Tangled Threads

by Belle Aurora

Page 9

  Instead of being smart and going around, the first giant barreled headfirst into the row of swings, long arms outstretched, trying to get to me before I slipped out the other side. But he misjudged the arcs and ended up with his arms stuck through the different swings, the metal chains crashing and clanging together like cymbals.

  I grabbed onto a swinging chain and kicked up, then out, with my feet. My boots caught the giant in the shoulder, and he spun around, twisting the chains around his torso. Instead of spinning back the other way, the giant let out a loud roar and tried to do a Hulk move to break free. But the metal was stronger than it looked, and the chains held firm.

  The momentum from my kick sent me back before gravity took over and I swung toward the giant again. I used the opportunity to bury my knife in his chest all the way up to the hilt. I felt the blade scuttle off of his breast-bone before sinking deeper into his hard muscle. I yanked it out. Not enough damage to kill him, but enough to make him think about how much he was hurting.

  Sure enough, the giant howled with pain and rage, baying like a wolf at the moon. He brought his fist up to hit me, but the chains wrapped around his body limited his range of motion. Still, he got a blow in on my left hip. It was just a glancing hit, but given his enormous strength, it felt like someone had slapped me with a sledgehammer. Red-hot pins of pain exploded in my hip joint.

  I grunted and slashed open his stomach with my knife, going first one way, then the other with the silverstone blade. X marks the spot. Blood spewed out onto my hands and arced through the cold air, painting me with its steaming, coppery warmth.

  I'd hurt him badly this time, and the giant gave up all thought of trying to attack me. Instead, now wailing and blubbering, he clutched his hands to his stomach, trying to slow the bleeding and shove everything back in where it was supposed to go. But the chains thwarted him once more, and he just couldn't get his hands up in the right place to really staunch the flow. He'd bleed out soon.

  In the background, Vinnie and the vampire continued their struggle in the sandbox, still rolling back and forth, each one trying to get the upper hand.

  My hip now throbbing with pain, my bloody knife still in my hand, I turned to face the other giant.

  He'd been more cautious than his buddy and hadn't followed me into the swings. He stared at me a second then launched himself at one of the heavy wooden support beams that held up the whole thing-trying to collapse the entire swing set on top of me, along with his friend. The wood wasn't as strong as the metal chains were, and the beam creaked, then snapped under the giant's great strength and heavy weight. The entire structure started to slide sideways.

  I threw myself forward out of the way of the flying seats and clanking chains. A second later, the whole thing collapsed in a crashing cacophony of metal, dragging the trapped giant down with it. Chains and seats piled on top of his broad back. The giant groaned but didn't get up. Well, that was one way to bury someone. I'd take what I could get.

  My hands and knees sank into the loose gravel that covered the ground around the swing set, and some of the stones scraped my palms. By this point, the stones had taken on low, ugly, harsh mutters, reflecting the violence that had just happened, as the giant's blood continued to seep onto them. The gravel was just as dense as the sand in the box, which made it hard for me to scramble to my feet, as did the stabbing pain in my hip.

  The second giant surged forward and clamped his hand onto my shoulder, his fingers digging into the socket like drills. The bastard picked me up, hoisted me up over his shoulder, and benched-pressed me as high as he could-a good nine-feet-plus off the ground. There was nothing I could do to stop him or make him put me down. Not from this angle. Fuck. This was not going to end well for me.

  "You're going to pay for killing Olson, you bitch!" the giant screamed and threw me down as hard as he could.

  I closed my eyes and reached for my Stone magic, pulling the cool power up through my veins, pouring it out onto my skin, head, and hair, letting it harden my body into an impenetrable shell.

  I slammed into the closest seesaw, the whole left side of my body smacking into the metal, before rolling across the top and plummeting down the far side. It didn't hurt that badly, not like it would have if I hadn't used my Stone magic to protect myself, but it still jarred me. I still felt the hard, raw, brutal force of it. Especially in my injured hip. I gritted my teeth, ignoring the pain now shooting down into my leg and on past my knee.

  But I didn't get up.

  Fighting hand to hand, the giant would kick my ass now, especially since I wasn't a hundred percent anymore. Which meant that the quickest way to kill the bastard would be to surprise him. Hence my header on the gravel. The force of the fall had ripped my silverstone knife away from me, and I didn't dare reach for another one. Not yet. Not until he was in range.

