Black Widow

by Jennifer Estep

  I checked the ground around the tree house, looking for footprints, broken branches, and disturbed earth, but the bunches of leaves, twigs, and pebbles that I’d piled in strategic spots were undisturbed. As a final precaution, I reached out with my magic—my Stone power this time—and listened to the emotional vibrations and actions that had sunk into the rocks hidden in the leaves.

  But the stones only whispered of the growing chill of the longer nights and the slow, steady approach of the winter they knew was coming. I probed a little deeper with my magic, but no dark, devious mutters, notes of worry, or trills of fear sounded back to me. Nothing bigger than a rabbit had been near my tree house since I’d been out here three nights ago.

  Satisfied, I shimmied up the tree, hoisted myself up onto the boards, and checked the black duffel bag full of supplies that I’d left here a few days earlier. Binoculars, bottles of water, chocolate granola bars, a digital camera, a directional microphone, some sniper scopes. All the tools an assassin would need to do some serious recon on a target.

  And Madeline was definitely my target, just the way that I was hers.

  I seated myself in a comfortable position, picked up the binoculars, and peered through them. This particular tree stood on a rise, and my little house was situated high enough in it to give me a clear view of the back of the Monroe mansion, which featured an Olympic-size swimming pool surrounded by a patio. Despite its being October, the pool hadn’t been covered up for the season yet, and the rippling blue water provided a colorful contrast in the heart of all that gleaming gray granite.

  The only things that ruined the elegant scene were the wooden planks, orange extension cords, piles of power tools, and burly dwarves shouting to each other as they moved into, out of, and around the sides of the mansion. Even though I was more than five hundred feet away from the patio, I could still see the thick clouds of sawdust that puffed out of the open doors and windows and lazily swirled through the air, bringing the harsh scent of paint fumes along with them.

  Madeline was doing some extensive remodeling, both inside and out, and construction crews had been roaming the grounds every time I’d come over here to spy on her these past few weeks. I’d thought about disguising myself as one of the workers to see exactly what she was doing inside the mansion, but it wasn’t worth the risk. I didn’t care if Madeline was remodeling. I just wanted to know what her plans were for me and my family.

  Still, as I watched and listened to the crews shout updates and directions to each other, I couldn’t help but think back to the last time I’d been so close to the mansion, the night that I’d tried to assassinate Mab by sneaking onto the grounds, climbing onto one of the mansion roofs, and sniping her with a crossbow through a dining room window. What I hadn’t known was that Mab had been hosting a dinner party for the group of bounty hunters she’d hired to track me down. Instead of killing Mab that night, I’d ended up getting shot and running through the woods for my life.

  Then again, that’s how a lot of my nights ended.

  So I wasn’t eager to risk another assassination attempt at the mansion. Not yet, anyway. Knowing my bad luck, I’d get spotted before I even got close enough to try to kill Madeline. Also deterring me were the giants who patrolled around the mansion, keeping an eye on the construction workers. All of them were armed with cell phones and guns, along with their massive fists.

  More gun-toting giants marched back and forth across the lawn, coming all the way down to the edge of the grass. But they didn’t venture into the woods beyond, much less come close to where I was perched. There was no point to it, not during daylight hours anyway, since they would have a crystal-clear view of anyone slipping out of the tree line and trying to cross the lawn to get to the mansion—and be able to shoot her down before she got halfway across the grass.

  Still, I thought it was a bit sloppy of Madeline, not extending the security net farther out. When Mab was alive, giants had roamed deep into the woods at all hours of the day and night, and nasty things like sunburst rune traps had been carved into the tree trunks, ready to spew elemental Fire in your face if you were unlucky enough to trigger them. Not to mention the trip-wires, bombs, and other deadly surprises that awaited anyone stupid enough to try to breach Mab’s outer defenses.

  But Madeline seemed content to just secure the mansion itself, along with the landscaped grounds surrounding it. I wondered if she was really that confident in Emery Slater and the giant’s ability to protect her. Or perhaps Madeline was that confident in her own acid magic, along with the giant blood running through her veins, courtesy of her father, Elliot Slater.

