Spider’s Revenge (12 page)

His tone lightened, as though he’d fully reverted back to the carefree, conniving Finnegan Lane who had seduced most of the female population in Ashland and had his sights set on the stragglers. But the barest trace of emotion flashed in his eyes before he was able to hide it from me—hope.

I shrugged as though it didn’t matter to me what Finn did or didn’t do with my sister. I wasn’t telling my foster brother the real reason I was suddenly on board with the Finn-Bria love train leaving the station—the fact that part of me wanted them to have each other to hold on to. Because when I went after Mab again, I probably wouldn’t be around afterward for either one of them to lean on. Better for them to find each other now. Better for them to realize that they could trust each other now, rather than after I was dead and burned to ash by Mab’s Fire magic.

“And what about Owen?” Finn asked. “Jo-Jo called me and said that he came over to the salon to check on you. That he was upset you hadn’t told him what you were up to regarding Mab. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one you left out of the loop last night.”

I shifted on my feet. Finn knew me inside and out, which meant that he could put the screws to me just as well as I could to him. But for once, I didn’t mind his inquisition. I needed someone to talk to this about all this relationship stuff, especially since I was in new territory here.

“Owen started to tell me that he loved me,” I said in a soft voice.

Finn frowned. “What do you mean
started to
?”

I drew in a breath and told him the whole sad story.
About how angry Owen had been with me because I hadn’t told him I was going after Mab and how he’d almost let those three little words slip—words that I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear yet, much less reciprocate.

“He really does care about you, Gin,” Finn said. “I can see it in
his
eyes whenever he looks at you.”

“I don’t know why. I’m not exactly the stuff that dreams are made of.”

“Oh, please,” Finn scoffed. “Smart, beautiful, tough. Does that ring a bell? Not only does it describe Bria, but it fits you pretty well, too.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. But it doesn’t change what I am and everything that I’ve done.”

“I thought that Owen was okay with all of that. With your being the Spider.”

“He might be, but I don’t want to rub his face in it over and over again. That’s just asking for trouble. That’s one of the reasons why Donovan Caine left me, if you’ll recall,” I said, referring to a previous lover of mine.

Finn opened his mouth, probably to analyze my stunted emotional state some more, when I saw something move in the trees.

“Hey,” I whispered, cutting him off. “Looks like we’ve finally got some action.”

A man stepped out of the patch of trees and into the parking lot, heading for Bria. From the way that she straightened, the man had to be her source.

Lincoln Jenkins was a short, extremely thin guy with a mop of frizzy blond curls and a wispy, pitiful excuse for a goatee. A diamond stud too big to be real glinted in one of his ears, while a couple of thick, fake gold chains hung
around his scrawny neck. The chains bounced against his white T-shirt, which he had on under some kind of puffy, oversize football jacket. Faded jeans sagged against his lean hips, and the tops of the denim pants all but swallowed up his pricey sneakers.

“He looks like some kind of wannabe white trash gangbanger,” I said.

“That’s the look that all the petty thieves in Ashland are rocking these days,” Finn replied.

I frowned. “Well, if Jenkins is so small-time, then why is he claiming to have big-time information about whatever’s going down in Ashland?”

“Every squirrel finds an acorn sooner or later,” he said. “Even a low-life hood like Jenkins.”

Finn kept watching Jenkins, but I looked past the thief, examining the thicket of trees that he’d left behind, the shadows that stretched out around the parking lot, and the street beyond with its two SUVs. It all looked innocent enough, but something about this whole thing felt wrong to me—seriously wrong.

Lincoln Jenkins sidled up to Bria. My sister glared at him.

“You’re late,” she snapped. “You said you’d be here ten minutes ago. I don’t like standing out here in the cold, Lincoln.”

“Aw, now, don’t be like that. You wouldn’t want me to slip and fall in the snow, now would ya?” Despite his gangbanger clothes, Jenkins’s voice rasped with a twang that was pure country.

