Deadly Sting

30

The Briartop heist dominated the airwaves and newspapers for the next few days. Story after story was written and broadcast about what had happened, about Clementine Barker and her plans, and how a few brave folks had banded together to eventually take down the robbers.

I let Bria and Xavier take all the credit for thwarting the giant and her crew. It was more or less the truth. After all, they were the ones who had saved the hostages. Besides, I had enough enemies already without getting my name splashed all over the newspaper or having some nosy reporter come barging into the Pork Pit trying to get an interview with me. Still, the rumors got out the way they always did, and I heard more than a few whispers about how deadly the Spider’s sting had been to Clementine.

Finn also told me about all the reports he’d heard from his sources, each one more outlandish and ridiculous than the last. So far, my favorite story was the one that claimed I had chopped the giant into little pieces, had stuffed her into a cooler, and was using her remains as bait for fishing in the Aneirin River. Heh. If that didn’t increase the pot in the betting pool on my mortal demise, nothing would.

I didn’t care what people thought or said about me as long as they left me alone, but I knew that I’d just created even more trouble for myself by taking matters into my own hands at the museum. Because in addition to killing Clementine, rumors abounded that I’d also gotten away with a chunk of the art and jewels she’d been trying to steal. It wasn’t true, of course, but that wouldn’t stop some folks from thinking it was. It wouldn’t be long before some idiot decided to try to steal stolen art that I didn’t even have.

The truth was that I had only two things left from that night: my memories and the ebony tube that contained Mab Monroe’s last will and testament.

In fact, the tube was standing on the porch railing in front of me right now. The evening sun hit the sunburst rune on the side, making the gold gleam and the ruby burn with an inner fire.

“Disgusting,” Finn said, snapping down the newspaper he was reading. “Absolutely disgusting. The reporter didn’t even mention me at all. Not one word about me, the giant that I killed, the hostage that I saved.”

It was a week after the heist, and we were sitting on the front porch of Fletcher’s house. Dishes clustered around our feet, covered with the sticky remains of the blackberry cobbler and heaping scoops of vanilla bean ice cream we’d just devoured. I’d made the dessert in honor of all those blackberry briars I’d crawled through at Briartop. I could still taste the scoops of ice cream, which had provided a soft, cool contrast to the cobbler’s warm, sugary berries and golden, buttery crust. I took a swig of my milk, reached for my magic, and added a few more Ice crystals to the glass to chill the liquid some more.

The sticky, humid heat of the day had finally broken, and the critters in the woods were out and about, skittering through the leaves, climbing up the trees, and generally getting a little livelier and more active as the sun set over the ridge. Just like me. I always did my best work in the dark, and tonight was going to be no exception.

“Why are you so upset the reporter didn’t mention you?” I asked. “Fletcher always told us that it was better to blend in with the shadows than to stand out in the crowd.”

“Did you not see how smashing I looked in my tuxedo? I was hoping the museum photographer gave at least one good picture of me to the press. But no.”

He sniffed, but his snit was far from over. “The newspaper has run a photo of practically every single person who was there that night except me. They even had a photo of Jo-Jo sitting on the steps with Eva and Phillip, and she wasn’t even at the gala. Not really. And what do they put on the front page today? Yet another story all about the stolen art and how long it’s going to take to get everything sorted out, cleaned up, repaired, and put back on display. Please. As if people actually care about that sort of thing.”

Finnegan Lane, art lover extraordinaire—or not.

Finn put down his newspaper and rocked back and forth in his chair for a few moments. Brooding. Then he turned his green gaze to the railing.

“And then there is that.” He stabbed his finger at the ebony tube sitting there. “I still can’t believe that you plan to turn Mab’s will over to Bria so she can get it into the right hands and make sure that it’s properly executed. It’s crazy, I tell you. Just flat-out insane. Like you’re doing Mab a fucking favor.”

“Yes,” I murmured. “You’ve made it quite clear what you think about my plan for Mab’s will.”

Finn had ranted up one side and down the other when I told him that I wanted Bria to make the will public. Shouting. Cajoling. Pleading. But he didn’t change my mind. And in the end, he had to agree with me that it was the only way we could make sure that Clementine’s boss got what he so richly deserved.