  So I leaned back against the tree trunk, peered through my binoculars, and munched on a chocolate granola bar, since I’d only had a liquid lunch at Northern Aggression. Truth be told, keeping watch in the woods was a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon. It reminded me of many a hike that I’d taken with Fletcher. And at least I felt like I was actually doing something to figure out what Madeline was up to, instead of just twiddling my thumbs and waiting for her to crush me under the sharp, pointed heel of her white stiletto.

  Still, while I kept my tree house lookout, I texted all my friends, checking in and making sure that they weren’t dealing with any sudden, suspicious problems like Roslyn was.

  Owen was going into a meeting, while Eva Grayson, his baby sister, and Violet Fox, her best friend, were at their usual classes at the community college. Violet’s grandfather, Warren T. Fox, was running his store, Country Daze, up in the mountains above the city.

  Jolene “Jo-Jo” Deveraux was busy perming, cutting, teasing, dyeing, and styling her clients’ hair at her beauty salon, while her sister, Sophia, was manning the Pork Pit for me, along with Catalina Vasquez, my best waitress. Catalina’s uncle, Silvio Sanchez, was off doing whatever personal assistants to assassins like me did.

  Phillip Kincaid and Cooper Stills, respectively Owen’s best friend and mentor, were playing poker on Phillip’s Delta Queen riverboat. And Detective Bria Coolidge, my sister, and her partner, Xavier, were dealing with the never-ending paperwork that came with being some of the few good cops in Ashland.

  So everyone was busy and distracted with their own lives, and I was the only one obsessing about Madeline and what she might have planned.

  Then again, that’s the way it usually was.

  Finally, an hour, two granola bars, and a bottle of water into my vigil, I was rewarded when the back doors of the mansion opened, and Madeline strolled out onto the patio, followed by Emery and Jonah. Madeline looked like she’d been working out, given her tight, white yoga pants and matching tank top. Her auburn hair was pulled back into a ponytail, while a white towel was draped around her neck, obscuring her silverstone crown-and-flame necklace. Emery and Jonah both still had on their suits from the dedication.

  Madeline tossed her towel aside and settled herself in an oversize, white wicker chair that overlooked the pool. A maid wearing a white shirt and black pants with a bright red bun of hair brought out a silver tray with a pitcher of lemonade and several glasses. Emery and Jonah both waited until Madeline had a tall, frosty glass of lemonade in her hand before sitting down in matching chairs across from her.

  I was pleased to note that Jonah didn’t look particularly comfortable, his briefcase sitting square and upright in his lap as if it would shield him from Madeline’s acid magic should she decide to unleash it on him. Jonah also tugged at his tie as if it were strangling him and eyed Emery with open suspicion, as if he expected her to try to beat him to death at any second.

  It would serve the weaselly lawyer right if Madeline killed him. After all, he’d tried to steal her inheritance and had embezzled from Mab for years before that. Madeline had as many reasons to want him dead as I did, if not more. I doubted that she would do the deed for me, though. Not while she thought that McAllister could still be of some use to her.

  Madeline and Emery sipped their lemonade, so I put down my binoculars, picked up the directional
microphone, and flipped it on. Silvio had purchased the toy for me a few weeks ago. I’d told him what I wanted, and he’d shown up with it at the Pork Pit the very next day, with only a mild, chiding raise of his eyebrows as he handed me the bill. I would never admit it to him, but I kind of liked having an assistant, especially one as quiet, discreet, and efficient as Silvio.

  Once I turned the microphone on, I started fiddling with the knobs, trying to maximize the range and clarity of sound. Mostly, what I heard was the steady, high-pitched whine-whine-whine of the power saws that the dwarven workers were using, along with the heavy thwack-thwack-thwacks of nails being hammered into boards. Whatever the crews were doing inside the mansion, it sounded big, loud, and impressive. Exactly what I would expect, given what a splash Madeline had made when she came back to Ashland.

