Heart of Venom

by Jennifer Estep

  Torture, beatings, rape. Jo-Jo had told me some of it, like how Grimes had forced Sophia to breathe in elemental Fire, ruining her voice. No doubt, that had happened in the pit when he and Hazel had been torturing her. So I didn’t need her to fill in the gruesome details. It had been horrible, more than any person should ever have to endure, but Sophia had.

  “It was ironic, Grimes taking me out to the pit again,” Sophia continued. “Because that’s the only place that I ever got a moment’s peace from him and Hazel. They would drag me out there and make me dig at the sides, making it larger and larger so they could dump more bodies in on top of the ones that were already there. But I didn’t mind it. Because after they had their fun with me, they would go and do other things. All I had to do was keep digging, and the guards left me alone. All those bodies shifting and rolling and squishing under my feet, they reminded me that I was still alive, and they helped me to keep going, even when all I wanted to do was just give up, lie down, and die. But I’d seen what happened to the other women who begged Grimes for mercy, men too, and I knew that I couldn’t do that. Not if I wanted to live. I knew that I had to keep my mouth shut, endure it, and stay alive for myself—and for Jo-Jo too.”

  I could have told her how sorry I was for everything that she’d suffered back then and again these past few days too, but I kept quiet. Because this was Sophia’s story to tell, and I had the sense that if I stopped her now, she’d never start it again. And I wanted to know all of it.

  “I lost track of how long I’d been at Grimes’s camp, and I’d almost given up any hope of ever escaping,” Sophia said, her voice still low. “Until the day one of his men disappeared.”

  “When Fletcher came for you,” I whispered.

  She nodded, tugged a clover out of the grass, and started plucking the leaves off it. “Grimes didn’t think too much of the guy’s disappearance at first, just that he’d probably gotten drunk off the moonshine and fallen off a cliff or maybe even drowned in the river. But then another guy disappeared the very next day. Then another one the next day. And Grimes and his men started finding the bodies, all of them with their throats cut or stab wounds in their chests and all of them left right out in the open, almost like someone had declared war on them.”

  She stopped long enough to grab another clover and start working on it. “Then I was out at the pit one day, digging, when I saw a man through the trees. He crept close enough to whisper that his name was Fletcher and that Jo-Jo had sent him to rescue me. Warren was there too. Fletcher told me that he and Warren were going to kill Grimes and get me out of there.”

  “But it didn’t work out quite that way,” I said, having an idea where the story was headed.

  Sophia shook her head. “Grimes had figured out that Fletcher was really there for me. He, Hazel, Horace, and Henry, their other brothers, set a trap, and Fletcher walked right into it. He managed to kill Henry and Horace, wound Hazel, and he even got Grimes to use up all of his Fire magic. Fletcher and Grimes fought, but Hazel shot him, and Fletcher was too weak and wounded to finish Grimes off. At that point, I didn’t care whether Grimes was dead. I just wanted to get off the mountain and go home. So I persuaded Fletcher to leave, and Warren and I managed to drag him down the mountain to where his car was. The three of us made it back to Jo-Jo’s, and she healed him.”

  This time, she reached for a blade of grass and began tearing it into thinner and thinner strips. “After that, Grimes kept his distance, but I was always worried that he would come back someday, so Fletcher taught me how to fight, and in return, I helped him get rid of the bodies that he left behind as the Tin Man. I figured that it was more than a fair trade.”

  So that’s why Sophia had disposed of all those bodies for Fletcher. Once again, my heart twisted at the wrongness of it, of the thought of her doing something over and over again that had to remind her of Grimes and everything she’d suffered at his hands.

  “Fletcher never asked me to do it,” she said, picking up on my thoughts. “He never asked me to get rid of the first body. But Grimes had made me good at digging graves, and it was the only way that I could think of to repay Fletcher.”

  “And me?” I whispered. “Why did you keep doing it for me? Why not at least stop when Fletcher died?”

