Jennifer Estep - Deadly Sting

But I should have known that Mab wouldn’t have had anything like that. She’d preferred using her Fire magic to hurt, torture, burn, and kill people. She hadn’t needed anything else. No props, no weapons, no help from her giant guards. Just the mention of her name had been enough to inspire abject terror—and rightly so.

“What, exactly, are you doing here?” a low voice snapped.

I turned to find Jonah McAllister standing behind me, his fingers clenched around a champagne glass and his mouth pinched down with as much surprise and displeasure as his tight features would allow him to show.

“Why, hello, Jonah,” I drawled. “Lovely to see you again too.”

His cold brown eyes flicked up and down my body, carefully studying my gown as if he expected to find bloodstains on the expensive fabric. Maybe later. Like Finn had said, the night was still young.

“I told the guards to keep the riffraff out, but apparently, they didn’t understand the meaning of the word,” he said in a haughty, condescending tone.

I laughed in his face. McAllister had called me trash—and worse—on more than one occasion, but his insults didn’t bother me in the slightest. In fact, I idly considered reaching out, grabbing the lawyer’s lapels, and dragging him back into a dark corner so I could stab him to death with one of my knives. But alas, there were too many people, too many cameras, and too many giant guards posing as waiters in here for me to get away with murdering McAllister.

Still, the lawyer’s days were numbered. I’d make sure of that.

An angry, mottled flush stained McAllister’s cheeks at my light, happy, mocking laughter, and I could almost see the wheels furiously spinning in his mind as he thought about how he could get the better of me. He took another long, careful look at me, intently eyeing me from head to toe, then pivoted on his heel and strode away. I watched him for a few moments, but instead of going over to a couple of the giants and demanding that they escort me out, he pulled his cell phone out of his pants pocket and started texting on it. Maybe he was sending his demands to someone higher up the museum food chain than the guards.

Strange, even for McAllister. Usually, he had some sort of devious plan in mind when it came to me, one that involved my untimely demise. It wasn’t like him just to walk away after merely one insult. I’d have to keep an eye on him—

“A fresh glass of champagne, ma’am?”

A silver tray appeared at my elbow, and I stared up at the person holding it, a giant about seven and a half feet tall. She looked to be in her mid-fifties, judging from the wrinkles fanning out from the corners of her eyes, the deep laugh lines grooving in and around her mouth, and the long crease slashing across her forehead.

She wore the same starched white shirt and matching black tuxedo vest, bow tie, and pants that all of the other waiters did, but her features were quite striking. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was a mass of tight, wild curls, while her hazel eyes were just a shade darker than her tan skin. Her understated makeup highlighted her full mouth, sharp nose, and high cheekbones, and even the waiter uniform couldn’t disguise her generous breasts or how long her legs were. Put a gown on her, and she’d turn her fair share of heads in the room.

She also seemed vaguely familiar to me, like I’d seen her before, although I couldn’t quite place when or where. I’d probably noticed her at some other event, serving as a waiter or maybe even as a bodyguard to one of the underworld bosses. As the Spider, I’d met a lot of giants in my time. Well, killed was more like it.

“Ma’am?” she repeated, moving the tray closer to my elbow. “More champagne?”

“No, thank you,” I said, putting my still-full glass on her tray. “I seem to have lost my thirst for it.”

“Men will do that to you, won’t they?” she agreed.

Her voice was pure country twang, although the hard, knowing smile on her face told me that she was much smarter than the aw-shucks demeanor she radiated.

Before I could tell her that Jonah McAllister was in no way my sort of man, she moved on to the next person. I shook my head. First, the woman working the door had frozen up at my appearance, and now a waiter was giving me tips on my supposed love life with the smarmy lawyer. The night just kept getting weirder and weirder.

I’d just started to wade back into the crowd in search of Finn when a sly wink of silverstone caught my eye, and I noticed one more display tucked away in a recess in the back wall of the rotunda. Curious, I wandered over and finally found something noteworthy after all.

Two silverstone rune pendants lay on a bed of blue velvet behind a sheet of glass. One pendant was shaped like a snowflake, the symbol for icy calm. The other was a curling ivy vine, representing elegance.

I knew the symbols, knew exactly what they meant.

I’d once had a pendant just like them, one shaped like a small circle surrounded by eight thin rays. A spider rune, the symbol for patience.

The symbol that was branded into my palms to this day.

My hands balled into fists, my nails digging into the spider rune scars there.

Mab had put the marks there the night she’d tortured me, using her Fire magic to melt my silverstone pendant into my palms. It had been one of the most excruciating things I’d ever endured, but it was nothing compared with the utter shock I was feeling right now.

Because the snowflake was my mother Eira’s rune. And the ivy vine had belonged to my older sister, Annabella.

I leaned forward, until my nose was almost pressed against the glass, and studied every single millimeter of the runes. The pendants weren’t polished to a high gloss like everything else on view was. Rather, the chains they hung on were blackened, and what looked like streaks of soot and bits of ash clung to the surface of the silverstone runes, as though they’d once been in a fire and had never been properly cleaned.

They’d been in fire, all right—Mab’s murderous elemental blaze.

Mab . . . Mab must have taken my mother and my sister’s rune necklaces after she’d killed them that horrible night. I’d thought that the pendants had been buried in the rubble after I’d used my Ice and Stone magic to collapse the mansion on top of us all; or perhaps they had been pilfered by looters later on. But somehow Mab had gotten her grubby, greedy hands on them. She’d had the runes all these years, and now here they were, on display for everyone in Ashland to see, like a—like a damn trophy celebrating my family’s murder.

I’d thought by killing Mab that I was finally free of her, that I was finally done with her, and that she couldn’t shock, surprise, or hurt me anymore. I’d even gone to her funeral and said my piece to her ebony casket. But once again, the Fire elemental had managed to reach out from beyond the grave and mess with me.

Shock, anger, rage, hate. Those emotions surged through my body, matching the sudden, rapid, painful thump of my heart. For a moment, I considered using my magic to harden my fist so I could punch right through the thick glass. It would feel good, so fucking good, to smash the glass and grab the runes. Because they were mine —mine and Bria’s—and I’d be damned if Mab or the museum was keeping them.

But I forced myself to slow my ragged breathing and calm my racing heart. No, I couldn’t do that. There were too many security cameras in here for me to get away with such a crude smash-and-grab job. The guards would swarm me en masse, and I’d end up like the dwarf at the Posh boutique—bloody, beaten, handcuffed, and escorted off the premises by the esteemed members of the po-po.