  After about ten minutes, some of the workers took a water break, and the sounds of the sawing and hammering died down to more muted, manageable levels. I leaned forward and adjusted the microphone a bit more, trying to get the most out of it that I could, before I pointed it at the patio again. It took me another thirty seconds, but I finally found a sweet spot that let me hear their conversation. I also raised my binoculars back up to my eyes and peered through them.

  “. . . how are things progressing?” Madeline asked.

  Emery chugged down her lemonade, set the glass on the table, pulled out her phone, and started texting on it. “Everything’s set.”

  Madeline turned her gaze to Jonah. “And you?”

  He cleared his throat and adjusted his tie again. “Everything’s ready on my end. I’ve reached out to all the right people. Dobson, in particular, is ready and eager to get started.”

  I frowned. Dobson? Who was that? And what was he so ready and eager to do? I pulled out my own phone and texted myself a note with that name so I would remember it later.

  Then the wind picked up, bringing more paint-and-sawdust fumes along with it. I moved the directional mike from one side of my makeshift tree house to the other, but the breezy gusts kept me from hearing much more than sharp, staticky crackles of air.

  But it didn’t matter because Madeline drained the rest of her lemonade, then rose to her feet. She gave Emery a conspiratorial smile, not even bothering to glance at Jonah, who was clutching his still-full glass of lemonade with one hand and his briefcase with the other.

  “Good,” she purred. “I’m glad that everything’s finally in order. It’s been a long wait, but now it’s time to really make my presence known—to everyone in Ashland.”

  Madeline beamed at Emery for another moment before turning and sweeping into the mansion.

  Jonah got up and started to follow her, but Emery moved in front of him, giving the lawyer the same cold gaze that she regarded everyone else with.

  “Don’t fuck this up,” she growled. “Or you’ll be wishing that Blanco had killed you when she had the chance.”

  Jonah smiled, trying to defuse the tension between them, but the expression didn’t even come close to reaching his brown eyes, and his tan skin seemed even tighter than normal, as though he was clenching his teeth together to keep them from chattering in fear. I wondered how he liked his new masters. I was willing to bet that Madeline was more of a nightmare than Mab had ever been, given her propensity for playing games with people.

  Emery gave Jonah one more hard look before she too disappeared into the mansion.

  The lawyer stayed where he was, swaying back and forth on his feet, as though he were about to topple over in a dead faint. He glanced around, making sure that no one was paying any attention to him, then put his lemonade down, opened his briefcase, reached inside, and drew out a not-so-small silver flask. He threw his head all the way back and drained the flask’s contents, whatever they were.

  I chuckled. Poor Jonah. Just a month in and drinking on the job already. Aw, I just hated that for him.

  After he drained his flask, McAllister stuffed it back into his briefcase, snapped it shut, squared his shoulders, and headed back into the mansion to suffer through whatever else Madeline and Emery had planned for him for the rest of the day—

  Crack.

  I froze at the sharp, staccato, unexpected sound. But what was even worse were the voices that accompanied it a second later—low, gruff voices that were getting louder and louder the closer they got to my location.

  3

  I remained as still as death, scarcely daring to breathe, as I waited and listened, trying to determine if I’d been spotted.

  “Do you really think there’s someone out here?” a giant rumbled, his low, deep voice much closer than before.

  “I don’t know,” another one muttered back to him. “But Emery thought she saw the sun reflecting off something in the woods. She texted and told me to come check it out.”

  Since they hadn’t spied me yet, I slowly, carefully, quietly turned off the directional microphone, so the crackle-crackle of static wouldn’t give me away, and then set it down, along with my binoculars. I dropped down onto my belly, ignoring the splinters that pricked through my T-shirt and into my stomach, and eased over to the edge of my makeshift tree house, peering out through a rip in the camouflage fabric at the forest floor below.