Jenkins might have been talking to Bria, but he wasn’t really paying attention to her. Instead, his eyes flicked
from side to side, as if he was trying to determine if Bria was alone. After a moment, a sly smile curled his lips. My thumb traced back and forth over the hilt of the knife in my hand. I didn’t like the look of his smile. Not one damn bit.

“So what’s this information that you have? The thing that you couldn’t dare tell me over the phone? What’s going on in the Ashland underworld that has everybody so stirred up?” Bria asked, her voice as chilly as the night air.

“Aw, you want to get down to business already? You don’t want to ask me how I’ve been or nothing?”

She sighed. “I know how you’ve been, Lincoln. Stealing whatever you can get your hands on, despite the straight jobs that you’ve been offered. The ones that I got for you. The ones that you worked at a few days before quitting and cleaning out the cash register on your way out the door.”

Jenkins shrugged, but he didn’t deny her claim. “So where’s your partner at tonight? You know, the big guy, the giant?”

Bria’s face tightened. “He’s around.”

“Around?” Jenkins cocked his head to one side. “That’s funny because I just saw him working the front door of the club.”

The thief backed up a step and took his hands out of the pockets of his puffy jacket. Bria tensed, and Finn and I did the same. But instead of coming up with a gun, Jenkins’s hands were empty.

“Cold tonight, ain’t it?” he said in a cheerful tone.

Jenkins brought his hands up to his face and blew on
them three times, before briskly rubbing them together and repeating the whole sequence.

My eyes narrowed.

Finn had spotted the particular movement too, because he stabbed his finger through the gap between the two Dumpsters.

“Did you see that? That thing that he did with his hands?” Finn asked. “That looked like some kind of signal—”

And that’s when the SUVs roared into the parking lot.

The lights and engines on the two SUVs that I’d noticed earlier immediately cranked to life at Jenkins’s signal. The vehicles roared down the icy street before the drivers turned the wheels, bouncing the SUVs up over the curb, through the snow-covered grass, and into the parking lot. For a second, I thought the lead vehicle was going to plow into Bria, but the driver slammed on the brakes, coming to a stop just a few feet in front of her. The other SUV slid in and stopped at an angle as well, trapping Bria and Jenkins between the two vehicles and the Dumpsters that Finn and I were still hiding behind.

“Fuck,” I muttered, my bad feeling now confirmed. “It was a setup all along.”

“Yeah,” Finn whispered, reaching for the gun in his coat pocket. “But for whom? Bria? Or Jenkins? Somebody could want him dead for deciding to spill his guts to her.”

“Doesn’t much matter,” I said. “Because if they so much as touch Bria, then they’re all going to get dead. You stay here and cover Bria. If one of them makes a move toward her, you put a bullet in his brain. I’m going around behind them. Maybe they’ll talk a little about what they want and who they’re working for before we end them.”

Finn nodded and moved into a shooting stance. I tightened my grip on my silverstone knife and stepped into the shadows.

The doors of the SUVs opened, and five dwarves spilled out—two from one car and three from the other. Bria stepped away from the men, putting her back to the Dumpsters, and yanked the gun from her pocket. Jenkins stayed where he was, the smirk on his face even wider than before. Yeah, the thief was definitely in on whatever was happening.

The men spread out and formed a semicircle around my sister. Each one carried a gun, but they were too focused on Bria to do the really smart thing—like check and see if she had any backup. Or perhaps Jenkins had already ruled out that possibility for them by making sure Xavier was by the front door of the nightclub, instead of back here with Bria. With the giant out of the picture, the men probably thought that Bria would be easy pickings. Fools. They didn’t realize how tough she really was—or that her big sister, Genevieve, was here and would do anything to protect her.
Anything
.

Either way, it was easy enough for me to hopscotch my way from shadow to shadow, circle around the parking lot, and slip up through the trees until I was right behind
one of the SUVs. I stopped there, hidden behind the massive vehicle, a silverstone knife in my hand, with another up my sleeve, two more tucked into my boots, and a fifth hidden against the small of my back. Five knives for five guys. No problem.

