By a Thread

9

Bria changed into jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt and packed up our things. My clothes were dark enough to hide the blood that had spattered onto them, so I got to work. The first thing I did was go out into the hallway, grab the luggage cart that had been left by the elevator, and roll it into the suite. Then I stripped off the linen jacket the valet was wearing and wrestled his body onto the cart. I put him on the bottom and piled Pete on top of him, to hide the valet’s wounds. As a final touch, I threw the valet’s jacket over Pete to cover up his injuries as best I could.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Bria asked, eyeing the haphazard way I’d stacked the bodies on the cart. “They’re going to get rug burn from their hands and feet dragging off the side like that.”

“Well, they’re dead, so I doubt it will bother them,” I replied. “Now let’s roll them onto the elevator.”

Bria helped me push the cart out of the suite and down to the end of the hall. I stabbed the button for the elevator. Since we were on the third floor, we didn’t have to wait too long for it to arrive. Given the late hour, the car was empty. Even if someone had been inside, I was going to cheerfully say my friends had had too much to drink and that Bria and I were taking them to their room. Not the best excuse I’d come up with, but I didn’t have time to be more creative or clever.

For once, my luck held, and we made it down to the ground floor without seeing anyone. Given the fact that the hotel didn’t have any security cameras in the hallways, elevators, or common areas, I didn’t have to worry about a guard spotting us on a screen somewhere and coming to see what we were up to.

I stepped outside and checked to make sure no one was using the pool, but the area was deserted. Even the bonfires had burned out on the beach. I craned my neck up, looking at the many stories above me, but I didn’t see anyone else out on their patio. The night was as still, dark, and quiet as it was going to get.

“Still clear inside,” Bria murmured from her spot in the doorway, looking back into the hotel. “But are you sure you want to do this? Someone’s bound to hear the noise.”

“I doubt that, given how many folks I saw sucking down mai tais earlier. They’re either in their rooms sleeping off their buzz or holding on tight to their honeys right now. Even if they do hear something, they’ll probably just think it’s some late-night skinny-dippers out having a little fun. Besides, I don’t see how we have much of a choice,” I said. “As you pointed out, Sophia isn’t here to clean up the mess like she usually is, and we can’t exactly leave the bodies in the room with your name on the bill. So let’s go. Heave-ho. These guys aren’t getting any warmer.”

Bria sighed with either resignation or agreement. I couldn’t tell which exactly, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

We pushed the cart out onto the patio and up to the edge of the pool. Thankfully, the wheels didn’t squeak. We started with Pete, since he was on top. Bria grabbed his legs while I took hold of his shoulders.

“One, two, three,” I whispered.

Together we rolled his body off the valet’s and into the deep end of the pool. Bria was right—the splash was louder than I’d thought it would be, but there was nothing I could do about that now. We quickly pushed the valet into the pool as well before shoving the cart back toward the door. Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . I counted off the seconds in my head as we worked. It took us ninety seconds to dump the bodies and make it back to the door. But no lights snapped on around the pool and no one came outside to investigate, so I figured we were safe enough to do the same thing to the other two goons.

Only one giant would fit on the cart at a time, so we had to make two more trips. One by one, we hefted their bodies onto the luggage cart, took it downstairs, and dumped the giants into the pool, trying to make as little noise as possible. By the time we finished, the four bodies looked like overgrown lily pads bobbing up and down in the pool, and the shimmering blue water had turned a muddy pink from the blood still oozing out of the men’s wounds. It wasn’t the best or most discreet body dump I’d ever done, but hopefully no one would notice the dead men until morning. I planned for us to be long gone by then.

“Now,” I said, pushing the cart away from the pool for the last time. “Let’s go upstairs and tackle the room.”

The suite was equipped with everything, and the kitchen was fully stocked right down to a box of rubber gloves and a wide assortment of cleaning supplies under the sink, probably so the maids wouldn’t have to push their carts into the room and disturb the guests any more than necessary. I grabbed a pair of gloves, a bucket, some rags, and a bottle of bleach.

