Heart of Venom

Chapter Five

I sucked down a breath and started running again.

Maybe I could catch them before they got out of the subdivision—“Gin!”

I pulled up short and whirled around. Bria stood on the front porch, covered with blood.

“It’s Jo-Jo!” she screamed again. “Get in here! Quick!”

I looked over my shoulder. By this point, the van was gone. I couldn’t catch Grimes and Hazel, and I couldn’t save Sophia.

I couldn’t save her.

“Gin!” Bria yelled again.

My heart burned with rage and guilt and shame, but there was nothing I could do about that right now. So I sucked in another breath, grabbed my knives from where they had fallen on the driveway, and ran back toward the house.

Once Bria realized that I was headed in her direction, she darted back inside. Dread tied my stomach into tight, aching knots, and I forced myself to move even faster. I\ leaped up onto the porch, raced down the hallway, and burst into the salon. Bria was already crouched down by

Jo-Jo’s side. Rosco was there too, his furry head resting in the dwarf’s lap. He must have come back inside while I’d been chasing after Sophia. He let out a low, plaintive whine when he saw me, begging me to help the mistress he loved so much.

Jo-Jo was in the same spot as before, slumped against the wall, her head lolling to one side, her clear eyes open, blood all over her chest.

Fear, guilt, and grief roared to life inside my chest, bubbling up like lava about to erupt from a volcano. My knives slipped from my numb fingers and clattered to the floor. I bent over double from the cruel, searing pain, from the thought that Jo-Jo was gone, dead, murdered— that I’d failed her just like I had failed Fletcher when I hadn’t been able to save him from being tortured to death inside the Pork Pit.

Then Jo-Jo slowly turned her head in my direction and looked up at me, her eyes bright and cloudy with pain, confusion, and fear—for her sister.

“Sophia . . .” Jo-Jo whispered, her voice faint and weak.

“Grimes . . .”

Relief surged through me, so sharp, cold, and bittersweet that it took my breath away. My knees buckled, and I stumbled down onto the floor beside her.

“Don’t you worry about that right now,” I finally said in a rough, ragged tone. “Just try to relax.”

I peered at Jo-Jo’s wounds, and my relief vanished, replaced once more by that hot, churning wad of fear, guilt, and grief. Grimes had shot her twice, and he’d made both bullets count. Two ugly holes marred her flesh, close to her heart. Each one a kill shot. The only reason Jo-Jo was still alive was that she was a dwarf, and her dense muscles had kept the bullets from tearing into her heart. But she was losing blood with every shallow breath that she drew in, and it wouldn’t be long until she ran out of it entirely.

Bria picked up a towel she’d grabbed from somewhere and pressed it against Jo-Jo’s wounds, trying to stem the blood loss. I got back up onto my feet, stepped over the dead men, and started rummaging through all of the pink plastic tubs on the counter, knocking bottles of shampoo, tubes of lipstick, and bags of pink sponge curlers off the surface in my hurried, desperate frenzy to find something that would help Jo-Jo. Finally, my fingers closed over a small metal tin, with a puffy cloud rune painted on the top in white and outlined in a deep, vibrant blue.

I popped the lid off the tin and dropped down beside Jo-Jo again. “Here,” I told Bria. “This will help.”

She pulled the towel away from the wounds, picked up Rosco, and moved him out of the way. I grabbed one of my knives from the floor and used it to cut open Jo-Jo’s dress so I could have better access to her injuries. Then I dipped my bloody fingers into the tin, which was full of a clear ointment that had a soft, soothing vanilla scent.

I leaned forward and carefully smeared the substance all over Jo-Jo’s chest, trying not to cause her any more pain than was absolutely necessary, but she still winced with every brush of my fingers against her skin.

Not only could Air elementals heal folks with their magic, but they could also imbue things like lotions, liquids, and creams with their power, as Jo-Jo had done to this tin of ointment. Now I was hoping that she’d put enough of her healing magic into the clear salve to help save her.

I held my breath as the ointment slowly soaked into her skin. It didn’t pull the black, ragged edges of the gunshot holes back together, but it did slow and then finally stop the blood loss—for now. Jo-Jo’s injuries were deep and serious, and it wouldn’t be long before the Air magic in the ointment faded away and the wounds started to bleed once more, and that was if one of the bullets didn’t continue its journey on into her heart in the meantime.