“Why don’t you put the gun down and come along quietly, detective?” one of the dwarves rumbled. A nasal,
New Yawk
accent colored his words, telling me that he was definitely not from around here. “Because I’d really hate to have to shoot you in that pretty face of yours.”

Bria stiffened at his tone, her face tight with anger. “Who the hell are you and what do you want? You called me
detective
, so you obviously know that I’m a cop. You really want to do something as stupid as threaten me?”

The man let out a low, evil laugh and looked at his friends, who all snickered in response. For some reason, they thought this was a laugh riot.

I used their laughter and distraction to slide into the shadows next to the second SUV—the one that was closest to Bria. I peered around the edge of the vehicle, studying the men who surrounded my sister.

They reminded me of a set of Russian matryoshka dolls in that they were all more or less carbon copies of each other, with the short, stocky, muscular frames that dwarves always had. None of them was taller than five feet, but their size definitely wasn’t relative to their impressive strength. They all had similar features—oily black hair that was slicked back over their foreheads, swarthy skin, and black eyes. Brothers, maybe, or cousins. And they were all dressed alike, in nylon Windbreakers in a variety of bright, neon colors, matching sneakers, and
gold chains around their necks. They looked like pint-size extras from some old
Sopranos
episode, as though the dwarven mob had migrated south for the winter. The only thing that would have been worse was if there had been seven of them. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho.

My eyes dropped to the guns in their hands, the ones they had pointed at Bria. Glocks for the most part. The lead guy, the one who’d spoken to Bria, had a snub-nosed revolver. I didn’t know who the men were, had never laid eyes on them before, but they still seemed familiar to me. They radiated the same kind of hard, predatory air as the guests did I’d seen at Mab’s interrupted dinner party. Which made me all the more curious as to why they’d decided to ambush my sister—and made them all the more likely to die when I found out the answer.

The lead guy, the dwarven don of the group, as it were, gave Bria a grin that was as greasy as his unwashed hair. “Honey, everybody in Ashland knows that you’re a cop. That’s why we’re all so interested in you.”

Bria frowned at his words. “What are you talking about? What’s the meaning of this?”

The five men laughed again, as if they were all in on some private joke that was just the funniest thing in the world. Real wise guys, this bunch.

“Don” jerked his head at Jenkins, who’d crept back and joined the semicircle of men surrounding my sister. “Why don’t you ask him what’s going on? After all, he’s the reason you came here tonight.”

Bria looked at Jenkins, but the informant wasn’t daunted by the anger burning in her icy blue gaze. “What’s going on, Lincoln? I thought that you had information
on what was going down in Ashland. What the hell are you trying to pull?”

“I’m not trying to pull anything,” he said. “Except earn myself a cool ten grand for leading my new friends here straight to you.”

I frowned. The dwarven mobsters had paid Jenkins ten large to set up a fake meeting with Bria? Why? What for? What did they plan on doing with her?

Bria glared at him. “You sold me out, you son of a bitch.”

Jenkins’s lips pulled back in a wide grin, revealing the fake gold grill stuck on his teeth. “Sorry, baby, but I got to get paid.”

My fingers clenched around the hilt of my knife. The only thing he was getting tonight was dead. Another minute, two tops.

“Why?” Bria snapped, turning her attention to the leader once more. “Why give Lincoln ten grand? I would have been happy to set up my own meeting with you.”

Bria’s hand tightened on her gun, her knuckles white against the black barrel, telling everyone exactly how that meeting would have ended. Despite the seriousness of the situation, I couldn’t help the warm pride that filled me at her bravado. Bria was no more a coward than I was. Still, that gun wouldn’t do her much good against five dwarves. Like giants, dwarves were strong enough to take a couple of bullets in the chest and keep coming at you.