Since I’d killed three of the men right inside the door, most of the blood was limited to the marble floor there. The stone had already taken on a darker, more somber sound as the blood had started to dry on top of it. I splashed bleach over the whole area and wiped it down three times, while Bria straightened up the rest of the room, making sure she cleaned up all the melted traces of her elemental Ice blast. I also wiped down the luggage cart with bleach and cleaned our fingerprints off the brass rails.

It was after one in the morning when we finished. I stepped back and surveyed the suite with a critical eye. The area wasn’t as pristine and spotless as it would have been if Sophia had been here and used her Air elemental magic to sandblast the blood into nothingness, but the bleach would muddle whatever evidence it didn’t outright destroy. This wasn’t the first murder scene I’d cleaned up on my own, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Besides, nobody but Randall Dekes knew that the men had been sent to our suite in the first place. He couldn’t exactly complain to the cops that we’d gotten away with murder, not without implicating himself. Despite how rich and powerful Dekes was, I doubted that even he would want to deal with the hassle of four dead bodies, how they’d gotten that way, and where they’d come from. When the cops got around to questioning him, the vampire would probably claim he’d never set eyes on any of the men before—even if everyone already knew they worked for him.

Blue Marsh might be hundreds of miles away from Ashland, but sociopathic assholes were the same no matter where you went.

I stuffed the gloves, rags, and empty bottle of bleach I’d used into a plastic bag and shoved the whole thing into my suitcase to dispose of at another, safer location. I also stopped long enough to put a fleece jacket on over my T-shirt, hiding the bleach stains on my dark clothes. Then Bria and I locked the suite and left. On our way to the elevator, we left the luggage cart in the hallway where I’d first found it.

Checking out of the hotel was a calculated risk. When the bodies were found, the cops would be sure to look at the guest list and who had left when. Our departing this late at night might draw some unwanted attention, but I wasn’t overly concerned. I could always manufacture some reason for why we’d had to leave in the middle of the night—an illness, a family emergency, a problem at the Pork Pit. Besides, I doubted the cops would look too hard at us. After all, we were two women. How could we possibly have had the brawn and brains to kill four men and dispose of their bodies in the pool? And the fact was that we simply couldn’t stay here where we’d be sitting ducks for more of Dekes’s men—or the vampire himself.

We made it down to the registration desk without any problems. I stepped up to deal with the paperwork while Bria got the night bellman to load our luggage onto another cart—one that hadn’t been used to haul around dead bodies. The clerk behind the counter was a college girl who looked barely old enough to drink.

“Are you arriving or departing?” she asked in a voice that was way too perky for this late at night.

“Checking out,” I said, matching her chipper tone. “The hospitality wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”

I’d thought there might be a few more of Dekes’s men waiting in the lobby to help Pete just in case we got past him, but the area was as quiet and empty as the pool on the back side of the hotel had been. That didn’t mean I didn’t keep an eye out, though, as I stepped outside at the front of the building. Behind me, Bria pushed along the cart that held our luggage. The valet on night duty was slumped over a podium, his white linen jacket draped over his shoulders like a blanket. He jerked awake at the sound of our footsteps and the wheels of the cart rolling across the cobblestones. I palmed one of my silverstone knives, just in case he was part of Dekes’s crew, recognized us, and decided to do something stupid like scream.

But the valet just blinked at us with sleep-crusted eyes. He didn’t know who we were, and he didn’t care. He started to get up, but I marched over and scanned the rows of keys on the metal rack behind him. It didn’t take long for me to spot a solid gold key ring shaped like a dollar sign. The dollar sign wasn’t a rune in this case, not really, but it was still one of Finn’s favorite symbols.

“No worries,” I said in a bright tone, plucking Finn’s keys off the board. “We’ve got it. We’re in a bit of a hurry, so just tell me where the garage is.”

