,” Vinnie protested. “I paid for all that. You took everything that we had to bring us over here.”
The vampire ignored his words. “And now that Mab’s trying to collect on that favor you owe her, what do you do? Run away the first chance you get. Shame on you, Vinnie. Shame on you.”
So Mab and her mob connections had helped Vinnie and his daughter emigrate to Ashland from Russia, and the Fire elemental had decided it was time to collect — in spades. Despite Vinnie’s betrayal of Roslyn, I could understand his motives. He’d only wanted to protect his daughter, to keep both of them safe. I might have done the same thing in his situation. Because I’d do anything for the people that I loved. Protect them, kill for them.
I was even going to die for them, for Bria, when I finally went up against Mab.
“Since you’ve been less than cooperative, Vinnie, Mab’s decided to pull the plug on this whole operation. Starting with you.”
Despite the chill in the air, sweat rolled down Vinnie’s forehead, mixing with the blood on his face. “What about my little girl? What about Natasha? She didn’t have anything to do with this. Please. Leave her alone.”
Brown let out another low, evil laugh. “Like I said before, I like them young. So I’m going to go pay sweet little Natasha a nice, long visit, once we get through with you. After that, well, Mab has plans for her. Big plans. Mab’s starting up a new venture, you see, something that will make Northern Aggression look as tame as a preschool, and Natasha will fit in just fine there. Why, she might just even be the star of the whole show, if you know what I mean.”
Grief and rage and helpless anguish filled Vinnie’s eyes, along with a faint flicker of blue-white magic. Even though he’d been severely beaten, the bartender wasn’t completely out of things yet.
“Das vidania, Vinnie,” the vampire smirked, flashing his fangs and getting ready to sink his teeth into the Ice elemental. “I’ll be sure and say hello to your daughter for you — after I get through fucking her.”
And that was my cue to finally make my presence known. I stepped out of the shadows, walked over to the swing set, and let out a loud wolf whistle. Startled, the men’s heads snapped around to me. Brown bared his fangs, while the giants’ hands tightened into fists. Vinnie stayed on his knees in the sandbox, his eyes wide with surprise, fear, and just a hint of Ice magic.
I walked toward them, stopping beside the metal swing set.
The vampire’s eyes narrowed as he took in my dark clothes and the silverstone knife in my hand. “Who the hell are you?”
I gave him a cold, hard smile. “The bitch who’s here to kill you.”