Once again, that hot, agonizing fear that I was going to lose her rose in me, but I ruthlessly squashed it, focusing on what we needed to do next to save her.

“We’ve got to get her to a healer, to another Air elemental,” I said. “Right now.”

“But who?” Bria asked.

Rosco eased back over to Jo-Jo’s side and whined again, as if he was asking the same question.

Who indeed? Air elementals weren’t all that rare, but they didn’t exactly grow on trees either. Not to mention the fact that not every Air elemental used his or her power to heal. Some, like Sophia, used it to destroy, to rip apart skin and bones and sandblast molecules into nothingness.

My heart clenched again at the thought of Sophia and what she could be experiencing at Grimes’s hands right now, but I pushed those sick, guilty feelings away. First, I had to save Jo-Jo. Then I could go after Sophia and rain down all of my cold, cold wrath on Harley Grimes for what he’d done to the Deveraux sisters.

Jo-Jo coughed, as though she was trying to say something. I leaned closer so I could hear what she was telling me.“coop . . .” she finally whispered. “. . . er.”

It took me a moment to put the syllables together. “cooper?”

Jo-Jo’s head lolled to one side, which I took as ayes.

Bria frowned. “cooper? cooper Stills? Do you think that he can heal her?” cooper was Jo-Jo’s gentleman friend. Well, I suspected that they were a little more than friends, but that didn’t matter right now. All that did was the fact that he had Air magic. cooper was a blacksmith by trade, so I didn’t know how good at healing he was. Still, I knew that he’d do his damnedest to save Jo-Jo any way he could.

At around five feet, Jo-Jo was tall for a dwarf, and she was heavy, because of her stocky physique. All of her thick, strong muscles had saved her from being immediately killed by Grimes’s bullets, but they weren’t doing her any favors now, because Bria and I didn’t have the upper-body strength to move her as quickly as we needed to. All we could really do was carefully shuffle forward with her a few steps at a time—time that Jo-Jo didn’t have.

Since Bria had Jo-Jo’s shoulders and I had her ankles, I grimaced thinking about how Finn and I had moved those giants’ bodies a few days before behind the Pork Pit.

And now here I was, doing the exact same thing to Jo-Jo.

It was one of the cruelest, sickest feelings of irony that I’d ever experienced.

And another thing that I was going to kill Harley Grimes for.

“We aren’t getting anywhere like this,” Bria finally said.

“Put her down. I have an idea.”

I bit my lip, wanting to scream at the delay, and she noticed my hesitation. Rosco let out another whine, mirroring my frustration.

“Trust me,” she said.

I nodded, and we slowly lowered Jo-Jo to the blood— spattered floor. Once that was done, Bria moved in front of the dwarf, as though she were going to leave the salon and step out into the hallway, although she ended up crouching down beside Jo-Jo’s bare feet. She put her hands flat on the floor, and the bluish white light of her magic leaked out from underneath her palms. A blast of power filled the salon and rolled outward through the entire house, and my own Ice magic stirred in response to the welcome, familiar feel of my sister’s cold, frosty power. A second later, the light and the feel of her magic vanished.

“There,” she said, getting to her feet. “Maybe this will help make it easier to move her.”

I peered out into the hallway, which now resembled some sort of crystal cave. My sister had used her magic to coat the floor from the salon all the way to the front door with an inch of elemental Ice.

“We can drag her along the Ice easier and faster than we can carry her,” Bria explained.

I grimaced again at the thought, but then I nodded.

“You’re right. It’s not pretty, but I think it will work.”

We moved back over to Jo-Jo, picked up her again, and shuffled forward until she was in the hallway. Then we put her down on the sheet of Ice. The cold crystals seared the bottoms of my bare feet, but I didn’t care. All that mattered was saving Jo-Jo. Bria and I leaned down, each of us grabbing one of Jo-Jo’s legs.

Then we pulled her across the Ice.

Bria had been right. With the slick surface, we were able to move farther and faster than if we’d still been trying to carry Jo-Jo. Rosco trotted along beside us, his black toenails digging into the Ice for traction.

We were still careful, though, trying not to jostle her any more than necessary. I hated doing this to Jo-Jo, dragging her along like she was just another body that I needed to dispose of, but we didn’t have a choice, not if we wanted to get her to cooper before it was too late.