The valet started to protest, but the hundred bucks I slipped him was more than enough for him to jerk his thumb over his shoulder. He’d already gone back to his half doze before we’d rounded the side of the building. The dark opening of the garage waited up ahead.

“Careful now,” I told Bria in a low voice. “Let me go first. Dekes might still have a guy or two down here, waiting in a car to drive Pete and the others back to whatever hole they crawled out of.”

Bria nodded, leaving the luggage cart at the entrance, and I stepped in front of her. Together, we eased into the parking garage. All around me, the concrete let out low, uneasy mutters. Even here at an upscale hotel, the stone resonated with sharp notes of fear, worry, and paranoia. Not surprising. Most people didn’t like parking garages, since they were great places to get mugged—or dead.

But no one was lurking behind the thick concrete posts or in the midnight shadows that filled in the spaces between the rows of luxury cars. That didn’t mean we didn’t run into trouble, though.

Because Finn’s convertible was a mess.

The windshield had been hit in at least three places with a baseball bat or tire iron, and deep, jagged cracks crisscrossed the glass like the thick, silvery threads of a spider’s web. The side mirrors had been knocked off, the radio had been busted, and the leather seats had been ripped to ribbons. Dents covered the car’s hood, while scrapes sliced down the sides where someone had used his key on the slick silver paint.

Looked like someone had told Pete what car we were driving, and the four dead men had decided to bust it up for fun before they came up to the suite and did the same to us.

Bria let out a low whistle. “Finn is going to freak when he sees this.”

Freak was an understatement. I could already hear Finn bitching about how he’d lent us his brand-new baby, and we’d gotten it busted up in less than twenty-four hours. Although that was something of a record, even for me.

“Well,” I said. “At least they didn’t slash the tires too. Let’s go.”

I retrieved the cart and threw our luggage in the backseat before shoving the now-empty cart over into one corner of the garage. Then I helped Bria brush the broken bits of glass, metal, and plastic out of the front seats as best we could. Five minutes later, Bria drove the convertible through the open iron gate at the edge of the hotel grounds and stopped just outside it.

“Where to?” she asked.

“The Sea Breeze.”

Bria looked at me, her eyes full of worry. “You think that Dekes sent some men there too?”

“Probably not, given what I heard Pete say outside the room about going after Callie tomorrow, but there’s only one way to be sure.”

Bria put her foot down on the gas, and we left the Blue Sands hotel behind, with even more trouble probably waiting on the road in front of us.

Bria steered the convertible toward Callie’s restaurant. We were the only car on the road, and only the steady whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the tires on the pavement broke the silence. The night was dark and eerily quiet. Trees crowded up to the very edge of the narrow, two-lane road and then arched and twisted over it, blocking out everything but a small strip of stars overhead. Thin black tendrils of weeping willows waved back and forth like skeleton fingers in the constant breeze, while the swamp grass and cattails undulated in perfect time below next to the rippling surface of the water. Every once in a while, the convertible’s cracked headlights would catch an animal hiding in the marshes on either side of the road, and its eyes would flash like fiery rubies before we zoomed past.

It seemed to take forever, but it was only a few minutes later when we pulled into the sandy lot that fronted the Sea Breeze. The weathered structure was dark inside and locked up tight for the night, although a lone streetlight burned at the edge of the road. Mosquitoes and other bugs buzzed around the harsh glare, their moving mass of bodies throwing twisted shadows across the landscape.

“Looks like Dekes and his men decided to leave the restaurant alone—at least for tonight,” Bria said.

“Or maybe they just went straight to the source,” I replied. “Where’s Callie’s house? Does she live alone?”

“No, she’s not alone. She’s already moved in with Donovan. Callie said that she didn’t want to try to move and plan a wedding at the same time.” Bria paused. “They’re getting married this summer.”