  “Because Fletcher loved you and trained you in his own image. And because I owe him everything. It wasn’t just that he got me away from Grimes. It was all the years of peace that he gave me afterward.”

  Another thought occurred to me. “That’s why you started working at the Pork Pit, isn’t it? So Fletcher could keep an eye on you. So he could protect you from Grimes, in case he came after you again.”

  Sophia nodded again. “And Fletcher kept his promise, right up to the day he died. He was a good man that way.”

  She didn’t say what we were both thinking: that Fletcher was gone now. That he wasn’t around to protect her from Grimes anymore.

  But I was.

  I’d made a promise to the old man in his office, and it was the same one that I’d made to Sophia and Jo-Jo too, even if I hadn’t said it out loud to them, even if they didn’t realize it yet.

  “Don’t you worry about Harley Grimes,” I said, reaching out and laying a hand on her shoulder much the same way that Owen had done to me when he’d given me back my knives earlier. “I’ll make sure that bastard never hurts you or anyone else ever again. I’m going to finish what Fletcher started and kill him for good this time. That I promise you, Sophia.”

  She nodded, but the thick muscles in her shoulder bunched under my hand, and the tension in her face didn’t ease. After a moment, she shuffled forward, keeping low and moving away from me and over to another patch of daisies. I let my hand fall away from her shoulder, but I didn’t follow her.

  Instead, I stood there with her in the dark of the night as she picked flower after flower, as though she could strip away all her bad memories as easily as she could separate the delicate petals from the stems.

  But she couldn’t, and we both knew it.

  28

  The next morning, I went to the Pork Pit and opened up the restaurant right on time, just like usual.

  Despite the fact that I was being hunted by a couple of Fire elemental psychopaths, I still had a barbecue joint to run. Besides, Grimes was looking for a woman who said that her name was Gin Blanco, and everyone knew that the Pork Pit was mine. I only wondered how long it would take him to realize that I really was the Spider and come here to confront me.

  The only thing missing from the restaurant was Sophia. She was still stashed away at Cooper’s house, along with Jo-Jo. I’d told the sisters to take it easy and rest up, that nothing was going to happen today. That I had Finn tracking down some leads and was formulating a plan on how best to deal with Grimes.

  I didn’t tell them that I’d already worked everything out with Finn, Owen, Phillip, and Bria. I didn’t want Sophia and Jo-Jo involved in my scheme, and I didn’t want them anywhere near me, not when I was waiting for Grimes to make the first move. They’d already faced him twice, which was two times too many. I was going to handle things from here, like I’d promised Fletcher. I didn’t want Sophia and Jo-Jo to set eyes on Grimes ever again—at least, not until after I’d killed him.

  I didn’t think that the sisters really believed me, but they’d reluctantly agreed to stay put, especially since neither one of them was a hundred percent. Despite the fact that Cooper continued to use his magic on her, Jo-Jo was still weak, and Sophia, well, Sophia had been shot, kidnapped, and tortured. She needed some time to recover from that and from all the grievous wounds that she had on the inside, the ones that no magic could ever fix.

  It made me a little melancholy, stepping into the restaurant and not seeing Sophia standing behind the counter, slicing up her homemade sourdough rolls for the day’s sandwiches, or hefting a big pot of Fletcher’s secret barbecue sauce onto a back burner to bubble away. But it was good that she wasn’t here. If she was, all I would do was wor
ry about her, and I couldn’t afford to do that. I couldn’t afford to be distracted for a moment, not when Grimes and Hazel were coming for me.

  So I did my usual sweep of the restaurant for bombs, explosive runes, and any other nasty surprises that someone might have planted on the doors, inside the storefront, or even back in the restrooms overnight. When I was satisfied that no one had been inside the restaurant who shouldn’t have been, I flipped the sign on the front door over to Open, tied a blue work apron on over my clothes, and switched on the appliances to start cooking.