Finn shook his head. “I’m telling you again, you should just burn that piece of paper inside and pretend like you never read it. No good can come from it.”

I shrugged. “But that wouldn’t stop anything. Not really. It would only delay the inevitable. Mab had to have left behind more than one copy of her will. Sooner or later, somebody’s going to come forward with it. Or a fake version they try to pass off as the real thing.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. You’d be surprised how many folks put stuff like that off, especially people as powerful as Mab. People with magic always think that they’re going to live forever. Either way, do you really want some long-lost relative of Mab’s coming to Ashland? We don’t even know who this person is, much less what he or she might be like.”

Despite all of his many connections, Finn had been unable to track down the mysterious M. M. Monroe whom Mab had left all of her earthly possessions to. He’d spent the past week scouring land deeds, bank accounts, birth certificates, family histories, and more, but whoever M. M. Monroe was, he or she didn’t have much of a paper trail in Ashland or beyond. And given how many Monroes there were out there in the world, it wasn’t like Finn had a narrow pool of suspects to start with. He was still working on it, but it would take weeks, if not months, before he might happen upon the right Monroe—if that person was even still alive.

“If this person is anything like Mab, well, it’s going to mean nothing but trouble for all of us, especially you,” Finn said. “You killed Mab. You shouldn’t have to take out the rest of her family too.”

I grinned. “Ah, but you know us Southerners. We love us some family feuds. Mab had one with my mom that carried over into my generation. You might say that I’m keeping the tradition alive by inviting Mab’s relative to come to town and visit for a spell.”

“Well, I still think it’s a mistake,” he grumbled.

I didn’t say anything. Maybe I was making a mistake by not destroying the will, but it had roused my curiosity more than anything else. I wanted to know who Mab had left everything to. I wanted to lay eyes on this mysterious M. M. Monroe and see if he or she was anything like the Fire elemental had been—and if he or she was a threat to me and mine.

Ah, my insatiable curiosity. Probably going to get me into trouble again—real soon.

Finn opened his mouth to argue with me some more, but I cut him off.

“Let’s talk about something else. Did you get that information I requested?”

“I did, and you were right about Clementine’s boss,” he said. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it myself that night at the museum.”

Finn leaned down, popped open the silverstone briefcase at his feet, grabbed some papers, and passed them over to me. “It took some doing, getting my hands on all the account information. The smarmy bastard’s almost as well connected as I am. You wouldn’t believe how many favors I had to call in, but I managed to dig up all of his dirt. There might be a few accounts I overlooked, but these are the most important ones, including the one he used to pay Clementine for her services. Looks like he gave her two million up front for the job, probably with another, similar payment to come once it was done. He also paid for that watch you noted, probably to sweeten the deal even more.”

I skimmed through the papers and let out a low whistle. “He’s one sneaky, black-hearted son of a bitch, isn’t he?”

Finn nodded. “You have to admire that about him. It’s a scheme that even I could be proud of. In fact, I may tuck this one into my back pocket for a rainy day.”

“I wonder how long it was going on. Do you think he started before or after I killed Mab?”

He shrugged. “If I had to guess, I would say before. He would have had to in order to accumulate what he has. If I were him, though, I would have left Ashland the second Mab died. Not hung around for all these months. But the real question now is, how do you want to handle him?”

“Oh,” I said. “I know exactly what I want to do about him.”

Finn grinned. “That’s the coldhearted girl I know and love.”

“You have no idea.”

“When?” he asked.

“Tonight,” I said. “Let’s go get the bastard tonight.”

I sat in the dark and waited for my nemesis to come home.

According to the grandfather clock ticking away in the corner, it was almost midnight. I wondered what he was doing out so late. If I were him, I would have been packing my bags and getting out of town. But he was arrogant. Always had been, always would be. Oh, he’d probably been on edge these past few days, wondering if anyone would be able to trace Clementine and her crew back to him. But given that a week had passed and no one had come knocking on his door, he probably thought that he was finally in the free and clear.