My heart twinged with old, familiar, bitter hurts, but I kept my face smooth. “Good. She’ll be safe enough with Donovan tonight, but we’ll drive by there anyway and make sure. Dekes probably sent his men after us to show Callie exactly what would happen to her if she doesn’t sell out to him. Bodies tend to motivate people far more than threats do. Maybe he thought she needed some more encouragement besides Stu Alexander. We’ll come back out to the restaurant tomorrow and talk to Callie about what to do next, about how we can stop Dekes for good.”

Bria shook her head. “What you really mean is that you’re going to pump Callie for information about how you can get close enough to Dekes to kill him. I don’t know why it surprises me anymore, but it still does.”

I stared at her. “Dekes sent his men to rape and murder us tonight, just because we dared to stand up to his goons. That’s plenty enough reason for me to kill him, but what makes you think that he won’t do the same to Callie? Or worse? His men certainly wanted to have a go at her. We’re just minor annoyances, tourists passing through who were tougher than they looked. Callie is the one that Dekes really needs to get rid of in order to build his seaside casino. People are more vicious about money than any other thing, and it sounds like the vamp has already sunk quite a bit of dough into his project. He’s not going to let one woman stand in the way of it, no matter what he has to do or how ugly things get. If Dekes is the kind of man that I think he is, then he likes ugly—revels in it, even, like a hog in slop.”

Bria didn’t like it, but she couldn’t argue with my logic. My sister might not be as far gone into the shady side of life as I was, but she’d seen her share of bad things as a cop, and she’d dealt with a lot of scumbags, especially since coming back to Ashland.

“Fine,” she muttered. “We’ll come out here for brunch in the morning and talk to Callie like I planned. But that’s hours away. So what do you want to do after we check on Callie’s house? If you’re right, Dekes can track us to any hotel that we might stay at here on the island, and I don’t think you want to ask Donovan if you can sleep on his couch.”

“One step ahead of you, baby sister. One step ahead.” I pulled my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and scrolled through the screens until I found what I was looking for. “Do you know where 213 Mockingbird Drive is?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because that’s where we’re going to stay tonight,” I said. “I took the precaution of renting a beach house under another name just in case we ran into trouble down here.”

Bria shook her head. “You can’t do anything like a normal person, can you? Not even relax enough to go on vacation for one measly weekend.”

The cold reproach in her voice made me shift in my seat. “I like to be prepared. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Bria snorted, but she made a U-turn in the parking lot and headed back the way we’d come. Callie had given my sister Donovan’s address before we’d left the Sea Breeze earlier tonight, and we pulled up to the detective’s house a few minutes later.

It was a two-story ranch house made out of gray brick with a wide, flat yard surrounded by a matching gray wooden fence. It was an anonymous suburban home in a nice middle-class neighborhood. No lights were on inside the house. A few televisions flickered through the windows of some of the other homes on the block, but everything else was dark and quiet. Dekes’s men hadn’t come here, which meant that Donovan and Callie were safe and snug inside his house—and probably in bed together for the night.

Even though there was nothing particularly special about it, I couldn’t quit staring at the detective’s house. It was a perfect, modest home and just the sort of place that I could see Donovan settling down and being happy in. Kissing his wife good-bye in the morning, coming home to her at night, mowing the yard on Saturdays, playing football with the kids on Sundays. Yes, that’s exactly the kind of life I could picture the detective having—with Callie.

“Well, you were right,” Bria murmured. “Dekes sent his men after us instead of them. Do you want me to knock on the door and let them know what’s going on?”

“Nah. It looks like they’re asleep for the night,” I said, my voice thick and husky with emotions that I didn’t want to think too much about right now. “Let’s not wake them. There will be plenty of time to talk tomorrow.”

Bria drove away from the curb. Try as I might, I couldn’t help but look back a final time before we turned onto the main road and Donovan’s house disappeared from sight.

We passed the Blue Sands hotel again with its gleaming white stone and perfectly landscaped grounds. Bria kept right on going, steering the car all the way to the other side of the island before eventually veering onto a wide, smooth road. We drove through a ritzy subdivision, although the houses were so large and spaced so far apart that subdivision didn’t adequately describe the upscale community.

