Bitter Bite (Elemental Assassin #14)

by Jennifer Estep

  The two dwarves looked at each other, raised their shovels, and charged at me. I reached for my Stone magic, hardening my body again, then surged forward to meet them.

  I sidestepped Ethel and sliced my knife across Don’s chest, but he was wearing so many puffy layers that it was like cutting into a marshmallow. I slashed through his down vest, and tiny white feathers exploded in my face, momentarily blinding me and making me sneeze.

  Don yelped in surprise and staggered back. I sneezed again and went after him—

  Whack!

  A shovel slammed into my shoulder, spinning me around. But since I was still holding on to my Stone magic, the shovel bounced off my body instead of cracking all the bones in my arm.

  I blinked away the last of the feathers to find Ethel glaring at me again.

  “Look at that gray glow to her eyes,” she huffed. “She’s a Stone elemental. We’ll have to beat her to death to put her down for good.”

  Don brightened, his blue eyes twinkling in his face and adding to the Santa Claus illusion. “Why, it’ll be just like our honeymoon all over again,” he crooned. “Remember robbing that cemetery up in Cloudburst Falls, hon?”

  The two of them smiled at each other for a moment before coming at me again. Well, at least they still did things together.

  Instead of trying to saw through their winter clothes and their tough muscles underneath, I reached for my magic, raised my hand, and sent a spray of Ice daggers shooting out at them. Ethel threw herself down onto the ground, ducking out of the way of my chilly blast, but Don wasn’t as quick, and several long, sharp bits of Ice punch-punch-punched into his chest. But dwarves were strong, and he only grunted, more surprised than seriously injured. He did lose his grip on his shovel, which tumbled to the ground.

  I dropped my knife, darted forward, and snatched up his shovel, since it was the better weapon in this instance. Then I drew back my arms and slammed the shovel into his head, as though his skull were a baseball that I was trying to hit out past center field.

  Thwack.

  Don stared at me, wobbling on his feet, his eyes spinning in their sockets. His dwarven musculature might be exceptionally tough and thick, but a cold metal shovel upside the head was more than enough to put a dent in his bowling ball of a skull. Still, it was just a dent, and he didn’t go down, so I hit him again.

  Thwack.

  And again and again, until the bones in his skull and face cracked, and blood started gushing down his head, face, and neck. A glassy sheen coated Don’s eyes, and he toppled over, more and more of his blood soaking into the frozen ground.

  “Don!” Ethel wailed, realizing that he wasn’t ever going to get back up. “Don!” She tightened her grip on her shovel, scrambled back up onto her feet, and charged at me again. “You bitch!” she screamed. “I’ll kill you for this!”

  Ethel stopped right in front of me and raised her shovel over her head, trying to build up enough momentum to smash through my Stone magic with one deathblow. But in doing so, she left herself completely open; it was easy enough for me to palm another knife, step forward, and bury the blade in her throat.

  Ethel’s eyes bulged, and blood bubbled up out of her lips. She coughed, the warm drops of her blood stinging my cheeks like the snowflakes had earlier. I yanked my knife out of her throat, doing even more damage, but Ethel wasn’t ready to give up just yet. She staggered forward and raised her shovel even higher, still trying to gather herself for that one deadly strike.

  Too late.

  The shovel slipped from her hands, and her body sagged and pitched forward. She landed facedown in the mound of loose earth that I’d dug up, as though it were a giant pillow she was plopping down on. Well, I supposed that was one way to take a dirt nap.

  While I caught my breath, I watched and waited. More and more blood poured out from the dwarves’ wounds, but Don and Ethel didn’t move or stir. They were as dead as the rest of the folks here.

  So I retrieved my first knife from the ground, wiped Ethel’s blood off the second one, and tucked both of my weapons back up my sleeves. I looked and listened, but the night was still and quiet again. No one was coming to investigate. The cemetery was located off by itself on one of the many mountain ridges that cut through Ashland, and I doubted that the sounds of our fight had been loud enough to attract any attention. Still, I needed to do something with the bodies. I didn’t want anyone to know that I had been here, much less whose grave I had been digging up.