  Sure enough, about ten feet ahead, a large clump of rhododendron bushes rustled, and two giants stepped around it.

  Sloppy, sloppy, Gin! I silently cursed myself. I’d been so focused on fiddling with the microphone and trying to hear what Madeline and the others were saying that I’d neglected to keep an eye on the guards patrolling the lawn. Two of them had slipped away from their posts and were now creeping through the woods toward my position, heads swiveling left and right, guns drawn, fingers curled around the triggers, scanning their surroundings for the smallest sign of movement so they could blast the danger into oblivion.

  Emery must have seen the sun winking off my binocular lenses as I was watching their little lemonade party. But instead of sounding the alarm and sending a platoon of giants after me, she’d been discreet about things, slyly dispatching her men to my position, and hoping to catch me in the act—and then murder me.

  I remained absolutely still and silent as the giants swept the woods below. I could have palmed a knife, leaped down from my perch onto their backs, and killed both of them, but I doubted that I could do it quietly enough to keep all the other guards from running in this direction. And if the giants swarmed on my position all at once, well, I’d have a hard time escaping, especially since Emery would no doubt come and lead the charge. She wouldn’t be satisfied until I was trapped—or dead.

  But even more than that, I didn’t want to tip my hand that I’d been watching the mansion. I might need to come back out here again, and I wanted my hidey-hole to be intact if I did. So killing the giants was out, unless absolutely necessary to save my skin.

  But I also couldn’t slip away while they were right below me. All I could do was lie still, wait, and hope that they wouldn’t have the bright idea to look up and see if someone was hiding in the branches above their heads.

  “This is pointless,” one of the giants finally muttered, holstering his gun and leaning against the very tree that I was perched in. “There’s nobody out here. Emery is being paranoid, like always.”

  The other giant stopped as well, but he didn’t put away his weapon. “Well, you know they’re worried about Blanco and what she might do when things start happening. They definitely expect her to retaliate. Or to try to, anyway. Not that she should have much of a chance to, if things go according to Madeline’s plan.”

  My eyes narrowed. What specific things could he be talking about? Madeline could set into motion any number of horrible scenarios that would piss me off enough to break our stalemate and finally come after her.

  But this . . . this sounded like something big. My worry cranked up another notch.

  “And then there’s the party,” he continued. “Everyone’s on edge about that. If things go the way Madeline expects them to with Bl
anco, it will be fine. If they don’t, well . . .”

  He trailed off, and the two men exchanged a tense, knowing look.

  My eyes narrowed even more. Madeline was throwing a party? When? And what for? Was she trying to get the Monroe mansion designated as some sort of historic landmark? That would fit in with all the construction going on, and it was just the sort of bizarre, egocentric thing I would expect, given everything else she’d done over the past few weeks.

  “Anyway, you’re right,” the second man said, finally holstering his weapon as well. “There’s nothing out here but trees and squirrels. Let’s go back.”

  For once, my luck held, and the giants turned around and returned to the mansion without looking up and spotting me.

  As soon as they were out of earshot, I slithered down the tree, landing in a low crouch. I palmed a knife and scanned the surrounding foliage, in case another team was lurking around, but everything was quiet. Those had been the only giants Emery had sent into the woods.

  I left my gear where it was, hidden beneath the camouflage tarp up in the tree house, since it was all anonymous and nothing that could be traced back to me. Besides, I might still have use for it.

  When I was satisfied that the woods were deserted, I slid my knife up my sleeve, got to my feet, and hiked back to the Vaughn estate to retrieve my car and drive home.

  As I walked, I thought about everything the giants had said, but their cryptic words only raised more questions than answers. I’d have to get Finn and Silvio to nose around and see if they could find out who the mysterious Dobson was and if they could pick up any rumors about this party that Madeline was planning, who was invited, and what it was for.

  I’d learned an important lesson today, though. No matter how careful and clever I thought I was, Madeline and Emery were even more so, and I’d have to be at my very best to weather whatever storm they had planned for me.