"I don't like the feel of it either," I said in a quiet voice, coming to stand beside her. "The Air magic."

Jo-Jo passed her hand over Bria's face, forcing oxygen into all the cuts that marred her features. I watched while the gash above her eye knit itself together, and the ugly bruising faded from her skin.

Bria gritted her teeth. "It's not the most pleasant sensation, but I'll live."

"Sometimes, it's better if you hold on to something," I said, stretching out my hand. "It helps distract your mind from the pain."

Bria looked at my hand hovering in midair, my fingers curled up; then her blue gaze flicked up to my face. I know what she saw when she looked at me. A woman dressed in black. A woman covered in blood. A killer. A murderer. A monster. No matter how she tried to hide it, Bria couldn't forget who and what I was-and how conflicted she felt about it.

Finally, she sighed and grabbed my hand. Her palm felt cool and soothing against mine. Bria might not like my past as an assassin, might not like my being the Spider now, but she also knew that part of me would always be Genevieve Snow-the big sister she'd loved so much as a child.

"You squeeze as hard as you need to."

Bria just nodded, her hand tightening around mine.

Besides the cuts on her face and a few cracked ribs, my sister wasn't that banged up from grappling with the bounty hunter, so it took Jo-Jo only a few minutes to heal her. Then the dwarf did the same to me, taking care of the injuries that Don had inflicted on me. Afterward, the three of us trooped into the kitchen.

Most people preferred the salon, but the kitchen was my favorite room in the house, maybe because I loved to cook so much. A long, skinny table sliced the kitchen into two pieces, while appliances done in a variety of pastel colors hugged the walls. Fat, fluffy clouds dotted the fresco-painted ceiling like marshmallows. More clouds could be found everywhere you looked, from the pot holders stacked next to the stove to the dishcloths piled beside the sink. Like other elementals, Jo-Jo also used her personal rune-a puffy cloud that symbolized her Air magic-in her decorating scheme.

Finn stood by the counter, having just finished making his thirteenth cup of coffee of the day. As always, the chicory fumes warmed me from the inside out and made me think of his father. I wished that the old man were here tonight. Fletcher would have known exactly what to do about the mess we were in-the mess I'd dragged us all into by declaring war on Mab in the first place.

Finn stared at me with his green eyes. "Any chance of getting something sweet to go with my coffee?" he asked in a hopeful voice.

I arched an eyebrow at him. "You mean all those pieces of strawberry pie that you ate for lunch weren't enough?"

"I'm a growing boy," Finn said in a sincere tone. "I need my vitamins."

Bria snorted. "The only thing that's growing on you, Lane, is your ego."

Finn sidled up to my sister and gave her a dazzling smile. "Well, other things of mine also tend to swell up in your presence, detective."

I rolled my eyes at Finn's attempt at witty banter. Jo-Jo just chuckled, amused by his antics.

Bria returned Finn's smile with a syrupy sweet one of her own. "Oh, really? So it's gone from what, pencil eraser to cocktail sausage by now?"

Finn sputtered and almost spit out a mouthful of coffee. His face flushed, and he glared at Bria. He opened his mouth, probably to come up with some biting retort, but I cut him off.

"Enough," I said. "We have more important things to worry about right now than what you two think of each other and your various appendages. Like what we're going to do about the bounty on your head, Bria."

She shrugged. "I don't see why we have to do anything about it. Now that I know about the bounty, I can protect myself."

"No, you can't." I opened the refrigerator to see what kind of ingredients Jo-Jo had on hand. "Not from every bounty hunter in the city."

"Bounty hunter?" Jo-Jo asked. "What bounty hunter?"

Bria and Finn filled the dwarf in on what had happened at Northern Aggression. The meeting with the informant, the botched kidnapping attempt, what I'd learned from Lincoln Jenkins.

I let their words wash over me while I got out the ingredients for brownies. Flour, eggs, water, baking cocoa, oil. All that and more went into my mixing bowl. Ten minutes later, I slid the brownies into the oven and got started on the thick layer of cream cheese frosting that would turn the brownies from just a mere dessert into something truly spectacular. Powdered sugar, butter, almond extract, and a block of cream cheese filled another bowl. As always, the stirring, the mixing, the careful measuring of ingredients, soothed me. I couldn't control what Mab did, how she came after me, or whom she hired to do her dirty work, but I could make my family a treat to sweeten the bitter times.