A few minutes later, we came to the end of the road and stopped in front of a three-story beach house that was half a mile away from its closest neighbor.

“Two-thirteen Mockingbird Drive,” Bria said.

“Wait here,” I told her, and got out of the car.

I’d rented the beach house a few days ago under the name Aurora Metis, which was an alias of mine, and had arranged to have it stocked with some staple foods, fresh linens, and all the other essentials that someone might need for a long weekend at the beach. Given how many people were gunning for me back in Ashland, it hadn’t been out of the realm of possibility that some of them might follow me to Blue Marsh, and I’d wanted a safe house to retreat to in case that happened.

The key was right where the realtor had e-mailed that it would be, under a small gray stone statue shaped like a lighthouse that perched on the front porch. An obvious hiding place, if you asked me, but I wasn’t going to be too critical, not after everything that had happened tonight. Even if I hadn’t been able to find the key, all I would have had to do to get inside was use my elemental magic to create a couple of Ice picks and jimmy one of the locks.

I used the key to open the front door and slipped inside the beach house. I walked through the interior, a silverstone knife in either hand, and peered into all the rooms, corners, and closets. Everything was clean and spotless, just as the realtor had promised me it would be. We’d be safe enough here for the night, but I still took my usual precautions, familiarizing myself with the location of the light switches and furniture and taking the time to trace more spiral protection runes into the various stone walls that made up the house.

When I was finished, I stepped through the door that led to the three-car garage, crossed the concrete, and opened the outer door so Bria could drive the convertible inside, where it would be hidden from sight.

“Now what?” she said, climbing out of the car.

“Now we go inside, get cleaned up, and get some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be another long day.” I looked at the ruined convertible. “And one of us needs to call Finn and explain what happened to his car.”

Bria gave me a knowing, sarcastic, slightly evil smile. “Oh, that pleasure is all yours, big sister.”

We turned on a few low lights and hauled our suitcases inside. The beach house was equipped with a stone fireplace in the main room, and I rummaged through the kitchen drawers until I found a pack of matches. It was too warm for a fire, but then again, the added heat wasn’t really my intention—destroying evidence was. I grabbed the plastic bag of bloody rags and the empty bottle of bleach and stuffed them inside the grate, along with a few pieces of newspaper and kindling from a nearby brass basket. Bria went into the back of the house to take a shower, and I sat there on one of the couches and watched the evidence of my latest crime crackle and burn while I dialed Finn.

“Hello, sexy. I knew that you couldn’t get through the night without me,” Finn’s smug, slightly sleepy voice filled my ear. “So why don’t you tell me what you’re wearing?”

I rolled my eyes. Apparently, my foster brother hadn’t bothered to check his caller ID before he’d picked up the phone. I wondered if this was how he answered all his late-night calls, or if he’d actually been expecting to hear from Bria. I really hoped it was the second one.

“What am I wearing? Why, right now it would be the blood of two giants, among other naughty unmentionables,” I purred. “What does that do for you, sexy?”

Silence.

Then Finn cleared his throat. “Uh, Gin? Did you dial my number by mistake? Shouldn’t you be cooing these sweet, sweet nothings into Owen’s ear instead of mine?”

“No mistake,” I chirped in a bright voice. “I just thought I’d call you and tell you that there’s been a slight change of plans. Bria and I aren’t staying at the Blue Sands hotel anymore.”

“Why not?” he asked in a sharp voice.

It was amazing just how much suspicion and accusation Finn could put into two simple words. Then again, he knew me all too well. And really, suspicion and accusation were always warranted whenever the Spider was around.

“Let’s just say that we had some unwanted visitors tonight—the kind who were intent on making sure we didn’t live to see the dawn. Of course, that didn’t work out so well for them.”

More silence.

“What the hell did you do?” he finally asked. “And more importantly, is my car still in one piece?”

“Well,” I said. “I suppose that depends on your definition of in one piece.”

Finn just groaned.