Heart of Venom

Chapter Twenty-two

Several working stills squatted in the backyard behind the building, but they were far too big and heavy for me to tip over and add to the mayhem, so I raced past them, my eyes fixed on the woods ahead.

Crack!

Crack! Crack!

Crack!

Bullets pinged off the metal stills and pipes and rattled away into the trees. Apparently, my five minutes were already up. Or maybe I’d forfeited my laughable head start by not playing by the rules.

Apparently, not as many of Grimes’s men as I thought were staying behind to fight the fire, because more shouts rose behind me.

“There she is!”

“I see her!”

“Get that bitch!”

I hopped over the white picket fence at the edge of the yard and darted into the woods. Despite the fact that men with guns were chasing me, I still made myself slow down and watch where I put my feet so I wouldn’t fall victim to one of the traps strung up around the camp. I had no desire to escape the hunting party only to get a face full of elemental Fire from a sunburst rune seared into one of the trees.

But the good thing about nasty surprises like booby traps was that they could work both ways—like helping me thin out the murderous herd thundering through the forest behind me.

I darted through the woods as fast as I could, searching for anything that might trip me up—or at least injure one of my pursuers. More bullets crackled through the trees and leaves around me, but they weren’t as close as they had been before, meaning that I’d managed to put a little distance between myself and my would-be murderers.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the sun gleaming on something close to the forest floor, and I veered in that direction. Even though I knew it was there, it still took me a few seconds to spot the fishing line. The trap was identical to the first one that Warren had disarmed earlier. One end of the line taped to a sunburst rune that had been scorched into a tree trunk, the line running across the path at ankle level, then the other end wrapped around a small peg that had been pounded into the ground.

Perhaps Lady Luck had finally decided to smile on me, because this particular peg was actually hidden by a thick rhododendron bush. I stepped off the path and crouched down behind the bush, making sure that I was as hidden as I could be by the arching branches and green, glossy leaves. Then I carefully took hold of the fishing line and waited—just waited.

Ten . . . twenty . . . thirty . . . forty-five . . . sixty . . .

I counted off the seconds in my head as I listened for sounds of pursuit. Finally, after about three minutes, two men came crashing through the woods toward me, rifles clutched in their hands. I peered through the branches at them.

“Did you see her?”

“Where did she go?”

“We need to find her!”

They shouted back and forth to each other as they moved through the woods. Grimes had trained them well. The two men stayed within sight of each other at all times so they could watch each other’s back, and they were close enough together that they wouldn’t miss me hiding in a clump of bushes between the two of them.

Slowly, they crept toward my position. I stayed still and quiet, my blistered, bloody fingers curled around the thin fishing line, as though I were a spider hanging on to a piece of my own web.

“careful,” one of the men said as they neared me. “You know this section is dotted with traps.”

“What kind?” the other man asked. “Pits, snares, or Fire?”

“Fire, I think,” the first man replied. “But you don’t want to trip any one of them.”

The other man nodded his head and started moving forward again, his eyes sweeping the forest floor, while his buddy kept a lookout on the landscape around them.

The men were fifteen feet away from me . . . ten feet . . . seven . . . five . . . three . . . one . . .

“Stop,” the first guy said. “I see some fishing line. Be careful—”

I grinned and yanked on the line, pulling the tape free of the sunburst. The rune flared to life on the tree trunk on the opposite side of the path, burning an angry red in warning.

“What the—” That was all the first guy got out before a ball of elemental Fire exploded all over him. He went down in a singed, smoldering heap, screaming and clawing at the flames that were melting his skin, hair, and eyes.

The second man stared down dumbstruck at his buddy, as if he couldn’t believe that the other man had been careless enough to actually trip the trap. I surged to my feet. A branch crackled under my foot, but I didn’t care. The man whirled around just in time for me to slam my fist into his chest. He staggered back, and I yanked the rifle out of his hands, flipped it around, and shot him in the throat with his own weapon. He was dead before he thumped to the forest floor—

The feel of hot, invisible bubbles popping against my skin was the only warning that I had that I wasn’t alone. I threw myself down onto the ground.

A ball of elemental Fire slammed into the tree above me, showering me with hot sparks and smoldering splinters. Another gust of magic swept through the air. I grabbed the guy I’d shot and rolled him over so that he was on top of me. A second later, another ball of Fire hit the tree a few feet above my head. The flames washed over the man’s body, burning through his clothes and leaving nothing behind but charred, ashy, flaky skin. The amount of Fire would have killed him had he not already been dead.