Twenty minutes later, just as Finn and Bria were winding down with their story, I took the brownies out of the oven. While I was waiting for them to cool enough to frost them, I grabbed the milk from the fridge, along with several mugs out of the cabinets. One by one, I wrapped my hand around the glasses and reached for my Ice magic. Crystals spread out from my palm and ran up the side of first one mug then another until all the glasses were cold and frosty.

When everything was ready, I cut the frosted brownies, stacked them on a plate, brought the milk and mugs over to the table, and started munching on my late-night snack with the others.

"So what do you want to do, Gin?" Finn asked. "Now that we know exactly who all these crazy people are in Ashland."

I chewed a bite of brownie. Rich and chocolatey, with an extra sugary sweet kick from the cream cheese frosting. Perfect. "See if you can find out more about them-backgrounds, skills, habits. I especially want to know about Ruth Gentry and Sydney, the girl that she has with her. Gentry seems to be the smartest of the bunch so far, which makes her the most dangerous."

Finn nodded. He'd started digging into Gentry earlier today, but Bria's meeting with Jenkins had taken precedence and sidetracked his search.

"What about me?" Bria asked. "What do you want me to do?"

I looked at her. "You're going to call your boss in the morning and tell him that you've had a family emergency and are going out of town."

Bria's eyes narrowed. "You want me to leave Ashland? Because of a few bounty hunters?"

I shook my head. "It's more than a few bounty hunters, Bria. Six guys jumped you tonight, and Mab had a whole dining room full of them at her house. There's got to be at least three or four dozen of them in Ashland by now, all eager to get their hands on you. Leaving town is exactly what they'll expect you to do, which is why you're not going anywhere."

Bria looked at me. "You want me to go into hiding then, don't you?"

I nodded. "I do. I want you in Ashland, close by, somewhere I know that you'll be safe. Someplace that's easy to defend and hard to get into. Someplace where I know every single nook and cranny, so there are no surprises."

"There's only one place that I know of that fits that bill," Finn said.

"Do you mind?" I asked in a quiet voice, staring at my foster brother. "Because, really, it's your house too."

Finn just shrugged. "He left the house to you, Gin. He knew that you'd need it for something like this someday. We both know that."

Bria looked back and forth between us. "What are you talking about? Where is this place?"

I stared at her. "We're talking about Fletcher's house. Baby sister, you're coming home with me tonight."

Chapter 13

Bria argued with me, insisting that she could take care of herself. But I didn't budge, telling her that she was going to hole up in Fletcher's house even if I had to duct-tape her into submission and keep her that way. Still, Bria acquiesced only after I pulled a roll of the gray tape out of one of the kitchen drawers and starting slicing off strips of it with a silverstone knife.

Deep down, Bria knew that staying out of sight was the smartest thing to do-for everyone. But that didn't mean she liked it. Grumbling under her breath about overprotective big sisters, Bria stalked off into the bathroom to try to wash some of the blood out of her clothes.

That left Jo-Jo, Finn, and me alone in the kitchen. When I was sure that Bria was out of earshot, I turned to Finn.

"You know what I have to do now," I said. "I have to kill Mab. The very first chance I get. That's the only way to lift the bounty on Bria's head."

Finn slurped down another mouthful of his chicory coffee. "Yeah, you tried that last night, remember? It didn't work out so good for you."

My lips curled back into a snarl at the memory of my epic failure, but I forced my anger at myself down into the pit of my stomach. "I don't care. Mab knows, Finn. She knows that Bria's my sister. That's why she put the bounty on her head. If Mab can't find me herself, then she can use Bria to make me come to her."

Nobody spoke.

I drew in a breath. "So work your contacts, Finn. The second that Mab leaves her mansion, I want to know about it. I don't care where she's going, one of her businesses, out to dinner, even to the fucking mall. Wherever she ends up at, I plan to be there waiting for her, knives ready."