  I looked at the dwarves’ bodies, then down at the open casket.

  Don was right. I’d gone to all the trouble to unearth Deirdre Shaw’s grave. She wasn’t in her casket, so somebody might as well get some use out of it.

  I grinned.

  And it might as well be me.

  2

  I rolled the dwarves’ bodies into the casket, shut the lids, and filled in all the dirt back on top of it. Then I arranged the blocks of sod that I’d first cut out of the ground back into place on the top of the grave, so that it had a layer of winter grass that matched the surrounding ground.

  While I worked, the snow intensified, morphing into a steady shower cascading down. Good. The thickening layer of flakes on the ground would help hide the uneven spots and loose bits of dirt and rocks around the grave. Not that I expected anyone else to come looking for Deirdre Shaw, but if there was one thing Fletcher had taught me, it was that you couldn’t be too careful when dealing with a new and largely unknown enemy.

  By the time I’d finished making the grave look as untouched as possible, it was almost midnight. I grabbed the box that had been hidden in Deirdre’s casket and left the cemetery.

  I walked to my car, which I’d parked half a mile from the cemetery entrance. When I first arrived, I’d stuffed a white plastic bag into the driver’s-side window as if I’d had car trouble, so no one would wonder why the vehicle was sitting by the side of the road. But my car wasn’t the only one here now. An old, battered white van was parked a few hundred feet away, also with a white plastic bag hanging out of the window. Most likely Don and Ethel’s ride, to haul away any loot they might unearth during their grave robbing.

  I ignored the van. In a day or two, someone would get curious—or greedy—enough to approach it. That person would either call the cops to report an abandoned vehicle or smash in a window, hot-wire the van, and drive it away to sell for scrap. I’d bet on the second option, though. This was Ashland, after all. Land of criminal conspiracies and malicious opportunity.

  I unlocked my car, took the bag out of the window, and slid inside. Then I placed the casket box in the passenger’s seat, cranked up the heat, and drove home.

  The roads around the cemetery were dark, curvy, and covered with snow, forcing me to drive slowly. Every time I reached a relatively straight patch of pavement, I glanced over at the box, wondering what secrets it held. The spider runes in my palms itched with anticipation, but I wrapped my hands around the steering wheel and forced my gaze back to the road. Fletcher had taught me to be patient, and I could wait until I got home to open it. Besides, I wanted to go through the box slowly, calmly, and carefully, despite my burning desire to pull over, crack it open right this very second, and dig through all the contents like a kid tearing through Christmas presents.

  Twenty minutes later, I turned off the road and steered my car up a rough, steep driveway. The wheels churned through the snow and down into the gravel beneath, but I kept gunning the engine, and the car slowly crept up the ridge.

  I crested the top of the slope, and Fletcher’s house, my house now, loomed into view. Snow could hide a multitude of sins, and the falling white flakes masked much of the mismatched brick, tin, and other materials that made up different sections of the ramshackle structure. For once, the house had a cohesive look, adding to the overall snow-globe atmosphere.

  Normally, this late at night, the house, the surrounding lawn, and the woods that lined the top of the ridge should have been dark and deserted.

  But
they weren’t.

  A navy sedan was parked in the driveway, and the front porch light was on, a bright beacon in the still, snowy night.

  Bria was here.

  Surprised, I took my foot off the accelerator. But the car stalled in the snow, so I gave it some more gas, steered over, and parked next to her sedan. I cut the engine, then looked over at the house. She must be waiting up for me. I wondered why.

  My sister seemed fine when she’d come to the Pork Pit for lunch. But any number of things—good and bad—could have happened since then. Everything from Bria finally having a lead on where Emery Slater, a giant enemy of mine, was hiding out to wanting help with one of her cases. But of course, my paranoid mind immediately seized on worst-case scenarios, like one of our friends being injured, held hostage, or dead.