The stench of seared flesh filled my nose, along with noxious clouds of smoke. I coughed and shoved the burned body off me. The rifle still in my hand, I staggered to my feet and risked a glance through the trees. I didn’t see any more men chasing me. They were probably busy putting out the fire I’d started. No, this time, Grimes and

Hazel themselves were hunting me.

Grimes was carrying a rifle, which he raised to his shoulder and pointed in my direction. But I wasn’t as concerned about him as I was about Hazel, who gave me a cruel grin even as more elemental Fire flashed to life in her hand. I could dodge bullets a lot longer than I could dodge magic.

Even as Hazel reared back her hand to throw her power at me, I fired off a few haphazard shots with my own rifle, then turned and started to run once more.

WHOOSH!

The Fire slammed into the spot where I’d been standing, and the heat from the blast nipped at my heels like a pack of hungry wolves, even though I was ten feet away and moving fast. Hazel wasn’t holding back. She didn’t want to take me back to camp alive. She just wanted me dead.

The feeling was mutual.

But with my magic still so low, there was no way that I could go toe-to-toe with her. And with Grimes by her side, I couldn’t hope to hide in the woods, sneak up, and shoot her in the back either. That meant running away and coming back to fight another day. I wasn’t ashamed by my retreat, though. I’d gotten Sophia away from here, so I’d kept that promise to Jo-Jo. Now I just needed to find a way to keep the one that I’d made to Owen to live through this.

So I ran and ran through the woods as ball after ball of elemental Fire tore through the trees, bushes, and rocks all around me. If Hazel wasn’t careful, she was going to set the whole mountain ablaze with her magic. Or maybe that’s what she wanted, for me to get trapped in the middle of a raging forest fire. Dead was dead, after all. I didn’t think that Hazel would be too picky about how she accomplished my demise.

Either way, there was nothing that I could do but keep running. I needed to put as much distance between them and me as fast as I could, so I didn’t have time to be cautious, slow down, and look for traps, not if I didn’t want Hazel to roast me where I stood. So I had to hope that I wouldn’t put my foot down in a snare, tug loose a bit of fishing line, or stumble into one of the stake-filled pits.

For once, my luck held, and I didn’t encounter any more traps, but I still wasn’t going to be able to escape Grimes and Hazel.

The fight at the salon, rushing Jo-Jo over to cooper’s, climbing up the mountain with Owen and Warren, killing the guards at the pit, using my Ice magic to freeze the rocks on the ridge, fighting Grimes’s men, feeling his and Hazel’s Fire slamming into my body. All of that had chipped away at me.

It was one thing to be without magic, but even more troubling was the loose, rubbery feeling in my legs, the sweat streaming down my face, and the constant stitch in my side as I tried to suck down enough of the hot, humid summer air to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

I was about to turn and try to make some sort of desperate stand against Grimes and Hazel when I spotted a wide opening in the trees up ahead. I’d long ago lost track of where I was on the mountain, but maybe I’d managed to stumble onto some sort of forest service access road.

There might even be an ATV nearby that I could flag down or hotwire, if it came to that— As I burst out of the trees, I immediately had to put on the brakes. The opening before me wasn’t a road. It was a cliff.

I skidded to a stop just in time to keep myself from plunging over the edge. I stared down, and I remembered something important from Fletcher’s maps that I’d forgotten: the river flowed through Bone Mountain.

The Aneirin River twisted and turned through Ashland and the Appalachian Mountains that ran around and through the city. I didn’t know if this was the river itself or one of the many mountain streams that fed into it. Although stream was a bit of an understatement, given that the water was at least thirty feet wide and white and frothy with rapids.

Oh, yes, I remembered seeing the river on Fletcher’s maps of the mountain. I just had no idea that I was this close to it—and no idea how to get across it.

Because this wasn’t any old ridge that I was standing on top of; it was a bona fide cliff, with a sheer, vertical, three-hundred-foot drop to the water below. Not exactly your usual summer swan dive. Still, I might have considered it if I hadn’t been so low on my magic. But I couldn’t risk it. Not now. I’d have to find some other way off the mountain— Crack!

While I’d been gaping at the rapids below, Grimes and Hazel had closed the distance between us. The first shot clipped the back of my left shoulder and spun me all the way around.

