Jennifer Estep - Tangled Threads

“But why would LaFleur kill the dwarf?” Finn asked. “Especially if they were both working for Mab?”

I shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe LaFleur was bored after having to wait so long for me not to show. Maybe all that electrical magic makes her twitchy. Maybe she just likes frying people. Her motives aren’t important. What I want to know is who set me up. Who told you about Mab’s shipment of drugs or whatever was in those boxes in the first place?”

Finn didn’t say anything for a moment. “You’re not going to like it.”

“Correction. He’s not going to like it when I get my hands on him. Now, who told you?”

Finn looked at me. “Vinnie Volga over at Northern Aggression.”

I frowned. “The Ice elemental bartender?”

He nodded. “The one and the same.”

Finn was right. I didn’t like it, mainly because I was friendly with Vinnie’s boss, Roslyn Phillips, the vampire madam who ran Northern Aggression, Ashland’s most infamous and upscale nightclub. I didn’t think that Roslyn would take too kindly to my killing her favorite bartender.

I sighed. “And just how did this information get from Vinnie’s lips to your ears? Did he tell you himself or was there a middleman involved?”

Information was the commodity that Finn traded in, and my foster brother had a network of spies throughout Ashland and beyond. Everyone from people he’d done favors for, to friends of friends, to folks looking to earn a few bucks by passing on what they knew about the city’s power players. Finn was a master at separating the wheat from the chaff, or the solid info from the smoke screens. I rarely asked him where he got his intel from, though. I trusted Finn, and that was all that mattered to me. He wouldn’t steer me wrong if he could help it.

Finn shrugged. “No middleman at all this time. I was sitting at the bar last night, chatting up all the sweet young things like usual. There was a lull in the action, so Vinnie and I started talking. He asked me if I ever, ah, imbibed something stronger than alcohol. He said he heard about some good stuff that was coming in down at the docks tonight.”

I looked at Finn. “Vinnie just blurted out that he knew when and where some drugs were coming into town? That sounds like a plant to me. Like Vinnie was spreading that line around to everyone to see who might bite on it.”

“I thought it was just bullshit myself, until the dwarf started unloading those boxes,” Finn said.

“I think we both know it’s a little more serious than that now.”

We fell silent as Finn left the downtown streets behind. The metropolis of Ashland sprawled over the corner of the Appalachian Mountains where Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia converged. The city was divided into two sections — Northtown and Southtown — held together by the circle of the downtown area.

The docks we’d just left were firmly entrenched in Southtown, the rough part of Ashland that was home to the poor, the down-on-their-luck, and the downtrodden. Southtown was the kind of place where people would slit your throat for your shoes. Anything in your wallet would just be gravy on top of that. Gangs and junkies littered the Southtown streets, along with more traditional forms of trash.

In comparison, Northtown was the rich, genteel, refined part of town, with high-end McMansions and immaculate estates that stretched out for miles. But that didn’t mean Northtown was any safer. Because the rich folks there would kill you first with kind words before they actually plunged a dagger into your back.

Middle-class suburbs with more modest homes and income levels ringed Ashland on both sides, with all the requisite schools, shops, and businesses that you’d expect to find. Which is the general direction that Finn and I were headed in now.

About ten minutes later, Finn drove his car past a massive iron gate and up a long driveway that curved by a four-story mansion. Unlike some of the others in this area close to Northtown, the home was relatively plain with a simple, sturdy, stone facade. Much like the man who lived inside. The one that I’d come here to be with this evening.

Finn grinned at me, his white teeth gleaming in the darkness. “Well, I hope you and Owen have fun on your booty call tonight, since you made me drive you all the way out here.”

The Owen that Finn was referring to was Owen Grayson, the wealthy businessman I’d recently started seeing and the owner of the mansion before me. Owen had asked me to come by this evening, if I wasn’t out too late killing Mab’s minions. Since I wasn’t covered in blood tonight as I had been for the last several, I’d decided to take him up on his offer.

“It’s not a booty call,” I muttered.

“Right,” Finn drawled. “And I’m a eunuch.”

I raised an eyebrow. “I do happen to have several sharp knives secreted on my person. So we could easily arrange that, if you really wanted to make that sort of permanent lifestyle change.”

Finn shuddered. “I’d rather be dead.”

He really would have. Finn had an appreciation for the female form that bordered on obsession. Old, young, fat, thin, blond, brunette, toothless. It didn’t matter to Finn. As long as it was breathing and female, he saw an open invitation to be charming and oh so suave.

“Be sure and say hello to Eva for me,” Finn said in a hopeful voice.

Eva Grayson was Owen’s gorgeous nineteen-year-old sister and the object of Finn’s affections whenever he saw her — or at least whenever there wasn’t some other, more accessible female in his immediate line of sight. Finn tended to have a short attention span where the ladies were concerned.

“I thought you’d sworn off college girls after that pair at Northern Aggression said you were old enough to be their father.”

“Hmph.” Finn sniffed. “I’m only thirty-two, Gin, so technically, that’s not quite accurate. I’m not that old.”

“Oh no?” I said. “You just had more than a decade on the girls you were hitting on.”

But Finn wasn’t bothered by my quip, because his grin widened. “Decade or not, it was a good thing that they had daddy issues, wasn’t it? Because I still went home with both of them.”

I rolled my eyes and punched him lightly in the shoulder. Finn just laughed.

“Seriously, though,” he said after his chuckles faded away. “What do you want to do about Vinnie and the info he leaked to me?”

“We’ll pay Vinnie a visit — tomorrow,” I said. “After we talk to Roslyn and tell her what’s going on. See what dirt you can dig up on him in the meantime. I want to know everything there is to know about Vinnie Volga before we go and brace him and see why he’s spreading rumors for Mab.”

And before I decided whether Vinnie was any kind of threat to me — and whether the bartender needed to get dead for being stupid enough to try and sell out the Spider.

Finn and I made plans to meet tomorrow and said our good nights. Then he zoomed his Escalade down the driveway to go back to his apartment in the city, leaving me alone in front of the house.

Instead of immediately going inside the mansion, I stood in the driveway. Listening, but not to the wind as it gusted through the trees that flanked the house, making them creak and crack and shudder. Instead, I tilted my head to one side and concentrated on the whispers of the gray cobblestones under my feet and the larger rocks of the mansion above my head.

People’s emotions and actions sink into their surroundings over time, especially stone. As a Stone elemental, I could hear, listen to, and interpret emotional vibrations in the element, no matter what form it took, from loose gravel underfoot to a brick house to a granite gravestone. I could tell if a home was a happy one, if blood had been spilled in a driveway, or if someone was lurking around the side of a building with dark intentions in her heart.