Jo-Jo didn’t utter a sound the whole time, although I knew how much pain she had to be in, not only from her wounds but also at the thought of what Grimes would do to Sophia. Instead, she fixed her gaze on the ceiling. The clouds that had been painted up there matched the white mist that filled her eyes.

But what made my stomach clench were the scarlet smears left behind on the Ice, like long, thin talons trying to tear into the crystals. I couldn’t tell if the stains were from all of the blood that covered Jo-Jo’s clothes or if her wounds had started bleeding again. It didn’t much matter, since I couldn’t do a damn thing about it either way.

Not one damn thing.

Jo-Jo wasn’t going to die, I vowed. I wasn’t going tolet her. I’d already lost my mom; my older sister, Annabella; and Fletcher. I wasn’t going to lose Jo-Jo too. Not like this and not to a piece of scum as twisted, dirty, and rotten as Harley Grimes.

When we reached the end of the hallway, Bria bent down and sent another wave of Ice crystals rolling out in front of her, coating the front porch.

We had managed to tug Jo-Jo out onto the porch and started to pick her up again to carry her down the stairs when a car pulled up the driveway and stopped in front of the house. I tensed, thinking that maybe Grimes and Hazel had come back for their men, after all, or maybe even for Bria and me. But after a moment, I recognized the silver Audi and realized who it belonged to.

A woman opened the driver’s-side door, got out, and stepped around the car. Like Bria and me, she was dressed down, in a black T-shirt, khaki shorts, and black strappy sandals, but the simple clothes only seemed to enhance the generous swell of her breasts, her toned legs, and all of the lush, lovely curves in between. She pushed her sunglasses up onto her head to hold back her black hair. The bright morning sun brought out the rich color of her toffee skin and eyes, further enhancing her beauty.

Roslyn Phillips gave us a happy wave and headed toward the porch, somehow not noticing the two dead men lying in the grass off to her left.

“What are y’all doing out here?” she called out. “I thought that y’all would be back in the salon where it was cool—”

What she did finally notice was the blood on Bria and me and the fact that Jo-Jo was lying on the porch between us. The smile slipped off her face, her eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open in surprise and growing horror.

“Gin?” Roslyn asked in a hesitant voice.

“Open your car door!” I yelled at her. “Now!”

Roslyn didn’t ask any questions as she hurried around the car, yanked open the back passenger door, and pulled out the basket of vegetables that had been sitting there.

Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and more tumbled out of the container and rolled across the driveway. Once that was done, she ran over to the porch. Bria and I started to lean forward to grab Jo-Jo’s shoulders and ankles again, but Roslyn waved us away.

“Don’t worry,” Roslyn said. “I’ve got her.”

She crouched down and scooped up Jo-Jo like the dwarf didn’t weigh any more than a small child. It was bizarre, seeing svelte Roslyn holding stocky Jo-Jo in her arms, but it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Roslyn wasn’t an elemental, not like Bria and I were, but she was something that was even better in this situation: a vampire.

My eyes narrowed. “You’ve been drinking Xavier’s 2 blood.”

Like all vampires, Roslyn had to drink blood to live, but she got more than just vitamins and nutrients from it. Depending on whose blood she was chugging down, a vampire could absorb everything from an elemental’s Fire magic to a dwarf’s toughness from a frosty glass of O-negative. Even regular old human blood was enough to give most vamps enhanced senses and above-average strength. Since Xavier, Roslyn’s significant other, was a giant, it only made sense that she was strong enough to pick up Jo-Jo.

Roslyn nodded. “Xavier says that my drinking his blood makes him feel better about me working at the club so late. He figures that if I have his strength, or at least a portion of it, then it’s the next-best thing to him being there on nights when he’s out working the police beat with Bria.”

“Remind me to thank him for that,” I murmured.

Roslyn quickly carried Jo-Jo over to her car and ma— neuvered her into the backseat, while Bria raced back inside the house. I climbed in beside Jo-Jo, and Rosco squeezed into the footwell, covering my bare feet with his warm, plump body. A few seconds later, Bria reappeared and slid into the front passenger seat, her arms full of towels.

“Where to?” Roslyn asked as she jumped into the driver’s seat.

“Cooper Stills’s place,” I said. “Start heading north. I’ll give you directions as we go along.”

“You got it.”

I took Jo-Jo’s bloody hand in mine as Roslyn threw the car into gear, backed up, turned around, and zoomed down the long driveway.