  The waitstaff showed up about half an hour later. A few were surprised when I told them that Sophia wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week, but nobody said anything to me about it. They were all too worried about what I might do to them as the Spider to give me any lip about working a little harder because we were a man down.

  But the day passed quietly. I cooked, waited on tables, cooked some more, and even managed to read a few chapters of Dr. No by Ian Fleming, which I was reading for a spy-literature class that I was going to start over at Ashland Community College in a few weeks.

  People came and went, flowing in and out of the restaurant in a regular, familiar, comforting rhythm. No one entered the Pork Pit who shouldn’t have, and no one tried to kill me. All in all, it was a rather boring day.

  I knew that it wouldn’t last, though. And I was looking forward to showing Grimes that I really and truly was the Spider.

  * * *

  Grimes’s men showed up at the Pork Pit just before noon the next day.

  Oh, they tried to hide who they were by trading in their usual old-fashioned suits in favor of jeans, cowboy boots, and western shirts, complete with pearl-button snaps. But their clothes were obviously new, judging from the stiff, starchy look of their shirts, the sharp creases in their jeans, and the fact that there wasn’t so much as a speck of dirt on their fancy boots. Plus, one of them brought his brown fedora into the restaurant and threw it down onto the booth beside him, a hat exactly like the ones all of Grimes’s men had worn.

  For all intents and purposes, the two men looked like a couple of wannabe cowboys who’d come to the restaurant in search of a good, hot, greasy meal. But their eyes tracked my every movement, and they paid more attention to me than they did to their food. Pity. The strawberry-peach pie was quite excellent that day.

  Either they were here to kill me and prove what badasses they were to the rest of the Ashland underworld, or they were watching me on Grimes’s orders. Since they didn’t try to murder me in front of the cash register or lie in wait and jump me in the alley when I took out the trash, that meant that they were most likely on a reconnaissance mission.

  The two guys lingered in the restaurant for more than two hours, ordering second helpings of everything, including the pie. I hoped they enjoyed their last meal.

  While the men were finally, slowly, finishing up their second servings of pie, I plopped down on my stool behind the cash register, pulled my cell phone out of my jeans pocket, and called Finn.

  “Finnegan Lane, always at your beck and call,” he answered in a cheery tone.

  “It’s on for tonight.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  I opened my book to the page that I’d marked earlier with a credit-card receipt, as though my conversation with Finn was so casual that I could read a few pages and talk to him at the same time. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see one of the men shoving a bite of pie into his mouth and staring at me.

  “I’m sure. Let the others know. I’ll keep to the schedule that we worked out.”

  “Roger that.”

  Finn hung up, and so did I. Now all that was left to do was wait and see exactly when Grimes would strike.

  * * *

  The men eventually finished their meal, paid up, and left. They didn’t say anything to me, and they didn’t approach me at the cash register, instead leaving more than enough money on the table to cover what they’d ordered. I dropped the change into the tip jar for the waitstaff to share.

  But apparently, Grimes wasn’t content simply to know where I was, because not ten minutes after the first pair of fake cowboys had left the Pork Pit, another set took their place. Same starched shirts, same creased jeans, same spotless boots. Their clothes were an exact match for the ones worn by the first set, and these two followed the same routine. Ordering lots of food, lingering over everything, not paying up until two hours later.

  After they finally left, a third pair came in ten minutes later, just like clockwork, to rinse and repeat the whole process yet again.

  Well, Grimes was definitely thorough. I’d give him that. He’d managed to keep at least two sets of eyes on me most of the day. I wondered if he really thought that I was stupid enough to lead him to Sophia and Jo-Jo and that I hadn’t anticipated that he’d come after me in the first place.

  “People sure must be hungry today,” Catalina Vasquez, one of my waitresses, remarked as she grabbed a pitcher of water from the counter behind me. “Because those guys who just came in ordered a truckload of food. That’s the third table that I’ve waited on today that’s wanted practically everything on the menu.”

  “Must be the heat,” I drawled. “Nothing works up people’s appetites quite like being in the great outdoors, hiking up and down mountains, digging graves, things like that.”