  Ten . . . twenty . . . I hadn't even counted to thirty before I heard his shoes crunch on the gravel. I cracked my eyes open just enough to track his movements. He came at me from the opposite side of the seesaw. The rows of seats still creaked up and down from the force of my body hitting them. My eyes flicked up at one seat wobbling just above my head.

  "Bitch," the giant muttered as he neared me. "That'll teach you to kill one of us-"

  I surged up, grabbed the seat, and brought it down as hard as I could.

  On the other side of the seesaw, the opposing, attached seat zoomed up and clipped the giant in the chin. He groaned, staggered back, and fell-right onto the merry-go-round. The giant's head slammed against one of the metal handles with a sickening crack. Dazed, he slumped to the ground, half on, half off the merry-go-round.

  I got to my feet, grabbed a knife out of my boot, and hobbled over to him. The giant's oversize, buglike eyes rolled back in his head, but he still saw me coming. He reached up, trying to keep me at arm's length, but the blow to his skull had messed up his depth perception, which made it easy enough for me to kick him in the balls. The giant howled, his hands automatically going south to cover himself from further assault instead of protecting his chest and head.

  I leaned over and cut his throat.

  The giant gurgled, his blood spewing out onto the sky blue paint that covered the merry-go-round. I watched him a second to make sure that he wasn't going to get back up. But his body was already shutting down from the trauma, and he didn't even try to move.

  With the giants down and dying, I turned toward the sandbox just in time to see Brown, the vampire, punch Vinnie in the chest and scramble to his feet. The vamp stared at me, eyes wide in his face, as though he couldn't believe that I'd actually taken out two giants all by my little lonesome.

  Then he turned and raced off in the other direction.

  Fuck.

  I palmed another knife, gritted my teeth against the pain pounding through my hip, and started after him. I needed to kill the vamp before he got out of the park. Before he got to a phone, called LaFleur or Mab Monroe, and gave them a description of me and what had happened here tonight.

  But the relentless throbbing in my hip slowed me, and despite the stab wound in his thigh and his other injuries, the vampire was running like Death himself was after him. I supposed that he was, in a way. Still, I hurried after the vamp. It was darker on that side of the park. Maybe luck, that capricious bitch, would smile on me, and he would fall and break his ankle-

  The flash of lights caught us both by surprise.

  The bright glare illuminated the vampire, who was so stunned that he stopped where he was in the middle of one of the park's grassy areas, eyes wide open like a deer.

  An engine revved, and a second later, a black SUV appeared out of the darkness and slammed right into the vampire. The vamp sailed thirty feet through the air before a tree trunk stopped his unnatural flight. I could hear his back break even from here. He didn't get up after that.

  I was out in the open too, with nowhere t
o run or hide, so I stood my ground as the SUV turned and headed in my direction, its tires flattening the frosty grass. If worse came to worse, I could always harden my skin again with my Stone magic and roll out of the way of the vehicle. After that, well, I'd find a way to do something clever and deadly. I always did.

  The SUV stopped about ten feet away. The glass was tinted, so I couldn't see exactly who was inside, although I got the impression that the driver was a giant.

  The passenger's side door opened, and, a moment later, a familiar, grinning face appeared over the top of the door.

  "Need a lift?" Finnegan Lane quipped.

  Chapter 8

  Two more doors opened on the SUV. Xavier got out on the driver's side, while Roslyn hopped out of the back. They, along with Finn, hurried over to me.

  Finn stopped in front of me, his green eyes sweeping over my blood-spattered clothes and the silverstone knives glinting in my hands. Assessing what he could see of my body and injuries, just like his father, Fletcher, used to do back when the old man was my handler.

  "Is any of that blood yours?" Finn asked.