Finn nodded, already pulling his cell phone out of his suit jacket to start making calls. Jo-Jo reached over and took my hand, her fingers warm against my palm.

"It's going to be okay, Gin," the dwarf murmured. "You'll see."

I thought about how close I'd come to losing Bria tonight. How close Mab, her giants, and her bounty hunters had come to nabbing me at her mansion. How many times in the last few months that the Fire elemental or one of her minions had just missed killing me. I didn't say anything, but I squeezed the dwarf's fingers with my own, trying to reassure myself as much as her.

Finn promised to contact every single one of his sources to see what they had to say about the bounty hunters, Mab, and anything else that might be relevant or helpful. Then Bria came back into the kitchen, and I drove the two of us over to Fletcher's house. Sophia had already gotten rid of the old clunker that I'd used to escape from Mab's mansion last night, hauling it off to some junkyard where it belonged. Bria and I had met Finn at Jo-Jo's earlier, and since he'd driven the three of us over to Northern Aggression, I'd left my regular car at the dwarf's house.

Bria and I didn't speak on the ride over, although she grimaced and grabbed the door handle as my silver Benz churned up the driveway. Couldn't blame her for that. The steep, twisting path still rattled my bones every time I drove up it.

My Benz crested the top of the ridge, and Fletcher's house came into view. A lone light burned like a firefly over the front door, dimly outlining the sprawling structure. White clapboard, brown brick, and gray stone joined together to make up the building, along with a tin roof, black shutters, and blue eaves. You couldn't see much of the odd mishmash of styles and materials in the darkness, but I knew the lines and texture of the ramshackle house as well as I knew my own face.

"Home, sweet home," I murmured, stopping the car.

Bria stared out the window, peering into the shadows that covered the yard like puddles of gray ink oozing over the snow. Despite the fact that we'd been getting reacquainted with each other, my sister had never been up to Fletcher's house before. We always met in public places, like the Pork Pit or Northern Aggression, usually with Finn, Xavier, Roslyn, or one of the Deveraux sisters in attendance. Self-imposed chaperones to keep the long, awkward pauses to a minimum.

There were no chaperones, no safety nets tonight, and this place was as personal as it got for me. I'd loved Fletcher like a father, and his house was a natural extension of the old man himself, as much a part of him and his legacy to me as the Pork Pit was.

We got out of the car. It was after three now, but thanks to the snow, a sort of pearl gray twilight softened the cold edges of everything and made it seem lighter than it really was. In front of the house, snow crusted the flat lawn before the ridge fell away into a series of frozen, jagged cliffs. Snow and ice covered the gravel in the driveway as well, but I could still hear the stone's murmurs. Low, steady, and as quiet as the icy landscape around us.

No footprints marred the smoothness of the snow, and no sense of excitement, urgency, or dark desires rippled through the stones under my boots. No one had been near the house tonight. Good. That meant that Mab and her city full of bounty hunters hadn't unearthed my true identity, hadn't discovered that Gin Blanco was really the Spider-yet.

I led Bria over to the front door, which was made out of solid black granite. Thick veins of silverstone also swirled through the hard stone here and in other strategic places around the house, while bars made out of the magical metal covered the windows.

Bria let out a low, appreciative whistle. "I don't think I've ever seen that much silverstone in a single door before. You'd have to have a hell of a lot of magic to bust through that much of it."

"Remember what I said about easily defendable? Well, this is it," I said, unlocking the door and stepping inside.

I flipped on some lights, illuminating the hallway, and toed off my boots. Bria stepped inside and did the same.

"So this is where you live," Bria murmured, staring out at what she could see of the house. "Looks like you've got a lot of rooms in here, a lot of passageways, a lot of places to hide."

She had no idea. So many additions in so many different styles had been tacked on to the house over the years that the whole structure was something of a labyrinth. Rooms joined together, branching off into hallways that doubled back on themselves, led to different parts of the house entirely, or in some cases just dead-ended. Not the kind of place where you wanted to have to search for the bathroom in the dark, much less an assassin like the Spider. Still, the odd, overlapping designs gave me a clear advantage, since I knew the ins and outs of the whole house-and the best way to sneak up and stab someone in the back when she thought that she was creeping up on me instead.