I was going to enjoy showing him just how wrong he was.

It had been ridiculously easy slipping onto his sprawling Northtown estate. There were no giants roaming through the woods, no guard dogs to bark at the first hint of danger, no cameras zooming from one side of the lawn to the other. He didn’t even have a decent security system on the house itself. No bulletproof glass, no iron bars over the windows, no reinforced silverstone doors. The pitiful locks that he did have on the doors were hardly worth the trouble of making a couple of Ice picks to jimmy them open with.

I suppose he thought that the stone wall and iron gate out front would deter most folks. Well, that and who he used to work for—but not me.

After I’d opened one of the doors, I’d gone from room to room to room, looking at all of his things, but the house was as cold and impersonal as he was. Oh, all of the furnishings were the absolute best that money could buy: antique desks and chairs, delicate china in stained-glass cabinets, expensive appliances done in polished chrome. But most of the furniture looked like it had never even been sat on, and there hadn’t been any human touches in the house—no odd knickknacks, no stacks of books, no piles of magazines. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. He’d been at Mab’s beck and call so long he probably hadn’t spent much time in his own house.

The only room that looked remotely lived in had been the master bathroom, and that was only because of all the beauty products inside. They were everywhere—in the medicine cabinet, clustered on the sink, even lined up like plastic soldiers around the rim of the sunken bathtub. Jo-Jo didn’t have as many anti-aging creams, gels, and lotions in her beauty salon as he did in his bathroom. Then again, that didn’t surprise me either. Not knowing what I did about him. He might have been a lackey, but he was a vain one at that.

The only other oddity I’d noticed had been all the mirrors. There was one on just about every wall, as though this was some sort of circus fun house instead of an upscale mansion. I wondered what exactly he saw when he peered into the glass. If he saw the smooth, confident figure he always tried to present to the world or the heartless monster lurking underneath that I did, maybe even if he saw Mab’s ghost trailing along behind him. But it didn’t much matter in the end. All that really mattered were people’s actions, and he’d doomed himself long ago with his.

Those were my thoughts as I waited in his office. I’d decided to make my approach in here because I’d figured he’d probably stop by for a nightcap before heading to bed. Along with the desk I was sitting at, the other main feature of the room was a mahogany wet bar. Behind it perched a cabinet that was stocked with booze. A snifter and a bottle of brandy had been placed in the center of the bar, perpetually on call for their owner to come home and imbibe. I wondered how many drinks he’d had since that night at the museum—and if they’d been downed to calm shaking nerves or to celebrate his actions seemingly going undetected.

I might ask him—before the end.

Outside, a car churned across the crushed-shell driveway, and a pair of headlights sliced across the glass doors behind me that led out to a patio in the front yard. But I stayed where I was at his desk and waited, just waited.

Two minutes later, a key turned in the front-door lock, and a couple of footsteps sounded, scraping repeatedly across the rug inside the door. I admired his cleanliness, if nothing else. Home, sweet home.

He shut and locked the front door behind him, then made other noises as he moved through the house. The soft rustle of fabric as he shrugged out of his suit jacket. The clatter of his keys as he tossed them into a bowl on a table. The dull clang of his umbrella as he slid it into a brass tub. That was the other thing I’d noticed as I’d searched the house: he was very meticulous. Everything had a place, and there was a place for everything. Even Finn would have been envious of his walk-in closet, where the suits, shirts, ties, socks, and shoes were sorted by size and color.

It took him longer than I thought it would to go through his routines and make his way to the office, but I’m nothing if not patient, and he got here eventually. One light turned on in the hallway, perfectly outlining his trim silhouette. If I’d bothered to bring a gun, I could have easily put three bullets in his chest from here. But that would have been a waste of lead. Besides, I needed to talk to him first.

He stepped into the office and started to walk over to the light switch on the wall, but I picked up the remote I’d found earlier and hit a button.

The crystal chandelier above my head blazed with light. A startled gasp escaped his lips, and he whirled around. His eyes widened when he realized there was someone in his house—and that someone was me. His mouth dropped open, although the rest of his tight features remained where they were, like usual.

“Hello, Jonah,” I said.