  Worry and dread chewed up my stomach like acid, but I forced myself to stay calm, pull my phone out of my jacket pocket, and turn it on. I hadn’t wanted Silvio Sanchez, my personal assistant, to track my phone and realize where I was going, so I’d shut off the device before my trip to the cemetery.

  I didn’t have any missed calls, texts, or messages. No one had tried to reach me, which meant that my friends should be okay. Instead of easing my worry, the knowledge only cranked it up another notch. What had been so important that Bria had come here tonight?

  And that wasn’t my only concern.

  I looked at the silverstone box on the passenger seat. The porch light’s golden glow made the spider rune carved into the top glimmer like an all-knowing eye staring back at me. Part of me wanted to leave the box out here so Bria wouldn’t see it and start asking awkward questions.

  But this wasn’t a secret that I could keep for much longer. At some point, I was going to have to tell Finn about his mother being alive, and Bria and Finn loved each other. Maybe my sister could help me figure out the best way to break the news to him. At the very least, she would be a sounding board to help me decide how to handle this.

  So I got out of the car, grabbed the box, and headed for the porch. I scanned the house, the lawn, and the woods, searching for intruders and using my Stone magic to listen to the rocks buried in the snow. But they only whispered about the cold, wind, and steady shower of flakes—no notes of alarm, fear, or malice rippled through them. Bria was the only one here.

  I stepped onto the porch, then unlocked and opened the front door, scuffing the snow off my boots and making plenty of noise so she would know that I was home.

  “Gin?” Bria’s light, lilting voice drifted through the house to me.

  “Yep.”

  “I’m in the den.”

  “Be right there.”

  I locked the door behind me, tossed my keys onto a table, and walked into the back of the house, still holding the box under one arm. I stepped into the den to find Detective Bria Coolidge sitting on the couch, checking her phone.

  In some ways, we were mirror images of each other, with our matching dark jeans and warm layers. But of course, her hands and clothes were clean and spotless, and her primrose rune glinted a bright silver against her navy turtleneck sweater. She was also far more relaxed, with her boots off and her socked feet propped up on the coffee table. Her gun and gold detective’s badge were on top of the scarred wooden surface, lying right next to . . . Fletcher’s file on Deirdre.

  I froze. I’d been in such a hurry to dig up Deirdre’s grave before the snow hit that I hadn’t thought to hide the file before I left. Then again, I hadn’t expected to have a visitor tonight either. If an intruder had been hiding in the house, I would have killed him, and he wouldn’t have had a chance to tell anyone about anything.

  But Bria was here, and she’d seen the file. She knew something was up.

  Bria tilted her head to the side, making her golden hair gleam, and her blue gaze swept over my black toboggan, fleece jacket, jeans, and boots. Despite my dark attire, her sharp eyes easily spotted the dirt and blood crusting my clothes.

  “Well,” she drawled, an amused note in her voice. “I see that the Spider has been busy tonight. Care to tell me where you were, what you were doing, and how many people you killed?”

  “That depends on who’s asking—the cop or my baby sister?”

  Bria grinned, a mischievous expression on her pretty face. “Well, this cop knows you’ve been up to something shady at Blue Ridge Cemetery.”

  I blinked. “How do you know I was there?”

  She started ticking off points on her fingers. “For one thing, it’s after midnight, and you’re wearing your usual assassin attire. You’re also covered with dirt and blood, which means that there was at least one body involved somewhere along the way. A cemetery seems like a perfect place for something like that to go down.” She paused. “And I might have tracked the GPS on your car when I showed up after my shift ended and you weren’t here.”

  I frowned. “I don’t have GPS on my car.”

  “Correction. You didn’t have GPS on your car . . . until Silvio placed a tracking device on it a couple of days ago.” Bria grinned again. “He wanted another way to keep tabs on you, now that you’ve started turning off your phone when you don’t want him to know where you are. Silvio is rather determined to ‘save you from yourself,’ as he puts it. Watch out, Gin. Next thing you know, he’ll be sewing GPS trackers into your underwear.”