Crack! Crack!

The next two bullets thunked into the front of my vest, making me stagger back.

One of my feet slipped off the rocks, and I had to windmill my arms back and forth to keep from teetering the rest of the way over the side. Finally, I managed to catch my balance and stumble away from the edge, although I probably shouldn’t have bothered, since Grimes and Hazel slowly approached me. He was still holding his rifle, while yet another ball of elemental Fire flickered in her hand. There was no way I could get a shot off with my own rifle without both of them unloading on me first.

“Well, well, well,” Grimes crowed in a triumphant voice. “It looks like we’ve cornered us a pesky little varmint.”

Instead of responding, I glanced over my shoulder at the rocks and rapids in the canyon below.

“Oh, now, don’t be like that, Ms. Blanco,” Grimes said, picking up on my train of thought. “We hunted you down fair and square. The least you can do is come on back to camp with us and hold up your end of the bargain.”

“Why?” I snarled. “So I can be raped, tortured, and murdered?”

“Of course,” Hazel chimed in. “That’s your punishment for all the bad things that you’ve done. Besides, you jump, you die. Simple as that.”

“I go back with you, I die anyway,” I countered.

Grimes shrugged. “Not right away. Who knows? You might be able to escape . . . eventually.”

It was probably the same line he used whenever he cornered someone in the woods like this.

Oh, come on back to camp, I could just hear him saying in that soft, syrupy, twangy drawl of his. It’s better than dying out here in the middle of the woods. Who knows? You just might live through this, after all.

But it was nothing but a damn, dirty lie. It had been a lie for all the people before me, and it would be for me too. Because Grimes and Hazel didn’t have any intention of letting me live. No, I’d entertain them and their boys for a few days—if that long—and then they’d dispose of me in the pit, along with all the others.

“Besides,” Grimes continued, thinking that I was wavering, “I’m starting to take a shine to you, Ms. Blanco.

You’re strong, just like you said Sophia was. And I do so admire the strong.”

He didn’t admire strong people; he wanted to break them to make himself feel stronger. That’s what he had tried to do to Sophia all those years ago: break her spirit, break her strength, break her will to live, to survive all the horrors that he had visited upon her. But he hadn’t broken Sophia, and he wasn’t going to break me either.

“come on, now,” he said, his voice taking on a soft, cooing note. “If you come back with us quietly, I’ll keep you for myself. None of my men will touch you. I promise you that.”

Hazel’s mouth gaped open for a moment before her whole face tightened with rage and jealousy. The Fire flickering in her hand coalesced into a ball of molten lava that oozed out between her fingers and splattered onto the rocks at her feet, causing the stone to shriek in agony.

But Grimes didn’t notice. He only had eyes for me.

After a moment, he licked his lips, like his men had done back at camp, and his gaze flicked up and down my body.

No doubt the bastard was thinking about how I’d look in a pretty white dress with my hair in a sweet little braid.

Well, he was never, ever going to find out.

My only regrets were that I wouldn’t get a chance to tell my friends and family how much I loved them and that I wouldn’t be able to stop Grimes once and for all.

I thought of Owen and how he’d kissed me on top of the ridge. There had been a desperate promise in that kiss, one that said that there was still a chance that things could get better between us, one that had kept me going through all of this. Just when it seemed like we’d finally turned a corner, we were going to be torn apart again forever.

But Owen would understand. He’d seen the pit. He’d seen what Grimes and Hazel had done to Sophia. He’d understand why I had to do this. I just wished . . . I just wished that I could have seen him once more.

But wishes were for fools. People made their own decisions, their own lives, their own fates. That was what Fletcher had always said, and it was certainly true in this case.

I’m sorry, Owen. So sorry. I wish that I had been able to keep my promise to you.

I slowly held the rifle out to my side, laid it down on the ground, and kicked it away, sending it skittering across the stones. Then I straightened back up, holding both of my hands out to my sides. Grimes smiled with hungry, sadistic glee, thinking that I was finally surrendering, that I was finally weakening, that I was finally giving up.

His grin lasted until I started walking backward toward the edge of the cliff.

“Don’t be stupid,” Grimes warned. “You’ll never survive a fall like that.”

“Probably not,” I agreed. “But I have no interest in being your little torture toy either. I’d rather take my chances with the river and the rocks. Simple as that.”

Before he could react, and still thinking of Owen, I turned and threw myself off the cliff.