  "Not enough to matter. "

  He nodded. "Good. "

  My eyes cut to Xavier. "Nice driving. The vamp never knew what hit him. "

  The giant dug his hands into his pants pockets and grinned at me. "What can I say? I'm a closet NASCAR fan at heart. "

  I grinned back at him and shook my head before turning to Finn. "Well, the party's over now. I was beginning to think that you weren't coming, since I called you more than twenty minutes ago. "

  "Sorry, Gin," Finn said in an apologetic tone. "I would have been here sooner, but Roslyn decided that she wanted to tag along to see what was happening with Vinnie. And then Xavier saw us leaving Northern Aggression and offered to drive. "

  I looked over at the vampire and the giant. "You didn't have to do that, Roslyn, Xavier. Neither one of you. This is my fight with Mab. Not yours. Do yourselves a favor and don't get involved. I already know that it's going to end badly for me. Call me crazy, but I'd rather not see you two end up as collateral damage. "

  Roslyn stepped forward, her eyes hard behind her silver glasses, her mouth a thin, determined line in her face. "That's where you're wrong, Gin. It's our fight now too. It has been ever since that first day Elliot Slater came into my club and started stalking me. "

  A few weeks ago, the giant had gone to Northern Aggression to question Roslyn about how one of her heart-and-arrow rune necklaces had ended up around the neck of a fake hooker who'd killed one of Mab's flunkies. The fake hooker had been me, of course, and I'd used the necklace to sneak into one of Mab's parties so I could take out Tobias Dawson, the greedy mine owner who'd been threatening Violet Fox and her grandfather.

  But the Fire elemental didn't believe that I'd died in a mine collapse along with Dawson, so she'd sent Slater to lean on Roslyn. The vampire hadn't cracked, hadn't given me up, but she'd been exposed to something much worse-Slater's creepy fascination with her.

  Once again, my heart ached for everything that had been done to Roslyn, for all the pain and anguish and fear that she had suffered because of me. But being sorry didn't change the past. All I could do now was keep going until either Mab or I was dead. Maybe if I was lucky, things would end there, and I'd at least get to take the Fire elemental out with me when I kicked off to hell. And I'd have the satisfaction of knowing that everyone else I was leaving behind, everyone that I cared about, was safe from Mab-forever.

  "Gin?" Roslyn asked in a soft voice, cutting into my thoughts.

  I just nodded my head, accepting her help and Xavier's, at least for this night. Even though I didn't deserve it. "Thanks for stopping by. Now, let's go see if Vinnie is still alive. "

  I sent Finn over to the tree to make sure that the vampire was dead, while Xavier, Roslyn, and I walked back to the playground. I went first to the giant who was still sprawled on the merry-go-round. He'd bled out from his cut throat, and his body was already starting to cool, given the chill in the December air. My next stop was the giant who was buried under the remains of the swing set. He was unconscious but surprisingly still alive. I must not have wounded him as badly as I'd thought. Didn't much matter, since I pulled his head out from underneath the chains and cut his throat to finish the job.

  Roslyn stood by the sandbox, looking down at Vinnie. Disgust, horror, and sympathy filled her beautiful face, and she held her hand over her mouth like she was seconds away from vomiting. She probably was. It wasn't hard to see that Roslyn was remembering her own brutal beating at the hands of Elliot Slater. Xavier had already stepped inside the sandbox and was kneeling by the Ice elemental, who had his eyes closed and was lying on his side, curled into a loose ball.

  Vinnie Volga was a mess. The giants' beating had been bad enough, but the vampire had only compounded the damage during their scuffle. Starting with his face and going down his body, there wasn't much left of Vinnie that wasn't covered with blood, blackening bruises, and crusty sand.

  I looked at Xavier and raised my eyebrows.

  "Still alive," Xavier said, answering my silent question. "What do you want to do with him, Gin?"

  Earlier tonight, my plan had been to take Vinnie somewhere quiet and find out exactly why he'd betrayed Roslyn, why he was working for Mab, and what he might know about my real identity as the Spider. And I'd planned on getting the information any way that I had to. Just as the giants had done, truth be told. Except I would have used my knives instead of my fists.

  But that was before I knew what kind of leverage Mab had on Vinnie-his daughter, Natasha-and the Fire elemental's horrible plans for the little girl. That was before I'd seen the rage, helplessness, and anguish in Vinnie's eyes as he listened to the vampire brag about how he was going to rape Natasha. That was before Vinnie had used the last of his Ice magic, risen up, and tried to take the vampire down with him. He'd tried to spare his daughter one horror, at least.