  “And I’m going to cheerfully throttle my overefficient assistant when he comes into work in the morning,” I growled. “After I take away his phone and tablet.”

  She laughed. “Oh, taking away his electronics will be punishment enough. Silvio is rather attached to them.”

  But her laugher faded, along with her grin, and she focused on the casket box. “You want to tell me what happened tonight? And what’s so important about that box that you’re clutching it like it holds all the secrets of the universe?”

  “That depends,” I countered, shifting on my feet. “You want to tell me what you’re doing here? Not that I don’t love unexpected visits from my sister . . .”

  “But you didn’t expect me to be here tonight. That’s why you sat in your car for so long. You were thinking about what to do, and especially what to tell me.”

  I shrugged.

  Bria put her feet down on the floor and gave me a serious stare. “I’m here because you’ve been quiet this past week.”

  I frowned again, not understanding what she was getting at. “Okay . . .”

  “It’s the same kind of quiet I remember from when we were kids. The quiet that always fell over you whenever you were thinking about something serious. Whenever you were trying to solve a problem that no one else even knew about.” She smiled, but sadness tinged her expression. “Like when I broke Mom’s favorite snow globe, even though she had told me not to play with it, and you were trying to figure out how to cover for me. Do you remember that?”

  Images flashed through my mind. Bria staring in wonderment at a globe filled with a lovely garden scene, the flowers crusted with real, tiny diamonds and other sparkling jewels. Her hand grabbing the globe and shaking it just a little too hard, making it slip from her grip and crash to the floor, shattering into a hundred pieces. My sister crying, not just because of the trouble she was in but because she’d destroyed something so delicate and beautiful. Such an ordinary memory but one of the few relatively happy ones I had from my childhood . . .

  “Gin?”

  “Yeah,” I rasped through the hard knot of emotion clogging my throat. “I remember.”

  “And do you remember how you handled it?”

  I shrugged again, still not sure what she was getting at.

  Her sad smile brightened, just a bit. “Annabella was planning on sneaking out of the house to party with her friends, so you blackmailed her into buying the same snow globe with her allowance, even though it cost a fortune. Mom never even knew that I’d broken the old one.”

  Bria’s gaze drifted up to two drawings I’d sketched that were propped up on the fireplace mantel. One was a sno
wflake, symbolizing icy calm, and the other was an ivy vine, representing elegance. Matching pendants were draped over the respective frames. The runes for Eira Snow, our mother, and Annabella, our older sister, both murdered long ago.

  Bria’s hand crept up to her throat and her own primrose rune, the symbol for beauty. The motion made two rings glint on her hand, one embossed with snowflakes and the other with ivy vines. I wore a similar ring stamped with my spider rune, a gift from Bria, with a matching pendant hanging around my neck, buried under my layers of clothes.

  My sister stared at the drawings a moment longer before dropping her hand from her necklace and focusing on me again. “That was the very first time I realized how much you loved me . . . and just how sneaky you could be.”

  I cleared my throat, pushing away the memories and the melancholy heartache they always brought along with them. “So you came over here tonight because I’ve been quiet?”

  “Too quiet, as they say.” She kept staring at me. “Your special kind of quiet that means something is up. If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think anyone else has noticed yet. Not even Silvio, despite all his GPS trackers.”

  Bria was right. I did have a tendency to get quiet—too quiet—when something was on my mind, just like when we were kids. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed that she knew me so well. Or just plain worried I hadn’t been able to hide my inner turmoil any better.

  “Now,” she drawled, “I am a trained detective, so I figure that whatever has been bothering you most likely has to do with that file on the coffee table.”

  I tensed, my arm curling even tighter around the box I was still clutching.

  “I didn’t look at the file,” she said. “I respect your privacy too much for that.”

  “But . . .”

  “But I would like for you to tell me what’s going on, since it’s obviously much more serious than a broken snow globe.” Stubborn determination filled her face. “And I especially want you to tell me how I can help. No matter how bad it is, we can figure it out—together.”