  Catalina completely missed the sarcasm in my words. She gave me a puzzled look, like I was spouting nonsense. Perhaps the gravedigging remark had been a little over the top. But after a moment, she shrugged and went over to refill the watchers’ water glasses.

  I turned another page in my book, completely unconcerned by the sly, angry glares coming my way—and the violence that was sure to follow before the day was done.

  * * *

  I followed my usual routines, and the hours slipped by until it was finally time for me to close down the restaurant for the night. After Catalina and the rest of the waitstaff went out the back, I locked the door behind them, then headed into the storefront to turn off all of the appliances.

  When everything was shut down, I flipped off the lights, went out through the front door, and locked that one behind me too. Then I stuck my hands into my jeans pockets, whistled a jaunty tune, and slowly ambled to the next block over, where I’d parked my car on the street.

  The Pork Pit wasn’t all that far away from Southtown, the part of Ashland that was home to hookers, pimps, gangbangers, and other desperate, dangerous folks. Two vampire hookers had left their usual hunting grounds a few blocks away and had wandered over here, trolling for customers. Sequined tube tops barely covered their breasts, while skirts that were all of six inches long clung to the tops of their thighs. They were wearing even less than usual, given the stifling heat.

  The two hookers I passed gave me respectful nods and made sure to stay out of my way. Even their pimp, who was lurking behind a Dumpster in the alley, hunched down more at my appearance. Word had spread on this block and the surrounding ones about who I was and just how very dead I could make you.

  Everyone else’s deference to me made the two idiots following me stick out that much more.

  It was the two men who’d come into the restaurant first today, still wearing their pearl-button shirts, jeans, and cowboy boots. They walked about fifty feet behind me. Since it was after seven, all of the commuters had left downtown for their nightly schlep out to the suburbs, and there wasn’t that much foot traffic on the sidewalk or many vehicles coasting down the street.

  Well, except for the two vampire hookers and the drivers who slowed down to ogle them. One man gave an appreciative toot-toot of his car horn. The hookers cocked their hips to the side and waved at him, inviting him to come get a closer look at everything they had to offer.

  Other than that limited action, the area was largely deserted, and I’d have had to be blind not to realize how interested the two cowboys were in little ole me. Maybe Grimes hadn’t trained his boys as well as I’d thought. Or m
aybe he was scraping the bottom of the barrel, given how many I’d killed at the camp.

  Either way, I reached my car, got inside, cranked the engine, and drove away. I looked in the rearview mirror. The two men were hoofing it over to their own car, which was parked at the very end of the block. So I slowed down and stopped at the light, even though I could have easily coasted right on through it. I didn’t want the idiots to lose track of me. It might take them hours to find me again, and that just wouldn’t do, especially since I wanted Grimes dead before the sun set.

  By the time the light changed, the men were pulling away from the curb and zooming up the street behind me. I went through the intersection, then drove over to Fletcher’s house as though I didn’t have a care in the world—and didn’t realize that someone was following me.

  And they did a piss-poor job of it too. Instead of hanging back at a safe distance, the men raced up until they were right on my rear bumper, then abruptly backed off. When they realized that they’d dropped too far behind and were in danger of losing me in the downtown loop, they roared right back up on my bumper again. And it was rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, all the way over to Fletcher’s house. I rolled my eyes. Good help truly was hard to find.

  But I made it home without them rear-ending me and turned into the driveway. I took my foot off the gas, coasting forward, but the men didn’t veer onto the path behind me like I thought they might. Instead, they drove right on past the entrance, as though they were going somewhere else entirely.

  I sighed. I’d really wanted to get on with the business of killing them and confronting their boss. But good things came to those who waited, and I was very, very good at waiting.

  So I steered my car up the driveway, parked it, and went inside the house to get ready for my not-so-unexpected visitors. It didn’t take long.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, I was sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch, drinking some blackberry lemonade, when Harley Grimes finally made his move.